The fisherman and the scholar

This is about the feast of SS Peter and Paul which marks the end of the month of June.  We keep the feast on the 29th, but many parishes keep it on the Sunday following the feast.  Whenever we keep it, let's celebrate it with gratitude and a sense of the wonderful continuity of leadership which Christ himself inaugurated in the Church.

Would we have chosen either Peter or Paul for leadership roles in the newly-formed ecclesia of the First Century AD, I wonder.  A poor fisherman from Bethsaida with an impetuous tongue which often landed him into trouble, a habit of telling Jesus what to do, and a lack of courage which led him to deny that he even knew his Lord at the moment of his greatest need...  The first Pope? " Oh no, we will have to cast the net a bit wider!" we might have thought...  He didn't tick any of the boxes!  And Paul?  A narrow-minded bigot  who spent all his time and energy persecuting the members of the Way, as the First Christians were called.  Undoubtedly well-read, intelligent and trained in oratory and disputation, but a leader in the Church?  "Impossible!" would be our conclusion. "He had vowed to annihilate the lot of us, anyway!" So that ruled him out....

 

But they were both chosen by Christ, both forgiven and encouraged to use their gifts of leadership for the building up of the young Christian communities throughout Judea Asia Minor, the countries around the Jordan, on through the Greek enclaves of Antioch, Cyprus, Pisidia,  Iconium, Samothrace,  Caesaria, Philippi, and on to Rome, which they thought of then as the end of the world!  What wonderful-sounding names!   The reality was perhaps not so wonderful; it was difficult, full of dissension and opposition from the authorities, particularly the Jewish and Roman authorities, who bitterly opposed the Christians. 

But the wonder of it all, was the courage, the witness and the sheer joy of those men, women and even children who braved persecution,  floggings and sometimes death for what they believed in.  "See how the Christians love one another!" was not said by one of their supporters, but by those who opposed them.  They transformed the people about them, and won reluctant approval from the Romans at times.

 

That was up to superb leadership, which brings us back to Peter and Paul, and the choice of Christ which seemed to go against many of the norms that usually are asked for when looking at possible leaders today.  Christ saw below the surface, he knew they would not fail him.  Perhaps the two outstanding qualities they showed were first of all their love of Christ and secondly their faithfulness to what he taught.  Paul's conversion was to say the least, unusual, but once convinced that Christ had indeed appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he never looked back, and we owe him so much. He gave organisation and a firm basis of theology and spirituality to the embryonic Church which we can see later on in the teachings of the early Fathers, and right up to the present day Paul's letters are as fresh and vibrant as they were when they were first penned by him in prison when he was in pain, in tribulation and facing death.

Peter's influence was incalculable.  We have only to read the letters to the communities in Rome who were suffering persecution and martyrdom daily, to see the care he had for each person individually, the encouragement he gave them without in any way masking the truth that many of them were likely to end up as prey to the lions in the amphitheatres or die at the hands of the Romans after torture.  The influence of young girls like Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia, Lucy and many others is still felt today.  "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church " has often been proved to be true.

I remember once in Rome, passing the great door of the Basilica of St. Peter's on the feast of SS Peter and Paul and seeing an ordinary fishing net stretched across that imposing entrance to the greatest Church in the world.  A fisherman's net!  Yes, that was where we started, with a small band of men, most of them local fishermen around the shores of Lake Gennesereth.  A sharp reminder of our origins and a challenge to live up to the ideals set by Christ himself.

 As Pope Francis reminds us "we all have a responsibility to bring God's love and salvation to the poor, the sad and the lonely."  That was how we started, so let's do what he urges us to do in the wake of that great witness that has been handed down to us from our ancestors in the faith.

Have a lovely feast of SS Peter and Paul!

 

 

Photos by B.Lally (c)2013

The month of Love

June is not only known as the month of the roses.  It is also kept in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church as the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

You may have been put off in the past by the poor quality of the pictures and statues of the Sacred Heart you may have seen in shops and piety stalls.  Many of them are crude and off-putting, but don't let things like that take away from the reality of what they represent.

June is enshrined in our hearts because it is all about the celebration of love.  Not in the commercial sense of course.  When have you seen a day celebrated in the commercial world which depicts  the heart of the man God broken for love of us?  Of course you haven't.  That wouldn't be a money- spinner.  But, nonetheless, it is true.

Jesus himself revealed to St. Margaret Mary the most astounding truth that he longs for our love;  he so wants a return for the love he has constantly poured out on us  that he came to beg us to make a response of love in return. He just asked for a small return, a sign, an acknowledgment that we are grateful, that we love him too.  It wasn't much to ask was it, yet he felt the lack of it even in the glory of Heaven. 

His heart was broken on Calvary,  pierced by a lance, if you remember.  When that great heart broke at last, it opened and left room for all of us,  sinners that we are, to creep close and to be warmed and comforted in that heart which is always ready to receive us. Haven't we all experienced that wonderful, warm, enveloping love at times, especially when we are in pain, or suffering loss or rejection.  Those are the times we notice his love, even though we feel lonely and afraid,, hurt and vulnerable.  He comes closer to us then, and reaches out his wounded hands to heal us. He invites us to rest awhile close to his heart while we lick our wounds as the expression goes.

Our Founder, who died on the 9th of June 1900, urged us with her dying breath, to "invoke the Sacred Heart."  We cannot ignore the last words of a dying person.  The testament of a saintly person is even more important.  So we do just that, in our prayer and, hopefully, with our lives.  We place our lives into the wounded hands of the one we call the Sacred Heart.  Since 1873 our Congregation has been consecrated to the Sacred Heart, and we renew this in our communities each year, in a way that is appropriate to us today.

Mother Magdalen didn't go in for what she called pious practices that seemed to point inwards.  She said that the love of the Sacred Heart was "a real, practical love for our Lord, and a realisation of his love for us." She also said that it must lead on to a spreading of that love around us stating:

"If you want to taste the love of Jesus, and to know the secrets of his heart, you must go by the gate of love for others."  

 Love and evangelisation go hand in hand. Otherwise it  is in danger of becoming mawkish or introspective. 

Remember that great French Romantic poet's words on this score:

"To have loved another is to have touched the face of God!"   Victor Hugo.

That is what the Sacred Heart also teaches us.

We wish everyone a very happy Feast of the Sacred Heart tomorrow and during the rest of this month, especially the members of Orders and Congregations dedicated to him under this title.  Our long-time friends and neighbours in Roehampton, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, have a very special day on this feast. May we all meet in the love and forgiveness of the great heart of Jesus tomorrow and always.