Sunday 28th October 2007TRINITY XXI
Fr David Cherry
Ecclesiasticus 35 : 12 - 17 ; II Timothy 4 : 6 – 8 & 16 – 18 ; Luke 18 : 9 –
Those words of the publican in today’s gospel : “God be merciful to me a sinner…”
We are infinitely more than we care to know about ourselves.
One of the exercises that first years do on the training course for
Spiritual Directors is to go into pairs and have another ask you: Who
are you? You write down whatever comes to mind. And this is
repeated over and over again: ‘Who are you?’
You and I could try this is in our prayers: “Who am
I?” Going deeper and deeper in our discovery, asking God to
tell me who I am. Many will think this is totally pointless while
most of us just find it too threatening to stay with it.
“Who am I?”
While we may assent to the truth that we are created by God and that
God loves each one of us, there is still a personal discovery to be
made which begins with the realisation that we are not merely an
accumulation of achievements of schooling and careers; relationships
and reputations; neither merely an accumulation of our failures in
relationships and our own lack of self-worth. We are infinitely
more than we care to know about ourselves.
Schools compete in the league tables while Universities are desperate
to up their profile. The University of Westminster’s motto is
“God is our strength” an embarrassment to a now proudly
secular institution founded out of a sense of Christian calling.
Instead we have a new slogan: “Educating for Professional
Life” on banner-heads and transit vans!
Lady Julia says of her ex-husband Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited: "'He was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole."
Sometimes chaplains listen to students who have started on a
route they now realise has nothing to do with who they really are or
want to be. It is these crisis moments which are often the
beginning of something true.
But who are we? How to stay with this nagging
question? Fr McCabe points out that the Pharisee has
forgotten who he really is, if he ever knew it. He is smug,
thrilled with himself. And the publican is repenting of himself
– look what I have become; God deliver me from the delusions
which prevent me from loving myself for who I am; deliver me from the
prison-house of my own estimations. God be merciful to me, a
sinner.
Fr McCabe writes : “Philosophers have talked about how important
it is to know oneself; and they are quite right. But Christianity
is a wisdom concerned with how to love oneself, and how to rejoice in
being.”
St Augustine at his conversion comes to a realisation of how he has been “You
were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those
things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at
all.”
And so he comes to himself – to the real rejoicing in himself, the gift of who he is.
You called and cried to me and broke
open my deafness : and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and
chased away my blindness; …. you touched me, and I have burned
for your peace…
Today is also the feast of Ss Simon and Jude and they get a look in, in
the offertory hymn. On Thursday, the great Solemnity of All
Saints, we celebrate those who advanced along the joyful road of
finding their true life hid with Christ in God, the God of their
strength and salvation; those who were able to say with St Paul that
they too counted everything else as so much rubbish by comparison with
knowing Christ and having a place in him; the Christ who was, and, in
heaven is, the well-spring of their lives.
And on Friday we commemorate the Souls of the Faithful Departed.
We pray, in solidarity with them as they continue their journey through
the valley of the shadow of death, that we, with them, may come to a
fuller love of ourselves and others.
And here, let us make remembrance, our great act of
‘not-forgetting’ the mercy and loving kindness of God
towards us, as we stand with hearts, confident in the goodness of God,
praying: “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Amen