Love's choice

Love’s choice

This bread is light, dissolving, almost air,

A little visitation on my tongue,

A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there.

This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung

A moment to the palate’s roof and fled,

Even its aftertaste a memory.

Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread

Love chooses to be emptied into me.

He does not come in unimagined light

Too bright to be denied, too absolute

For consciousness, too strong for sight,

Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute;

Chooses instead to seep into each sense,

To dye himself into experience.
Malcolm Guite

Strengthen my hands

Strengthen for service, Lord,
the hands that have taken holy things;
may the ears which have heard your word
 be deaf to clamour and dispute;
may the tongues which have sung your praise
be free from deceit;
may the eyes which have seen
the tokens of your love
 shine with the light of hope;
and may the bodies which have been fed
with your body
 be refreshed with the fullness of your life;
glory to you for ever.

The post-communion collect for
the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

The great Chi-Rho

We often see a combination of a Greek chi (which looks like an X) and a Greek rho ρ (which looks either like a rounded P or an r). These two are the first letters of ‘Christ’ in the Greek word ‘Christos’.

      The chi–rho is a favourite image on an altar frontal or a stylised image on the front of a priest’s vestments. For artistic reasons, we often see the symbol depicted with a small X and a very long ρ, although it is still common for their lengths to be equal. The chi–rho symbol can also be shown with a miniature alpha on its left-hand side and a small omega on its right.

    It’s common to see the X of the chi crossing the rho, for example in art. The great chi–rho (left) comes from the Book of Kells, which was written and illuminated by Celtic monks in about 800 ad.In this example, the letter Chi dominating the page with one arm swooping across most of the page. The letter rho snuggles beneath the arms of the chi. Both letters are divided into compartments that are lavishly decorated with knot work and other patterns.

This image occurs on page 34r of the Book of Kells.

Dorothy Day -- a modern prophet

Dorothy Day was born in New York in 1897. Her father was Irish and her mother was English. Dorothy’s parents were nominal Christians who rarely attended church. By contrast, Dorothy displayed a strong religious streak as a young child. When she was ten she went to an Episcopalian church and was captivated by it liturgy and its music.

    Dorothy first worked as a journalist but is better known for her social activism. For example, she was imprisoned in 1917 as a member of the non-violent suffragist movement, the ‘Silent Sentinels’.

    She converted to Catholicism, which she described movingly in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. She later became a Dominican tertiary. Being a Catholic brought her into contact with a wide array of activists so, in 1932, she helped found the Catholic Worker Movement. It was a pacifist society combining direct aid for the poor and the homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. Its vision was a form of social justice and its connection with the poor that was strongly inspired by Francis of Assisi.

     She later worked very closely with the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, whose writings many consider to be the spiritual justification and underpinning to Dorothy’s work.

To supplement the Catholic Worker Movement, she founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 and was its editor until her death. The paper said it was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, ‘those who think there is no hope for the future’ and announced to them that ‘The Church has a social program ... there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare’.

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light a fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. The Long Loneliness  

     Using the newspaper as her mouthpiece, Dorothy advocated the economic theory called ‘distributism’ which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. From the publishing enterprise came a ‘house of hospitality’ — a shelter providing food and clothing to the poor of New York’s Lower East Side and then a series of farms for communal living. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States and to Canada and Britain.

     She denounced sins against the poor. Using similar language to the Epistle of James, she said that ‘depriving the labourer’ was a deadly sin. And one of the major roots of sin, she said, was to deny that we are all interconnected spiritually. Using words St Paul could have written, she said,

True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable. There should be some flavour of this in all our love for others. We are all one. We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them.

 

    Throughout the 1960s, Dorothy Day was one of the most vocal advocates of nuclear disarmament and pacifism, demanding American withdrawal from Korea and Vietnam

Dorothy Day’s life has inspired many Christians. Pope Francis
recently compared her to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

She died in 1980.

Our God is unchangeable

The sun was shining brightly only a few minutes ago, but now the rain hammers down relentlessly. A distant portion of the sky is pure cornflower blue, and is approaching us fast. It promises yet another change of weather. What a day.

    It’s also been a year of changes. Some changes are always bad: a theft, bereavement or breakage, for example, or ill health. Conversely, some changes are good such as recovery, forgiveness and new friends. And some changes seem ambiguous, or cause us unease such as a new job or some other form of responsibility.

Most people dislike change. It threatens their sense of who they are, so we fight change in order to keep our security and self-image. So it’s good that we worship a God who never changes. As it says in the Bible, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end” (Lamentations 3:22).

     But the Bible never says that we must never change. Indeed, the Bible generally commands that we do. John the Baptist was forever telling folk to repent, which means a complete change of life’s direction; and Jesus tells us to become perfect as God is perfect, which surely commands a profound change in all of us. Perhaps that’s why the passage in Lamentations continues in verse 23, “His mercies are new every morning”: God customises his mercies according to our daily need rather than being somehow static, staid and therefore liable to becoming boring.

     A life that is truly Christian can never be staid because God calls us to continual newness of life. That can seem a challenge until we remember to anchor our lives to an unchangeable God. In proportion to our interior living drawing close to an unchangeable God, so we can cope with external changes of circumstance.

Will the real angel come forward ...

The Bible mentions angels fairly often. God chose to speak through angels because he is holy and could not let himself be ‘dirtied’ by physical things such as our physical world. The first theme concerning angels is the way God uses them as a kind of go-between, so the word ‘angel’ is Greek for ‘messenger’.

       A second common theme in the Bible is the way angels act as God’s representatives, offering help and protection. There are vast numbers of references of this type. Perhaps the classic New Testament verse here involves Jesus warning us not to harm children. He says, “See that you despise not one of these little ones; for I say to you that their angels in Heaven always see the face of My Father in Heaven” (Matthew 18:10).
      Thirdly, God made many different kinds (or ‘orders’) of angels just as an army has different grades of officer from Lieutenant through to General. St Paul points to this idea in his letter to the Greek Church in Colossi, in which he says, “In him [Jesus] all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him’ (Colossians 1:16) or again, Christ is raised up ‘above all principality, and power, and virtue, and dominion’ (Ephesians 1:21).

      In this thinking, there were nine different grades of angel. The least important of these angels were called just ‘angels’. Next were the archangels, of which there are four in the Bible and Apocrypha: Gabriel, Michael, Uriel and Raphael. (The actual term archangel itself only occurs in St Jude and 1 Thessalonians 4:15.)

      Contrary to popular conceptions, the Bible never mentions an angel having wings. The classical image of a heavenly being with wings occurs in Isaiah 6, when a seraph flies before the prophet:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke (Isaiah 6:1–4)