Homily for the Morning Mass on the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Readings for Year A: Acts 1:12-14; Psalm 26; I Peter 4:13-16; John 17:1-11
I wonder if there are any of you watching today who woke up and wondered what day it was? Or perhaps woke in the middle of the night with the same thought? It seems that many are feeling this these days. “The week’s just gone by in a blur” someone said to me yesterday. Here in the Jesuit Community we try to mark the days as different – the calendar of Mass and the Church’s Prayer Cycle helps – and having company and a routine makes us very blessed – but it’s still the case that we have that feeling of “every day is the same”.
Time is really important to us. When you lose track more seriously of days and times your mind plays tricks. We start to become more anxious, less rooted; it can even, unless we reclaim routine and structure, descend into psychological bad health and depression. It wouldn’t surprise me at all – in fact scientists are saying this and I’m noticing it in people I’m in contact with – that there are many in our population and some in our congregation who are feeling like this. It’s a “strange time”, so many are still saying, but some are saying it’s getting more difficult now. And we can’t minimise that: mass fear, illness, people dying alone, bereavement, domestic abuse, loneliness, losing jobs and homes. I won’t go on though: the more we catalogue it the more is the recipe for despair.
What I want to offer us today is a challenge. And the challenge is to use time well. To use this time well. Pope Francis has been constantly reminding us of this in fact in much of what he’s been saying in recent weeks. He tells us this is an opportunity to recover the gift of “contemplation’. What he means there is a gift of discernment to identify where the gifts of this time are, where the opportunities lie, and through that to look to a future we can and will need to shape whenever we arrive at whatever will be that much hailed “new normal”.
Now how does that fit with today’s scriptures and celebration of Mass today? Well, we’re in that in between time in the Church’s year, now Easter Sunday 7 weeks ago and now having celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, we are in this in between time for the first followers of Jesus. They’ve been through the twists and turns of following Jesus and it’s been a long journey, through thick and thin with the Lord. I think they must be absolutely exhausted and their physical and mental health must have suffered. We tend, at least I tend, to think of the apostles as strong robust men of action – and indeed they were – but they would have wept bitterly that he was gone, they would have been left unhinged at the thought of what would happen next, if we look at Peter’s life at least we notice the meltdown of denial, but there must have been for so many the retreat into self-introspection or the flight into overzealous work for the Kingdom. The passion of Jesus must have left the scars. Just as we will emerge from this current crisis scarred, different, it won’t be life as normal.
And it’s right here in the middle of a time of emptiness, confusion, anxiety, that God does not abandon us but he enters into our world to help us. To help us to discover the road ahead which we must discern and follow freely, which we must shape. The Father will send the Holy Spirit into the Church. And the Holy Spirit will help us to seek consolation, to look for what the Spirit is saying to our communities of faith. Pope Francis reminds us of something else which is straight from St Ignatius of Loyola: to seek constantly consolation. That is not to always look on the bright side, to see the silver linings, but to take the God-given time to look honestly, deeply at our world and our place in it and to seek to bring to it what is of God. Those gifts of the Spirit we learned when we received the sacrament of Confirmation are not to be stored away – they are to be used – that is what seeking consolation entails.
I have to say again I see those gifts all around me here in London. Our wonderful volunteers helping the homeless in Trafalgar Square, our care workers, many others who are using the gifts of the Spirit, those God-given gifts which show true humanity. And that gives me great hope. Great hope that this awful time will bear its fruit and make the world a better place. Great hope that we begin through our active contemplation of the world around us to see the interconnectedness of our world, of our place in it as a generation which has the opportunity to change the world for the better. The campaign to end global debt, conflicts and wars, to wake up to realise we must take positive steps to save the planet from destruction. At the end of Mass today we will say a prayer marking the 5th anniversary of the signing of the Holy Father’s letter Laudato Si’ which calls us to this awareness and this new action. May that prayer today inspire us at this strangest of times to keep looking to discern what the Spirit is saying to us and to act on it so we come out of this and not simply return to a “new normal” but come out stronger, more confidently Christian, more ready to work to bring his Kingdom to the earth.
In a few minutes, at the end of our Bidding Prayers, I will lead us in the prayers for our Thy Kingdom Come novena. This is a novena – 9 days of prayer – initiated by the Church of England and now each year leading up to Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, an opportunity for all the Churches together to pray ardently for the Spirit to inspire us to work for a better world. So may this week, this strangest of times when each day, each week may still feel the same, be a week when we are rooted in that desire to use this time well, to ask that the Holy Spirit enters into our hearts and leads us to ways of consolation, of good health physically and spiritually, and to the peace and joy God wants for each and every one of us.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ