Homily from the Parish Priest for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Readings for Year B: Acts 1:15-26; I John 4:11-16; John 17:11-19
The Camino in the Steps of St Ignatius, the Founder of the Jesuits is a wonderful experience we run most years here at Farm Street. This year in September, obviously still dependent on the situation with the virus, we hope to run this again – indeed we are at present fully booked. This year indeed is a very special year. It is exactly 500 years since St Ignatius made his pilgrimage from Loyola to Manresa, a journey which led to his dramatic conversion to serve God under the banner of the cross. I very much enjoy the Camino experience, a walking pilgrimage which stretches you physically and which also invites the pilgrim to take time out – sacred time out of ordinary life – to reflect on our journey in life, to make new bonds of friendship, and to recognise our need for constant conversion, for change. Now one of the experiences of the Camino is inevitably both frustrating and redeeming – namely the finding of your way. Those who have made the Ignatian Camino here will attest to this as we are often put off by following arrows which seem to be taking us in the correct direction but in fact put us off course.
Reflecting on the experience of being lost and refinding the right path is also the experience of the first disciples, and especially at this time when the Lord has ascended to his father. Their story has all the twists and turns of a camino which goes off track and seems to get irredeemably lost. They’ve certainly been abandoned and it’s already been a long arduous journey They’re trying to discern what God’s plan really is, what path they should take now, as it seems Jesus is about to leave them behind.
I wonder if we can really connect with this experience in life? I can on various levels I think. Maybe it’s like the loss of a loved one, an anchor in life, the experience of a break-up of a long and fruitful relationship, or leaving to go on a gap year or job abroad, or leaving home to go back to boarding school, or maybe even worse being betrayed by someone you love and had misread. To really not know what is round the corner and to be unable to make sense of the present.
I think that makes it all the more extraordinary the disciples respond as they do as we read of the way the Gospel is preached and lived out in the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus has told them categorically not to be afraid. He invites them to reach out in trust that all will be well, that despite the dark clouds threatening us we are to be consoled, we are to be assured that his love for us as we are, even if it doesn’t drive those clouds away, makes some sense of them, even in the midst of despair, frustration, depression, even when we find ourselves as humanity reeling from the terror of a pandemic and its consequences for our flourishing as global society. He is calling us to be consoled that he will always be there even when it seems he is not. To reach out to believe God is close to us even and especially when God seems to have abandoned us.
The great medieval mystic Julian of Norwich wrote about this experience I think when she said that even when we are so distanced from God God really is “nearer to us than our own soul". God is in a certain sense, says Julian, as a mother who gives birth to us, weans us, brings us up, and forever holds us always close, assuring us that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”. This is said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else, says Julian as she recounts this vision. For me this is surely how God looks on our fragile generation sometimes seeming to grope around in the darkness of the lost and forsaken yearning to embrace a new era of love and truth.
One thing from the scriptures is really clear to me at this time of the Church’s year. The apostles and first disciples did not know Pentecost was coming. Humanity cannot quite get its soul and mind around the truth that we are pointed in the direction of freedom from all that knocks us off track be it pride about status, financial standing, pride that we don’t need to change, that we are going in fact in the right direction, that climate change will sort itself out, that the pendulum will swing back fifty years and the Church will once again be full every Sunday and attract vocations to religious life and priesthood in the same way as we always conceived them. All we need to do is to convince our fellow pilgrims we are on the right road.
I’ve certainly been on that road and like to comfort myself with snippets of these false hopes rather than dare to turn round and go back to the turn in the path where we followed that wrong arrow and to reroute ourselves back to the only path that leads us forward. In my ministry as a priest I hear so much of this kind of journey. It’s the stuff of human life. And at this time I wonder if as a society we’re at this place too – a turn in the road, yes as the Holy Father reminds us ‘a change of era’ (not just an ‘era of change’) – requiring a radical rerouting.
This last year we’ve been robbed of normal human encounters. Here in Farm Street Parish I’ve missed that so much but I’ve also encountered many folk who have of necessity found themselves in this situation, at such a turn in the road. Here at Farm Street our main work outside of the liturgy and its associated media and keeping in touch by ‘phone with parishioners has been our emergency homeless project serving the hundreds left on the streets. This has shown me something of the reality of total despair, even impending death on the streets in some cases, and of the raw need to simply know you are cared for. And that speaks to me of this God who is close to us, so close he never abandons us and sends his Spirit to rehumanise us, to visit us with mercy and kindness, to show us that the essence of his truth is the love that holds us dearly to himself. To share this truth with those who have lost hope, who are on the margins of society, has been for our army of volunteers making this God present, living out the Eucharist, being the Body of Christ. The Father will send the Holy Spirit into the Church.
As we prepare for Pentecost we pray for the Spirit of renewal, for ourselves and for us all so we may truly respond, each and every one of us, to that call to some definite service which helps us to reset together onto that narrow path. Above all to be assured that, while he is taken up to heaven, his Spirit is in our world and his face is to be seen on our streets as we are called, each and every one of us through our common baptism in him, to reveal the eternal truth that is his everlasting love.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ