Joy versus happiness: Bless you!

It is Shrove Tuesday and the sun shines, making even the grey old street look attractive. The wind is cold, and there is a certain amount of rain still spitting in the wind despite the glorious rays of light pouring through the rapidly dispersing clouds. It is as if reality itself possesses a beauty that is often hidden by the monotony of living. Of course it does! I confess that I probably had an attack of pure joy for a single moment of time.

Joy and happiness are actually very different things. The etymology of happiness contains that positivity that comes about from pure chance. The "hap" bit is the same "hap" as in "mishap" "happening", and "hapless": "hap" is luck. Joy is not. If happiness were the same as joy then we could not have eternal joy because there cannot be such a thing as eternal good fortune. So what is joy?

Well, Joy is characterised by that sense of positivity, that euphoria that arises in things as they are. We can see very clearly the presence of God in Joy, as God is the only being whose existence depends on nothing else. All things exist because they share in God's marvellous fact of being. Joy itself depends on nothing other than God's being, this is why it is a true gift of the Holy Spirit. Joy is the recognition of the presence of God in things, and thus something enjoyed by all those who are drawn up by God into Eternity.

There is nothing that is deficient in God, and this means that any desire we may have are fulfilled in Him - the presence of God must be pure joy as that is the only sensation that one can feel when all desires cease - Eternal Contentment!

We now see what blessing does. It is a prayer for that joy which underlies our day-to-day reality to burst through into our senses. A blessing is a spiritual happiness which pours forth from the rent in reality cut out by the fingers of a priest making the sign of the cross. This is one of the remarkable properties that ordination bestows upon a cleric - God gives His authority to slice through the veneer of our life to allow the flood of God's grace to pour forth into the world.

Of course, we can easily miss this. One thing that makes joy most notable is its absence. Unless we train our souls to be joyful, then we will always only glimpse it through little windows in the Veil. We obtain joy by getting rid of happiness. Once we give up allowing our "joy" to rely on fortune or chance, and start to find God in things and circumstances as they are, then we will truly obtain joy.

The sun has gone in, and the rain is starting to fall, Everything seems rather darker and less glorious. Yet, God is there: His light pours out unseen through all creation. Only eyes that will be opened by Our Lord shall rejoice. May God bless your eyes, so you may see clearly this Lent!

Discriminating between discriminations in Sheffield

At the time of writing, a bit of a furore is happening in the CofE Diocese of Sheffield. The Bishop appointed to the See is Bishop Philip North, a leading figure in the Society of St Wilfred and St Hilda. He is a traditionalist who does not believe that women can be ordained as priests.

This, of course, presents a bit of a problem for the 28% of incumbents in the Sheffield Diocese who are women. Essentially, they will be given oversight by a bishop who does not believe that they are priests - at least in the Catholic sense. Quite what he believes about them is another matter and one for him to explain. I suspect he will see them and work with them as cordially as the CofE does with Protestant ministers such as Methodists and Presbyterians. There is the possibility of of good collegiality here and, indeed, Bishop North is known for his desire to work alongside the women in his work as Bishop of Burnley.

This, of course, has angered the progressive element in the CofE. Both Modern Church and WATCH have called upon Bishop North either to decline the Bishopric or distance himself from Forward in Faith. They believe that to have a Diocesan Bishop who does not believe in the ordination of women is tantamount to sanctioning discrimination against women in the CofE, and will therefore devalue the work being done by female incumbents in the Sheffield Diocese.

Why should I care? I'm not in the CofE. Am I just poking my nose into someone else's affairs? I should say that this is a problem that the CofE have created by being established. They are the country's Church and thus open themselves for scrutiny for all in the country whether they are members or not. As I've said before, a Church that is part of the establishment is duty bound to follow the rules and adapt to that establishment.

As I am now "North of the Watford Gap", I am also affected by the decision. How will this affect my attempts at getting the Mission of St Anselm and St Odile started? So I do have an interest in proceedings. What I do not have is reason to be swayed one way or the other. As a consequence that my Church believes that the Catholic Faith is immutable, it accepts that God has not given it authority to ordain women, and that is that. There are no cliques for those that do, no "ordinariates" or "patrimonies" in which dissenters from that decision can be allowed to flourish. It isn't even a "clear decision" on our part - God made the decision and we are trying hard to be faithful to that.

The CofE has made a clear decision that women can be priests but it has also made the decision that people who dissent from this be given space to remain. They have made the clear decision that both supporters of women's ordination, and those who say that women can't be priests be allowed to flourish mutually.

And now we run into the problem.

Let us for a moment just replace the word "woman" with "black person" mutatis mutandis.

My above sentence now reads

The CofE has made a clear decision that black people can be priests, but it has also made the decision that those who dissent from this be given space to remain. They have made the clear decision that supporters of black people's ordination, and those who say that black people can't be priests be allowed to flourish mutually.

And now the whole situation sounds a bit like apartheid.

The whole issue now does turn into a question of whether the CofE is allowing discrimination to thrive.

For a mathematician, the word discrimination has a very simple meaning. It just means telling one thing from another. A quadratic equation possesses a discriminant which discriminates between equations with two real answers, one real answer, or no real answers. Likewise, the toilet door still does discriminate between male and female, not because of unfairness, but because women would have problems with the fixtures and fittings in the men's restroom.

However, we now use the word "discrimination" to mean an unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex. This is where the CofE could find itself accused of not being entirely fair.

Here's the problem. The CofE says that women can be priests. It ordains women as priests, and now as bishops. There is an expectation that these women are recognised for what they are, that their sacraments are valid, and that they they really are doing what they say they're doing. Within the Canon Law of the CofE, it is fair that anyone, male or female should be recognised for what they are. Yet, there are those who object to this. If I object to the judgement against me of a female judge because I don't believe that women can be judges, then I still stand condemned because the law of the Society to which I subscribe does recognise the authority of  a female judge.

However, this whole thing rests on whether this really is discrimination.

For me, as an Anglican Catholic, the Catholic Faith is clear. There is no authority for the Church to ordain women and no change in Canon Law can stop that, because it is not Law, it is Catholic Faith, and Catholic means for all time. It is accepted that getting a white actor to "black up" and play Martin Luther King is the height of offence. Indeed, recently a white actor played Michael Jackson, and the internet erupted into cries of racism! It is not discrimination that only a black actor should play Martin Luther King. It is not discrimination that only a woman should play Elizabeth Bennett. It is not discrimination that only a man can play Our Lord in something like "Jesus of Nazareth". This is because it is a point of reality, not law. Martin Luther King was black. Elizabeth Bennett is a woman. Our Lord is male. No passing of any law can change these facts. It would be as absurd as legislating that the number pi be 4.

What God has put into existence is the Law, and no human law can change that.

However, that is not to say that people should not worry about whether there is discrimination going on. There are those who use theological arguments against women's ordination to hide their misogyny. There are those who cling to the Catholic Order, not because of obedience to the commands of Almighty God, but rather to disguise their attitude of "jobs for the boys". Personally, the CofE has made a legal rod for its own back by promising mutually exclusive parties that they can flourish. It would be so much better for all concerned if the Catholic Group were allowed to separate and allow flourishing in that situation.

If these men are serious in wishing to be obedient to God, then they should learn to see and value what every single person, male or female, can bring to God's Church. Only God gets to discriminate: He discriminates by the very fact of creation, and He discriminates only in the truest, purest love!

Charity versus Love

Sermon for Quinquagesima

St Valentine’s Day is behind us: the roses are beginning to fall apart; the chocolates have been eaten; and the “I wuv U” teddy bear lies forgotten behind the sofa where the dog has dragged it. 

Love never ends? It hardly seems like it, does it?

The “love” that St Valentine’s Day brings us is highly superficial, and yet many people associate this sort of thing with love. For many people, love is just a feeling, a nice warm glow at the pit of the stomach. Is this the nice warm glow that St Valentine was feeling as he knelt there, battered and bruised before the sword fell on his neck?

[PAUSE]

This is the side of Love that people do not see. In fact many people are blind to what love really is, or even Who Love really is. 

Christians know full well from St John that “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” St Paul tells us that “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.” Isn’t it interesting that in St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we hear of Charity and not Love, yet in St John’s words we hear of God being Love and not Charity. There is only one Greek word used here for both Charity and Love – the same word being used by both St Paul and St John – and yet we have translated them differently. 

Why is that?

[PAUSE]

The word Charity comes to us from a Latin word meaning dear, of great worth, precious. St Paul makes it quite clear that Charity is not an action, nor a way of speaking, because these things can be done without Love. However it is Charity that gives meaning to these acts of kindness. If we speak with Charity, then we speak with meaning, power, and giving value not just to what we say but also to the people who hear it. If we acquire knowledge and skill with Charity, then that knowledge and skill become vehicles for the presence of God in the world, strengthening and encouraging all who encounter with what we have. If we give up all that we have in the name of Charity, then we gain more than we could ever have possessed, and those for whom we give up our very lives will find Charity there declaring their value and worth.

[PAUSE]

This world is blind to its true worth in the eyes of God, that’s why it needs works of Charity to show it. Our Lord Jesus will open the eyes of anyone who is blind to His love and who dares to pray for that blindness to be healed. As we approach Lent, we approach it remembering that it is our very intention that will make our fasting, abstinence and penitence worthwhile. We fast, abstain, and repent through the Love for God. Unlike “Charity”, the word “Love” expresses the idea of desire, of longing. To say that God is Love, expresses the fact that God is the One we long for, the One we seek to return to, the One Who will make us truly joyful.

Yet, this goes the other way, for God loves us. We, too, aren’t just desirable, we are desired. God wants us for what we are, for who we are, yet knowing us more fully than we know ourselves.

[PAUSE]

As we complete our self-examination ready for Lent. Let us remember one thing. The love of God is bigger than any sin that we have committed. All we have to do is repent of all sin, and learn ever more closely what Love is and how to Love.

God is Love. God is Charity. What does this mean for your words and actions?

When a lot falls upon you

Today we mark the feast of St Matthias. This man was the first bishop to be consecrated after the Ascension of Our Lord. His feast day therefore marks the beginning of Holy Orders as a sacrament and thus the beginning of the Apostolic Succession of Bishops.

We read that "the lot fell upon Matthias". Of course, by this we understand that Matthias was chosen from acceptable candidates by lot. He was not chosen for political means, nor for a particular movement within the Church, but rather because he had walked with the other apostles from the time that Our Lord was baptised by John, and was thus a witness to the Lord's ministry. And that's it! Matthias is mentioned only twice in Holy Scripture, both times in the first Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Then silence.

This is actually significant: it demonstrates the importance of generating bishops with the same authority that Our Lord gave to His original disciples. If St Matthias were to be a figure of Biblical proportion like St Paul, then greater mention of it would be made. Yet, St Luke includes this passage to show that this ministry of mission, teaching, and sacrament must propagate into the future for as long as humanity exists and seeks God.

Yet, if this first chapter is to be believed, Judas himself was a bishop in the same way that the other Disciples were. Why else would St Peter refer to Psalm cix.7 which in the Latin says, "fiant dies eius pauci et episcopatum eius accipiat alter" and is translated by Coverdale as, "Let his days be few and let another take his office". This son of perdition is a bishop which is truly significant as to the fate of any whose lives betray Our Lord.

Time and again will the Church see bishops who will disregard their true vocation. History is littered with bishops as fat grotesques seeking to hold political power through the governance of the souls of humble men and women. This type of medieval prince rejoices in his purple, his golden mitre, his sumptuous attire, his feasts, and his entitlement to be invited to the best feasts! One might look to Pope Alexander VI - Rodrigo Borgia - is regarded as an archetype of Papal corruption, yet his successor Pope Julius II is just as scheming and politically motivated. Do they walk with Jesus? It's hard to see how, yet they are products of their time! Do they share in the ultimate fate of Judas? We may not judge, and God is merciful to those who repent.

However, the pun is true. "The lot fell upon Matthias". The lot falls upon each person whom God calls to be a bishop, and it is a lot! Were it not for St Matthias and his episcopal brethren, there would not be a Catholic Church. Our Lord is its chief cornerstone, but the Apostles and their successors have contributed to the foundations of the Church by ministering to the Christians at the coal-face. The Bishop is not to be a commander, one puffed up with his idea of self-importance which he forces upon the clergy through Canon Law and Episcopal Mandate. He is to be an example of humility, laying aside the purple robes of state, and adopting the dirty shift of labour for the vineyard of Christ. It is his walking with Christ that will gather others around him in the same walk, every step bowed with the weight of his responsibility to those who do gather.

If tradition is correct, St Matthias founded the Church of Cappadocia. If this is true, then it is his "Bishoprick" that gave rise to the Cappadocian Fathers, St Basil, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Gregory Nazianzus, all of whom became bishops in the fourth century and defended the Christian Faith and still inspire Christians today with their writings of such depth and spirituality which draw the soul to God. Their writings form a roadmap of their walk with God and, through the Nicene Creed, accompany us back to the Holy Trinity.

Thankfully, the days of feudalism are gone. The political authority of bishops is much less, save only in Churches where secular politics has a foothold. These days, a bishop must have an extraordinary quality whereby people see in his character, his work, his action, the love, and especially, the sacramental grace of God in his hands. He must bear the weight of that grace, that he has authority  to bestow the Holy Ghost as well as to forgive and bring through the veil the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and he will be held into account for all of these. His teaching will be scrutinised and every error will be accounted to him.

Who on earth would desire such an office? Only those who in ignorance believe it to be the pathway to power and entitlement, and who will thus face a terrible fate in the wrath of God to come. Or those whom God calls and who meekly allow their backs to be bowed under the cross of Christ that they might walk with Him. A bishop should indeed be venerated by Christians, for thereby they venerate Christ Himself and receive blessings from Him regardless of the character of the bishop. As a priest, though with the fullness of God's ordination, every Bishop is an ikon of Christ and thus must be treated accordingly. However, woe betide that bishop who thinks himself worthy of the veneration of the faithful!

Yet the office of a Bishop is a good thing to desire, for by it we are connected inescapably to Our Lord through the chains of the Apostolic Succession. To agree to God to bear our part in supporting our bishops, we are helping to attach the lives of all Christians buffeted about upon the turbulent and fearsome sea of this World to the Rock that is Christ Himself, anchoring us all to safety and to salvation. In the Episcopacy, we see the promises of God assured and, by gathering around our bishops, we can find comfort in that assurance.

On this day, may the merits of St Matthias be of great encouragement to all bishops, and with his prayers and ours, may all the bishops of God be blessed, may their hard work be lightened by the smile on Our Lord's face when he says "well done, good and faithful servant", and may the riches of God's grace which they bear at their hands be a source of their humble fulfillment. At the last, may the life of every bishop, purified by God's Holiness, shine to guide the lost back to their Creator.

On the joys of not being popular!

I often wonder whether this blog is of any good. I don't get a large readership and, truth-be-told, many of my brethren in the Church dispute my views. I've wondered before whether it might be time to put dear old O Cuniculi out to pasture. It's been going for over ten years and I'm about fifty posts short of a thousand. That last sentence some of my readers might attribute to my mental state.

What is the point of this little blog? It's a good time for a little appraisal. First and foremost, I put my sermons here. The whole point of a sermon is to produce a connection between the hearer and God. I do have a duty to preach and it does make sense to allow others the opportunity to reflect on the word of God.

The question I have to answer seriously is whether this blog is merely my attempt to maintain an addiction to dopamine. It's an interesting fact that when people post on social media, every time that post is "liked" or given some other positive affirmation it sends a shot of dopamine into the brain. According to Psychology Today, "Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them." You can see why this is addictive, especially when Facebook and blogs actually offer a more-or-less instant gratification for every "like" or "share" or whatever. It makes me wonder whether all those who post on Facebook daily are themselves addicts to the whole pleasure-seeking nature of posting just for the sake of it. It seems just a little too onanistic, if you pardon my vulgarity.

If I therefore keep this blog going for the sake of sheer vanity, then I am doing much damage to my own soul. Vanity is formed from emptiness and, in particular an emptiness of God which we should not tolerate. In a blog there is a temptation to become the centre of one's own little universe like Edwin Abbott Abbott's God of Pointland who "cannot conceive of any other except himself – and plumes himself upon the variety of Its Thought as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."

The word sermon is connected to the Latin sermo which is a conversation, and perhaps this is where this blog really does have a value - at least for me. Anyone who knows me knows how difficult it is to have a conversation with me. Sometimes I latch onto one idea that someone speaks to me and my mind contemplates that while missing the rest of the conversation. I have a tendency to forget what I was saying mid-conversation. This is why I was next to useless as a teacher, and that much is inevidence even in what I write. However, the written medium allows me to share thoughts and ideas with greater precision and control. On Facebook, I enjoy sharing jokes and cartoons not for dopamine, but because jokes are a way of communicating humour. I blog to share ideas, to clarify my thinking, even to repeat myself in order to test some ideas out to destruction.

But the problem is that I do get a bit of a rush whenever anyone says that they like what I post. That needs to stop! One thing I will be doing is removing the "interesting" and "helpful" buttons at the bottom of each post. While these helped me to gauge and pitch my thoughts and words, they can too easily become another outlet for dopamine addiction and blogospheric onanism - i.e. they become the reason for posting in the first place. They have outlived their purpose and - poof - are now gone.

To the same end, I am now going to request, humbly yet urgently, that,  should this blogling continue, my posts are not "liked" or "shared" to my knowledge.  I have had many very kind comments from people saying that they have appreciated what I have written. I have found these very uplifting, but if I write this blog in deliberate attempts to please people, then that can stem anything prophetic that needs to be said. If you do like a post genuinely then please don't press the "like" button, please don't "share" it. If you feel that I have said anything of merit or, better still, you have heard words from God speak to you upon your reflections on what I have written and want to share those thoughts, then please do so but by copying the URL directly and not by giving any fuel to this culture of dopamine addiction as evidenced by so many people (myself included) wasting their time with their eyes on their phones. I do welcome comments, but I would be grateful if they were comments of substance. I need to ensure that I deprive myself of the oxygen of seeking praise in itself, for seeking praise in itself derails my desire to please only God.

I am also grateful that I am not a popular thinking, even in the Anglican Catholic Church. I remain defiantly non-Augustinian and thus I rid myself of the whole legalistic Original Sin problem that has caused many a ruction in the Western Church. All I have seen in my studies of the first millennium is a general tendency towards theosis in a sizable number of Church Fathers. It also means that I can be at peace in my mind away from the troubling issues that Calvinism throws up. I also want to avoid the competitiveness of Internet Argumentation which usually results in someone getting deeply offended. I have been very heavy-handed in my apologetics to the extent of losing friends when I should have just shut up.

What I do want to do is LEARN! I have learned a lot from my discussions with others, and by watching others. Yet I need to eradicate from my viewpoint any argumentative one-up-manship. I had a wonderful discussion with Fr Anthony Chadwick and Fr Gregory Wassen on the Eternity or not of Hell. We disagreed profoundly! However, I learned something, and it felt good. I kept two friends and I felt that I built upon what I already knew. That is what I want to continue on this blog. No "liking", no "sharing" but learning, study, investigation and thought.

I beg your prayers that my life would be free from vanity of all kinds, especially intellectual vanity, and that I can continue to serve God in humility and truth, and bring that truth to others in His love. I pray also that society will lose its dependency on dopamine addiction.

Belief, prophecy, and certainty

I mentioned earlier that the whole idea of belief is becoming unpopular. If we look at the world before the Council of Nicaea in 325, we find a world in which any belief is tolerated, except for a belief that doesn't tolerate other beliefs. The Roman empire of the second and third centuries was a world full of gods and goddesses of all kinds of religion, This was fine if you believed in a pantheon, but for Christians, there was only one God and one alone! Christians were regarded as the original atheists, despite the fact that they believed in one God. This would normally be fine, except Christian life did not tolerate the worship of other gods. For a polytheist, it doesn't matter which god you're sacrificing to, it's all good! For a Christian, to sacrifice to another god who is not God, is idolatry mainly because the Christian does not believe that other gods exist. Meat offered to idols must be refused, even if the best meat at the local butcher has been offered in sacrifice. If running for political office involves a sacrifice to a god, then a Christian cannot enter local government. If the Emperor is coming, then it's best to find a hidey-hole, because he will demand worship as a god incarnate!

We look at the lives of Christians in the first few centuries, and we see lives of persecution, of punishment for transgressing the ultimatum of be part of pagan society or die. We look and we see St Valentine clubbed and beheaded, St Lawrence roasted, St Simeon crucified, St Sebastian shot with arrows before being given the coup de grace, St Agatha mutilated, St Perpetua thrown to the beasts. What can be said is that these men and women truly believed. They held something so dear as to be certain about it.

I said earlier that the word "belief" in its very origin means holding something beloved. To believe means to be convinced, to have a conviction. Ideally, is one prepared to be convicted about one's beliefs? 

Few of us would risk going to gaol for the belief that it will rain tomorrow, but one might risk losing a fiver, or a day's worth of washing-up on it. For Christianity, the wager is clear: believe in God or risk eternal separation from Him. Pascal's wager may not be a watertight argument, but it does have a good convincing power.

In today's society, I believe that we find much the same thing. The plethora of beliefs, plus a force within society to regard all beliefs equally valid or invalid is very much the norm. Theological courses tend to be that of comparative religion and often encourage the student to suspend her own belief so that she can study the subject "fairly". If you are a Christian, then there is only one belief. The others are false, wrong, incorrect, incomplete, or nonsense pure and simple. That other people have the freedom not to be Christian is common sense: Christianity is about the freedom to be human and to choose. Other people have the freedom to be wrong, and we Christians believe that people who are not Christian are wrong. That doesn't mean that we believe that they are wrong about everything, though. This is why dialogue is important - not to convince each other of the correctness of one's belief, but to explain one's own belief.

Now, I have just said that as a Christian we are not to convince others of why our Faith is correct. We are witnesses to the Truth, not the Thought Police, nor the Inquisition. We can only give testimony to the Truth by the way we live our lives. What then of prophecy? Are not some Christians called to be prophets? Aren't prophets supposed to be loud and objectionable people telling passers-by that they are all sinners and going to Hell?

Actually, a prophet is simply one who speaks the will of God via the Holy Ghost. Thus a prophet can never contradict previous prophecies otherwise the Holy Ghost would be contradicting Himself and that would be nonsense. The Holy Ghost dwells within every baptised Christian and, therefore, every Christian has the propensity to be a prophet and speak prophecy. The testimony that each Christian bears is witness to the existence of a loving God. It means that each Christian must live a life with that conviction. The Christian that is not convinced or loses conviction needs to get it back and thus requires support, prayer and encouragement. 

There have recently been some cases in the media where Christian retailers have been hauled through the law-courts for refusing to support a marriage of two homosexuals. The worst that I have seen is that of Irish Cake bakers who were sued for not baking a cake with the slogan "Support Gay Marriage". For the Christian, gay marriage is a logical nonsense for, in the Christian milieu, marriage is by definition between a man and a woman. Since Christians are to bear witness to the Truth, it is simply not possible for a Christian baker to support "gay marriage" without testifying to that which is not of God. The Christian that does support "gay marriage" is setting up within himself a cognitive dissonance which he can only explain away by changing the meaning of words from what they were, or by declaring that what Holy Tradition bears is either false or changes.

The choice for the Christian baker is to submit, bake the cake, and then reflect on the action, or to refuse and receive the full punishment of the law for that conviction. The law-courts will pass away, the Truth of God will not. In this day and age, it is now a frightening possibility that Christians in Western Society will find persecution by law-court. Given that the Christians in the Middle East are suffering a massive persecution which is practically ignored by Western media, the Western Christian's lot seems rather incommensurate. The Syrian Christian would, I'm sure, rather lose money to the law court than his hand, eyes and/or head. However, the Christian that is not willing to sacrifice anything for his belief in God is going to reap no reward for burying his talent.

The only belief that is being encouraged in society is that nothing is certain. That's not untrue. Certainty is a very difficult thing to establish. Logic is infallible in its grasp of certainty, but logical truths are not very interesting. Aristotelian syllogisms are certain but fail to establish any new information about the world. In order to discover new information, it seems one must sacrifice certainty. There is much logic and rational thought in Christian doctrine but it has, at its root, axioms of belief, thus logic cannot establish certainty itself. It can, however, establish conviction and thus further belief. If one accepts the Epiphany of God, this great Theophany, given in the Church and Holy Scripture, then one has the basis on which to encounter the Truth. However, one has to accept that Theophany as infallible, otherwise one compromises the whole of Christianity and runs into danger of just being another syncretist like the pagans of the AnteNicene era, and that is not what Christianity is about.

However, there is a flip-side to this. It's all very well being Christian and thus necessarily saying that Islam, Hinduism, Atheism, and Buddhism are not true, but rather inherently wrong, but the Christian faith insists - absolutely insists - that we always see people. We cannot live out the truth of Our Lord's commandments if we see people merely as embodied ideas.That reduces the great unsearchable interior of another human mind to an abstract. Thus we should not see Muslims - we should see people. We should not see Communists - we should see people. We should not see <insert your least favourite expression of Christianity here> - we should see people.

If we are seriously convicted Christians, then we should be prepared to be convicted. If we aren't showing love in our conviction, then it's not Christianity that we're convicted of!

Sympathy or glory?

Sermon for Sexagesima

Some people always have it worse, don’t they?

You have a cold, but they’ve had flu. Your back is a little sore, but they’ve had lumbago. You’ve had to change a washer in the kitchen tap, but they had to call the plumber out because their boiler went wrong. It’s as if they want to compete for sympathy.

Is this what St Paul means when he says, “If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”?

[PAUSE]

Clearly not. We already know that sympathy is not something to compete for. Yet, this is the attitude that some people have towards their lot in life. They know that they can’t win the prize for being fastest, strongest, cleverest, so they seek to win at “most unfortunate”, the first prize at “I could have done that, but…” and the cup for “poor me”.

Of course, many people have a very, very tough life. You only have to walk through a city centre to see the number of beggars, buskers or homeless people to see that. Or to pass through the corridors of an intensive care unit. Or to sit in a pew at a child’s funeral. Humanity does suffer much!

Yet St Paul is not talking about misfortune: he is talking about infirmity.

We’re tempted to see them as the same thing: it seems that every infirmity is a misfortune, and that misfortune is caused by an infirmity somewhere along the line. But an infirmity is something that is part of us – a weakness that often causes us to fall, often in precisely the same way. Can we really glory in our propensity to catch a cold?

[PAUSE]

As we approach Lent, we are using these Sundays in Gesimatide to get to grips with the things that we want to focus on during Lent. We look for particular ways in which we can discipline ourselves better so that we can grow more in Christ Jesus. If you think about it, we can use this time to work out what our true infirmities are. We can see how angry we’ve been lately, or how we’ve allowed self-pity to rule us, or how we haven’t really forgiven Mrs Miggs for knocking the wing mirror off the car.

Knowing our infirmities allows us to grow. The misfortunes that happen to us often reveal those infirmities. Yet if we look closer and with better care, we can see the grace of God in those misfortunes. Thus our misfortunes in life can wake us up to ourselves and to the presence of Our Lord in our lives.

That’s difficult to do, but it is something that St Paul has learned to do. Just as we come to know God both by knowing where He is and where He is not, by knowing Good and knowing Evil, so we come to a better knowledge of ourselves in Him by knowing what we are and what we are not. The more we recognise our infirmity, the more that we can see God’s grace working with us, plugging the gaps, changing our point of view, setting us free. Our pain wakens us up to what is wrong, but it also wakens us up to what is right.

[PAUSE]

Glory means impact. We could glory in our infirmities by looking for the impact that they have in our lives. This will make us miserable beings competing for every scrap of sympathy that we can find.

Or, we can do what Christians do best, give God the glory. We seek the impact that God can have in our lives BECAUSE of our infirmities. In knowing where we are weak, we know that God is strong. In knowing where we are foolish, then we know that God is wise.

As we examine ourselves in preparation for Lent, we look at our fallibilities and we invite God into those fallibilities to make us more of the people He wants us to be.

Do you know who you are? Will you have a better idea by knowing who you are not?

Ecclesial Myopia and Hypermetropia : an issue of focus

Of the two eye conditions, myopia is probably better known than hypermetropia. I remember one biology master being long-sighted whose glasses made his eyes look enormous! As for myopia, well, when I'm trying to see something far away, my face seems to resemble that of an overly confused mole. These are common problems in the human eye.

For the myopic, things that are near can have a staggeringly clear aspect while the periphery becomes somewhat vague. I know that I am especially clumsy with regard to things that are in my peripheral vision, and I cannot read signs until the last possible minute. For the hypermetropic, things are reversed. It is the distance that is clear, but things under the nose get missed. Apparently, this is all due to the shape of the eye and how the eye fails to be round.

I feel that the Church behaves in the same way, often to a staggeringly awful degree. There is a hypermetropia which misses people out because of looking with far too wide a range. There is a myopia that picks a person to pieces so that they cannot ever feel part of the Church. 

In a hypermetropic parish, the goal is always to look to the future, bring in new members, minister to the wider community. Posters go up, slogans are emblazoned all over the Parish Notes, initiatives are announced at the end of Mass. What gets missed are the members of the church that are already there, and need ministry themselves. I remember asking what I believed to be really important questions to my former CofE priest. Whether or not they were important, they still deserved an answer, but I got none. I saw people leave the Church, but no-one called after them, no-one tried to get them back - to my shame, that included me! I was in a position of responsibility and I failed to run after them. I should have done better.

However, I failed to run after them because of myopia. I was focussed on the details, scrutinising the orthodoxy (or lack of it), and engaging in a battle with prevailing winds, rather than focussing on what mattered - the needs of the people in the Church. In many ways, my hands were tied by my circumstances but, in retrospect, there were things that I could have done. A myopic parish will be focussed on the minutiae, the fixtures and fittings, the amount of lace on the altar and where the Gloria should come in the Mass. Again, people will lose out by being part of the picky pedantry, or by witnessing the 3" Lace Brigade clash with the 5" Lace Division. 

I have tried to learn from my failings to see people when it comes to matters ecclesiastical. I still fail - big time! Yet, all too often, the difficult person in the Church is encouraged to leave. I know: I was that difficult person. Too often, it is the one making the noise who is actually in need of ministry, not exclusion. Yet, also it is those who are silent too, who sit week after week, who lack a voice to deal with their pain in life until, one day, the priest opens his mouth in a sermon, and crushes the souls of these silent folk so that they leave and never return. This crushing can come hypermetropically and ignore them completely by trivialising something that they find precious, or it can come myopically and reduce a person to some caricature based on only one aspect of their being.

I fought, myopically, for orthodoxy. Of course, the orthodoxy is at the heart of our encounter with Christ. I do not regret trying to influence my old parish in the CofE back to orthodoxy, however flawed or useless were my endeavours. The key, though, is to use that orthodoxy as a correcting lens that will correct both myopia and hypermetropia at one fell swoop. 

This is why the doctrine of the Primitive Church is so important. The search for what is orthodox is over at the level of the Church while that Church is riven by internal schisms. It means that, if a parish wants to use that lens of orthodoxy to see what is right, it must use its scripture, its liturgy, its ritual to encourage that truly valuable person in the pew that they are in the presence of Almighty God Himself. 

Orthodoxy reigns in the excesses of the hypermetropic parish whilst opening out the vision of the myopic parish. The central message of Christian Orthodoxy is "Where are the love for God and the love of God being exhibited and distributed?" We must remember that we can only love our neighbour if we love God first. God is the source of love and only by a life directed in His worship can we hope to love those around us. At Mass, our focus is on God who, through His Grace, is present objectively and actively both for individual and for the whole Catholic Church. At every level, individual, parish, Diocese, Province, Jurisdiction, the lens of Orthodox Christian belief can reach out if we focus properly on what it means. If Christ is both human and divine, then the Church can take both the benefits of being hypermetropic and myopic together into itself too. The Church's mission to its member is vital. The Church's mission to those who aren't its members is vital. Both can be cultivated if we hold fast to the true Doctrine of the Church in the spirit in which it was given to the Church.

That spirit, of course, is the Holy Ghost Who will indeed blow where He wills, but not to the confusion of His Church!

Come, Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love.

 Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created;

And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

St Odile, pray for the vision of God's Church that it may be clear and purified.

The Lie of Self-Identification

Who gets to say who you are?

The obvious answer is that you get to say who you are, but what does it even mean to say who you are?

Essentially, we use a collection of adjectives or properties to describe aspects of ourselves: what we look like, how we feel, what we do, what we like, what we don't like, et c. This way we can communicate aspects of ourselves to others. There is a problem. This whole idea of language and dialogue requires us to agree on what things mean. We have dictionaries which help us define and understand what words mean. Yet occasionally words have multiple definitions. I think the word, "set" has the most definitions in the dictionary. This does mean that misunderstandings occur, and it also means that we also obtain the humour that comes from puns. Language comes from an agreement of meaning between individuals. It is when that agreement is broken that causes the problem.

As much as I hate to admit it, I fit the definition of Protestant which means "not-a-Roman Catholic", but I deny that this is the proper definition of the word. Am I allowed to do so? Well, yes, in that I am capable of the denial, but no in the sense that the word "Protestant" has a popular meaning, i.e. a meaning that is understood by most people. It means that I have to explain myself every time I come across the word with someone new. 

The same is true of Anglican Catholic. I am not an Anglican as Fr Christopher Little would have it, but then I don't use the word Anglican as a noun, only as an adjective that qualifies my Catholicism... and that's another word that I have to qualify because of its popular meaning! 

This brings us to an important point. Should the popular voice determine what words mean? 

Of course the answer is yes because otherwise the individual loses the ability to speak with the society in which he finds himself. Often the popular voice  determines meaning misguidedly and lazily! Words exist as means of communication to an audience. It is an irritating fact that words change meaning rather more rapidly than new words are invented. However, as the words change their nuances and meanings over Time, the "Democracy of the Dead" is trounced by the "Tyranny of the Living". The Dead only get to say what words meant, the living get to say what they mean. Of course, this does mean that in order to read and understand old texts, we have to learn even our own language anew.

Of course, the popular vote depends on the society in which we find ourselves. If everyone around us is speaking French, then we must speak French in order to be understood. Likewise the Church as a community has its own language over which the indigenous society can have no jurisdiction. The popular voice of the Church does include the Dead!

Being an Anglican Catholic means that I have to explain myself in order to communicate with other people, but it doesn't bring me any rights. As an Anglican Catholic Priest, I cannot marry anyone in the legal sense. That is a right enjoyed by the Established Church. In being Anglican Catholic, I cannot have the right to marry anyone legally. Nor can I pretend that I am a clergyman of any other jurisdiction even though I am a validly ordained priest with Anglican, Old Catholic, and Polish National Catholic streams running through my orders which are indeed Apostolic. That means too little to the man on the street. My self-identification is utterly meaningless until the prevailing language makes it meaningful. I do not have the right to force my self-identification on other people. I must, therefore, accept the necessity to explain myself constantly and that other people will be confused by my being an Anglican Catholic. That is not their fault, nor is it unreasonable.

Yet it is this principle of self-identification that is making dialogue between people impossible. These days people can say that they identify with something that they are obviously not. such as Rachel Dolezal the only "black" white woman in existence in the first actual instance of trying to argue that black is white! It is not possible to perform self-definition as a Christian because we believe in "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth" (unless you're Fr Clatworthy, in which case this statement is, was, or will be false at some time in the future). It means that as human beings we have to develop humility and drop the pride that causes us to assert an identity that we don't have. God created us, He gets to call the shots. If He creates a man, then that man cannot be a woman, or even become a woman. If He creates a sheep, then that sheep cannot become an orca. As soon as man and woman become equivalent, then language breaks down. We now have the phrase "pregnant person" because (oh how ridiculous) some "men" can have babies. Thus "man" and "woman" become utterly meaningless terms, thus fulfilling Kant's Categorical imperative! The language of millennia becomes lost or confused all because we must not be allowed to discriminate. The individual's demand for black to be white undermines the purpose of language as communication with Society. The Church has its own language which is now different from that of Secular Society. The individuals clamouring for the Church to change its language forget that the Church takes its definition from the Supreme Source and thus have no right to change it!

In all the furnace about rights, humility seems to be the ultimate loser. Life is hard because of sin and our fallen nature, and we have to stand up against that sin and fallen nature by being humble. As a result of our fallenness, life is grevously, scandalously, horrendously unfair - men cannot become women, homosexuals cannot receive the sacrament of marriage, women cannot be Catholic priests. The fallenness of our nature here is that we actively want the impossible. We want things that contradict God's revelation to us and we want the things that contradict God's will. We have to start looking beyond our wants and seeking what is actually truly Godly which exists apart from ourselves. It hurts worse than any physical pain because it strikes at our self-worth by the apparent right to self-define and self-identify. But life hurts - it's hurt every human being that ever existed! We have to learn to deal with this pain and seek its alleviation in the One Who wants us as the people He created us to be.

St Paul tells us that we can do anything we want, but he adds quickly that not everything we want is good, will build up society, will be healthy, will make things better for those who are truly in need. We are too ready to see what is unfair on our own terms without thinking about what is unfair in global terms. Yes, women's rights are indeed one of those great issues that need challenging - not subverting the will of God in the presbytery and thus causing division and confusion, but rather the fact that there are cultures that still promote women as chattel, deny their very humanity, refuse their counsel, and give them no worth whatsoever. Likewise, the rights of the homosexual are indeed a great issue that needs challenging - not by changing that which is instituted by God, but rather their protection from persecution, ridicule, and hatred of any kind and, further, assistance to help them find worth, warmth, and genuine appreciation in society as consecrated celibates. Why is it that we do not prize virginity any more? - God certainly does! It is His unconditional love that we need to propagate, but this will not come from pandering to that which is not true. Truth and Love go together - both are as embodied in Our Lord Jesus Christ as His Humanity and His Divinity. If we seek first His Kingdom and His Righteousness, then we will truly find precisely what we want and need!

The Lie of Self-Identification appeals to our pride and self worth, but not to beings who surrender this dubious right in recognition of themselves as creatures defined by God Himself, and thus completely sanctifiable. If we reject God's right to create us as He wants us, then we can self-define as much as we like. We just endanger our membership of the Church, that's all - unless "inside" also means "outside"!

The Relative Truth?

Thinking Anglicans is a blog on which I seem to see a lot of very grumpy liberals who spend much of the time kvetching about the CofE's stance on same sex marriage, getting very irate when the new Bishop of Sheffield is a prominent member of Forward in Faith, and getting unpleasantly jubilant whenever an anti-gay Christian shop is closed down (preferably by a female bishop). One thing that I am surprised about is that there is an apparent double standard here. The Bishops are willing to change perfectly clear Church Doctrine about the sex of a priest and thus change the matter of one sacrament for a significant group of individuals, but they are not willing to change the matter of another for a significant group of individuals.

Before anyone accuses me of CofE-bashing, I'm not, at least that is not my intention. I still maintain the existence and intention of the CofE is to promote the love of God. I'm afraid I do question how they interpret that word "love" but there are true Christians within the CofE and I am sure that they receive the blessing of God in what they do. However, there is an attitude that does bug me, and perhaps it crystallises the whole difference between conservatives, like me, and liberals that seek to influence the CofE.

As usual, I turn to my clerical antithesis.

Fr Jonathan Clatworthy of Modern Church says:

"Christianity is not, and never has been, an unchanging monolith. No dogma, no text, not even one’s favourite biblical text, is God’s command to everyone at all times. No single source is infallible. In every age we bring the resources available to bear on the issues we face. Our understanding is always limited and uncertain. The only people who are certainly wrong are the ones who claim to be certainly right. Such people become intolerant and deaf."

What happens if your favourite bible verses are St Matthew xxii.37-40

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Perhaps I'm not reading Fr Clatworthy correctly and doing him a dreadful disservice. I am only human and capable of much error, yet If Fr Clatworthy really believes this statement which he uses to try and tell the CofE bishops what they could have done better, then he must hold that the commandment to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves are not infallible and that there are times when they do not apply. Perhaps there is a time when it is right to hate God. Perhaps there is a time to hate our neighbour. In which case that voids any argument he makes about supporting same-sex marriage in the ears of those who so pathologically hate LGBT Christians. "Sorry, Father, I just happen to believe that now is the time to hate the gays." That cannot be what Fr Clatworthy wants, but, as usual, his premises are flawed.

Perhaps, he will say, that his statements only apply to some of Christian Doctrine. Well, okay, but which bits? The bits that agree with Societal norms? The bits which are politically correct? The current societal norm is to be atheist. Does that mean that Christianity needs now to adopt atheist beliefs?

It seems to me that this is the whole issue that faces Christianity in the West, and yet no-one wants to believe it. The issue is precisely that we have forgotten how to believe in the first place.

The central element of belief is love. The word "belief" means to hold as beloved. Yes, we say, "I believe it will rain tomorrow," and it's difficult to see what we're holding to as beloved. Yet perhaps the fact that we hold beloved the consistency of our experience, that life follows some rules on which we rely to make sense of life.

Fr Clatworthy's belief cannot be that of the Creeds, especially the Athanasian Creed which states clearly that his salvation is in doubt.

Fr Clatworthy is correct that there is much uncertainty in human understanding this is why we have the Revelation of God through Scripture and Tradition which are both espoused in the Church, and then - then - right reason. Human beings can't be certain, but the Holy Ghost can.

Actually I can be absolutely certain in this statement:

If Matthew xxii:37-40 is correct then I must love God and my neighbour in the appropriate manner.

Fr Clatworthy must therefore hold me to be certainly wrong. Of course, if Fr Clatworthy is certain of his statement then his statement is certainly wrong. If no single source is infallible, then neither is his statement that "no single source is infallible".

That may seem to be pedantry and "smart-alec"ry on my part. Yet my point is important. The Christian Faith that Fr Clatworthy puts forward holds nothing to be beloved. There is no belief there save that "there are no unchanging beliefs". There is no sense of Eternity, no Timelessness in this vision of Christianity.

If Fr Clatworthy suggests that I am intolerant and deaf, then I must agree with Him. I believe in God and I believe in the Devil. I will not tolerate nor listen to the the Devil who seeks to lie, mislead and encourage people to deny the infallibility of God Himself, the objective truth of His Holy Incarnation, and the Revelation of Himself as inspired by the Holy Ghost.

If Fr Clatworthy is truly representative of the liberal agenda, then he certainly has my prayers that he will be deafened to all voices save that of the God who loves him so very much, and thus find some certainty in his life.

I categorically believe that the Christian Faith is not, nor should be, influenced by societal norms, but rather issue the same challenge to every society to cast its crown before the Divine Master. If this makes me person non grata to the liberal element of Christianity, then I'm not the only one being intolerant.

The value of the score-board

Sermon for Septuagesima

“It’s not the winning, George, it’s the taking part.”

You’ve probably heard that phrase before used when George is in floods of tears because he hasn’t got a medal for being the fastest in running across the playground. The medal is clearly something that matters to George, and not winning it is a cause for great sorrow and anguish.

But why do we get a medal for coming first?

Why not a medal for coming fourth or ninth?

[PAUSE]

You may say that we give medals to inspire people to do better, but surely coming fourth would involve some very interesting skills other than just being the fastest.

For many issues, the first past the post is an obvious method of making choices. The fastest runner will be the one who can take the message to an ally while the town is in siege. The best javelin thrower will be the one to use against the enemy walls. The best boxer will be the one to beat the opposing champion for the hope of the city.

These are old Greek ideas of several thousand years ago. Do they have much meaning now?

If these are merely things we value in war or combat, shouldn’t we be evolving out of such a competitive or war-like way of thinking?

[PAUSE]

The people we describe as winners todayhave something about them that we value. We see in them something in our heroes and heroines that we would like for ourselves, and that’s no bad thing. It isn’t envy when we don’t want to take that away from those whom we admire but seek to emulate their achievement. Achievement only really works if we value what we seek to achieve. Yet, if we covet the prize itself, and seek to take that prize away from another, that truly is envy.

Can we say that the whole sports industry is based around envy?

Probably not. However, where our treasure it, there are hearts are also. The Lord tells us as much, and what He is speaking about is worship. Worship is literally worth-ship; what we worship determines our own value system. Once we have a thing that tops the score board in our own thinking, something that we desire most, something that we’d do anything to achieve, then everything else ranks behind it.

The Christian knows precisely what the score board should look like.

[PAUSE]

We worship God by putting Him first, and this sets up our whole system of values. We should value what He values; we should hate what He hates; love what He loves. It doesn’t matter when in our lives we acquire this system of values; the prize, the reward, the joy is always the same – nothing less than God Himself.

That should terrify us.

Once we look at where we are, we realise just how far short we are of worshipping God in spirit and in truth. We need that knowledge, no matter how painful it is, but we run our race with God alongside us, rooting for us, cheering us on, and giving us the grace to succeed.

 As we enter Great Lent, the first three weeks of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are there to get us to examine ourselves, the condition of ourselves to run the race to God. Then, when we have examined ourselves, we shrive ourselves on Shrove Tuesday by confessing to God, sacramentally if we wish, what we need to put right. Then we can spend Lent preparing ourselves properly to worship the Risen Lord anew on that Glorious Paschal Sunday morning.

[PAUSE]

Now is the time to think about how much we really do worship God, and seek the prize that is set before us.

How seriously are we prepared to change our score board?

Why St Anselm And St Odile?

Things never run smoothly, but in the love of God, they do run to the end. I find myself in the process of making myself a new life "Oop North" in Sheffield. I have left my lovely Parish in Rochester, and now I must face the face that I am going to have to build God's Church anew in a new Mission. This is an enormous task and may not even reach the first hurdle. I have to listen to God and see what He is saying for His Church here.


I have chosen for this Putative Mission, the patronage of St Anselm and St Odile - two Benedictine Saints who have relevance in my life. One might have thought that I choose the patronage of St Michael and St Bartholomew, the saints on whose feasts I received my ordinations, but something has made me consider these two less-well-known saints. To see why, we need a few biographical notes.


St Anselm 1033/4-1109

Feast Day: 21st April

Born in Lombardy to a noble family, Anselm entered the monastic life where he excelled in his studies and became famous for the precision of his language. He left to study under Lanfranc in the Abbey at Bec and took his vows there. When Lanfranc left to become Abbot of Caen, Anselm was elected prior of Bec and then subsequently became abbot. It is here that he began his major writings such as the Monologion and the Proslogion in which he tried to demonstrate the existence of God by reason alone in his famous Ontological Argument. He might, from this, be regarded as the father of Scholasticism. The Proslogion was given another title for which Anselm is famous - fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.


William the Conqueror, a patron of the Abbey at Bec, granted lands to the Abbey in both England and Normandy. While Anselm was viewing these lands, William's successor, William II (known as Rufus) appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury. The relationship between King William and his archbishop was turbulent to say the least as the King sought to have control over the Church's property (where have we heard that before?). When Anselm refused to pay the King's demands, the king prevented him from going to Rome to receive the pallium from the the Pope, thus creating the Investiture Controversy over whether the King had the right to appoint or reject candidates for ecclesiastical positions. This controversy continued after William II's hunting "accident" when Henry I took over. Anselm died peacefully on 21st April 1109 and was canonised not too long after probably at the behest of St Thomas Becket, his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury.


Anselm defended the filioque clause, and brought forward a powerful theory of the Atonement which has been developed by St Thomas Aquinas and influenced the Reformers Luther and Calvin.


So why have I, an Anglican Catholic who largely rejects the soteriology of St Augustine, who rejects the Papal claims to authority, and who also wants the filioque removed from the Creed, chosen the patronage of one who ostensibly believes the opposite?


For me, St Anselm is a brother Benedictine of a remarkable intellect, exceptional clarity and language, and he is responsible for challenging a secular authority. It isn't so much that I believe his conclusions to be wrong, but rather that he and I are both out on the same search, that fides quaerens intellectum. I admire very much that keenness of mind, and sharpness of wit that he possesses. I believe that his reasoning was wonderful, beautiful even, but he did not see the premises that he needed on which he could found his theory.


The idea of being able to see brings me to:


St Odile (aka St Odilia or St Ottilia) c662 - c720

Feast Day: 13th December

Tradition has it that Odile was born in Alsace to a noble family, but was also born blind. Being disabled in such a way at that time brought about her father's rejection and so she was given to be raised by peasants in Burgundy. The legend is that, when she was twelve, Bishop St Erhart of Regensberg baptised her whereupon she suddenly regained her sight.


When her brother brought her back home, her father was so enraged that he accidentally killed his son, whom then Odilia miraculously raised from the dead before fleeing. When her father fell ill, Odilia returned to nurse him. In gratitude he gave her Hohenburg Castle which she turned into Hohenburg Abbey, becoming the Abbess there.


She is a patron saint of people with eye problems, and of Alsace.


St Odile predates the Roman method of canonisation and she is recognised as a saint in the Orthodox Church too.


I have chosen the patronage of St Odile, not just for personal reasons, e.g. my own eye-sight, but because she represents something fundamental that I alluded to earlier.


Reason, without clear sight of what really is true, cannot guarantee the truth. It doesn't matter how elegant the arguments are, or how brilliant the conclusions. If the premises are not true, then the conclusions cannot be relied upon. With St Anselm, we have to begin our understanding of our relationship with God with faith, and faith comes as a result of seeing God's revelation. God gives faith as a gift and, if we open that gift, faith seeks God. Every Anselm needs an Odile to ensure that his understanding bears faithful witness to the truth. Every Odile needs an Anselm to give a language that helps us develop our relationship with God, even if that language is not in a tongue that we're used to speaking.


It's on this basis that I seek to build this Mission for the love of God. In this country, our Christian Faith is too much affected and held to ransom by secular and secularising authorities. St Anselm challenged that in his lifetime, even if he brought Romanising influences on the English Church. Given that the alternative was a church run by corrupt and greedy rulers, putting the Church under the Patriarch of the West probably saved it! Likewise, with an increasingly secular Established Church, so we seek to regain that vision of Christ in our society. There is much that is good in secular society and that should be cultivated in a healthy Church: a tolerance for those who have different beliefs without accepting those beliefs or, as it seems some folk in the Church of England want to do, adopting them wholesale; a desire for fairness and justice, regardless of faith, race, or sex, yet rejecting the lazy thinking and cultural blindness that tries to make faith, race, and sex homogeneous characteristics through the deception of self-definition; a vibrant scientific curiosity, but which is curtailed and actually driven by the intrinsic God-given worth of every human being conceived as well as a healthy respect for Creation.


I would ask for your prayers as well as the prayers of St Anselm and St Odile, that this silly little vision of mine may be worthy of being brought into reality by the Love of God in Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The fake news about tares?

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

You may have noticed that we live in an age of “alternative facts” and fake news. These days, we really can find apparent justification for saying that the Moon-landings never happened, that the Earth is flat, and we now have a powerful political figure claiming that Global Warming is a fiction against a lot of scientific evidence which claims that it is a fact.

Is Global Warming real, or is it fake? How do you know?

{PAUSE]

In the Church, we know that we are not immune from falsehoods. We see all these changes and additions and subtractions and criticisms from people who claim to have faith. We hear people say, “When Jesus says this, what he means is that.” There are Biblical Scholars who say that the Gospels have been altered and edited for the Church’s benefit. There are even people calling themselves active Christians who even deny that Jesus was God and, further, that God isn’t real!

How can we know the truth in a turbulent ocean of information, much of which is completely made up by men for their own ends?

[PAUSE]

We listen to Jesus.

“The tree is known by his fruit.”

We might say, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” but Our Lord tells us something stronger. Unless we have our eyes open to the truth to begin with, we can only know a fact by the effect that it causes. Until we see that effect, we are in no position to make any judgement at all. Indeed, if we judge too soon, then we can and will miss the truth. This is why prejudice is such an evil: it starts in ignorance, and is nourished by ignorance of our ignorance!

As we listen to Jesus, we hear Him say, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.” It is while men sleep that falsehood comes into our world. It is while we allow ourselves to sit idly in ignorance that we lose track of what is really true. That’s where the falsehood enters in the first place, through the cat-flap in the back door on a moonless night while we’re napping.

St Peter exhorts us, “Brethren, be sober! Be vigilant! For your adversary the Devil as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour; whom resist, steadfast in the faith.”

[PAUSE]

The sad fact is that many Christians are allowing themselves to be devoured by the enemy, ensnared in his tissue of lies. He hides these lies within an enormous cauldron of truth so that they can’t be seen. At all times, every single Christian is living in the temptation to loosen their grip on the Faith. This is why we need to keep sober, and watch, and wait for the wheat and the tares to grow.

Jesus says that He is the Truth. He says also that God is love. Therefore, the truth cannot be where love is not. As long as we see the love of God together with the love of neighbour, then the truth is growing there. So we must never despise someone who calls themselves Christian and yet behaves otherwise. While they are still in the Church, they have a chance to have the truth grow within them. Outside the Church, they will not have the benefit of the encouragement that we should be offering to each other as a matter of our Christian duty.

[PAUSE]

Only God the Father is the author of what is real. God the Son shows us, in His humanity, what is truly real by revealing His Divinity. God the Holy Ghost, fanned into flame within us by our continuing devotion to God and our growing love for our brothers and sisters, will guide us by His light in our darkness. And, with the help of God and abiding in His love, this little thing called the Church, with all the fallibility of the men and women within Her, has guarded, continues to guard, and will guard, this Truth, this Faith, more fiercely and devotedly than any prowling lion his prey.

How do we tell the difference between the real and the fake?

Wait and see!

Working out the Nunc

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,
according to Thy word.
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation,
which Thou hast prepare before the face of all people
to be a light to lighten the Gentiles
and to be the glory of Thy people Israel.

It is interesting to note that the Benedictine office of Compline doesn't have these words of St Simeon on a day-to-day basis when perhaps many think it should. However, the Nunc Dimittis does appear in the Office of Compline over the Triduum and on the Commemoration of All Souls. 

From the Traditional Benedictine point of view, the Nunc Dimittis is not a bedtime prayer. Even through the night we are to watch with Christ, rise from slumber and say the Night Office called Matins, or more appropriately Vigils. For Benedictines, the Nunc Dimittis is truly a prayer to pray when our work is done. 

The oblate is largely free from the obligation of rising at night, allowing the brothers and sisters who have taken the full vows to perform that work on their behalf. However, many oblates still desire the ability to do so even when their lives are taken up with family and work duties. The Night Office is a truly beautiful work to perform, alternating between psalms and readings, beginning with the Venite. 

The Venite and the Nunc Dimittis are polar opposites. The first encourages us to scurry to the oratory to present ourselves ready for God's service. The other is said by the tired old monk who finally sees what his life of prayerful watch and vigil have done for him. It is a canticle which proves that God fulfills His promises.

It is true! God does exactly what He says He will do. He hears our prayers, and answers them in the way that brings about the greatest good in humanity. His methods boggle our understanding, even confound and scandalise us, but nonetheless, God is truly faithful to the covenant even when we are not. 

If we want to see this light to lighten our own lives, then we have to make the presentation of Jesus ourselves, just as St Joseph and Our Lady do, just as St Simeon has been doing all his life long. A life of work is hard, yet by dedicating ourselves as temples of the Holy Ghost and allowing Christ's presentation to this temple, and then working to shine this great light like a mirror upon a dark world, we will receive great peace and the knowledge of a job well done. 

The monotony of work and prayer only becomes boring if there is something in us that needs changing. Boredom with liturgy demonstrates that we require some change within ourselves so that we can become more Christ-like. When we feel disinclined to pray, then this is the exact time to do so, forcing our voices through the somnolence of the darkness and through into the Divine Light of God. 

We have a duty to pray and work until our lives end. St Paul did as much. The Holy Martyrs went through the agony of their work for God and they saw Christ waiting for them. The saints devote their lives into service for God and we still feel the warmth of the good that propagates from God through their merits, spreading like ripples across the fabric of Spacetime.

If we pray the Nunc Dimittis tonight, then let us receive the peace which God does give us before we sleep, and let us pray the Venite all the more devoutly tomorrowmorning when our service to God continues afresh.