Sunday 32 (C) November 7 2010
A few weeks ago some of us, including a party of 15 students from the College, had the privilege of being at Cofton Park in Birmingham where Pope Benedict XVI declared Blessed John Henry Newman to be officially recognised by the Church as a saint. 60,000 people at a single Mass and the atmosphere was electric – a never-to-be -forgotten day that ‘revived and rejuvenated our faith’ in the words of one of you interviewed afterwards by the BBC, a great message heard by millions of viewers.
In fact, the media had been pretty hostile before the visit. What difference could the visit of a frail elderly man make to the life of the Church in this country - or indeed to anything else? As it happened; this shy, warm, intellectual conquered the hearts of young and old, liberal and conservative (in the spectrum of Church politics) and demonstrated very clearly what a blessing the Lord gave his Church when he appointed Peter and his successors as his Vicar here on earth.
Before his arrival, the media may have been mostly negative, though by the end of the visit they were climbing down rapidly. But the media has its uses, too, for the good of the Church. Many of you will have seen the Big Assembly held at Twickenham and broadcast to Catholic schools throughout the country.
Do you remember what the Pope said on that occasion? Like all his speeches, they are full of real wisdom and substance and deserve our careful attention.
The Pope realised this was a big chance to address virtually all the Catholic students in this country – perhaps the only chance he’d ever get to do that – so his message had to be about something which is really important. He said he hoped that some of those listening would become the saints of the 21st Century. ‘What God wants most of all from you is that each one of you should become holy. He loves you and wants what is best for you and the best thing for you is to grow in holiness’.
What does that mean? Perhaps we think of the saints as remote from us – almost unreal – on another planet or confined to stained-glass windows. Or perhaps as way beyond us – people who were virtually perfect (though they themselves would all vigorously deny this).
What, then did the Pope mean? We all have some people we admire – indeed we live in a celebrity culture where ‘icons’ (a religious word) are often sought in the world of entertainment and sport. But many of these examples are not always admirable people. What is it that you see in others that you would like to see in yourself? What, indeed, will make you happy? What will bring us that happiness which is often so elusive because we are looking for it in the wrong places.
As Catholic Christians we believe that true happiness can only be found in God. Our faith tells us that our deepest longing and aspirations can only be met by a living relationship with the Lord. They will not be fulfilled by money, nor by sexual experience, nor by a career, nor by worldly success, nor by pleasure, nor even by our relationships with others (though we can also meet God and have an experience of Him through them) but only in God Himself will we find ultimate satisfaction. Only He can satisfy the deepest needs and yearnings of our hearts.
What is of ultimate importance in our lives? As Jesus makes clear in today’s Gospel that depends how we see this life in which we find ourselves. Do we think this life is all there is – that once you’re dead that’s it – you cease to exist and you go into oblivion? If that’s the case then does anything much matter? ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ as the old saying goes. Virtue (doing what is right) loses its moral force; the moral imperative goes, if the way we live has no consequences. Morality without religion - without a faith in God to support it - soon degenerates into licence and consequent bad behaviour and the selfishness that can only add to our misery.
But if we see this life in the context of a relationship with God that begins here and now and continues beyond this life for ever, then we are going to see the life we have now very differently. We have a compass for life but the compass is only of use to us if we know where we are going.
That is why the resurrection of Jesus that we celebrate every Sunday is so central to our faith – indeed, without it there would be no Christian faith. His resurrection is the pledge of ours. Our God is the God of the living not the dead. Death is, as St Paul says, the last enemy to be destroyed because it is the denial of everything God stands for. We have been joined to his life through our Baptism and nothing – not even death itself – can extinguish that. But, at the same time, it does mean that what we do here – the kind of life we live -the kind of people we become has consequences not only for the present but beyond that as well.
When you are young, you are perhaps less aware of this because you seem to have plenty of time at your disposal. With modern advances in medicine, most of you can have a reasonable expectation of many years to come – so you may be tempted to imagine that you don’t have to think of these things yet. But then, from time to time, we get a jolt that pulls us up and reminds us of the fragility of life. It may be the death of a grand-parent or perhaps worse of a parent (some of us know what it is like to lose a parent while we were still at school) - And what about that boy we are praying for who left school just over a year ago and who is now fighting for his life in hospital following a brain haemorrhage. Or what of that other boy who left last year and died recently in tragic circumstances. We hear all the time of tragedies that remind us of the fragility of life. In any case, even if we live to ripe old age, it’s a fairly insignificant span in the context of the millions of years that have preceded us and God knows how many that will follow us.
So we see this life in a broader context that centres on the importance of our friendship with God. Friendship with God changes us – it attracts us to virtue, to doing what is good and right and turns us away from what can damage us. You begin to stop living selfishly, you start to respect other people, you begin to feel compassion for those in need and become eager to help the less fortunate. When we start to live in this way we are on the way to becoming saints, on the way to holiness.
This is not something that happens overnight. Also on the way there can be serious lapses from which we all need to learn. That can be painful as you all know. But the fact remains that we express our love for God by the way we treat other people.
Our faith, as the Pope pointed out elsewhere during his visit, cannot be excluded from any area of life. Religion cannot be marginalised or reduced to the private sector. It is an integral part of life that affects all our relationships both as individuals and as members of society.
To deepen our relation with God, we have to take our faith seriously and put it into practice. We are assisted in this by all the Church makes available to us – through the Sacraments, through being immersed in the Word of God given to us in the Scriptures, through our experience of prayer. These give us the grace we need to make a real difference in our lives and enable us to be transformed into the kind of person God created us to be and in whom alone we shall find our true happiness.
We are called to holiness, to be saints, that is the vocation of all Christians, not just the spiritually advanced. The saints are those who are close to God – those to whom God is real and near and who make God seem real and near to other people as well. We recognise holiness when we see it – when we see it in lives transformed by the grace of God and we need to understand that that is our calling too.
‘To live is to change’ as the newly beatified John Henry Newman once famously wrote. That can be challenging, even painful, but without that conversion of life we simply become complacent and regress and fall far short of our true potential.
Our faith works when it is put into practice – and that is what we can learn from the very varied example and witness of the saints. It is not just a theory or a philosophy but a way of life and values to be embraced, a life centred on our relationship with God and that sees everything else in that context.
That in essence is what the Pope said is the ‘one thing I very much want to say to you’. That is the message reinforced by the Gospel today that shows us the God who loves us beyond all our imaginings, the God who is the God not of the dead but of the living, the God of those who are truly alive.
Colin Battell OSB