Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C: Only our soul matters

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You may be familiar with the work of the Monty Python comedy troupe, and if you’re young enough to not be, it may be worth an hour or two on Youtube exploring what previous generations found themselves chuckling away at.

One of their most famous sketches involves a man returning a freshly bought parrot to a pet shop; as it turns out that the parrot is, to be blunt, dead. Much of the humour in that sketch comes from John Cleese’s expertly delivered litany of British euphemisms for death, in his attempt to convince the shopkeeper that the purchased parrot is, again to be blunt, most definitely dead. Some of his phrases are crudities: he’s a stiff; he’s kicked the bucket; he’s fallen off the twig. Some are socially sanitised phrases to avoid the ‘d’ word: he’s passed on; he’s no more; he’s bereft of life. Still others are much closer to a religious understanding of death: he rests in peace; he’s shuffled off this mortal coil; he’s gone to join the choir invisible.

In today’s Gospel Jesus puts words into the Father’s mouth in his parable. Words which include an ominous euphemism for the man’s death: “This night, your soul is required of you.” That would be a very dark phrase to add in to Monty Python’s list; but it gets to the heart of Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel. When we are called to judgement, only our soul matters.

This past week I have been in Ireland, but before I left on Monday I attended the funeral of a former colleague. There was a good number of present and former staff there, and we were sharing stories and memories, as you do. One recurring thought that kept coming up in discussion was the sadness of a man who worked all his life, paid into his pension and so on, only to develop the symptoms which ultimately killed him, within a year of retiring. I was reflecting on that sadness on my drive to the West of Ireland and it dawned on me that it shouldn’t be thought of as sad – frustrating perhaps, but not sad. It is right and sensible to provide for ourselves, in working life and ahead of our retirement; but ‘our souls being required of us’ is not something that we need to fear if our souls are ready to go. There is a difference between seeking to provide what is just and fair for ourselves, and hoarding far more than is necessary. This is the real difference between simply ‘filling our barns’ and tearing them down and building newer, unnecessarily larger ones.

This all speaks of course of greed and at the heart of greed lies envy. We live in an age of advertising; where we attach something as simple as a certain shade of a colour, a certain sequence of musical notes, or a certain slogan to particular products. All of this makes us want, desire, or in a word used in all three of today’s readings, covet (which the first reading identifies as a form of idolatry). We begin to desire these earthly things even over that which is good for our souls. That is sin in its strictest sense – it causes our souls to turn away from God. And to say it again; when we are called to judgement, only our soul matters.

Greed and envy then are things to be fought against; and as we much about in Lent, the Church gives us three spiritual weapons with which to fight sin and the temptation to sin: prayer to orient our souls always towards God, and away from the distractions of the world; fasting to discipline ourselves in small things, so that we can be sure of our ability to resist more serious temptations; and charity to align our wills more closely to that of God, who himself is Love.

The catechism speaks most of that last as the most useful weapon against greed and envy. It says that: “envy represents a form of sadness and therefore a refusal of charity; the baptized person should struggle against it by exercising good will.”

Whilst in Ireland I went on pilgrimage for the first time to Lough Derg, which if you don’t know of it is a particularly ascetic three-day programme of prayer and of fasting. It involves a great deal of what might be seen as old-school Christian practices: isolation on an island; bare feet throughout; a single meal of dry bread and black tea; an over-night vigil without sleep; and literally thousands of meditative prayers, many said kneeling on bare rock. If that sounds terrible to you I would simply say don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Last Sunday Fr John told me, “you’ll either really enjoy Lough Derg, or you’ll really enjoy coming away from it!” It was a difficult, but massively fulfilling spiritual exercise, focussing on the first two weapons – prayer and fasting. As I drove back in the early hours this morning I was thinking where does the final weapon, charity, now fit in? What love is now going to be manifest in my life as a result? I don’t yet have an answer to that, but I will trust it to God; which brings me to my final point.

For a third time: when we are called to judgement, only our soul matters; but we are fooling ourselves if we think that we alone are in control here – like all good things, material and immaterial, the spiritual weapons of fasting, prayer and charity are rooted in, and draw their efficacy from, God’s good grace. As with all things, we must cooperate with God’s grace if they are to have value. Going without food is not fasting in a spiritual sense unless we intend the discipline to avoid sin. Saying the words of a hundred Our Fathers is not truly prayer unless we intend those words to be carried into heaven. Doing good works is not charity unless we truly intend the good of the other.

I will finish with a quote from St John Henry Newman, who it was announced last week will soon be declared a Doctor of the Church – a saint whose work has contributed points of crucial importance to Catholic theology and dogma. His point ties together the two ideas of rejecting the riches of the world and instead cooperating with God’s grace in the preservation of our souls. He wrote “Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes. One alone is true to us; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our need.” That One, brothers and sisters, is Almighty God himself.

A short guide to chanting the psalms

Who is this guide for and what does it hope to do?

This guide is written for those hoping to introduce themselves, or a novice choir, to the singing of psalm tones. This may be for Mass, the Divine Office, or just for one’s own prayer life. It may sound complicated on the first read through, but hopefully with the sung examples to listen to as you go, you will be able to make sense of things. Do persevere, it very quickly becomes a natural process.

What is this guide not?

This guide is not intended to delve into Gregorian chant, its notation and the more complicated Modes of singing the psalms. We will stick to modern notation and a discussion of how to annotate lines of a psalm for chanting.

What is chant?

Firstly it should be said that chanting is not singing in the modern understanding. Singing has two fixed requirements of the singer: pitch and rhythm; Chant has pitch (though very easily changed) but rhythm is much more flexible. Think of it as a combination of speaking and singing. More on this shortly.

Why ‘tones’, not ‘tunes’?

A (hymn) tune is written for a specific number of syllables in each line. Each syllable has a note or notes attached to it. This means that they only work with the correct number of syllables.

A tone has ‘reciting notes’ which are used for most of each line, with a movement of pitch toward the end (and sometimes at the beginning). This allows it to be used for lines of different lengths, such as those of the psalms.

How are chant tones shown with modern notation?

Usually the reciting and final note are shown using the semibreve symbols, as these can apply to more than one syllable. The moving notes are shown as crotchet notes (usually without the stems.) The example we will use throughout this guide is shown below:

Many psalm tones, including the one above, are written to allow for the singing of different-length stanzas in the psalms. Older tones generally only include two lines.

How do I/my choir know when to move note?

With the text of the psalm written out, it is normal to indicate the syllable of the first moving note by changing the font (underling, emboldening, italicising, or even all three).

Let us take some examples from the responsorial psalm for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A), Psalm 26(27), with the moving notes underlined, in bold and italicised. Consider the response below, which uses only the first and final lines of our tone:

I am sure I shall sée the Lord’s goodness
in the lánd of the living.

The first stanza of this psalm has four lines, so uses the first, second, third and final lines:

The Lord is my líght and my help;
whóm shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
before whóm shall I shrink?

The next verse has six lines, so uses all six lines of the tone:

There is one thing I ásk of the Lord,
fór this I long,
to live in the hóuse of the Lord,
all the dáys of my life,
to savour the sweetness of the Lord,
to behold his temple.

How do I choose which syllable to move note on?

This is where it does get a little difficult. When preparing the psalms to be sung, one must decide which syllables to mark as the first moving notes. This is where the idea of thinking of chant like speech comes in: As we speak we naturally stress certain syllables, and we need to identify them.

The best description I have come across this comes from a Latin resource called the Liber Usualis, which includes the following image to relate the lilting rhythm of the text, with the high-points being placed over the stressed syllable:

These stressed syllables should be marked on a text, usually with small accents above the (first) vowel of the syllable. Consider this stanza from an earlier example, accented fully:

The Lórd is my líght and my hélp;
whóm shall I féar?
The Lórd is the strónghold of my lífe;
before whóm shall I shrínk?

That is the difficult bit, the next rule is simple: The final note is reached on the final (accented) stressed syllable, so to find the first moving syllable just count backwards by the number of moving notes. All of the lines in our sample tone have two moving notes, so the moving syllable is two before the last accent on each line. Our stanza therefore becomes:

The Lórd is my líght and my hélp;
whóm shall I féar?
The Lórd is the strónghold of my lífe;
before whóm shall I shrínk?

It is worth noting here that often in English the final note is only used for a single syllable, as is the case for all four of these lines. This is because we tend to stress the last syallable of a sentence; but it is fine for the final note to be used for two or even three syllables, depending on where the last stressed syllable falls. An example of this can be seen in the last line of the six-line stanza seen earlier, with the two syllables of the word ‘temple’ being sung using the final note.

Unusual Considerations

There are three complications which must be considered, all of which generally flag themselves up on a first attempt to sing through:

Firstly, you may have noticed in the first examples above that some lines had an extra syllable underlined, always that immediately before the moving syllable. Where the final syllable of the reciting note (that is, immediately before the first moving note) is a stressed syllable, it is natural to hold the note slightly. I add a simple underlining where this is the case as it draws the eye more clearly than a tiny accent. Consider the famous opening verses of Psalm 22(23), noting the holding of the syllables Lord, green, gives, and ‘war’ in the first, third, fourth and fifth lines, respectively:

The Lórd ís my shépherd;
there is nóthing I shall wánt.
Frésh and gréen are the pástures
where he gíves me repóse.
Near réstful wáters he léads me,
to revíve my drooping spírit.

A held note can also be used when a significant punctuation mark occurs mid-line. Again, for the ease of the singer(s), it is helpful to underline that syllable.

Secondly, it is not uncommon for a verse or stanza to have an odd number of lines – three or even five. Some psalm tones are written to account for this, but most are not. The thing to do here is to break the verse or stanza up into ‘pairs’ of lines using the meaning of the text, with one ‘pair’ having the extra (and therefore three) line(s). In the ‘pair’ with three lines of text, the reciting note is held all the way through to the end of the second line; the first line (on which the note is held) is usually marked with an ‘obelus’ or ‘dagger’. Two verses of psalm 94(95) are given as an example below:

Come ín; let us bów and bend lów;
let us knéel before the Gód who made ús:
for hé is our Gód and wé †
the péople who belóng to his pásture,
the flóck that is léd by his hánd.

O that todáy you would lísten to his vóice! †
‘Hárden not your héarts as at Meríbah,
as on that dáy at Mássah in the désert
when your fáthers pút me to the tést;
when they tríed me, though they sáw my wórk.’

Thirdly, and most rarely, some lines of text are very short. Some sources would have the moving note as the first syllable (with the reciting note not being used at all.) However it is acceptable, and easier for novices, to sing more than one note on a single syllable in this case. Consider the example of the last verse used on the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A), which requires both moving notes to be sung on the word ‘his’ in the final line:

O Lórd, hear my vóice when I cáll;
have mércy and ánswer.
Of yóu my héart has spóken:
‘Séek his fáce.’

Conclusion

I hope this has not put any budding cantors or musical directors off. The best way to learn is to listen to some alongside the tone and listen for the different features. It does get easier and soon you’ll be able to annotate as you go on the first sing-through of a psalm (really!)

The other thing that will prove invaluable is having someone who already knows what they are doing. I hope you have someone like that to call on, but if not, you are always welcome to contact me with questions at martin@martincasey.uk.

Below, I’ll attach a Word document copy of this post, which will not have the recordings, but will include a few ready-marked psalms at the end for you to have a practice of. They get progressively more intricate as you go through them.

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a-short-guide-to-chanting-the-psalms Download

Homily for the Epiphany: We are the Magi of today.

Adoration of the Magi by Pietro Perugino

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The relationship between Christmas and today’s Feast of the Epiphany is complicated, but despite the appearance of wise men in many nativity plays, it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that it is simply an extension of the Christmas story. In fact, in a very important way, Christmas and the Epiphany can be seen as opposites to one another:

Christmas emphasises the humanity taken on by the divine godhead in coming into the world. What could be more human than the tiny, helpless babe of Christmas night? Epiphany on the other hand reveals the divine nature of that child and the man he grew up to be. Adoration, sacrifice, miracles – these are things associated with God, not a human person. Even the word Epiphany means a revealing or an appearing. Today we are seeing the Christ-child in a new light. Christmas showed us the human baby Jesus, Epiphany unveils the Son of the God, the second person of the Trinity.

The readings today put the emphasis very much on the Magi who came to Bethlehem, but Sacred Tradition gives us three revelations to consider: The Magi, certainly; but also the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus revealed his divine power through the miracle of water being turned into wine; and the Baptism of the Lord, at which the three parts of the Trinity are revealed together.

At 12 noon: If you pay particular attention to the words of the first two verses of our offertory hymn you will see the emphasis placed on these three events.

But as today’s liturgy focuses on the revelation offered by the Magi, let us see what we can discern about them. The short answer to ‘what can a group of two thousand year old astronomers teach us about the Christian life?’ is simply ‘everything.’ But perhaps we should dig a little deeper into two aspects of this mystery.

One of the running themes through our readings is that of light: The first reading is a great prophecy of Isaiah: Arise, shine out, Jerusalem, for your light has come. The Gospel tells of the famous star that filled the Magi with delight. This light is a symbol of divinity, and it leads the Magi, eventually, to the humblest of circumstances. When they arrive and go into the place where the child is, we get none of the displays of knowledge or the talkativeness that they displayed back in Jerusalem. They know that they are in the presence of the divinity that the star was leading them to. They simply and silently fall to their knees, and worship him, and make an offering to him.

The second running theme is that of the revelation to the nations. These men were not Jews, yet they recognised the divine when they saw it and took news of what they had seen back to the lands they came from. They are the all who are assembling and coming towards God’s house in the first reading; they are the all nations who shall serve him from our psalm. They are what St Paul describes as the pagans who now share the same inheritance. In fact, they are us.

Two thousand years on we are the Magi of the world; and like them we are called to do two things. To take the first theme, do we recognise the divine when we see it? Do we recognise in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and in the tabernacle, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ? Do we truly experience the same divinity in this place, our chuches, that the Magi recognised in that infant in his mother’s arms? If we do, how can we do anything other than fall to our knees and worship him? We do not need to offer the symbolic gold of a king, the frankincense of a priest or the myrrh of the dead. We are asked for something far more profound. In the words of the carol: If I were a wise man, I would do my part, but what I can I give him… give my heart.

As for the second idea; do we take the light of the Gospel to the nations today? We do not need to be setting off for the Missions to spread the message of Christ. The Lord knows there is enough darkness in the world, even in our own country. So much so that it can sometimes seem hopeless to be a Christian in the modern world. But to go back to John’s Gospel from Christmas morning: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. We live in a privileged time, a sacramental age when our Baptism causes Christ’s light to shine through us. As we, or our parents, were handed our baptismal candle we were told that this light is entrusted to [us] to be kept burning brightly… keep the flame of faith alive. All we need to do is cooperate with the graces of our baptism and we can be a sign to the nations.

It is the time of year for resolutions and practicalities. Perhaps this year we can, every one of us, resolve to more fully appreciate the divinity of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament; could you arrive ten minutes earlier for Holy Mass, and take the time to kneel (if you are able) and worship him as the Magi did; or perhaps you could make a special effort to visit the Lord during a time of Adoration; or even commit to a regular time each week?

And what of sharing our light? I sometimes hear people say they are embarrassed about public expressions of the faith, even within their own families. The message of the Epiphany is: don’t be! I’m a big fan of St Therese’s adage to ‘do the little things well.’ So do that – the little things: leave the crib up until the Presentation on the 2^nd February; put that Child of Prague statue in the front window; bless yourself with a drop of holy water when you enter and leave the house; openly call to St Anthony when you’ve lost your keys; write and talk about the Epiphany blessing over your door. There are so many little things that we can do. Now me, or any one you, doing these things, won’t change the world. But if Kings Heath (and the Maypole) had 600-odd people all offering small acts of faith, and across the earth 1.4 billion people were doing them, what a wondrous light we could shine into the darkness; what a wonderful witness we could be the world. Even the wise men might not be a patch on us then.

Homily for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: I want to be perfect!

*Workers in the Vineyard of their Master by Erasmus Quellinus*

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You may be familiar with the TV programme Gogglebox, but for those who aren’t the premise is that various videos are shown to groups of viewers, and their reactions are recorded. I can’t claim to be a regular watcher, but I would very much like to see a Catholic edition of Gogglebox, in which we get to see people’s reactions as they hear the messages of the Gospel for the first time.

I suspect today’s parable would be a hit on a programme like that. It’s hard not to find ourselves thinking ‘do you know what, fair play to the whole day’s workers for moaning – they had done the full day’s work after all.’ People on the show might be nodding their heads in agreement, only to find themselves with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions when the landowner calmly explains that those workers got exactly what was promised. The only thing that could be being criticised here is his generosity, and generosity’s a good thing, surely?

In a time when we are very aware of social justice, this parable really can seem unfair; but we need to remember that it is just that – a parable. The examples used in parables are illustrative – the message of The Good Samaritan is not limited to mugging victims, nor is the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids about the logistics of owning oil lamps. In the same way, we must not read an earthly sense of fairness into today’s message – the pay received by all represents eternal salvation, and what could we possibly hope for beyond that?

The first failing of the workers then, is that they see long-service as entitling them to more than those who took up the landowner’s offer at the eleventh hour. It would be easy to use the words of our first reading to explain God’s mercy as being a thought beyond our comprehension, but it is worth remembering here that Matthew was writing his Gospel for a Jewish audience; and as we heard in the Gospel of his Feast Day this past Thursday, the Jews generally were far from keen on embracing anyone that they did not believe was part of God’s chosen people. In fact, this parable is only recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps he intended it as a thinly veiled message that those who come to God through his Christ are just as entitled to his mercy as those who followed the Law of Moses. On our shorter time scales, of course, we must remember that having been Christian for a lifetime does not entitle us to more than a death-bed convert. There are no VIP rooms in heaven, and it would be vanity to hope for such.

This brings us neatly to the other failing of the workers in our Gospel – their selfish sense of their own value. Being made in the image and likeness of God, we do of course have an innate dignity and worth; but forces in today’s society have managed to corrupt this ideal. I love rugby and I’ve been watching a great deal of the World Cup in recent weeks. Many of the advertisements shown in those programmes are typical of exactly this corruption. One of them in particular barely advertises a product, instead it glorifies the message that as long as we are doing what we want to do, nothing else seemingly matters. This is not the Christian understanding of individual worth and value. We are called to embrace our distinctiveness, within the Gospel message; and then to place it at the service of others – St Paul understood this in our second reading. He longed to die and reach his eternal reward, but he also knew that, in his words, “living in this body means doing work which is having good results.” Those good results were most apparent in the lives of others, not in his own.

Another of those adverts is for the British Army, with its tagline “be the best”. But if you told me that I was the best person, the best Christian in this church this morning, I would not be pleased. To aspire to being the best means to embrace life as a competition with others, and as long as I am better than them, I can be happy. For the army it make sense as a slogan; in war being better than your opponent is what keeps you and your comrades alive. Being the best is enough in their profession. But you and I won’t get to heaven simply by trying to be better than everyone else.

To put it bluntly, being the best isn’t good enough; it isn’t what being a Christian is about. I don’t want to be the best. I want to be perfect – perfect enough to spend eternity in the presence of my God and Lord. With the grace of God I will get there; but I fully expect, like Gerontius in St John Henry Newman’s famous epic, that I will have to beg my guardian angel for the purification of purgatory when the time comes.

But that’s not me trying to ‘be the best;’ because I want that same perfection for every single one of you, from the youngest child who hears this to the oldest pensioner. And beyond that, I wish it and pray it for all of humanity in every age of the world. That is what it means to be a Christian. I can be me, and you can be you, but we can do it selflessly and still live the lives that God wants for us. Life is not a contest. We can, all of us, attain perfection, in this world or the next. And we know that we can do it because, in the words of the psalmist today:

            The Lord is kind and full of compassion…
            He is close to all who call him,
                        Who call on him from their hearts.

Homily for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: Creation itself obeys the will of God

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The recent success of the film Oppenheimer has drawn the public consciousness to some of the great, and at times terrible, discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century. Those discoveries of course, stemmed from attempts to understand a very base question of our existence: ‘what is stuff made of?’

The ancient understanding of the elements was of course very different to that of Oppenheimer and his contempories. In the time of Christ, the answer that everything is made of Earth, Air, Fire and Water (and later Ether) was broadly accepted among those who cared to ask such questions.

Water and Fire were understood as the extremes of the elements. Where Earth and Air were relatively passive, Water and Fire had the capacity to destroy and to take life. Water in particular had that reputation to the Jews – both for the disciples themselves and for the Jewish audience that St Matthew wrote his Gospel for. One might consider the Flood and Noah’s Ark in Genesis, the storm that turned back the prophet Jonah, or the destruction of Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea – these stories were well known. Yet all those familiar stories have something in common besides an awful lot of destructive water. They all make clear that the seas; the elements themselves; creation itself; obeys the will of God.

These stories were then reflected in the psalms that Jesus and the disciples would have prayed daily. Psalm 89 says: “Who is like you, LORD God Almighty? … You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them.” And in another psalm: “The LORD stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.” The word translated as LORD in both of those psalms refers the Holy Name of God; sometimes translated as I AM, in Greek ego eimi. Jesus’ use of that phrase is more often associated with St John’s Gospel, but it is exactly the phrase that Matthew records in today’s passage, translated for us as ‘It is I’. To the Jewish disciples, Jesus’ words identify him both as the man they know, but also as God.

Peter steps out of the boat, and with his eyes fixed on his friend, his friend who has just identified himself as God, walks across the water; but as soon as his mind is drawn from God by the wind and the storm, he begins to sink. The Lord reaches out to him and brings him back to the boat, at which point the wind and the heavy seas calm instantly. Creation itself obeys the will of God.

In all of this we can draw a multitude of analogies: Perhaps we recognise in the disciples’ boat the Barque of Peter – that ancient allegory of Mother Church herself. Perhaps we see ourselves as Peter, needing to keep our eyes on the Lord and avoid the distractions of the material world; or perhaps we see ourselves as one of the others in the boat, wishing we had Peter’s confidence in calling out and his faith in taking those first steps. Perhaps we feel ourselves sinking right now, and long for the Lord to reach out and lift us up; or perhaps we happily feel that the Lord has recently calmed the waters of our lives.

Regardless of where we might consider ourselves in that story, this final thought, I hope will be relevant. It stems from my reflections in the parish Lectio group last Monday morning; and as we reflected on this scripture the phrase that jumped out at me was: “In the fourth watch of the night.” That would be between three and six in the morning – the Lord had left them in their struggle against the wind from the evening-time all the way through to the hours before dawn. That was more than enough time to reach their destination on the far shore, had the weather been favourable, and yet they had done nothing but struggle on without him.

Sometimes we struggle, just like the disciples in the boat. Sometimes the Barque of the Church herself appears to be merely struggling along in a hostile world. Sometimes it can feel as though the stresses and worries of the world, even the very fabric of the world – the elements themselves, are conspiring against us. What today’s Gospel shows us is that the Lord will always be there for us in those trials. Not as we expect necessarily – the disciples’ did not expect to see him walking on the sea, perhaps not even as we would like him to be – the disciples could have done without that sleepless night fearing for their lives, I’m sure; but he will be there when we truly need him. All we need to do is endure the trials, the crosses, which in his wisdom he sends to us and be willing at the appointed time to cry out in the words of Peter: “Lord! Save me!” Because at those words he will surely reach out and bring us to safety, for nothing is impossible for him – even Creation itself obeys the will of God.

Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: What are you?

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Many of us will have experienced at some point what is best described as a corporate icebreaker. The sort of affair where a group of people have gathered, usually in a circle, and to begin to get to know one another each person is asked to speak in turn, with some generally innocuous details about themselves and their lives. Some people hate these tasks, some don’t mind them; I’ve never met anyone who admitted to actually liking them!

You’ll be please to know that I’m not going to go around asking anyone, but I would like you to try one of the common icebreakers in your own mind. Sometimes people are asked to try and describe who they are in five words; not a sentence – they can be unrelated words. But I am going to change one part. I would like you to think for just a few moments not about who you are, but about what you are. So let’s take a few seconds of silence: In no more than five words – how would you describe what you are.

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Whatever words came to you in those few seconds, try to hold on to them in your minds.

I had a bit of time to reflect on that question in preparing for this homily, so I’m going to take myself as an example. The words I settled with are : I am a Christian, a Husband, a Teacher, a Father, and a Deacon. Of course, once we have our words in mind, if we are to share them then we have to settle on the order that we’re going to say them in. Perhaps just the order they popped into our heads? I gave mine in chronological order – I was baptised as a Christian as a baby; I got married when I was twenty; became a teacher straight out of university; a Father a couple of years later; and a deacon just under a year ago.

But what if we try to put our words into an order according to their importance to us? Try it in your minds with some of your own words. It’s difficult. It’s very difficult. In fact it’s so difficult that we may not ever be able to find an answer we are happy with. Is it more important to me to be a deacon or a teacher? A father or a husband? My wife and children heard this homily on Sunday morning and it led to a few interesting questions when I got home!

What we are presented with in today’s Gospel seems at first glance to be a very difficult teaching of Jesus’. He says “anyone who prefers father or mother… son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Wow. What he’s saying is that whatever else we are, and whatever order of importance we might settle on for the other things, being his disciple, being a Christian, must come first.

What he’s not saying of course, is that we should not love being the other things too; but he does insist on our belonging to him first.

To understand these difficult lines we must remember that this person speaking, this man, Jesus, is the Word of God in the flesh. This is what we acknowledge in the Creed. We say also that “through him, all things were made.” All things, not just the concrete nouns, if you’ll pardon the grammatical term; not just the rocks and the air and the trees and the squirrels. All things – including ourselves; including our nature to procreate and raise children; to teach one another; to undertake marriage or to receive holy orders. All of that comes from him. In fact, there can be no word in your mind that cannot be traced back to him, because everything that you are, you are because of him and his plan for you.

So being his first is not a bad thing. Being his first makes us better at everything else. If you recognised yourself as an artist, you will be a better artist if you appreciate that the things you paint are his handiwork; if you are a nurse, you will be a better nurse if you see him in the face of every patient; if you are a scientist, you will be a better scientist if you realise that it is his creation that you seek to reveal.

For my part, I truly believe that I am a better husband, because I am his; I am a better father, because I am his; I am a better teacher, because I am his; and, frankly, I would be a pretty useless deacon if I was anything but entirely his.

In short, if the person of Jesus is anything at all to us, he must be everything to us.

The deacon’s bits…

Okay the title might be a little provocative, but once the Carry On fans at the back have finished sniggering, we can begin…

Since my ordination last summer I have fielded a number of questions from parishioners about the deacon’s role at Mass. In this post I hope to provide an overview of where deacons fit into the liturgical life of the Church, particularly at Holy Mass, and use ‘the deacon’s bits’ – that is, the parts of the Mass in which a deacon says or does something, to illustrate some wider truths about the diaconate as part of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

The first thing to say is that in the experience of most Catholics, the deacon appears to turn up and take some of the priests’ roles. That’s not strictly true – for the most part the roles I’m going to be discussing here are those proper to a deacon, which means that if a deacon is assisting at the Mass, then he should be the one to say or do that thing. For instance, it comes as a surprise to some people when I mention that you will never see the Pope read the Gospel in St Peter’s, because arrangements are always made for a deacon to be present at such large Masses. Of course, St Peter’s is not a typical parish church, and the Pope is not a typical parish priest. In the absence of a deacon at Mass, a priest steps into those roles, as he is also a deacon, having usually been ordained such about a year before his ordination to the priesthood. It was quite unexpected, but very nice, to be greeted as a ‘brother deacon’ by a number of priests following my ordination.

The deacon’s roles at Holy Mass largely fall under three identities: as a herald of the Gospel, as an image of Christ the Servant, and as the link between the Altar and the Faithful.

A Herald of the Gospel:

We have already mentioned the proclamation of the Gospel as a proper function of the deacon. Immediately after his ordination, a deacon kneels before his bishop and is handed a book of the Gospels as the bishop says to him; “receive the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you now are: Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach.” The diaconate order has been associated with proclaiming and teaching the faith since ancient times, and although it lost something of its identity by becoming a precursor to the priesthood (until its restoration as a permanent order in the 1960s) it still existed within the liturgy, with the role of the deacon at a High Mass usually being filled by a second priest. This identity as a herald of the Gospel is also the basis of the deacon’s permissions to preach, including homilies at Mass; the graces of ordination allow us to share in our Bishop’s teaching authority, and he grants us the faculties to “exercise the ministry of preaching the Word of God, as a service to the people, and in communion with the Archbishop and the priests.”*

One of the differences that does apply to deacons is that before we proclaim the Gospel, we ask the blessing of the celebrant, by bowing to him and asking quietly, “your blessing, Father.” The deacon then receives a short blessing from the celebrant, which bears a number of similarities to the prayer which a priest would himself say before the Gospel. Following the Gospel the deacon reverences the book in the same way as a priest by kissing the opening words of the passage whilst praying quietly “through the words of the Gospel may our sins be wiped away.”

Chanting the Gospel.
Priestly Ordination Mass of Fr Toby Duckworth and Fr Steven Fleming, 2023. St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham.

An Image of Christ the Servant:

The word deacon comes from a Greek word which translates as servant. It should be no surprise therefore that many of the deacon’s liturgical functions appear to be acts of service at the altar. The deacon prepares the altar and adds wine and water to the chalice with the quiet words “through the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” He then hands the paten and the prepared chalice to the priest in turn. Depending on the celebrant’s wishes the deacon may also cover and uncover the chalice as needed, and turn the pages of the Missal for the priest. The deacon also elevates the chalice for the conclusion of the Eucharistic Prayer, though he does not sing or say the words – they are still a part of the Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the function of the priest(s) who is (are) celebrating the Mass; instead he joins with the rest of the people in acclaiming the Lord in the final Amen. After Holy Communion the deacon can, if the priest wishes, purify the sacred vessels and return everything to their proper places.

Preparing the Chalice.
My Ordination Mass, 2022. St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham.

On the Distribution of Holy Communion:

A mention should be made here of the distribution of Holy Communion. A deacon is an ordinary minister of Holy Communion. This means that the Church allows him to distribute Holy Communion by virtue of his Order, without a special commissioning, such as that required to allow lay people to serve as extra-ordinary ministers of Holy Communion. However, a deacon receives Holy Communion just like a lay person, from the hand of another minister – usually the celebrant of the Mass. The celebrant of the Mass will usually distribute Holy Communion, but there is a question, it seems, of who should be the ‘second’ minister of Holy Communion if both a deacon and a concelebrant priest is present. I have not been able to find a clear and satisfactory answer to this question, but my opinion would be that if there are concelebrating priests present, the intimate connection between their Order and the Blessed Sacrament would suggest that they should distribute Holy Communion before the deacon(s) of the Mass.

Since my ordination a couple of people have asked me why I receive Holy Communion on the tongue, when I am about to distribute it with my hands. I hope that this note has addressed that: priests communicate themselves; my own reception of the Lord is from the hands of the priest. That did not change with my ordination as a deacon, despite my being in the privileged position of having the faculty to then aid the priest if needed in the distribution of Holy Communion to the faithful.

As the Link between the Altar and the Faithful:

The deacon has a number of little phrases to say aloud during the Liturgy. The most noticeable is the dismissal at the end of Mass – “go forth the mass is ended,” or one of the other options available in the Missal. There are others, such as the instruction to “bow down for the blessing” before a solemn blessing, or the repeated “let us kneel” and “let us stand” during the solemn intercessions on Good Friday. These instructions can seem rather curt and even rude, but the English translations are actually rather toned down; the literal translations are very clearly instructions. For example, the single word instruction levate, translated as “let us stand” would more strictly be simply “stand up.”

Translations aside, it is a fair question to ask why it falls to the deacon to give these announcements. The answer is simply that deacons are a link from the altar to the people, and vice versa. The celebrant addresses the people at different points in the Mass, such as with the words “the Lord be with you;” “pray brethren that my sacrifice and yours…;” or “behold the Lamb of God…;” but when instructions are to be given, it falls to the deacon to give them. This is also the reason why, after the priest has incensed the altar, it is the deacon’s role to incense in turn the priest, other clergy (usually concelebrants), and then the congregation in the main body of the church.

Another aspect which emphasises the deacon as the link between the altar and the people is the reading of the Universal Prayer, or ‘Bidding Prayers.’ While this is a role proper to the deacon, in many parishes a lay person reads these intercessions and a pastoral reason is given for this, usually something along the lines of ‘that’s what we always did before we had a deacon.’ I am not, and have never met a deacon who is, particularly precious about reading the Bidding Prayers at Mass, but the principle of praying at the altar for the needs of the world definitely fits into this meaning of the diaconate.

Reading the Intentions of the Universal Prayer.
Rite of Election, First Sunday of Lent, 2023. St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham.

Conclusion:

This post has not taken a toothcomb through the Liturgy to examine every thing a deacons says or does, but it has covered most of them. What I hope it has achieved is to draw out some of the unique theology of the diaconate as one of the Holy Orders, and demonstrate how these aspects are expressed at Holy Mass.

With every blessing,

Martin

* Note: That quote is taken directly from my letter of appointment, and so refers to ‘the Archbishop’ as I live and minister in an Archdiocese. Everything said in relation to a bishop applies to any local Ordinary, whether a bishop or archbishop.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A: The Woman at the Well

*Samaritan Woman by Paolo Veronese, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria*

One of the criticisms often levelled at the Catholic Church is that we do not read enough of the Bible. The length of today’s Gospel might suggest otherwise, and this was the shortened account!

[For the reader: A reference to the passage used is given at the end of this text.]

The criticism is not entirely unfair however, and while we will never embrace the sola Scriptura, Scripture alone approach of Protestantism, it is a fair question to ask – when and how do we read and reflect on the Word of God?

One approach is Lectio Divina, a process in which a piece of Scripture is read three times, with a period of reflection between each. It is all very contemplative, allowing a word or phrase to jump out at us; that is the word or phrase which we are then called to consider the importance of, for ourselves and in our lives.

Each person brings their own personality to this sort of reflection, and I find that my curious nature is often drawn to the little details: Why did the writer choose to include that – what is the importance of an often apparently trivial detail. When I was reflecting on today’s Gospel, my attention was drawn to a couple of things:

John’s Gospel wasn’t written by him personally, but by a community of his followers. Those followers would have memorised his stories and teachings word for word, after the Rabbinic traditions of the time; but why did John insist that they remembered that this meeting happened at the sixth hour, or include the snippet that “Jews, in fact, do not associate with Samaritans?”

It is no secret that the Samaritans had a long history of conflict with the Jews. They were the remnant of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, with the Jews being the remains of the Southern Kingdom. They had freely intermarried with non-Israelites, and as we hear alluded to in the Gospel, they worshipped God at this mountain, called Gerizim, rather than at Mount Zion – the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Worse still, the Samaritans had opposed the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, and the Jews had destroyed the Samaritans’ Temple in turn. It’s safe to say that while the Jews looked down on the Gentiles – the non-Jews, they openly hated the Samaritans.

And what of this sentence “it was about the sixth hour?” The daytime was divided into twelve hours, so the sixth hour refers to the middle of the day, the hottest part of the day; and here was this woman alone at the well. Water would have been collected by the women in the early morning, when the day was cooler and the walk back to the city less arduous. So what was she doing there in all that heat?

Jesus Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well by an unknown artist, Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, USA

Another thing that often catches my eye with the readings at Mass is when I look at the reference at the top of the reading and there are verses missing. In this shortened version, what was said in verses 16-18, and 27-38? The first of those gaps is significant here – Jesus tells this woman something about herself that he should have had no way of knowing – that she had had five husbands, and was now with another man who was not her husband. This is why she calls him a prophet, and later says “he told me all that I have ever done.” It is also very likely the reason that she was disliked by the other women of the city, so much so that she had to come to the well alone at the sixth hour – in the heat of the midday sun.

This all adds up to a woman who was as despised as it is possible to be – excluded by her own people, and they themselves a people who had been shunned for centuries by Jews; Jews like Jesus.

And yet the Lord offers her, even her, living water and eternal life. There is hope for all of us, I think.

But she doesn’t just take from the Lord; she passes on what she has received. Think of those you consider to be credible sources of information – are any of them outcasts like this woman? I suspect probably not. Yet the zeal with which she spoke of the Lord when she returned home inspired those in the city to welcome him and to believe.

That same living water, that same eternal life, is offered freely to every human soul, to every one of us. All we have to do this Lent is turn to him, worship him in spirit and in truth, and he will grant us everything that he promised to the woman at the well; and what is more, we will be filled with the same intensity that caused her, an outcast of outcasts, to speak so fervently, and with such conviction, of the Good News of God.

Gospel Passage for the 3^rd Sunday of Lent, Year A, Shorter Form: John 4:5-16, 19-26, 39-42

Lent and ‘Christian Warfare’

Evil exists. The Evil One exists. And Lent is a time to renew our fight against them.

There are many in the world today who doubt what I have just typed. There are many in the Church today who doubt what I have just typed; and it is rare to hear such things in a homily. Such ideas are apparently even more unpalatable to the modern world than the radical teachings of Christianity.

Ironically, even the institutional Church itself would seem to be shrouding such ideas in more favourable language. At an instruction class last week in our parish the translation of prayers came up; consider these two translations of the Collect for Ash Wednesday:

From the Latin typical edition of both the Breviary and the Missal (published in 1970):
Concéde nobis, Dómine,
præsídia milítiæ christiánæ sanctis inchoáre ieiúniis…

From the Breviary, to be used in the Divine Office (translated in 1974):
Support us, Lord, as with this Lenten fast
we begin our Christian warfare…

From the Missal, to be used at Mass (translated in 2010):
Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting
this campaign of Christian service…

One does not have to be a Latin scholar to recognise that præsídia milítiæ christiánæ is not best translated as a campaign of Christian service. A strict literal translation would be the garrisons of the Christian army. This is more closely reflected in the older (1974) translation, but who or what are we going into battle against? That prayer goes on to give us an answer: the spirit of evil/spiritual evils. In this we must see the person of the Devil.

The Catechism writes (CCC 2851) of the line in the Our Father, but deliver us from evil, that “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God.” In combatting his influence in our lives and in our world, we bring ourselves closer to God; because we reject and fight against not just him, but all evil. St Augustine described evil as “an absence of good;” anything which stems from God is good, anything which lacks God’s goodness is the work of the Devil. As the Catechism continues (CCC 2854), “When we ask to be delivered from the Evil One, we pray as well to be freed from all evils, present, past and future, of which he is the author or instigator.”

This has been the view of the Church from its earliest days and only recently has evil seemingly become a term to be avoided. Some early Christian examples include St Peter, who wrote (1 Pet 5:8) to suffering Christians, “your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith;” and St Paul, who blamed the devil for preventing his visit to Thessalonica (1 Thess 2:18) – “we wanted to come to you… but Satan hindered us.”

The effect of evil in our day to day lives as Christians is of course sin – those times when we turn away from God and give in to the temptations of false happiness offered by the Father of Lies. Fortunately the Church offers us the spiritual weapons needed to fight against such temptation, and insists on our use of them in the Holy Season of Lent.

The word insists in the last sentence may seem authoritarian, but the Church does exercise her authority in this. The Church has five precepts, which I will again turn to the Catechism to define (CCC 2041): “The precepts of the Church are set in the context of a moral life bound to and nourished by liturgical life. The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by the pastoral authorities is meant to guarantee to the faithful the very necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort.” (Emphases are my own)

The fourth precept of the Church binds us to observe the times of fasting and abstinence laid down by the Church (CCC 2043). While there are days of defined fasting and abstinence, the spirit of self-denial extends to all of the days of penance, which includes “every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.” (CIC 1249-50)

Along with Prayer and Almsgiving, Fasting is one of the weapons with which we are called to battle sin during Lent. It is the inward facing weapon with which we battle temptations in the depths of our heart. We deny ourselves in imitation of the Lord in the desert, as we will hear about in the Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent (Mt 4:1-11); after his time of fasting the Lord was able to reject the temptations of the Devil. Some would say that the Lord’s rejection was a foregone conclusion because of his divinity, but that was not the case; his humanity caused him to feel temptation just as we do. What is more, there were no witnesses save the Lord and the Devil, and yet the Lord felt his time of fasting and temptation was important enough to later recount it to the Apostles, who passed it into the Gospels.

Some would point to the Gospel of Ash Wednesday (Mt 6:1-6,16-18) and say that fasting is not something to be talked about. I would certainly agree that it is not to be boasted about, especially not in the seeking of recognition or adulation; but that is not to say that it should not happen at all. Indeed, the words that the Lord uses, When you fast… suggests an assumption that fasting definitely will take place; and if fasting must take place, then at the least there must be a discussion of what it involves, or no one new to the faith (as a child or an adult) would ever learn about it.

Fasting is a form of self-discipline. Whatever we fast from, it must be something we will miss. This principle is understandable even to the very young. Children will often joke that they will give up broccoli or some similarly disliked food, usually with the full knowledge of the humour they are sharing by apparently missing the point of a fast. What we are doing when we fast is denying ourselves something morally neutral, so that we can be confident in our ability to deny ourselves things which are attractive. Then when things morally evil come along, we can be confident in our ability to deny them too; and with them, the author of all that is evil – that same Satan that tempted our Lord. In this way we prepare ourselves worldly to celebrate the liturgies of the Holy Triduum, and spiritually for the eternal reward won for us in the Paschal mysteries.

By way of a summary, I will give the final words here to the Prayer over the Offerings for Ash Wednesday:

We entreat you, O Lord,
that, through works of penance and charity,
we may turn away from harmful pleasures
and, cleansed from our sins, may become worthy
to celebrate devoutly the Passion of your Son.
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Those who trespass against ‘uzz’ or ‘uss’?

One of my many obscure interests is in the rhythm and stress patterns in texts, especially in poems and liturgical texts such as hymns, psalms and prayers. Over the past few years one particular stress pattern used when praying the Our Father has intrigued me because when it is combined with the accents of the Midlands of England, it suggests that an important aspect of the Our Father is being missed or misunderstood. If you have a different accent, the pronunciation part of my thoughts below may not mean a great deal, but I hope that the ideas of stress patterns will.

All of this may seem a strange starting point for a religious reflection to take, but please bear with me.

Whether we realise it or not, in spoken English we emphasise certain syllables over others. This is because every text contains stressed and unstressed syllables. When chanting, these syllables become even more important, partly for rhythm and partly because they indicate on which syllables the note will change. This is why the psalms of the Breviary are written out with accents – the accents indicate the syllables to be stressed as one reads or chants. Consider the opening of Psalm 50 (51):

Have mércy on me, Gód, in your kíndness. *
In your compássion blot óut my offénce.
O wásh me more and móre from my gúilt *
and cléanse me fróm my sín.

Below is a recording of this verse being spoken aloud:

And sung to psalm tone 3g, as found in the Liber Usualis:

The Liber also contains (in Latin) a simple, yet wonderful illustration of this ebb and flow between stressed and unstressed syllables:

This brings me neatly to the title of this reflection. The word us can be read in two different ways in some English accents. In the Midlands of England, it is often pronounced uzz, with a long ‘z’ sound, rhyming with buzz. Sometimes however it is pronounced uss with a shorter, harder ‘s’ sound, rhyming with fuss; this is less common and usually happens when the word us is itself a stressed syllable, such as at the end of a phrase or sentence.

This may all seem terribly trivial, but consider now the final sentence of the Our Father, punctuated and line-broken as it appears in the Missal:

“Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.”

The Our Father is of course a prayer we say regularly, and it can be very tempting to rattle through such prayers without really considering their words. Although one sentence, the semi-colon at the end of the third line is a clear split between two separate requests: we ask for God’s forgiveness in lines two and three, and then ask him to keep us clear of temptation and sin in the future. As line three ends a phrase and a specific request we should make an effort to pronounce us with a clear, short uss sound; but in haste we are often looking straight to the end of the sentence and resort to the longer and more common uzz sound instead.

On a deeper level, when we are hurrying, we are not fully considering the words we are saying; we don’t take the time to appreciate the ‘us’ in those lines. We are asking God’s forgiveness for the things we do to offend him, but only in the same manner as we forgive those who sin against us. That is a big deal for the Christian life – we are called to forgive as we wish the Father to forgive us. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I have a great deal I would like forgiveness for; and so I must endeavour to be forgiving in every single situation where someone upsets or hurts me.

Of course, we are not trying to strike a divine bargain with God – he will, in his love, forgive us anything anyway, as long as we show true repentance. But Jesus did not leave us these words in example for nothing; he left them as a guide both for prayer, but also for life. We will live a better, a more fulfilled, and, most importantly, a more holy life if we follow the example of forgiving others who trespass against us.

That is the message which we gloss over and do not take the time to consider every time we rush through an Our Father, all because of a lack of emphasis on a word just two letters long.