Homily for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve Jubilee Year of Mercy

Christmas Blessings to one and all!

Here is the sermon I gave at Midnight Mass at our friary last night...

May it bless you and yours. +

Brother Richard

 Christmas Eve 2015 The Year of Mercy

Our God bows low…

This is the message of Christmas Night…

The One who is the Lord of Lords, and the Light from Light from all eternity;

the One who is the only begotten Son and the Eternal Word of the Father bows low…

Bows because of us…

Bows before us…

He bows so low that He descends, emptying Himself of all that would keep Him separate from us,

of all that would make us feel unworthy, or lost, or shameful…

The awful and terrible All-Holy presence in the Garden of Eden who sent Adam and Eve hurrying to hide their fallen selves now hides Himself in our flesh.

The voice of thunder upon the Mountain of Sinai that made all those who heard it throw themselves on the ground in fear while they begged Moses to pray that they would never hear it again is now heard in the cry and gurgle of new born baby.

The One whose luminous glory filled the Temple and whose reign transcends space and time chooses the deep rich darkness of a woman’s womb and delivered into time is now swaddled against the night’s cold and barely fills the manger He lies in…

Our God bows low…

He has descended to be with us, to seek us out.

He has descended to raise us up…

The Word became Flesh and dwelt amongst us…

Amongst us sinners!

We who were meant to be the joyous light filled pinnacle of creation but who had fallen to the lowest place of darkness and despair, now find ourselves called out of darkness and into His own wonderful light…

And His light is not the proud light of glory, but the gentle glow of lantern in a stable that is really only a little cave; just a crack in the earth that over the ages will crack the hardest of hearts open if they just hear its call…

Our God bows low…

He bows down to raise us up,

He empties Himself so that we may be filled,

He leaves the 99 to seek the One who is lost.

He comes not as conqueror or Lord, though He is truly both;

but only as Shepherd, Healer, Teacher, Carpenter…

Child…

But we forget…

we forget this every year…

every day…

even, perhaps, every moment…

We fail to hear the cry of the newborn calling us to this new beginning and so we need our Christmas celebration… and perhaps this year we need it like never before… we need its reminder of the Love and mercy that is poured into our world. The infinite Love and Mercy which sustains it and nourishes it and heals it and renews it in every moment…

We need it to call us to watch with the Shepherds and the Wise men for that glimmer of light in the sky of our souls, for that song of the Angels that we stopped singing a long time ago when we fell from the Eden of our innocence. It’s harmony has always been there just at the edge of hearing, on the threshold of our dreams, resting within our heart waiting to burst forth again and renew us with the light of Christmas, the light of Christ Mass, the light of the Child of Bethlehem who makes everything new and whose light the darkness can never overpower.

We seek that light in every Christmas bulb kindled on tree or shop-front or street corner, in every sparkle of tinsel or flame of hearth even when we do so un-remembering why it has ever been our human need to light lamps at the darkest time over the countless ages of our longing for He who is the Light for our darkness…

So how do we touch this mystery the Word Made Flesh, this mystery of mercy made flesh in our midst?

How can we, the cynical and the proud, the lazy and the lost, the anxious and the tired recover this gift offered to us in every moment?

We must come to the crib…

Do not hold back…

Do not let our sins hold us back…

We have been invited…

There is a place for us…

If there were not, if it were only a place for the holy and sainted then there would have been no shepherds, those unclean men of the fields and the hills, always excluded from the town and the temple.

Yet they are the first called, the first Apostles of the Lord who speak face to face with Angels and bring the message of the miracle to the people round about and to us…

Down through the centuries that message they were given comes to us again and speaks to us all the louder in these days of war and violence and so much pain:

“Glory to God in the Highest Heaven, and Peace to all people of good will!”

If we were not invited there would have been no Ox, no Donkey, for us to find ourselves between… they have their place there by right… they the only honoured witnesses to the moment of the Divine Birth.

Greeted by the newborn Babe as His gentle friends, they the emissaries of that kingdom whose countless centuries of simple animal obedience honoured him more by their very being than we have ever done until He came and gave us our new beginning in Love, are first to carol His coming with the warmth of body and breath.

So come now, join with St. Francis and the brothers who journey through the ages to the Crib taking not the smooth paved road to town square or shining basilica but a mountain track into the deep forest where a cave lies prepared to stun the people back to innocence. Follow those torches lighting their bare-footed steps and sing with them those ancient songs, of Holly and Ivy, of Blood and Berry, of Candlelight and Crib as we travel to the Cave where time stands still and the white candle is kindled as eternity enters time and the Babe is born to die; where God bows low and the Father of the World to come, sleeps gently on His Mother’s breast…

Come to the crib…

Come to the cave where Mother Earth holds her most precious treasure and there bow low too…

You will have to…

I will have to…

For none can enter this place without bowing…

Without stooping…

To enter this first Holy Door of Mercy you must enter at a child’s height, and with a child’s heart… and then you will hear the whispered choirs of the ages sing their eternal “Venite Adoremus” and looking around you will find that no matter how old, or hardened, or weak you are you have the shining eyes of a child again…

This is the first gift to you of the One who is Mercy itself, the One who restores innocence and heals hearts long hardened… and then you will discover Christmas, the reality of Christmas again…

Not the Christmas of the shops and the TV’s and the black Fridays, and the rows, and the drinks, and the noise, and the pressure, and the stress, and the stuff, (so much stuff), and the buying, and the queuing, and… and… and…

Stop, breathe, be…

All that is another thing altogether… a distraction… the mere wrapping paper on the real Christmas Gift…

Having bowed low you will come to stillness there sitting upon the rough straw of the crib, the perfect stillness of a Mother and Child, and stilled yourself you will know the new beginning that comes with the Child.

You will discover again the true Christmas that always sits in your heart and there opens a stable to One who is greater than all.

One who is Compassion.

One who is mercy.

One who IS Love…

Our God has bowed low…

He bows so low that wherever we are, He is…

Even in the mess, even despite our sins…

He entered the world in a dung filled stable…

How could He ever draw back from you, draw back from me…

He bows so low that He seeks to enter the stable of our hearts now and in every moment and once born there to invite us to begin again in love

He bows so low that, yes, we can sometimes forget Him… for sometimes what is nearest to us we do not see unless we open the eyes of our heart again with a child’s simplicity; until we come to the crib, yearly, daily, even in every moment entering the Holy Door of Mercy by serving each other in compassion and love, by simply bowing low.

So bow low this Christmas and be met by the God who bows low.

Enter the cave.

Come to the crib.

Cross the Holy Door of Mercy.

Become Love.

Dealing with those Distractions: The Meditation Gym.

Dealing with those Distractions: The Meditation Gym.

There is a wonderful story from the life of that great mystic and master of meditation, St. Teresa of Avila, that deals with distractions in prayer beautifully.

Having been brought to a convent of sisters to teach them about the way of meditation she did so in great depth and with much skill. However, towards the end of her time with them she was asked by one of the sisters to describe how she herself meditated. Taking the last half hour that the sisters had gathered she began by saying she had gone to the chapel with them, genuflected before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and interiorly dedicated the time of prayer to Him. Then she sat in stillness, and almost immediately was distracted by a sunbeam illuminating the corner of the chapel that showed up a little dust. She began to think to herself that the sister in charge of the sweeping wasn’t doing a very good job…

But she remembered she was there to pray and returned to her meditation…

A few moments passed and then she noticed that the sister kneeling in front of her had three nails in the sole of one sandal, but four in the other…

Where could the other one have gone to, she wondered…

Was it a case of two few nails in one or too many in the other?...  

But she remembered she was there to pray and returned to her meditation…

A few moments passed, and then she noticed that the breathing of the sister beside her was in a different rhythm to her own and she began to listen to the music of her breath…

But she remembered she was there to pray and returned to her meditation…

St. Teresa continued to describe the ongoing oscillation from distraction to distraction that to her listeners seemed to comprise the whole of her meditation much to the dismay of the sisters who wanted to learn from this Master of Prayer.

At the end one of them was so amazed she blurted out, “But then you were just distracted for the whole of your meditation!”

“Ah,” said Teresa, smiling, “Yes, I was distracted but I returned each time and that makes all the difference.”

Perhaps one of the most common difficulties in prayer that is brought to me both as a teacher and as a confessor is the whole area of distractions during meditation.  

People can often torture themselves over this perceived difficulty, indeed, for some the encounter with the dross and ephemera that arises before the mind’s eye during meditation can be so off-putting and the struggle to defeat them become so exhausting that it can even be enough to put them off the practice of meditation completely… in a later post we will deal with the content of these thoughts and the wisdom of the fathers and mothers as to how to deal with the major ones that every meditator has to struggle with, but for today let’s look at the general problem of distractions and how we should deal with them in meditation…

You see, the problem often begins with dividing our assessment of our period of meditation into the time “I was distracted”, (which often seems like the majority of our time), and “the time I was meditating”, (which usually seems like the minority), when the real issue is that we are approaching it from the wrong perspective by using this as the framework of our division of the time in the first place. The problem then becomes further compounded when we add a layer of guilt and self-recrimination for the distractions in to the mix. This then arouses anxiety and further separates us from the relaxed stillness necessary to our prayer. These difficulties arise when we fail to realise that the distractions are a part, indeed a very necessary part, of the meditative process. I will repeat that: The distractions are part of the discipline of prayer.

Let me explain…

Suppose as part of your “New Year, New You” initiative, (that takes place every January first), you decided you wanted to build up your biceps, or triceps, or abs or whatever muscle group you feel needs some work. You go to the gym and with effort you lift a weight. (So far so good.) But then you NEVER put it down again. Do you build the muscle? No of course not, in fact you will probably wither it and end up with less movement and less muscle. It is in both the contraction and the release, the picking up of the weight and the putting it down again, that the strength of the muscle is built when the process is repeated over and over again. The same is true for the mind at prayer. Every time a distraction arises, and we notice we are distracted, we simply and gently return to the anchors of the breath and the Prayer Word that draws us back to our focused mindful awareness of the Divine Presence. The taking up of the time of prayer is the picking up of the weight. The distraction arising is the releasing of the weight. As long as we pick up the weight again as soon as we notice that we have put it down, we are only building the “muscle” of the attention, refining our mindful awareness a little more each time, so that over the days, weeks, months and years of practice we will find that the distractions become less and the periods between them become longer. Indeed, after a time the distractions will simply rise and fall but our own focus on the Presence will remain true beneath and beyond them.

This “discipline of distraction” is actually essential to the beginner in meditative prayer and is the whole of the art in its initial stages. It refines focus, builds attention in a gentle way, opens the present moment as the place of encounter with the Divine Presence, and deepens our humility and the awareness of our need for Divine Grace.

In coming back again, and again, and again, we are allowing the Holy Spirit to write the path of metanoia, the path of conversion, (literally re-turning to God) within our hearts. It is on and in this struggle (parrhesia) for mindful attention that the Desert Fathers and Mothers saw the foundations of the real meditative life being built, and it was the art that the monastic had to be grounded in before moving on to deeper forms of meditative prayer.

As the great master of prayer St. Francis DeSales wrote in his wonderful treatise The Introduction to the Devout Life,

“If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master’s presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole hour, (of meditation), but bring your heart back and place it in Our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.” 

 So then, the next time you go to sit... and the distractions arise... smile... once you have noticed them... and then immediately return to the breath and begin again...and again... and again... this is the discipline of meditation, this is the path of prayer... this is the way to build mindful attention of the Divine Presence... And as you leave your meditation, if anyone asks you what you were doing in there just say "Working out!"

Blessings :)