Saint Athanasius (295 – 373)

He was born in Alexandria. He assisted Bishop Alexander at the Council of Nicaea and later succeeded him as bishop. He fought hard against Arianism all his life, undergoing many sufferings and spending a total of 17 years in exile. He wrote outstanding works to explain and defend orthodoxy.

Athanasius’s passion for the truth seems tactless to many of us today, to the point where some Catholic devotional works even express embarrassment over it. This is grotesque. Before we congratulate ourselves on being more gentle and civilised than Athanasius and his contemporaries, we should look at the lack of charity that characterizes academic controversies today (from string theory to global warming) and the way that some of the participants are willing to use any weapon that comes to hand, from legal persecution to accusations of madness to actual assault. The matters in dispute with the Arians were more important than any of these scientific questions. They were vital to the very nature of Christianity, and, as Cardinal Newman put it, the trouble was that at that time the laity tended to be champions of orthodoxy while their bishops (seduced by closeness to imperial power) tended not to be. The further trouble (adds Chadwick) is that the whole thing became tangled up with matters of power, organization and authority, and with cultural differences between East and West. Athanasius was accused of treason and murder, embezzlement and sacrilege. In the fight against him, any weapon would do.

Arianism taught that the Son was created by the Father and in no way equal to him. This was in many ways a “purer” and more “spiritual” approach to religion, since it did not force God to undergo the undignified experience of being made of meat. Islam is essentially Arian, granting Jesus a miraculous birth, miracles, death (though not crucifixion) and a resurrection, but all as a matter of God demonstrating his power by committing more spectacular miracles than usual.

Arianism leaves an infinite gap between God and man, and ultimately destroys the Gospel, leaving it either as a fake or as a cruel parody. It leaves the door open to Manichaeism, which mixes Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Gnostic elements into Christianity, so that God is good but creation is bad (or at worst, a mistake) and the work of an evil anti-God. Only by being orthodox and insisting on the identity of the natures of the Father and the Son and the Spirit can we truly understand the goodness of creation and the love of God, and live according to them.

TAKING TIME to find someone we trust to be our “wailing wall” and sharing the stories that our tears represent brings immense healing benefits into our lives and relationships. Something positive and life-giving is released when our tears flow and find their voice. This could be why the church, long before the advent of modern psychology, gave special atten-tion to “the gift of tears.” Besides their therapeutic value, which is well documented, tears help us realize when we have reached the point when we are most wounded, which is precisely the moment that restorative grace and new beginnings often enter our lives. Our tears make us receptive to angelic presences and surprising resurrection encounters. It happened for Mary, and it can happen for us as well.

St Joseph the Worker

The feast of Saint Joseph the Worker is not a mere Catholic copying of the Communist First of May – any more than Christmas is a mere copy of the pagan feast of Saturnalia. The dates are taken over, for obvious reasons; but the content is radically different.

The Christian view of work is the opposite of the materialist view. A worker such as St Joseph is not a mere lump of labour – “1.00 human work units.” He is a person. He is created in God’s own image, and just as creation is an activity of God, so creation is an activity of the worker. The work we do echoes the glorious work that God has done. It may not be wasted; or abused; or improperly paid; or directed to wrong or pointless ends. To do any of these things is not oppression, it is sacrilege. The glory of the present economic system is when it gives so many, of whatever class, the chance to build and create something worthwhile, whether from their own resources, or in collaboration with others, or by attracting investment from others. But its shame is when that does not happen: when people are coerced, by greed or by poverty, into being “lumps of labour.” Whether the labour is arduous or not makes no difference; whether it is richly paid or not makes no difference.

Because she must combat the anti-humanist Communist heresy the Church is sometimes thought to be on the side of capital. Reading the successive Papal encyclicals on labour and society, from Rerum Novarum (1891) onwards, will soon dispel that illusion. The enemies of the Church have no reason to read them; all too often we feel too comfortable in our present economic state and refrain from reading them also.

BECOME QUIET for a few moments and imaginatively join Mary as she stands weeping outside the tomb. Envision yourself meeting Mary in the garden, her eyes and yours filled with tears. Go together across to the open tomb, look inside, and slowly take in what you see. Witness the intriguing emptiness of the grave . . . the grave clothes neatly folded . . . the shroud and napkin lying separately.

Now stand for a moment at your own pool of tears and reflect on it in the light of this resurrection picture. Weep if you need to. Allow this Easter-morning scene to deepen your belief that, on the other side of your brokenness, grief, and loss lie the possibilities of new beginnings. We can look at our tears and give up in anguish and despair, or we can look up to God through them and hope for transformation. I encourage you to make the second choice. Resurrection life and tears often interweave, which could be why the psalmist, many centuries ago, celebrated the promise that “those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.”

EACH OF US does sit next to a pool of tears. As you read my words you are sitting beside your pool; and as I write these words, I am seated next to mine. Our pools are different. Some are deeper; some are muddier. Some have been caused by what has been done to us; some are the result of our own doing. These pools remind us of the grief and losses that we have experienced through our lives. It might have been the death of a loved one, the pain of divorce, abuse as a child, the unmet longing for a partner, the loss of a job, or a rejection by a close friend. There are many different kinds of pools—the list goes on and on.

But tears don’t have to end in sadness and pain. As different as our pools of tears may be, they can lead us into a new space of change and growth. If we allow our tears to tell their stories, they can become the means by which our lives are transformed.

The seer of the Book of Revelation is talking about a reconciled world. A world in which people “of every nation, race, and tongue have come together in joy. And so we ask: How can this happen? What road do we take to get there?” Well, first and most important: these people are living with God. God himself has “sheltered them in his tent”( Rev. 7:15), as the reading says. So we ask ourselves again: “ what do we mean by God’s tent?” “Where is it found? How do we get there?” The seer might be alluding to the first chapter of the Gospel according to John, where we read: “ The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (Jn 1:14)

The hectic pace of our daily living pushes the calendar forward. How quickly we come to the end of Easter week. Perhaps the personal, family, and community celebrations of last weekend get lost in the blur of time. This Saturday of Easter week offers the chance to look back to our experiences of Holy Week and Easter and ask “what stands out for me? Which persons, which conversations, what events marked this Easter as key moments of grace for me?”

Today’s Gospel brings us to familiar words of Jesus: “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” What part of the world are you called to go out into today? Perhaps it is to a neighbor, a relative, or a coworker. And how are we called to proclaim? It might be by mending a relationship, engaging a long-delayed conversation, offering Jesus’ Easter words of peacefulness and hope.

Ours is a missionary Church, sparked by these words of Jesus. Figuring out how we respond to this call is the joy, and the challenge, of the Gospel.

In the course of our lives, all of us are on a journey, we are traveling towards the future. Naturally, we want to find the right road: to find true life, and not a dead end or a desert. We don’t want to end up saying: I took the wrong road, my life is a failure, it went wrong. We want to find joy in life; we want, in the words of Jesus, “ to have life in abundance.”

JESUS COMES to each one of us through his Spirit, walks alongside us, and desires to enter into conversation with us. He wants to know about the dark thoughts and feelings in our hearts. He opens our minds to words of scripture so that they speak directly and personally to our situations. He makes himself known to us as bread is broken and wine is poured. In moments like these, our hearts also begin to burn again with new faith and hope and love.

Saint John-Paul II, Pope from 1978 to 2005

Apostolic Letter “ Mane nobiscum Domine ” §19-20 (7/11/04, © copyright Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

“Stay with us”

When the disciples on the way to Emmaus asked Jesus to stay “with” them, he responded by giving them a much greater gift: through the Sacrament of the Eucharist he found a way to stay “in” them. Receiving the Eucharist means entering into a profound communion with Jesus. “Abide in me, and I in you” (Jn 15:4). This relationship of profound and mutual “abiding” enables us to have a certain foretaste of heaven on earth. Is this not the greatest of human yearnings? Is this not what God had in mind when he brought about in history his plan of salvation? God has placed in human hearts a “hunger” for his word (cf. Am 8:11), a hunger which will be satisfied only by full union with him. Eucharistic communion was given so that we might be “sated” with God here on earth, in expectation of our complete fulfilment in heaven. This special closeness which comes about in Eucharistic “communion” cannot be adequately understood or fully experienced apart from ecclesial communion… The Church is the Body of Christ: we walk “with Christ” to the extent that we are in relationship “with his body”. Christ provided for the creation and growth of this unity by the outpouring of his Holy Spirit. And he himself constantly builds it up by his Eucharistic presence. It is the one Eucharistic bread which makes us one body. As the Apostle Paul states: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1Cor 10:17).