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A story I’ve told elsewhere and believe to be true is of how a Jewish person scratched with their fingernails on the wall of the gas chamber as they were dying the following words: “There is no God”.

Their sad but completely understandable conviction surely resonates with everyone who has ever suffered, especially when that suffering is great and unsolvable, such as parents facing the illness and death of a young child. And while we religious folk maintain that God has spoken through Jesus, through the Bible, through holy men and women through the ages, and still speaks through the signs of the times, through the natural world, and through our own conscience, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge that for all practical purposes God appears to be absent in our world and in our lives.

It really doesn’t do to try and fudge this issue, and no amount of pious sermonising and religious ritual will persuade decent people who have cast off any pretence at belief in a god. Words, as they say, are cheap. And yet a blog fundamentally depends on words, so what can I say here to honestly address the seeming absence of God?

The first aspect should be to attempt to answer the question: why, if God is supposed to be all-loving, does He hide from us? Why, if He truly is all-powerful, does He not intervene to convince and even to heal?

The answer touches the very nature of love, and it may sound counter-intuitive but God is absent precisely because He loves us! We are created in radical freedom, and this necessitates that God must stand back and allow us choices. Even God cannot have it both ways: either He steps outside of human life and allows us to be ourselves, or He is present and compromises that radical freedom. And so, the absence of God in this life is the very touchstone of His great love and the very guarantee of our great dignity as free beings made in His image. I don’t think there is any getting around this ‘fact’ of life and death.

I believe that God loves all creation, and not just human beings but the entire universe. I further believe that this life is but the momentary preparation for the real life, the eternal life, where choice will no longer be an issue, and will no longer engage and torment us with its complexities and consequences. That eternal life will be fully redeemed and healed, and is where God desperately wants us to be, with Him forever. In that life to come, we achieve our full potential, and there will be no more sin, no more suffering, no more goodbyes, and no more death. We cannot begin to conceive of such a world, and if we but knew a fraction of it we would be enthralled and desirous of arriving at our true home. And full of joy.

So a wonderful future lies ahead of us – but… we have no proof of this. No one has come back from the dead to confirm this, and even the claim that Jesus has risen from the dead cannot be proved. Where does that leave us?

The unavoidable truth is that we need faith. Faith is not irrational. It is not believing in fairy tales. In fact, everyone lives by faith – even atheists and agnostics, since no one can one hundred percent guarantee that what we take in with our senses is in fact reality.

Faith honours mystery. And mystery is not nonsense – it is the limit of our understanding. Faith, based on a judicious evaluation of reality, is actually the honest path – the true way of human life in this world. And as regards faith in God, the revelation of Jesus resonates with what we can discern in our hearts – an inner truth that is common to all humanity.

God appears absent in this life. God will not ‘descend’ in a cloud and sort us out! We have therefore to accept this and work to understand the meaning behind our existence. Ultimately however, it is not formal belief in God that will see us home to our eternal destiny – it is quite simply love.

“He who lives in love, lives in God, and God lives in him.” 1 John 4: 16

For God is love,

Martin

In an earlier blog, “Loving without Limits”, I tried to articulate how the quality of our love should always mirror the quality of God’s love for us – namely that His love is utterly unconditional and inclusive. God loves everyone without exception, and we are called to do the same. No exceptions.

In that earlier blog I used the image of the corral – to express how we often build a barrier around ourselves and especially around our tribe or kin. What this means is that we tend to love and associate with our own kind and – while we may not hate others – we effectively don’t care or bother with those outside our ‘circle’. This corral mentality is akin to racism and is also a fundamental denial of the love that we are all called to show – if we are serious about following Christ.

It follows therefore that racism is totally against the Gospel of Jesus, and if we claim to follow Christ and have racist inclinations, whether overt or subtle, we are being at best hypocritical but in fact living in direct opposition to His teaching. And while we may fool others, and even ourselves, we will never ever fool God. Racism and Christianity are diametrically opposed.

But I want to go even further than this and say that racism in all its forms is actually an obscenity in the eyes of God. And while all sins can be forgiven and God’s love is certainly greater than human sin, the sin of racism is an awful cancer in the human soul, and its effects are widespread and often devastating. Read “Solitary” by Albert Woodfox if you want a horrendous account of unbridled racism – in our day and age.

Imagine fifty people come into a room to meet you for the first time. You don’t know them but immediately – on the basis of their skin colour – you tell a number to go: you don’t want to meet them or have anything to do with them. How utterly illogical and stupid is that? You have made a value judgment on the basis of something that none of us can change. And why would we ever want to change our skin colour? Victims of racism may well have an answer to that question.

It is hard to love someone who has done you harm, and wanting to avoid them is perhaps only natural. But to want to avoid someone because of their skin colour? Someone you may never have met before and have no idea of whether they are good or bad? This is why I say that racism is an obscenity in the eyes of God. It is the worst form of corralling love. It strikes at the very heart of the core nature of God’s love.

Jesus actually emphasised this in many of His parables, where He was at pains to state that it is the other, the foreigner, the stranger, the ‘least’ who should be the focus of our love, and is often the very person who may show us love. He goes further and directly states:

“If you only love those who love you… “ (Matthew 5: 46)

meaning that love of our own kin or tribe to the exclusion of others is not what God asks of us. And we are always to give in the measure which we have received from God – that is, without limit.

Most of us, as good people, might say that we don’t hate others and that we don’t hate those who are different to us, whether in the colour of skin or perhaps ideology, sexual identity, or whatever. But racism can be very subtle, and I think there are profound undercurrents of racism particularly in ‘western’ societies that we imbibe from our earliest breaths. This may manifest as perhaps choosing to talk to someone of the same colour at a meeting, but this inclination can also involve the same sex, the same dress code, the same age group, even when we recognise the same accent – to the exclusion of others. At such events I feel that Jesus is prompting me to go and speak to the obvious stranger, the apparent loner, etc. We should, all of us, take the time to look into our hearts and try to discern if we have any subtle prejudices that God may be wanting to heal.

As Christians we are called to hold no barriers – even with those who have done us wrong! While that last point is hard, we should certainly not hold barriers simply on those unchangeable qualities of skin colour, sex, and age.

To be a racist is terrible. To be a racist and Christian is beyond obscene.

God made us who we are, and loves us as we are. All of us!

Martin

No matter how dark things can get, no matter how desperate things appear – there is always hope. To use the old metaphor, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. And this simple fact is true at both the individual and the collective levels.

How can I say this? Am I pretending that somehow everything will come right for individuals and for humanity in this world, that we will reach a point where evil and subterfuge are ended? Surely that’s pie in the sky, and dangerous: is there anything more cruel than to give someone or some group false hope?

This cast-iron hope that I am talking about is rooted in – faith in God. It is God, who in this world appears to be so absent, who will nonetheless bring all things together for the good: all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. In His time, in His way, in His kingdom.

Someone may say: “I know a child who died of a wasting illness, and no medicine, no prayers made any difference. The child died. There was no hope in that situation.”

The only answer I can give in such a dreadful situation, and words are limited, is that not even death can separate us from God’s love. If all your focus is on this world, this life, then you miss the point – God’s point. Nothing and no one is ever lost to God. Some would even say that death is the final healing. Thus the inevitability of our death does not negate a blessed hope – and I have sat with people who have died in that wonderful hope.

We are never promised that everything will be rosy in this life. God certainly has never promised that – in fact He affirms the cross, both in His word and in His example.

Hope obviously concerns the future but it radically affects the present. If we have a current suffering, perhaps a serious illness, but we are assured we will get better and we will be cured, then we have hope, and that hope gives us a strength today which often helps to promote our recovery. There is a story told of a woman who set out to swim the English Channel – twenty one miles across at the narrowest point. A considerable swim, but she was a strong and experienced swimmer, and she was doing really well, and almost at the coast of France, when a sudden fog came down on the water. Immediately she started to struggle and after a short while gave up and climbed into the support boat. She later said: “If only I could have seen the cliffs.”

Faith in a loving God is somewhat like seeing the cliffs, being able to sense the destination or the end point of our suffering. God offers all of us this hope today, because as I say, hope concerns the future but it massively impacts on our present. Real hope can put a ‘spring in our step’. It can even bring a deep joy in the midst of difficulties.

A thought – when someone’s life is so painful and bleak that they commit suicide – could that be in some way an implicit hope in eternity?

There is always hope. Praise Him.

Martin

Fr Richard Rohr OFM, whom I regard as a modern prophet, says these stark words about Catholics attending Mass:

“I’ve been a priest for over forty five years now; sometimes when I look out over the crowd at Mass, I can see a passive resistance over much of the congregation’s faces. Even when I’m giving what I take to be a risky and life-giving message. They are conditioned to expect nothing. They’ve got so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind.” The Divine Dance, pg 192

As myself an ex-priest and someone who has never given up on weekly Mass attendance, or indeed of being a Catholic, Rohr’s words strike me as entirely true and hugely concerning.

Over the last fifty or so years – my adult lifetime – the numbers attending church have massively decreased. It’s easy to categorise these folk who have either rejected the Church’s teaching and moral example, and perhaps even faith in God, or just simply ‘lapsed’ – it’s easy to categorise them as selfish and uncaring people: the ones Jesus referred to in his parable of the Sower (Matthew 13: 1 – 23) as those who never had any heart investment in their faith. And while that analysis may be true of some of those who have left the practice of their faith, I think we need to consider just how well the seed was actually sown by the Church. This brings us back to Rohr’s incisive comment because I cannot deny that the quality of much of the Church’s liturgy and celebration is desperately poor.

A typical Sunday Mass, certainly in the UK, is often a lack-lustre event with little ‘celebration’ of the Good News of the Gospel. We say ‘alleluia’ without really any feeling or meaning behind it. We may give the ‘sign of peace’ but it often seems to be a ‘going through the motions’ before receiving communion. The standard of reading of God’s word, both by lay people and clergy, is awfully bad. But perhaps the biggest deficiency is the dreadful standard of preaching – the almost exclusive preserve of the ordained (male) clergy.

I belonged to an order whose entire raison d-etre was preaching. And yet, my fellow confreres – and myself – while good and decent individuals, were often as sadly deficient in the quality of their preaching as many other priests. At seminary, I think lip-service (no pun intended) was given to what was called ‘homiletics and communication’. Personally, I like to think my preaching content was prepared and reasonably good, but my style was certainly very flat indeed.

The upshot of this dire standard of preaching is I think captured powerfully by Rohr’s sentence: “They are conditioned to expect nothing.”

Wow. I can only agree. Even as someone now sitting in the pews, and perhaps because of my experience as a preacher and celebrant, I often know when the congregation – who may start by listening – effectively switch off. The preacher is ‘droning on’ and it doesn’t take long for the congregation to start shifting in their seats, looking around and generally being distracted, if not despairing of any spiritual riches. How sad. How very sad.

Perhaps the most amazing fact is that so many folk – at least here in central Scotland – still attend Mass. But maybe that’s down to a lingering fear of going to hell – which was drummed into us as children all those years ago.

Expect nothing… And, as Rohr suggests, even when someone tries to impart a deep spiritual truth, the congregation may be so conditioned to expect nothing that they are not even listening! They may well be thinking about their Sunday roast because they – expect nothing from the sermon. I know some folk who basically only attend Mass because they know that they will receive Jesus in Holy Communion, but who despair of any other grace from the event.

And yet – the Gospel of Jesus is good news, the greatest news of our eternal destiny and our unshakeable identity as beloved children of God. Perhaps the Catholic Church has to largely die out in the western world before it might possibly revive? Certainly it will never disappear entirely.

Let’s each of us make the effort to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying and asking of us today! And pray for priests!

Martin

One of my earliest memories is of a travelling salesman who called to our home and spent some time trying to persuade mum and dad to buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. At that time, back in the early 1960s, this wonderful treasury of knowledge came in twenty four large volumes and cost a considerable amount of money. My parents would have loved to buy it to help their children in our learning but sadly couldn’t afford it and the salesman had to admit defeat and leave without a sale and without his commission!

Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web (internet) is a truly amazing thing. Thousands of powerful computers, located across the world and storing inconceivably huge amounts of information, are all interconnected with each other, and anyone who has access to a suitable device can plug in to this massive treasure trove of knowledge, pretty much for free.

Of course some of this vast store of information is dodgy to say the least, and sad to say there are malicious individuals and groups who purposely proffer false ‘facts’ and dangerous advice that can and does cause harm. We all need to be careful what we visit and view on the web, but in general there is so much valuable and interesting content at our fingertips that the web is a magnificent development of modern technology that has in many ways changed our world and even how we interact with one another.

I have always had a sense of God and a deep need to express the truths of the Gospel of Jesus. That’s why I became a priest many years ago and since having left the active ministry I have struggled to find any release for this ‘fire in my heart’. It’s perhaps a reflection on the clericalism of the Catholic Church that few apart from priests are given the opportunity to preach the Good News of the Kingdom. No wonder then that for me the internet, and my website poemsforpilgrims.com, have given me a platform and an outlet for this fire in my heart. I constantly pray that my website, its poetry and blogs, are all according to the mind of God and will never ever mislead or cause someone to turn against God.

My website has given me the possibility of sharing the things of God with others, and yet there is a catch: partly because the web is so vast but also because to find something in the web you have to know how and where to search. While setting up and maintaining a website is relatively cheap, the process of making it well known and well visited can be complex and quite costly. My attitude has been: if there is anything of God in my website and God wants to make use of it then God can take the lead. I admit that that sort of attitude can often be a cop-out!

I’ve called this short blog “A voice crying in the wilderness”, borrowing John the Baptist’s description of himself, itself taken from the words of the prophet Isaiah (John 1: 23 and Isaiah 40: 3). In saying this I acknowledge that my poems have gone from being hidden in a cupboard to being effectively hidden in the vast ‘wilderness’ of the internet and that therefore my voice – which I hope is also the voice of God – has been isolated and ‘crying out in that wilderness’.

The home page of my website gives my mission statement:

a small website that seeks to combine two tremendous forces:

~ the Good News of Jesus

~ the power of poetry.

I do think my website is fairly unusual among the countless myriads of websites because there is no commercial aspect to it – there is nothing to buy or sell. And another thing which I do believe is pretty well unique – I certainly haven’t found another website that carries this – is a ‘website blessing’. While many websites contain prayers and specific prayers of blessing, my site has a specific blessing for everyone who visits, whether they actually alight on that page or not. And that means you!

People reacted to Jesus in different ways: some loved and adored Him while others hated and rejected Him. Few I suspect were ever left unmoved by Him. My hope is that through my website the Good News of Jesus is proclaimed and that visitors to the site are left hot or cold, but never lukewarm.

Martin