“ all sought Jesus out”-some thoughts from this week’s Lectio

 Those who know me personally know that the practice of Lectio Divina has shaped my practice of the faith for some time now. Since my student days at the Oxford Catholic Chaplaincy. Far from a pious claim this is has been and continues to be  a confirmation of how much I don’t know about scripture. It is an honest recognition that I, and most likely many other Catholics, don’t spend enough time before our Lord in the written words of Scripture. 

Today’s reading is from the Gospel of Mark, like the past few weeks, we continue in Chapter I. Today Jesus cures a leper. Fr Nicholas Crowe at Blackfriars Oxford goes far deeper into the minute symbolic meaning of the actions taken by the Leper in today’s Gospel during the homily he gave at Mass, than I will do. What stayed with me from this week’s Lectio with the local Dominican fraternity was the phrase that comes at the end of the Gospel. The leper understandably joyful about his being cured tells all and Jesus can no longer enter a city or town because throngs of people seek him out. In spite of remaining in secluded places they go out to find him. The action of people seeking him no matter how hard that is can be found in several places in the Scriptures, today’s phrase that manifests this action stood out to me especially because it made me realise that people today as they did yesterday as they did centuries ago are still very thirsty for Jesus. For the light, truth, and healing that Jesus is. What are we doing to show people the compassionate but also the truthful, illuminating face of Jesus?

The other thing that has been underlined for me is that ‘leprosy’ can be understood as sin, leprosy of the heart or soul. I have noticed this because two separate brothers - Fr Nick being one of them- have made the same comment. Something that occurs in two different countries, cultures and languages, and almost similar stands out. Today, it is rare to hear a priest speak of sin in a homily, unless of course you are Dominican. Not because Dominicans are obsessed with sin or self-flagellating but because they live very grounded in the Truth, God, and the truth about themselves and by extension of all of humanity. It can’t be any other way. To enter into true communion with God we need to have our feet firmly grounded in reality, in the reality about ourselves and the reality of those that surround us. To restore true harmony with ourselves, with others, and with the created world we need to have our eyes wide open to the truth, the tensions, weakness, and strengths with which we are confronted daily. This past week the local theology faculty had the pleasure of having a talk by the Bishop of Trondheim, Erik Varden, a cistercian monk turned Bishop. One of the things that he said was that we made the mistake of thinking that to be with God we had to be angelic. We don’t, in fact not embracing ourselves as we are, not recognising our passions and coming to terms with them, would atrophy out capacity for true communion with others and with God. He develops this quite beautifully in his book Chastity: reconciliation of the senses, which I highly recommend. Fr Nick, as Fr Erik, return to the topic of today’s Gospel, we need to recognise the ‘leprosy’ that we have within, recognise how we think and feel when we realise our weaknesses, how that influences whether or not we turn to God, whether an acknowledged sense of shame prevents us from truly turning to God, and examine if maybe there needs to be both an more honest and a more compassionate view of our own soul from ourselves in order to seek out the loving care of our Lord. God does not look at us with disgust and rejection, he turns his compassionate and loving gaze onto us as he did the leper in todays Gospel desiring our healing and giving us our healing. He desires our coming to Him and we should not shy away from this.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On marriage: thoughts from a marriage ‘postulant’

 This may not be the easiest post to read for some people I know and may seem infinitely naive for those few I know that are actually knowledgeable and much more practiced on the subject. Edith Stein once gave a talk titled in German Muttererziehungskunst- roughly translatable as motherhood kraft. At the start of it she humourously commented on the irony of a single female academic, who had spent the better part of a decade living in a Dominican convent and college, and a year or two later would become a Carmelite, being asked for talk about motherhood. She of course had ample knowledge about spiritual motherhood, something she also commented on in this talk. There is much that one can learn from observation and talking to others about a certain topic, it isn’t only experience, though obviously experience gives a knowledge about some things that renders a depth that is missing without that experience. In the case of marriage, it is a curious thing, but the church has a clear idea about
Read more

A brief note on going too far

Image
 These past weeks have involved intense discussions, prayer, and thinking on a topic close to the hearts of all of my fellow discussants. Our concern, pain, and confusion is clear. St Catherine of Siena comes up regularly. Watch this space if you are interested in some weeks or a few months you might want to find out more. Independent of them and only briefly publicly saying what I think on one topic specifically, I write this very brief note. The role of women is one of those topics that has become a ‘hot’ topic for Catholics and one can be easily misunderstood if one is too diplomatic. It has happened to me as a theology student in Cambridge and being amongst anglican ordinands I was diplomatic and wholly misunderstood. The way I, a Catholic, think about this topic is radically different from theirs and I wanted to spare their already confused and frayed spirits. BUT being misunderstood on this important topic did no one any favours. As a Church we have some wonderful sources for thi
Read more

Edith Stein and issues with translations

Image
Part of the reason linguistic matters have come to the forefront of my work is the particular way in which they related to my work on Edith Stein’s essay’s on Woman and the comments made by several friends on what they perceived to be her narrow view on women in today’s world. I couldn’t understand it at the time because Stein’s ideas are in line with their own way of thinking. My lack of understanding stemmed from not having read either the English or the Spanish versions of her essays.  This term I am tutoring a student who is analysing an evangelical influencer group that is anti-feminism but defend what can be understood as fractional complementarity. I felt she needed to read Stein to better understand the broader context of Christian Feminism and how the group she is analysing has failed to comprehend certain aspects of metaphysics, unsurprising given their evangelical background and how since Luther this has been a weak point in Protestant theology. My student does not read or s
Read more