St. Nathy’s Cathedral – 3rd April 2023
I have the opportunity this year, for the first time since Covid, to visit the children in schools that I will be Confirming. Last Wednesday week I was visiting a school, I won’t name it, but it was up the Sligo end of the Diocese. I had a lovely visit and the children, and their teachers were fantastic. After my little talk with them there was an opportunity for questions from the children, and all sorts of wonderful questions were put to me. But one child asked what the typical day of a Bishop is like. It was a good question and I said I’d share with them what that day was like for me…
I was on the 8am Mass in the Cathedral that morning, then I got a bit of breakfast afterwards, then I went to the Office and collected the post, normally there is a lot of post. I went through it and replied to some letters immediately others I left until later. Then I opened my emails, again normally a lot of emails, I went through them and replied to most of them. Then someone was calling in to see me, that meeting lasted about half an hour. Then I had to get ready to come up to the school. I will be a couple of hours in the school visiting all the classrooms and the teachers and so on. Then I’ll head back for lunch and go to my Office again. I have to prepare for some upcoming events and meetings, finish off on the post. I had another person calling into me about something and then I had a Zoom meeting later that evening.
After I had shared all this, and was almost exhausted telling it, one little fellow put up his hand and said, in all innocence, “And do you have a real job as well?” I think the fact that there was no animals or land mentioned pointed to the fact that it didn’t really constitute a “real job”!
But it got me thinking! What is my real job? Is it all about administration, and letters, and emails and meetings and so on and so on. Now they are important and necessary, I’m not saying otherwise, but my real job is to preach the Gospel. I have news for us all here, that just doesn’t apply to me, it applies to us all. We all share in a common baptism, that means we are all called to be disciples, we are all called to preach the Gospel through word and witness. That’s our real job, our real mission given to us on the day we were immersed into the life of Christ in baptism.
I mention this today because there is a lot going on in our world and our Church and our Diocese. Change is happening and there are questions about the future. It can be daunting and somewhat confusing, perhaps even wearisome, it’s easy to lose focus in the midst of it all. That’s why I love the readings presented before us this evening. They provide us with a clear focus. The passage from Isaiah in the First Reading and it is the same text Jesus proclaims in the synagogue…
“The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.”
“The spirit of the Lord has been given to me” That same spirit was given to us in baptism. “He has anointed me.” We were anointed in baptism and confirmation, some of us deepened that commitment when we were anointed in ordination. “He has sent me…” Our faith is not just something for ourselves it calls us out of ourselves to mission. That reality is really put up to us, when the prophet talks of “the poor, the captives, the blind, the downtrodden…” They are at the heart of the mission.
The Word of God is very real. It speaks to reality of our world today. The Gospel outlines Jesus’ mission, which is our mission, the mission to liberate people from all that holds them back, from all that prevents them from living life to the full. Its easy to talk about this but it’s not so easy to live it, especially when we live in a society where being a follower of Christ is an uphill battle. To give an example, there was an article yesterday in one of the Sunday papers by a well-known Irish author who proclaimed the Catholic Church was “evil” and that it should be “abolished.” He’s not the first to proclaim these sentiments. By the way, this is nothing new, the Church of Christ has faced such opposition from its very beginnings, so we shouldn’t be too surprised or upset. But we do have some choices as we face this reality:
We can lie down in defeat and give up?
We take a back seat and let others worry about it.
We can wallow in our pessimism.
Or we can be optimistic and proclaim Christ in the midst of the reality.
Jesus always reached out and called the disciples to dig deep, especially when they were tired, fed up and weren’t too optimistic! In those moments he always said, try again, throw the net out in a different direction this time… trust me!
Pope Francis is very much aware of these challenges, he said yesterday:
“Whenever you or I or anyone else seems pinned to the wall, lost in a blind alley, plunged into the abyss of abandonment, sucked into a whirlwind of so many whys without an answer, there can still be hope: Jesus himself, for you, for me.”
He reminds us to go back to Jesus, the way, the truth, the life. He is the foundation of all that we do. Sometimes, perhaps, as the sand shifts, we can forget that. He’s in charge and I believe we get glimpses of him along the way that encourage us and gives us the strength to keep going.
A Jesuit priest called Fr. Daniel Berrigan who along with others in the 1960s went to jail over Vietnam, has a poem called “Tulips in a Prison Yard.” It describes the dull, grey world of prison life. Then one day as he came out into the concrete prison yard, he happened to see a tulip in the corner and in the midst of the greyness and the horror of the daily grind, it’s colour and beauty seem almost miraculous, and it lifts his heart. I like that because I think it captures the faith journey; in the darkest moment, when all seems lost, the Lord can give us a glimpse of himself that offer us hope and encouragement. These are the miraculous moments that lift the heart and help us to keep going knowing we are on the right track.
As Jesus handed back the scroll to the assistant, we hear that “all eyes were fixed on him.” What a powerful image. We are the pilgrim people of God, our ancient story is developing and evolving. We are not alone, but we must keep focus, we need to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. A young child in the Confirmation class up in Co. Sligo last week reminded me that that’s our real job.