4th Sunday Lent A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

It has been a painful time for us Catholics over this past week. The evidence before the Royal Commission has been quite distressing. You are here tonight – that says something – some perhaps just hanging in, perhaps browned-off, sad … uncertain how to respond to what you are feeling. I was talking to a friend during the week. She said that God is still very much part of her life and she will keep coming to Mass; but she feels quite disillusioned with the Church. She looked so hurting, so sad; and I did not quite know how to help her, other than respect her hurt and sadness.

The need to give a homily this weekend has made me look at what is going on inside myself. I am sad. I am sad for the victims, not just for the original sexual abuse they experienced but for the way they were discounted, demeaned and unjustly fobbed off when they approached Church personnel hoping for compassion, understanding and practical help. I am sad for ones like my friend, loyal, salt-of-the-earth Catholics who want to love the Church and to feel at home in it; and now feel adrift.

I am sad. Yet, personally, I am not overwhelmed; nor do I think that I am caught in some kind of psychological avoidance. I feel that over the years I have, perhaps, become “battle-hardened”. I have wrestled with the Church, on-and-off, probably since the late 60s – I nearly left the priesthood during the 70s. But God has kept tight hold of me, and I have hung in. I have had to go deeper into myself to check out what I really believe, what was Jesus really like and what did he really say; and to engage with him constantly. I have had to come to terms with the mystery and the power of sin – in myself and in others, even in others I had put on a pedestal.

I have had to face the sinfulness of the Church – not just in theory; and to realise that there is nowhere better to go so long as people are people. It is my Church as much as anyone else’s, and no one, however they behave, will make me leave it. Before I receive Communion with all of you, I say: Lord, I am not worthy …, and you are all saying it too. It is true. I have had to learn to become comfortable with that, and comfortable that it is the only way I can meet God – bringing my own real unworthiness, and making peace with yours. It is hard at times to live in a Church like that, but where is the Church of the sinless? If there were one, what makes me think I would qualify?

Unworthiness, of course, is not the whole story. In this inevitably and always unworthy Church there is also grace; there is also beauty. Without being cynical, I see that grace-filled beauty more obviously as I look back down the hierarchical line rather than up the line – in people like you, young and old. You are blessed here in Hamilton to have the pastoral team you have – Marg, Paddy, John – all of them compassionate, wise, courageous.

And I have lived long enough to be convinced, like St Paul, that, whatever the reality, God can make all things work together for the good for those who love him. I have learnt to hope.

Before I went to bed last night the words of a poem came into my mind, written by a 19th century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was saddened by the spread of industrialization. What he said of nature is even truer of supernature. He wrote: