8th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 6:39-45 in Luke 6:39-49

Homily 1 - 2019

Jesus talked about our being expert in observing the minimal splinter in our brother’s eye but being unable even to see the plank in our own eye. He was quite insistent that we take that plank out. The problem is, how do we begin to observe what we can’t see, what has become second nature to us? There are many possible answers to that, but one common one stems from the fact that we are often run more by our feelings than we realise. We do well to alert ourselves to them. The current situation regarding Cardinal George Pell is a case in point. Most people feel very strongly about what has so far occurred. Feelings are running high – of both his supporters and of his opponents. I want to comment just a little about this.

Yesterday I had lunch with a few friends of mine, whose chaplain I was when they were key leaders in the YCW movement back in the 60s. Two of them were discussing the recent court case. One was quite prepared to accept the outcome; another was condemning it strongly. In both of them, feelings were running high – with the result that neither was listening to the other, but each was simply expressing more definitively and loudly what he believed and why.

When feelings are strong, reasons tend to count less. What can be important in that case is quietly to ask ourselves what we want to be the outcome, and why we want it. What we want can influence more than we realise what arguments we listen to and the importance we give to them. It might help all of us now quietly to stop for a moment and ask ourselves. What outcome did I want? And why did I want it? And has my wanting influenced the arguments I take notice of and the ones I simply discount?

What matters with our feelings is that we notice them. Once we notice them and admit them to ourselves, they are less likely to influence inappropriately the conclusions we adopt. We are able to reason more clearly. However, it can be difficult to notice our feelings. The common wisdom it that we men find it harder than women to be in touch with what we feel. In that case, we need to try harder.

It helps to realise that, often contrary to what many of us were told as children, feelings of themselves have no morality. They are neither good nor bad. "Should’s" and "shouldn’ts" do not apply to feelings. It is actions and deliberate attitudes that come under the heading of morality and can be good or bad.

A few years ago, about the time when the Royal Commission began, I was at an information meeting in another town where parishioners were opening up the whole issue of clerical sexual abuse. A lovely older woman stood up and confessed to feeling very confused and bewildered. She felt guilty because she could not help feeling angry at the brothers and priests who, she was coming to learn, had abused young children. She felt that somehow it was wrong and disloyal for her to feel angry.

Though actions flowing from anger can be out of order, even vicious, the feeling of anger is neither morally bad nor good. We feel anger when we have in some way been hurt. It is as simple as that. Like all feelings, anger is a potent source of energy, and that energy can be used to destroy or to change things for the better. It can certainly be a precious resource. Our problem may well have been that we were not angry enough with the offenders and the bishops and superiors who covered up.

There is so much more that could be said. If you feel confused or would simply like to talk things over further, I know that Father Paddy, Father Doan and myself are quite ready to help to the best of our ability.

Homily 2 - 2022

Some people have good memories. Some nations have good memories, long memories. Here in Australia we are more prone to short memories, and many of us have great difficulty in facing up to how we initially engaged with First Peoples, just two centuries ago, when we arrogantly and violently deprived them of their lands.

I gather that many Russians have long memories that go back over ten centuries to when Russia was first converted to Christianity under Vladimir the Great. In fact, many Russians still see their land as sacred, and themselves as specially chosen by God. They see their Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, as the key Patriarchate of Orthodoxy, and a constituent factor of their historical identity — of who they are. They have a keen respect and reverence for what they see as the divinely favoured soul of Russia.

I was surprised to read, just in the last couple of days, that President Vladimir Putin shares that historical sense of the specialness of Russia, of the sacredness of its lands and of the centrality of Russian Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, historically, Ukraine was a significant part of the original Russia; and the city of Kyiv, the capital of present-day Ukraine, was Russia’s original capital. He seems to be haunted by the fact that, over the last two or three decades, Ukraine has become not only politically independent of Russia but increasingly attracted to Western Europe, and that even its current Patriarchate status has become independent of Moscow.

It looks like he may have the dream of reversing the trend — though it sounds that he may be oblivious to the Christian soul of Orthodoxy. Threatening another nation’s sovereignty is not Christian, nor are indiscriminate shelling and bombing.

We need to be careful, however, in how we pass judgment, and how we respond to the present crisis. In the Gospels of the last two weekends, Jesus insisted that we “love our enemies”. He wasn’t joking! Today’s Gospel warned that “disciples are not superior to their teacher”, Jesus. No one knows more about our human hearts than he does. We have had enough of “one blind person guiding another”. There may be “a splinter in our brother’s eye”, but that does not mean that there is not a corresponding problem with ourselves.

I am really pleased that, with few exceptions, leaders in the West have refrained from threats of armed retaliation. Pope Francis has persistently asked for diplomacy, not for armed violence. If we haven’t learnt from him, and more pertinently from Jesus, I hope that we are beginning to learn from the hard experience of recent fruitless warfare on so many fronts. I do remember that, some years ago, the Catholic University in Ballarat offered students the option to choose “Peace Studies” — the subject deserves serious thought.

Jesus remarked that good people “draw what is good from the store of goodness” in their hearts, just as bad people “draw what is bad from their store of badness”. We have no monopoly, however, on either goodness or badness — we have both! None of us is yet “a fully trained disciple”. We are all still in training. Since, as Jesus said, people’s “words flow out of what fills their hearts”, we know what such training involves — we need to become ever more familiar with our “hearts”. Given the power of current Western culture, that means, I believe, spending significant time in prayer with Jesus.