THE MAN WHO HAD IT ALL AND KEPT IT TO HIMSELF!

Last Saturday I was in a small provincial town and I saw a crowd gathered around a bookstall on the side of the road.  Of course, I joined them.  I can never resist the lure of a book, particularly a children’s book. 

To my delight, I spied a secondhand copy of a book written for children by Oscar Wilde.  “I bet it’s got ‘The Selfish Giant’ in it,”  I thought to myself.  That was my all-time favourite story as a child, and it still is! I opened it eagerly. There it was in the centre of the book, illustrated with a very, very cross giant, outside his garden,  threatening the children who used to play there during his long absence visiting the Cornish ogre.

“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.

“MY OWN GARDEN IS MY OWN GARDEN,  ANYONE CAN UNDERSTAND THAT!” HE MUTTERED.  “I WILL ALLOW NOBODY TO PLAY IN IT BUT MYSELF.”

So he built a high wall all around it, and put up a big notice:

 

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

 

                                                                                                                              

He was a very selfish giant.

The poor children had nowhere to play.  It was too dangerous in the road, and too dirty in the lanes, so they were very sad.

They said to each other: “How happy we were there!”  And they went away.

I’m sure you know what happened next.  Spring came. All over the country there were beautiful blossoms and early flowers.  The birds sang their delight at the return of Spring, but in the Selfish Giant’s garden it was still Winter! The birds didn’t want to sing in that garden because the children were banned from it, and the trees forgot to blossom. The only ones who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost.  “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried. “So we will live here all the year round!”

So the snow covered all the ground with her white mantle,,  and the Frost painted all the trees silver.. Then they invited the North Wind, and he roared all day about the garden.  And he blew the chimney pots down.

Then the Hail came. He broke most of the slates in the roof because he rattled for three hours every day, and went round and round the garden as fast as he could!  He was all dressed in grey and his breath was like ice.

“I cannot understand why the Spring is so late! “ said the Selfish Giant. “I hope there will soon be a change in the weather.”

But it never came, and Summer and Autumn kept away too. Autumn gave lovely fruits to every garden except his. “He is too selfish”  she said.

SO IT WAS ALWAYS WINTER THERE (and never Christmas!)

One day the Selfish Giant, all wrapped in furs, looked out at his cold, white garden, and he saw something wonderful. All the Winter things had stopped, and he heard beautiful music.

What did he see?

Through a little hole in the wall, the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees.  All the trees were so glad that they blossomed and the birds were flying about twittering with delight.

Only in one corner it was still Winter. A little boy was crying . He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering round it, crying bitterly.

“Oh, that poor boy!” the Giant said (he was no longer selfish because his heart had melted) and he hurried down to the garden and lifted the little boy into the tree. But the other children were frightened when they saw the giant, and they ran away, and the garden became Winter again.

“Now I know why there has been no Spring in my garden”  the giant said. “How selfish I have been!  I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever.”

He kept his promise, and the children played with him in the garden which became the most beautiful one in the district.

But the giant always looked for the little boy whom he had put in the tree. He never came back, and the Giant was so sad.  He longed to see him, for he loved him best of all.

One Winter evening he looked out of his window as he was dressing.  Suddenly he rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. In the furthest  corner of the garden was a tree covered with beautiful white blossom, even though it was Winter. Underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

So he ran downstairs with great joy, and hastened across the grass to the child. But when he got close, his face went all red with anger. He said:  

“WHO HAS DARED TO WOUND THEE?  TELL ME WHO HE IS AND I WILL KILL HIM!”

For on the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on his feet.

“No”, said the Child. “ these are the wounds of love.”

“Who are you?” said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

The Child smiled at the Giant and said to him:

“You once let me play in your garden. Today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”

When the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

Giants are often used in folklore to portray wicked , selfish or powerful people who bully others.  Here we have a portrait of one who met Christ, and became transformed through love.

He came in contact with the innocence and simple happiness of children, and his own heart was changed by them. 

Jesus promised us through the prophet Ezechiel:

“I will give you a heart of flesh, and take away your heart of stone."

Children usually have hearts of flesh.  They respond to love like sunflowers opening up to the sun   They don’t remember past hurts unless they are taught to be bitter.  Bitterness is not a child-like virtue.  Trust and love are.  They are only crushed out by insensitive adults.   

Jesus told the apostles that, in order to get to Heaven, we must become child-like.

The selfish giant learned the lesson.

Can we?                                                                                                

 

The man who loved people

You will forgive me, I’m sure, if I speak a little about my football club, or rather, about the values and qualities that are at the heart of its philosophy.

Football is in the news at the moment, mainly because of the phenomenal amount of money spent on transfer fees before the window closed at midnight last night.  By anyone’s reckoning,  almost seven hundred million is a lot of money, and especially in a time of recession.  But that is what the game has become – a business which is about assessing players by their worth in terms of what it will cost to buy or sell them.  It is a far cry from the philosophy of the man who called it the beautiful game, and laid down his condition of entry into its higher echelons at Liverpool with the words:

“For a player to be good enough to play for Liverpool, he must be prepared to run through a brick wall for me, then come out fighting on the other side.”

That’s commitment.

His name was Willie Shankley, the youngest of five boys, all of whom became professional footballers.

His birth place was a small mining village in Ayrshire called Glenbuik, a village which was already dying when he thrust his way into its sheltering arms way back in September, 1913.   It would have disappeared without leaving a trace if it had not been for the fact that it had produced the man we now know as Bill Shankley.

If you have visited Anfield, you will have seen his statue and perhaps walked through the Shankley gates.  You may have even touched the sign which all players  have to pass on their way to the pitch, which says in large letters:

THIS IS ANFIELD!

That was the work of Bill Shankley.  “ It’s there to remind our lads who they’re playing for, and to remind the opposition who they’re playing against!”  he asserted stoutly as he put it in place.

That’s ownership.

He knew all about ownership and closeness.  He was brought up in a place so small that most of the families were connected.  In a population of about 3,000 people, there were about four surnames! It was common to say “Which one are you, a Brown, a Ross, a Shankley or a Smith?

It paid off dividends when the young Willie Shankley went down the pit at the age of 14.  Of course he had to spend an apprenticeship hauling down coal and doing all the running jobs at the pithead before he was considered responsible enough to go down into the cold, dark and dangerous world of the Ayrshire pit face.  Here the miners were mostly cousins, family members who acted as “muckers” for the younger ones,  standing behind them to protect them, seeing that they came to no harm.  Like Matt Busby and Jock Stein, also miners in Scotland who became famous Football Managers – Matt Busby in Manchester United and Jock Stein in the National side – he learned the hard discipline of toughness and togetherness which saved lives.

He never forgot his time in the mines.  He learned from it to appreciate the gifts he was given by God , particularly his football skills.  He brought to his management the same skills which he had learned as a lad; the value of togetherness, of respect, of getting on with the job and not allowing distractions to take his mind off what he hoped to achieve.

He once told a now-famous ex footballer who was limping, and showing him a bandaged knee which might prevent him from playing that day:

“Take that bandage off. And what do you mean about YOUR knee? It’s Liverpool’s knee!”

Tough love, which might not be appreciated today!

He took a club in the Second Division with no ambition, little resources, and no apparent desire to better themselves, into a club of iconic status. But he never did it for reward or money.  He got neither in his life-time. He did it for love.

I’ll end with a tribute from a relative, Matt Vallance, quoted in LFC on line. He says:

Shankley operated the same system at Anfield that he had known in the mines in Ayrshire. Even players of the like of Emlyn Hughes and Kevin Keegan had to earn their first-team jersey. He made sure that  each player fitted in and knew his place and could face difficulties and overcome them. 

He was the most inspirational person I ever met, not because of his extraordinary wit and charisma which rubbed off on his players, fans and on his adopted city and on all who met him, but because of what was inside him. The love, dedication and honesty he gave to the game, and to its people all his life, while asking for so little in return

The passion and optimism he gave to tens of thousands of ordinary folk that lit up their ordinary lives, and never left them.; the way he treated everyone as his equal and with respect

He believed in everyone working for the common good. He once said:

“If I became a bin-man tomorrow, I’d be the greatest bin-man who ever lived. I’d have everyone working with me, succeeding and sharing out the success.

I’d make sure they were paid a decent wage with the best bonuses and that we all worked hard to achieve our goals.  Some might Say “But they are only bin-men. Why do we need to reward them for a job anyone can do?” But I’d ask them “Why do you think you are more important than a bin man?”  I’d ask them how proud they would feel if their city became the cleanest in the world. Then ask:  “Who made them so proud?”  The bin men!”

That was Shankley. He gave everyone who wrote to him a personal reply  hammered out on an old typewriter. Every young person who knocked at his door was welcomed to a game of footie, and often to a joke, a ticket a “yes” to a request.

He was not as successful as Matt Busby at Man. U who was similar to him in thought, but he is remembered today as the one who went into football management to use his own words “to make people happy”  Not to make a fortune, not to be the most powerful, the most successful man in the game.  He wasn’t.  But as his autobiography says:

“Above all, I’d like to be remembered as a man who strove and worried so that others could share the glory, and who built up a family of people  who could hold their heads up high and say: ‘We’re Liverpool’ “

He knew nothing about modern ways of governance, he never heard of training courses for man-management. But, like Matt Busby and others like him, he could tell us a thing or two about leadership. And about love

  May he rest in peace and have time in Heaven to assess, with wry humour how we are doing in the game today.  And may he pass on the torch to us. We need it.

 

 

 

 

The thirst for power!

I once taught a girl who told me about her first, terrifying, day at school. She was in the playground, huddled against the wall, trying to get used to the noise of the hordes of children rushing about everywhere and screaming with delight at the freedom of the playground, when a little boy came up to her. "How old are you?" he asked her. "Five," she answered, thinking she had made a friend among all these unfamiliar children. "Then you watch it, I'm six!" the young gallant answered sternly before whizzing off to join his pals in the Second Class Infants.

That's power! We start young, don't we? In fact, long before we reach the age of six. Have you ever seen a baby having a rattle taken from him (or her)? If it's another baby who wants it, watch out for the squalls, the red faces, the screaming! That's the exercise of power!

In my misspent youth, I was the proud owner of a brand new bicycle, complete with gears, a bell with a beautiful ringing tone, and all the latest accoutrements. We hadn't heard of mountain bikes at that time, but I was satisfied with what I had. I was the only one of my friends who owned such a machine - and did I make the most of it! It occurred to me that I had a business opportunity right under my nose - rides for a penny each or some such daring entrepreneurism! But of course, it didn't work - my parents found out! But I remember the feeling of power it gave me - heady stuff! Power is seductive isn't it? It goes to the head and makes us feel giddy - even a little bit of it.

We live in a world that puts power at the top of the agenda. There is always someone who is jostling for your position, trying to pull one over on you by fair means or foul, so that he (or she) can put you down. We see it in schools - the bullying that goes on is widespread, and can have very serious consequences in later life. I was bullied at school, now I come to think of it, and it made me very miserable for a long time. "You are so stupid, you even look stupid!" I used to hear that every day. I got into the habit of looking in the mirror to see why I looked stupid! All I could see was a woebegone face and two long plaits. I longed to have my long hair cut, so that I would look clever. I blamed the plaits. But, even after I had them cut off I still looked stupid. So my tormentor told me. What a waste of money having the hair trimmed! The woes of youth!!

We might laugh at that sort of thing now - after all, what does it matter if you look stupid! But that's a grown-up way of looking at it, the hurt goes deep when you are young and not very confident. It is a very common experience - no doubt most of you reading this can look back on similar trials at school or even much later. We need to teach young people how to use power wisely. That is where the teaching of the Church, if understood properly, comes in.

Christianity is based on humility, on sensitivity to the other's point of view, on love. Jesus built up the confidence of those with whom he came in contact. He made the blustering know-it-all Simon of Bethsaida into the gentle, wise leader of post-Resurrection times - he encouraged the shy and reclusive Nathaniel to go to the ends of the earth with the Gospel message - he even accepted Judas as a member of the apostolic group and treated him as a friend. His dealings with women, particularly, were ground-breaking. Mary of Magdala, the reputed sinner, becomes the one who draws all of us into the love and forgiveness of Christ. Our Founder, Mother Magdalen wrote a lovely hymn to her. The last verse has always entranced me. In it she says:

"There are thousands in all ages come to Christ because of you."

It was Jesus who encouraged her to understand the true meaning of love and forgiveness, and now we too, come to him because of what she teaches us.

He made the Samaritan woman an apostle just by talking to her at the well in a non-judgemental way. He gave us his mother, and we have never looked back. She was one of the anawhim, the little ones who put their trust in God and did not seek power for themselves.

 

 

The power we have now is the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the power of love. Pope Francis is teaching us that nowadays. He said:

"Only when the thirst for power is replaced by love, will true transformation take place."

Our world will never be changed by power-hungry people, or by those who seek to overthrow restrictive regimes by force. The only real transformation is brought about by love. The Pope of the poor knows that. We need to learn it too.

So we pray:

Glory to him, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. Amen.

Enjoy the rest of July. We'll be in touch next month.

 

 

 

Holiday Month!

The weather here is beautiful,  the sun is shining,  a slight breeze is rippling the trees, everyone out on the streets are smiling, dressed in their Summer finery, the flowers are breathtaking everywhere;  all they need is a pleasant drink in the evening and they are content, that is until the slugs come along!  Oh, and Andy Murray won at Wimbledon on Sunday, so all is well!

But our God is always there for us, no matter what the weather, no matter how we feel, no matter whether the flowers bloom or not. As a friend of mine from the USA used to say: “that is awesome!”  So it is.

 

What a God – in a changing world, we can always think of him and there he is!  We can always put out our hand, so to speak, and it is held securely, lovingly, protectively. We have only to call out his name, as the Carpenters, I think, used to sing, and he is there. Always on our side, always ready to lift us up when we fall,  always THERE.  And that, surely, is eternal Summer or Spring or Autumn or even, perhaps Winter – it depends what your favourite season is.



St. Paul summed it up perfectly, as he seemed to have a habit of doing:

“In him we live, and move, and have our being!”

For this month, I suggest that you take the lyrics of  The Deer’s Cry by Shaun Davey from The Pilgrim which is, of course, the Lorica of St. Patrick – his breastplate.  Think about  the wisdom they contain as you listen to the words on the DVD.

I arise today through the strength of Heaven....
I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s eye to look before me, God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me....

 

What more can you ask? Only the last verse:  Christ before me .... but I’ll leave that one for you to reflect on at your leisure!

If you really want a crie du coeur or a cry from the heart, the last two lines make  one of the best prayers I know:

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me;

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me!   I arise today...

Oh yes, that, if lived, would make our world perfect inside and outside.  So let’s during this holiday time, do what the Celts always did so well in times gone by: live happily in the atmosphere of the God who is always on our side.

That’s better than a soak in the sun even with 30 factor sunscreen on, or even a pina colada under a gently waving palm beside a turquoise strip of water surrounded by gleaming white sand.  You don’t believe me?   Try it!

P.S . It’s a whole lot cheaper too!

REPEAT OF THE EVER-POPULAR SCHOOL HYMN TO OUR LADY AT THE START OF A HOLIDAY.

O Causa Nostrae Laetitiae     (Cause of our joy)

Mother of all that is pure and glad, all that is bright and blest,
As we have taken our toil to thee, so we will take our rest.
Take thou and bless our holiday, O causa nostrae laetitiae!

Airs that are soft, and a cloudless sky, we would owe all to thee
Speak to thy Son as thou did of old, that feast day in Galilee.
Tell him our needs in thine own sweet way, O causa nostrae laetitiae!

Be with us Mother, from morn till eve, thou and thy blessed Son;
Keep us from all that is grief to you, till the weeks and the months are run
Thine be we still, from day to day, O causa nostrae laetitiae!

Keep us in all that is blest of God,  give us the joys that endure,
Lips that have smiles and words for all, hearts that are kind and pure;
so will thou be by night and day, O causa nostrae laetitiae!

Come when earth’s tears and smiles are o’er, mother of peace and love
Show to us He who is joy to earth, and joy to the Hosts above;
So shall we laugh in the latter day, o causa nostrae laetitiae!

 

Have a good holiday!

 

Listen to the Holiday Hymn O Causa Nostrae Laetitiae in Latin

The fisherman and the scholar

This is about the feast of SS Peter and Paul which marks the end of the month of June.  We keep the feast on the 29th, but many parishes keep it on the Sunday following the feast.  Whenever we keep it, let's celebrate it with gratitude and a sense of the wonderful continuity of leadership which Christ himself inaugurated in the Church.

Would we have chosen either Peter or Paul for leadership roles in the newly-formed ecclesia of the First Century AD, I wonder.  A poor fisherman from Bethsaida with an impetuous tongue which often landed him into trouble, a habit of telling Jesus what to do, and a lack of courage which led him to deny that he even knew his Lord at the moment of his greatest need...  The first Pope? " Oh no, we will have to cast the net a bit wider!" we might have thought...  He didn't tick any of the boxes!  And Paul?  A narrow-minded bigot  who spent all his time and energy persecuting the members of the Way, as the First Christians were called.  Undoubtedly well-read, intelligent and trained in oratory and disputation, but a leader in the Church?  "Impossible!" would be our conclusion. "He had vowed to annihilate the lot of us, anyway!" So that ruled him out....

 

But they were both chosen by Christ, both forgiven and encouraged to use their gifts of leadership for the building up of the young Christian communities throughout Judea Asia Minor, the countries around the Jordan, on through the Greek enclaves of Antioch, Cyprus, Pisidia,  Iconium, Samothrace,  Caesaria, Philippi, and on to Rome, which they thought of then as the end of the world!  What wonderful-sounding names!   The reality was perhaps not so wonderful; it was difficult, full of dissension and opposition from the authorities, particularly the Jewish and Roman authorities, who bitterly opposed the Christians. 

But the wonder of it all, was the courage, the witness and the sheer joy of those men, women and even children who braved persecution,  floggings and sometimes death for what they believed in.  "See how the Christians love one another!" was not said by one of their supporters, but by those who opposed them.  They transformed the people about them, and won reluctant approval from the Romans at times.

 

That was up to superb leadership, which brings us back to Peter and Paul, and the choice of Christ which seemed to go against many of the norms that usually are asked for when looking at possible leaders today.  Christ saw below the surface, he knew they would not fail him.  Perhaps the two outstanding qualities they showed were first of all their love of Christ and secondly their faithfulness to what he taught.  Paul's conversion was to say the least, unusual, but once convinced that Christ had indeed appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he never looked back, and we owe him so much. He gave organisation and a firm basis of theology and spirituality to the embryonic Church which we can see later on in the teachings of the early Fathers, and right up to the present day Paul's letters are as fresh and vibrant as they were when they were first penned by him in prison when he was in pain, in tribulation and facing death.

Peter's influence was incalculable.  We have only to read the letters to the communities in Rome who were suffering persecution and martyrdom daily, to see the care he had for each person individually, the encouragement he gave them without in any way masking the truth that many of them were likely to end up as prey to the lions in the amphitheatres or die at the hands of the Romans after torture.  The influence of young girls like Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia, Lucy and many others is still felt today.  "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church " has often been proved to be true.

I remember once in Rome, passing the great door of the Basilica of St. Peter's on the feast of SS Peter and Paul and seeing an ordinary fishing net stretched across that imposing entrance to the greatest Church in the world.  A fisherman's net!  Yes, that was where we started, with a small band of men, most of them local fishermen around the shores of Lake Gennesereth.  A sharp reminder of our origins and a challenge to live up to the ideals set by Christ himself.

 As Pope Francis reminds us "we all have a responsibility to bring God's love and salvation to the poor, the sad and the lonely."  That was how we started, so let's do what he urges us to do in the wake of that great witness that has been handed down to us from our ancestors in the faith.

Have a lovely feast of SS Peter and Paul!

 

 

Photos by B.Lally (c)2013

The month of Love

June is not only known as the month of the roses.  It is also kept in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church as the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

You may have been put off in the past by the poor quality of the pictures and statues of the Sacred Heart you may have seen in shops and piety stalls.  Many of them are crude and off-putting, but don't let things like that take away from the reality of what they represent.

June is enshrined in our hearts because it is all about the celebration of love.  Not in the commercial sense of course.  When have you seen a day celebrated in the commercial world which depicts  the heart of the man God broken for love of us?  Of course you haven't.  That wouldn't be a money- spinner.  But, nonetheless, it is true.

Jesus himself revealed to St. Margaret Mary the most astounding truth that he longs for our love;  he so wants a return for the love he has constantly poured out on us  that he came to beg us to make a response of love in return. He just asked for a small return, a sign, an acknowledgment that we are grateful, that we love him too.  It wasn't much to ask was it, yet he felt the lack of it even in the glory of Heaven. 

His heart was broken on Calvary,  pierced by a lance, if you remember.  When that great heart broke at last, it opened and left room for all of us,  sinners that we are, to creep close and to be warmed and comforted in that heart which is always ready to receive us. Haven't we all experienced that wonderful, warm, enveloping love at times, especially when we are in pain, or suffering loss or rejection.  Those are the times we notice his love, even though we feel lonely and afraid,, hurt and vulnerable.  He comes closer to us then, and reaches out his wounded hands to heal us. He invites us to rest awhile close to his heart while we lick our wounds as the expression goes.

Our Founder, who died on the 9th of June 1900, urged us with her dying breath, to "invoke the Sacred Heart."  We cannot ignore the last words of a dying person.  The testament of a saintly person is even more important.  So we do just that, in our prayer and, hopefully, with our lives.  We place our lives into the wounded hands of the one we call the Sacred Heart.  Since 1873 our Congregation has been consecrated to the Sacred Heart, and we renew this in our communities each year, in a way that is appropriate to us today.

Mother Magdalen didn't go in for what she called pious practices that seemed to point inwards.  She said that the love of the Sacred Heart was "a real, practical love for our Lord, and a realisation of his love for us." She also said that it must lead on to a spreading of that love around us stating:

"If you want to taste the love of Jesus, and to know the secrets of his heart, you must go by the gate of love for others."  

 Love and evangelisation go hand in hand. Otherwise it  is in danger of becoming mawkish or introspective. 

Remember that great French Romantic poet's words on this score:

"To have loved another is to have touched the face of God!"   Victor Hugo.

That is what the Sacred Heart also teaches us.

We wish everyone a very happy Feast of the Sacred Heart tomorrow and during the rest of this month, especially the members of Orders and Congregations dedicated to him under this title.  Our long-time friends and neighbours in Roehampton, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, have a very special day on this feast. May we all meet in the love and forgiveness of the great heart of Jesus tomorrow and always.

Walking with Francis

Pope Francis I is a man of energy and enthusiasm. He may be in his late seventies, but he is, in spirit, still in his youth.  The youth of the Spirit. He has the same gift of enthusiasm that the early Christians had.

When we read the Acts of the Apostles, we cannot but be enthused ourselves.  We are amazed each time  we read anew about the account of those men, women and children who took the Gospel message across the world as they knew it then.  Their courage, joy, steadfastness and sheer vitality catch at our hearts and make us feel good. What other qualities did they have that made them so memorable?

Well courage for a start;  then we could add openness to the work of the Spirit, faithfulness, integrity, humility, truthfulness, justice,  a love of prayer.  The list could go on....

 

Looking at what Pope Francis is saying and doing since his inauguration as Supreme Pontiff, we can see the same qualities surfacing in him.  As our leader, he is following the example of all our previous popes in his desire for a renewed Pentecost in our time. It was Pope John XXIII who, at the age of 78, started the Second Vatican Council fifty years ago by saying:

 

"Renew in us, Lord, the wonders of the First Pentecost"

 

and Paul V1th, his successor who declared "we need the fresh breath of the Holy Spirit" on our

world today.  Succeeding Popes have urged us to open our minds, our hearts and our lives to the power of the living God.  We now have Pope Benedict's Year of Faith in order to help us to do just that.

Francis has opened up a new window on the world, on the Church, on us all from the Vatican.  He strides through the byways of Vatican City and its environs with a new energy, a wide smile and with what has been called by journalists the "elan" of a Jesuit!  Let's look at some of his recent sayings:

"What a joy it is for me to announce this message: CHRIST IS RISEN!" 

 I would like to go out to every house, and every family, especially where the suffering is greatest, in hospitals, in prisons...

 

Most of all I would like to enter every heart, for it is there that God wants to sow this GOOD NEWS.

Jesus is risen!! There is hope for you, you are no longer in the power of sin, of evil!

LOVE has triumphed, mercy has been victorious! The mercy of God ALWAYS triumphs!"

"Don't look at the Gospel purely through the intellect, without regard for love or beauty" he advised the employees of the Vatican printing press and newspapers.  "When ideology enters into our understanding of the Gospel, we understand NOTHING. Ideologies falsify the Gospel. The path of love, the way of the Gospel is simple. It is the road of conversion, the road the saints understood,  the road of humility, the road of love, of the heart:  the way of beauty. The Gospel is so beautiful, it makes us beautiful with the beauty of HOLINESS."

"Don't leave the Church out, you cannot follow Jesus, love Jesus, without the Church! You cannot find him.  It is the Church which gives us Jesus, gives us IDENTITY"

"You must announce Jesus with your LIFE, with your WITNESS and with your WORDS!"

"Don't be afraid to swim against the tide," he told the young people he was about to confirm. "it is good for your heart!"

And to ten young men on their ordination day.  "proclaim the Gospel with JOY and don't forget to thank your parents, your grandmothers, your catechists, for passing on the faith to you!"

 He himself was very influenced by his grandmother, who was his mentor throughout this life.

Finally, he said, wistfully, at the beginning of his pontificate.  

"How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!"

The fresh breath of the Spirit is forming us into a new pentecostal community.  So let's pray together:

"Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us, on our hopes and dreams, on our mistakes, on our loved ones, on those who walk other paths.  Make us all into a world-wide community of love and hope and friendship! " We ask this with faith in the power of your Spirit.  Amen.

Have a lovely Pentecost!