Newsletter and Homily
OUR CHAPEL of St Cecilia is in the house and is open every day for silent prayer. Just open the front door and walk in.
SUNDAY MASS is at 6.00pm except July and August
HOLY HOUR is from about 5.00pm every Sunday with Benediction at 5.45pm. Holy Hour is a time of silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Just join in as you arrive
LEARN THE MUSIC. Join in with those who practise in the Back room from 5pm. Just go through when you arrive.
MASS on THURSDAYS at 12.15pm during term in the Students Union Chaplaincy Room followed by Croissants etc.
TAIZE PRAYER on THURSDAYS at 7.30pm during term at the Sisters House, 2 Harberton Mead
THE HOMILY. Email Fr. Martin : meflatman@brookes.ac.uk if you want it sent direct to you. It appears at the end of this Newsletter.
HELP NEEDED for FRESHERS FAIR next September. Please tell Fr. Martin OR our new President. Free Brookes Catholics T-shirts for those who help. Others can buy one for £8 - A Bargain!
ELECTION Veronika Kubasova is our new President and Janka Stehlikova is her Deputy. Thanks to Jason Tyler, Bronwen Hedley and John McCauley for all their work this academic year.
WOULD you like to join your fellow Catholic students for social events. Contact us for more details
BROOKES CATHOLICS have a Group on FACEBOOK. Do join and link up with all of us.
HOMILY for Pentecost
All of us have those moments when we are either too happy or too sad to be able to express our thoughts or our feelings in words. And when we pray, this experience ought to be even more common. How can we use ordinary words to say anything to God, let alone to share our deepest thoughts, or receive some of his glory? So it is hardly surprising that the disciples of Jesus, along with Our Lady, found themselves overflowing with a joy beyond words, when God sent his Holy Spirit upon them in a very special way to empower them to share the message of Jesus with the world.
The Pentecost event is deliberately presented to us by the writer (Acts 2:1-11) as a reversal of the old story of the Tower of Babel. In that story we hear of people being so proud of themselves that they began to claim the power of God, symbolically presented as the building of a tower to heaven. The result of such folly was their inability to understand one another, as they began to speak in different languages. The disciples of Jesus find that as God comes to them in their humility, their ecstatic expression of God’s presence and love can be understood by people of every nation and language. It is in their humility and faith that they are filled with God.
Thus we are given a vision of a world where it is as we humans co-operate with one another in humility and love that we find a power from God (his Holy Spirit) that is beyond words.
We are seeing this today aren’t we, as the tragedy of Burma unfolds, especially if we contrast it with the Tsunami a few years ago. On that occasion the whole world worked together to help their fellow men and women, but now a sadly suspicious clique in Burma literally prevent their people from receiving the help they so desperately need. The Tsunami event showed how the power of God can work when we co-operate in love and service with one another, whilst in Burma suspicion and selfishness are already leading to more and more people dying without help. It is a situation where once again, as we pray, we are speechless, but know nonetheless that God hears our prayers even when words fail. And we know this because St Paul tells us that “when we do not know how to pray, the Spirit prays within us with groans too deep for words.” (Romans 8)
But we also learn today that the Holy Spirit comes to people in a variety of different ways. At Pentecost the Spirit came in a way that made the disciples feel that tongues of flame were descending upon them. But notice from the Gospel (John 20:19-23) that the Holy Spirit had already been given to them in a much quieter way. Jesus simply and quietly breathes on them, and the Holy Spirit comes. Breath is a fascinating thing isn’t it. Most of the time we breathe regularly without even noticing the stuff that is keeping us alive. But there are times of course when we really feel ourselves breathing as our body demands more breath to suit the fact that we are running or swimming or something like that. In the same two ways, God is within us. Within us quietly and steadily, in a way we hardly notice, but also within us in a more obvious way when the need is there.
I heard a bit on the radio the other day reporting that someone had done some research that showed that marriages were more likely to fail once the children come along. They pointed out to us that getting up to feed or care for a child in the middle of the night put a strain on people!! Well! Once again I felt like shouting at the radio “Please don’t bore us with the obvious.” It is, of course, only too true that it is when things are hard that we need the power of God’s love to help and support us, and for many people caring for a child is their first realisation that love is not just a nice feeling but can be very hard indeed, An act of will NOT a feeling! A time when we need God’s Spirit within us to help us discover within ourselves resources of love that we never knew existed until that moment.
The other thing that God’s spirit should bring to us is a greater realisation of what God is calling us to do and to be in the Church and in the world. The idea that all Christians are meant to be more or less the same in order to serve God is another piece of nonsense. When someone wants people to be all the same, I always think that what they’re really saying is that everyone should be like they are. This has often been a problem in the life of the Church! Our 2nd reading. (1 Cor 12:3-7.12-13) shows clearly that there was someone in the church in Corinth who was already making this mistake so Paul emphasises that there are a variety of gifts.
Some of the greatest saints in the Church’s history from St Paul onwards have been people who were prepared to break the conventional mould, the way of living that was expected of them. and thus brought the whole Church back to a closer understanding of how the Holy Spirit works in many ways to reveal God’s love and power. Think of St Anthony of Egypt going out in the desert to be the first monk, or St Francis of Assisi rejecting the proper pious world of his parents and becoming a wandering preacher and beggar for Jesus, or Mother Teresa of Calcutta moving away from the ordinary life of a nun and creating a new community to care for the poor and the dying in the gutters of Calcutta.
The Spirit works in us in a multitude of ways beyond words, and the excitement of being a Christian is that it is always an adventure. We never arrive. So whatever is next for each one of us, let us be watchful and waiting as those disciples were, and then, whatever we do, provided it is good, God will be with us. |
