Here I have put together a selection of homilies. The Word of God is ‘alive and active’ says the Letter to the Hebrews. That is not to say that it lives a hidden organic life we can trace through a microscope, as if it were a virus; but that it is inspired, a bearer of God’s eternal Spirit. Therefore it resounds to this day with quite as much force as when it was first spoken. It ever has something new to say. The preacher’s first task is to listen intently to this Word at once ancient and new, then to make his own, necessarily limited words its vehicles. I have not been able to provide translations of texts in other languages; but if you rummage around a little you will find a fair amount of material in English.
A great deal of nonsense is often said about angels. We may find we’re given to thinking nonsensically about them ourselves, haunted as we are by images of feathers, celestial chariots, and cascading cloaks: so earthbound are we poor human clods, so conditioned by our bodies, that it is hard for us to conceive of pure spiritual existences.
Continue reading The Queen of Peace is our model. Like her, we are called to say a deliberate ‘Yes’ to the lordship of Christ, letting him take flesh in our flesh, becoming his instruments, sacraments of his presence.
Continue reading I recently finished reading a new biography of St Bernard of Clairvaux by the Austrian historian Peter Dinzelbacher. In his effort to place Bernard in context, the author leaves no stone unturned: his book contains 3,000 footnotes.
Continue reading For Guerric, divine contemplation was fundamentally a matter of assimilating, by interiorisation, the prayers we recite with our lips in the breviary and missal. He would have scoffed at any notion that mental and vocal prayer were somehow in opposition.
Continue reading Kolbe’s death eclipses his life; his life, indeed, seems like a build-up to his sacrificial death. That is something to reflect on with regard to our own Christian lives.
Continue reading Even if we can swim there was a time when we couldn’t. We may remember the awful downward pull; how scary it is, even up there in the shallow end of a pool, with people everywhere and lights on, with our father’s arms ready to carry us up.
Continue reading So often, when what we considered a thoroughfare turns out to be a cul-de-sac, we raise our arms to heaven and cry out, ‘Why, Lord, why?’ We’re indignant and hurt, proceeding, as we are, from the assumption that our journey ought to be uncomplicated, that the Lord, like some tour guide, should make the path straight before us.
Continue reading In my first year at Cambridge, I picked up a copy of the Rule of St Benedict from Waterstones. I read it right through, I remember, and thought: Wow, to live like that!
Continue reading ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’, says the Lord. It would take a brave preacher to expound that verse to two cardiologists.
Continue reading The perspective on life and death offered us this night is extraordinary. We take in the whole sweep of human history at a glance, from the beginning of the world to the saving events of our Lord Jesus Christ to our own present reality.
Continue reading The Passover is no magic charm; the Eucharist isn’t either. It is a pledge from the Lord and a pledge we give in return: a pledge to be faithful, to conform our lives to grace, to answer love with love.
Continue reading How can we respond to the call of Palm Sunday with integrity? We can, quite simply, refuse to run away.
Continue reading For Br Thomas, the history of the monastery and his own history were inseparable. This led him to invent what, to my knowledge, is a new and original literary genre, an extended autobiography in the form of obituaries!
Continue reading Above the horizon we shall ever perceive the comforting twinkle of the Star of the Sea. It sheds the light we need to journey on with confidence: the knowledge that our gracious God saves, wants to save, never ceases to save.
Continue reading Meister Eckhart once wrote: What good is it to me if Christ is born in Bethlehem but is not born in me? What use is it to me to call Mary full of grace, if I am not full of grace also?
Continue reading Newman had a genius for wonderment. We find it expressed in natural terms, as when, at the end of his life, he picked up the violin again and was so moved by the sheer joy of it that he had, so he wrote to a friend, to lay down the instrument and literally cry out with delight.
Continue reading It was during the reign of Edward the Confessor that a Norfolk noblewoman, after entertaining a vision of the Holy House of Nazareth, ordered a model built at Walsingham. Her masons had hardly got stuck in before they found the work completed by a team of engineers from quite a different league.
Continue reading In most villages, one house stands out: a mansion among hovels, a single large property with satellite dishes, an ornamental staircase, manicured lawns, and armed guards. The rich make their presence felt, in a contrast that seems preposterous until, by virtue of sheer repetition, one gets used to it and accepts it as part of the order of things.
Continue reading We are not all called to be martyrs, certainly; but we will all, one day, have to leave everything familiar behind, throwing ourselves into our heavenly Father’s embrace in a death that, in reality, is but a passage to a higher mode of living—but will nonetheless test us, like gold in the furnace, by fire.
Continue reading The enchanting mystery of the blessed Trinity is this, precisely: that it is a constant flow of life and love, a divine current that has always been, never shall cease, into which we, too, are drawn to be charged and enlivened. It is difficult to speak of these things.
Continue reading What contradiction Christ knew, humanly speaking! In communion with the Father through the Spirit, in communion with mankind through the flesh, his earthly life culminated in a cry of dereliction that rent his heart within even as, outwardly, it was pierced by a lance.
Continue reading Let’s not judge just by what we see, be sensible and say, ‘Oh, it was nothing’. It is everything!
Continue reading A ceremonial from 1600, the heyday of Francis de Sales, mentions the custom of bishops washing the feet of cathedral canons, but says it might be better still, as a lesson in humility, to seek out ‘poor people’ instead. It was Pius XII, pope during WW2 and its aftermath, who integrated the washing of the feet into Maundy Thursday’s Mass, limiting it to ‘twelve chosen men’.
Continue reading The art and poetry of Christmas loves to meditate on this stunning paradox: that the Maker of all things, the invisible, boundless God, should be corporeally present in a human person, an infant wrapped in swaddling cloths, the most confined posture imaginable.
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