Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp ThM STL
In 1985 I obtained my drivers’ license for the first time. My father congratulated me and encouraged me to take the family’s spare vehicle and make use of it. In the face of my nervousness, he said “Go! Drive! Just remain on your side of the road. Everything will be all right”. Thus began my long experience of driving, an experience rooted in an initial ‘sending-off’ by my dad. Jesus does something similar for the disciples in today’s Gospel reading for Pentecost. In St John’s text we read: Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you,’ and showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord, and he said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.’
The Christian community is sent out into the world. As I said to you last week, we are not people set adrift, we are people set ablaze with the Spirit of the living God, to become one with the world, sharing in its hopes and its problems. We the Christian community are invited as Pope Francis tells us in that beautiful phrase, to acquire “the smell of the sheep.” As the Holy Father reminds us in Evangelii Gaudium, we cannot sit calmly and passively in our churches, but we are instead encouraged to go streaming out into the world.
Christianity is more than a club, a safe space to raise our children. If all you want from the Church is to be happy and comfortable then you have not yet understood the Christian message. If all you want in life is to feel well and at peace then you don’t want enough…there is a world in peril. This cocoon of ‘wellness’ and ‘positivity’ with which we surround ourselves, can easily become a prison, blocking us from the real world. The reading for today begins as follows: In the evening of the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. That room that is locked, is our personal and social world, which we tend to share only with people who look like us. The ‘Jews’ that we fear are those who are not like us. We run the constant danger of turning the Catholic Church into a gated community. For many of us, we see the world, and we look away.
It is not my usual practice to criticize other Catholic leaders in my homilies, but I need to express my disappointment about the response of the official leadership of the Catholic Church to what is now unfolding in the United States, where so many of us have relatives. In the face of the widespread unrest and upheaval taking place over the murder of a black man filmed on a cell phone, from where I sit, the response of Catholic leaders has been somewhat anemic. One would have thought that a mighty institution such as the Catholic Church in America which claims to be vigorously ‘pro-life’ would use this as a ‘teachable moment’ to remind all people about the sacredness of human life, the gravity of the sin of racism and the need by all who exercise power never to infringe the human dignity of all citizens. I remind us all that for Catholics to be ‘Pro-life’ means to have great reverence for all human life from the moment of conception to the point of natural death. A politician or any leader for that matter, who defends the unborn yet supports the murder or torture or denial of the human dignity of the ‘born’ is NOT truly pro-life.
What about us here in T&T? Are we any better? Do we respect the human dignity of all persons? Here on social media platforms it is a regular feature of life to pass around photographs which are deeply demeaning to black women…as if we do not have sisters, aunts or grandmothers of our own. Which one of us was not born of a woman? It was heartening to see that the Catholic Church led a national campaign to offer food support for the suffering poor in the midst of our corona virus lockdown. But let us ask ourselves as Catholics, what do we really think of poor people? How many of us actually know someone who could be described as poor? How many of us are prepared to ask questions about the kinds of situations which reduce people to poverty (e.g. expensive legal representation, high medical bills etc.) or in which poor people have to suffer ( e.g. the elderly at banks or in the public hospitals). The late great Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara once said ‘ If I feed the poor, people call me a saint, if I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.’
The feast of Pentecost, then invites us to join God in the battle now raging to put this world aright. It is a feast meant to arouse our zeal and our sense of activism. As Christians we are reminded as we go out into the world, this world belongs to God, not to the devil – we cannot leave it as it is now. The Spirit reminds us NOT to be afraid of controversy, not to be overly concerned about the ‘cleanliness’ of our reputation. The world and society await our word and our action. I end with one of my favourite quotations from James Baldwin: Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The world is calling to us. WE CANNOT LOOK AWAY.
