NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "A"

NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR 1

  “Take courage !  It is I.” (Mt 14, 27)

Introduction:                 Life is a tough haul for many people some of the time and for some people most of the time. This is very true for committed people trying to live out Christian values everyday. They sometimes feel they have set out in life alone into the headwinds of poverty and pain, unemployment, injustice, loneliness and limitation. They feel unable to make much progress. Maybe we need to invite our Lord into our lives more realistically, asking his wisdom and courage. We must believe that we can change; we can be better and help others become better too.

G. K. Chesterton once remarked, “If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?”

The Homily:  “Take courage ! It is I,” said our dear Lord Jesus to Peter as he was terrified of the swirling waters all around him, and, mature man as he was, he cried out in fear. And Jesus assured him, “Courage, I’m here.” As the Psalmist says, “When the Lord is near what have I to fear?” We need to develop a deeper and deeper consciousness of the presence of the Lord.

Talking about courage. Courage is not the same as fearlessness. It is not the absence of fear, but the control of it. “Grace under pressure,” as Earnest Hemingway said. Courage gets above fear; it is, so to say, “fear that has said its prayers” (General Pershine). The great storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson, was always plagued by ill health, and though he filled his novels with exciting characters and exotic places, he was more interested in man’s inner spirit. He said that everyone needed to possess courage, even those who outwardly lived less adventurous lives. According to him, the ordinary person is no less noble because no drum beats before him when he goes out to his daily battlefields and no crowds shout his arrival when he returns from victory or defeat.

            The birth pangs of the modern world were being felt in 19th. Century France. The French Revolution went true to its anagram, “Violence run forth.” Religion was abolished and Reason was enthroned on the altar of updated French life. It was risky to practise the faith openly, and any priest seen in public would be tumbrel driven to the guillotine. It was in those worst of times that the province of Lyons was blessed by the activities of a youth, named Jean-Baptiste Marie Vianney. Born in 1786 and brought up in traditional piety, as a young lad he would gather the village children for religion lessons which he gave himself, thereby keeping their faith alive. He was in turn inspired by the example of loyal and courageous Catholic parents who refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary hierarchy, and his own family boycotted the revolutionary priest who had installed himself in the parish. Any brave priest available would be invited to celebrate Mass in a barn, the windows of which would be blocked from outside by huge stacks of hay. The chalice, cruets and missal were pulled out of the hay, and the Lord’s Resurrection would be proclaimed for a bleeding France.

The dangers of the period only reinforced the young John’s resolve to become a priest. But entering the seminary produced another brace of troubles, though not of his making. He was older and more mature than his boyish companions. He had already had apostolic experience and a taste of army life (from which he had had a providential escape); his fellow seminarians had none. He had wisdom; his professors expected knowledge. He was easily misunderstood and was a figure of fun, especially when he made mistakes in Latin grammar - which was quite often. But he stuck to his study of theology like a soldier sticking to his guns, even though he had as much local memory as a village donkey. That is why he flunked the final exams and the repetition, too. His bishop did not want to ordain him. “Jean Marie,” he said, “what can I do with you? You’re a complete ass!”  “My Lord”, replied Jean Marie, “if God could enable Samson to kill a thousand Philistines with only the jawbone of an ass, what could he not do with a complete ass?” The bishop ordained him, thinking probably that one more in the diocese wouldn’t make a difference!

            It did make a difference; a great difference - to the diocese and to the devil.  Fr. John Mary Vianney was appointed to the country parish of Ars in the district of Dardily. On the eve of his departure for Ars, Fr. Courbon, the vicar general, told him, “There is no love of God in that parish. Go and put some love into it.”  And that he did. The people of Ars were given over to drinking, dancing and debauchery. The Curé d’Ars blew into them like a tornado, and like the true prophet he called them to repentance. Initially rigorous, he often refused absolution for faults that today we would not consider grave. Yet through him the spirit of penance spread through the land like fire over dry stubble. Within a few years there were seemingly unending lines at his confessional, so that on most days of the week Fr. John Vianney had to sit up to 14 hours a day reconciling sinners. Apart from the confessional, his fame as a preacher spread rapidly to the cities, including sophisticated Paris. The fashionable ladies came to hear this marvellous minister of the Word, with an eye to getting him transferred to the big city. But John Mary Vianney had no eye for the city lights. Whenever he saw a bevy of powdered and perfumed females in his little church, he behaved like an unlettered bumpkin, blundering ungrammatically through his sermon. They were shocked and stopped coming. But the simple folk kept coming from far and near, including those from the neighbouring parishes, much to the chagrin of the parish priests of the neighbouring parishes, who felt they were losing their parishioners and Sunday collections. So the brother priests met in conspiracy and finally got down to drafting a memo to the bishop with the request to have him transferred. The memo had to go from priest to priest for signature. By some misadventure it fell into the hands of Fr. John Mary Vianney. He read it placidly and promptly added his signature to it!            His pastoral successes were not without their hard side. The grace of reconciliation of long hardened sinners, the miracles of feeding the children in his “La Providence” orphanage, his ripostes in the verbal duels with the devil were the fruit of long hours of prayer and penance. More than subsisting on boiled potatoes most of his life, his penance was provided by the insults and calumnies of certain people and the harrowing assaults of the devil that deprived him of much needed sleep. He often reminded himself and others: “Everywhere there is the cross; we are made in the form of a cross.” But God’s glory was coming through, and the demonic accents became more and more high-pitched as penitent after penitent fell on their knees to make their confession. Finally, the devil also made his “confession” by screaming, “Vianney, eater of potatoes, if there were three people like you in this world my kingdom would come to an end !”  While the saint’s body lies sweetly composed in the Seminaire Jean Marie Vianney in Ars, visitors can view his house and the burns on the bedroom walls and curtains caused by the devil. Now that’s a life of courage, “si vous plais.”

We too will encounter and recognise the Lord even in the most trying and distressing situations when we cannot cope, despite our best human resources. God may speak loud and clear in power. But more often than not in the still small voice of an intimate personal experience. Like Peter, we waver and hesitate when we look at the threatening waves of difficulties, failure or opposition. It is only when we keep our gaze steadily on Jesus, the “Unsinkable One”, in persevering prayer, that we find new strength and an unexpected power, which can keep us in peace even in the midst of the greatest storms and stresses of life.

Courage is not something we need rarely, but what we need on a daily basis: to live, to suffer, to struggle and die. Winston Churchill ranked courage as “the first of the human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”

            The famed aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, who went down with her aircraft over the Pacific and was never found again, understood that without courage, personal contentment is not possible: “courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”

PRAYER:  (Ulrich Schafer)

God, here I will stand to fulfil what your faith in me expects. I will take the desert upon myself, the absence of your answers, your multifaceted, eloquent silence, to allow the fruit of solitude to ripen in me as nourishment for others.  I will not run away, even when I am afraid of the endless sand, of the senselessness; you silent one, because you are never far.  Amen.