Advent snows

This is a piece written for the Staffordshire Sentinel and due to appear in the paper on Wednesday December 1st. 

Sacred Heart, Hanley 27 Nov at 8am

What is it about snow? 

Yes, we know it causes inconvenience and hassle. It closes schools and business, blocks roads, and makes travel precarious, even dangerous. Snow disrupts our routine, plays havoc with our appointments. 

But we can't despise it. We have to admit: it is so beautiful. 

It veils the bare trees, stripped of their leaves, and gives them dignity and beauty again. It rests on roof tops and fences, dusting them with sugar from the sky. It dampens sound and gives the busy city streets a calm and peace they rarely have. 

And as the days grow short and the light is dim, with its bright whiteness it magnifies the weak light of winter. It makes ordinary scenes enchanting, and fine landscapes stunning. It conceals some features, but it also reveals their beauty. 

Yet it is only here for a short time. Here, snow visits us generally for a few days, a couple of weeks at most, and often just a few hours, intruding into the day. Of course, there are places, more familiar with its winter visitation, where it lasts for many weeks, but even then it is seasonal, rarely permanent, soon moved by the spring thaws and the warming sun of the longer days. Like the snowman in Raymond Brigg's cartoon, it provides a short moment of magic, but may be gone in the morning. 

Yet for all this, it provides us with glorious scenes in drab days. It lights up dark mornings and refracts the light of the early setting sun. It brings joy and jollity in dim and depressing days. The fall and dusting of the snow reminds us that in the middle of the night there will be a dawn. In the midst of a bleak cold winter, there is beauty. In the midst of hardship, they may be hope. Snow provides a temporary beauty, but it hints at a permanent one. 

And so it is with the Christian Season of  Advent, which began last weekend. It is a time of looking forward, of excitement and anticipation through the darkness of winter to the light of Christmas, and the longer days which follow. As the Churches prepare for the celebration of Christ's birth at Christmas, they are also expressing a belief in something much more far reaching, much deeper, and more permanent. 

Sometimes, and for some people, life may seem like an eternal winter - like the people of Narnia in CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Warderobe, a place where it is 'always winter but never Christmas'. 

We sit not only in the darkness of winter, but also in the darkness of economic trouble, the darkness of anxiety, the darkness of doubt, the darkness of bereavement and loss. We look, as  St Paul  says,  in a mirror darkly at our lives and the world around us. 

And the lights of Advent, and the snows of winter, give us a hint of hope, of an end to sorrow and separation, of an end to uncertainty.They promise to us the fullness of life - not only of the life of a new born child celebrated in song and generosity - but also of the life of a Light which is never dimmed or obscured, a beauty which never thaws nor melts away, but which lasts for ever. 

 

Smile for the newest Saint

This is the text of an article written for publication in the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel on Wednesday 29th September 2010.

On September 19th I was privileged to be present (with 50,000 others) when Benedict XVI beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman. Or to put it more simply, he named Newman as Britain’s newest Saint.
You may have been surprised by this news. Newman - a Victorian clergyman and academic who converted to Catholicism in1845, half way through his life - is not especially well known, even by many Catholics.
Why? Well, while students of his writings greatly admire them, it has not always been easy for people to warm to the man himself. He seems a bookish figure - a fellow of Oxford university, who wrote learned works on education, philosophy and theology. He lived for most of his life in a community of priests, and appears to some to be rather dour and dull. In the many photographs of him which survive, he is studious and serious. There are no images of him smiling.
But this understanding of Newman misses out so much. He was indeed a great thinker and educator - but he was also a man of great tenderness and compassion, who saw the image of God in all people. Don’t be misled by the photographs. You will search long and hard for any Victorian photograph in which the subjects are smiling - exposure times were too long, and teeth, I suppose, too bad.
No, when he became a Cardinal, he took the motto “Heart speaks to Heart”, for he, the academic from a privileged background, could see very well that God’s heart speaks to the Heart of every single person, rich or poor, educated or illiterate. As an Anglican he moved from the centre of Oxford out to Littlemore to care for the poor in a rural area which was rapidly industrialising. When he came to Birmingham, the already famous Dr Newman set up his new community not in the plush and affluent suburbs, but in a former gin warehouse, amongst the poorest and most deprived of the rapidly growing city. He was deeply loved by the ordinary parishioners who he consoled, encouraged and educated through the schools he founded. When nearby Bilston was overcome with an epidemic of cholera, the local priests unable to cope and others afraid to help in case they too became ill, he went there, oblivious to his own safety, to console the sick and bury the dead.
And though he was no Oscar Wilde (another Victorian convert to Catholicism), neither was he without wit. When a pompous English priest in Rome invited him to address his intelligent and well-to-do English congregation - who would be a much more cultured audience than any in England, he claimed - Newman pointedly but firmly declined “because people in Birmingham have souls too”!
His concern for the ordinary people, and their love of him was most apparent at the end his life. Well into his eighties he walked the several miles from his parish to the Cadbury factory to plead the case of workers there. And just a few years later when his funeral cortege passed through the the city to his grave in Rednal, the streets were lined with more than 20,000 people who had loved this kind and holy man.
Perhaps the course of time, and the many academics who still read and study Newman, have clouded the memory of someone who was not just an intelligent man, but also a warm and saintly one.
His first ever Feast Day is on October 9th. If you wish, join Catholics all over the world and in saying “Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us.”

Hard Times - Dark Clouds

The following article is written for inclusion in the Staffordshire Sentinel on April 21st 2010

It is a difficult time to be a Catholic.
It shouldn’t be. We’ve just celebrated Easter, the most colourful and hopeful festival of the Christian year. We also preparing for the visit of the Pope in September. Parishioners are signing up for a great choir for the Mass in Coventry, and rehearsals are soon to begin. It should all be very exciting.
But there are menacing clouds overshadowing our causes for joy, and I don’t mean those drifting over from an Icelandic volcano. There is a darkness which is obscuring the sunshine of our faith and Christian life.
I mean the continuing scandal over the abuse of children - those most vulnerable and beloved by God - which has been perpetrated within what were supposed to be the protective wings of the Church. It is a matter of disgust and shame for all who claim the name Christian, and of utter horror for those who cherish the Catholic Church.
The terrible crimes have of course given great material to those who want to paint religion as a force for evil and not good, who describe faith as something which damages people rather than frees them, and who have a fervent anti-Catholicism, fuelled by the kind of hatred of ‘papists’ long since abandoned by non-catholic Christians.
And it is hard for us to answer. We feel the pain of crimes wickedly committed and the shame of criminals protected out of a desire to avoid scandal for the Church.
And it is not enough for us to point out that the most terrible crimes happened many decades ago. It is not enough to argue that every organisation involved in the care of children has had to face similar scandal. It is not enough for us to list the many caring activities of the Catholic Church throughout the world, often in places where others are afraid or unable to venture. It does little good to point the finger to other institutions, where abuse has been as bad and often much worse. None of it is enough, because the wickedness has taken place. Lives have been damaged, and we do not want to appear to be putting a ‘spin’ on the bad news. We are wounded, disgusted and ashamed.
And the attacks have gone beyond the perpetrators now; they are at the doors of Church itself. A national newspaper promotes a proposal to arrest the Pope during his UK visit - something which would normally be called “crackpot”. They claim that it is Catholicism itself: the priesthood, holy Church, which is the cause of the abuse. Tear it all down - they say - it is rotten to the core.
For the Church receives special treatment: no one blames the BBC because a senior producer was charged with child pornography; nor even today’s Swedish government because in the 50s and 60s more than half the children in their orphanages were sexually abused. The Church is held to a different standard. Child abuse in the Church is perhaps the most reported crime in the world, but elsewhere perhaps not so.
And so perhaps that is right, because Catholics find no comfort in knowing abuse was so widespread. Multiple wrongs put nothing right, and our pain and sadness is not only that these things happen, but also that we were not better, that the Church’s good work was used to do bad, wicked, evil things.
And we carry this as a heavy burden. Explanations might look like an attempt at evasion or excuse. But it is the victims who most of all deserve our prayers and compassion.

The Light of all nations

It about time I got back to blogging. This post links the recent English Defence League 'gathering' in Stoke-on-Trent to the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (a more obvious connection than might first appear). It will appear in the "Yours faithfully" column of the Sentinel on February 3rd 2010. 

• You might also want to see my photos from the day 
• Or watch the video from behind the lines
• Or even listen to my Audio Boo from the day here

I've put a YouTube player and an AudioBoo at the end of this post. 

On the afternoon of 23rd January I crossed the Potteries Way from our Church in Jasper Street and walked the short distance to the City Centre (or Hanley, as we used to call it). 

Saturday afternoon is always busy, a hubbub of people, rushing here and there to shop, stopping from time to time to chat, in and out of shops and cafés and pubs. But this Saturday was different. From about midday bus after bus had brought protesters together for a ‘gathering’. 

By the time I got there the situation was already ugly, as the group pushed against police, trying to advance towards a counter-demonstration outside the Town Hall. There was a lot of noise, chanting as if from a hostile football crowd. I saw one young man climb on top of a police van, missiles thrown into the air, someone with a head-wound which poured with blood. I saw groups of police don riot gear and march in formation towards the crowd. And here and there small groups of angry men (they were mostly men, and mostly angry) muttered darkly and conferred with one another on their mobile phones. 

But it was also a surreal scene. Many shoppers clearly had no idea what was going on and were taken completely by surprise. Some were anxious, finding, as if in some bad dream, that they had emerged from a familiar afternoon shopping and socialising into the bad dream of a 1970s football crowd intent on violence. Yet others, oddly, were inquisitive and amused, edging towards the chanting and the police vans and dogs to get a better look at this unexpected performance. 

And what was it all for? The banners railed against the religion of Islam, and its legal system. All muslims were characterised as terrorists, in much the same way as earlier generations had described communists, or jews, or papists. The chants and songs were more obviously filled with hatred for racial minorities. But the words and the messages were confused and vague, bitter and angry. At one point, one of their own speakers was jeered. There was no attempt at persuasion: it was all about venting spleen. Some banners proclaimed a distaste for the oppression of women in Islam, though the members of the crowd were unlike any feminist activists I have ever seen before. 

Whatever genuine concerns could be aired, points stated, or arguments advanced, they were not being expressed here. The blaze of anger, of fury, of hatred for what is different burnt away all reason and left only darkness and violence. 

By striking contrast this week the Christian Churches celebrate a festival which places the darkness of hatred and despair back into the shadows where they belong. February 2nd, the 40th day after Christmas, is the day when Mary and Joseph presented the infant Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem, according to their  religious law. St Luke tells us that the old man Simeon told Mary and Joseph that their Child will be a “Light for All Nations”. In Catholic Christianity we remember this day with the blessing and procession of candles. Indeed, the day is known as “Candlemass”.

On this day, it is Light which is the symbol of human diversity and difference. 

It is a sad fact that differences between peoples can be a source of anxiety or fear. There may be conflict, and a sense of injustice. But the only realistic response to these great challenges is not anxiety, but dialogue, not division, but celebration, not the darkness of fear, but the light of hope.

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