Me? A Catholic? (Part II)

This is the second part of the text of a talk to Sixth Year students on the occasion of Catholic Schools Week in March 2018. The first part was carried in the May issue of Position Papers.

I would now like to turn to the very important consideration of marriage. Here too, my Catholic faith plays a central role. It was through another Catholic organisation for young adults called Pure in Heart that I met my wife. It involves attending Mass, Eucharistic Adoration and the all important cup of tea and chat afterwards. I remember vividly the moment of being introduced to a seriously beautiful girl. I lost no time, as I pursued her – across continents as it turned out! I remember before proposing praying hugely to God for guidance to enlighten me as to whether she was the woman for me for the rest of my life. As a Catholic, marriage is a life-long affair; it is till death do us part as true love demands. When you think about it for a moment life long is a very long time! But when you look at people who managed to do this – you see that they have had to work at it. It’s not just a nice thing to happen.

The love that I have pledged to my wife and that she has pledged to me is unconditional. That is, after all, the nature of genuine love: it is endless. To love another human being is to delight in their very existence: you make like this or that about someone – and dislike much else. But you love the entire person, their entire existence.

That my wife and I have proclaimed our love publicly is as it should be. It’s what two people who love each other naturally desire. Of course love is intimate and personal, but it is in the nature of love that it wants to be known and recognised. And it’s a reminder that marriage is much more than a private agreement between two individuals: it is an integral and vital part of human society. That’s why living together short-changes marriage.

Marriage, properly understood and faithfully lived, is a vocation: an honourable, noble and beautiful vocation. Which is to say that, in responding to each other’s love and in publicly vowing to live in married and fruitful love, we are responding to God’s call, a call addressed to us personally, to be living proof of his love in this world: first and foremost, for one another and, please God, for our children, but also for all of us and for the world, as such. We have become ‘one flesh’, a communion of life, and love, and mutual attentiveness, reflecting and mirroring in human terms, that communion of life and love which is God, a Trinity of persons, united in mutual love.

It isn’t difficult to see why God has made marriage a sacrament: all love, but especially the life-bearing love between husband and wife, is an echo and expression of our desire for that infinite, divine love for which we have all been made, an expression of our desire for God. In marriage, God has taken my love for my wife, and made of it a sacrament of his love and the means by which we will be drawn closer not only to one another, but closer to him.

My wife and I will be married six years in April 2018: in this time, I have witnessed how we have grown in love and understanding. It has been a joy and a privilege to do so. That is not to say there have not been misunderstandings, difficulties and burdens. Of course there have, but one of the things we do when such things arise, is we learn to say sorry, where we learn to forgive (a lot easier to say than do in practice).

But remember this for later on in life: you’re marrying and accepting not just each other’s strengths, but each other’s weaknesses too. And you’ll get to know both in marriage as nowhere else. Love may be blind, but marriage is an eye-opener.

I would like share a conversation I had with my daughter (who is four years old) one evening as we were saying our night prayers together. She asked me with delightful simplicity why do we pray if God never answers us? I think you’ll admit that that is an excellent question and one I am sure we have all asked ourselves. Why doesn’t God respond? Well, it’s difficult to explain to a four year old who lacks the life experience and understanding of certain concepts but I will try here and now to give an answer. Well, God does respond; maybe not in the way we would like, maybe not as quickly as we would like but in a quiet unassuming way. As it says in the Book of Kings when the prophet Elijah was seeking the presence of God, we are told “God was not in the hurricane, neither in the earthquake, nor in the fire. Then came a gentle breeze and Elijah went out to meet the Lord.” I think that is an excellent symbolic way of how our Lord talks to us. It’s not trumpeted loudly, it’s not in the spectacular showy moments, it is in the quiet of our hearts that God talks to us, it is in His word that he has given us in the Bible, it is in quiet realisations of our life. You see God can communicate with us when we are listening out attentively to God. If we always have headphones in our ears or are absorbed in technology is it any wonder that God cannot make us hear! IF you complain that God never answers you, perhaps examine yourself first of all: am I listening to God? Do I dedicate quiet time, without technology, just to sit and listen to him. I sometimes start my prayer with the phrase from the book of Samuel: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening”. All that God has to say to us, has been recorded for us in the Bible and so we just need to read it regularly and with care to hear what he wants to say to us. When we are worried, we read “Do not be afraid”. When we are happy, we read “Rejoice in the Lord, I say to you Rejoice!”. When we are doubtful, we read “Trust in me/Trust in the Lord”. When we are overcome with the stresses of life, we read, “Come to me all you who are overburdened and I will give you rest. When we need advice, we read “I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go”. In short, all our human needs, and longings are answered by God in the Bible.  Conscience = God’s voice within us.

But, as some of you will no doubt say to me later on: what if I don’t believe? What if I find it hard to be believe? I have many wonderful atheist and agnostic friends of whom I am very fond and whose conversion I pray for a lot. There is an excellent detective series by G.K. Chesterton about an amateur sleuth, Fr Brown. In one story the detective, a catholic priest, is talking to the murderer who is very clever and who has dressed up as another priest. When the villain is exposed at the end he asks “How could you tell I was not really a priest?” Fr Brown replies “You attacked logic. It’s bad theology”. I am reminded often of this quotation when I listen to people who have decided there is no God. They attack any proposition before they can fairly evaluate its truthfulness. It’s a bit akin to kicking a bunch of flowers. Ok, so you can knock the petals off the roses but that’s not the point, is it? The point was that the flowers were there to beautify life around them. Theology is there to point out the beauty of God and God’s plan.

Let’s listen to these words of scripture again: “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be open to you. Therefore I tell you, whatever you have asked in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.” Having doubts is normal – we all have them at times. How to resolve them is by asking God, sincerely in prayer, believing that he will reveal the answer to you in his time. There is a powerful scene from a wonderful book you should all read called Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. In it, the protagonist, Charles is an agnostic. Towards the end, he is at the deathbed of his lover’s father, a lapsed Catholic who was living a sinful life. The priest comes in to give the Last Rites. Here Charles

…. knelt, too, and prayed: ‘O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,’ and the man in the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him. I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd.

…The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he finished what he had to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly, Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. ‘O God,’ I prayed, ‘don’t let him do that.’ But there was no need to fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”

I too have an experience I would like to share with you that happened just before Christmas. As some of you were aware, I was supposed to go to Mexico for Christmas. However, my mother who suffers from Parkinson’s disease developed aspirate pneumonia – a condition which signifies death. As she lay there dying surrounded by her family, I called my friend who is a priest to ask him to come and give the last rites. It is a very powerful sacrament. Given the fact that my mother was unconscious and breathing labouredly, he gave her general absolution from all her sins that she had ever committed in her life. Then he touched her forehead and lips with oil. At that moment, my mother who had given no response, slowly lifted her hand to her forehead to bless herself. I am firmly convinced that God in his wisdom, had decided her time had not yet come. My mother has recovered to be able to talk with us.

In conclusion, in this brief exposé of my life we have looked at four of the sacraments, Confession, the Eucharist, Marriage and the Sacrament of the Sick to see how these lead to a truly happy, fulfilled existence. I would not live my life any other way. God desires my happiness, even when I don’t understand what it is at times that will give me true happiness. Perhaps it is best to end off with a question: Are you happy? And I ask it again, deeply, profoundly are you really happy?