The Fisher Mass

Yesterday, in the midst of a beautiful Mass at Great St Mary's - as we praised God for his servant St John Fisher and sought the prayers of our patron saint - Fr Allan

White, Catholic Chaplain to the University from 1994-2000, preached this homily:

One day a parachutist jumped out of an airplane. As he floated to earth, he was blown by the wind in to the branches of a tree. He hung there for some time unable to free himself. Eventually, to his relief, he saw two men coming towards him. He called out to them and finally they noticed him from the bottom of the tree. He looked down at them and in a dazed voice asked, ‘where am I?’ They looked at each other and then looked at him and said, ‘why you are in a tree’. He looked won at them and said, ‘you know, you two must be English Dominican friars.’ They were astonished and said, ‘yes, we are, but how did you know that?’ He replied, ‘because what you say is true, but it is not doing me any good.’ In other words, the truth they spoke was not useful. In a world which is dominated by the principle of utility we can come to justify everything in utilitarian terms. Everything is judged by what it can offer to the world or to society. Education is reduced to the imparting of transferable skills which will serve the greater economic good. The ideal of the common good is promoted by expedience. Principle is governed by poll. Individuals are seen as tools designed to further some greater project. Even the ministers of the Church can be overly concerned with usefulness. In the face of anxiety about professional and institutional survival the more useful we can strive to be. Efforts to be useful can compromise fundamental identity and true purpose. It can undermine that vitality which springs from communion in the grace of Christ. God refuses to be useful. A true vocation is to witness to the splendid unencumbered holiness of God that calls every human measure of achievement into question. Martyrs are not useful. That is why they are martyrs. They are not useful to the dominant ideology. They decline to be the prisoners of the transitory and in the end of the ephemeral. They stand for the principal of subversive truth.

In the first reading Eleazar, already an old man, refuses to dissimulate. He is offered a way to belong to all of those who have conformed out of fear or ambition to the dominant ideology. He says, ‘Even though for the moment I avoid execution by man, I can never, living or dead, elude the grasp of the Almighty.’ Eleazar is rooted in a greater mystery. Those with him, so recently well disposed towards him, turned against him, they regarded his stand as sheer madness. In Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, the Duke of Norfolk tries to persuade Thomas to conform to what has emerged as a new reality. Norfolk says, ‘frankly, I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But, Thomas, look at those names. ... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship? Thomas More answers, And, when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me – for "fellowship"? More then begins that journey into isolation. He who stood at the center of society now finds himself increasingly marginalized until, like the Savior, he is led to die outside the camp, because the price of belonging was too high. Fellowship with Christ was a stronger impulse than the temporary satisfaction of belonging to party.

A constant temptation for those who have known religious persecution or discrimination is to desire to appease their oppressors by denying what they are or disguising it in some socially acceptable way. They deny their fundamental identity in the hope of being accepted by a society which finds it difficult to tolerate them. In the end, of course, such aspirations are hopeless since the hostile society can never accept them since to accept them would be to heed the call to conversion and penitence. The first Christian martyrs were put to death as ‘atheists. The Roman world saw them as impious unbelievers who would not worship the gods; they were subversive people who would not assimilate. They would not submit to the false gods of the society which rejected them. There is always an element of ‘atheism’ in the Christian, a fundamental refusal to worship the idols manufactured by those amongst whom we live.

The key to the lives of the genuine Christian witness is not found within the confines of a purely human history it is to be found in the unfolding purpose of God’s mysterious providence. In a way our lives are always a mystery to us that is because we are part of the dream that is being dreamed by God. A sense of impermanence or instability is an essential component of our experience. The authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the 1st Letter of Peter took idea this up and used a special term to describe it. Hebrews talks about the patriarchs and how they were ‘strangers and foreigners on the earth.’ (Hb. 11:13). In a certain sense they were exiles, living and partly living where they were. Their whole lives were dominated by the hope of arriving one day in their true homeland. All of this develops in later Christian literature; St Thomas Aquinas can talk about when we are ‘in patria’ that is heaven, our ‘homeland’ or our ‘fatherland’ Since 1222 at the end of Compline Dominicans have sung the antiphon to the Mother of God in which we refer to ourselves as ‘poor banished children of Eve’ and our lives here on earth as ‘an exile’.

In the liturgy we speak in the Eucharistic prayer of the pilgrim Church on earth. St Thomas likes the term ‘pilgrim’, or traveler, in Latin ‘viator’. He says: ‘A person … is called a pilgrim because he is proceeding towards beatitude; he is called a beholder because he has already obtained it’ (IIIa 15, 10 resp). We are all on a journey towards the fullness of vision when we shall see, we shall know, and we shall rest. St Augustine reminded his congregation that the pilgrim journey is a strange one. On this journey we do not change our location but our lives. The journey is a radical commitment since on this journey we open our lives so that God may touch the very root of our histories and biographies with his grace. Augustine says: ‘Come you also to Christ… Think not of long journeying…One arrives at him the omnipresent one, through love, not by sea faring’ (Sermon. 131.2 PL 28: 730) Often we look for God in the wrong place. This was Augustine’s experience too. In his Confessions he talks about his search for God and his discovery that in the end it was God who was searching for him in all of the byways and twists and turns of his own story. He experiences his alienation from God as a kind of self-alienation. He was in exile but exiled from his own true self. As he says: ‘…but behold you were within (me) and I was outside (myself); it was there that I sought you. (Conf. 10.27.38). The martyr is one who has been given the gift of total self-possession, a gift which renders them supremely free. As early as the Epistle to the Hebrews we find this insight expressed. Christians do not entirely belong where they are. Their focus is elsewhere. Innate in each of us there is a certain restlessness, which conflicts with a desire to be rooted. Christians believe that they have been summoned to make a journey. This is often seen as a journey in search of God but in reality, it is shaped by God’s search for us. Pascal wrote: ‘our nature consists in movement. Absolute rest is death.’

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the motley group of pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn. An Inn is a gathering place and a resting place where strength for the renewed journey is replenished. One hundred years ago the Black Swan inn became the center of the Cambridge Catholic Community. Inns were important places in recusant times. The Black Swan Inn in York was where Saint Margaret Clitherow secretly lodged the priests who served the persecuted Catholics of the city, In the same inn the Queen’s Commissioners lodged. Margaret appreciated the criminal insight that when on the run it was best to hide in plain sight. In Oxford the Catherine Wheel Inn and the Mitre were places where the Catholic community met. Inns were perfect places to fade into the background as people were always coming and going.

Needless to say, the inn has been appropriated as a symbol of the Church. When commenting on the parable of the Good Samaritan says, ‘For the Inn is the Church.., where the wearied traveller casting down the burden of his sins is relieved, and after being refreshed is restored with wholesome food…within the Inn is contained all rest and health.’

In her Dialogue, Catherine of Siena has a striking image of Christ and the Church. She compares Christ to the bridge as the bridge to heaven. In her description, this bridge has stone walls (so that travelers will be protected from rain) and those walls are made of the stones of virtue, secured with the mortar of Christ’s own blood. And at the foot of the bridge, is the inn of the Church which serves weary travelers the bread of life and the blood. Fisher House is truly the inn of the Church, where Christians are gathered around the table of the Lord, where they are brought to flourish by the preaching of the word and the praising of his holy name and where that love of neighbor that flows from sharing in the life of the pilgrim people of God nourished by the Eucharist and sustained by the transformation of the mind in love.

At the end of his life, St. John Fisher was so weak that he had to be carried to his execution in a chair. The King was anxious lest he die before he had a chance to kill him. At the Tower Gate he took out his New Testament and prayed, "this is the last time I shall ever open this book. Let some comforting place now chance to me whereby I, Thy poor servant, may glorify Thee in my last hour"----and looking down at the page, he read: Now this is eternal life: that they may know Thee, the one true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou has sent. I have glorified Thee on earth. I have finished the work Thou gavest me to do (John 17: 3-4). With that he closed the book and said ‘Here is even enough learning for me to my life’s end.’ At Fisher House let that be the sum of our learning and the end of all our exploring.