27 th Sunday of the Year

7 October 2007

Today is a parish celebration. Although it is a Sunday, it is also the day on which the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Patroness of this parish, is celebrated. It The first reading, which opens with a cry for help and a complaint that God does not listen, may seem out of harmony with that. We all know the feeling. Things go wrong in our lives or in the life of someone we love; we never know when we will meet sickness or heartbreak or death. Things that we desperately hoped and prayed would not happen, do happen. We sometimes feel like joining in the complaint of the first reading “How long am I to cry ‘oppression’ in God’s ear and he will not save”.

The prophet is told to remind the people that God’s promise is eager for its own fulfilment and that it will come without fail. God’s promise is stronger than anything we fear, anything that harms us; God’s promise is greater even than our most extravagant hopes. In the Opening Prayer we said, “Your love for us surpasses all our hopes and desires.” The vision, the promise, is to be written down so that can “be easily read”. In other words, we need keep reminding ourselves of it everywhere and all the time.

It is advice for us, not only for the people for whom it was written, two thousand six hundred years ago. But there is this difference. For us, the vision and the promise are not just in the future. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. He is the love of God made visible in our world. The vision that was eager for its own fulfilment was fulfilled when God’s Word became flesh and lived among us. That is what we celebrate here at Mass – Jesus has already conquered death and suffering and evil – and he is drawing all of us to himself.

As Pope Benedict clearly reminded us, this is the foundation and the core of our faith: We are a people who have come to know and believe in the love God has for us. We believe that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that we could have eternal life (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 1, cf. I Jn 4:16; Jn 2:16). That is why the second reading tells us, “You have been trusted to look after something precious; guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us”.

But all of that is a real challenge to us in today’s world. Our world often experiences violence and heartbreak and anguish and anxiety, but it rarely looks to God for answers. When things are apparently going well, our world feels little need to turn to God. It is a world leaves little room to listen and reflect about the big questions of the meaning of life and death, about really understanding the situation of millions of our brothers and sisters who struggle through lives of misery and hunger and injustice, about what sort of world we will leave to the generations that come after us.

Pope John Paul pointed out that if we are to live the Gospel with joy and if we are to hand on that vision and good news, we first of all have to be people who reflect and who see the wonder of life, of each individual, of the whole gift of creation. We need to pray; we need to contemplate the love God has for us (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 83); to allow the truth to sink into our minds and hearts; it needs to become part of our outlook in every aspect of our lives. The love that surpasses all our hopes and desires is what gives meaning and hope to our whole lives – not just when we are at Mass or when we are praying, but all the time.

These thoughts are very appropriate in the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary. Pope John Paul’s call for us all to be contemplative may sound a little less daunting if we know that he also said: “The Rosary is simply a method of contemplation” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, [RVM] 28).

We have been trusted to look after something precious, to guard it and value it. That means praying and reflecting about how the love and the vision and the promise made visible in Christ speaks to every corner and aspect of our own lives and of the life of the whole world. It means hearing and responding to that challenge in every corner and aspect of our lives. And it means never being ashamed of witnessing to our Lord.

There is no use complaining how secular the world is becoming, how the deeper questions seem to play no part in inspiring the sort of world we are creating, if our faith does not influence many aspects of our own lives.

The Rosary is a reflective prayer, which looks at the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Christ through the eyes of Mary. It leads us to reflect on how the promise of God began to be fulfilled in him. The Rosary, if it is said with a real sense of reflection, helps to create a quiet rhythm and pace (RVM 12, 25). which allows us to look at God’s gift to us and at what it should mean in our lives. If we do not make space to reflect and pray about that gift, the world we live in is quite capable of sweeping us along on the surface, at least until we meet a crisis.

The Rosary may be said in many different ways – sometimes perhaps just one decade said slowly and deliberately, sometimes said with family members or other people, sometimes adding short prayers or phrases or scripture verses to focus our minds. It is one of the most powerful ways of building up the reflection and contemplation that we all need to bring to our lives. Every pastoral effort, every effort to make the world what it should be, begins for us believers through a deepening of our own faith.

There is nothing more important for the future of the faith in Ireland and in Europe generally than that we allow the promise of God to bring light and hope to everything we do and that we recognise that the promise speaks just as powerfully to today’s world as it ever did in the past. We need to live that faith confidently; we need to live it in such a way that people can see in us the hope that God offers to all humanity. That gift is not a spirit of timidity; it is a faith that can do all things through the Holy Spirit of power and love. We should not be ashamed to let people see how important that faith is to us. We are servants of a Lord who loves us more than we can imagine. If we understood that, we would serve him wholeheartedly and gladly in all we do. We would realise that God’s gift to us is a fulfilment greater than we could ever earn or deserve.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick