The Australian Jesuits

SESQUICENTENARY
HOMILIES

To the Father through the features of Men's Faces

Address at St John's College

Rev Bill Lawton,
formerly Rector of St John's Anglican Church, Darlinghurst,
now Chaplain to SCEGGS, Darlinghurst

Take, O Lord, and receive
all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.
Whatever I have or hold,
You have given to me;
I restore it all to You
and surrender it wholly
to be governed by your will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
and I am rich enough
and ask for nothing more.
Prayer of Ignatius

Thank you for the great honour of inviting me to offer my small words on this notable celebration in the life of the Society of Jesus. I drew you first to Ignatius, conscious that his prayer enfolds you and informs you, but sensing also my own yearning to be of the same mind and disposition - with God's love and grace I am rich enough and need ask for nothing more. I shall shape those words against the backdrop of some lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

...that just man justices;
Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces (note 1 )

Those words fill the mind with the encounters of every day. They remind me - to use some critical Ignition terms - to be a discerning and deliberate man who endeavours to see Christ in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his.(note 2)

We were about to make Eucharist, a solemn affair of liturgy and symbol but we lacked a communion assistant. Casually I asked for a volunteer, imagining one of the wardens or the biblically literate would offer. Instead a dishevelled man, part locked in a world of delusion, stepped forward and took the chalice. We meet him in all our churches, the vulnerable poor of whom the smell of poverty hangs heavy.

He moved eccentrically among the congregation, no words, no order. Chaos rippled through the audience; people bent their faces low to conceal embarrassed laughter. And then in a flash of community - koinonia - the wonder of the moment infected everyone; this man of the street bore Christ to us.

Each of us has a vocation not only to be Christ to those around us but to see Christ in them. We embrace solidarity with the poor and learn for ourselves what it might mean to live 'the beatitude of the poor'.

I found that phrase in a 1990 interview with Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach (note 3). He shaped it to highlight that solidarity, but which we strip 'ourselves of selfishness, to make ourselves open to others and to God.'

This is the sum of your evangelical promise. And the Christian man and woman who takes seriously the needs of the time and the works of faith will resonate with it. Every disciple can take as their own your question:

What is it to be a companion of Jesus today? It is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes. Faith and justice are the focus that identifies in our time what [we] are and do.(note 4)

Pursuing faith and justice, reaching the Father through the features of men's faces, takes all of us into difficult and compromising places, where only discernment and deliberation keep our whole being turned to the city which is to come. We find ourselves at home with the dispossessed and all the while looking level-eyed into the face of God.(note 5)

We discover here that this age, burdened by its brutality and injustice, its sentimentality and apathy, still yearns to name the nameless. To reach beyond itself. To heal the memory. To know there exists someone to whom I can say that I am sorry.(note 6)

I have listened to preachers of righteousness for almost fifty years; I have been moved to tears by their words, felt the guilt of my own oppressions, but it has taken ordinary people, and poor people, to prompt me from words to justice. I have reached the conclusion that we servants of Jesus must be found where others will not venture and take risks born of discerning the meaning of the gospel and the times in which we live.(note 7)

You and I will need to be more bold in such matters; each of us is bound under authority, but the spirit of Ignatian adventure and discernment demands we explore radically that 'tension involved in being faithful to the teachings of the Church while at the same time trying to read accurately the signs of the times'.(note 8) You and I must make common cause, as integral to mission, with all who are abandoned by society and those silenced and slandered by hierarchies.(note 9)

This is the justice urged by your General Congregation as you face 'a world beguiled by self-centred human fulfilment, extravagance, and soft-living, a world that prizes prestige power and self-sufficiency. in such a world preach Christ poor and humble, with fidelity and courage, is to expect humiliation, persecution and even death'.

In our journey to the Father we bear the beatitude of the poor. And so we pray: Give me that sensus Christi that I may feel with your feelings, with the sentiments of your heart... Teach me how to be compassionate to the suffering, to the poor, the blind, the lame and the lepers. Teach us your way so that it becomes our way today, so that we may come closer to the great ideal of St Ignatius: to be companions of Jesus, collaborators in the work of redemption. Amen.(note 10)

Notes

1 WH Gardner ed., Gerard Manly Hopkins: a Selection of his Poems and Prose, Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1953, 51 Back

2 General Examen Back

3 'Committed to the Present: Witnessing to the Future' Back

4 Jesuits Today: the Decree of the 32nd Congregation, 1975; see further GC34 'The Jesuit Priest: Ministerial Priesthood and Jesuit Identity, IV. Back

5 compare 'Ever Searching for the Magis' in 1995 General Congregation of the Jesuits Back

6 Graham Greene, The Quiet American, London; William Heinemann, 1955, 247 Back

7 GC 34 Our Mission and Justice 'finding Jesus Christ in the brokenness of our world, living in solidarity with the poor and outcast, so that we can take up their cause under the standard of the Cross' Back

8 GC34 'Jesuits and the situation of Women in Church and Civil Society: Back

9 ibid.

10 Fr Pedro Arrupe, quoted in 1995 General Congregation Back

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The Australian Jesuits

SESQUICENTENARYHOMILIES

To the Father through the features of Men's Faces

Address at St John's College Rev Bill Lawton, formerly Rector of St John's Anglican Church, Darlinghurst, now Chaplain to SCEGGS, Darlinghurst

Notes

SESQUICENTENARY
HOMILIES

Address at St John's College

Rev Bill Lawton,
formerly Rector of St John's Anglican Church, Darlinghurst,
now Chaplain to SCEGGS, Darlinghurst