21st Sunday Year B

21st Sunday Ordinary Time – What about you – do you want to go away too?

What about you – do you want to go away too? I wonder how many of us have had this thought over the last year, when we have been faced with all of the restrictions and impositions of the various lockdowns. When we have been faced with having to wear masks in church. With having to sit so many metres or seats apart. With having to disinfect or sanitise our hands on the way into church, before we pray and before we receive the Blessed Sacrament. With not being able to shake each other by the hand and certainly not hug one another, no matter the need; and then having to enter and leave the church by different doors like sheep or cattle being driven in and then out.

I wonder how many of us had the thought that this was it. This was too much. I’ve had enough. I am going to another church; to another faith-practice or simply going to watch the mass on TV or on-line, like watching Match of the Day. That will be enough for me now and in the future.

How many of us can, and did, respond in faith and with confidence, as Peter did, “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life, and we believe; we know that you are the Holy One of God.”

We are faced every day with challenges to our faith and to our beliefs. We are challenged every day and in every way to examine what we believe and hold to be true. Some of these challenges are subtle and may pass us by on a conscious level – adverts on the telly or in the newspapers that promote different things that we know to be wrong or at least counter to our faith; things that are promoted within the soaps that we watch to be accepted as right and proper and correct and acceptable; and even the actual programmes themselves! I mean where do you start to consider the likes of Love Island and its contemporaries? I wouldn’t know where to start!

Other challenges are more direct and we can decide to face them up or to walk away from them, being determined to be unaffected by them and to not let them into our thoughts and/or our lives. What, I wonder would have been our individual response to Mike Leach, a local minister, as quoted by Father Bernard last week, when he challenged, “Why do you bother to pray to Mary, Our Lady? It’s a waste of time! It’s nonsense!”

Do we just walk away  and pretend that we haven’t been tainted by his comments? Is that enough? Do we feel we have been good, strong, Catholic Christians in that walking away? There is a quote that I often think about in situations like this, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.”

What does to take to be a good Catholic in this twenty-first-century? How can we live a life of faith that mirrors and echoes Peter’s statement, , “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life, and we believe; we know that you are the Holy One of God.”

We have to do more. We have to be more. We have to pray to Our Lady, our Mother; the mother of our Saviour and the mother of our Church, to intercede for us with her Son, to make us stronger in what we are willing and prepared to accept and in what we are able and prepared to challenge. We need to pray to Our Lady, who has answered millions, in fact, countless, prayers to her over the centuries for help, for sustenance in faith, for guidance and for strength in heart, mind and spirit.

Being a Catholic Christian is an active thing. It requires active participation. It means that we have to seek out ways in which we can actively participate in and with our neighbours to show God’s love alive in us and in our actions. This will involve our doing stuff, things - but it will also involve us in speaking out when we hear our faith and our faith-practices, being rubbished and trodden down. It will involve us speaking out and even where we cannot confidently challenge or rebuke, we can at least proclaim what we do and what we believe to be right and true.

Evil comes in many forms and in many guises. It has many voices and many sounds. We need to pray to God our Father to give us strength, wisdom and courage that we might recognise it when we hear it, when we see it or when we feel in the presence of it and then challenge it with all of our faith, with all of our belief and with all of our trust in the Lord that He will guide, guard and always protect us, as His faithful servants.

“Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life, and we believe; we know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us.