We all know someone who is celebrating a first Christmas after the death of a loved one--or the second, or the third, or even the 12th or the 31st--and the special pang of that absence.
We may be experiencing that pang ourselves. That's one reason I selected this sermon by Saint John Henry Newman just based on the title for our last Advent reflection, Monday, December 19 on the
Son Rise Morning Show: "
The Church a Home for the Lonely".
So I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here and remember that you may find the recording of the show later that day on the Son Rise Morning Show website!
As the late Father Ian Ker noted in his biography of Saint John Henry Newman, as a priest and cardinal Newman remembered many of his departed loved ones in Masses on the anniversaries of their deaths. His private chapel in the Birmingham Oratory was filled with pictures of his favorite saints and of his living and departed friends, for whom he prayed and offered Mass. There's a video about that chapel in this post on the New Liturgical Movement website. As his eyesight began to fail, Newman prepared by memorizing the propers for two Masses: "a Mass of the Blessed Virgin and a Mass of the Dead" so he could continue to pray for his beloved dead.
In this sermon from October 22, 1837, Newman takes a more existential point of view and sees the Church on earth as the place the Christian may find peace and consolation when rebuffed by the World*. But as I read the sermon, I thought of my parish church, and the other parishes or chapels at which I attend Mass, visit the Blessed Sacrament, or got to Confession, etc., as the local site through which the universal, Catholic Church is a home for me and I hope it is for you.
We have to remember that Newman's ideas about the Church on Earth and the Communion of Saints took some time to develop; influenced by Calvinist doctrines of Salvation after his major conversion at age 15, he for a time thought the true true communion of the Church was invisible. Yes, professed Christians gathered for services and registered in parishes, but unless they were predestined for salvation, they weren't really in the Church. I commented on Newman's developing ecclesiology
here.
He takes as his verse Ephesians 2:6: "And [He] hath raised us up together, and hath made us sit together in the heavenly places, through Christ Jesus."
In the excerpts Christopher Blum has provided in Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas for December 21, Newman offers examples of different kinds of Christians:
Those who have always understood that "heaven is an object claiming our highest love and most persevering exertions. Such doubtless is the blessedness of some persons: such in a degree is perchance the blessedness of many. There are those who, like Samuel, dwell in the Temple of God holy and undefiled from infancy, and, after the instance of John the Baptist, are sanctified by the Holy Ghost, if not as he, from their mother's womb, yet from their second birth in Holy Baptism."
Those who may have had this understanding "even though it has been latent; not quenched or overborne by open sin, even though it has not been from the first duly prized and cherished." . . . They "have never been wedded to this world; they have never given their hearts to it, or vowed obedience or done folly in things of time and sense. And therefore they are able, from the very power of God's grace, as conveyed to them the ordinances of the Gospel, to understand that the promise of heaven is the greatest, most blessed promise which could be given."
And those who have wandered away and have returned:
They are recovered by finding disappointment and suffering from that which they had hoped would bring them good; they learn to love God and prize heaven, not by baptismal grace, but by trial of the world; they seek the world, and they are driven by the world back again to God. The world is blessed to them, in God's good providence, as an instrument of His grace transmuted from evil to good, as if a second sacrament, doing over again what was done in infancy, and then undone. They are led to say, with St. Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" for they have tried the world, and it fails them; they have trusted it, and it deceives them; they have leant upon it, and it pierces them through; they have sought it for indulgence, and it has scourged them for their penance. O blessed lot of those, whose wanderings though they wander, are thus overruled; that what they lose of the free gift of God, they regain by his compulsory remedies!
Long before Pierce Brosnan as James Bond realized it (just for you, Matt Swaim), most of us, Newman says, recognize that "the world is not enough for [our] happiness".
[*If you go to the NewmanReader.org
source for this entire sermon, you would find Newman's description of "the World" in the sense he means it. For example:
By the world, I mean all that meets a man in intercourse with his fellow men, whether in public or in private, all that is new, strange, and without natural connexion with him. This outward world is at first sight most attractive and exciting to the generality of men. The young commonly wish to enter into it as if it would fulfil all their wants and hopes. They wish to enter into life, as it is called. Their hearts beat, as they anticipate the time when they shall, in one sense or other, be their own masters. At home, or at school, they are under restraint, and thus they come to look forward to the liberty of the world, and the independence of being in it, as a great good. According to their rank {188} in life, they wish to get into service, or they wish to go into business, or they wish to be principals in trade, or they wish to enter into the world's amusements and gaieties, or they look forward with interest to some profession or employment which stirs their ambition and promises distinction.
Hint: Look for the page number (in bold type above)]
As Newman says, by whatever grace we discover this fact, that "the world is not enough", it demonstrates to us that we need "some shelter, refuge, rest, home or sanctuary from the outward world" and that God [the Father] has provided us "the shelter or secret place . . . in Christ". He has provided us a home because we "need something which the world cannot give: this is what we need, and this it is which the Gospel has supplied."
Jesus has supplied with this home, establishing His Church and leaving a "blessing behind Him", after His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension:
He left in the world what before was not in it,—a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever found, in spite of the world around us. Do you ask what it is? the chapter from which the text is taken describes it. It speaks of "the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone: In whom all the building, being framed together, groweth up into an holy temple in the Lord. In whom you also are built together into an habitation of God in the Spirit." (Ephesians 2:20-22) This is the Church of God, which is our true home of God's providing, His own heavenly court, where He dwells with Saints and Angels, into which He introduces us by a new birth, and in which we forget the outward world and its many troubles.
Newman notes that the Temple in Jerusalem served as the great home for the Jews, citing Psalm 27:4-5: "One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. That I may see the delight of the Lord, and may visit his temple. For he hath hidden me in his tabernacle; in the day of evils, he hath protected me in the secret place of his tabernacle."
He says that the Church Jesus founded provides not just one place of refuge, in the Temple in Jerusalem, but
"admits of being every where". In 1837, Newman may be speaking according to a less visible and established version of the Church (he uses the words "spiritual" and "invisible") but as Catholics we know that when we enter any Catholic church in union with the local bishop and the pope, we have entered The Catholic Church, "the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" with the Blessed Sacrament really and truly present in Tabernacle, and even sometimes with the hint of incense still lingering in air (if we make a Visit after a Funeral Mass has been celebrated, for example). The Church Militant throughout the world, the Church Triumphant in Heaven, and the Church Suffering, the Holy Souls in Purgatory, is all represented there. And I use the word "is" because it is all One.
As Newman concludes in Blum's selection,
There is a great privilege which we may enjoy, if we seek it, of dwelling in a heavenly home in the midst of this turbulent world. . . .
We may be full of sorrows; there may be fightings without and fears within; we may be exposed to the frowns, censure, or contempt of men; we may be shunned by them; or, to take the lightest case, we may be (as we certainly shall be) wearied out by the unprofitableness of this world, by its coldness, unfriendliness, distance, and dreariness; we shall need something nearer to us. What is our resource? . . . it is that holy home which God has given us in His Church; it is that everlasting City in which He has fixed His abode. It is that Mount invisible where Angels are looking at us with their piercing eyes, and the voices of the dead call us. "Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world;" (1 John 4:4) "If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31)
Newman's complete sermon ends with this exhortation:
. . . Let not your past sins keep you from Him. Whatever they be, they cannot interfere with His grace stored up for all who come to Him for it. If you have in past years neglected Him, perchance you will have to suffer for it; but fear not; He will give you grace and strength to bear such punishment as He may be pleased to inflict. Let not the thought of His just severity keep you at a distance. He can make even pain pleasant to you. Keeping from Him is not to escape from His power, only from His love. Surrender yourselves to him in faith and holy fear. He is All-merciful, though All-righteous; and though He is awful in His judgments, He is nevertheless more wonderfully pitiful, and of tender compassion above our largest expectations; and in the case of all who humbly seek him, He will in "wrath remember mercy."
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
All photos (C) Stephanie A. Mann (2013-2022) and All Rights Reserved. Top photo: Crucifix carved by the deceased father of Jeanne Gordon, taken at her Rosary in Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Wichita, Kansas on January 3, 2017; Second photo: pulpit in the University Church of St. Mary's the Virgin in Oxford, England; Third photo: Stained glass of the Third Joyful Mystery (detail) in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Wichita, Kansas; Fourth photo: Christmas Day Mass in 2013 at Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, Wichita, Kansas.
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