How wonderful is God among his saints: come, let us adore him.
Year: B(II). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: White.
All Saints of Africa
Today we celebrate the feast of all the Saints of Africa who, down through the ages, have followed the Lord with courage, love and dedication. Many of these saints are unknown to us, while others are remembered in various countries on account of their exemplary life of discipleship. Their example and teaching remind us of our call to holiness, while their intercession makes it possible for us to achieve it, thanks to God’s grace. The feast we celebrate today is a foretaste of the joy we shall experience one day in heaven.
Other saints: All the Saints of Ireland
Ireland
Ireland, especially in the early Christian centuries, was known as an isle of saints and scholars. More than once, when the rest of western Europe was submerged in ignorance and chaos, Ireland kept learning alive.
Many of the Irish saints combined pastoral care with an observance of the monastic life. The Irish also did much as missionaries, bringing the faith to other parts of Europe, and the story of St Brendan, whether authentic history or not, shows that they set their sights even further afield.
Other saints: St Illtud or Illtyd
Wales
He was a Welsh abbot in the early 6th century, and founder of a monastery in Glamorgan that carried his name. He may have been a disciple of St Germanus of Auxerre. No reliable biographical details survive: the earliest Life that we have was written 500 years after his death.
Other saints: St Nuno Alvares Pereira (1360-1431)
6 Nov (where celebrated)
Nuno was born into a Portuguese noble family, a family noted for its history of distinguished religious and military service. He followed the path of a young nobleman becoming a royal page at thirteen, and marrying a wealthy noblewoman at sixteen. He and his wife had three children, but only their daughter Beatriz survived to adulthood.
At the age of twenty-three, Nuno was named the Constable (commander in chief) of the Portuguese loyalist forces who were formed to defend Portugal against the King of Castile’s plans to annex the country after the death of the Portuguese king. Between 1383 and 1411 Nuno led many battles, insisting that his soldiers remembered the holy cause for which they were fighting and that they acted as moral Christians who were ready to die, if necessary. He was strict on moral behaviour in camp, urged the soldiers to pray and receive the sacraments, and upheld respect and mercy toward enemies and civilians. Every victory Nuno attributed to the protection the the Virgin Mary offered to the Portuguese nation. After the fighting had ended and the stability of Portugal was re-established under King John I, Nuno had become a popular, powerful and wealthy man. His wife having died during his military career and with his daughter married to the King’s son, Nuno gave much of his wealth to his veterans and at his own expense built numerous churches and monasteries, one of which was the Carmelite church in Lisbon.
In 1423, Nuno decided to enter the convent of Carmelites he had founded in Lisbon, abandoning any remaining power and privilege he had gained as the glorified commander. He entered the convent as a serving brother and took the name Brother Nuno of Saint Mary. He did not seek any privileges but put himself at the service of Jesus in the poor and offered his work to the Virgin Mary his loyal patron. He died on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1431 after which the people acclaimed him as “O Santo Condestavel” – the Holy Constable. At Nuno’s canonisation in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI presented Nuno as one who having gained all wealth, power and acclaim, gave it all up in thanksgiving to a merciful God and to Mary who remained with him even in the darkest moments.
Today's Gospel: "With all your mind"
Sometimes there is a message for us in some words of the Gospel that even the evangelists don’t notice. There is an example here, hidden in words so uninteresting that we can’t even be sure who said them. Matthew and Mark say Jesus, while Luke says the scribe.
Jesus (or the scribe) appears to be quoting from the Old Testament, but one phrase does not exist in any text of the Commandments: that we should love the Lord our God with all our mind.
It is easy not to notice this phrase, and indeed Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t notice it. We know this because normally when Jesus departs from the Old Testament it is noticed, and remarked upon, and made the subject of a whole “But I say to you…” discourse.
Not here.
There are two aspects to this. One is what it says about the past, the other is what it says to us. The past is straightforward. The Jews have never been “people of the Book” in the sense of believing in the Bible and nothing but the Bible. They have, it is true, had a peculiar reverence for every sacred word, but they have lived not in unthinking obedience to those words alone but in a dialogue, you might even say in a relationship, with the sacred text. So the fact that “all your mind” appears here, without attracting notice or comment, must mean that it had become a part of the generally accepted interpretation of the words of Scripture. When, centuries after the Pentateuch, the Jews came across the new, Greek ways of thinking – as the Wisdom literature shows that they did – they immediately realised that this new thing called “mind” was included, no doubt about it, in the commandment to love.
What this says to us is more important than just a footnote in the history of ideas. It is the foundation and justification of all science. God does not command the impossible. If he is to be loved with the mind, that can only be because he is lovable with the mind, or, to detheologize the language, because Ultimate Being can be related to rationally. The Gospel phrase tells us that things make sense and that we have the equipment to make sense of them.
What does omnipotence mean? Does it mean that the Omnipotent can do anything at all? If that were true, all science would be at an end. If God willed that when I dropped a glass on the floor it would shatter, then even if God had willed the same whenever anyone in the past had ever dropped a glass, that would still not bind God. God would still be free to decide, if I dropped a glass on the floor now, that this particular glass, alone among all the glasses in history, should bounce and not break.
Which is to say: on this interpretation of divine omnipotence, science is impossible. We cannot predict the result of an experiment, because next time God may decide differently. We cannot even lay down laws of nature based on previous experience, because to call a law a “law” is to claim to be able to bind God, which is blasphemy.
This is not merely an academic quibble. When the 11th-century Muslim philosopher al-Ghazāli propounded this very idea, it captured the mainstream of Islamic thinking and led to the virtual suicide of science in Islam and the abandonment of rational thinking about the physical world, as being unnecessary, or sacrilegious, or both.
We are saved from this by this one little phrase in the Gospel, about loving God with all our mind. It is more than mere permission, it is a command to understand, to go out and do science, and it was followed whenever Christians had leisure to think. It led to the dazzling 13th-century renaissance and the birth of modern science, and we are still living through its consequences.
As for divine omnipotence, this is not the place to go into it in detail, but the answer to al-Ghazāli must surely be that God can indeed make the glass bounce, but God cannot make the glass bounce and still be God, since to break the laws and regularities of nature whimsically and without reason would be to abandon lovability-with-the-mind. This is exactly the argument that theologians use against pointless or frivolous miracles, but it applies to science as well, and to the possibility of doing science at all.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: St Cyril of Jerusalem (315 - 386)
Cyril was born in 315 of Christian parents and succeeded Maximus as bishop of Jerusalem in 348. He was active in the Arian controversy and was exiled more than once as a result. His pastoral zeal is especially shown in his Catecheses, in which he expounded orthodox doctrine, holy Scripture and the traditions of the faith. They are still read today, and several of the Second Readings of the Office of Readings are taken from them. He died in 386. He is held in high esteem by both the Catholics and the Orthodox, and he was declared a Doctor of the Church by the Pope in 1883.
Liturgical colour: white
White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.
Mid-morning reading (Terce) | 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 |
Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.
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Noon reading (Sext) | 1 Corinthians 13:8-9,13 |
Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail; or the gift of languages, it will not continue for ever; and knowledge – for this, too, the time will come when it must fail. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect. In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.
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Afternoon reading (None) | Colossians 3:14-15 |
Over all these clothes, to keep them together and complete them, put on love. And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful.
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