I haven't forgotten, but ....

I haven't forgotten that I had said I would do a further post on Richard Feynman. I am (slowly) reading James Gleick's biography, and one or two other things. I promise I'll get round to it ...

Days of Eucharistic Adoration ("Forty Hours")

I have spent the last couple of days putting together the programme for our parish's Days of Eucharistic Adoration. As I went to look at the materials I used last year, I realised that this is now the fifth consecutive year that I have done this. There is now an established "routine", and I am, as I usually am, a bit bowled over by everyone's willingness to "join in" with getting it up and running. I took the photo below last year, at the end of the Adoration on the Friday evening. The Church is set up as it was for the Children's Adoration and Vigil. Last year's theme was the Our Father, hence the icon of God the Father and the words of the Our Father on the displays.

The theme for the days of Adoration - "The Eucharist: Gift of God for the Life of the World" - is taken from the theme of the International Eucharistic Congress, taking place in Quebec in June. The three "sub-themes" are based on three of the icons that decorate the "Ark of the New Covenant" that has been designed as a focus of devotion and adoration, particularly for the young people of Canada, during the time leading up to the Congress.

If you are within reach of Romford during these days, please do call in and visit Jesus, our Eucharist, Gift of God for the Life of the World.

New City Magazine - May 2008

The May 2008 issue of New City is the first since the death of Chiara Lubich, the founder of the Focolare Movement who publish the magazine. It is therefore dedicated to her, and to some of the key events in her life and the life of Focolare. Particular attention is given to Chiara's visits to England and Ireland.

One article is entitled "The Work of Mary". This is the official, canonical title of the movement - Focolare is a kind of nick-name. According to the article, it was Chiara's understanding of God's plan for the movement that it was to live "like Mary"; or, in fact, more than that to "relive Mary" in a certain sense. New City reproduces a meditation in which Chiara gives an account of how this intuition for the movement came into being. It has a striking resonance with a thought of Alina Reyes included in the post I did yesterday on the April-May issue of Lourdes Magazine. One might also want to suggest that apparitions of the Virgin Mary such as those at Lourdes do in some way make a presence of Mary in the Church.

I went into church one day, and with my heart full of trust, I asked: "Why did you wish to remain on earth, on every point of the earth, in the most sweet Eucharist, and you, you who are God, have not found a way to bring here and to leave here Mary, the mother of all of us who journey?"

In the silence he seemed to reply: "I have not left her because I want to see her again in you. Even if you are not immaculate, my love will virginize you, and you, all of you, will open your arms and hearts as mothers of humanity, which, as in times past, thirsts for God and for his mother. It is you who now must soothe pains, soothe wounds, dry tears. Sing her litanies and strive to mirror yourself in them".

[Chiara Lubich Mary the Transparency of God]

Lourdes Magazine - April/May 2008

The current issue of Lourdes Magazine arrived a few days ago. As usual it contains a mix of articles related to the life of the shrine. The main feature covers the 50th anniversary of the International Military Pilgrimage. I think it was participation in this pilgrimage, possibly in the late 1950's or early 1960's, that saw my father make his first visit to Lourdes. We saw from time to time some black and white film of this .... The ethos of this pilgrimage is that of military engagement as being at the service of peace. The pilgrimage can be an occasion of reconciliation between those who have fought on the opposite sides of conflicts. The Magazine also contains the homily preached by the Bishop of Lourdes and Tarbes on the 11th February this year, for the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

What caught my attention, though, was coverage of a "book fair" held in Lourdes 9th-11th February. This featured a number of books about Lourdes or St Bernadette, some published for the 150th anniversary year. One is a book La jeune fille et la Vierge by Alina Reyes. The surprising thing about this is that Alina Reyes previous writings are "controversial" (the word used by her interviewer in the Magazine - they are actually better described by the word "erotic"). I have not been able to find out much about Alina Reyes apart from the Lourdes Magazine interview. The fascinating possibility that I want to explore when I am able to obtain her book about St Bernadette and her novel Foret profonde (in which she writes about the healing influence of Lourdes in her life) is that her life expresses the purification of eros to become agape of which Pope Benedict XVI writes in Deus Caritas Est.

Meanwhile, some extracts from the interview:

I did not recieve a religious education; I was a natural mystic who was not aware of it. Above all, as far as I can remember, I knew with an unsustainable certainty (to the point that I often tried to rid myself of this feeling), that a superior, cosmic order, invisible and spiritual, which I could not name, carried me personally in His heart. I could never have talked about it, it was too overwhelming, and I still cannot say any more. At twenty four, whilst expecting my second son, I read and re-read the Gospels and spent months embraced by a marvellous grace. I continued to experience this state, but still declared myself an unbeliever. This is how I know of this process of emptying oneself to receive the invisible. Little by little, increasingly specific things occurred to me, more and more evident, notably a direct contact with God. I knew then I should no longer conceal the name of the One who inhabited me ...

My novels are only "controversial" for those who see evil where it is not. I have always denounced the culture of morbid sex, and sought to give my vision of the flesh; flesh which is happy is one of the means for human beings to access a fulfilled fusion with the world, in other words, the Creation. ... Then yes, I reconcile Eros and Agape, and I am a Christian because this religion is that of the flesh. When we enter a church we see the flesh of Christ, the flesh of the saints, we see the child Jesus at Mary's bosom ... God was incarnate, how can one believe He hates the flesh?...

I tried to show the literary dimension of this event [ie the apparitions at Lourdes], and what strikes me is its resemblance to the beginning of Genesis: "God said ... And there was light". The word of God is a light; this is what is happening in Lourdes. The word which Bernadette transmitted to the world testifies to this "light", as she says at the beginning, which appeared to her in the "darkness" of the grotto ...

Yes I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing Pascal and I do it again by saying: "It is necessary to find the virgin in oneself to discover the hidden Virgin". The Virgin Mary is a door to enter God, and this door is innocence, the spiritual possibility of regarding the world as immaculate in its conception. I think I have said that the Virgin in us is our true face, our face denuded of social masks ... Lourdes invites us to present ourselves before the Virgin Mary, as we are surrounded by the mountains which evoke naturally the purity of nature, a purity we lose so dramatically.

The introduction to the interview describes Alina Reyes book as "at the same time splendid and surprising"; according to the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, it is "a book which will stand the test of time".

Some election statistics ....

In the recent local elections here in the UK, residents of London boroughs had no less than three different ballot papers to fill in. First: to elect a mayor for the whole of greater London (this being quite a different position than that of the "Lord Mayor of London" who is the mayor of one London borough, the City of London - a much more ancient position). Second: to elect a constituency member of the Greater London Assembly. Third: to elect London-wide members of the Greater London Assembly, on the basis of proportional representation.

Amongst the candidates in all three of these elections were candidates of the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party. These are candidates who, from a Catholic point of view, can be described as being "on the side of the angels" - pro-family, pro-life and supportive of Catholic social teaching in other regards too. How did they get on?

According to the 2008 diocesan directory, the Mass attendance at the Catholic parishes within the Havering and Redbridge GLA constituency is 17 403. Let's take this as some sort of rough measure of the level of Catholic activity in the constituency. The turnout in the constituency was 44.78%, so, assuming that these active Catholics voted in the same proportion as their non-Catholic neighbours, that gives 7 793 Catholics voting. I really do not know what scaling factor should be applied to take into account Christians of other denominations - shall we say a factor of 5, trying to take account of evangelical churches as well as the Church of England, Baptists, Salvation Army etc? That gives a rather rough guess at 38 965 Christians voting in the constituency.

In the Havering and Redbridge votes for the mayoral contest, 2 957 people (1.78% of total votes) voted for Alan Craig, the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate; in the constituency election for the Assembly, 5 533 (3.29% of total votes) voted for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate. So, very (very, very) roughly, 7.6% of Christians voted for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party candidate for Mayor of London and 14.2% of them voted for their constituency candidate for the Assembly.

So, is it fair to say that the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party in London did not tap in to what might be thought of as their voting base? A number of thoughts occur:

1. It is for lay people to use their expertise and experience to decide whether or not it is appropriate to stand for electoral office on a Christian platform. In the same way, it is for lay people to decide how they should use their vote. It would be quite wrong for church leaders to take an approach of saying that their members should vote for one candidate or party rather than another, even where that party has a Christian platform. There is an appropriate secularity of the political process that church leaders need to respect.

2. This is not the same as saying that church leaders should say nothing about politics! They could, for example, be expected to speak out if a particular policy being proposed was clearly contrary to their church's teaching (something that might be easier for the Catholic Church than for other denominations). They could also promote Christian social teaching.

3. But there is a way in which points 1 and 2 merge together. In this election, how far have Christians voted according to conscience - and by that I mean by using their Christian faith to make a judgement of the appropriate way to vote? Or, how far have they voted on the basis of Conservative vs Labour (or perhaps with Liberal Democrats in there as well), in a kind of allegience to the major party system, and then simply trying to choose what they judge to be best of the top three, believing that any other vote is a wasted vote? I do not want to say that the only judgement of a Christian conscience would be to vote for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party - depending on your individual constituency candidates, for example, a Conservative or Labour vote might well be appropriate - but I do feel that there would have been a noticeably higher vote for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party if the idea of a vote based on conscience were more widespread amongst Christians. And this is something to which Church leaders can legitimately make a contribution.

On a more optimistic note: so far as I can make out from the voting figures, the Christian Peoples Alliance have made progress in the 2008 London elections when compared to their showing in 2004. Their share of the vote for the constituency election votes in Havering and Redbridge, for example, progressed from 2.14% in 2004 to 3.29% in 2008, and this with an increased overall turnout in 2008.

Go here for the Christian Peoples Alliance/Christian Party comment on the election results and here for my post on William Hague's recent lecture on "Practical Politics, Principled Faith", which is relevant.

A funeral

On Tuesday/Wednesday I undertook a round trip to the North West (civilisation!) for a family funeral. My mother was one of eight sisters, and the lady whose funeral I was attending was the last of the eight. She died at the ripe old age of 91, after many years of severe visual impairment and, more recently, a lengthy period suffering from dementia.

One of the interesting things I learnt about my aunty on Wednesday was the strength of her Catholic faith, and how much this was part of her ordinary culture. I heard anecdotally of wedding dresses being converted into vestments before the couple had returned from their honeymoon. The aside comment added to this, however, was that she would have probably accepted them being made into cricket whites if the materials had been suitable - in their younger days, theirs was very much a cricketing family. Another whimsical comment was about St Peter having to make sure the kettle was on when my aunty arrived at the pearly gates - she being a great tea drinker. Champagne and pasties were order of the day at the get together afterwards - this being all but a family "tradition".

My aunty had four children (my cousins), two daughters who lived nearby and two sons who were further away. They have cared for their mother over many years, first when she was living at home and then, more recently, when she was being cared for in a nursing home. During the last few years, I think they arranged for their mother to have a visit from at least one of them almost every day. This visiting was not easy, given their mother's illness.

Listening to the homily at the funeral Mass, which briefly referred to my aunty's death as being in some way a relief, my mind went on to a completely different track. I thought first of an idea of Cardinal Barragan, of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral of Health Care. He observed a year or two ago that the person who is mentally ill is a faithful image of Christ, and not in some way a damaged image of Christ. This is because their suffering and helplessness images that of Christ in his agony in the Cross. Seen in this way, the life of someone who is mentally ill should be seen as being precisely that - a life that has a positive value.

The second thought I had was that my cousins probably did not think that they were doing anything special in the way that they visited and supported their mother over a very long period of time. It appeared to be taken for granted that that was what they would do. The only implict reference to it during the homily was in describing the death as a kind of relief, though that was not an explicit reference. Perhaps this caring within a family is something that we should not take for granted, and should celebrate more than we do. In a practical way, it is a recognition of the life of the one who is visited as being precisely that - life, and a life that, though it is "lived" in an imperfect way, is nevertheless life that has a positive value.

In the context of the funeral Mass, this double recognition of life amidst the mortality of earthly existence is fulfilled in the belief that the body of the one who has died will rise again to eternal life in heaven. It is this belief in the resurrection of the body that gives meaning, not only to the dying of the person, but to the caring given during the days, months and even years leading up to the death. Whilst there is certainly a very human sadness to be recognised, perhaps priests preaching at funerals could present more positively the continuity of the recognition of life through illness and death to eternal life.

Eternal rest grant to her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace and rise again in glory. Amen.

Jerome Lejeune and a success for gene therapy

The news media have today reported a successful treatment (as part of a clincial trial) of an inherited eye disease using a technique of gene therapy. This is part of the report on the BBC news website:

An 18-year-old whose sight was failing has had his vision improved in a pioneering operation carried out by doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital. The London researchers used gene therapy to regenerate the dying cells in Steven Howarth's right eye. As a result he can now confidently walk alone in darkened rooms and streets for the first time.

Steven, from Bolton, is the third person to have the operation - doctors expect better results in future cases. Before the procedure, he could hardly see at all at night and in time he would have lost his sight completely.

His condition - Leber's congenital amaurosis - was due to a faulty gene that meant that the light-detecting cells at the back of his eye were damaged and slowly degenerating further.

But, in a delicate operation, surgeons at Moorfields injected working copies of the gene into the back of Steven's eye.

As I listened to this news on the radio, I was reminded of the person who first identified a link between a specific genetic defect and a resulting illness. The illness concerned was Down's Syndrome, and the geneticist Jerome Lejeune. It was the aim of Jerome Lejeune's research that the discovery of this link would lead to the development of a cure. A similar intention lay behind the work of Professor Liley, originally from New Zealand, who first invented the technique of pre-natal diagnosis. Sadly, both men saw their discoveries diverted from their original objectives towards selective abortion of those identified in the womb as being disabled.

In some way at least, today's news represents a fulfilment of their work. The potential of gene therapies to revolutionise medicine is beginning to become a reality. And, at the very beginning of this development, lies the work of Jerome Lejeune.

My own direct memory of Jerome Lejeune is seeing him chairing a question and answer session at the end of a conference in Oxford, just a few months before he died in April 1994. This he did in a way that can only be described as "fatherly", and I had to remind myself of his immense moral and intellectual stature. Having since read "Life is a Blessing", the biography of Jerome Lejeune written by his daughter Clara, this was entirely in character.