The Forty Hours has begun
Tonight
11pm Sung Compline followed by Benediction
All night vigil
Saturday
5am Sung Matins and Lauds
6am Low Mass in the Extraordinary Form
9am–10am Confessions as usual
10am Mass
5pm Musical Oratory with the Parish Choir
5:30pm–6:30pm Confessions as usual
6:30pm Sung Mass for Peace
9pm Sung Compline
Exposition until midnight
Sunday
Morning Masses as usual
Exposition resumes after 11am Mass
5pm Closing Choral Vespers, procession and Benediction
#oxfordoratory
We were delighted to welcome Brian and Pat Barnes, who were married in our church 60 years ago today. Brian was baptised here, began serving at the altar at 8 years of age, and his family have a long association with the parish. The Fathers were very pleased to give them a blessing on their anniversary. #oxfordoratory
A shot from the night walk to Littlemore last week, to prepare for the feast of St John Henry Newman.
If you missed out, there is another chance for late night religion today, as we begin our Forty Hours Devotion, including an all-night vigil!
#oxfordoratory
Push through and run
Our annual Quarant’ore devotion — Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament all weekend — begins with a Solemn Mass on Friday evening. The Sacrament will remain exposed, and the church open, all night and throughout the next day, interrupted only by the celebration of Mass. Staying up all night does feel like something of a marathon, like a great feat of endurance, and there are times when one feels the need to just keep going, just push through. But as much as the forty hours seem like a race of sorts, they should not be a race of strength or endurance — as if this time were the intrusion into our lives or a distraction that takes us away from more pressing things. We do this because we know Christ is our goal; and the thousand other things that clamour for our attention and draw us away from our real source and centre, they are the intrusion and the distraction. We need to “push through” such things and run to Christ, calming our restless bodies and distracted minds and, even if it is for the briefest of time, relearn what it means to rest gently in his love.
If you come to our church on Friday night or the early hours of Saturday distracted, inconvenienced, worrying about how the laundry is going to get done, or the dinner cooked, or wishing you were on the sofa watching the telly, then you will be in good company. To one degree or another, we all are distracted. If sitting in silence before the Lord makes you uncomfortable, if you think “what am I supposed to do?”, or “how am I supposed to pray?” — join the club. Silence can be uncomfortable. It forces us into the encounter with ourselves and the God who speaks in the depths of our being. Push through and run! That is why the Forty Hours are punctuated by Compline, Benediction, Masses, Musical Oratory — we have a chance to rest and recharge.
For what is placed in the monstrance, is a Who and not a thing — he is Christ the Lord, and we come to be in his company, in his presence. This we know and believe with all our hearts. But even though we will see the Host, seemingly immovable and inactive, enthroned in its monstrance, surrounded by candles and flowers and gold hangings, we know and believe with all our hearts that there is more happening than the eye can see. Christ is not inactive and immovable in the Eucharist. In this sacrament, he continually pours himself out in love for us and for the world he came to save. We gaze on him in the Blessed Sacrament because he first gazed upon us, not with a look of reproach or judgment, but with eyes of love, a look that pierces us to the soul and sees into the core of our being, loving us, calling out to us, asking that we forsake our sinful ways and our petty distractions, and return our love for his. Where Christ is, there is heaven and when Christ comes he never comes alone. All of heaven draws near to us, the angels and the saints, our brothers and sisters who have gone on before us draw close; past, present and future all converge in him who is the Lord of time and history. This is why when the Christian prays, he or she never prays alone. And this gift, this call to step out of time and into his company, is given not because we deserve it, nor is it denied us because we are sinful. It is given because of the love he has for us, and the mercy with which he deals with us until the day when our time is ended.
What are our to-do lists compared to this? What is one hour or so away from the telly or computer in comparison? What is so hard, really, about spending time with the One who loves us? Nothing surely.
So we still our souls, we raise our hearts and minds and voices to the Lord; we put aside our distractions for a time; we cease worrying about how we are to pray; prayer, after all, is not the words we speak, it is listening to the heart of God speaking to our hearts, and our hearts making their fleeting, and faltering, and yet eminently precious answer to his love. So come to the Lord this weekend during the Forty Hours, if not for the all-night vigil then at least for an hour or so. He will be waiting to spend time with you.
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The English Aquinas
The sermon of Br Albert Robertson OP for the feast of St John Henry Newman
At the top of a bookshelf in the library of the Dominican community in Edinburgh, there’s a quotation from St John Henry Newman. According to the quotation, St John Henry Newman is supposed to have said that ‘What England needs is more Dominicans.’ I’m not really sure where this comes from. I’ve never been able to track it down. The quotation has no reference. But St John Henry Newman was keen on the Dominicans. Our sisters at Stone in Staffordshire were visited by Newman on a number of occasions, and he had a great love for that community, connected as it was to the mission of Bl Dominic Barberi. Indeed, for a while there was the question of whether Newman himself would become a Dominican. When his own small community of converts from Littlemore arrived at Maryvale in 1846, the question of the future of their community life came to the fore. Bl Dominic Barberi wanted Newman and his friends to be ‘preachers, missionaries, martyrs.’ Wiseman’s idea was that they should use their special intellectual gifts contending with the various infidelities of their time. A letter dated 6 July 1846 ends with Newman’s speculation about the future, and explores the idea of embracing the life of the Friars Preachers. At the very end he states his objection: ‘Is not the Dominican Order’s great idea extinct’? Are not the Jesuits ‘the fashion of the age’?
Talk of becoming a Dominican seems to have filled his companions with some dread. In a letter from Frederick Sellwood Bowles to Ambrose St John, Bowles writes ‘For my part I would sooner be a Jesuit. I have no fancy for that no meat diet, and eight months’ fasting you talk about. And how do you think you would stand all that hard head work, living on nothing but air?’
If Newman had become a son of St Dominic, the fit may have been a very difficult one. The English province of the Order was, at that time, in a precarious state, propped up with friars sent from other provinces. During his time at Rome, Newman found that Aquinas wasn’t much taught. This is probably a surprise to us now, but until the revival of St Thomas under Leo XIII, Aquinas was an obscure figure. Despite this obscurity, Newman recognised St Thomas as, in his words, the champion of revealed truth. But the difference between them is great enough for Newman to be considered an English Aquinas, almost an English version of Aquinas — not only because of the range of questions he addressed and the amount which he wrote, but to also reflect the real difference in their thought: Newman was certainly no Thomist. His time in Rome did not equip him with the vocabulary or thinking of St Thomas, and his age meant that he was unlikely to ditch his own intellectual system in favour of another. So what should a Dominican say of St John Henry Newman? For all their differences, Newman and Aquinas stand as two intellectual giants in the Catholic Church, and it was precisely in their understanding of the intellectual life that they stand as one. For both Newman and Aquinas, our faith is not simply about what we know, but about abiding in Lord, and allowing the words of Christ to abide more deeply in us.
From its very beginning, St John’s Gospel tells us that the life of the disciple is one of abiding with the Lord; the intimate relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, is the basis of an intimacy between the Lord and His disciples. The Lord’s first disciples are called when he invites them to ‘come and see’ where he is abiding and they respond in turn by abiding with him. But in the chapters which recount the Last Supper, the Chapters from which our Gospel Reading was taken, the Lord tells the disciples quite plainly that this relationship is mutual: ‘Abide in me, and I in you.’
For St Thomas, this abiding is expressed as friendship. The disciples gathered around our Saviour enjoy not just his companionship, but also his friendship. The true sign of friendship is that friends reveal the secrets of their hearts to each other, and an intimacy and confidence grows between them. Ultimately friends become of one mind and one heart. In Christ, God reveals his secrets to us by allowing us to share his wisdom when we abide in Jesus, and Jesus’s words abide in us.
But it is the Church which ensures that we remain in this abiding friendship with God. As we are grafted onto the vine, the words of Christ are not just words to us. They become effective in our lives, they mould and shape us, and the Holy Spirit guarantees that these words are as effective now in each of us as they were when Christ first spoke them. As Newman wrote in one of his sermons, ‘…the heart of every Christian ought to represent in miniature the Catholic Church, since one Spirit makes both the whole Church and every member of it to be His Temple.’ The mysteries of Christ’s life are, for St John Henry, almost tangibly imprinted on us. In another of his sermons he writes ‘Christ Himself vouchsafes to repeat in each of us in figure and mystery all that He did and suffered in the flesh. He is formed in us, born in us, suffers in us, rises again in us, lives in us.’
If we love Christ’s words, they remain alive within us, they teach us and mould us to abide in an ever deeper relationship with our divine master and teacher. St Thomas tells us that by loving and believing in the words of Christ, by constantly meditating on them, we come to accomplish them, and we do this, says St Thomas, by living well and teaching well. This is the fruit which we bear. Loving the words of Christ brings an integrity and a coherence to our lives. Indeed, for Newman, the divorce of our thought, our intellectual life, from our life in Christ was the very essence of the rationalism and liberalism which he fought against. Our path to that mature Christian life which St Paul encourages the Christians in Ephesus to aspire to, is only possible if we have, Newman says, ‘clear heads and holy hearts.’
When we think of Newman or Aquinas at work, we perhaps think of these great men precisely as towering intellectuals. We picture Newman standing at his desk and scratching away at his paper with his ink pen, or Aquinas in his intellectual ecstasy dictating to his numerous scribes. What we perhaps don’t see are these two great saints abiding in God, loving the Word of God, and allowing the Word of God to abide in them. If we want to see this a little more clearly, it might be worth remembering that for both Aquinas and Newman, their theology spilled over into poetry: the treatise and the tract were not enough for them to convey the depth of their love.
Newman was received into the Church on this day in 1845, and this feast and anniversary stands at the head of each academic year; a fitting feast day for a saint who loved this city and University and who rejoices that the sons of St Philip and the sons of St Dominic find a home here. This feast which for many of us marks a new year, means that he can be for us a special guide and patron to show us the true meaning of study and enquiry. St Thomas and our very own English Aquinas, St John Henry Newman, teach us that knowledge of our faith is not enough. We must love and meditate upon Christ’s words, as well as believing them. Aquinas distinguished theology from other kinds of knowledge, he said that some things like geometry train the intellect, but theology differs from these other bodies of knowledge, because it trains not only the intellect, but also the affections. In Grammar of Assent, Newman writes that ‘Every religious man is to a certain extent a theologian’, because everyone can come to a fuller understanding of revelation through prayerful and reasoned reflection. St John Henry saw Our Lady as the model for this; in a sermon written while still an Anglican he said that Our Blessed Lady ‘does not think it enough to accept Divine Truth, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit to Reason, she reasons upon it.’ For both Newman and Aquinas every aspect of our lives has to be shaped by the words of Christ which dwell within us, it’s this which leads us out of shadows into a fuller reality. For both Newman and Aquinas knowledge of our faith is not enough, all theology worthy of the name, and really all intellectual life is, for the Christian, rooted in heart speaking unto heart.
October Music
Sunday 3 October Solemn Mass 11:00
27th Sunday of the Year
Missa Bell’ Amfitrit’ altera Lassus
Vir erat in terra Palestrina
In spiritu humilitatis Croce
Saturday 9 October Solemn Mass 11:00
St John Henry Newman
Missa Brevis in Bb Mozart
Beati quorum via Stanford
Veritas Mea Malcolm
Sunday 10 October Solemn Mass 11:00
28th Sunday of the Year
Missa Iste confessor Palestrina
Verba mea Schütz
Sicut cervus Palestrina
Friday 15 October Solemn Mass 18:00
Forty Hours: Solemn Mass of Exposition
Missa Pange lingua Josquin
Sacerdotes domini Palestrina
O salutaris hostia Josquin
Sunday 17 October Solemn Mass 11:00
Forty Hours: Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart
Missa Dormendo un giorno Guerrero
Improperium expectavit Lassus
Ave verum Byrd
Forty Hours: Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament Solemn Vespers 17:00
Deus in adjutorium Zacharia
Magnificat Quinti toni Victoria
Pange Lingua Victoria
Tantum ergo Laloux
Adoremus Laloux
Sunday 24 October Solemn Mass 11:00
30th Sunday of the Year
Missa Brevis Buxtehude
Domine vivifica me Lassus
Jesu dulcis memoria Victoria
Sunday 31 October Solemn Mass 11:00
All Saints
Missa O quam gloriosum Victoria
Justorum animae Byrd
Audivi vocem de caelo Tallis
Today is the feast of St John Henry Newman, famous for many things, especially as a great academic in Oxford, as a prominent convert to the Catholic faith, and a prolific writer throughout his life.
We celebrate him today for his holiness, as a faithful priest, as a son of St Philip, and the founder of the first English Oratory.
St John Henry, pray for us.
#oxfordoratory
Amazement
Some students training to be teachers once went on a visit to a cathedral in order to learn what a school visit might be like. They went in, looked around, and the Education Officer who was acting as guide, stopped them and said, “You’re all looking in the wrong direction!” When children come into a space like a cathedral, they look up. Little ones stand agog, wondering. When was the last time that you were amazed?
One of the characteristics of an encounter with God in the Bible is amazement, wonder, fear and trembling. When God acts, people are silenced. They marvel at what he has done, yes, but also, and perhaps more particularly, they marvel at his nearness. That holy amazement is, as we know, a gift of the Spirit of God. It left the Apostles speechless at the Ascension and that same fear of the Lord seized them at Pentecost — they were amazed and astonished as the Love of God was poured into their hearts.
To children, amazement comes easily, especially if it concerns something new. Is it not true that we don’t always hold on to that skill? Idle scrolling of the smartphone is conducive neither to amazement nor life-enhancing wonder. That gift of holy wonder, of Fear of the Lord, is given to us for a purpose. It enables us not only to realise how much we depend on God but also to see and renew in our hearts the realisation of the wonders he works in us day after day. The Lord is making all things new within us. By the gift of his Spirit, by the grace of the sacraments, by our life of prayer and friendship with him, he shapes us anew, and often we just have to get out of the way and allow him to do it.
“The Spirit of Truth,” our Lord tells us, “will lead us into all truth,” and we know that the fullness of truth is Christ himself, nothing else. The Holy Spirit who was given to us at our baptism, the fullness of whose gifts we receive in Confirmation, who comes to us each time we pray to him for guidance and help, this same Spirit comes to shape us, to mould us after the pattern of Christ himself.
The thing that those children were quick to marvel at in that great Cathedral was beauty. If you and I are to grow in the spiritual life, we too have to learn to become children again. When the Holy Spirit touches us we are beautified by him, we are enriched. If we can allow ourselves by simple acts of trust to be more open to the wonders the Spirit wants to do within us, if we can respond to that by a generous charity and fidelity, we become sanctified and are made truly children, the adopted children of God, no matter what age we are.
These reflections are sent out each Wednesday to all those on our mailing list. Click here to sign up to our mailing list, and receive our Sunday E-newsletter and these reflections straight to your inbox.