Novena of Grace (Day 7) Year A

I am happy that the weekend is over. It was tough and really long. But I am not relieved because I have overcome the seemingly impossible. I am only glad because I can be with you as a small and rather cosy group of worshippers. It’s so much easier to be more of who I am... less formal but no less solemn [because the Eucharist deserves our solemn devotion]. Today, brothers and sisters, things are beginning to come together for us.

Yesterday, after Mass, I received a number of SMSes about the novena prayer—reminding me that I had forgotten to include it in. And even as the servers and I came down to make our recessional bow before the altar to process out, Alex who was sitting in front, was mouthing to me about the novena prayer... Well, I didn’t forget. It was just tricky trying to harmonise so many diverse needs together without mutilating the majesty of the Mass which is the sacrament above everything else... We had the Elect’s 3rd Scrutiny, the normal Sunday worshippers, our novena needs, and finally the blessing of our migrant/foreign and guest workers. Let me assure you that the intent of the novena is fulfilled as long as you make yourself available for the Masses for these nine days. What you could have done was to come up here to make the novena prayer yourself, in your own words. The availability for the nine days doesn’t follow a magical trajectory but rather is an expression or indication of what I have always been reminding you about... outside sign of an inward grace... your physical presence is sacramental of your intention.

So, just be clear that what I am going to do is not superstitious. We shall make sure that at the pause of our novena prayer, we shall spend a longer period of silence to ask St Francis to intercede for us. It is not superstition because the questions that came to me yesterday about whether or not we had broken the novena dynamics came from sincere and searching hearts and the longer silence is a response to the heart’s desire.

And with that long preamble, we are brought into the matter of today’s reading. How so? Both the first reading and the Gospel touch on an issue that affects the heart—an issue that is also at the core of our novena. I would like to bring together my thoughts on some issues.

First of all, let us look at the readings. The matter appears to centre on the lady in question—Susanna who is accused unjustly of questionable behaviour—for engaging in death-demanding deeds. The focus seems to be her deeds as they are chronicled in rather exhaustive details. Thankfully, we’ve chosen to skip the salacious specifics by reading the shorter story. Suffice to say our concern is that the charge of adultery is really an indictment of the elders themselves—an indictment of hearts turned in on themselves. Wickedness is the bitter fruit of a heart—or human desire—turned in on itself. They persecuted the woman because their hearts’ evil desires could not be satisfied.

But, is it just a problem of the heart? No. It is also a problem of the head as we see in the Gospel. The Pharisees approach the problem from a logical perspective. They place Jesus in a logical impossibility whereby his position either set him against the Law of Moses or against the Roman authorities. Mercy would place him above Mosaic Law or stoning would mean he incited murder. Both are unacceptable options.

Jesus response is both logical and compassionate. Both his head and heart are involved. The Latin word for Mercy is misericordia. I love that word because it involves both the head and heart—misereor (to take pity) and cor (heart) meaning to take pity from the heart. The story of the adulterous woman and Jesus shows love is needed for logic to function correctly.

It wasn’t logic that saved Jesus from that complication. It was his heart that saw through the hypocrisy of a twisted logic—we heard that in the first reading. Logic when allied with greed or unalloyed desire always leads to manipulation. See how it is with some of our elected leaders. But logic when correctly aligned with the heart will only bring about greater good for the world. But how difficult it is!

Remember yesterday’s gist of the homily. Fides et ratio, faith and reason. Today, we see how this divide is at work because the split between faith and reason parallels the disjunction between the head and the heart—logic and compassion. We like to speak of vision and mission statements. The problem with vision and mission statements is that they deal with the head. They are logical. But vision becomes ideology and is thus dry because it does not touch the heart. And the frustration with failed vision often leads to cynicism. Ask the most cynical people you can find: Jesuits. Many of them are failed idealists. When the reality they desire does not fit an ideal they often give up hope failing to understand that the elucidation or the clarification of any vision falls within the domain of education. But, education is not enough because the achievement of an ideal belongs to the process of conversion. Conversion speaks directly to the heart. Our beloved St Francis wasn’t someone who lacked a vision. Remember that he had a Parisian vision and later a vision of himself as a courtier. Rather, it was his desire that needed conversion. Francis was a man of the head. He didn’t discover his heart until he encountered Ignatius. It was the conversion of his heart that brought him to the Far East...

If you think about it, the swing in the election was not really because people didn’t know that the country has been in such deep trouble for so long. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to solve our problems. We analysed the results of the previous elections as voting according to bread and butter issue. The truth is the head has more solutions than the heart is ready to accept. This election was when we allowed our hearts to come to the fore. Likewise, the area of sin too is not that we don’t know what they are or how we should proceed. We know but just that the heart is not ready to go where our head is.

Since the beginning of the novena, I asked that people come with great expectation. Why? Because expectation is an expression of the human heart. And the heart is the one that needs conversion. As I said, we often approach conversion from an intellectual point of view. It is much easier to educate. It is harder to convert because conversion involves giving of the heart to someone as in the case of Francis, giving his heart to Ignatius. Don’t be scandalised. He gave his heart to Ignatius who led him to give his heart ultimately to Christ. So, the core of our novena centres around the formation of our hearts.

In our case, when we come with our expectations, we demand that God does for us what we desire and yet in the end, we find that our desires, expectations must blend to God’s will. The embrace of God's will is difficult because it involves giving our hearts to God. And that’s where many of us balk. We are afraid to give our hearts to Him.

So, brothers and sisters, in summary, Jesus healed many of our illnesses not because he applied an intellectual solution to them but rather he healed us of our iniquity because he recognised that the heart is in need of, more than anything else, a human acceptance or human touch. The pitfall for us is being an intelligent but a heartless people! G.K Chesterton once said that “poets do not go mad but chess-players do”. The problem though is not with logic. As Fides et Ratio tells us, the danger is when logic is not guided by the heart. There's no fool like a logical fool, because he is committed to defending his foolishness. And from his foolishness mischief is sure to follow. The core of our novena... coming with great expectation is right but it is also for us, many of us, a reconciliation between our head and our hearts. We pray for that grace that one day when God calls, we will readily give Him our hearts.