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Homily

2 March 2025

Quinquagesima Sunday

Domine, ut videam.—‘O Lord, that I may see.’

Setting forth on a journey

Today, as we stand on the threshold of Lent, the Holy Mass summons us to a great journey: Our Lord tells us, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.’ And so we set our faces to go with Him to Jerusalem, to His Passion and to the glorious Resurrection that He also foretells. At Matins this morning we heard about another journey: we heard the word addressed to Abram: ‘Go forth from thy country and from thy kinsfolk and thy father’s house, and come into the land that I shall show thee.’ This too is an image of the journey that we are called to undertake during Lent: the journey that will take us away from what is familiar, away from what is comfortable, away from our ‘comfort zone’, to go out and to come into the land that God will show us.

A continual conversion

Many of us have already undertaken such journeys: each of us here in this choir has quite literally gone forth from our country and from our kindred and from our father’s house, to this land that God has shown us. But the journey that we’re called to, in imitation of Abraham and in imitation of Our Lord going up to Jerusalem, doesn’t stop with physically leaving the world and coming to dwell in the monastery. Monastic life, indeed every Christian life, requires continually leaving our comfort zone. Our vow of conversio morum, the ‘conversion of our manners’, is a vow of continual conversion: a promise to continually be starting again, continually willing to change, to leave our old habits, to come into the land that God shows us. Even amidst the stability of our monastic life we are constantly being called to come out of what we are used to. Even as we stay here, various people come and go, various aspects of our life change: the schedule changes, our work might change, things about our surroundings might change. And so we are never done with this going forth from our country, from our kindred, from our father’s house, coming into the land that God shows us.

A new way of seeing

But the biggest going forth is above all the one that happens invisibly inside us, in our souls. It is the call to come out of our old mentality, our old way of thinking, our old way of seeing the world, and to come into the land that God will show us: the new perspective on all of life that God wants to open our eyes to. We see in today’s Gospel that the Apostles, even though they had already left all things to follow Our Lord, had not yet made this great ‘going forth’: that they were still stuck in their old way of seeing things. They wanted to hold on to a worldly mentality even as they were physically following Our Lord. They wanted worldly success; they wanted glory; and they could not understand the path that He was setting before them, the path to the cross. And so, St Gregory tells us, as an image of this blindness of theirs, of their need to go forth from this worldly way of thinking that they were still carrying with them, we are given the second part of today’s Gospel: the blind man, whose cure is an image of the new vision that Our Lord wants to open us to. ‘Go forth from your country and your kinsfolk and your father’s house, and come into the land that I will show you.’ In inviting us to leave all that is comfortable and familiar as we stand on the threshold  of Lent, Our Lord is inviting us to open our eyes to a new perspective that He wants to set before us, the land that He will show us. And so our prayer on the threshold of Lent is the prayer of the blind man: Domine, ut videam, ‘O Lord, that I may see’:  a prayer that we will continue in other words in a few moments in the Offertory: Benedictus es, Domine, doce me justificationes tuas, ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy justifications.’ (Ps. 118: 12) Or as we also heard in that same Psalm 118 as we sang it before Mass during Terce: Revela oculos meos, ‘Unveil my eyes that I may see the wonders of Thy law.’ (Ps. 118:18) This is what we pray for: that God will open our eyes in the Lenten season to look upon the wonders of His law, to understand, to see, the fullness of His plan for our lives.

The vision of charity

This vision, this new sight that Our Lord wants to give us, begins of course with the virtue of Faith, which is the beginning of the supernatural life. But it is only perfected, St Paul tells us in today’s Epistle, in charity: in the love of God above all things for his own sake, the love of our neighbor as ourselves for love of God. This is the only thing that allows us truly to see as God sees. St Paul tells us that all other gifts, even spiritual gifts, all other works, even apparently spiritual works, are in vain without it. The Church wants us to hear this on the threshold of Lent, to remind us that all of the works that we will put on our Lenten tickets—all of our fasting, all of our mortification, all of our almsgiving, all of our extra works of prayer, all of the good deeds we might do, all of the external works of our monastic observance and of the Christian life—all of these things are in vain without charity, without the love of God which is the only thing that allows us to truly see. St Paul contrasts charity with all of these other works using the analogy of the child who grows up to be a man: all of these other things—prophecy, tongues, the giving up of one’s goods—these things in themselves are simply the things of a child. True spiritual maturity only comes through the love of God, through charity. The Votive Collects given in the Missal to ask for charity pray that ‘the desires conceived by [God’s] inspiration might not be able to be changed by any temptation.’ Charity, then, is the desire conceived by God’s inspiration: it does not come from us. It’s not just a warm human feeling of affection; it is the very love of God Himself, inspired in our hearts, breathed into us by the Holy Ghost. And so the Postcommunion prayer for charity asks: ‘May the grace of the Holy Ghost  enlighten our hearts and refresh them abundantly with the sweetness of perfect charity.’

Charity, the beginning of the life of Heaven

This charity, this perfect love of God, is what allows us to pass beyond the ‘seeing in a glass darkly’, the imperfect vision St Paul speaks of, and to come to the perfect knowledge of God. Here in this life our vision is still indistinct: we don’t see God as He is, and faith has yet to give way to the beatific vision. But even in this life we are already united to God through charity. Faith will pass away—when we have the vision of God we will no longer need it—but charity will abide: the union with God that we can have even now through charity, through love, the love of the Holy Ghost poured into our hearts—that is something that will substantially abide even in heaven, and so charity is truly the beginning on earth of the life that we will lead in Heaven. And so, in a certain way, in loving God and loving our neighbor for His sake, already in this life we begin to ‘know Him even as we are known’, to ‘put aside the things of a child’, to live with full spiritual maturity, to move beyond seeing ‘in a glass darkly’, and to begin to have the union with God which we will have in Heaven when we look upon Him face to face. This, then, is what we desire above all from Lent. This is what we should pray for as we enter this season: if we come away with nothing else from the Lenten season, we should desire to come away with a greater charity, greater union with God through love. And our prayer today as we prepare for Lent is the prayer of the blind man: ‘O Lord, that I may see’, that I leave behind the darkness in which I’ve been living—the darkness of selfishness, the darkness of the world’s way of seeing things—and enter the light of charity, the light shed upon all things by the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Ghost.

The Eucharistic Food of Charity

And so, as we enter Lent, let us draw ever closer to the burning furnace of charity: the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, hidden for us but burning with charity in the Most Blessed Sacrament. We ask the Most Pure Heart of His Mother to lead us deeper Union with his heart here in the Sacrament of His love that Eucharistic Heart of His will satisfy all of our desires as we will sing in the Communion Antiphon of today’s Mass. As we prepare to enter the season of bodily fasting, we are given to sing the words of Psalm 77 about the manna: ‘They ate and they were satisfied, and the Lord brought to them their desire; they were not defrauded of that which they craved.’ This is what Our Lord does for us in the Most Holy Eucharist: there He satisfies all of our desires through His charity, poured into our hearts. It is there, in the Sacrament of His love, that we find the anticipation of that heavenly country that He will show to us, that heavenly country where we will live eternally on His love.