Homily to Youth 2000, 29th August 2011
“We have lived together an adventure. Strengthened by your faith in Christ, you have resisted the rain … you can always, with Christ, endure the trials of life. Do not forget this.” Those were the words of Pope Benedict addressed a week ago to almost two million people gathered for World Youth Day in Madrid when the heat and sunshine of the Spanish Summer suddenly turned into the darkness of a violent storm, with torrential downpours, powerful, swirling winds and fork lightening falling from the sky. Some of you were there. I was with several hundred bishops on the platform beside Pope Benedict and it seemed, as the Holy Father suggested, like a parable for our time, something we should not forget.
I must admit to you like many around me drenched in the pouring rain and struggling against the wind on an elevated platform with the scaffolding shaking around us your first instinct is to run for shelter. But it was the Pope’s courage to remain, his serenity amid that storm, which caused us bishops to stand firm with him who is called, “Peter”, the rock. And it was the young people on the platform beside us who were determined too that we would remain with them they asked us to sing through the storm. It was the joy of that new generation of which you are part which gave courage to the drenched and windswept bishops. How remarkable that scene was as powerful as any homily or address which could have been given. As the storm cleared, the wind and rain eased the Pope knelt with us inviting us all to fix our eyes on Jesus truly present in the Holy Eucharist, “in these moments of silence before the Blessed Sacrament,” he said, “let us raise our minds and hearts to Jesus Christ, the Lord of our lives and of the future.”
At this Youth 2000 Prayer Festival you know quite a lot about high winds and heavy rain! And I want you today to take from the scene I described at World Youth Day and this experience of, “Live at Walsingham,” a parable for your own life-times. Yes, there will come moments when the brightness of a Summer day may turn to sudden storms, when scandals come, when familiar patterns of parish life are shaken, when like the young prophet Jeremiah this morning you experience, “insult, derision all the day long”, when like Simon Peter you are tempted to rebel against suffering at the hands of others, “Heaven, preserve you, Lord this must not happen to you”, when we find ourselves thinking no longer in God’s way but man’s. Then listen to Pope Benedict’s words in Madrid, “The Church needs you, and you need the Church.” We need to stand together with the Church, to stand with Peter’s Successor the Pope, and so through every storm when we are tempted like Jeremiah or Simon Peter to run from our difficulties, the threats and fears around us then to fix our eyes on Jesus, “I now ask you,” Pope Benedict wanted to say to the young that night in Madrid, “to abide in the adoration of Christ, truly present in the Eucharist. I ask you to enter into conversation with him, to bring before him your questions and to listen to his voice.”
It is here in the Eucharist we find strength to do what St. Paul describes as offering, “your living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God”, here our behaviour changes, modelled no longer on the thinking of a troubled world around us but by a new mind, which allows us to think in a new way. In receiving and adoring His Body given for us, His Blood poured out for us we learn what it is to love: to give, “to lose” our lives and so truly to find the life which is ours. “It is a good thing to open our hearts to Christ,” Pope Benedict told us that night in Madrid, “and to follow with courage and generosity the path he maps out for us.” Blessed John Paul II would say that we are only given our lives so that we could, one way or another give them, away, give them to something great. Pope Benedict mentioned in Madrid the Lord’s call of many to marriage as a project for true love, “marked by complete self-giving”, and Christ’s call to others to follow Him more closely in the Priesthood or Consecrated Life, “it is hard to put into words the happiness you feel,” the Holy Father said to us, “when you know that Jesus seeks you, trusts in you and with his unmistakable voice also says to you: “Follow me!”
As you consider your own call in the morning of your lives, how you are to give your life when there may seem many a storm around marriage and family, around priesthood and consecrated life, making such commitments seem to some around us almost impossible. Then think on that parable of World Youth Day 2011, the lesson Pope Benedict asked us not to forget, of how we stand together with Peter’s Successor in the joy of our faith even when the wind is blowing, the rain pouring down because we fix our eyes on Jesus truly present with us in the Eucharist. For we put our faith, as Pope Benedict said, not on an idea or a slogan but a person: “Christ, God Himself, who has come into our midst … (who) had always loved you and knows you better than anyone else.” (Address Plaza de Cibeles, Madrid 18th August)