Given at the Mass of blessing the new church doors at Our Lady Help of Christians, Kentish Town on 31 January 2016.
So you have a new church door!
It’s good to reflect on what the church door symbolises. For those of you who were born in this parish, it’s the doorway through which your parents brought you for baptism. It’s the doorway through which parishioners are carried out after their funeral.
The church door reminds us, every time we pass through it, of this certainty: that we shall one day pass through the door from this life into eternal life. Jesus said, ‘I am the door’; and we long to be united with him in the next life.
But he did warn us that the door he stands at is a narrow door. We need to use this life to make sure we can fit.
I found myself reflecting on all of this when I recently visited the Holy Land.
It was my first ever visit. I found it incredibly moving to reach Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’s birth. To enter the actual place you have to enter a very low church door.
It’s called the eye of a needle because it’s designed to be too low for camels to enter, which explains what Jesus meant when he said, ‘It’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle.’
At Jesus’s tomb, too, you have to stoop very low to enter. The doorway is tiny.
You feel as if you’ve entered with him; and you can imagine the guards sealing the entrance.
We often describe being laid in the tomb like a return to the womb, where we await a new birth, this time into eternal life. It’s touching always to hear the Lord say, on the lips of his prophet Isaiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.’
He knows us better than we know ourselves. That’s why he is so merciful towards us.
As you know, Pope Francis has designated this a Holy Year of Mercy. At the Cathedral, and in various parts of the diocese, there are specially designated Holy Doors. We’re encouraged to go there and ask for Mercy. Your nearest one is at Haverstock Hill.
Pope Francis wants us to believe that God waits to meet us at these Holy Doors like the Father waited for his prodigal Son. He waits to show us his mercy.
You’ll remember how, in that amazing story of the Prodigal Son, the Father didn’t close the door behind his boy; nor did he just leave it open; no: he waited at the door. The same Father waits for us at each and every Holy Door.
Mercy, Pope Francis wants us to be clear, isn’t so much a noun as a verb. That’s to say, it’s not just a thing; it’s an action; it’s something God does in us.
Above all, it’s an invitation. Just as the Father waited for the Prodigal Son to return, God waits for us to turn back to him.
I do think one of the loveliest expressions of this is to be found here in London itself.
I mean that wonderful painting, ‘The Light of the World’. It hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral. Christ is depicted as a man holding a lamp: he is the light of the world.
He stands by a door, obviously waiting to be allowed in.
As you look at it, you notice something very important: the door has no handle on his side. The message hits you. This door is the door to my heart.
The choice is mine whether or nor not I let Jesus in. But how to let Jesus in?
Part of the answer is given in these stirring words of St Paul, where he reminds us that the key is love. Love is the key to the door which lets Jesus into my heart.
As Paul says, ‘If I am without love, then I am nothing at all.’
I had a friend who said this was his favourite passage. He said to me, ‘Have you ever tried replacing the word “love” with “I”? Try it and see how it feels.’
What he meant was this: ask yourself if you could ever say, ‘I am always patient and kind. I am never jealous. I am never boastful or conceited; never rude or selfish.
I never take offence. I am never resentful. I never take pleasure in other people’s sins. I always delight in the truth. I am always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.’
No, of course we can’t. And, if we try, it simply brings home to us how much we actually lack love. We realise how much work we need to do on ourselves.
If we seek to grow in love, I can’t think of a better place to start than with this list of Paul’s. Reflect on it each night and you will know what aspects of yourself you need to work on tomorrow!
Pope Francis reminds us there’s another checklist we would do well to revisit in this Year of Mercy. He means the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison, burying the dead: these are the corporal works. And the spiritual: instructing, advising, consoling, comforting, forgiving and bearing wrongs patiently. Reflecting on any of these will focus our hearts. It will open our hearts to God’s mercy by making us ask what more we could be doing to help people.
Our response as a diocese to this appeal of Pope Francis has been to have an evangelisation conference, the Proclaim conference. We gathered last November with representatives from each of the parishes to ask ourselves how much of this we do already; what more might we do to help those in our midst.
Every parish was asked to form an evangelisation team to reflect on the call to mercy. Each team was to meet in January and February to ask themselves those two questions: what do we do well already; what more might we do to be more evangelising. The hope is that every parish will come up with three initiatives.
They don’t have to be all brand new: some could be developments of what you do already.
Each team was then to use Lent to plan the first of their three initiatives. Come Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, every parish is to announce its three planned initiatives and be ready to embark on the first. You can imagine what an outpouring of mercy there will be if all 215 parishes of this diocese embark on some new evangelising initiative this coming spring.
I do hope you will support your own evangelisation team in taking up the initiatives they propose to you. If the going is hard, as it may well be at times, then console yourselves with thinking about the long term, how it will be the ones whom we helped in this life who will be there to welcome each of us when we arrive at heaven’s door.
Because Jesus was quite clear about that, wasn’t he? As we contemplate the narrow door of heaven, someone will hopefully come up to us and say, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Let me now take you in.’
All of this we should reflect on, not every time we walk into church; but from time to time. As we touch the new doors, we might try to remember from time to time to ask Jesus to be for us, as he promised: the door, the door which leads us into eternal life.
It’s certainly something we should aim to think about particularly in this year of mercy; say to him, as we cross the threshold, ‘Lord, have mercy on me a sinner’; and imagine him, our loving Father, waiting on the other side of the door, saying to us simply, ‘Make your home in me.’
‘Make your home in me as I make mine in you.’ Because this church is nothing if not our home. And these new doors; well, they’re our front door, aren’t they?