There's been a lot in the media this weekend over the canonisation of two Popes. Canonisation is a strange affair.  To publicly say that someone had heroic virtue (which is what I think it means) is something, especially when the candidates are known to so many people. In one way it's consoling to know that saints have their flaws and their limitations.  But no matter what, these were two great men who made an enormous impact on the Catholic Church and the world at large.

John Paul was well known because of his travels, even coming to have lunch in my house in Scotland.  It's not quite what it seems as it was a convent in the grounds of a college where he gave a speech on education. But he did lunch there and it caused a lot of excitement especially for those of us brought up in the days when Popes never left the Vatican. It seemed almost unbelievable to meet a Pope in one's own home!  John Paul was a larger than life figure who appealed to large audiences. He could speak to large gatherings and each one felt personally addressed.  My experience of meeting him face to face was a bit different as he tended to look beyond the person he was being introduced to. I felt at the time it might be a way of keeping a kind of detachment in the face of public adulation but I  think it was simply his personality.  I remember the great excitement when he was elected. Again he broke stereotypes as this was the first non-Italian Pope in a long time. It seemed to usher in a new era.  For many people these expectations were dashed as he seemed to move the Church in a more conservative direction and for some time it looked as though the new life that came with the Second Vatican Council was in danger of being extinguished.  He was, however, a great advocate of peace and was recognised as making a significant contribution to the ending of the Cold War.

He was also a great advocate of interreligious dialogue. He had been brought up in a house owned by a Jewish family, was the only gentile to play in the Jewish football team at school and felt keenly the sufferings of the Jewish people, knowing well what the Holocaust had meant to them. I'm sure this would have been a factor when at the millennium he apologised  for the wrongs Christians had committed in the past, including wrongs against the Jews, other faiths and cultures. This didn't sit too easily with the then Cardinal Ratzinger as the document  Memory and Reconciliation shows. , Nor did his call to the religious leaders of the world to come to Assisi to pray for peace, something Cardinal Ratzinger boycotted.  The debate that accompanied these meetings, three in all, led the Catholic Church to declare its stance on praying with people of other faiths as coming together to pray but not praying together. This is a topic for another blog but enough to say that Pope Francis cut through this by silently blessing a delegation from the press shorty after his election. No matter what his theology John Paul visited synagogues and mosques, kissed the Qur'an, left a prayer for forgiveness at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and hailed the Jewish people and his elder brothers and sisters. He was a true ambassador for dialogue, saying "either we learn to walk  together in peace and harmony or we die together"

John XXIII was a different kind of person and a different kind of Pope.  He was elected after Pius XII who had been Pope all during my childhood and teenage years. At 76 he was seen as an interim Pope but he shook the Church in a way no-one could have envisaged.  Unexpectedly he called the Second Vatican Council saying he wanted to open the windows of the Church and let the Spirit blow through it.  He wanted the Church to look out on the world and the world to look in on the Church.  The Second Vatican Council changed so much - liturgy no longer in latin but in the the language of the country in which it was being celebrated, a new sense of calling for all Catholics whose participation in the priesthood of Christ was recognised, an awareness that the Church was part of humanity with the same hopes and fears.  In all 16 documents were published. One of the most important for me was the one on the Church's Relationship  to Non-Christian Religions, described by Michael Fitzgerald as a gift of the Spirit because it was so unexpected.  John XXIII's great concern was Christian Unity and he only extended this to include  a statement on the Jews after a visit from Rabbi Jules Isaac who pointed out to the Pope the anti-semitic elements in scripture and Church teaching and how this had contributed to the history of Catholic anti-semitism which had culminated in the holocaust.  The Pope needed no convincing.  As Nuncio to Turkey he had issued baptismal certificates to Jews to help them escape the Nazis, for which he is now recognised as one of the Righteous Gentiles in Israel. What started off as a statement about the Church's relationship with the Jewish community developed into a document in its own right and included the other major world faiths but more of this in another blog. 

So we have two great Churchmen being publicly recognised for their virtue and given the title saint.  But all this has to be seen within the context of the Church's teaching about the communion of saints.  In a sense all those who faithfully tried  to live out the gospel message of peace and reconciliation and have died before us are regarded as saints and there are living saints too. in the news today are two such people who both happen to be Jesuits.  Father Frans van der Lugt who served in Homs in Syria for over 50 years refused to leave the city when it was under seige. He was the last European in the city and continued to serve the people as he had done for most of his life.  His home was a space of quiet and peace but this was disturbed when he was shot at point blank range on 7th April by a masked gunman.  The other Jesuit is Paolo dall Oglio, an Italian priest who has also spent his life in Syria and has not been seen or heard of since he was kidnapped by Islamist rebels in Raqqa in July 2013. He developed a wonderful monastic centre called Deir Mar Musa which was a  place of dialogue for Christians and Muslims.  Surely these two men are saints, heroes of faith whom we can be proud of and who are an inspiration to us.  There are, however, many more men and women like them, quietly going about lives of love and service in small and inconspicuous ways and members of the communion of saints even if not publicly recognised as such.

Holy Saturday as the Christian Churches that follow the Julian calendar wait to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus is traditionally a quiet day.  It is a time of waiting, a time to reflect on the loss that death can bring, on the fragility of life, on  how easily dreams can be shattered and broken.  But it is also a time of hope and calls us to trust that in the darkness there is another life to be had, to trust that tomorrow can be better in  spite of all appearances to the contrary.
This year my Holy Saturday was spent traveling to Iona. I was going to meet with two friends to scatter the ashes of a mutual friend of ours. It was a real pilgrimage - three hours on a train, forty-five minutes on a ferry, over an hour on a bus, another ten minute ferry ride before arriving at the beautiful island of Iona, once described as the jewel of the Atlantic.  The journey was worth it.  At every stage I could feel myself leaving behind work and obligations to relax and enjoy the beauty of it all.  Spring was everywhere - the fresh green of the trees just beginning to blossom, masses of primroses all along the railway track, rabbits and pheasants in the fields and even the cry of a corncrake on Iona itself.  It was quite perfect and so appropriate for the task ahead.

The scattering of our friend's ashes took place with very little ceremony.  We had remembered and talked about her over lunch and on the walk to the beautiful north shore. We read a psalm used at her funeral in London and then let her go gently into the sea using these words:
                Out of our sorrow and our love -  we let you go
                Out of the distractions, demands, distress, delights of daily life - now you are set free
                Out of anxiety, ambition, anger, attachment - now you are set free
                Out of sorrow and our love - we let you go
We then  wished her the deep peace of the running wave, the deep peace of the flowing air, the deep peace of the shining stars and the deep  peace of the Son of Peace.

It was very simple and very moving. I felt more intimately connected to her at this moment than I had in life. It was a moment for me to understand that love, friendship, relationships transcend death, that each of us is more than our individual life, that our influence and connectedness is greater than we can ever imagine.  It was a moment to face death and its loss but also a moment to see something of what the resurrection is about - a real Easter experience.

I then had to make the long return journey and decided to go to the Vigil service on my way.  This was so disappointing compared to where I had been and what I had done. For me it was more style than substance.  The choir were in good voice, the ceremonies were carried out with precision but it did not speak to my heart.  It was not a 'thin' experience. It did not help me enter into the reality of what the resurrection might mean.  Perhaps I had been  spoiled by my experience on Iona so couldn't really appreciate it.  I was left me thinking that religion is like a wrapped gift which contains a nugget of gold, an experience of meaning and value, a story to live by  but sometimes it's difficult to get to the gift because of the wrapping.  All religions, at least in the western world, are concerned about low attendance at places of worship, a falling away of commitment but perhaps the people who are rejecting the wrapping are doing religion a good

This is the week Christians remember the last days in the life of Jesus, beginning with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, ending with his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.  The events of Jesus' last days are remembered at church services throughout the week. For committed Christians it can be a time of heightened devotion as Christians believe that the events of this week have so changed the world that sin and death will not have the final word. Rather love can triumph and new life can come from even the direst of situations.  It is a week to be lived through in gratitude but also in the realisation that the story is not just about what happened to Jesus in the past but is, in some way, also our own story.  We all know the realities of condemnation, rejection, apparent failure, suffering, death. In the midst of these it is sometimes difficult to have hope.  Easter is a time for hope, a time to believe that all will be well in spite of the evidence to the contrary.  Does not our world need hope at this present time?

But Holy Week has not  been good news for everyone, especially in the past.  Heightened devotion can easily turn into fanaticism and the telling of past stories can lead people to wrong conclusions about the present. For Jews Holy Week came to be a time of dread, when Jews were accused of the death of Jesus and punished for it.  During Holy Week Jews were advised to stay off the streets and in some instances forbidden to appear in public from Holy Thursday onwards for fear of upsetting Christians.  They were often subjected to a blood libel which suggested the blood of innocent Christian children  was used in the preparation of the Passover bread.  These libels and the persecution that followed lasted right through the Middle Ages up to the last century.  In fact it was one such libel that led to the setting up of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council that celebrates its centenary this year. 

Thank Goodness things have changed. Any accusations of deicide have been outlawed by the Catholic Church which now
recognises its fraternal relationship with Judaism and encourages Catholics and Christians to see Jews as our elder brothers and sisters in the faith.  I'm not too sure how Jews feel about that.  This year, as he has done every year for the last few years, Archbishop Mario Conti has written to the Jewish community at Passover.  One member of the Jewish community commented that it was unusual to send greetings on this festival - better to send them at New Year, I was told.  And yet given the history of this week in which both Passover and Easter are celebrated, given past histories, and given the meaning  of the exodus story for both communities it would seem quite appropriate to send greetings now.

One of the things that's important at this time is for Christians to respect the integrity of the Jewish faith and not try to Christianise it.   In some Churches there is a tradition of celebrating a seder meal - the ritual family meal celebrated by Jews on the first day of Passover. This is to help Christians understand the Jewish background of Jesus.  A recent newsletter for the Council of Christians and Jews addressed some of the issues involved asking: Does the concept of a seder ‘for Christians’ have full integrity?  Does this put Christians in touch with their ‘Jewish roots’, or involve something of a ‘colonial takeover’ of a Jewish practice which in at least some respects is probably centuries later than Jesus?  Some scholars suggest that the last meal Jesus celebrated with his friends was more likely to be an ordinary Jewish family meal than a ritual Passover meal and that any suggestion it was is more theological than historical.  All this needs to be kept in mind at this time of year when past histories might make some members of the Jewish community rather suspicious of Christians celebrating the seder. It's important to remember that modern day Judaism has developed its own integrity from biblical times as has Christianity.

I've been attending an undergraduate physics course this term. I'm no scientist and much of it was over my head. I was able to understand enough to marvel at the interconnectedness of all things and to be amazed at the language of mathematics as a way of understanding the universe. Scientists would wait for decades to have their hypotheses verified and commit themselves to understanding a small part of a universe which they acknowledged as full of mystery.  To learn about atoms and quarks and neutrinos etc was fascinating and to see how we're all connected to the great web of life, originating from the same source was profound. In a way I didn't learn anything new because religions have had this intuition for centuries. But it was an insight into the great dance of life that we're all caught up in, the reality that we all share, the processes that keep us alive, the relationships that are the bedrock of our very being.  Now I know a little bit of what these are and that in itself has been a spiritual experience.  To wonder at the mystery of life is something that connects science and religion and the world needs to hear more of it. The world is charged not just with the grandeur of God as Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it but with the grandeur of life itself.

Recent reports of climate change, warnings that some destructions that we humans have inflicted on our planet are now irreversible, that species of plant and animal life have been destroyed doesn't seem to make much difference to us.  We continue to build on flood plains and wonder at flooding, to build on volcanoes and wonder at them erupting. I recently saw someone on television talking of Naples sitting on the time bomb of Vesuvius with a wide smile on her  face. Looking at it all rationally we are quite mad.  Pope Francis recently said that God always forgives, humans sometimes forgive but nature never forgives. Nature cannot forgive.  All it can do is regulate itself, change the steps of the dance to ensure its survival, establish new relationships that compensate for the ones that we humans have destroyed and that might eventually lead to our own destruction.  What can we do about it - what am I doing about it? How to get back to treasuring the earth, to living in tune with nature, to see every step as a miracle?  This is  a challenge for me and for all of us.

There are and have been prophets amongst us who have warned us against our exploitation of the earth's resources, often at the cost of poor and traditional societies. One such person is Bro. Vincent Canas, remembered in this month's Jesuit calendar.  Twenty -seven years ago yesterday Br Vincent was murdered in his small hut because of his dedication to the Amerindian people and his commitment to speaking up for their land rights in the face of farmers and cattle ranchers wanting land for business and profit and not afraid to destroy it or abuse it for their own ends.

There is also my own religious sister Dorothy Stang who was murdered in 2005. She understood how necessary the Amazon rain forest was to our planet as well as the people who lived there.  She saw the forest and the people plundered for financial gain by illegal logging operations, land speculators, and cattle ranchers. She witnessed political leaders allowing the destruction to continue. She knew her name was on a death list and that her days were numbered. She was shot by two hired gunmen, only with her bible.  As a result of her murder the  Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva put nearly 20,000 of the Amazon's 1.6 million square miles under federal environmental protection.  Why was her death necessary before this could happen?

This beautiful and fragile planet is in our care, we are intimately connected to it and its future is in our hands.  The lives of each one of us will make a contribution to its well -being for good or for ill.  What will it be?