#Bede Jarrett

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for Beato Angelico

Heb 11:1-7; Ps 144; Mark 9:2-13

A few days ago, the Rosary Shrine welcomed its first group of pilgrims of this year: five women and one Dominican friar had come on pilgrimage to England, and they were devotees of Fr Bede Jarrett OP who had served as Provincial for 16 years; revered as a retreat giver, spiritual writer, and tireless in his work of expanding the Dominican mission in this country. Like all good Catholics, Fr Bede had a great aesthetic sense, a love for beauty, which is inherent in human souls, and also in beautiful things made by the ingenuity and hard work of human hands. He once spoke of beauty being found “not as a secret but as a gospel, not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed.” 

This love for beauty, which must be both spiritual and material in order for it to reflect the splendour of the incarnation of Christ, a splendour glimpsed in its magnificence by the three disciples on Tabor, is ultimately a love for God, for the Son who is the splendour of the Father, the icon of the unseen God. As such, when Dominicans preach the Word, they don’t only focus on what is spoken, nor even just on what is written, but also on what is seen, expressed artistically through the painter’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, or the photographer’s lens! 

For the Dominican seeks and preaches beauty, “not as a secret but as a gospel”, as good news in a world darkened by sin and destruction, and in moments when we might be tempted to cast our eyes downwards in the face of so much ugliness and brokenness. In such a world, beauty is needed all the more, to give us faith in God and his goodness and beauty and power to save and redeem. Thus Christ revealed his divine beauty to his disciples, transfigured on the heights, to help them look up and give them hope of the Resurrection in advance of the terrible suffering of his Passion and Cross which was to come. Likewise, the Dominican find and makes manifest beauty “not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed”. For the One who has befriended us, and who has revealed his glory to us, even when we were made ugly by sin, is Christ, who is Beauty himself and the greatest Friend of humanity. Dominican preaching, therefore, calls us to look and see that God is with us, and his grace fills this world with divine light, to dispel the darkness, and to beautify us. 

Bede Jarrett thus wrote to an aspiring Dominican who did not think he was much of a public speaker that “Fra Angelico used his paint brush” to proclaim the Gospel, and “these [paintings] are effective” and perhaps more so than the voice. For spoken sermons fade and become mere memory but, he implies, paintings live on. Clearly the painted sermons of Fra Angelico (or Blessed John of Fiesole, as he is properly called), this blessed Dominican friar who we commemorate today, and who is the patron saint of artists, have an endurance and an interior beauty that powerfully communicates the Gospel to us even today. Indeed, many, who would not read a sermon or spiritual writing, do still flock to the museums and churches that are blessed with Fra Angelico’s works, and there they can see in his frescoes and paintings a world transfigured by divine light, and a beauty that gives hope and draws us forward in life’s journey, calling us to look up towards heaven. 

In part due to the example of Fra Angelico, who himself was inspired by the preaching of St Antoninus, Dominican bishop of Florence in his lifetime, beauty, then, has been firmly established in our Dominican life, especially in our churches and in every aspect of our liturgical life. So, I want to momentarily pay tribute to our Dominican Sisters of the English Congregation of St Catherine of Siena, who are based in Stone (Staffordshire), and who were renowned for their beautiful and painstakingly embroidered vestments and liturgical furnishings. This past week, a significant part of the Sisters’ beautiful heritage was handed down to us to be used in the Rosary Shrine, for the glory of God. My hope is that we can have an exhibition of these works in October this year. Such things are, unfortunately, regarded these days by many people, even Catholics, as unnecessary luxuries that shouldn’t concern serious Christians. After all, we should be feeding the poor! However, the Sisters who educated the poor (and fed them) knew that Catholics also couldn’t neglect beauty and art. For the human person needs to be fed in body and soul; the human heart longs for beauty, longs for God and so looks for his beauty to be revealed as gospel and as friend. 

Hence, the austere observant Dominicans, of which Fra Angelico was a member, also had paintings in their monastic cells at San Marco in Florence for we pray not just with our lips and in our minds, but also with our eyes, and indeed, our whole bodies. The goal, therefore, was that such external beauty would lead to interior beauty, so that as we look on the face of Christ and Our Lady and the Saints, our lives would be transfigured by the gospel of Jesus Christ, made beautiful by his grace as, through beauty, we befriend Jesus and so we are made beautiful. For as St Thomas Aquinas says the divine communication of beauty is beautifying, ie, the revelation of divine beauty and our recognition of it  produces beauty in things; Beauty himself acts to make us truly beautiful. 

May Blessed Fra Angelico pray for artists today, and for create beautiful things in this world. May God use the work of their hands to reveal himself to us. Amen. 

[revolutionoftenderness]

“...Saint Lucy declared to the judge that the Spirit of God dwelt in her, and that her body was in very truth the temple and shrine of God. Again, Eusebius relates in his history that Leonidas, the father of Origen, devoutly and reverently kiss his breast as the tabernacle wherein God dwelt. The child in his innocence and grace is indeed the fittest home on earth for God...” —Father Bede Jarrett, O.P. [The Kiss - Honoré Daumier] 

• THE death of Father Bede Jarrett is so fresh a memory that we cannot disentangle our emotions from the thought of it. Thousands everywhere have been struck as with a sense of the personal loss of a real friend and the dominant note in the prevailing grief, so spontaneous, so genuine, so universal, is sorrow not for the dead but for the living, an overwhelming sorrow for ourselves and for each other. More: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1934.tb04225.x 

• Honoré Daumier's career was one of the most unusual in the history of nineteenth-century art. Famous in his time as France's best-known caricaturist, he remained unrecognized in his actual stature--as one of the period's most profoundly original and wide-ranging realists. Even today, his essential quality may not be fully understood; the marvels of his pictorial inventions are half-hidden in the profusion of his enormous lithographic work, the sharp truths of his observation overshadowed by his comic genius and penchant for monumental stylization. Honoré Balzac's remark, "There is a lot of Michelangelo in that fellow," was perceptive, though probably made in a spirit of friendly condescension. More: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1209.html 

[thisdanglove]

God cannot cease to love me. That is the most startling fact that our doctrine reveals. Sinner or saint He loves and cannot well help Himself. Magdalen in her sin, Magdalen in her sainthood, was loved by God. The difference between her position made some difference also in the effect of that love on her, but the love was the same, since it was the Holy Spirit who is the love of the Father and the Son. Whatever I do, I am loved. But then, if I sin, am I unworthy of love? Yes, but I am unworthy always. Nor can God love me for what I am, since, in that case, I would compel His love, force His will by something external to Himself. In fact, really if I came to consider, I would find that I was not loved by God because I was good, but that I was good because God loved me. My improvement does not cause God to love me, but is the effect of God's having loved me.

Fr. Bede Jarrett, Classic Catholic Meditations, p. 51

[eternal-echoes]

“Forgive. Let God hold you. Go God’s way. Turn to Him. You are not merely forgiven; you are lifted into the Kingdom of the Son of His love.”

- Fr. Bede Jarrett

[the-daily-tizzy]

The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough.

~ English Dominican Preacher Bede Jarrett

[joeyboy1970]

The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough.

Bede Jarrett

[theartofadventure]

“[God’s] hands are strong and powerful hands and we can confidently rest there. . . But with God, they are not only the hands of power, and not only the hands of wisdom, but of love, and it is only when we leave all things in his hands that we find complete serenity; and then a great peace shall come into our souls.”—Father Bede Jarrett

[live4thelord]

“God cannot cease to love me. That is the most startling fact that our doctrine reveals. Sinner or saint He loves and cannot well help Himself. Magdalen in her sin, Magdalen in her sainthood, was loved by God. The difference between her position made some difference also in the effect of that love on her, but the love was the same, since it was the Holy Spirit who is the love of the Father and the Son. Whatever I do, I am loved. But then, if I sin, am I unworthy of love? Yes, but I am unworthy always. Nor can God love me for what I am, since, in that case, I would compel His love, force His will by something external to Himself. In fact, really if I came to consider, I would find that I was not loved by God because I was good, but that I was good because God loved me. My improvement does not cause God to love me, but is the effect of God’s having loved me.” —Fr. Bede Jarrett https://www.instagram.com/p/CZRWjdPLC61/?utm_medium=tumblr

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for Sunday after the Ascension (Dominican rite)

1 Pt 4:7-11; John 15:26, 27; 16:1-4

“Be watchful in prayer” says St Peter in today’s epistle, for this is the time for prayer, these nine days between the Ascension of our Lord and the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. For Our Lord, before he returned to his Father in heaven, had told his disciples to pray for the Holy Spirit to empower them to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. And so St Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles that the apostles returned to the upper room in Jerusalem, and there “with one accord [they] devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus” and with his relatives. (Acts 1:14) So all the followers of Christ, the whole Church, were gathered together in prayer – for a Novena, to be precise, that had been instituted by the Lord – and they were altogether in that room where Christ had instituted the Holy Eucharist.

We’re meant to understand from this, I think, that the Church prays principally through her Sacred Liturgy, gathered for the Holy Mass, and it is upon this liturgical assembly that the Holy Spirit will descend in great power. The Liturgy, therefore, is the “source and summit” of our Christian life, and we, who are gathered here at the Altar, are at the heart of the praying Church, together with Our Lady, the apostles, the holy women, and the family of Christ. Indeed, through grace, we have become his kin, his brothers and sisters, and indeed, through Holy Communion, we become sharers in his own body and blood. And so, it is from this upper room, this holy place where we celebrate the Eucharist and pray together, that we shall be sent forth in the power of the Holy Spirit to become witnesses of the Resurrection. As Jesus says: “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8b) Indeed, we are to be his witnesses in London, and in all the surrounding boroughs even to the ends of the earth.

To be a worthy and credible witness, then, we must first have seen and known the Risen Lord. Hence we’re told by St Peter to be watchful, to be vigilant, in prayer. One who is vigilant has his eyes peeled, watching at all times, on the lookout. Many of us probably close our eyes when we pray – mainly to shut out distractions and to focus our minds! Thus we realise that the watchfulness enjoined upon us is interior, spiritual, and is not an external matter.

In prayer, therefore, we’re to focus the eyes of our heart and of our minds on heavenly things, on the saving works of Christ, on the wonderful things the Lord has done for us. The Liturgy, therefore, is the principal locus of prayer because it is here above all that the saving mysteries of Christ are present and his work of salvation is being renewed at the Altar. As the great English Dominican, Fr Bede Jarrett OP said: “Calvary meant for us the undoing of all our woe and the upbuilding of our lives for the service of God; in consequence, the Mass being but a prolongation of that ‘far-off event’, it, too, becomes the living reality of that which is most real in all the world… It is the eternal testimony of God’s love for man; the eternal stimulus to man’s love of God.”

Here in the Mass, therefore, if we attend to it with prayerful hearts and minds, we shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God’s love which inflames our hearts with charity, just as the Holy Spirit descended in the form of fire upon Our Lady and the Apostles in the Upper Room, given to them as the fruit of their prayer and of Christ’s promise. The Lord promises us too the gift of the Holy Spirit which is why he calls us annually to observe this sacred novena of prayer to the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit, as we hear in today’s Gospel, will bear witness to the Lord Jesus. So, it is from the Spirit, the faithful and true witness, that we shall learn to become authentic witnesses of the Risen Lord. The Holy Spirit, therefore, will enable us to be watchful in prayer, to watch what the Lord does and say, and so to follow his teaching and his example.

As we are still in Our Lady’s month, and as we are gathered here in Our Lady’s House, I cannot fail to point out that the Holy Rosary trains us to be watchful in prayer, because as we pray the Rosary we must meditate on the mysteries of Christ’s life, contemplating with Our Lady all that her Son has done for our salvation. To meditate on the Rosary is to ponder in our hearts the great love of God for us, just as Mary pondered and treasured these things in her immaculate heart. (Lk 2:19) So last Thursday we recalled that Our Lady herself came to us at Fatima, and there she told the three children to “pray the Rosary every day”, specifically five decades of the Rosary. For it is through the Rosary that Our Lady, the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, trains us to be watchful in prayer, to be focussed on her Son, and so to be taught by the Holy Spirit to become an authentic witness of the Risen and Ascended and Glorified Christ.

To be an authentic witness of Christ, as St Peter reminds us, means to remain “unfailing in your love for one another” (1 Pt 4:8). As such, we need to be vigilant, watchful, always on the look out for opportunities to exercise charity, to extend hospitality, to serve the other, as St Peter says. In this regard, it seems to me, we have much to learn and far to go. Often, our tendency is to be watchful for the failings of others, and we are much too vigilant of the sins of others. However, none of us have been called to this. Rather, as witnesses of Christ, we’ve been called to be “unfailing” in love, “good stewards of God's varied grace”, says St Peter, so that “in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ”. (1 Pt 4:10-11)

Therefore, we are gathered here in the Sacred Liturgy for prayer, in order that we might see again the unending mercy and love of God for us, the “eternal testimony of God’s love for man”, as Fr Bede Jarrett said. “Be watchful in prayer”. Therefore, be sure that your hearts are focussed on God, on the Cross, and ponder anew your unworthiness and God’s great mercy and undying love. So Fr Bede Jarrett considers how it might have been for Our Lady and the apostles to have celebrated Mass in the Upper Room in Jerusalem. “She saw, as on Calvary, her Son’s death”, says Fr Bede, and as for the apostles, “how fervent must have been at Mass their reparation for that sad night when they left him, or denied him, or stood far off from him!” All the more, when we gather around the Altar for prayer, here in this upper room of the Eucharist, we should likewise make reparation for our sins; offer up our sufferings and daily humiliations and mortifications; and call down the fire of the Holy Spirit to receive the oblation that we offer on the Altar of our hearts. And so, if we are truly vigilant in prayer, the Lord will “take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh”, as he promised by the word of the prophet Ezekiel.

The authentic witness of Christ, the true disciple of the Lord, will thus have a heart of flesh. This is a heart that bleeds for the world when it encounters injustice, and inhospitality, and division; this is the heart that cares for refugees, and the unmarried mother, and the victims of the world’s sinful callousness; this is the heart that loves as Christ has loved all of us sinners. For the one who loves will be watchful for those who are in need of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love; the one who loves will lay down his life for his friends. St John Houghton, the first martyr of the English so-called Reformation thus said: “Good Jesus, what will you do with my heart?” Or as another notable English Dominican, Fr Herbert McCabe OP once said: “If you don’t love, you’re dead. And if you truly love, you will be led to the Cross”.

Here in the Mass, here in the upper room of the Church’s Sacred Liturgy, we stand at the foot of the Cross. Here is Calvary, here, “the eternal stimulus to man’s love of God”. So, here we learn to truly love, overcoming our sinful selves, so that we can at last truly be authentic witnesses to the God who died for sinners, and who rose from the dead and ascended above the stars. All this Christ did for us, even though none of us are worthy, so that his grace, his Holy Spirit might bring us to live fully by inflaming our hearts with love. For God is glorified when we are alive with charity, burning with love as the Saints and Martyrs are. Thus St Irenaeus said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive!”

[urbanhermit]

Finished ‘Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family’ by Michael G. Brennan. A comprehensive work on the life, the family, & the writings not only of Evelyn Waugh but also those of his father, his elder brother, and Evelyn’s’ son & his brothers’ children. Most of Waugh’s major works remain in print & his reputation as a rebarbative (unattractive & objectionable) social satirist & Catholic commentator seems assured. His various personae – decadent student, valiant soldier, devout Roman Catholic, country squire, iconoclastic commentator & aged misanthrope have made ‘the life more compelling than the fiction’. The latter half of his literary career was more substantially ‘autobiographical’. The Waughs have been the most productive English literary dynasty. His father Authur Waugh, Evelyn’s brother Alec, Evelyn’s son, Auberon & his daughters Margaret & Harrier. Auberon’s wife, Lady Teresa Waugh, a translator & novelist & three of their children, Sophia, Alexander & Daisy, are writers. The Waughs have published approaching 200 books & numerous articles, reviews, newspaper & magazine columns. The Jesuit Father Martindale & D’Arcy, Father Bede Jarrett, OP (the Prior of Blackfriars & friend of the Catholic convert & writer Graham Greene), along with Monsignor Ronald Knox were friends & defenders of Evelyn’s writings. He was received into the Catholic Church by the Jesuit Fr. D’Arcy (later Master of Oxford’s Campion Hall) in 1930. I will soon read ‘Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith & Authorship’ another English Catholic convert, by Michael G. Brennan. https://www.instagram.com/p/CWGMB0orzeg/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thisdanglove]

Many people seem to worry themselves a great deal more over the things they cannot help than over the things they can... This want of proportion is doubtless observable in myself. Do I think more of the accidents of birth, fortune, and personal appearance than of the self that I have created? For I myself am responsible for myself. ‘To be born a gentleman is an accident; to die one is an achievement.’ Other things, then, I may not be able to help; but myself, I can. As I am at this very moment, as my character is – truthful or untruthful, pure or impure, patient or impatient, slow to wrath or quick-tempered, eager, enthusiastic, energetic, or lazy and dull and wasteful of time – I have no one to thank but myself... The fact remains that I myself alone am responsible for my own character; for character is an artificial thing that is not born but made.

Fr. Bede Jarrett, p. 371-2, Classic Catholic Meditations

[divinemercymeditation]

Oxford Dreams - Catholic Herald

Oxford Dreams – Catholic Herald

“I am beginning to take active steps to carry out my Oxford dreams,” the Dominican Fr Raphael Moss confided to his diary on 26 June 1904. His dream was to send a young friar to study at the university, and his choice for the “experiment” fell on an intelligent, passionate, young man from a military family, Bede Jarrett. To that dream we may trace Fr Bede’s own dream: he laboured tirelessly over…

[stupendousrebelpuppy]

3 Numbing Temptations In Our Times

3 Numbing Temptations In Our Times

Conley Historical | CC BY-SA 3.0 Fr. Patrick Briscoe, OP 02/27/20 – aleteia.org When we try to settle down in this life, as if it’s all there is, problems arise. The great English Dominican friar, Bede Jarrett, once gave a series of Lenten conferences based on the theme “Here we have no abiding city” (Hebrews 13:14). Jarrett explained, “If you are traveling, the whole secret of a happy journey…

[the-daily-tizzy]

The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough.

Bede Jarrett

[moniflyes]

The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough // Art: Current Mood by Wyanne Thompson. Words: Bede Jarrett. Http://www.wyanne.com #livingartist #wyannethompson #art #abstractart #mixedmediaart #bedejarrett #quotes #anger #currentlyfeeling #canvasprints #iownthis https://www.instagram.com/p/CBOBrHCBVrw/?igshid=kjl4lfwhlq6e

[quoteclimax]

Bede Jarrett – The world needs anger. The…

“The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough.” -Bede Jarrett

The post Bede Jarrett – The world needs anger. The… appeared first on Quote Climax!.

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