 Thank you for that wonderful warm welcome. Ron has done so much personally, but all the members of the faculty have, to ease this whole process of transition and make sure that any difficulties that arise because of changes in culture are made really easy. He hasn't been able to catch every single one of them, but he's caught most. I can remember though that shortly after accepting the post with great joy, I went down for the celebration of Mass, and we're sitting at the front of the Mass there listening to the homily, and at the end of the homily, suddenly the priest said, "'Professor, will you give me an amen?' And next to me, this voice shot back, "'Amen!' Now, nothing like that has ever happened to me before. It was a little bit as though you're sitting under a tree where lightning strikes and hits the person next to you rather than you yourself. Because you see, we don't say amen at all in England. We say amen. And you can't really make amen sound convincing, if you see, so. I'm watching very carefully where I sit in future for this, but I'm not sure how useful this Catechetics faculty will be to me because I was sitting lamenting the fact that the Lord had tricked us all by giving us that gospel this morning. Just when you're trying to speak on peace, he suddenly gives you a gospel in which Christ says he's not the peace. So I was just asking Sis to your Hannah, what should I do about that? And she said, I could lend you a sword. You see, she has the equipment of the whole of Lord of the Rings in her office next to me. So anything at all you need by way of props, she helps with. It's Jesus had the same problem at the last time, didn't he, when the disciples came up with two swords. But okay, so now we've got Christ is our peace. You can see I decided I would try and give myself that challenge and see if I could speak on the theme of the conference as a whole. I've given you all or asked to be given a handout of the passage from which that comes, which is a passage from the letter to the Hebrews. So you should have a green sheet on your chair and I'll refer to that occasionally. In bold, you'll see the passage which we have for our conference. Strive for peace with all men and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord. And you see it comes in the middle of a passage from the letter to the Hebrews. What's interesting is that this whole passage is about peace and everything I want to say this evening is on that sheet. So I'll refer back to it a few times. Peace interestingly, I was very helped by the fact that when St. Peter spoke to Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, he used the word peace to describe the carigma or the central message of the gospel. He said then to Cornelius, you know what message or what word the Lord sent to Israel, the good news of peace. So good news there. We know we're always trying to create a catechesis based on the carigma or the good news. Peter there has used the single word peace in order to describe it. And it's the good news of peace by Jesus Christ. So it's not just any form of peace. And that's part of the clue to what Jesus means by, I've not come to bring peace. It's not any form of peace. It's going to be a very particular form of peace, but it's Christ peace. And the one thing Christ leaves with us is peace. So at the last supper, when he promises he will leave a gift, it is the gift of peace. Peace I leave with you. And remember he goes on saying not as the world gives, do I give? It's not the same kind of peace, but it is peace. My peace I leave with you. In other words, it is the peace that he himself has. So Christ gives us his own peace. He gives us what, just as he gives us the Lord's prayer, which is his own prayer, he gives us his own peace. So it is Christ peace that we've been given. And of course, where do we hear that peace be with you? We hear it at the mass, don't we? The peace of the Lord be with you always. That comes after the sacrifice. So after the sacrifice of Christ, after the Lord's prayer in which we share in his prayer, from the altar, the priest shares the peace of Christ with us. And then invites us to share the peace of Christ with each other. So do you see how it flows from the sacrifice, from the priest, which makes sense for why we always say we cataclyzed towards the liturgy. Because if peace is the curriculum, peace is the message, the good news, then we lead people to the place where that peace will be given to us. Not just spoken about, but given to us by the priest, shared from the altar, and we share it with each other. Now that's what this passage to the Hebrews is trying to explain to us. And also trying to explain how we live that peace in our lives, the peace of Christ, which we will be receiving from Christ through the priest and then sharing with each other. Let's look then at this first phrase, strive to be at peace with all men, strive for peace with all men, and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord. The word peace itself is the direct translation of the Hebrew shalom, which appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament. And the Greek word we've given a name to, if anybody here is called Irene, that's the word for peace. So anybody who's called Irene has a vocation in their name to be a peacemaker. Yeah, that's you. There's Irene, there's the peacemaker. That's the translation in the Greek shalom. Now shalom in the Old Testament has a very particular meaning. The center of that peace is to be in the presence of God and to receive his blessing. So peace is first of all the result of the blessing of God. So we have the famous blessing in the book of Numbers, Numbers chapter six. And this is where the Lord said to Moses, say this to Aaron and his sons, thus shall you bless the people of Israel. You shall say to them, the Lord bless and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. This is how they will put my name upon Israel and I will bless them. So the result of the blessing of God is peace. Peace only ever flows from God's blessing. And that helps us to understand why this passage from Hebrews has united the idea of peace with that of holiness. We strive for peace with all men but not without the holiness that comes from God because peace is going to flow only from God's blessing. So the shalom we receive comes from that. And that is when Adam and Eve were created, they were created with that shalom, that peace. God blessed them. All right, so in the first chapter you have the blessing of God upon the original couple. And that blessing of God is being given the name original holiness. And then the state in which we're established because of God's blessing has been called original justice. And the whole of that is the peace or the shalom of God. So when God blesses us, he establishes us in the right relationship with him, that's holiness. And then he said, I give you dominion. Now dominion, he gives us, in other words, a world to look after. And the dominion he gives us is ourselves. We're called to have dominion over ourselves. So the church calls us a microcosm, a little world. You know the idea of self-government? This is God giving us self-government. One person under God. That's the idea. We're one person under God, his blessing. Once we have his blessing, we govern ourselves, how we live, and because of that, we govern the relationships around us. We are in a position to be able to govern and keep peace. And therefore the psalms, often see this as the greatest of all gifts. He keeps peace on your borders. He feeds you with the finest wheat. That's the shalom. He keeps peace on your borders. He feeds you with the finest wheat. We know what that is. So the idea then, and the peace is not a personal thing belonging to me alone. The peace is something which is social. So I keep peace with others, which is why strive for peace with all men. In other words, strive to be at peace with the others. It's with other people that we make peace. It's not just my personal possession. I'm not trying to get a peaceful realm just for myself. The shalom of God is seen in the Old Testament as being like a city. So it's a well-ordered city. The definition in the Catechism of peace is the tranquility of order. The order that comes from God through his blessing, the order that comes through my self-government and therefore my relations with others and with creation. And that is the tranquility of the order, God wants, where he keeps peace on our borders and feeds us with finest wheat. The next part of the letter to the Hebrews, just under that, describes the fall from shalom. It describes the rejection of the blessing. See to it that no one fail to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness spring up and cause trouble. And by it, the many become defiled. And it uses the example of Esau. Esau, if you remember, who refused, who sold the right to the blessing. So he no longer had the blessing of God but tried to make peace in other ways. So he's used as a little symbol for those who will reject the peace of God because they reject the right to that blessing which God wants to give them. And then it goes through the results of that. And the results are described by the church using this word concupiscence. And concupiscence is the lack of boundaries, the lack of clear borders in your life. Because God has made us for peace which is this desire for wholeness, for peacefulness with our neighbors, for a good life in relation to creation, a sense of unity and integrity. But if it doesn't flow from that blessing, we still carry on seeking it. And because we don't seek it from God's blessing, we seek it in other ways. So we overflow our borders trying to seek it. And so Saint Augustine said, you can always spot the lack of peace by a sense of inability to stay within borders yourself, a sense of compulsion without satisfaction. I remember as a child, because what happens is that borders become points of conflict rather than peace. Our house adjoins, when I was a young child, our house adjoins another neighbor's house and we shared a common driveway for cars. So we had a little funnel leading up to where the cars came in and then the funnel came down to two garages. And we didn't get on well with our neighbor. And because our family and their family didn't, there were lots of conflict points and they started always around the shared drive. So our neighbor, who I'm sure started it, would park his car at the top of the funnel and then he would go out. So whenever we wanted to go out in our car, we couldn't get it out. So I can remember my father saying, okay, what we're gonna do? We're gonna park our car at the top of the funnel. Then we all go back in the house and we pretend we've gone out, which is I can still remember the man coming down the drive, knocking on the door and all of us saying, shh. You see the conflict point between where the boundaries meet. There was a fence between us. After one of the things he used to do was when we put the washing on, my mother put the washing out, he used to light his bonfire. I know, shocking, isn't it? So we had to bring all the washing in and I can remember the delight of turning on the tap when my father got the hose out and put his bonfire out. We trained our cat in guerrilla warfare. We trained our cat to be really clean in our garden and not in his. And he threw her over the fence. I know, it's a good job we moved. Do you see how the lack of peace on the boundaries? Some people have no sense of boundaries whatsoever. I do remember when I, this was when I was older, obviously, I used to own a narrow boat and I lived, this was when I was in Oxford and the community of people who lived on boats was quite a close one, but they tended to be very casual about ownership. And I'd only lived on the boat a few months when I'd gone away and when I came back, I found somebody living on my boat. There was only room for one on this boat. I asked her what she was doing and she said, well, I had to live on your boat. My boyfriend and I had a horse and cart, but he's gone off with a horse and cart and I've nowhere to live, so I have to live on your boat and everybody said you wouldn't mind. So anyway, I let her, and you've got a really nice crucifix and do like that. So anyway, I let her live on my boat for a few days and said she had to be out within a few days. When I came back, the locks were changed. I can remember this. Loads of my possessions were floating in the canal and she had gone off and left my boat to one of her friends who was not at all interested in everything else. So I had to wait until I saw her go out and I used an axe to break back into my boat and my poor little door of my boat was not in a good state. But you can see these conflicts over borders and boundaries all take place when there's no peace establishing. So the restoration of peace, this way I have to strive to be at peace with all men but it does take more than one of you to do it. Strive to be at peace with all men. So what does the letter to the Hebrew say about how we recover, how we come back from that state of the fall? If we go back just to before that bolded statement, lift your drooping hand, strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be put out of joints but rather be healed. Do you notice in other words, the first thing about which we're being told is that peace doesn't happen automatically. Left to themselves, things disintegrate. Left to themselves, relationships break down. In the work of New Evangelization, John Paul loved using a phrase, mend the fabric. And this is like a constant need to be repairing something. So peace is a very active thing. Strive for peace. Jesus asked for us to be peacemakers. Now then that's striving. It doesn't mean doing a lot of things. It means in the first place, making a decision that your life will be one of peace. This striving, in other words, the center of the striving we're called to do is not to get up and do a lot of things, first of all, but it is to make an act of will. When a group of nuns asked Thomas Aquinas to write them a manual for how to get to heaven, he came back very quickly and when they received the book and read what was inside, it simply said, will it, right? That's the manual. How do you get to heaven? You will it. And what's interesting is it's surprisingly hard in life to get an act of will moving. This might be something we could really help people we cataclyse reflect upon, that actually the spiritual side of us is will and intellect in particular. And so we really need to think about what it is to make an act of will. One of my favorite poems, I just want to read you a short poem, is by a Scottish poet who lived in a very rural part of the British Isles. He traveled to the city of Prague and he was very taken on the bridge of the city to see a huge bronze statue of a horse reared up in the middle of the bridge with a knight and a sword on the horse. And the name of this statue is the Rider Victory. Now this is the poem Edwin Muir wrote about that and it's all about the act of will. The rider victory reigns his horse midway across the empty bridge. As if head tall, he'd met a wall. Yet there was nothing there at all. No bodyless barrier, ghostly ridge to check the charger in his course, so suddenly you think he'd fall. Suspended, horse and rider stare, leaping on air and legendary. In front, the waiting kingdom lies. The bridge and all the road are free, but halted in implacable air. Horse and rider with stony eyes up rear, their motionless statuary, an amazing poem to describe how often in life people we know cannot move forward, not for any reason. And one of the first things we need to teach is that peace is possible for everyone. The only thing preventing holiness is will, will it. There is nothing in front of the empty kingdom lies. The bridge, the roads are clear, but you halt. You halt and you can't move forward and a lot of people get stuck at different points in their lives. And what we need to teach them, and this is what the letter of the Hebrews is saying, is will it, just will holiness. That's what the Lord is calling you to do. So what is it I will? What is it to will holiness? This is what the very top part of our passage is talking about, because what we will is God's will. We will God's will, thy will be done. The first passage, do you see from verses seven down to 11, if you have a pen with you, just note how many times the word discipline is appearing in this passage. It is for discipline you have to endure. God is treating you as sons, for what son is there, his father does not discipline. If you're left without discipline, do you see how it goes on? Now the word for discipline is a Greek word from which we get the term pedagogy. And this particular passage is the passage which the church has selected and placed it at the heart of the general directory for Catechesis. You'll see there that book three is called the pedagogy of God and it opens with this passage. And it's all about God's discipline because that is the word for pedagogy. In Greek it's paideia, God's paideia or his pedagogy, his discipline. And what this means is that God has arranged each of our lives so that we can achieve holiness and peace. God has made sure that every single thing we need for holiness and peace is present in our lives. So that we have to simply will, thy will be done. And that is to put ourselves under God's pedagogy. So we make the act of will and we place ourselves under it. And if you notice, the big theme here is about the relationship of the father's discipline to his son. God is treating you as a son. What son is there, his father doesn't discipline. Now what we can point out to people is this is really a passage about Christ and God the Father. You know the most famous passage speaking about Christ in the Old Testament which we hear every year is the passage from Isaiah chapter 53. And this is exactly, this passage from Isaiah 53 uses exactly the same language of God's discipline and his pedagogy but in reference to Christ. So I'll show you where it is. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, and upon him was the discipline that makes our peace. And with his stripes we are healed. In other words, Christ came to share in the human condition so that he would place himself under God's pedagogy to restore our peace. And what we always call the passion is Christ bringing back peace to the human race through God's pedagogy. And it's within that pedagogy that we're invited to share and of course which we share in the mass. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have each turned to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. I really liked that, that's the bit following, because for three years I was an assistant shepherd. I lived in a place called Wales, which is part of the British Isles in which there are more sheep than human beings. And I had a very, very bad sheepdog. So my job, I only had 20 sheep, but my job, and I always think of this now as a kind of model for what it looks like to do pastoral care. My job was simply to chase the sheep around the mountainside and try and catch them. And when I caught them, because this part of Wales was so, it was very wet and boggy, the sheep's feet would all get rotten. So I would have to catch a sheep, turn it up so its feet were in the air and I'd have a pen knife and I would take off all the rot on their sheep, on their feet. And that was basically, I wasn't actually any good as a shepherd except catching sheep like that, that's all I did. I didn't know how to do anything else to them, but I did chase the sheep and catch them and do their feet. And so I always think of God's pedagogy as a little bit like that. He's presumably catching us trimming our feet. You see? Remember the vine dresser? He always prunes the vine, right? A little bit like clipping the feet in order to make it more fruitful. I think we need to tell people in other words that we need to, this idea of making peace, but sharing in God's pedagogy. A lot of people today think that as long as they do nothing and will nothing but a harming nobody, that that's a good life. But Jesus in fact constantly says, remember the parable about burying the talent in the sand? Anybody who doesn't produce fruit on the vine, my father cuts away and throws away. The Christian life is not meant to be about avoiding trouble, about doing nothing at all. The Christian life is meant to be about doing something good. So striving for peace, willing something good, producing fruit. So that passage there then about the pedagogy of God is showing us the path that God lays out for every person. So when we cataclyse, we cataclyse people about how to make an act of will and then that the act of will is to place oneself under God's pedagogy, his discipline. There is a very beautiful prayer, which if you'd just like to close your eyes, I will read to you, by Francis the sails about God's pedagogy, in which he speaks about our embracing of the more difficult parts, because it does say in the passage to the Hebrews that a lot of the discipline of our lives, we resist. When God does catch us like the sheep and start doing the trimming, that's the time we resist. But in fact, that is when God is giving us a great gift, he's helping us to have peace restored in our lives. Oh my God, I thank you and I praise you for accomplishing your holy and all-lovable will without any regard for mine, with my whole heart in spite of my heart. Do I receive this cross I feared so much? It is the cross of your choice, the cross of your love, I venerate it. There is nothing in the world that could keep me from accepting this cross since it is thy divine will. I keep it with gratitude and with joy as I do everything that comes from your hands. And I shall strive to carry it with all the respect and all the affection which your works of salvation deserve. So from this point of discipline then, if we just go down towards the bottom of the page, this is where we really, we get lots of practical assistance in what we now do. And I think where we're really helped to see how to avoid the pitfalls in the life of peace. Because shalom is such a wide and broad thing, because peace touches every single part of our lives, the big temptation that the Old Testament prophets knew was that people opt for a false peace. Do you remember Jeremiah said, I'm gonna read it to you. They have healed the wounds of my people lightly saying peace, peace when there is no peace. And Ezekiel also said, your prophets have been like foxes among the ruins Israel. You prophets have not gone up into the breaches to build up the walls for the house of Israel that it might stand in the day of the battle of the Lord. The prophets have spoken falsehood and divine to lie. They say, says the Lord, when the Lord has not said anything to them, they have misled my people saying peace when there is no peace. Do you see, we have this temptation to seek false cuts to peace all the time. We see at the moment a lot of discussion of mercy, but we know there's a true and a false mercy. An only true mercy says the Lord would never leave his people in the misery of their sins. So true peace is the restoration of ourselves under the blessing of God, which is a gift from Christ. This passage then, the next passage from verse 18 onwards compares the first covenant of God with the second covenant. And this is the passage about the mass. You haven't come to the place of the first covenant where that was made, where there was thunder and trumpets and not even a beast could go near the mountain without it being slain. You've now come to Zion, the city of God, the assembly of the people of God, all the angels together and the blood of Christ. Well, this is speaking, isn't it, about the sacrifice of Christ which we receive at the mass. And then he goes on to say, see that you do not refuse him who is speaking. And it compares the fact that what we are being offered is an unshakable kingdom of peace, not a shakable. Now, I think this is the other thing we must really help to cataclyse people about. If we just look at the world of catachetics, the world we live in all the time, if we're trying to be peacemakers, in other words, we're trying to make sure that all the different elements of our catechesis are helpful and are building relationships and are doing the right thing the best we can under God, then we will attend to every detail as well as we can. So when we send out invitations, we'll try and make sure they're done attractively, they're sent to the right people, the font size is appropriate, there's a good picture, they're printed in time, we'll make sure there's a place of welcome when people come in. We will be attending to all those elements, we'll be attending to our own preparation to make sure that what we're going to speak, we know what the doctrines are. All of this, in other words, is the work of building the kingdom. That's the first point. But the letter to the Hebrew says, this is a shakable kingdom. In other words, every single element that we're putting together here, which we must attend to, can go wrong. The posters might not get printed through no fault of our own. The people might not turn up. The gospel reading might be a really peculiar one on the day when we're trying to teach about something. There are things we cannot control. The kingdom can be shaken. And nothing endures. Even when we've managed to get a whole generation or a whole group of people through, there's another group. And then we're beginning again. And so we are constantly building the kingdom. And at the same time, the kingdom is constantly being shaken. And this is why there's this temptation about the root of bitterness, where we can give up, where we can decide that somebody else is to blame, when we can decide that something can't be achieved, that we begin to do less than we can. Now, what Jesus says about this is very interesting. Because he speaks about, first of all, he says, nothing is ever lost. Do you remember the places where he says that? Every hair on your head is numbered. Not one sparrow falls to the ground, but your heavenly father knows it. Nothing is ever lost that's of value. So how does that work that nothing's lost and yet everything is shaken? Jesus speaks about the fact that we need to, do not build up treasures on earth, but build up treasures in heaven, right? Don't build barns on earth, but build storehouses that are in heaven. And I think one of the big lacks in catechetics is we don't teach about heaven and what we call eschatology nearly enough, because it is the center of what Jesus wants to say. Saint Augustine put it like this. He said that if a poor person comes to you and you give the poor person something, that person is God's vehicle given to you on earth to take what you've given and place it in the treasury in heaven. Now that's something that you give. It can be money, but it can be a good work. It can be a look of kindness. It can be an attentiveness to someone. It can be designing a poster well. In other words, every act of will, every act of loving will that we have, that we put into building the kingdom on earth. While the earthly kingdom is shaken, those good things are taken to the treasury in heaven. And there, the letter to the Hebrew says, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and thus let us offer God acceptable worship. So the kingdom that cannot be shaken, the way in which we will achieve peace of mind is knowing this. We know what it's like to receive from somebody in this kingdom, right? The city of man, if you like, a loving look, a kind act. And whilst that may not last, and whilst that act and that kindness may not be able to take root here and build something solid and lasting here, it has built something solid in the city of God, which is unshakable and more beautiful than we can imagine. And that's why Christians always are trying to call for Christ to come again. Because if you look at the end of the book of Revelation, when Christ comes, his bride will be revealed in all her glory. Now, what is the bride? The bride is the city of God, which we have built with his grace. The unshakable kingdom, more beautiful than anything on earth, which we have built with love. That is the kingdom, which can never be shaken. You can only build it on earth. It can't appear in any other way. So it's built through our work on earth, and it is unshakably there, waiting as a bride for us to come down from heaven, the kingdom we are building, and it's together. It's not just my kingdom, because we're made to be with each other. When I do something good for you or you for me, you're putting a bit of the wall of the city of God in. The place we will all be able to unshakably live. And this is why everybody, putting themselves under God's pedagogy, is building the kingdom of God, not the kingdom on this earth, not the kingdom of man. And if we think we're building the kingdom here, we will turn to bitterness, disappointment, and despondency. But the kingdom must be built here, but constructed in heaven. Now I think we need to explain that to people, so they can truly say, come, Lord Jesus, because they want to see the incredible, invisible beauty of the kingdom they are contributing to, and in which they will live forever. And Christ spoke about this, it's the temple made without human hands, which he would raise up through his passion. And at the center of that city of God, there is no temple because it's the Lamb himself. So this city we're building is the city of love created from those acts of will and intellect, from the spirituality of entering the pedagogy of God. Because it's all about peace, the letter to the Hebrews ends with the most beautiful prayer of peace. So it's a prayer of peace and of blessing. So I'll just read you this, this isn't on your sheets, it's chapter 13. But it unites all the themes we've been speaking about. Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in you that which is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ. To him be glory forever and ever. Will you give me an amen? Thank you.