The Holy Mass for the feast of Blessed Gerard was celebrated by our Chaplain Father Stephen Morrison OPraem, at St James's Church, Spanish Place, by grace of the Rector. Fr Morriosn also preached. The text is given below.
Reverend Fathers, dear Confreres, I wish you a happy founder’s day, a joyful feast of our brother in heaven, Blessed Gerard.
Since the historians tell us that he left this transient life between the years of 1118 and 1121, we celebrated last year the 9thcentenary of Blessed Gerard’s entry into eternal bliss. This year, being the latest date when the same anniversary might reasonably be marked, is no less an occasion of joy. (In fact, this year is also a jubilee for the Norbertine Order too, 900 years since our foundation! So much to celebrate!) Perhaps we can think of tonight, then, as the closing of a jubilee – and, we pray, the beginning of a new chapter in each of our pilgrimages. For we are all pilgrims and patients in a Hospital, the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem; the Holy Father once even referred to the Church as a “Field Hospital for Souls.” Since this is rather a beautiful expression, I shall refrain from the acid retort (tempting though it is) that, if the Church is a hospital, there are several parts of it (some rather prominent) that might qualify as its secure unit for the insane…
But in all seriousness, yes, we are all pilgrims and patients. Blessed Gerard founded an Order, not a hospital; but it was in a hospital that he did so. And he founded it, by God’s inspiration, for us. Before we think of ourselves as running that Hospital, we need to remember that it was – and still is – run for us as well.
We too are pilgrims to the Holy Land, we are all patients in a hospital, we are all poor and sick, in some way. At the beginning of this and every Holy Mass, we have acknowledged our war-wounds, our impoverishment, our persistent complaints of thought, word, deed or omission – our sins. And we try to empty ourselves and “detox” from all worldly cares and cures, in order to be ministered to by the Divine Physician, to whom also we will one day submit ourselves for our final examination, so that, until then, we may receive from “His Holy and Venerable hands” the eternal and supernatural remedy, the medicine of the Blessed Eucharist, the pledge of future glory, a little piece on earth of Him to whom we shall be joined forever in Heaven. For the disease of our sinfulness need not be terminal, though often chronic: we can improve; we can change; the Doctor might look pleased with our progress. After all, He has administered the cure several times.
What Blessed Gerard understood, and left the Church as his particular legacy, is that some of these poor and sick in that Hospital were themselves called to be Servants and Carers of other poor and sick souls, in both natural and supernatural ways, both physically and spiritually; think of the paradox: brothers were called to serve their brothers; the diseased were called to nurse the diseased; the lame were called to carry the lame; was this the blind leading the blind? Bear with me… From a hospital of patients would come the Knights Hospitaller. Some of these men wounded in battle had the divine vocation to be enlisted as soldiers, knights, and defenders of the embattled and shell-shocked faithful of Christ; this is what profession and membership of our Order means. This is what working in and for the Church means. In other words, the asylum was to be run by the inmates. It should not surprise us, then, when the Church of Jesus Christ sometimes resembles (at least to those outside her bounds) a replay of “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”; for those of us who, like Blessed Gerard, are simultaneously patients and staff in the Field Hospital of the Church, know all too well our own wounds and our own suffering, but we also know the power of His wounds, His suffering, His agony – and we know that His Passion is the medicine for our own, that His Resurrection is the promise of our own, and that His care for the souls entrusted to Him by the Father is also our own task and special care. So we know what our treatment plan is. We know that one day we will leave the Accident and Emergency ward which is the world, and we hope immediately thereafter to ascend to the permanent rest of Paradise forever (with perhaps a little ‘Intensive Care’ in purgatory before we do). But we do not think only of ourselves; our task too, then, is to bring the patients in our care with us: to bring souls to Christ for Him to present them to the Father: holy, clean, and spotless, cared for, nursed, convalesced, and healed. After death, our bodies will lie in wait for His powerful “Rescuss” – when the Morgue will become as busy and as noisy as the wards – at that final day of Resurrection and Reward, when our broken bodies will rise again in a beauty and a glory that we could not possibly have imagined when our life was one of bandages and weeping sores.
Our very presence here, as the Grand Priory of England and the British Association of Blessed Gerard’s Hospital, speaks loudly, nine-hundred years since preceding us into glory, of the power of this metaphor. For it is not merely an image for us – it is a hard reality, a practical endeavour, and a noble effort. The pilgrimage for us is real. The quest for the Holy Places is real. The building and defence of the Kingdom of God outre-mer – that is, beyond the visible boundaries of the known world – is real. Since suffering and poverty are real, our care for Our Lords the poor and the sick is real. The care we know that our own souls require is real. The Faith must be defended, and the poor cared for. Therefore, our need for chivalrous zeal and the highest standards of care is real. Blessed Gerard saw a need, and sought to supply the demand; to say that he saw only a practical need would be to miss the entire point of his life – but to say that he lived in a pious fantasy would also miss the point. Neither was true of him, and neither is (nor should be) true of us. For he was blessed to have had eyes to see and ears to hear; and he not only saw the Church and the world of his own time, but perceived a heavenly goal too, one for all time. He knew that what he did for the least of Christ’s brethren, he did for Christ Himself. Christ presented Blessed Gerard with a Cross, and He presents it to us also. Our Lord does not lie to us, as some doctors do, saying “this won’t hurt…much…” – in fact, He’s honest. He says, this will hurt; how could it not?, since it hurt Him. Yet, “by His wounds we have been healed.” Therefore we perceive reality for what it is, when we glimpse the saving power of the Cross, the nails, and the Crown of Thorns. Blessed Gerard knew the power of that Cross, and we who wear it today thank God for the White Cross of the Order and that first Hospital of St John in Jerusalem.
Today, we remind ourselves of that origin, that first calling, which has allowed so many of our confreres since to follow in Gerard’s venerable footsteps. We too, nine hundred years later, are called to this holy endeavour. We recognise that we are the fortunate ones, poor and sick though we are, to be called to minister to the poor and the sick around us. When the Church, local or universal, starts to look and feel like a chaotic A&E after the pubs close, or if it looks like the lunatics are running the asylum, let us remember what we are offering: a Hospital run for patients by those who are patients themselves. So let us be patient… It is Christ’s Church, not our own. He is in charge, and we can have no better Physician. God diagnosed, and it is He who treats us – and with what tender compassion He does so, and with what wondrous medicine! He himself said, “it is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick;” He has come for this purpose, He will see it through, and He will care for Gerard’s Hospital and all within it. The devil said we could not be cured, we were done for, the poison within us was lethal, we were terminally doomed. But our guardian angels asked for a Second Opinion, and they who sang the Gloria when the remedy was born, sang joyfully again as it was first injected into us in Holy Baptism. Do they not sing still, at each absolution? No wonder we make our confessionals soundproof; after each good confession, it is filled with a heavenly chorus that would deafen our poor mortal eardrums. The devil’s gloomy prognosis has been confounded. For the Battle is indeed already won, though it rages on and still requires the service of knights in armour; the cure has already been found, though many still succumb to illness and require treatment; and while some show contempt and may even despise the Doctor, He nonetheless offers the remedy, inviting all yet forcing no one; He pays the price, bandages wounds, and whispers words of peace into anxious hearts. That he did so through Blessed Gerard is what we celebrate today; that He should now wish to do so through us, his Knights and Dames Hospitaller, is what must be our glad motivation tomorrow, and all our tomorrows, for at least the next900 years… For all Time belongs to Him; let us then use the time He has given each of us as wisely as Blessed Gerard did.
For to be wise is to know ourselves to be patients as well as carers. The Tabernacle is our Medicine Cabinet, and the Church has been given its key. As we receive from it tonight a perfect dose whose potency is beyond what our minds can comprehend, may it truly be for us an eternal remedy for body and soul. Let us not hold back, out of shame, from revealing to Him the dangerous infection of our sins, our gaping wounds and their foul stench, since it is in our interests to lay ourselves humbly before Him for healing; what would make others squeamish does not horrify Him. He has already taken up the challenge of our condition. A single tear of his loving anguish, and a single drop of His Precious Blood falling upon us, is able to clean, heal and make us whole. And He provides nourishment to keep us fit and strong: food for the pilgrimage. As we have been fed, so may we feed others; as we have been healed, so may we heal others; and as we have been so generously served, so let us be generous in serving others, at His command.
Blessed Gerard, pray for us.
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