November Days

Nature parades the last of her autumn splendour but will soon be completely stripped for the winter months ahead. It is a dead time, the fag-end of the year, short evenings and cold mornings, days neither wet nor dry, the sun trying to break through. ‘The end is nigh’, we might be tempted to cry, as nature retreats underground.

This dead month of November is the month of the dead. Remembrance Sunday comes with its quiet solemnity, its sad memories of young lives cut short, the tragic waste of human life that the last century saw (and that, sadly, continues). At Mass all this month we remember the dead, all those we have loved, young and old. Some died in the fullness of their years, others before their lives were fully underway. We remember all who have gone before us, parents, children and friends whom we continue to mourn and whom we continue to miss.

On the banks of the river Boyne in county Meath stands a structure older than the pyramids. The passage grave or tumulus at Newgrange was constructed some five thousand years ago. Its builders seem to have been preoccupied with winter and with death. Above the entrance to the passage there is a small opening through which the sun shines on the morning of 21 December, its rays penetrating some fifty feet to the inner chamber where the ashes of the dead were kept. It is an extraordinary construction that required painstaking and precise work and nobody knows for sure what it means.

At Newgrange the mid-winter sun reached — and still reaches — deep within the earth to illuminate the place of the dead. Because of this some think it is a very ancient expression of hope in an after life. In the moment when the northern hemisphere is at its lowest point these primitive but sophisticated people looked, it seems, to the return of the sun, to a light illuminating the winter darkness, to some way in which the life-giving rays of the sun might reach the place of the dead.

We stand on firmer ground when we read the Book of Daniel, written a century and a half before the birth of Christ. It contains the first clear enunciation in the Bible of belief in the resurrection of the dead. ‘Those who lie sleeping will awake’, it says, the just to receive the reward of ‘everlasting life’ (Daniel 12.2). It is also the first time that the phrase ‘everlasting life’ occurs in the Bible. Those who have taught others goodness and virtue will ‘shine like stars for all eternity’. This is quite a change from the grey and mouldy Hades of which the earlier Hebrews spoke, a place of ghosts, neither alive nor dead, an in-between place not reached by God’s light and from which God is not praised.

The firmest ground of all is the Christian hope in the resurrection of the dead founded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In one of the earliest New Testament texts to witness to this hope Saint Paul says ‘we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus: God will bring them with him’ (1 Thessalonians 4.14).

There is an end time to which we look forward which will not be a November end, nor a winter time of mourning and tears. Even in these dog days of the year’s decline we look forward to an eternal spring in which all that has been sown in tears will be reaped in joy. Much has been wasted, much has been left unfinished, much has already been surrendered to death. But nothing is lost because Jesus Christ ‘has offered one single sacrifice for sins and then taken his place forever at the right hand of God’ (Hebrews 10.12). When the Son of Man comes in power and glory he will send out his angels ‘to gather his chosen from the four winds’ (Mark 13.26-17).

For the present we wait as we protect ourselves from the wintry chill. In many churches a ‘Book of the Dead’ is placed on the altar and left there throughout November. We hope that all whose names are entered in such books — together with all our deceased relatives and friends — also have their names inscribed in the Lord’s ‘book of life’ (Daniel 12.1). We pray that their good deeds have gone with them and that when winter has passed they will shine like stars for ever and ever (Daniel 12.3).

A Dominican Vocation

Whilst I have always been a Catholic, for most of my life I had great difficulty in seeing myself as the sort of person who could become a priest. I decided my true calling was to be a mathematician, so I duly went off to Cambridge to study mathematics.

It was whilst finishing my PhD in Cambridge that I spent 9 months living in the Dominican lay community. The lay community consisted of about six lay students living alongside six Dominican friars and sharing in their prayer life. I really enjoyed life there, and the thought did occur to me that maybe I could become a Dominican. But I hesitated. There were so many other things I wanted to do. Religious life would be fine if only I could pick and choose the bits I liked and reject the bits I didn’t. So instead I got a job as a software engineer in Somerset. Maybe there I could settle down, buy a house and have a family.

Two years into my job, I was listening to the radio and a journalist was saying that there was a crisis in religious vocations. I wondered whether there really was a crisis. Maybe there was only if people like myself didn’t respond to God’s call. Maybe God was calling me but I just wasn’t listening. So over the next few days I listened. It was only then I really started to understand how much God loved me and how much I loved God. I didn’t need to get married to be a complete person. My faith in Jesus Christ made me a complete person. For the first time in my life, becoming a priest was something I really wanted to do.

At this stage I didn’t know what sort of priest I should become, so I got in touch with Worth Abbey which runs a religious discernment programme. Over the next year, I went to Worth Abbey once a month. This really helped me discover how I could best serve God, and I soon started to look at the Dominicans. It wasn’t just that I enjoyed living with Dominicans, but I really believed in their mission statement – preaching for the salvation of souls. Being a fairly shy person, the thought of being in the Order of Preachers was fairly daunting, but I felt I didn’t have to rely on my own strength – God would give me the strength to do His will.

So here I am, in the Order of Preachers, confident that God will give me the grace to live out my Dominican vocation.

Br. Robert Verrill is a first year student

Not fanaticism but radical love

"Peter began to say to him, "Lo, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life." - Mark 10:28-30

Fr Peter Hunter OP preached at Mass for the feast of All Saints of the Dominican order (7 November) and the Gospel appointed for the feast is that given above. The homily inspired his hearers and we hope that it will give Godzdogz readers an appreciation of our life and hopes.

Fr Bob Ombres once told me a story of travelling in his native Naples. He was talking to a man who told him he was a Catholic. Fr Ombres expressed interest and asked the man where he went to church. Puzzled, the man replied, “Cattolico, non fanatico!”

Yet, religious life can seem in today’s world like fanaticism, a wide-eyed pursuit of an ideal, giving up all sorts of important things in this pursuit. Jesus, in the Gospel appointed for today’s feast (Mark 10:28-30) talks about leaving family and property for his sake and for the Gospel. Isn’t that rather fanatical?

The same Fr Ombres said to me when he heard that I had made the decision to make final vows in the Order, “I’m so glad! If you really throw yourself into it, the life will make you very happy.” But can this kind of wide-eyed pursuit, this kind of fanaticism, make you happy?

The feast we celebrate today, the feast of All Saints of the Order of Preachers, is our more parochial version of the universal Church’s celebration of All Saints. That it makes sense to celebrate it at all is confirmation that the Dominican way of life is rich enough and wide enough to be a way of holiness. That is to say, it says that after all, the Dominican way of life is a way to be happy.

What is this way of life? Our Order is dedicated to the study and preaching of the truth of the Gospel. And when we characterise it like that, we see that commitment to this life cannot be fanatical. It cannot be fanatical because it is, we now see, not a wide-eyed pursuit of an ideal, but based on the love of a person. Loving the truth of the Gospel is ultimately nothing other than loving Jesus. The Dominican saints, no less than the apostles, leave family and property not for an ideal, but out of love for the Son of God. This means that this following, while radical, is not fanatical but reasonable and human.

An early Dominican expressed a worry (perhaps a tongue-in-cheek one) that the life gave him so much joy and hence could not be a way to heaven for him. But it was for him, and it is for us, if we give ourselves to it freely and fully. We can celebrate today that our way of life turns out to be rich enough, broad enough, to be a way to heaven and rededicate ourselves to living that life properly. In doing that, we leave behind things which we rightly love, not out of a wide-eyed fanaticism, but because we love Christ more.

Remember, remember...

On 2 November, the Master of Ceremonies at Blackfriars, Oxford puts up a notice saying: "Remember, remember the second of November". This, of course, is an allusion to the chant sung by English children in the run up to Guy Fawkes' day which falls on the fifth of November. But what are we friars asked to remember on the 2 November?

We are reminded to don the black cappa of the Order for Mass and the major offices:


November is a month for remembering, for calling to mind those holy souls who rejoice in heaven (All Saints' Day) and those who undergo purgation (All Souls' Day). In addition to these feasts of the universal Church, Dominicans also celebrate their own feasts, All Saints of the Order of Preachers on 7 November and Commemoration of our Deceased Brothers and Sisters on 8 November.


As this is a month for remembering the dead, Godzdogz will be recalling the lives of deceased English Dominicans. Watch this space.

Credo 46: 'Amen' - Video of Credo 1

To mark the end of our commentary on the Creed, which we've been publishing on Godzdogz since April this year, we have recorded Credo I (which is in the 4th mode) according to the Dominican chant books. Do excuse the few stray notes - this was the fifth attempt!

Credo 45: … and the life of the world to come.'

Maybe it is only when someone actually dies that the full strangeness of these words hits us. The creed’s words are themselves stark. They are uncompromising, and do not go into any details. There is an appropriateness to that. Talk about the ‘world to come’ has often been marked by a certain articulate sentimentality. This can be honestly or kindly intended, but it does not take account of the disturbing and complete rupture that comes with death. It often feels as though that there is a staring discrepancy between the models and schemes that people sometimes use and even the tiny insights that can be gathered about what is to come. Of course, people need some language to talk about these things. The danger is that the words become too familiar, and do not do justice to the otherness of what is called ‘eternal life’ and the ‘vision of God’.

The great theologian Karl Rahner was said to be afraid of death, though he did not lack faith. In trying to give some limited sense of what is meant by the ‘world to come’, I cannot do much better than to quote some of his words. He spoke them when he was eighty and did not have much longer to live

…when all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves in our own presumption have draped the heaven of our own lived lives, have burned out and are now extinguished; when death has built a monstrous silent void, and we have silently accepted this in faith and hope as our true identity; when then our life so far, however long it has been, appears only as a single short explosion of our freedom…when then we are shown in the monstrous shock of a joy beyond saying that this monstrous, silent void, which we experience as death, is in truth filled with the originating mystery that we call God, with God’s true light and with God’s love that receives all things and gives all things… - then, then I don’t actually want to describe anything like this, but nevertheless, I do want to stammer out some hint of how a person can for the moment expect what is to come…

Rahner’s speech finished soon after this point and then he made a collection for a poor priest in Africa who had written to him out of the blue, to ask for some help towards buying a motorcyle. Asking for the money, Rahner said how he felt ‘all our theological talk’ was not as important as when ‘we gave a poor person a bowl of soup’. Perhaps, after all, in these or similar gestures, you get the hint of what is meant by ‘the world to come’. In gifts freely given, with the hope of nothing in return, but with the sheer delight of the giving…there is some tiny anticipation surely of what the saints will see and adore in the vision of the one who is all in all.

Credo 44: We look for the resurrection of the dead ...

The end of the Creed – the symbol of our Faith – reflects the end towards which our faith is oriented: the resurrection of the dead.

Since we believe in the resurrection of Christ from the dead, we firmly believe that the righteous will live for ever through sharing in His resurrection. This has been a central aspect of Christian faith from the beginning. But isn’t this a little far off to consider at the moment?

Christ will raise us up on the last day; but in a sense we are all risen with Christ. By the virtue of the Holy Spirit, Christian life is already a participation in the death and Resurrection of Christ now on earth. We are united to Christ by baptism, and so we already participate in the heavenly life of the risen Christ, but this life remains ‘hidden with Christ in God’. We have already been raised by the Father to sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. As we are nourished with His Body in the Eucharist, we already belong to the Body of Christ. When we rise on the last day, we will also appear with Him in glory.

While we wait for that day, the body and soul of the believer already participate in the dignity of belonging to Christ. This dignity demands that both our own bodies and the bodies of all other human beings should be treated with respect. Through the justification we have celebrated in the Creed, we declare that we have been won for Christ. Our whole being and nature has been united with the Godhead. In these last days, we await the consummation of that glory.