It is a joke we have heard so many times of course: “How many Oratorians does it take to change a lightbulb? [adopt incredulous voice:] Change?!” Well, call us old fashioned, and we hope you do, but there is something in our DNA that makes us rather cautious of change. That is not because we are old stick in the muds but because, in this ever-changing world, there is much to be said for stability. Oratorians take no vows — we do not solemnly vow to stay in one place like monks or nuns, but we do try to, or rather we pray for the grace always to want to. An Oratory is St Philip’s house. Our vocation is not to a theoretical ‘Oratorianism’ but it is to these men, this place, these people who come to us, and all of whom we seek to serve and to love according to the spirit of St Philip: to help everyone to find that stability and holy contentment that comes from a life fixed on Christ, whatever else might change.

St Philip bequeathed to us a love of place. You remember how he only moved to the Chiesa Nuova when commanded so to do by the pope. It is for us to cultivate a love not only of 25 Woodstock Road, but of Oxford. It is so wonderfully fitting therefore that our church is where we venerate the Holy Mother of God under her title of ‘Our Lady of Oxford’ — that reminder that heaven is very interested indeed in what goes on in this little pocket of Mary’s Dowry. It is such a beautiful thing to meet people who come back to venerate her after years away from Oxford, their lives so changed but still so wonderfully confident in her motherly care and protection. Whatever else might change, heaven does not. St James reminds us of this so splendidly: “Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration.”

Just the other day on the radio there was a programme describing the ‘problem’ of summer. It is for so many people a long-awaited break, which one idealises all the year, only then to find it doesn’t quite measure up to all our expectation — the change in routine rather throwing people off centre. Amidst our holidays and relaxations we can sometimes rather miss our usual routines, especially of prayer. St Catherine of Siena advised us to: “Build yourself a cell in your heart and retire there to pray.”

Having that knowledge of the presence of God, wherever we may be, whatever we are doing, whomsoever we are with, keeps us fixed on him who does not change — a sort of spiritual mobile home, if you will. That helps us with the bigger changes of life too, for they too will come. Careers begin and end; friends come and go; our health changes; those we love are taken from us; and even the places we thought we should never leave may one day have to be left behind. There is only one thing that endures through every season of life: Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and for ever.” If our hearts have learnt to dwell with him, then no change can ultimately rob us of our peace. It is as the motto of the Carthusians has it: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, “The Cross stands while the world turns.”

That was really the key to St Philip’s extraordinary serenity. He delighted in all that was familiar: familiar streets, familiar faces and familiar prayers, and he desired to make the things of God familiar to people too. He did not make an idol of routine. Rather he treasured all those things that so help us to cling to Christ. We stay, not because nothing should ever change, but because love deepens in perseverance. This is why our Cardinal, who wrote “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”, was not contradicting this love of stability. He was speaking of the continual conversion of the heart. The more firmly we are rooted in God, the more he is able to change us from within.

Although perseverance does not sound very exciting, it is precisely there that we find our peace. In that we must pray to love faithfully the place and the people God has entrusted to us, and those amongst whom he has placed us — without always imagining that happiness lies somewhere else, with another crowd, just around the corner or else on the other side of the world. So too we must ask God for the grace to build that little cell within our hearts where we may always meet the Good Lord, where we may work out our conversion — that refuge of prayer, which is always there for us to retreat into. Then, whether our lives are marked by great changes or by quiet constancy, we shall find ourselves able to rest in the love of the One who changes not.

It can be very easy to picture a saint as one who weeps over every small sin and feels very far away from the perfection to which God calls us. Some saints seem to do precisely that, and our own St Philip used to walk through the streets of Rome lamenting, “I have never done any good.” But then again, it was the sixteenth century, and that just seems to be what Italian saints did at the time.

Because St Philip also had very sensible things to say about not overreacting to our failings, noting that we can sometimes be so upset after a fall, that we do more damage than was caused by the original fault.

It’s certainly a pattern that can be seen in the confessional. A person sins, and from an apparent piety, falls into a deep awareness of his or her sinfulness. But it leads to a despair of ever being holy, and an “I might as well carry on” attitude that leads to even worse things. That sorrow can’t have been genuine contrition then, if its fruit is further sin.

This is something St Paul identifies. There are two kinds of sorrow that sin produces: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.” (2 Corinthians 7:10)

There are times when we think we must give in to the feelings of sorrow that come upon us when we call to mind our sinfulness. But this is not the kind of sorrow for our sins that God asks of us. After all, God never commands anyone to feel guilty, but to repent! True sorrow means changing our ways, not moping.

Perhaps the most damaging reaction to sin is to give up prayer. It is true that sin makes us less motivated to pray (and with no other information, we should be able to tell from this effect alone which actions are not good for us). But to think that God does not want to hear from us when we have sinned is rather dangerous. If we are not worthy to pray after sin, does that mean that, until we sinned, we were worthy? That God did want to hear from us…because we were so good that he had no choice? False humility always contains in it some extraordinary pride.

The solution to all of this is simple: don’t overreact! Instead, no matter our weaknesses, we must carry on trying to serve him who did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

Mary Magdalene occupies a vitally important place in the Gospel accounts: present by the Cross when the men had fled, first at the tomb while it was still dark, and first to see the Risen Lord. Whatever her past difficulties may have been, the Gospels are less interested in cataloguing her sins than in showing us what Christ did with her: he freed her, and she followed him to the very foot of the Cross when all but his Mother and the Beloved Disciple had fled. Her whole identity in Scripture is defined not by what she once was, but by the completeness of her deliverance and the fidelity it produced. In her we see, more clearly than in almost any other figure, the pattern of Christ’s mercy: total forgiveness met by total devotion.

John’s account of Easter morning is succinct and exact. Mary comes to the tomb early in the morning, finds it empty, and runs — not to hide herself in her grief and confusion, but to tell Peter and John what she has found. When she returns, she stays at the tomb weeping, refusing to leave even after the men have seen and gone home. It is in that refusal to leave, that willingness to stay in unresolved grief, that the Lord meets her. He does not appear to the disciples in hiding, not to Peter in his guilt, or indeed the Beloved Disciple, but to Magdalene in her steadfast loitering at a grave. Seeing him through her tears, she supposes him to be the gardener until he says her name. One word — “Mary” — and in that instant, she recognises him, not through argument or evidence but through being known and called by a familiar voice.

Then comes the command: Go and tell. She is commissioned before the eleven are even gathered, sent by the risen Christ himself to announce what she has seen. He is risen! Consequently, the Church, without sentimentality, but with theological precision, has named her Apostola Apostolorum — Apostle to the Apostles. The first to announce the Resurrection, the central fact of the faith, was a woman who had nothing to offer but having stayed, and having seen.

What she gives us today, I think, is less a model of penitence than a model of fidelity even when she failed at that moment to understand what had happened. She had no doctrine of resurrection to reach for — that would come later, worked out by Paul and the councils. She had only the fact of her having been there, her refusal to abandon the tomb even when there seemed nothing left to do but weep near it. That is a spirituality available to anyone: you do not need to have resolved your grief, or fully understood your loss, in order to remain faithful, clinging on to the naked idea of God.

For those who do pastoral work — walking with the bereaved, the doubting, the ones sitting bewildered outside an empty place in their own lives — Magdalene is a patron of exactly that kind of waiting. She did not need to have her theology sorted before Christ used her as a witness. She needed only to stay, and to listen for her name.

Her feast, raised in 2016 to the rank of an Apostle, rightly honours what the authors of the Gospel already knew: that the first messenger of Easter joy was a woman who had simply refused to leave the tomb, and who had known, in her own life, the full measure of Christ’s merciful compassion.

“Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me…and you will find rest for your souls.”

The University students have gone down, schools are about to break up, already Oxford is filling up with teenagers on summer school programmes. Some of us may be getting ready for a sunny holiday in the South of France, or a staycation in St Ives, but all of us are looking forward to the slightly slower pace of life that summer brings — a time to breathe freer, to relax, to spend time with friends and loved ones, to rest.

Our Lord’s words in this past Sunday’s gospel are both remarkable, and remarkably apt for the beginning of July: “I will give you rest…You will find rest”. Why does Jesus choose rest — not peace, or hope, or joy, or salvation — why is rest the thing he recognises his disciples need the most?

The Lord sees in his followers a hive of activity and business, a burdensome application, that is ultimately fruitless. They are so busy pursuing goals, enacting projects, developing schemes, working hard, always scurrying around doing things, but somehow those things never seem to produce fruit, never bring satisfaction, never end, because there is always another project, another scheme, another activity to be taken up. They even make hard work of faith, of their relationship with God, which involves so many commandments and rules, hoops to be jumped through; it all looks like so much effort. If Christ were to come back to earth tomorrow he might feel much the same. In spite of all the gadgets and the gizmos, and labour-saving devices, we seem to be as busy and as harassed as ever. Ordinary everyday life seems to be such hard work.

Seeing us harassed and dejected the Lord says: “Come to me.” Enough with all this fruitless business, all this frantic activity, “Come to me, and you will find rest.” That rest contains everything else we need: joy, peace, hope, salvation. The rest that he offers us is not just a sort of temporary suspension of activity, a glorified coffee break before plunging back into all the frantic doing. The rest he offers us is much more than just a summer break from activity for a limited time, it is something positive, it is something good and beautiful and beneficial in itself.

The rest that Jesus offers is a step out of what has become the reality of daily life into another reality, another way of being. Just as he takes his disciples away from time to time to a lonely place simply to be with him and to pray with him, he invites us all to come to him and rest with and in him.

Christ’s rest is the Sabbath rest. On the sixth day, after his work of creating was done, God saw that all is very good, and the next day, the Sabbath, he rested. In his rest, God looked at his creation and at himself: not just as a break from work, but in love for what he has made, a delighting in all things. He is like an artist who creates something beautiful and then steps back to look at it, to enjoy and appreciate it. The rest Christ calls us to, the rest of being with him, is meant to draw us into a deeper knowledge and understanding of who we are, of where we are, of what we are, of the world around us, and of who this God is who loves us so much. It is not a break from activity designed to make us better workers; it takes us deeper into God and into ourselves to make us better people.

“Come to me, and I will give you rest.” We make of our lives such a business; we even make of our lives of faith such a business. We have so many things to do — often good and important things, but we will never really understand or appreciate them unless we listen to the Lord’s call, and meet him in stillness and peace, unless we rest in him, and learn from him.

The start of every summer is chock-full of feasts, and this week is no different. Just the other week we celebrated St Alban, the first martyr of this land, and SS John Fisher and Thomas More — albeit on the Cambridge date. Today, having gone through the first, and the (perhaps!) most glorious, we reach the last English martyr: St Oliver Plunkett.

Claiming St Oliver as the last English martyr is, perhaps, a little controversial — he was actually Irish, and ended his life as the Archbishop of Armagh. All the same, it was London’s soil that he consecrated with his blood. In a funny way, he owed his vocation to our own St Philip, who so loved the English mission, even though he was born thirty years after St Philip’s death: it was a Father of the Roman Oratory, Fr Pierfrancesco Scarampi, who had been sent by the Pope on a mission to Ireland, and on his return journey took back with him to Rome a small group of would-be seminarians, among them a young Oliver.

He was ordained priest in Rome in 1654, but he could not return to Ireland: it was too dangerous. This was the time of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell’s forces were particularly brutal towards Catholics. Nevertheless, in late 1669 he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh. The Restoration of the monarchy had seemed to bring with it religious toleration, and so he returned. He found a flock waiting to be sent a shepherd. Although his predecessor had been in office for twelve years, he had only been able to spend two periods of a couple of years in his diocese before being expelled from the country. St Oliver was a good shepherd to his people. He reformed the clergy, set up a Jesuit school, and confirmed 48,000 people in the course of just four years. 

All great persecutions go out with a bang, and the suffering of the Church after the Reformation was no different. Like a new Persecution of Diocletian, the carnage unleashed by the calumnious ‘Popish Plot’ saw a new series of martyrs, last of whom was St Oliver Plunkett. He was a shepherd of souls to the last, even administering the Last Rites to the Archbishop of Dublin as he lay dying in the cell next to St Oliver’s. He was brought to London to be tried in Westminster Hall, the site of St Thomas More’s trial almost 150 years earlier, where he was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered for the crime of “promoting the Roman religion”.

What a grace it is that we live in a place and a time where we can practice our religion freely — where our priests and bishops can minister to us without hindrance. Not least it means we don’t have to join a queue of 48,000 when we wish to be confirmed! But every Sunday, after Benediction, we pray not just that we might be able to be Catholics, but for the conversion of England back to the faith of our fathers. We don’t do this out of a strange kind of pining for medieval England. We do it because we believe wholeheartedly that we have Good News to share with everyone, the Good News of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. God has greatly blessed us in granting us the grace of being Catholics, of being able to come to Mass and receive his sacraments. But that enormous privilege is not just for us. We must share it with others, by our lives, by our example of love, by our prayer. Don’t forget the example of St Thérèse, now the patron saint of missionaries, who never left her Carmel, but helped the missionaries by praying. Pray for England, through the intercession of St Oliver and all the English Martyrs. 

St Paul once stood by while St Stephen was stoned for his faith in Christ and “entirely approved of the killing,” but then became the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Let us pray that England, which once entirely approved of St Oliver’s martyrdom, may return to the faith which Saints Peter and Paul brought to the Eternal City, and which St Gregory sent St Augustine to bring to this land. The Good News of Jesus Christ is not something just for Mass on a Sunday. It is something transformative, something which our holy martyrs loved so much that they laid down their lives rather than give it up. By God’s mercy, we aren’t asked to make that choice today — but we are asked to share the graces we have received, to build up God’s Church for his greater glory.

On Monday we celebrated the feast of St Thomas More (together with St John Fisher of course), those great defenders of the Catholic Faith in this land. I have on my desk a little card with words attributed to More: “Thank you, dear Jesus, for all you have given me, for all you have taken away from me, for all you have left me.” It is always remarkable that the saints, even in the midst of dungeon, fire, and sword, are able to lift up their hearts with joy and with gratitude.

Gratitude is so entirely capital in our Christian life — in our prayer and in our outlook. When we think of holiness, of our following of the Good Lord, we often think of heroic sacrifices, extraordinary acts of charity, or dramatic moments of courage, but the saints teach us that gratitude is key: we cannot love, or be loved, without being thankful for it. And it is gratitude that is absolutely necessary if we are to be happy and to be holy — it is rather difficult to be thankful and bitter at the same time. Gratitude is the great tonic to all those thoughts and attitudes that act as such a poison to Christian charity and joy. If we really do count our blessings each day then we find it very much harder indeed to be consumed by envy or greed.

Every day at Vespers the whole Church sings the great Magnificat of Our Lady: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” When the Blessed Virgin reflects on God’s working in her life it is not with worry about the future or complaints about the present (or the past!). She begins with thanksgiving and with gratitude and she sees everything in the light of what God has done. The Magnificat is not simply a hymn of praise. It is a lesson in perspective.

We live in an age that is very good at noticing what is wrong — think of all those news websites with their ‘sidebars of shame’ with the latest moral or fashion failing of public figures. For our own lives too of course: we can wake up in a bad mood and easily spend the day ruminating on our disappointments and perceived slights, our wounds whether real or imagined. But it doesn’t have to be like that; we can choose joy instead.

St Thérèse wrote: “All is grace.” And she wrote that amidst illness and approaching death whilst yet so young. God’s gifts are everywhere, that is what she had learnt so perfectly. There is something similar in St Francis of Assisi. Towards the end of his life, weakened by illness and nearly blind, he composed the Canticle of the Creatures, praising God for “Brother Sun”, “Sister Moon”, but also for “Sister Bodily Death”. We can, and must, be thankful even when it takes much more effort to be so — maybe it is precisely when it is harder that the change of perspective it brings is most powerful. Every Mass is a school of gratitude too — ‘eucharist’ means thanksgiving after all. We bring to the Lord all that we have received from him and he returns it transformed and sanctified.

Oxford, perhaps more than many places, reminds us of this. This is a city of comings and goings. At this time of year we say goodbye to students who have become familiar faces in our parish and then in a few months’ time we shall welcome new faces, and the steady stream of summer tourists who wander into our churches seeking beauty, history, shade from the sun, but whom we hope will find something more and Someone Else. Amidst transition and change, the instinct of us all is to focus on the loss, but gratitude reminds us that God’s work is never done; that he and the Father are always at work; it is in allowing ourselves to recognise his gifts and rejoice in them that we see him so very much more clearly — magnified and magnificent.