New Year's Day Reflection with Canon Pat Browne

Canon Pat Browne gave the following homily early this morning at the New Year's Eve Midnight Mass at Holy Apostles, Pimlico, central London. (The Mass began at the same time as the fireworks celebrations on the river Thames nearby)

...

Who do you think you are? Is the name of a popular programme on TV at the moment. To put it another way, as we begin this new year, I ask you, "Do you know who you are?"

A native American warrior, what we used to call a Red Indian, was rushing through the forest. He saw a fallen egg on the grass and placed it in the first nest he came across.

He had placed an eagle's egg in the nest of a simple prairie hen.

One day when the hatched chickens were busy doing what a prairie hen's family does best - hopping, pecking, squawking, scratching in the dirt - a magnificent eagle swooped across the sky. The young eagle now hatched was filled with a sudden aching longing.

She was immediately reprimanded by the mother hen for time-wasting and day-dreaming and so went back to who she thought she was and so dutifully continued to scratch the dry earth and squawk, hop and peck.

But the story goes that from that day she was never content with what she did. Somehow she felt from that. That that there was more to her.

Our human nature keeps us scratching round in the dirt of everyday life trying to eke out a living. Most often eyes down, looking only at, dealing with, immediate earthly problems which sometimes absorb us.

But something has happened! God has joined us in this earthly life. In the dust and dirt and has asked us to look up. Within 33 years we see the one who was born in the crowding and manure of the cattle shed, now resurrected from the dead and soaring to heaven.

Jesus has revealed to all of us - there is more to us than meets the eye, than prairie chicken. Beneath our beating heart there is an eagle wishing to soar.

God became human so that humans could become divine. This is both astonishing and upsetting. Christmas is about roots and wings. We hold within us the sublime summit, the infinite horizon to which we aspire, yet our feet of clay are rooted in the heaviness of a fallen humanity.

And some people settle for that - sadly.

Don't settle for the least you can be. Look up and aspire to greater things.

Yes we have to scratch away in the daily grime of life wherever we are but constantly look up and ache for who you are called to be. In doing that, there will always be more to you than the simple earth-fixed prairie chicken.

This is what St Paul is telling us in that second reading to the Galatians

God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, 'Abba, Father', and it is this that makes you a son, you are not a slave any more; and if God has made you son, then he has made you heir.

It is this Spirit in us that causes the ache and longing in us which reminds us who we really are.

So as we begin this New Year let us make space to wonder at the beauty of God. Be silent often to be in Awe of what God is calling us to. Respond to Him. And be grateful.

When I do this I am looking up and seeing the heights to which I have been made to soar. Then I come to know my true identity.

I discover myself to be a child of God.

More than anything else I wish that you discover this truth in a whole new way in 2014. Happy New Year!