God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.
He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place….”
So wrote Saint John Henry Newman who last month was inaugurated as a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education with Saint Thomas Aquinas. Traditionally, the title has been granted on the basis of three requirements: the manifest holiness of a candidate affirmed by his or her canonization as a saint; the person’s eminence in doctrine demonstrated by the leaving behind of a body of teachings that made significant and lasting contributions to the life of the Church; and a formal declaration by the Church, usually by a pope.
Newman is the Anglican who had a boyhood epiphany about the course of his life, founded the Oxford Movement to bring the Anglican and Catholic traditions closer together, finally converted to Catholicism as his spiritual belonging-place, and was appointed a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. He was one of the profound Catholic thinkers and theologians of the 19th century and his ideas percolated into 20th century Vatican documents. His body of work includes forty books and more than 20,000 letters.
His believed that ideas had to change and develop if they were to truly be themselves; that these were living entities, responsive to time and tide, conduits of an energetic goodness that can break open hearts and minds when they have atrophied, both at an individual, collective and Church level. He believed in the power of conscience.
Newman believed in the power of personal influence where he saw that the best way for truth to be passed on was by doing good. His motto was cor ad cor loquitor, heart speaks to heart. This is exactly what we do when our hearts speak to other hearts with the warmth of good influence. (We may look askance at what influencers are and do today and be gladdened that we are (mostly) impervious to their spruiking and selling).
As well as his big thinking, Newman wrote the words to the hymn, “Lead Kindly Light.” This hymn was composed when he was on a boat becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica and keen to get back to England to start what he saw as his life’s mission.
This brings me to Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt’s famed painting of Jesus holding a lantern, “The Light of the World,” the most famous Christian painting of early last century and a blockbuster when it was toured in Australia in 1906. In Melbourne, people queued around the block to see it and, according to researcher Bronwen Hughes, it was the first painting to comprehensively capture the imagination of the Australian public. Our current equivalent might be the recent Impressionist blockbuster at the NGV. But times change and secularisation diminishes religiosity in the public square. Today, more than ever we are in need of light in our world.
Like our newest Doctor of the Church, we all have our mission in life. I love it that I am a link in the chain of connection, a chain, occasionally rusty, sometimes lustrous, still holding on to a two-thousand- year-old story that belongs to both heaven and earth.
I am here to do good, wherever I can, a small link in a great chain.
I continue to follow the kindly light.
I happened to see the new British film The Choral, starring Ralph Fiennes, in the same week that Pope Leo XIV made the announcement of Newman’s elevation.
It is a gem of a movie and I get quiet delight from spotting the character actors who are the reliable stalwarts of British film and TV. This film – no spoilers – is set in 1916 where a Yorkshire mining town is putting on a performance of Edward Elgar’s oratorio, The Dream Of Gerontius.
Elgar was given a copy of the original poem by Cardinal Newman and being a devout Catholic, the composer decided to put it to music. Naturally, I had to read the poem after seeing the movie. It is about the soul finding its way to a salvific purgatory knowing that this penitential waylaying will ultimately result in being greeted in heaven by God. The words were naturally quite Victorian as he writes of the soul hovering over the dizzy brink of some sheer infinite descent, no longer captive to the busy beat of time.
I was struck by the fact that two of my most earnestly sung childhood hymns, Firmly I Believe and Truly and Praise to the Holiest in the Height were taken from the poem. I can still see myself in the old incense-fumed Genazzano chapel singing these fervently. They are the bedrock of a certain Catholic hymnody of the 1950s and 1960s which forever archive a place and time in a lifetime’s faith journey.
Towards the end of the poem, Gerontius, the old man as narrator, declaims,
We have gained the stairs
Which rise towards
The Presence-chamber…
We all have our mission in this life, big or small, known early or discovered latterly, the things that mark us profoundly and shape what we do and where we stand.
Today, we may not use the florid language of high Victoriana but we know the essence of intention is the same. We seek the presence of God, no matter how long it takes to get there. We do our best in this life to be united with his Presence in the next.
May the presence of the Christ child infuse all your gatherings over the Christmas season with peace, joy and love. May you end the year gently and well and look ahead hopefully to all that 2026 offers.
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Betty Rudin says:
Thanks Ann.Lots of food for thought and kindled memories.