Flame 2023: Rise Up in Faith Conference

Speech

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Saturday 4 March, 2023
Wembley Arena, London

Download the full text in PDF

Thanks for that great welcome and thanks to all of you, and especially the organisers of Flame 2023 for the opportunity to join you for this fantastic celebration. I couldn’t believe my luck when Fr Bob Gardner, a Salesian priest here in London, contacted me and invited me to be with you all and to share some thoughts about the theme of Flame 2023: Rise up. It’s a theme that makes a lot of sense to me. In recent times, since the Covid-19 pandemic started to slow down a bit and we have all been able to travel again I seem to have been rising up a lot; the most recent time was when I rose up in a big plane in Perth in Western Australia and set out on the long journey to London.

We all know, of course, that the theme for Flame 2023 is based on the theme for the next World Youth Day in Portugal: Mary arose and went with haste. It’s a great thing that both WYD later this year, and your gathering today, have Mary front and centre. Mary is often described as the very first and very best disciple of Jesus and for that reason she has a lot to teach us.

Really, it’s for that reason that Mary matters. She is all about helping us to be the best disciples of Jesus that we can possibly be so she is always pointing us away from herself and directing us towards him. Remember what she said to the waiters at the wedding feast in Cana? The wine had run out – a very embarrassing situation for the new bride and groom – and Mary had gone to Jesus to see what he might do. Although she wasn’t sure just what that might be, she simply turned to the waiters and said, “You do whatever he tells you”. That’s her message to us as well. That’s what she most wants – that we do whatever the Lord is asking us to do. It seems to me that this is exactly what Flame 2023 is about: it is about helping every single one of us to work out., as best we can, just what the Lord might be wanting to say to us.

God speaks to us in lots of ways and one of those ways is through Pope Francis. I remember really well when, in Poland at the last World Youth Day, the Pope invited the millions of young people who had gathered there to get up off the couch and get moving. “The time we are living in,” he said, “does not call for young couch potatoes but for young people with shoes – or better boots, laced up and ready to go”. 

This is a call to everyone, of course, but in a very particular way it is a call to you – and to young people like you – to get up, get moving, become passionate about the things that really matter -  and work together to make a difference. The Church needs your energy, your enthusiasm, your restlessness and your idealism – and when I say the Church needs all this I am really saying that God needs all this. The Church is always in danger of getting stuck and closing in on itself.

Luckily God is aware of this danger and constantly does things to shake us all up. I think this is why God has given us Pope Francis. We really needed, and still need, to be reminded that we haven’t been given the gift of faith because God likes us more than God likes other people, or because we deserve this gift because we are so good, or because we are especially gifted and talented – no, we’re given the gift of faith because, in God’s strange ways, he has decided that he wants and intends to work with us and through us to reach into the lives of all the other people God loves. This is why Pope Francis keep insisting that we have to become a missionary Church, a Church that doesn’t stay hidden behind the walls of its institutions but gets up, gets going, goes out and takes some risks in order to let everyone into the secret of how good it is to have God at the heart of your life.

Getting up, getting going, going out, taking some risks: this is exactly what Mary did when she “arose and went with haste” as WYD 2023 puts it, in order to meet up with her cousin Elizabeth. We often think that Mary did this because, as we heard in the story of the Annunciation earlier this morning, Mary had been made aware that Elizabeth, who was no longer a young woman, was unexpectedly pregnant and Mary, in her generosity and concern, rushed to help her.

I’m sure that’s true but I think there is probably more to it than that. Mary had just had her whole life turned upside down by the visit of the angel who told her that she was to be the mother of the messiah. It wasn’t something that had ever been on her radar. As we heard this morning she was initially frightened, then she became confused and uncertain, and only when she was reassured that it was the Holy Spirit who was at work, and that she could rely on God rather than on herself, that she found the courage to say “yes”. But the angel had also told her of what had happened to Elizabeth: in a different way her life, too, was turned upside down. Elizabeth would have given up hope long ago of every falling pregnant. I think Mary was driven by a need to share what had happened to her with someone else whose life had also been touched in a powerful way by God. There’s something really important here: when God steps into our lives, and especially when in one way or another God points the way forward for us, it is often a deeply personal and private thing. Sometimes, and maybe very often, we need time to think it all through and work out exactly what it all means. But at the same time, when the time is right, it’s good to share our own experience of God at work in our lives with others – to tell our stories to each other, to celebrate the ways in which God is always surprising us by what happens to us, and in these ways to become familiar with – to get used to – all the different ways in which God moves in and through our lives.

I don’t imagine that there are many people here in the stadium today who have had a visit from an angel of God the way Mary did. I certainly haven’t. But I am quite sure that there are many of you here, maybe even most of you, who if you look back carefully, will be able to recognise ways in which you can now see that God was at work in your life, even if you didn’t realise it at the time.

Before I move on there is just one other thing that I would like to share with you about Mary. She was a woman of action, she was a woman immersed in the realities of the world around her, and she was a woman of great courage. She acted quickly when she found out that her cousin was expecting a child. She arose and went out with haste. Together with her husband Joseph, she had the foresight and the courage to set out on a long and dangerous journey to Egypt as a refugee in order to protect the life of her child. She was down to earth enough to accept an invitation to a wedding feast presumably of a family member or a close friend. She had the courage to stand at the foot of the cross and watch her son die, when most of his closest disciples and friends had abandoned him through fear. But while being this woman of courage and action she was also a deeply reflective woman who, the gospels tell us, was constantly reflecting and pondering over everything that happened to her. I can’t help thinking that it was this pondering, this reflecting – what we should probably call this praying -  that was the source of her courage and her activity. I think there’s something here for all of us as well, something that goes with being, as I mentioned before, the first and the best disciple. It’s not always all about doing – it is also all about working out why we are doing what we are doing – and this requires us to slow down, sit quietly, and listen for the often quiet ways in which God speaks to us.

What was true of Mary has been true of so many other disciples of Jesus through the ages. Let me remind you of one of them now, one who happens to be one of my favourites.

A long time ago, in a country a long way from Australia, though not quite so far form here in the UK, a young man, possibly in his early twenties or even younger, came home from fighting in a local war against a neighbouring kingdom. He had just been released from prison as he had been injured and then captured in the course of the fighting.  That experience changed him. Before he went to war he was a typical, fun-loving young person who seemed to live primarily for parties, reckless adventure, and generally a good time. After the war he closed in on himself, became moody and withdrawn, and spent long hours on his own.

Living in a religious culture he was surrounded by the symbols of the Catholic Faith. The countryside around him was peppered with roadside shrines and many little country churches, some of them slowly falling down through neglect.

One day this young man entered one of these tumble-down church buildings and discovered that there was a red lamp burning in front of a crucifix hanging on the back wall of the Church. The young man knelt down to say a prayer, and it seemed to him that the figure of Christ hanging on the cross spoke to him. And this is what that young man heard: go and rebuild my Church for it is falling into ruin. The young man looked around him at the crumbling walls and half-ruined roof and he realised that here, in this humble little place, he could find a reason to live again, and to love again, and to hope again. He decided that he would do just what the voice had told him to do: he would rebuild this humble little church and restore it to its simple beauty.

The young man’s name was, of course, Francis - Francis of Assisi- and the Church the Lord was calling him to rebuild was not so much that tiny church building dedicated to Saint Damien in the countryside outside Assisi, but rather the Catholic Church, the Lord’s Church, which in many respects seemed to have lost its way, lost its heart, and needed to rediscover it.

As we all gather here in London for this adventure of Flame 2023 we know that our Church, or rather the Lord’s Church, seems to be in trouble. The terrible scourge of sexual abuse of the young has caused so much suffering to so many people, and has called into question in the minds of many the very legitimacy of the Church, and especially the credibility and trustworthiness of its leaders. The number of people identifying as Catholics who regularly attend Mass or make use of the sacraments continues to decline. If the UK is anything like Australia, and I suspect that it is, across this country values which we as Catholics have always held close to our hearts are being challenged by a society which no longer seems to want to retain its links to its Judaea-Christian foundations. And while our material prosperity, at least at this stage, continues to increase for many of us, so does the level of violence in our cities and towns, so does the rate of suicide, so does the experience of mental health challenges, so does the prevalence of drug abuse.

It all sounds a bit bleak and we could easily give in to a sense of hopelessness and even despair. Like that young man coming back from war, Francis of Assisi, we could be tempted close in on ourselves, become moody and withdrawn, isolate ourselves - or we could, like the earlier version of that young man, throw ourselves into a hectic life of endless parties, constant distractions, a kind of deliberate turning-away from the challenges all around us.

But if, like that young man, Francis, we give ourselves a chance to tune in to another wave-length, we too might hear a mysterious, unexpected, possibly quiet and hard-to-catch, but nonetheless persistent, voice calling to us, holding out to us a chance, and a challenge, not to sink into a sense of hopelessness, or a life of frivolous distraction. We might hear a voice saying to us, much as Pope Francis said to those young people at World Youth Day in Poland a few years ago, “Get off the couch: set out on new and uncharted paths.” This was, I think, the modern Francis putting into contemporary language the words the other Francis heard so long ago. We could put them together and if we do I wonder if we might be hearing, perhaps in a different way, the Lord also speaking to us today. Could it be that he is saying to you:  Young people of the UK, get up off your couches, go and help rebuild my Church, help it to set out on new and uncharted paths. Help stop the Church from falling into ruins.

In that address the Pope gave in Poland he went on to say this - and again maybe the Lord is calling to us here at Flame 2023 through the words of Pope Francis: today’s world demands that you be a protagonist of history. The Lord wants to work one of the greatest miracles we can experience: he wants to turn your hands, my hands, our hands, into signs of reconciliation, of communion, of creation ..... So, young people, have the courage to teach the rest of us that it is easier to build bridges than walls!

Francis of Assisi knew that the Lord was calling him to rebuild the Church, not to tear it down and create a new one, and the Lord will be asking us, asking you, to do the same. Francis did it by letting go of the things that didn’t really matter so that he could be free, with the help of the Lord’s grace, to concentrate on the things that did matter. And it will be the same for us. You will probably all be aware that the Church throughout the world is in the process of getting ready for a special meeting in Rome in October this year. It is the Synod on synodality. Hopefully many of you have been involved in all the discussions and consultations which have taken place all around the world, including here in the UK, to prepare for this important gathering. I know that Pope Francis is hoping that amongst all the voices which have contributed to the preparations for this meeting, the voice of young people will be strongly heard. But even if you haven’t been part of the preparations so far, I would want to say to you that it is not too late. There will be a first meeting of all the participants in the Synod in October this year but then there will be time for everyone in the Church to get involved and to help move the conversation forward so that in October 2024 the Holy Spirit will be able to use your contributions to move the Church forward.

So, again to use the words of Pope Francis, and building on what happens today and in the days and weeks to come as you all digest the implications of this great event of Flame 2023, don’t be afraid to make some noise, don’t be afraid of causing a bit of mess, don’t be afraid of sharing what is in your hearts with the rest of the Church. But remember, Francis of Assisi made more noise by what he did than by what he said and Pope Francis, though he speaks often, also makes more noise, makes a greater impact, by what he does than by what he says.

“Go and rebuild my Church” the Lord is saying to you as you gather here today. Some in the Church have lost their way, lost their heart, lost their hope. So be people, young people, of the Way, the Way of Jesus. Be young people of heart and of hope in the Church.

You have been fantastic sitting there listening to me and I hope that what I have been trying to say makes some sense. If I can, though, I just want to add one more thing. I think I’ve still got a few minutes up my sleeve. It’s another story from the gospels about Jesus encouraging someone to get off his couch and get moving. It’s a bit challenging – or at least it is for me – but I guess you wouldn’t have come to Flame 2023 if you weren’t up for a challenge.

It's the story of a young man who, like Saint Francis, was pretty well off financially and who, also like Saint Francis, had a good heart and a deep desire to do the right thing. One day he came to Jesus and asked him a very direct question. It’s OK to do that – in fact it is a very good idea to do that – but if you do you have to expect that Jesus might just give you a very direct reply! This young man asked Jesus what he, the young man, needed to do in order to gain eternal life. It’s a question that people have been asking ever since belief in eternal life became part of their thinking. Initially Jesus gives what we might call the stock-standard answer. “Keep the Commandments”, he says. The young man shoots back with a quick response. “Which ones?” he says. Jesus starts to list them off, and it is clear that he is basically saying, “Keep all of them”. The young man then says, and I believe quite sincerely and honestly, “I have kept them all since my earliest youth”. This is an impressive answer, especially if it is accurate. I wonder how many of us, if we found ourselves in the same position as the young man, could honestly say the same thing. It’s a question you might ask yourself. Jesus is impressed by this young man – the gospel says he looked at the young man with love – and then he says this to him: “There is one thing you are lacking. Go and sell everything you own, give the money to the poor and then come and follow me.” This is Jesus’ way of saying to this young person, “It’s time to get off the couch, time to get up and get moving, time to get serious about following me.” You probably know what is coming next. To my way of thinking it is one of the saddest moments in the gospel story. The gospel writer tells us that when the young man heard this he went away sad because he was a person of great wealth.

What an opportunity missed. We know about this young man who failed to follow Jesus, but we don’t know his name. The New Testament is filled however with the names of those who did follow Jesus: Mary, Joseph, Peter, all the other apostles, Paul, Timothy and so on. There is no basilica erected anywhere in the world to this young man, but the world is full of churches, and schools, and hospitals and all sorts of other institutions, large and small, dedicated to the countless people who have been faithful disciples of Jesus.

We do not know what this young man did with the rest of his life. Was he among the crowd in Jerusalem who eventually turned against Jesus and called for his death? Was he perhaps someone who regretted his decision not to follow Jesus and eventually found his way back to Jesus and to the Christian community Jesus had established? Did his refusal of Jesus’s invitation harden his heart and leave him imprisoned by his money forever?

We don’t know the answer to these questions, and we don’t really need to know because the real question is not what happened to this particular young man. The real question is whether or not we are ready to accept whatever invitation Jesus is offering to us.

For the young man in the story the thing that prevented him from saying “yes” to the adventure of being a disciple of Jesus was his wealth and his inability to imagine his life without his money. That may also be the case for some of us here tonight but perhaps for many of us that is not what is holding us back. For us tonight the important and even urgent question is this: what is stopping me from giving my wholehearted “yes” to the Lord? What is stopping you from giving your wholehearted yes to him? This is a challenging question but if we are willing to ask it of ourselves and courageous and honest enough to really consider our answer carefully, then like the rich young man Jesus will be offering us the adventure of a lifetime.

So ask yourself this: If on my way home from the Flame 2023 tonight I were to encounter Jesus along the way and found within myself the courage and go to him and say “Lord, what do I need to do in order to live my life to the full?” and he were to sa, “Keep the commandments”, would I first of all be able to say to him, “Lord, I have kept them all since I was very young”? Maybe I would and if so that is a wonderful thing. But even if I can’t, and yet still want to ask Jesus to tell me what I need to do, and he turns to me and looks into my eyes and I know that he loves me, what will he say to me?  “If you really want to have the fullness of life then go and .....” what? Sell all you own and give the money to the poor? Rethink your career choices and opt for something that perhaps pays less but contributes more to our society? Let go of the anger and resentment you feel towards people who have hurt you? Stop insisting on always having things your own way and start to accommodate yourself to the needs and desires of others?

There are so many answers to the question “Lord what must I do?” The answer Jesus gives to you will depend on your own circumstances and also on what it is that you hold closest to your heart, but which is preventing you from being the person God has created you to be.

The key line, of course, in the answer Jesus gives to the rich young man - and it will be the key line in whatever answer Jesus gives to you - is this: Come and follow me. So don’t walk away sad from the opportunity Jesus holds out to you for a heroic life. Don’t walk away sad from the chance to make your life a wonderful gift to others. Don’t walk away sad from the chance to live your life to the full just as God intended you to when he called you into existence. Don’t walk away from Jesus: he is our Way, he is our Truth, he is our Life.  He is alive, he is here with us, he’s calling to each one of us, asking us if we are ready to get up off our comfortable couches, put on our walking boots and get ready to follow him, no matter what.  Today take the chance he is offering you, take your courage in both hands, and open your hearts and your lives to him. Like Mary, like Joseph, like Saint Francis, like the Pope, like all the great figures of our Church past and present, claim your rightful place in the Church and help to rebuild it, so that it does not fall into ruins.