In the homily at the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, Fr Dean explores the connection between the Eucharist, the crucifixion and our life of service.

Darren McGarvey, also known by the stage name Loki, grew up in Pollock on the south side of Glasgow.  Today, he is a writer, columnist and Rap artist.  He became the first ever Rapper in residence at Police Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit.

In his book “Poverty Safari: understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass” he provides moving insights into his own experience of growing up in poverty, a life surrounded by anger and violence, drugs and crime, inequality and difficulties.

In one passage, he shares a moment when he was five years old.  His mother was partying downstairs with friends, and so he decided to join them with the plan of being able to stay up a little later and join in the fun.  But his plan turned into a distressing moment of anger and violence.  His mother ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and chased him as he stumbled up the stairs to his bedroom.

“If only I had the sense to run out of the front door instead,” he writes.    “Seconds before, she had appeared to be having so much fun that it had felt safe to wind her up in front of people.  Now I was trapped in my room, pinned against the wall, with a knife to my throat.  I don’t remember what she said to me but I do remember the hate in her eyes.  I remember thinking that I was about to be cut open and that I would probably die.  Just as she lifted the knife to my face, she was pulled from behind and thrown to the other side of the room by my dad, who then restrained her while one of the guests picked me up and bundled me into the back of a car.

“I don’t remember my mother, or anyone else, ever talking about that night again.  Truth be told, I forgot about it myself until many years later, when it came back to me in the form of a flashback.”

Our memories play tricks on us.  Sometimes, for those who have experienced great trauma, their brain tries to protect them from harm, pushes away, into the deep recess of their mind, some painful memory too much to take, too much to process but which somehow emerges later in life.  Sometimes, in other extreme cases, humans are even able to create false memories, construct events and experiences that never happened but which seem as clear as day.

Our minds and memories are complex.

For Darren McGarvey, it was only later, as he began to put his life together and address his own power to bring change, that the pain of the past could be seen more clearly.

This evening, we begin to enter sacramentally into the Mystery of Christ’s pain, death and resurrection.  We do so with a sense of hindsight.  The past is made present, the memories are made clear right in our midst.

In some ritual, liturgical and shared way, we draw closer to the cross of Jesus – to his love, to his life, to his power to save, to the way in which he makes sense of our lives.

This is the night on which Jesus broke bread, the night on which he gave us a new way of remembering and recalling, of sharing in his life, in his death, and in his resurrection.

St Teresa of Calcutta said, “The Eucharist is connected to the Passion (of Jesus).  If Jesus had not established the Eucharist we would have forgotten the crucifixion.  It would have faded into the past and we would have forgotten that Jesus loved us.  To make sure that we do not forget, Jesus gave us the Eucharist, as a memorial of his love.”

This is such a simple thing.  The Eucharist recalls, reminds us of the cross.  It’s what St Paul meant when he wrote, “Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.”

Back to Darren McGarvey, whose words we began with.  “In ‘deprived’ areas, where resources are scarce, gossip is a form of currency, and if you’re unlucky enough to hail from a visibly troubled family, you are presented with a choice: you can let others people talk about it or you can become the author of your own story – which is exactly what I did.”

Now and over the coming days, through word and action, we tell the story of God’s love for the world.  We move through the moments of this Mass tonight until it stands froze, locked in that Gethsemane moment of struggle and prayer.

Tomorrow, we will lean closer to the cross of Christ as we bring our pain to his, and wonder at “Love so amazing, so divine.”

We will wait and watch and gather in darkness on Saturday evening to celebrate the unfolding of God’s Love story which elaborates into a life that doesn’t end, into the remarkable, redeeming presence of Jesus for ever.

In tonight’s gospel story, we hear how the reality of the Eucharist can be expressed and told in our own day, in our own way.  As he leaves the table, clothed with a towel, Jesus acts out that life of service.  It’s a role-play of divine proportions, a scene filled with love.  And the only stage direction is to do for others as he has done for us.

As the Eucharist is connected to the Passion of Jesus, so it’s connected to the pains of everyone.  Flowing from the Eucharist is our service of those who are in need.  The clean pristine cloth of the altar is never far away from the grime of our feet.  The trimmed candles and polished silver are not separate from the dirt of the street.

Everything we do throughout these days is underwritten by the story of God in Christ.  We don’t change the story of God’s love for the world.  We allow it to change us, and so through changed lives, take part in changing the world and transforming the lives of others.

Much of the world and our society, despite growing in secularism, still know some of the story of Jesus.  They are free to take what they want from it.  They can place it alongside all the other stories they know or think they know.  They can file the stories away as fables or store them alongside other sacred stories.

It’s our calling to share the gospel truth, the story of Jesus’ love with its grim and great reality, with all its outtakes and spin offs, with its sequels and extended material, as we become part of the story, live it out, pass it on.

We are invited to allow God, the author of life, to draw us deeper into the story which is his.  To be, as St Teresa said, “a little pencil in the hand of God, who is writing a love letter to the world.”

We can allow others to distort and try to hide the story of God in Christ, or we can take that story, and live it out in our own lives, beginning here at the place where God calls us back to the cross of Jesus, to the love of Jesus.

Without the Eucharist we would forget the cross.  Let us never forget the cross.  Let us never forget the Eucharist.  And let us never forget our calling to be that light in the world, the salt of the earth, the yeast, the leaven, the pencil in the hand of God.

From here, as Christ fulfils our hunger, may we go out and fulfil the hunger of others.

The story is out there.

It’s our calling to fill in the gaps, to stand in those places, to stoop to those feet, to let the memory live, to be faithful to the Eucharist, to be faithful to the Cross, to be faithful to God’s love in action.

“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; 
where there is hatred, let me sow love; 
where there is injury, pardon; 
where there is doubt, faith; 
where there is despair, hope; 
where there is darkness, light; 
and where there is sadness, joy. 

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console; 
to be understood, as to understand; 
to be loved, as to love; 
for it is in giving that we receive, 
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, 
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.”

(Prayer of St Francis of Assisi)

Homily by Fr Dean Atkins for the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday 2024 at St Paul’s Church, Grangetown

Last night, at the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, I shared something of the experiences of Darren McGarvey, also known as Loki, the writer, social commentator, and Rap artist as featured in his book, ‘Poverty Safari.’

Coming from a troubled family, with a mother whose life was turbulent and dependent on drugs, he writes of his own life as a means through which more widespread questions about poverty and inequality can be explored.

“By the age of ten I was well adjusted to the threat of violence,” he writes. In some ways, violence itself was preferable to the threat of violence.  When you are being hit – or chased – part of you switches off.  You become physically numb as the violent act is carried out.  A disassociation occurs.  You become detached from the violent act as it is being perpetuated against you.  The disassociation can make you physically numb as well as emotionally unresponsive. Your body goes into self-preservation mode until the threat is over.

“In a home where violence, or the threat of violence, is regular, you learn how to negotiate it from a young age.  On the one hand, you don’t want the violence to happen.  On the other, you know it is inevitable and would rather just get it out the way.”

There is an inevitably to the violence inflicted upon Jesus.  After all, it had been predicted by Jesus himself although, for his disciples, that thought was unbearable.

‘I will never let this happen,’ said Peter.  ‘I will lay down my life you.”

“Lay down your life for me?’ asks Jesus.  And then he pulls the rug from under Peter’s feet, and predicts that his bravado will dissolve.  He’ll deny even knowing Jesus, not once or twice but three times.

How do we negotiate our way through a world of pain and suffering?  None of us goes out of our way to seek pain, although so many of us, on so many different levels, experience self-harm.  It comes in many guises and from so many different places within ourselves.  Yes, so much of what we do harms ourselves and harms others.

Perhaps in our ideal world, there would be no pain or suffering, but then that would also appear to be a physically impossible world.

The experience of both physical and emotional pain warns us against certain dangers.  Pain causes us to remove ourselves from further harm – to retract our hand from the flame, to run for our lives when our heart is racing, or to indicate that some thing isn’t right with us, so that, hopefully, we can seek some help, allow our wounds to heal.

Negotiating our way through all that inevitable pain can be enough, but what about the gratuitous pain inflicted upon so many people in so many different ways?

The pain of those who experience depravation and poverty, abuse and neglect.  The traumas and terrors of war. The violence and aggression which seem to characterise our world and features so deeply in the human story.

The broken relationships caused by greed and selfishness.  The walls and barriers we build around ourselves leaving us to peer over and wonder what that ‘enemy’ of ours is up to.  The suspicion we cast upon those who seem different from us.  The arrogant thought that all people should be ‘just like us.’ How do we negotiate our way through this violence, through this pain?

It’s no mistake that Golgotha lies outside the city walls.  After all, we want to push the thought of our own hatred and aggression, our sundry sins and unjust ways, our pain and suffering – and the struggles of others – so far away from us.

We simply keep our heads down, hide our guilt, conceal our culpability.  Perhaps we pretend that we are powerless, unable to do anything.  That speaking peace, or seeking peace, is for the professional, the politician, the ones we push forward, and finally learn to push away.

It’s into this world that God sends his Son.  After dragging his cross through the familiar streets, through the landscape of our lives which we have learned to love and loathe, Jesus arrives at that place of death which we have shunned, and there he dies.

The disciples, who had dispersed and abandoned him, begin to regroup.  They try to find some comfort when all around them has been destroyed.  As their lives fall apart, they try to create something else out of the remnants of everything they had known.  How will they respond to this new life? How will they respond to what has happened to Jesus? How will they negotiate their way through the violence of grief, the pain of loss?

Henri Nouwen tells the story of a close friend of his who was dying of cancer.  His friend had been such a great social activist and cared so deeply about people that he saw the value of his life as being able to do things for others.  Now that he was unable to be active, he was finding his life impossible.  He said, “Henri, help me to think about my not being able to do things anymore so I won’t be driven to despair.”

For someone who had been so active and did so much for others, he now experienced a different reality – having things done for him, having things done to him.

During our lives, whilst we fill them with action and doing, we are mostly ‘done to’.  This is particularly the case for those whose lives are dictated by the decisions of others, those prisoners of inequality or greed.  Those who live in state funded poverty of well-intentioned schemes that often fail.  Those displaced from their homes as a result of a war they did not create.

Throughout his ministry Jesus was busy doing so much.  He taught and preached, he helped and healed, he travelled from town to town.  But now, in these last days, he has been ‘handed over.’  Things are done to him – he is beaten and scourged, he is crowned with thorns.  He is burdened with a weight which brings him tumbling to the ground.  He is stripped and nailed to a cross.

He has vinegar pushed to his face to the numb the pain, by those who caused the pain – an image that so encapsulates our perverse human endeavours.  We try to live green lives to remedy the harm we’ve done to the planet.  We send aid to the places where we’ve played a part in their ruin. We show compassion to those who are poor or homeless, when all we have really done is priced them out of the market.

Yes, Jesus’ work and activity have now culminated in things being done to him.  There is a shot of despair, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’

We can easily, like Henri Nouwen’s friend, be driven to despair, but in those moments of being done to, in those moments of powerlessness, in those times of waiting are met by God in a new way.

It can be an unfamiliar place, outside the landmarks of our lives, in that place of struggle and pain we know as Golgotha.  It’s a place to which we bring our whole lives.

The times we have tried to do so much, the times when we have lost our way. The moments when we tried to redeem our own lives through being busy and preoccupied by such ‘important’ things.  The times when we made excuses for ourselves, licked our wounds, sat in self-pity, or just felt bloody awful.  The times when we questioned how influential we were or tried to be. 

The times when life diagnosed us, when people poked us, cells were scraped from us, when we were dealt blows from out of the blue, and when blue seemed to be the colour of our life at times.

But Golgotha is a place where God waits to see if this thing he has done is enough to win back the world, and not drive him to despair.  As we approach the cross today, we take this sense of Divine despair to our lips, as we sing: “My people tell me, what is my offence? What have I done to harm you? Answer me!’

I’ll begin to end as I started – with words from Darren McGarvey as he reflects on an early life of violence and aggression.  As he shares an incident of violence he remembers from when he was five years old, he writes:

“After explosive incidents like this, whether they involve physical violence or non-physical aggression, there is always the hope that the perpetrator’s remorse will propel them towards better behaviour.  Even when there’s no sense of that happening, there remains a perverse allure in their empty promises.

“In these moments, there is a vulnerability, tenderness and honesty, seen so rarely, that is so affecting that you struggle to resist the twisted logic of your abuser.  All you want is for them to love you and this need persists at the expense of your own sanity and safety.”

Here, at the heart of this Passion of Jesus with the inevitable violence and sense of despair, as we seek to negotiate our way through the pain, he asks simply for love.

It was this love which Henri Nouwen’s friend had discovered in his own passion.  It was a love which underpinned all the actions he had ever done for others throughout his life, but he had not then realised or experienced the fulness of this love, not now, not until his painful time of waiting.

“More than ever,” wrote a Jesuit priest, Pedro Arrupe, “I find myself in the hands of God.  This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth.  But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God.  It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.”

‘Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit,” cried Jesus.  In this moment of vulnerability, tenderness and honesty, he looks to us for love and, like him, to place ourselves into God’s hands with total abandon.

The cross is a moment of waiting.  It’s a place for us to wait and to work out who we are and what we’re for, as we negotiate our way through the pain. 

And, there, God also waits for our response, wonders if we will love him, wonders if it’s been worth all the waiting.

“It is finished,” cried Jesus.

It is accomplished.

It is done.

I can do no more.

I have done everything I have been sent to do. 

No more,

No less.

It’s a twenty minute walk from where I live in Butetown to St Paul’s Church in Grangetown to where I’m heading. It takes a little longer to reach there today.

Near the door of St Mary’s Church someone has discarded a needle during the night. I return to the house for the sharps box which is getting pretty full now. I dispose the needle safely.

A minute later, and I pass the entranceway to Ty Gobaith. For weeks, during the evening time, numbers of people gather there, and inject there. They have been dispersed by the decisions made elsewhere. The problem passed on, pushed closer to where people live. Closer to schools.

Here, I count five needles. I wonder if I have time to return to the house to collect the sharps box again. I check my watch. I’ll be late.

A street cleaner is collecting rubbish. I point out the needles. He doesn’t collect needles, he tells me, although the company he works for does.

Luckily, I have the Company’s contact details. Send an email with photographs. Hope they will be able to attend soon.

The school run has just finished. I move on.

As I walk on, I see more needles scattered at the side of the pavement on Callaghan Square. I take another photograph, send another email.

This is not uncommon. Sometimes, here, we collect needles on a daily basis. Sometimes, it may be just the one needle. Sometimes, half a dozen.

In a five minute walk from the house I have counted eight.

On my return, the needles outside Ty Gobaith have been collected although one was missed. I return home for the sharps box.

Recently, in Glasgow, a safe drugs consumption facility was opened. (You can read about it here). It would be against the law to initiate one here in Wales, in Cardiff. And yet such facilities have emerged across Europe, North America and Australia. They reduce harm for the user, whose life may be fairly chaotic, and provide a supportive environment which perhaps may eventually lead to them accepting the help they need.

They also reduce drugs litter, and create safer communities, prevent a child stepping over a needle, or walking past someone injecting in broad daylight, or even worse receive an injury from a sharp.

I’m not suggesting that such a facility in Cardiff would solve all the problems. I’m suggesting, that a serious and public conversation around the possibilities of safe drug consumption facilities needs to happen, a conversation which should involve all concerned parties including the community, and be driven by the communities affected.

When the first facility opened in Barcelona, there was a fourfold reduction in drugs litter.

It’s time to start talking in a different way about drugs and homelessness. It’s time to begin to make new decisions, to look compassionately on the needs of all affected (individuals and whole communities) and to move towards making a bold decision.

Who wants to talk?