Tower and Town, July 2023

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Clergy Letter

"Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed."

Not long ago I was enjoying a five day visit to Rome, the "Eternal City". The visit had been planned for three years ago but due to the pandemic it was only this year that it was possible to go there. When I came to some magnificent building, be it a basilica or museum, with a wide impressive doorway, entry into that building seemed easy. Yet I would probably only be visiting for a short time. To really enter a building, that is to really belong to that place, it needs more than just a grand entrance. I needed to find some indication that this is a place where I belong, a place that has been prepared for me. Perhaps this is behind the idea of the narrow door that Jesus asks us to enter through. How narrow is it? Just as narrow as we are, because it fits us and no one else.

What exactly that doorway means in our own lives is something we have to discover for ourselves. It probably means accepting some sort of sacrifice in our lives. Our lives are limited, and that is as it should be. We waste a lot of time and energy thinking of the things we do not have and haven't done, and miss out what is laid out before us. This is the way we are to go. The great doorway, the magnificent arch we might want to walk through, can give us the delusion that we are great, as the doorway is great. The small way teaches us humility, but it also shows us that we enter the Kingdom of Heaven through a doorway shaped by God just for us.

Fr John Blacker