Welcome to this Online Retreat.

The aim is to give an overview of the Gospel that we will hear at Sunday Masses this coming year. Normally we hear the Gospel week by week as distinct passages, each worthy of reflection on their own. 

The aim of this retreat is rather to help us hear those passages in the context of the Gospel as a whole, its themes and concerns. Something that we might otherwise lose.

My hope is that these talks may help you enter more deeply into Mark's Gospel this coming year, and in prayer reflect on the figure of Christ who stands at its centre. 

'The Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God' as related by Mark, the Master Storyteller, becomes 'the greatest story ever told.'

Many blessings,

Fr Brendan 

O God, who raised up Saint Mark, your Evangelist,

and endowed him with the grace to preach the Gospel,

grant, we pray,

that we may so profit from his teaching

as to follow faithfully in the footsteps of Christ.

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever.

Collect for the Feast of St Mark

In the first talk David Lodge was quoted as saying:

“Narrative, whatever its medium, holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers.” [The Art of Fiction]

In the light of the videos you might reflect on how Mark does this, and to what purpose?

The priest-poet Malcolm Guite's has a wonderful book of reflections on the liturgical year. Here is his reflection for St Mark, we might notice how well he captures its various themes.

 On his website he comments: "As I re-read it during this lockdown, as we too make the shift ‘from grand to intimate’, I am struck afresh by the transition in Mark from Christ’s action to his passion, from doing to suffering, from being in control to experiencing with us and for us what it is to depend, patiently, on the actions of others."

Mark

A wingèd lion, swift, immediate

Mark is the gospel of the sudden shift

From first to last, from grand to intimate,

From strength  to weakness, and from debt to gift,

From a wide desert’s haunted emptiness

To a close city’s fervid atmosphere,

From a voice crying in the wilderness

To angels in an empty sepulcher.

And Christ makes the most sudden shift of all;

From swift action as a strong Messiah

Casting the very demons back to hell

To slow pain, and death as a pariah.

We see our Saviour’s life and death unmade

And flee his tomb dumbfounded and afraid.

Sounding the Seasons

On the retreat day we heard the story of the call of Levi and his response to the call "Follow me."  We reflected on a more modern encounter with Christ.

Anthony Bloom, of Russian background, often spoke of  how he had met Christ, truly met him, as a skeptical young man determined to find that the Gospels were false. He decided to read Mark’s Gospel rather than another Gospel because none was so short as Mark and he wanted to get it over with and not waste his time!

Here is how he put it in on one occasion:

“While I was reading the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I suddenly became aware that on the other side of my desk there was a presence. And the certainty was so strong that it was Christ standing there that it has never left me. 

This was the real turning point. Because Christ was alive and I had been in his presence I could say with certainty that what the Gospel said about the crucifixion of the prophet of Galilee was true, and the centurion was right when he said, ‘Truly he is the Son of God’. It was in the light of the Resurrection that I could read with certainty the story of the Gospel, knowing that everything was true in it because the impossible event of the Resurrection was to me more certain than any event of history. History I had to believe, the Resurrection I knew for a fact. 

I did not discover, as you see, the Gospel beginning with its first message of the Annunciation, and it did not unfold for me as a story which one can believe or disbelieve. 

It began as an event that left all problems of disbelief behind because it was a direct and personal experience…. I became absolutely certain within myself that Christ is alive and that certain things existed. I didn’t have all the answers, but having touched that experience, I was certain that ahead of me there were answers, visions, possibilities. This is what I mean by faith — not doubting in the sense of being in confusion and perplexity, but doubting in order to discover the reality of the life, the kind of doubt that makes you want to question and discover more, that makes you want to explore.”

He became a monk and Metropolitan bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church