Homily for Installation of Relic of Blessed Carlo Acutis – Our Lady of Dolours Chatswood – 11 October 2024
It has been noticed by scholars that the drawings we find in the Roman catacombs of the first Christians praying are of figures, “standing, looking up, with arms outstretched, and eyes wide open, ready to walk or to leap forward . . . posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart searching. [They say] . . . We are on the watch, in expectation of the One who is coming . . .[1]
With their witness, as those who proclaim that Jesus cannot be found in a tomb, we are those who live a life in constant watchfulness and expectation. In the apparent absence of Christ from our midst, we live our life in watchfulness. This means that we are those who can no longer “pray with closed eyes, but [now rather], messianically, with eyes wide open for God’s future in the world.” Pope Francis declared it succinctly in his very first words in his Letter to Young People in 2019, Christ is alive! He is our hope, and in a wonderful way he brings youth to our world, and everything he touches becomes young, new, full of life.”
The Spirit of God comes to awaken us, to keep stretching us out into new horizons, “stretching out to what is ahead, [always with] a readiness for a fresh start.”[2] It is the Risen Christ, in the Spirit, who continues to open our eyes and our ears, so that we might see and hear, might listen more deeply, and might perceive more fully the truth of ourselves, of the world and of the divine promise that is offered us (cf Matt 13:14-16). It’s not surprising then that Jesus will declare, “Take care how well you listen! For the one who has will be given more, but the one who has not, even what they think they have will be taken away.” (cf. Lk 8:18). Thus St. Paul goes on to remind us that we “do not live in the dark” for “we are children of light and children of the day: we do not belong to the night or to darkness, so we should not go on sleeping, as everyone else does, but stay wide awake.” (1 Thess 5:4-6; Rom 13:11).
It is the Spirit who is the ‘drive’ and ‘instinct’ for life, awakened by God. And therefore, the Spirit of the living Christ, is experienced in us, then, whenever we say ‘yes’ to life. As one of the great Christian thinkers of the 20th century teaches, “true spirituality [is] the restoration of the love for life ‑ that is to say, vitality. The full and unreserved ‘yes’ to life, and the full and unreserved love for the living are the first experiences of God’s Spirit. . . “ And so, paraphrasing and adapting Augustine, he prays:
When I love God, I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses I the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me. For a long time, I looked for you within myself, and crept into the shell of my own soul, protecting myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside – outside myself – and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others[3]
“We shall only become preachers of the Resurrection if we are alive in God,” preached the newly appointed Cardinal, Fr Timothy Radcliffe at the Synod of Bishops last week. “No one will believe a zombie. Remember Irenaeus, Gloria Dei, homo vivens; the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Like Lazarus, we hear the voice of the Lord summoning us out of our locked rooms: ‘Come out and live.’ Holiness is being alive in God.” And therefore, according to Jurgen Moltmann, holiness, “breaks through [the] inward numbness [to life], the armour of our indifference, the barriers of our insensitivity to pain. It again breaks open the ‘well of life’ in us and among us, so that we can weep again and laugh again and love again.[4]
Carlo Acutis lived life with this vitality of the Spirit of God, the one who urged us to live as the original that we are rather than as mere photocopies. And what meant that Carlo, himself, was not a mere photocopy was that he engaged his life with both passion and purpose, never one without the other. Passionate about his faith, his family, his friends. Passionate about soccer, technology, animals. Passionate about his faith given expression as an altar server, a catechist, an evangelist. Above all passionate about the Eucharist which was the centre of life. And most importantly, passionate about the disadvantaged which gave his love for the Eucharist its legitimacy, for his was a genuinely eucharistic life, a self-emptying become a self-giving.
His was an engaged life, a life alive, taking every opportunity to immerse itself in the joy of creation. And yet always with intentionality, with purpose, with focus. His gaze never veers from Jesus himself. “To always be close to Jesus, that’s my life plan” he says, such that he is “happy to die because I’ve lived my life without wasting even a minute on things that aren’t pleasing to God.”
That someone as young could combine both passion and purpose with such integrity is remarkable. But the future belongs to those who can follow his example. Life belongs to the one who is awake, no longer fearful, but enlivened by love. This is the hope that Carlo Acutis shares with us, into which he invites us. It leads us to “expect the presence of God in everything I meet and everything I do. . . What does God have in mind for me? What does God expect of me? What is he saying to me through the things that are happening in my world, and what is my response?”[5] When we bring these questions to everything that we enjoy then passion and purpose come together in the original that each and every one of us is.This evening, we welcome Carlo, through his relic, into our own church of Our Lady of Sorrows, which bears the same name as the church in which he was baptised in 1991, so that forever now he will be a part of the life of our own community. This is the power of the relic. It makes present the one whom we remember. They are not just an idea, a thought. They are someone with a body, a tangible life we can see and can touch; they become physically present in our midst. And with this presence they are now our intimate friend, our inspirer and our intercessor. The need for such a model for all of us, and especially for our young, is real. May Carlo whisper his friendship with us deep in our hearts. May he call us to live our lives in the fullest way possible, and may he be there always to support us and pray for us before the God in whom we are all in communion. Amen
[1] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 83 -84.
[2] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 87.
[3] Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 98.
[4] Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 97.
[5] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 84-85.
