Homily for Monday, 26 May 2014‒ Memorial of St. Philip Neri

This homily was given at the convent of the Holy Child Sisters, Oxford, United Kingdom

Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 16:11-17; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; John 15:26-16:4a

What words or concepts do we associate with poverty? Does poverty mean to be materially poor or even destitute? Does poverty mean to give up wealth in order to live by the Word of God? Do we perhaps relate poverty with one of the religious vows we have taken and a principle by which all Christians are called to live?

How many of us would think of Lydia, the “dealer in purple cloth” we encounter in today’s first reading, as poor? I suspect that not many people would think of Lydia as poor. After all, she was a wealthy merchant whom Acts says had a home large enough for the Christian community of Philippi to gather in for worship. Lydia was one of the first leaders of the early Christian “house churches.”

For this reason I see Lydia as an example to us of poverty. How so? Lydia was not poor materially (the Book of Acts notes otherwise), but she was poor in the sense that she generously opened her home to St. Paul and to the Christians of Philippi. Even before this, and before Lydia and her household were baptized, Acts says that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention” to St. Paul and his message, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

“The Lord opened her heart”; Lydia allowed her heart to be opened by the Lord. This is an example to us of courage and humility; of poverty of heart and spirit; of openness to the Lord that extends beyond mere material poverty. It is possible to be materially wealthy and yet to be poor in the way Lydia was.

Speaking of poverty, I deeply appreciate that for the last several days I have been visiting Oxford, the home city and university of Blessed John Henry Newman. The English cardinal was an Oratorian and an admirer of St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorians whose feast day we celebrate today. John Henry Newman admired Philip Neri especially because of his poverty.

Newman writes this of St. Philip Neri toward the end of The Idea of a University: “He would be but an ordinary individual priest as others: and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love… He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there… He sat in his small room, and… the rich and the wellborn, as well as the simple and the illiterate, crowded into it… And who was he, I say, all the while, but [a] humble priest, a stranger in Rome... great simply in the attraction with which a Divine Power had gifted him?”

St. Philip Neri in Rome, Cardinal John Henry Newman here in Oxford, and Lydia in Philippi in the Acts of the Apostles are all examples to us of poverty. May we, too, live their way of poverty; of humbly allowing God to open our hearts “to pay attention” to the Lord and to the Lord’s Gospel.