A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 8:5-8, 14-17  1 Peter 3:15-18  John 14:15-21

In the late ’80s, a classmate and I toured the Tower of London. It was not our first visit. This second time, I do not think that we mounted the moving walkway, which allows visitors to view the crown jewels, the principal focus for many visitors to the tower. It was enough simply to stand in the courtyard of the famous enclosure and listen as Beefeaters, its yeoman warders, shared its stories. Besides, this second visit had a unique focus for us.

I had written to the resident governor of the Tower of London, asking permission to view the prison cell of St. Thomas More, King Henry VIII’s deposed lord chancellor and Catholic martyr. 

We met the governor’s representative in the tower’s courtyard on a beautiful summer morning. From there, he graciously guided us to a 12th-century construction, known as the Bell Tower, where we climbed several flights of stairs to reach Thomas More’s cell. 

It was larger than I expected, befitting More’s status. Before falling from the king’s favor over the question of his remarriage, Sir Thomas had been the most powerful man in England. The pentagonal stone room measures some 18 by 20 feet, though in the 16th century it was lit by narrow, arrow slit windows and could be quite cold and damp.

For most of his 15 months in the tower, More seemed strangely content to be its prisoner. He was a lawyer by training, a scholar by desire and, by the grace of God, a saint. Sir Thomas spoke as though the king had granted him leave to return, full-time, to his three favorite activities: reading, writing and prayer. 

Among the works More composed in the tower was the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. It is particularly helpful in understanding one of the principal gifts of the Holy Spirit: consolation.

As God, the Holy Spirit is always present to us, though not always recognized as such. In its daily channels, our consciousness typically flows without much awareness of God, unless we carefully cultivate a habit of prayerful mindfulness. Not so, however, in the two radical experiences of high joy and intense sorrow. 

Great sorrow interrupts our spiritual slumber. In its wake, nothing seems right with the world—certainly not our place within it. We are tempted to forget the God who loves us, and we struggle to remember God as our destiny. 

Christ promised us an advocate who would always be with us but especially in this moment. 

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted,
saves those whose spirit is crushed (Ps 34:19).

For St. Thomas, this is when a life of faith comes into play, facing the challenges for which it is forged. This is the moment, he says, to “gather our faith together into a little narrow room” and ask a critical question of ourselves. We must not take the answer for granted, thinking it obvious. No, we must sincerely ask ourselves if we truly wish to be comforted by God. 

The answer matters greatly because, as St. Thomas More sees it, the desire to be comforted by God is itself a work of grace, indeed the first consolation of the Spirit.

I will in my poor mind assign, for the first comfort, the desire and longing to be comforted by God. And not without some reason call I this the first cause of comfort. For, as the cure of that person is in a manner desperate, who hath no will to be cured, so is the comfort of that person desperate, who desireth not his own comfort. 

We cannot receive the Spirit of all consolation without opening ourselves to him, without desiring to be comforted by him. 

Thomas More suggests that there are “two kinds of folk who are in tribulation and heaviness: one sort that will not seek for comfort, and another sort that will.” 

Those who will not seek God’s comfort in suffering have yielded to two great temptations, spiritual sloth and blind ire.

For the first there are the sort who are so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness, regarding nothing, thinking almost of nothing, no more than if they lay in a lethargy. With them it may so befall that wit and remembrance will wear away and fall even fair from them. And this comfortless kind of heaviness in tribulation is the highest kind of the deadly sin of sloth.

Another sort there are, who will seek no comfort, nor yet receive none, but in their tribulation (be it loss or sickness) are so testy, so fuming, and so far out of all patience that it profiteth no man to speak to them. And these are as furious with impatience as though they were in half a frenzy. And, from a custom of such behaviour, they may fall into one full and whole. And this kind of heaviness in tribulation is even a dangerous high branch of the mortal sin of ire.

The Spirit holds us in times of great sorrow the way a parent holds a child, but only we can choose to raise our eyes and look about, to stop kicking against the caress. 

For those who do seek to be consoled by God in times of great sorrow, who rise above sloth and ire, St. Thomas sees two reasons for confidence. First, because they

seek for their comfort where they cannot fail to find it. For God both can give them comfort, and will. He can, for he is all-mighty; he will, for he is all-good, and hath himself promised, “Ask and you shall have.”

Second, St. Thomas suggests that our desire to seek God is, paradoxically, already a sign of the Spirit’s presence. 

For since his desire is good, and declareth to him that he hath a good faith in God, it is a good token unto him that he is not an abject, cast out of God’s gracious favour, since he perceiveth that God hath put such a virtuous, well-ordered appetite in his mind. 

In times of trial, we need to ask ourselves if we have turned to God. When our weak faith does not allow that, we must pray, like the man in St. Mark’s Gospel, for more faith. “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24). 

As St. Thomas sees it, simply to know that we are seeking the Lord, despite our weak faith, is already a sign of God’s consoling presence. We may be struggling against despair and anger, but we are struggling. And we could not do that without the aid of the Spirit. 

It is possible that the greatest suffering of St. Thomas More’s fall from favor was not the executioner’s ax. As he put it, from the moment of his birth, he was “already laid in the cart carrying toward execution.” 

No, in his final weeks, to compel the prisoner’s submission, the king’s officers took away Thomas’s books and his writing materials. He was compelled to use charcoal to scratch out a few lines to his family, for himself and to his God.

At the time, Thomas More had begun A Treatise on the Passion, a work he would never finish. In it he wrote,

Good Lord give me the grace so to spend my life that when the day of my death shall come, though I feel pain in my body, I may feel comfort in my soul and with faithful hope of thy mercy, in due love towards thee, and charity towards the world, I may through thy grace part hence into thy glory.

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, stands ever ready to console us, but we must desire that consolation. At the least, we must ask the Holy Spirit to grant us the grace to so desire. Then, says St. Thomas More, God can do the rest.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.