"I am coming to gather every nation and every language. They will come to witness My glory.... They will proclaim My glory to the nations, to the distant coasts and islands that have never heard of Me or seen My glory. And from all the nations they will bring all your brothers as an offering to Yahweh to My holy mountain, Jerusalem, to Yahweh's house." [Isaiah 66].

That is the most explicit statement in the Old Testament of both Yahweh's universal claim and the particularity of Jerusalem. It is a foretelling, an eschatological discourse, of the universal call to salvation in the unique God and His unique Church. It is good, it is refreshing, to grasp the simplicity of it, the bold thrust of it: there is one God, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. For all.

And yet, in the Gospel passage for today it is made clear that though the call is universal and unique, the door is narrow, the passage to life difficult. People will come from east and west, from the north and the south and will take their place at this feast. And some will not make it. "I do not know you, nor where you come from." Here indeed must be a reconciliation of opposites, and that, of course, is not unusual in Christianity.

The words of Christ this morning make it clear. A universal call. But the gate is narrow. A summons to unity in God, and yet some are excluded. Narrow the gate, hard the way that leads to life.

There is this uncomfortable note in Christianity that expects us to make great leaps of faith. We must manage somehow in nature and in grace to use both hands to grasp a reality that is seemingly contradictory and too much to manage. This is what constitutes the rough road and the narrow door.

One thinks of that when one thinks of the Irish. A taste of how things are. Surely a people beloved of God, surely a people blessed with kinship to the world of spirit, a people of the wind and the rain and the sea, of remote islands, dynamically communal and passionately solitary. Great fighters, great poets, gifted in speech, in human encounter, in humor.

If so blessed, then why so cursed? Why so misery-ridden? The English are Teutonic people and the Irish Celt. They do not meet. They live in different worlds. They do not understand one another. Good enough: people differ. But the Irish were miserably oppressed by the British for seven centuries. More than that, oppressed because Catholic. The Irish never had a colony because they never were a country, never oppressed another people because they were never there to oppress.

And to this people dearly beloved by God and so heavily burdened, a sweet Providence sent, 150 years ago in 1845, a five-year famine that left at least one million dead and drove abroad two million more. So what have we done to deserve this? One does not speak so, even when famine was followed by the severest winter in history with mild westerlies replaced by snow-bearing gales from the plains of Russia (6 inches of snow in Ireland!)

Instead of complaint, look around. Millions of Irish all over the world, and where the Irish went, the faith went. And they brought their gifts and graces to every land. This was the fruit of starvation and tyranny. In the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, 7 million Irish came to this country alone. Their descendants are some 40 million today. And there are other lands.

Is this good? Is this God's work? Is this sweet Providence? One would think so. It is a marvel, is it not? To be sure, not all that unique. For there are other peoples, and others who knew oppression, and other migrants also richly gifted, highly endowed. But the Irish are a good sample.

And the lesson is clear. Bear what must be borne for Christ's sake, in the hope that somehow, somewhere, sometime, great good will come of it.

This is not Irish superstition. It is the Faith. It is to reconcile peace and joy with suffering and death. The road is rough and the gate narrow and I don't think it can be other than that. Can it?

The call is universal, extended to all. And it is a call to unity in the one God in Christ. To maintain such a faith is witness to the significance of human existence. For what we do here is prologue, is prelude and overture to the ultimate reality in the life to come.

The Portuguese left Goa in India. We left Manila in the Philippines. And the English will leave Hong Kong. And Ireland too. For oppression and subjugation are not it. Not it at all. The gift we carry and leave behind is the Faith. And that is from God, by any of us, by way of suffering and death, famine and cold wind from Russia.