26th Sunday Ordinary Time

After numerous comments after Mass this week, I thought I'd better post this homily.

What is our understanding of sin?  For some, it is defined as a breaking of a rule or commandment.  That's a very legalistic way of understanding sin, but one that many are used to.  If you remember the days before the Second Vatican Council, you might remember going to confession and saying the following, "Bless me father for I have sinned, I broke the 2nd Commandment 4 times, the 3rd Commandment 5 times and the 4th  Commandment 10 times."  It used to be that one would not even have to say what that commandment was, just number and kind as they used to say.

It's ok to view sin that way, but the danger is that we can distance ourselves from our actions if we con't take some personal accountability.  A better way of viewing sin is looking at it as a failure to love.  Specifically, failing to enter into loving relationship with God and others.

We all want to be happy, but what we often do is seek out that happiness in the things of the world, forgetting that true and authentic happiness is only going to be found in God, staying connected to the vine that is Christ.  Unfortunately, that happiness can seem so elusive to us while the enticing things of the world are right in front of us.  So we turn from our relationship with God in favor of those attachments.  We damage the divine intimacy that God wants to have with us, and sometimes even sever that relationship.

What happens then is we become centered on self.  We begin to  satisfy our own needs without giving consideration to others.  When we stay on that path and make bad choice after bad choice, our hearts can be filled with pride, envy, jealously, lust, greed and all those tools the devil uses to entice us to sin.   Our hearts become ugly and lonely and incapable of loving effectively.  We find ourselves eventually wondering what happened to us.  How did all this happen?  St. Augustine was in that place, asking those questions before he began his journey home.

To understand how this happens, look at St. Peter.  His downfall did not begin in the courtyard when he denied Jesus on that Holy Thursday night.  It began with his failure to do the one thing Jesus asked him to in the garden- stay awake and pray.  He turned from the spiritual need to pray for the material need to sleep and it began a series of bad choices that culminated in denying the Lord.  That's what happens to us.  We turn from our spiritual need to be close to God in favor of our corporeal needs, and we sin.

Luckily, the readings today don't dwell on sin as much as they speak of the return from sin.  Ezekiel talked about the wicked man who turns from his wickedness and does what is just and right.  He will save his soul.  The gospel today reminds me of last weeks a little.  Last week you had the parable of the workers in the vineyard.  Remember the point of that parable was not how long they had been in the vineyard working, but whether they were there and the end of the day when it counted.  This weekend, we have two brothers who represent two very different kinds of people.  One who says "yes" to God when he asks him to do something, but loses his soul through an act of disobedience, not following through.  The other says "no", but later saves his soul by an act of obedience.

We are all prodigal.. We, at times walk away from God.  Some of us walk away for great lengths of time, but we are called to return.  God loves us infinitely so and challenges us to turn back to him.  In the story of the Prodigal son, the young son squanders his father's money.  He finds himself at that same point of St. Augustine, alone, broken and lost.  How did I get here?  Sound familiar?  He recognized that the only real happiness he had know was when he was with his father and makes the choice to return home.

I know what many of you are thinking.  "Father, I know, but you don't understand, I've been away so long, done so many terrible things, I don't think I'm worthy of that journey home.  Or I'm not strong enough to let go of those attachments that have kept me from him."

Here's the great good news.  All we have to do is make the choice to return and the Father will make the rest of the journey for us.  He will run to us, pick us up if necessary, and bring us home.  We don't make that journey home alone, but we have to choose it for ourselves.

In the Hail Mary, we ask our Blessed Mother to pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.  When you think about it, those are the only two moments in our lives that really matter- now and the hour of our death.  What happened yesterday, last week, last month, last year doesn't matter.  It's what we do in the here and now moment that matters.  Having said that, at some point those two moments are going to coincide.  The moment of our death will be now and how we have lived our live will matter.

We are like moist clay, we can mold ourselves into any shape we can imagine by the choices we make in life.  It can be a beautiful vase or a misshapen blob, but once the moment of death comes what we have created by those choices gets thrown in the fire and what comes out is that way forever.

In this life we make ourselves to be the people we will be in eternity.  I pray that we all might have the courage to come home, reconnect ourselves to the vine that is Christ and allow him to fill us with the true happiness that satisfies so we can love as he loves.

19th Sunday: Stillness in the Face of Anxiety

This weekends first reading from Kings is one of my favorites.  It was a huge part of my discernment process as it is for many young men and women thinking of religious life.  Elijah is waiting to hear the voice of the Lord.  He listens through earthquakes, fire and mighty wind only to hear nothing.  It is only is the soft gentle breeze that God reveals himself.

This great story reminds us to listen.  We all know that we often place obstacles in our lives that keep us from truly hearing God.  Sometimes those obstacles come unwanted, other times we put them there ourselves as something we place as a higher priority.  We have to turn the volume down on those various voices, if we truly want to know what God wants of us.  I mentioned last week that a little self reflection is good for us.  We can't do that well, if we keep giving ourselves over to the external distractions of our lives.

As beautiful as this message is-the need to hear God in the stillness of our hearts, I think there is something much deeper going on here.  It is helpful to back up the lens when we read Scripture to better understand a reading in context.  This is a great example.  Why was Elijah in the cave to begin with?  You might remember another passage about him that occurs just before this.  He challenged the prophets of Baal to a contest to see whose God was the real God.  It was a sacrificial offering contest.  Which ever God answered the prayer of the their prophet(s) would be the one true God.  Clearly Elijah won this contest as God consumed his sacrifice with great fiery splendor.  What we don't hear is what happened next, when Elijah then killed the 450 prophets sparking the rage of King Ahab and Jezebel.  Jezebel sought his life and we find Elijah here in the cave on the run.

He is overcome with anxiety, fear and doubt as hides in the cave, worried for his life.  It is then that he is told to listen to the voice of the Lord.  Earthquakes, fires and mighty winds are great spectacles, but God is not in them.  We want to be careful that we don't look too literally at these images.  Spiritually speaking they communicate something we don't want to miss.  They represent the anxiety, fear and doubt that he suffers from.  He needs to overcome them to finally hear God.  He needs to surrender those obstacles, giving them back to the Lord so he can be filled with the conviction he will need to finish his journey.

We hear a similar story in the Gospel as well.  The disciples are overcome  with fear themselves as they are being tossed about.  Even as Jesus walks to them, they don't recognize him, so distressed they are.  Peter's great challenge was a failure too.  He was focusing on his predicament and not on the Lord in his midst.  As a result, he fell.

If these two stories teach us anything, it is to have faith.  To listen intently to the soft whisper in our own hearts of a God who loves us and protects us.  We all have anxieties, fears and doubts.  Illness, financial problems, relationship issues will always be a part of our lives.  We can't allow ourselves to be overcome by them, but instead learn to abandon ourselves into the arms of Christ.  When we have the courage to let go and give them back to him, he will fill us with the grace and strength we need to finish our journeys too.

Corpus Christi

Back in the 1970s, when there was a lot of liturgical innovation going on. I remember growing up in my home parish the transition from Vatican II.  The two associate pastors in my parish wanted to start a folk Mass in the gym on Sunday mornings.  Their pastor reluctantly agreed.  I remember it being a very joyful liturgy.  The music was new and upbeat.  Young families were flocking back to Church again. It wasn't without its problems, though.  It caused greater division in the parish, an us against them mentality- those going to Mass in the gym versus the Church. It would take another decade for that to get sorted out and bring people together.

One thing that sticks out at me about that time, though, was the decrease of the sacredness toward the Sacred elements of bread and wine.  More and more, gold and silver chalices and ciboria were replaced with ceramic cups and dishes. I bring that up from my personal experience because I ran across this story about Dorothy Day from the same time period. 

Dorothy Day invited a young priest to celebrate mass at the Catholic Worker. He decided to do something that he thought was relevant and hip. He asked Dorothy if she had a coffee cup he could borrow. She found one in the kitchen and brought it to him. And, he took that cup and used it as the chalice to celebrate mass.

When it was over, Dorothy picked up the cup, found a small gardening tool, and went to the backyard. She knelt down, dug a hole, kissed the coffee cup, and buried it in the earth.

With that simple gesture, Dorothy Day showed that she understood something that so many of us today don’t: she knew that Christ was truly present in something as ordinary as a ceramic cup. And that it could never be just a coffee cup again.

She understood the power and reality of His presence in the blessed sacrament.

Which is really the sum and substance of what we celebrate on this feast, Corpus Christi. The reason for what we will do today – celebrating with the monstrance, the music, the procession – isn’t to glorify an inanimate object, a bit of bread contained in glass.

It is to remind the world that in that bread we have been given Christ.

Not an idea. Not a symbol. Not an abstract bit of mysterious theology. No.

It is wider and deeper and more mysterious than that.

Look at that host — and you look at Christ.

I love his opening story. Dorothy Day (a convert and Benedictine Oblate) founded The Catholic Worker, and lived in voluntary poverty in solidarity with the poor of her day. She is often, and wrongly, dismissed as a “radical” by people who do not realize that Day was, in her own words, “an obedient daughter of the church,” and completely passionate about the grace-imparting sacraments given to us by Christ. Far from being “radical,” Day looked upon the Eucharistic Christ and recognized her King, just as even the earliest Christians knew him, the travelers who “recognized Jesus” in the breaking of the bread

Everything we are, everything we believe, everything we celebrate around this altar comes down to that incredible truth. What began two thousand years ago in an upper room continues here, and now, and at altars around the world. The very source of our salvation is transformed into something you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Sister Camille D’Arienzo tells the story of a priest who was pouring some unconsecrated communion wafers from a bag, to get ready for mass. Some fell on the floor. He bent down and picked up the stray hosts, just ordinary wafers, unconsecrated, to throw them out. And he held one between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to her. “Just think,” he said, “what this could have become.”

Just think what we become when we receive the body of Christ. We become nothing less than living tabernacles. God dwells within us. As the hymn tells us, we become what we receive. And what we receive becomes us. That is the great mystery, and great grace, the great gift of this most blessed sacrament.

My question on this feast: what will we do with that knowledge? Once we have been transformed, by bread that has been transformed, how can we leave this holy place without seeking to transform the world? How can we just go out and head to brunch, or dinner, or out to do yard work or the weekly grocery shopping?

We carry something greater than ourselves. And that makes us instruments of God’s great work in the world.

Trinity Sunday

Last weekend we celebrated the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. It's the central mystery of our faith, yet also the most difficult to comprehend. We often get tied up in the "what" of the Trinity, trying to understand the inner workings of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It may be easier to focus on the "why".

In it's simplest terms the Trinity is a love story. No doubt the greatest love story ever told. It's about a Father who loves us so much, he created a world for us and created us in his image and likeness, because he wants us to share in divine life. We don't always live our freedom correctly though and reject that life by sin. We are unfaithful, but our Father is ever faithful, even to the point of sending his Son to us to teach us how to love, to turn our hearts back to the Father, and die for us to reopen the offer of divine friendship. Their mutual love for each other generates the Holy Spirit who enlivens us and sets our
hearts on fire for the gospel.

There is a profound intimacy between Father and Son. Read John 17 and you hear Jesus pray lovingly to his Father for US! He asks Him to pray for us and protect us. We hear the Father bless his Son too at his Baptism and Transfiguration.

This is a feast about relationships. We are invited to share in this intimacy of the Trinity. We do this by committing ourselves to prayer and service. Sometimes we take our relationships for granted. It is often easier and a relief to communicate via email or text messages, but we miss opportunities to interact and share ourselves with each other.

May we never miss an opportunity to tell those we love how we feel. May we go the extra mile to bring the love of the Trinity to those we meet.

Pope John Paul II to be Beatified

 

Great news coming from the Vatican today, as Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will celebrate the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1st. 

Our late Holy Father has been fast tracked through the canonization process.  Usually they is a 5 year wait before a person’s cause to sainthood may be introduced.  Pope Benedict dispensed with the wait given the obvious holiness and service to the Church of John Paul II.  It has taken this long because of the due diligence of the committees who have researched the life and writings of our late Holy Father.

After the beatification, he will be regarded as Blessed Pope John Paul II and will be the worthy of veneration. Wonderful news for our Church!  I remember meeting him in Rome, toward the end of his life.  It was and still is the most touching and humbling moment of my life.