27 September 2016

Team Work

Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Pius X Church
One of the fun parts of being a parish priest is the different events to which I get to go: football, basketball, and soccer games, just to name a few.  This past Wednesday I had the opportunity to watch our 7th and 8th grade girls basketball team play basketball.  We didn’t get the result we wanted (that is to say, we lost), but it was great watching our girls play.  They work well as a team, passing the ball, shooting when they have the shot, and getting back to play defense.  Each of them has to work together; none of them can do it all by herself.  Jaelynn relies on a trusts her teammates like Layla to pass to, Ari can support Emily and set a pick, and Mimi, Lauren, Sierra, and Emma have to support each other in the plays they run and in the constant back and forth of basketball.     
I also have attended some of the Powers boys soccer games this season.  I played soccer for 9 years when I was younger, and it’s fun to be involved with it again.  Soccer is definitely a sport, like basketball, where each person has to contribute in a particular way; no one person can do it all by himself.  If a defender like Trevor or Connor decides on his own to try to play offense and score a goal, it can lead to big trouble; if mid-fielders like Mason or Dominic don't adjust to the flow of the game, pushing up when the team is on offense, and falling back when the team is on defense, the team is likely to lose; even if the forwards, whose primary job is to provide offense and score goals, like Drew or Brian or Blase, don’t occasionally look up to see if someone else has a better shot, the team may not score as many goals as they could have.
Today we celebrate the Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Pius X Church.  On 23 September 1956, this building, a grouping of bricks and mortar, was dedicated to God as a place to worship Him.  This place was set aside as a pre-eminent place to call on God, and where God promised that He would always be present, especially in the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Tabernacle.  Experiencing God here is different than praying in our rooms, or in nature, because this place is set-aside from the rest of the world to be a special place where we can encounter God and worship Him in spirit and truth.  Here God’s covenant with us in the Precious Blood of Jesus is re-presented, made present to us again, in a way that happens no where else.  That’s why Catholics are generally required to get married in a church building.  As they make their covenant with God and each other, they are in the presence of the covenant God has made with us.
This church building, too, is a sign to us of what we are called to be as members of the Body of Christ.  Each brick plays its own important role; each piece of the window does its part to let the light of the sun in; each piece of liturgical furniture works together to allow God to become present through His People assembled as one, through His Word proclaimed, through the Priest acting in the Person of Christ the Head, and especially in the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.  So, too, we each have our role in the church.  We each contribute to making up the parish of St. Pius X.  As your pastor, my primary role is to provide you with God’s grace, especially through the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance, and to oversee the work of the parish.  Some of you help in proclaiming God’s Word; some of you are Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion and help bring Jesus in the Eucharist to those who are here and those who are not able to join us at Mass; some of you work on staff; others volunteer in a variety of ways and in different organizations; some of you are already so busy with taking care of your family that your role is joining us for Mass, helping to provide for the parish by your stewardship of money, and helping to spread the Gospel in your daily lives through word and deed.

Like our girls basketball team or the Powers soccer team, we have to work together.  We cannot do everything ourselves.  We work together to achieve our goals as a parish.  Imagine if the roof decided it didn’t like providing cover from the direct sun, the rain, and the snow.  If it doesn’t perform it’s important, though perhaps not glamorous, duty, we’d be sunburned or wet.  Imagine if the doors wanted to be closer to the tabernacle, so they moved into the sanctuary.  We’d have no way to welcome parishioners and visitors in, nor ways to keep vandals and thieves out.  If our girls basketball team members decided that they each wanted to score every basket, or only wanted to play defense, we wouldn’t win a game.  If the Powers soccer team decided they weren’t going to play their positions and support each other, we’d be last in the Saginaw Valley League.  Today as we celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Pius X Church, we are invited to work together in our diverse and unified roles to help build up the Body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

12 September 2016

Birth Order

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Various studies have shown that there is a general trend about the personality of a child based upon their birth order.  Of course, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but, speaking for myself, I have found most of the attributes to be true.  Parents.com says the following (and it’s on the internet so it must be true!): “As the leader of the pack, firstborns often tend to be: reliable; conscientious; structured; cautious; controlling; achievers.  Firstborns bask in their parents’ presence, which may explain why they sometimes act like mini-adults.  Firstborns are diligent and want to be the best at everything they do.”  As a firstborn, I would say most of those are true, though I would use the word administrative rather than controlling.  I think firstborns, but also others, certainly want to be the best at everything we do.  We, as with others, can tend to be perfectionists.  
The challenge for any perfectionist, whether firstborn or not, is that when we mess up, we can take it very personally.  Perfectionists are certainly tough on others, but are, more often than not, tough on themselves.  And so, in our spiritual lives, when we sin, as all people do (even the firstborn, perfect child), it can be hard to accept the Lord’s mercy.  Pope Francis once said that the Lord is sometimes more willing to forgive us than we are ourselves, and that can certainly be true.  We fall, like the Israelites in the first reading, and we can feel like God should start over with someone else.  In those moments, we need to trust in the Lord, and remember that He does want to have mercy on us.  He does not want to destroy us.  In the first reading, God was seeing how Moses would respond to God’s justice (for turning away from God the Israelites did deserve death), and God was pleased that Moses was becoming more like God and asking for mercy for the Chosen People.  We, too, should be like Moses when it comes to others and even to ourselves.  We should not beat ourselves up, but acknowledge our sin (pretending we didn’t sin does not solve anything), and then ask God for his mercy in the Sacrament of Penance.
The other challenge with firstborns and other, as we heard in our Gospel today, is to hold others’ faults over their heads.  The firstborn, and others, strive to please God, and work hard to stay on the straight and narrow.  But without a sense of God’s mercy, that desire for perfection can become hardhearted and lead to looking down on others who don’t succeed.  It can, as in the Gospel, lead to disdain when others are merciful to them.  We don’t want Jesus to go after the lost sheep; we don’t want Him to find the lost coin; and we certainly don’t want Him to throw a feast for those who wasted their spiritual inheritance on the fleeting pleasures of life.  We want justice.  Being merciful will only show others that it’s ok to do all those bad things; they need to be held accountable!
God, instead, invites us to be like Him, and show mercy to others.  Certainly, God cannot be fooled by fake contrition.  If we are not truly sorry, God will not forgive us.  When God gives His mercy, it is meant to lead to a change of heart, a conversion.  The Prodigal Son truly was going to change, and that change was made possible by the father’s love.  Even the worst people can change, and our mercy to them can help them experience God the Father’s love.
Who knows if the birth order/personality traits correlation is right.  But this week the Lord invites us to know ourselves, and see how ready we are to be like Him, to be merciful to those we meet.  Knowing ourselves is not always easy.  It is often easier to concentrate on someone else’s faults than our own, because we don’t have to deal with the pain and sorrow when we’re not focusing on our own failings.  As St. Basil the Great says, “In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things.  Not only our eye, which observes external objects, does not use the sense of sight upon itself, but even our mind, which contemplates intently another’s sin, is slow in the recognition of its own defects.”  

But knowledge of our own failings is not for the sake of beating ourselves up.  Rather, it is meant to push us towards God, the all-merciful, who gives us the grace to change our lives.  No matter what our birth order, the Lord invites us to receive His mercy so that we can be more like Him, we can be divinized.  And, if we strive with all our hearts to accept God’s transforming and divinizing grace, then at the end of our life, we can hope for God the Father to run out to meet us, clothe us in the white garment of the saints, and welcome us into the great celebration of the wedding feast of the Lamb of God.