Entering the Paschal Mystery (Precept #1)

 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Part of my hope is that, as you listen to the Scriptures being proclaimed over these weeks where I’m preaching on the Precepts of the Church, you’re trying to guess, as you hear the different readings, which precept I’m going to talk about, or how I’m going to talk about a precept based upon these readings.
    This week is precept number one: You shall attend Mass on Sundays and on holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor.  I especially want to focus on why the Church would tell us that we need to attend Mass.  

    What is the Mass?  We often think of the Mass as the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, presented for us in an unbloody manner (and that is certainly true).  But it is not only Good Friday that is made present for us each time the Mass is celebrated.  When we participate in the Mass, we are participating in the entire Paschal Mystery, that is to say, the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ.  And that is what St. Paul proclaimed in the epistle today: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; …he was buried; …he was raised on the third day…”. What St. Paul proclaims to us is precisely that in which we participate.
    Notice that it’s not simply a memorial, either.  I didn’t say that we remember the Paschal Mystery; we participate in it.  It’s not a bad thing to remember.  We have lots of memories that connect us to the past, whether our own, our families, or even the members of our Church.  But we do more than remember: we enter into the very mysteries that we also recall.  Sundays are our days as Christians because it is the day that our Lord rose from the dead.  So on those days we enter into all that proceeded the Resurrection (the Passion and Death), and the consummation of the Resurrection (the Ascension into heaven) as our primordial day of celebration, the day that we assemble as a community of faith to give thanks to God for what He did for us, saving us from sin and death and allowing us to be able to enter into heaven.  On the holy days, we honor other special parts of our Lord’s life, or parts of our Lady’s life, or All Saints.  
    And while we can remember the Paschal Mystery, or we can remember our Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, or All Saints from the comfort of our living room couch, or by a lake, or another outdoor setting, we cannot enter into that Paschal Mystery in any of those places without the Mass because the Mass connects us to an historical and eternal event, which is something we cannot do on our own, but must be gifted us from God.  Going to Mass is not so much that we go to God (though it’s important that we do), but that God comes to us and allows us to participate, even in a limited way, in His eternity, and in the eternal offering of our Lord to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is why not even watching Mass on TV or on the Internet is the same as going to Mass (though it could be a good second option if we are sick or otherwise unable to attend Mass through no fault of our own).  
    In the Mass, we also have a chance to be healed in a way that doesn’t happen anywhere else.  In our Gospel, we heard about Christ healing the man who was deaf and mute.  Other than the Sacrament of Penance (which should be a regular part of our life as Catholics anyway), the Mass is the ordinary place where our venial sins are forgiven.  Our lack of hearing the Gospel (like deafness) or our failure to proclaim the Gospel by word and deed (like the speech impediment) can be forgiven and we can be restored to the fullness of the relationship that God wants for us.  When we receive the Eucharist, our venial sins are forgiven (as long as we don’t have any mortal sins), as the culmination of those times of asking for the Lord’s mercy.  At the very beginning of Mass, I, as well as the servers, who represent you, confess that we have sinned through our own fault, and ask God to be merciful to us sinners.  And throughout the Mass we continue to approach God, recognizing that we are sinners, even right before the reception of Holy Communion, we we acknowledged, “Domine, non sum dignus,” “Lord, I am not worthy…”. But God makes us worthy and unites us to Himself through the Eucharist.
    Again, this aspect of forgiveness is not something that we can receive sitting by ourselves, no matter how comfortable or how beautiful it may be.  Only when we come together, as God’s holy people, and receive the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Son of God, do we have that level of access to the mercy of God.  Yes, God can forgive our sins outside of Mass, or even outside of the Sacrament of Penance.  But He certainly forgives our venial sins in the Mass, and all our sins in the Sacrament of Penance.  

    God wants His grace in us to be effective, and so He gives us a sure way that we can approach Him, be strengthened by Him, and enter into the very realities–the mysteries we call them–that save us.  What a beautiful gift to us, a gift that we should want to have access to each and every week.  But, for those times where we need a little extra encouragement, Holy Mother Church reminds us in the first precept, that we are to attend Mass each Sunday and holy day, so that we can participate in the Paschal Mystery, and be healed from our deafness and muted voice.  May God help us always to hear His voice, and proclaim what God has done for us: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Saints Among Us

 Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
 

   There’s a beautiful song by the band “Alabama” called “Angels Among Us.”  The song talks about the presence of “angels” at different times in the singer’s life, those who “guide us with the light of love.”  It’s a touching image and song, and mentions people who help out, who are like angels, assisting us in our various times of need.
    But the “angels” among us are not simply kind and loving humans on earth.  As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”  We often forget these witnesses, because we don’t see them.  But if we truly believe that death is not the end, that it is simply a transition to a new state that, temporarily, does not include the body (except for the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose Assumption we celebrate on Monday), then we should remember that the saints are among us, urging us to “persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.”  
    Do you have a relationship with the saints?  Do you turn to them each week or each day for help in being a saint yourself?  Or do we turn to saints like St. Anthony only when we have lost our car keys, or on All Saints’ Day in November?  

    Our devotion to saints (but not worship of them) is part of the beauty of our apostolic faith.  We Catholics and the Orthodox are really the two churches that foster great devotion to these heroes and heroines of the faith who have gone before us (some Protestants honor the Biblical saints, but not many or any beyond that).  We, instead, have saints of all kinds from all times.  Yes, we honor the apostles, but we also honor St. Monica, whose tears won her family’s conversion.  We venerate children saints like Maria Goretti, and saints like St. Anthony of the Desert who lived for a hundred years.  There are married saints and celibate saints, monks, nuns, brothers, and sisters.  We have saints who were kings and queens, and saints who gave up everything to serve lepers.  There are saints from every continent.  Some like Dominic and Elizabeth have very common names.  Others like Cundegunde and Polycarp have names that never seem to be in the top one hundred when considering a name for your newborn child.  There are saints who are patrons for just about anything.  Some were holy all their life; others had major conversions.  There’s even a blessed, Bl. Anthony Neyrot, from the 1400s, who was captured as a Dominican friar by Muslim pirates, renounced his faith in Christ after some years in slavery, but then had a vision of his Dominican mentor, St. Antoninus, who had died, and reverted to the Catholic faith, which led to his martyrdom by the muslims among whom he lived.  So there are saints for everyone and every situation.
    There’s a book I have called “Drinking With the Saints,” which provides drink ideas for some of the major or minor saints of our faith.  I’m not encouraging getting drunk, but it’s a great way to learn something about the saints throughout the year, and maybe enjoy a new (or familiar) adult beverage at the same time.
    Our relationship with the saints is one of the great ways that we can persevere in doing our best to live holy lives.  Just last week, I felt a bit overwhelmed by all the things I had to do (I often use the example from the old “Ed Sullivan Show” where a man puts plates on poles and starts them spinning, and then has to run around the stage to keep them spinning so that they don’t fall and break).  So I leaned on two of my best friends to commiserate and to bolster me to keep going.  The saints help us to do the same thing and we should turn to them in any joy or struggle.  The saints can understand the pain we’re going through, but they can also show us how to persevere, no matter what is happening in our life.  And they can be great voices before the throne of God, telling our loving God to ease up a bit when times are tough, or to pour it on when there’s something worth celebrating.  
    Jesus reminds us today that following Him is not always easy.  Following Christ doesn’t always bring peace, but sometimes brings great interior turmoil as the grace of God strengthens us to put the old man to death and live for the new man, Jesus Christ.  It sometimes even causes families to be divided.  The saints are urging us on, like a cross country coach meeting us at different points along the course, or a boxing coach standing in our corner, patching up our cuts and making sure we get re-hydrated.  
    Don’t just stay at a surface level relationship with the saints, where we ask St. Anthony to find things for us, or we put up a statue of St. Francis because we like pets.  Get to know the saints more deeply.  Read about their lives.  Talk to them each week or even each day.  Because there are not only angels, but saints among us “to show us how to live, to teach us how to give, to guide us with the light of love.”

No Participation Trophies for Heaven

Solemnity of All Saints
    There are those who, when looking at a difficult task, think, ‘That’s so easy, anyone can do it!’  And there are those who, when looking at a difficult task, think, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this, and I don’t see how anyone could!’  I probably tend towards the latter.  I remember when I was training to run the CRIM in 2019: I had previously thought that there was no way that I was going to be able to run 10 miles; and when I was training, running circles around this parking lot, I still wasn’t sure if I could do it.  But, sure enough, on a relatively cool August day in 2019, urged on by Tommy Rinoldo, one of our seventh grade students here at the school who decided to run, I put one foot in front of the other with my iTunes exercise mix playing in my ears, and I completed the race, even finishing faster than I thought I could.
    Holiness, sanctity, being a saint, or, as the Powers students learned this year, hagiasmos, is often viewed in one of two ways.  We may think: everybody’s in heaven!  You’d have to be Hitler to go to Hell, so very few people have anything to worry about; it’s a shoe-in!  Or we may think: I’m not like St. So-and-so, so I can never get to heaven.  Probably the more popular approach right now is thinking that everybody goes to heaven, as long as they’re not Hitler.
    Honestly, I think that approach, in its own way, cheapens heaven.  If basically everybody goes to heaven unless you commit genocide, it makes heaven not seem like such a big deal.  It’s the participation trophy ideal making its way into our afterlife.  Participation trophies are nice, and I use that word “nice” on purpose, because you are commended for trying, and sometimes trying does take a lot.  But winning is better, and losing is worse.  No matter how you dress it up or try to ignore it, that’s a fact.  If you doubt it, ask the Wolverines how they feel about losing to the Spartans this weekend.  And the Wolverines wouldn’t want they’re own Paul Bunyan trophy simply for playing the game. 
    But, I would also caution us against the view that making it to heaven is like the odds of a high school athlete eventually getting signed to an NFL team.  One study puts that number at 0.08 percent.  That’s .0008 people out of every hundred people, or 8 out of every hundred thousand people.  If my dream were to play in the NFL, that stat would kill my dream. 
    Heaven is difficult to enter.  Jesus says that we get there by a narrow road, not a wide one.  Or, to put it in a cheeky manner, the fact that there’s a stairway to heaven but a highway to hell should tell us something about the number of people expected in either direction.  Heaven is not a default that we slide into by not doing anything horrendously wrong.  But it’s not only for some elite group of people.  Heaven is what God wants for everyone, and God is constantly working to help us get there.  It’s possible for each and every person here, if we cooperate with God’s grace.
    And to prove it, I want to focus on two saintly people.  Both of these people are blessed, that is, one stop short of being a canonized saint.  But it’s a safe bet they’re in heaven, even if they don’t yet have the miracle for the official designation.
  

Bl. Carlo Acutis

The first is Carlo Acutis.  He was beatified this past 10 October, after dying at the age of 15 in 2006 from leukemia.  He liked joking around, and making people laugh.  He loved playing soccer and video games.  His will-power was not so great when it came to Nutella or gelato.  He didn’t give in to those desires all the time; he knew he had to control himself, but he didn’t pretend that he couldn’t like soccer or video games.  His was a simple path of holiness.  He bought a sleeping bag for a poor person he met.  Even though he lived a comfortable life, he did his best to make less work for the people who cleaned his house.  He created a website that tracked Eucharistic miracles around the world.  And in 2006, when diagnosed with leukemia, he was noted to say: “I offer to the Lord the sufferings that I will have to undergo for the Pope and for the Church, so as not to have to be in Purgatory and be able to go directly to heaven.”  He knew responding to God’s grace could be tough, but he was in it to win it.  And now he’s one miracle away from being venerated around the world as a canonized saint. 
    The second was just beatified yesterday, and he is Fr. Michael J. McGivney.  He is the founder of the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal organization that Fr. McGivney founded to assist immigrants and their families with insurance policies in case a member of their family died.  He was born in 1852, the eldest of 13 children, six of whom died in infancy or at a young age.  As a man who had to work at the age of 13 to help support his family, he knew how difficult life could be.  And that life only became more difficult if one of the working family members died, which Fr. McGivney’s own father did in 1873 when Michael was away at seminary.  Seminary was put on hold for a time while Michael earned enough to support his family.  The Knights started small, in his parish in New Haven, Connecticut.  But it is now the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization.  In 2019, the Knights donated $187 million and 77 million hours of charitable work.  They assist in defending life, especially the infant in the womb, but have also done great work in Iraq to help families who have lost everything through war and poverty.  They are great promoters of the parish, and also raise money each year to assist the mentally handicapped.  Fr. McGivney probably never imagined the scope his work would have, but he did what he could, for whom he could, when he could.

Bl. Michael J. McGivney

    And that’s our ticket to going to heaven.  It is tough; I’m not going to lie.  God’s grace often seems less attractive, especially in youth, and the highway to hell sounds like a ride with more fun.  But if we do all we can, by God’s grace, each day, taking little steps, not worrying about the distance, then we can get there.  It’s not impossible. 
    Today we celebrate all saints, all those who are in heaven.  If we haven’t before, let’s commit ourselves to be saints now, to run the race that is before us, disciplining our bodies, minds, and souls to win the prize of eternal life.  It’s not impossible, but it’s not possible without God’s grace and our effort.  Heaven doesn’t hand out participation trophies, so let’s do whatever we can to be champions in our life of Christ!

The Saints–The Heroes of our Catholic Family

Solemnity of All Saints

A few weeks ago I visited my maternal grandmother.  Her sister, my great-aunt Hilda, just moved from a house she had lived in with my great-grandfather since the 80s.  Of course, there were a lot of things that had to be sorted through when my Aunt Hilda was moving.  One of the things she found was mementos from some of my grandmother’s uncles from when the family was still in Belgium.  When I visited, my grandmother showed me the holy card that was made for her uncle Jules who died in World War I, shortly before the fighting stopped.

When older families members move or die, and we start cleaning out old houses, we can often find family treasures that we might not have even known existed.  Stories are told from one generation to the next about the heroes in our family who did, at least in our family’s estimation, great things.

Today we remember all of the heroes of our Catholic family.  Some of them have been canonized and are celebrated in Catholic churches at Mass around the world.  Others are saints who are in heaven, which is known only to God.  This is so often the case with family members, or particularly holy people we know: we know people who lived holy lives, but whom the church does not canonize because there’s no widespread devotion to them by others.  Today, on the Solemnity of All Saints, we celebrate the people who lived as disciples of Jesus, making Jesus their number one priority, even when it meant giving up other good things.

Jesus gives us the blueprint for how to do that in the Gospel today.  In teaching us the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches us how to be blessed, how to be holy.  We are called to be poor in spirit–to depend on God; to mourn for the sin that still exists in the world; to be meek and not seek after power and glory on earth; to work with all of who we are for justice; to show mercy and forgive; to dedicate our minds and our bodies to the Lord in living a chaste life; to work for peace by living in justice; and even to be persecuted for Jesus and His truth.  But I think that we hear this Gospel so often, that we can forget exactly what that looks like.  So I want to share with you two stories of our Catholic family heroes that hopefully will show you what that can look like.  Having said that, holiness looks a little different for everybody, because how we follow God is as unique as we.  But it always means living according to God’s plan for our life, and living as a disciple of Jesus, following His way, His truth, so as to receive His life.

The first heroes of our Catholic family that I will highlight today are Sts. Louis and Marie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  They were canonized on October 18, just 2 weeks ago, and were the first married couple canonized on the same day.  Louis and Marie were a middle-class, French couple, who had nine children, though four died at an early age.  They went to daily Mass, made frequent confessions, and lived the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  They tried to share their financial resources for the spreading of the faith, including donating money to build a seminary in Canada, though they lived in France.  They liked to go on walks, go fishing, and travel, when possible.  In 1877, at about the age of 45, Marie died from breast cancer, and left Louis with five daughters, the youngest of whom, Thérèse, was four and a half years old.  Louis later suffered his own illnesses, and died in 1894, at the age of 70.  In many ways, Louis and Marie lived out what St. Thérèse described as doing little things for God with great love.  There was very little extraordinary in their lives, but they lived it for God.

Another hero of our Catholic Family is Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati.  He was born in Turin, Italy in 1901.  His mother was a painter, and his father was the founder and director of the Italian newspaper, La Stampa, who also became an Italian Senator and Ambassador to Germany.  Pier Giorgio went to Mass frequently, and had a strong devotion to the Eucharist and to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  He joined the St. Vincent de Paul society at the age of 17, and spent much of his time serving the sick and the needy, orphans, and injured soldiers from World War I.  While his family was quite wealthy, he spent his money for the poor, without his parents’ knowledge.  He loved mountain climbing, art, and music.  He was a Third Order Dominican, and worked ardently against Fascism in the political sphere.  Pier Giorgio contracted polio (probably from the sick with whom he spent so much time), and died at the age of 24 in 1925.  The night before he died, he wrote a note, asking his friend to take medicine to a poor, sick man he had been visiting.  At his funeral, the streets of the city were lined with many mourners who were unknown to his family–the poor and needy with whom Pier Giorgio spent so much of his time.  The poor and needy had no idea that Pier Giorgio was the heir of a wealthy, famous family.

Those are just two stories of our saints.  Yes, we have a lot of saints who are priests and consecrated men and women (nuns, monks, sisters, and brothers), but here are two who are lay people, like yourselves.  They didn’t do grandiose things, but did small things they could for God.  Their spiritual lives were not overly complicated: go to Mass, confess their sins, and serve the poor.  God is inviting each one of us to be saints right here, right now, in Adrian.  It’s not complicated: love God with all of who you are and love your neighbor as yourself.  God wants you to be a saint so that you can be truly happy.  Will you deny His desire for your life?

Is Heaven a Place on Earth?

Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

            In this month of November, when we remember the dead in a special way, our minds easily turn towards heaven.  We began the month by praying for All Saints: all those who are in heaven, not just the ones the Church knows about and has canonized, but even those who are known only to God.  As we write the names of our family members and friends who have died in the Book of the Dead, we pray and we hope that they are in heaven. 

            Secular music has thought about heaven a fair amount, too.  As I thought about songs with heaven in them, three came right to mind: Belinda Carlisle singing, “Oh, heaven is a place on earth”; Eric Clapton singing, “Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?”; and, a little more recently, Los Lonely Boys singing, “how far is heaven?”  You can probably think of more (but do it after Mass so you’re not distracted). 

            Heaven is our goal.  It is the hope we have.  I’ve never known a person who didn’t want to go to heaven.  It was the hope for the seven brothers and their mother as they were offered the choice to eat pork, that is, to break the Mosaic Law, or to die.  We get a few of their stories today, and their perseverance in the face of physical torture is inspiring.  Why do they remain faithful to God rather than make a small concession?  Because they believe that God will reward them for their fidelity.  We have countless martyrs, many from the last century in the Spanish Civil War, during World War II, and in from Communist countries, who died rather than deny their faith.  From the very beginning with St. Stephen, the first martyr, the hope of heaven has been what has consoled the multitude of men and women as they underwent excruciating pain for Jesus.

            Heaven is our hope amid the sighs, mournings, and weepings in this vale of tears, as we pray in the Hail, Holy Queen prayer.  And we intuitively want heaven to be worth the price of what we go through on earth: all the little sacrifices we make, all the big sacrifices we make.  We want to know that heaven is worth it.  In a way, we’re weighing the cost of discipleship against the cost of the world.  For this reason, it’s no surprise that when I visit our parish school classroom, or when I visit our parish high school, Lansing Catholic, I frequently get asked what heaven will be like.

            The students often want to know: will heaven have a TV?  If not, how can I be happy if I can’t make sure I’ve seen all the episodes of my favorite shows?  Will heaven have an X-box?  If not, how can I truly be happy if I’m not killing zombies?  Will heaven have my iPhone?  If not, how am I ever going to finish all the levels of Candy Crush?  Perhaps we adults like to think that we’re a little bit more sophisticated: will my favorite food and drink (maybe adult beverage) be there?  Will it be the perfect temperature?  Will the Lions finally win the Super Bowl?  Our view of heaven is very much based upon what we know, and that is what is earthly, and then making it a perfected earthly existence.

            But it strikes me that in our Gospel today, Jesus challenges the Sadducees, and us, to not get caught up in making heaven simply a better version of earth.  The Sadducees are trying to trap Jesus into making the resurrection seem silly if the Law of Moses is true, because all seven men will claim to be this woman’s husband in heaven.  But Jesus sidesteps the trap by teaching them that heaven is not simply earth perfected.  Heaven involves a change of mind, a change of attitude because it’s not happiness from our fallen point of view, but is happiness from God’s point of view.  God, who made us, and who knows what will make us perfectly happy, gives us true happiness, not just what our minds can conceive as true happiness.  Even our bodies, which we know we will receive back at the end of time in the resurrection of the body, are different, and we see that in Jesus.  It’s still His body; He still has the marks from the nails and the spear, but it’s different; it’s glorified.  And it’s different enough that Mary Magdalene at the tomb does not at first recognize Him; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t even recognize Him.  But it’s similar enough that the apostles in the Upper Room do know it’s Jesus. 

            What we know by Scripture and the teaching of the Church is that heaven is perfect happiness, and it involves the worship of God in a time of Sabbath rest.  It is being with God, who made us to be with Himself, and the fulfillment of what it means to be human.  Maybe some of our creature comforts will be there; maybe not.  Maybe the Lions will actually win a Super Bowl; maybe not.  But we do have faith and confidence that whatever heaven is like, we will be perfectly happy because we will be with God and lack for nothing that we truly need.  May we all be found worthy, by the way we live our lives, to accept that gift of eternal blessedness that God wants to give us, so we can experience for ourselves, with all the saints, canonized and known only to God, the joy of entering into the eternal rest of our Lord.