Not About Me

Memorial of St. Barnabas-15th Anniversary of Ordination Mass

    Before I begin my homily, I want to thank all of you for coming here this evening to celebrate my 15th Anniversary of priesthood.  At the risk of leaving people out, I do want to try to mention the different groups here today.  First, my parents and one of my two sisters, Amanda, and her family; secondly, my brother priests and deacons, including one of my classmates from Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Fr. Craig Giera from the Archdiocese of Detroit; third, my current parishioners from St. Matthew parish, who are graciously putting on this dinner, as well as former parishioners from other parishes going back to when I was a seminarian; fourth, priests of the Orthodox Church here in Genesee County and their wives; fifth, Knights and Dames of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, who are papal knights and dames and who bring great honor by their presence; sixth, members of the Michigan State Police, including command officers, troopers, and fellow chaplains; I appreciate the friendship of all of you and your presence here tonight.  Five years ago I had planned a celebration of my 10th Anniversary, perhaps a more normal number to celebrate, but that was June of 2020, and I didn’t want to put my Troopers in the odd spot of having to arrest me for violating executive orders, so we just cancelled it.
    There’s a lot of focus on me today.  Some may question celebrating an anniversary with others.  After all, we’re celebrating doing what I am supposed to do: be a priest and continue with my commitment to those promises.  And, in that sense, there’s not much noteworthy in doing what we’re supposed to do.  Our Lord Himself tells his disciples: “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”  When we do what we say we will do, that should be normal, whether it’s the promise a priest makes at his ordination, the promise a couple makes to each other and to God when they get married, or the promise a Trooper makes when he or she takes the oath upon graduation from Trooper Recruit School.
    But, lest we pack up and just go home, rather than enjoying a tasty dinner after Mass, there must be something more.  Otherwise we’re just patting ourselves on the back.  And I think the something more is that we rejoice at God providing for His Church.  Christ promised His Apostles that He would not leave them orphaned; Christ promised His disciples that He would remain with them always, even to the end of the age, as they made disciples of all nations.  And in celebrating St. Barnabas, “a good man, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith,” we celebrate God fulfilling His promise.  And St. Barnabas took under his wing this guy named Saul, who, after his conversion, also went by the name Paul, and proclaimed the Gospel not only to Jews but also to non-Jews, Gentiles.  “And a large number of people was added to the Lord.”  

    Throughout the centuries God remains active in His Church through the power of the Holy Spirit.  God chooses people to continue His work, especially choosing certain men to share in His ministry, as we will hear in the preface of the Eucharistic Prayer tonight.  Men like Ignatius of Antioch; Basil the Great; Martin of Tours; Dominic; Jordan of Saxony; Anthony of Padua; Thomas Aquinas; Pius V; Antoninus of Florence; Charles Borromeo; John Henry Cardinal Newman; Emil Kapaun; Solanus Casey; Vincent Capodanno; John Paul II; Benedict XVI; and many others who have made Christ Himself present by their preaching and their sacramental ministry and service to the poor.  They didn’t just remind people about what Jesus did some 2,000 years ago, though they did that, too.  They acted in His Name and with His power to bring people into relationship with God through Holy Baptism; to forgive their sins through Penance; to give a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit through Confirmation; to join a couple as a icon of the Trinity in Holy Matrimony; to anoint and heal through the Sacrament of the Sick; and especially to make Jesus’ Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity present in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist through their sharing in Christ’s priestly ministry which they received in the Sacrament of Holy Order.  
    They did so as the person God made them, with all the ease and challenges that came with it.  They did it in their time, adjusting, not the teaching, but the method of proclamation to the cultures in which they lived.  They did so with joy at serving so loving a Father; they did so with tears knowing their own sinfulness and unworthiness to exercise so great an office.  They were set apart, like Barnabas and Saul, for the work to which God called them.  And we celebrate them today because they were faithful to that work and never gave up, even when it meant, for some, giving up their lives.
    And so today, God reminds me that I’m not done yet, at least not today (we are never promised tomorrow).  Today, you remind me that I have a high bar for which to strive.  My name is not in that litany of saints that I just enumerated, but it’s supposed to be after I die, and it gives me something for which I can strive.  
    And your name is also supposed to be in the litany of saints, those holy men and women who, throughout the centuries, heard the Gospel and conformed their lives, whatever their vocation, to Jesus Christ, so that they could say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  The good news for you, and the good news for me, is that Christ does the heavy lifting.  His grace makes it all possible.  All we have to do is cooperate, not get in the way, and let God do the brunt of the work.  
    Today is not about me.  It’s about what God has done and what God wants to still accomplish through me, with me, and in me, not so much for me, but for the People He redeemed by the Death of His Son.  Pray that I will continue to know that I am an unprofitable servant, doing only what I was obliged to do out of the love I have for Christ.  Pray that I will help you to hear, even as I myself hope to hear, these words at the end of my life: “Well done, good and faithful servant….Come, share your master’s joy.”   

Peace

Solemnity of Pentecost

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of the most striking parts of Pope Leo XIV’s election (aside from the fact that the cardinals elected a pope from the United States) was his first greeting.  As he stepped out on the loggia, and we saw him for the first time, he said, “La pace sia con tutti voi,” which, translated into English, means: “Peace be with you all” or simply, “Peace be with you.”  What struck me is that these were the words of the risen Christ when He appeared in the Upper Room after the Resurrection, which we heard in today’s Gospel.  This 266th successor of St. Peter made his own, as his first words, the words of Christ to the troubled disciples.  His desire, as that of Christ’s was that His followers might have peace.
    Peace is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, whose descent upon those same disciples at Pentecost fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ we celebrate today.  We list peace as a fruit of the Holy Spirit, based upon Galatians 5:22-23, a list of the virtues that one should exhibit when the Holy Spirit dwells in a person.  Peace should be a hallmark of our lives as followers of Christ, those who have received the Holy Spirit first through Holy Baptism, and then through Holy Confirmation.  
    Often when we think of peace, we think of it as something external, concerning countries and their relationships with other countries.  I daily pray for peace in the Holy Land, and what tends to be on my heart is the cessation of violence and war in the land where the Prince of Peace walked.  But peace is not meant only for over there.  Peace starts right here, in our lives: in our souls and in our hearts.
    Peace goes beyond stopping violence or war.  The Biblical meaning of peace, or shalom in Hebrew, It means a wholeness to the person, a reality of fulfillment in God.  It recognizes that we have nothing to fear because, as St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.”  Or, to say it more simply with the words of a campy, devotional song, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”  
    While nations can break peace between themselves by starting fighting, the peace that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit no one can take from us.  If we lose peace in ourselves, we gave it away.  We allowed something to enter in and pushed aside the peace that the Holy Spirit wants us to have, the peace that allowed martyrs to suffer for the faith serenely, even though it involved great amounts of pain and suffering.  It is, as St. Teresa of Avila said: “Let nothing disturb you, / Let nothing frighten you, / All things are passing away: / God never changes. / Patience obtains all things / Whoever has God lacks nothing; / God alone suffices.”  When we recognize who God is and what He does for His beloved children, then nothing need worry us or try to convince us to give away our peace.
    Do we ask for this fruit of the Holy Spirit?  Do we seek out peace and desire it to fill our lives and demonstrate itself in our lives and our interactions with others?  Or does the lust to dominate seem more attractive to us?  Would we rather lack peace and seem to have more control over others than they have over us?  Because there is always a bigger fish.  There is always someone else who will lord over us as we have lorded it over others.
    To have peace within ourselves means that we seek to order our lives in the way that God intends: our bodily desires subject to our reason; our reason subject to our souls; our souls subject to God.  Adam and Eve lived this sort of life before the Fall in the Garden of Eden.  But when they decided to disobey God, they shattered that order that brought them peace: their souls were no longer subject to God, their minds were no longer subject to their souls, and their bodies were no longer subject to their minds.  So they had to cover themselves for fear that the other would seek to dominate and take advantage of each other’s body, though they were of one flesh.  They quickly blamed each other for the fault to which they both assented, because they were afraid of the other having some priority of spiritual power over each other.

    So how do we have peace?  How do regain that which Christ gave to us at Easter?  Though we have received the Holy Spirit in the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we still recognize that our interior and exterior lives do not always fall into order.  If we wish to have peace, then starting with ourselves, we have to live in a rational way, not simply giving in to the desires of our body.  And to do this, we practice bodily asceticism like fasting or abstinence.  By denying ourselves from some bodily good temporarily, we remind our bodies that they are subject to higher goods that our minds perceive.  We also make sure that our minds are formed properly by truth, and not by falsehood, or even by conjecture or conspiracy.  We should watch how we form our minds, and what we allow in.  Does our intellectual diet include solid foods of truth, or is it simply the candy of gossip and jumping to conclusions?  Lastly, we subject our souls to God through obedience to what He has revealed, especially when it is difficult or doesn’t come naturally.  The Church is a sure guide of knowing the will of God, and helps us to order our life in the way God originally intended through its moral teachings.  
    Pope Leo XIV reminded us in his first words as pope that Christ wants us to have peace.  The gift of the Risen Christ is peace, which is given as a fruit of our reception of the Holy Spirit.  May this same Holy Spirit, who descended upon the Apostles, the Blessed Mother, and the disciples at Pentecost, give us peace at all times, the peace the world cannot give, the peace that comes from ordering our lives to God: the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Waiting

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  When it comes to difficult times for most people, any time a person has to wait probably ranks towards the top.  Maybe it’s a child waiting for summer break to begin in the last days of May and the first days of June (or maybe a teacher!).  Maybe it’s a mother, waiting for her child to be born.  Maybe it’s waiting in a doctor’s office or in the lobby of a dealership to get the oil changed.  Maybe it’s waiting on the phone for a customer service representative to try to resolve whatever issue you may be having.  For me, one of the frustrating things is that there is nothing I can do to speed up the time when I’m waiting.  I have no control.

    So as we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord, we’re now in a long waiting game.  And if you think you were on hold for a long time with that customer service representative, we’ve been waiting almost 2,000 years for Christ to return, as the angels promised He would.  We know that God keeps His promises, but we also know that He chooses the right time to accomplish His will.  After all, He waited unknown centuries from the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to fulfill His promise to send a redeemer to restore them to friendship with God.  But that waiting wasn’t just sitting on their hands, doing nothing.  He prepared His People so that they could be ready to welcome the long-awaited Messiah, who was also His Only-Begotten Son.  They waited through the Great Flood; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; slavery in Egypt and their return and conquest of the Promised Land; the judges and kings; the prophets who corrected them when they went astray; and even through foreign occupation of their land, first by the Babylonians, then by the Greeks, and then eventually by Romans.
    So, in this time, we also wait, as we have from the year AD 33.  And our waiting is really twofold: waiting to celebrate the promised gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and waiting for the Parousia, the return of Christ in glory.  
    While we wait to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we should be asking the Holy Spirit to dwell within us more deeply, especially through the Novena to the Holy Spirit.  These days between the Ascension and Pentecost was the first novena, the first nine-days of prayer for a particular petition.  Granted, in most dioceses that’s now shortened to seven days, but that’s another story.  Still, even though we have received the Holy Spirit, especially through the holy sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, we can never have too much of the Third Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity, the one who is our Advocate, who strengthens us with gifts like wisdom and courage, and who gives us the fruits of love, joy, and peace, among others.  While waiting at a doctor’s office or waiting on the phone can seem very passive, where you can’t do anything else, waiting for the Holy Spirit is more like waiting for summer break, or even giving birth to a child, where there are preparations and things to be done so that, when the day comes, we’re ready.  It would be very sad to go into labor, knowing that we hadn’t started or completed the baby’s room or crib, or bought the necessary supplies to help the child thrive and grow outside the womb.  But, when it comes to Pentecost, how often does this happen, that we are not quite ready to receive the Holy Spirit?
    But beyond Pentecost, we wait for Christ to return in glory.  And this, too, is not a passive waiting.  This wait should be active.  Because at the end of time, Christ will put all things “beneath his feet,” as St. Paul says in his epistle to the Ephesians.  What is not of Christ will be cast down; what is of Christ will be raised up.  In this waiting time, we have the opportunity to participate in that reign of Christ already, even though it’s not yet fully known.  We have the opportunity to cast down all that is not of God, and focus on making sure we devote all of our words, actions, and thoughts to God so that God will raise us up, and will not have to cast us down, whether in totality to Hell, or even just parts of us in Purgatory, the parts that have to be burned up like chaff, or like the dross that is burned off to purify gold.  
    We know that Christ will return, but we don’t know when that will happen.  So, the best plan of action is to make ourselves ready at all times, or at least as ready as we can be.  And it’s not just a matter of looking the part (I remember a sign that said, “God is coming back; look busy.”).  Making ourselves ready is only possible by cooperating with God’s grace, and letting that grace transform us from the inside out.  We are not promised more time.  We are only promised today; God only gives us “now” to turn away from sin and turn back to Him.  If we passively wait, presuming we have more time, the day of Christ’s return, or the day of our death, could catch us off guard, and then perhaps we will be cast down because we had not allowed Christ to configure us to Himself.
    Waiting is difficult.  And it’s especially difficult when we see evil grow and be celebrated and good struggle to survive and be persecuted.  We might feel tempted at times just to give up, like our wait will never end.  But, like summer break for children; like the day of birth for a pregnant woman; even like when we’re waiting in a doctor’s room: the time will come when our hope will be fulfilled and our joy, which no one will be able to take from us, will be complete in Christ [who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen]

Truth: Proposition and Person

Fourth Sunday after Easter
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Math is not my thing.  Math is good, but it’s not something I focus on or am drawn to in my life.  There were many days in high school that I wondered whether I would ever use what I learned in Algebra I, Geometry, or Algebra II later in life.  But today, at even if just in this homily, it seems like math is once again useful.
    The math that came to mind when reading over the Gospel was the Transitive Property of Equality.  This law states that if A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C.  What does that have to do with the Gospel?  Well, our Lord states that when the Spirit of truth comes, He will teach us all truth.  But the Christ Himself also says, “‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”  So the Spirit of truth will lead us to truth, but Christ is truth, so the Spirit will lead us to Christ.
    Pope Francis, may he rest in peace, emphasized this point in his weekly audience in May 2013, when he said:
 

Jesus himself told his disciples: the Holy Spirit “will guide you into all the truth”, since he himself is “the Spirit of Truth”.  We are living in an age in which people are rather sceptical [sic] of truth.  Benedict xvi [sic] has frequently spoken of relativism, that is, of the tendency to consider nothing definitive….And yet Jesus is exactly this: the Truth that, in the fullness of time, “became flesh”, and came to dwell among us so that we might know it.  The truth is not grasped as a thing, the truth is encountered.  It is not a possession, it is an encounter with a Person.

We often think of truths like we think of mathematical laws: propositions that explain reality.  But truth cannot be limited to propositions, but desires to be encountered in the Divine Person of our Lord.
    We can try to limit truth to mere propositions.  We might say: you must believe this fact; or you must live in that way.  But for Catholics, these propositions do not exist simply as Platonic ideas in a far away heaven.  For Catholics, our beliefs and our morality reveal to us who Christ is, which is important because Christ reveals who we can be to us.  Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World from the Second Vatican Council puts it this way: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light….Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

    And the Church Fathers from the earliest times recognized this revelation of who God desires us to be so clearly.  At the end of this month, we will celebrate in this church, with our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Genesee County, the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea.  At this first ecumenical council in the life of the Church, the 318 bishops affirmed that Christ is consubstantial with the Father (‘𝜊𝜇𝜊𝜊𝜐𝜎𝜄𝜊𝜍 is the Greek term; we say consubstantialem in Latin), rather than what the heretic Arius taught, which was that Christ was an exalted part of God’s creation, but merely a created being.  But the fathers recognized that if Christ was not co-equal God, then He could not save us.  As St. Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.”     So Christ reveals to us, in this proposition of truth, that we are those saved by God Incarnate.  We encounter the mystery of God-made-man, which allows us to understand that we are worth saving, that God would come to us and take on our human nature so that our human nature could be united to God.  While there are propositions that are true, we can more easily reject cold axioms.  But if Truth is a Person, then our connection to that axiom becomes a relationship with a brother, an opportunity to love and be loved and become the fullest version of ourselves, revealed by the one who created us.
    And Truth in flesh calls us to go deeper than merely the recitation of facts or axioms.  This becomes clearer when you think about your spouse or your best friend.  I could tell you that my best friend has brown hair, is six-foot-something tall, is muscular, works for the State Police, is married with children, likes to joke around and poke fun at me for mediocre homilies.  You might know those facts, but if you haven’t met Anthony, you wouldn’t fully appreciate who he is and how he is.  I could list all the facts in the world, but the encounter with him gives a reality that stating facts never could.  The same is truth for our faith: we could give all the facts about our Lord, but until you encounter Him, you cannot truly love Him, and only in encountering Him can that love blossom so that it gives us the fullness of joy that God desires for us.

    Yes, the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Father and the Son to the Church, leads us to understand propositions and axioms of how God made the world and how we are to live in it to find happiness.  But the Holy Spirit leads us to so much more than that!  The Holy Spirit leads us to encounter the Truth that surpasses propositions, because the Truth is not an “it” but a “He,” a Person that loves us, has shown us how to be truly happy, and that desires our love in return, Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  

Receiving the Holy Spirit

Sunday after the Ascension
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  St. Peter lays out some challenging admonitions for us in our epistle today: “be serious and sober for prayers…let your love for one another be intense…be hospitable without complaining…[use your gifts] to serve one another.”  Those are all things to which I hope we aspire.  But maybe we feel like we simply have to muscle through to get these things done.  And perhaps, as we try to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, we get frustrated because in day to day life exhibiting these behaviors doesn’t always come easily, and maybe we even fail on a regular basis. 
    But God does not want us to muscle through or to try to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps.  God gives us a gift that will give us what we need to live as St. Peter exhorted.  That gift is the Holy Spirit.  He is the one who makes living as a disciple of Christ possible as the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth, and gives us the power to live that truth daily.
    I know that sometimes as Catholics who love the traditional Latin Mass we can get nervous about the Holy Spirit.  Maybe we see charismatic Catholics whose outward appearance seems more like Pentecostals than Catholics in their devotions and even in their liturgies.  Or people equate the way Vatican II was implemented (which was often a hot mess) with the Holy Spirit who called Pope St. John XXIII to convoke the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.  So perhaps we are a bit skittish when it comes to this Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.
    But we do not believe in a Binity, only two Divine Persons of the Godhead.  We profess our faith each week in the Trinity, which includes the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.  And without Him, we miss something of the full expression of our life in Christ.  Christ promised us the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to help us to know the truth who is Christ, and to live that truth, even in the face of persecution and suffering.  And these nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost are precisely the days when our Lord asked the Apostles and the Blessed Mother to pray for that gift of the Holy Spirit, who would give them a new power from on high to evangelize and transform the world.

    So how often do we call upon the Holy Spirit?  When, if ever, do we ask the Holy Spirit to fill us?  Is it only in these nine days as we pray our Holy Spirit novena?  Or is it more frequently?  A local priest is known to invoke the Holy Spirit every time he loses his train of thought or is having difficulty expressing himself as he says, “Come, Holy Spirit.”  Though I still need to grow in my comfort and relationship with the Holy Spirit, I will ask for His guidance in the hiring process, or when I need to make a big decision. 
    But the Holy Spirit is not just for new hires or major changes.  I need to, and I encourage you to, make the Holy Spirit more of a daily part of my life.  The Holy Spirit is not just the closer you bring in towards the end of the ninth inning to help you win the game.  The Holy Spirit should be the starter, the reliever, and the closer, all rolled up in one.  And the more we condition ourselves to be attentive to His voice in our daily lives, the more even our small choices will be guided by the Holy Spirit so that we cooperate with God in the big and the small matters.  This is the way the saints lived.
    One of the primary ways the Holy Spirit guides us is through the conscience.  Again, most people act as if the conscience is some subjective voice which tells me what do to without any connection to anything else.  Basically, we can use the word conscience to justify simply following our feelings.  But the Holy Spirit, as our conscience, tells us how the moral law applies in various situations.  He does not make us a moral law unto ourselves, determining right from wrong, though many would like that to be the case, which is exactly what Adam and Eve wanted.  They wanted to determine right from wrong, rather than let God guide them.
    As a parent, and especially today as we honor mothers, the Holy Spirit helps you to know how to raise your children.  I do not envy you parents in trying to raise your children today.  On the one hand, kids are so often over-exposed to social media, to extreme violence, to lust, and to unkindness from others.  Yes, I got teased when I was a young boy, but I could get away from it when I went home.  Today, kids will mercilessly make fun of each other on social media, and you never seem to be able to find a place that is not connected to it.  I was first exposed to pornography in a magazine when I was in high school.  Today, due to phones and the internet readily available in most places, many kids see images they should never see in fifth or sixth grade and devices their parents give them (because every other kid has one), and it can affect their future relationships and their interactions with the opposite sex.  When I was growing up, we knew that boys and girls were different, even if some girls liked rough sports and GI Joes, and some boys didn’t appreciate those things as much.  Now, our national leaders can’t even say what makes a woman and woman, and kids are told that gender dysphoria is not only not an illness that needs therapy, but should be celebrated and protected. 
    On the other hand, you can’t just live in a bubble (at least most can’t).  Eventually, children will go out into a rough and morally dangerous world, and parents are tasked with preparing them to choose virtue even when vice seems more attractive and readily available.  Part of the vocation of a mother or father is to help their children be attentive to the voice of the Holy Spirit to know what behaviors will lead them away from God the Father, and which behaviors will lead them toward God the Father.  A mother or a father’s vocation is to help their children be able to interact with people who are different from them and love others who do not live as God invites us, but to be able to reject the behaviors of those who reject God’s laws and teachings.  That is only possible if parents are calling upon the Holy Spirit daily to help them know when to push towards freedom and when to pull back to safety.  The Holy Spirit can guide you to know how best to discipline with charity, and not simply out of anger or a lack of patience. 
    So not just in these nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost, but each day, may we all call upon the Holy Spirit to help us hear the voice of God in our hearts, which is really His voice, and to follow it, so that we can go where Christ has led and has brought our human nature with Him, the right hand of God the Father, who with Christ His Son and the Holy Spirit who proceeds from them both, lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.  

The Holy Spirit Wants...

Solemnity of Pentecost

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]. When it comes to the different Persons of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the one with whom most Catholics are probably least familiar.  We learn much about the Father through the Old Testament and from Jesus, who is the revelation of the Father.  Christ, while revealing the Father, also helps us to know Him better through the Gospels.  But then He ascends into heaven, and leaves us the Holy Spirit, who works in the Church.
    For our part, we are probably used to invoking the Holy Spirit when we have an instinct to do something or not do something.  And certainly, the Holy Spirit guides our actions, whether sought out or avoided.  But sometimes it’s also simply our instincts pushing us towards or away from something.  And do you ever notice that every group seems to claim the support of the Holy Spirit?  Both those who advocate teachings contrary to the faith, like women’s ordination, as well as those who hold to the faith revealed to us by Christ will argue from the authority of the Holy Spirit that their course of action is what God wants.  
    Some see in the Gospel according to John, as John and Peter run to the empty tomb at the instigation of Mary Magdalene, a distinction between the hierarchical nature of the Church (represented by Peter, our first pope) and the charismatic nature of the Church (represented by John, the one loved by the Lord).  John (charism) arrives at the tomb first, but waits for Peter (hierarchy) to go in.  Throughout the history of the Church, these two groups have oscillated back and forth for more influence.  The Second Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, states, “The Church, which the Spirit guides in the way of all truth and which He unifies in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts.”  In other words, both the hierarchical and the charismatic are gifts of the Holy Spirit, all given for the salvation of souls.
    I mention this because the Holy Spirit is often invoked by some for pushing the Church to new realities, while others invoke the Holy Spirit as the one who brings order to chaos.  In reality, both are right: the Holy Spirit pushes us beyond our comfort zone, but also orders and unifies all of creation.  We see this in the Upper Room scene at Pentecost.  On the one hand, the Holy Spirit took those who probably knew only Aramaic, Hebrew, and possibly common Greek, to those who proclaimed the Gospel so that everyone present, from many different parts of the Roman Empire, could understand the proclamation of the Gospel in their own tongues.  The Holy Spirit pushed the disciples out of the comfort of the Upper Room, and eventually to lands as far as India to the east, down to North Africa and Egypt, over to Rome, and lands in-between.  It helped the Apostles discern that non-Jews could become members of the nascent Church without becoming Jewish and being circumcised.  
    On the other hand, the message that the disciples proclaimed was the one Gospel of Jesus Christ, the one message of salvation.  As the disciples traveled far and wide, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church expanded its influence, and began to rid the world of the worship of demons in the pagan religions.  The Holy Spirit united all those who wanted to follow the Lord to be united in faith and morals, as discerned by the Apostles and their successors.  
    Even before that, the Holy Spirit is the one who spoke through the prophets, who were often a bit…eccentric.  The prophets were often the outcasts of society, because they called society from its rejection of God back to fidelity.  The Holy Spirit inspired King David to dance with abandon before the Ark of the Covenant as it was brought into Jerusalem, which dancing David’s wife Michal mocked because it made David look too much like the common people.
    But the Holy Spirit also took the primordial chaos and ordered it into light and darkness, land and sea, different forms of animals, and was given to our first parents to give them the breath of life.  The Holy Spirit guided sacred authors to compose literary works to communicate God’s saving will, and guided the bishops to choose which works were, in fact inspired by the Holy Spirit, and which were simply the works of man that also told stories that involved God.  
    In our own lives, too, the Holy Spirit often pushes us beyond our comfort zone.  He fills us to continue the proclamation of salvation through Christ.  He sometimes puts us in situations we never expected, sometimes even dangerous situations.  But, as our Advocate, He pleads our cause and gives us words to respond to our attackers, as He did for St. Stephen.  
    But as He pushes us to new realities, He does so with the continuity of what has come before.  The Holy Spirit deepens our understanding of what God desires for His people, but without contradicting what came before.  For example: the Holy Spirit has revealed that the Church is meant to be led by the Pope, the Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter.  That is a truth that can never be rejected, without rejecting what the Holy Spirit has revealed.  At the same time, the Holy Spirit can guide the Pope to understand how to exercise that power in new ways.  The Holy Spirit has revealed that marriage is between one man and one woman for life.  That can never change.  But the Holy Spirit can give us new guidance on how to share that truth with those who have gone through a divorce, or those who struggle with same-sex attraction.  
    [Joshua and Halley: the Holy Spirit has led you here to this day when you will receive the fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit through the Sacrament of Confirmation.  You have come by different paths, but have come to this union of faith in what the Holy Spirit has revealed through the Church and her sacred teaching office.  The Holy Spirit will give you new ways to proclaim that one faith, and to witness to the life of Christ from this point on, and into the future, especially as you prepare for Holy Matrimony.  Be open to the Holy Spirit pushing you to spread the faith, but also stay faithful to that faith as revealed to us by God through His Church, which is still one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.]
    If we feel that the Holy Spirit is only keeping us in our “safe spaces,” then we are probably missing out on one aspect of the work of the Holy Spirit.  If we feel that the Holy Spirit is going against what has been taught infallibly before, then it’s not the Holy Spirit to whom we are listening.  Each of us will have different ways that the Holy Spirit operates in us.  No matter what, may we be open to the Holy Spirit, who with the Father and the Son is God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Prayer's Jackpot

Fifth Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I hate to admit it, but I have, from time to time, asked God to win the lottery.  It wasn’t simply to get rich for myself, but because I would give money to the Church, probably help out some friends, and maybe set up trusts to support different charities even after I’m dead and gone.  In my ask, I always reminded God of how generous I would be, especially to the Church, as a way of helping Him to know that He could trust me with the responsibility of winning tens of millions of dollars.
    As our Lord talks about prayer and having confidence in what we ask of God, we may find it strange that I haven’t won the lottery yet (or maybe you have prayed the same thing and have not won the lottery, either).  “‘If you ask the Father anything in my name, He will give it to you,’” the Savior said in today’s Gospel.  And yet I can tell you that my request to God to win MegaMillions has not been answered.  So what gives?
    Of course, deep down we know that God will only give us what is good for us.  Elsewhere, Christ says, “‘What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish?  Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?’”  God does not give us something that will bite us or hurt us, even if we think the thing for which we’re asking is good.
    Further, our Lord presumes that, as disciples, we are following the pattern He set for us, and being obedient to the will of the Father.  If we truly want to be obedient to God the Father, as Christ showed us, then when we ask the Father, we do so knowing that sometimes our wills are not fully conformed to His, and we might not need to receive that which He is giving us.  Sometimes that will mean we don’t receive something that we want.  Sometimes that will mean that we receive something that we don’t really want.  Remember that Christ asked in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup of suffering might pass by Him if there was another way to save the world.  But, He ended that prayer with, “‘But not my will, but yours be done.’”  The Father had answered the prayer of our Lord over and over again, working miracles among the people.  This was made evident especially at the resurrection of Lazarus.  But God the Father’s will was also that His Son would die on the Cross to save us from sin, a will which God the Son fully embraced, with all its pain and suffering.
    Or think of St. Paul.  He talks about a thorn in his flesh, which he asked God to remove three times.  But God told the Apostle that this weakness was a way to manifest that the power came from God, not from Paul.  And that thorn was not taken away.  St. Paul had to endure it, as far as we know, for the rest of his life.  Somehow, that weakness was part of Paul’s salvation and the proclamation of the Gospel.
    Part of receiving also connects to our confidence and trust in God.  When we pray for something good, and we do our best to conform our wills to that of the Father, we still need to trust that God can do what we ask Him to do.  Christ in His hometown did not work many miracles because of their lack of faith.  Do we trust the words of our Savior that we heard today, that God will give us what we ask if we ask in the name of Christ His Son?  Or is our faith fickle that like of our Lord’s hometown neighbors?
    I can testify to times when I prayed in the name of the Lord, and what I sought in prayer was given to me.  I’m not saying this to say that I’m a saint or have special powers.  I am a sinner, trying to be holy, but not always succeeding, and any power comes from God, not from me.  I am simply an earthen vessel, trying not to get in the way of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes these, what I consider, miracles, have been about serious issues, like a person’s health.  Other times they have been for the finding of more trivial things, like stolen golf clubs or a stolen moped.  In one case, I can remember praying for a couple I know, and my prayers seemed to have no effect.  I prayed with them again, and the effect they were seeking came to be.  Again, this is not to attribute anything to me as if I’m special; I’m not.  God wants to answer our prayers, according to His will, whether the request be for something we feel is very worthy, or even for things that don’t mean as much.

    And sometimes the answer is no.  It wouldn’t be a Fr. Anthony homily without some reference to country music, and what comes to my mind is the Garth Brooks song, “Unanswered Prayers,” in which he sings about a girl he knew in high school whom he prayed he would marry, but his prayers went unanswered.  Years later he met his wife, and they met this old flame, and he was glad that God didn’t answer those prayers.  Or Brad Paisley has a song called, “No,” where he talks about different prayers he said, but “sometimes the answer is no.”  Sometimes we think our will is aligned with God’s, but it’s not, and it’s not for our good, so God can answer our prayers with the opposite answer we desire.  It’s not that God doesn’t care or doesn’t love us, but that He answers our prayer with a response that is better for us.
    It is easy to hear how God answers prayers and think, “yeah, but that’s for other people.”  Don’t just hear, but live the word, be a doer of the word, and trust in God’s answers to your prayers.  Go to God with any need or desire you have.  Submit it to the will of God, and then trust that the answer you receive, either yes or no, will be good for your own salvation and the salvation of those you know and love.  God’s answers are a jackpot worth even more that a MegaMillions prize, because they bring us closer into the life of the Blessed Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Simple and Complex

 Feast of the Most Holy Trinity
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.].  How is it that the most fundamental part of our religion, the teaching that defines us as a faith–our belief in the Most Holy Trinity, one God and three divine Persons–is so hard to explain?  We often think of what is most basic as what is the simplest.  But, when it comes to our faith, that’s not quite right.
    Followers of Christ have struggled with this teaching from early on.  The heretic Arius, in order to uphold the oneness of God, held that Jesus was not really God.  Another heresy, pneumatomachianism, taught that the Holy Spirit was not really God.  Others failed when trying to explain the Most Holy Trinity, by saying that the different Persons were simply different phases of the one God, like water can be a solid, liquid or gas (that was the heresy of modalism).  Or another failure was that God was like the sun, where God the Father is like the sun itself, and Jesus is the the light, and the Holy Spirit is the heat (another version of Arianism).  Or there’s the heresy of partialism, which taught that the three divine Persons are each parts of the one Godhead.  Or (and I don’t know the name for this) the very vogue teaching that we can change the names of the Persons to be less restrictive (as in God the Creator, God the Redeemer, and God the Sanctifier).  All of those are really intriguing ways that we have gotten the teaching of the Most Holy Trinity wrong.  
    So what we do believe?  We believe in one God, who is also three divine Persons–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–co-equal in glory, majesty, and power, yet not three gods, but One.  The Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Holy Spirit, nor is the Holy Spirit the Father, and yet the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all one God.

    We struggle because we are finite–limited, while God is infinite–unlimited.  So we rely on what our infinite God has revealed to our finite minds.  We need the Holy Spirit, whom we celebrated last week and whom we celebrate this week.  And we stick to what the Holy Spirit has revealed, because the Most Holy Trinity is the foundation for all life, but especially for our life, and even more than that, for our salvation.  If we get who the Trinity is wrong, we get who we are wrong, and we mess-up our connection to salvation.  Recently, a handful of priests have been discovered to have done great damage by changing the way babies are baptized (most often, changing the words).  While some question why this matters, the Church asserts that words do matter, and if baptism is the beginning of our saving relationship with God (which it is), then if we get the beginning wrong, the rest of it cannot follow.  
    But The Trinity is not just the beginning.  It should be our day-to-day connection as well.  Our spiritual life should be connected to all three divine Persons if we are to live in the fulness of grace that God desires for us.  We often say “God” when we mean God the Father, and He is often the one to whom we address our prayers.  But we should also pray to and through Christ, because He is consubstantial with the Father.  And we should not forget to turn in prayer to the Holy Spirit, “the Lord and Giver of life,…who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.”  Our prayers at Mass often highlight this, as we most often pray to the Father, “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.”  
    How do we guide our life by the Trinity?  One easy way is to read the revelation of the Trinity in the Sacred Scriptures.  How has God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, spoken to us in an inerrant way through the Bible?  What moral laws has God revealed that help us to be the best person that we can be?  Whether it’s the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and what Christ taught in the Gospels, or the teachings of St. Paul in the New Testament about not being greedy, or making false gods for ourselves, or being sexually immoral, those are great guidelines to know whether or not we are living in the reality that the Trinity intends.
    Another way to live our life by the Trinity is by love.  St. John wrote in his epistle that God is love, and the applies to each divine Person.  God the Father is love, God the Son is love, and God the Holy Spirit is love.  If we are to live in the best way possible, we are called to love others.  And that love, as the Trinity shows us, is always about sacrificing for the other, and leading the other into truth.  Our Lord sacrificed Himself so that we could go to heaven, in the full out-pouring of Himself in love.  And the Holy Spirit, our Lord taught, leads us into all truth, so that our love is not merely delight or affection, but is grounded in what is most real and the way that the Trinity created the world.  If we are living like a toddler, who loves as long as he gets what he wants, then that’s not the love of the Trinity, the love that will save us and make us truly happy.  If our expression of love is only about what feels good, rather than sacrificing, even when it’s quite painful, then that’s not the love of the Trinity, which would never do anything to endanger the other person.  
    In a way, the Trinity is as hard to describe as love is, even though the Trinity and love are foundational to life.  But because of the love of the Trinity, we get glimpses of who God is in Himself, which helps us to understand how He made us, and how we are called to live and what will make us truly happy.  When our love is off, when we try to redefine love, then we are not living the Trinitarian life.  And when our understanding of the Trinity is off, when we try to remake God in our own image, the way we act will not be truly loving.  Ground yourself in the life of the Trinity: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

The Upper Room

 Solemnity of Pentecost
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  Harold Samuel is famous (or at least his phrase is) for saying in 1944 that the most important thing in property is location, location, location.  And as we celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost, it’s important to look at the location of this dramatic gift of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son.

The Upper Room in Jerusalem

    St. Luke writes in the Acts of the Apostles that the Blessed Mother, Apostles, and disciples were gathered in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.  We might gloss past that location, except that Upper Room was the place of the Last Supper, as well as the first appearance of our Lord after Easter.  Pentecost, then, is connected to the new life of Easter, and to the Eucharist.
    The Eucharist is the sacramental presentation of Jesus’ suffering and death, His sacrifice on Calvary.  Through it we are connected to the oblation which saved us from sin and death.  In the Eucharist we receive the love of the Son, who was willing to lay down His life, not only for His friends, but even for His enemies.  Christ commanded His Apostles to celebrate the Eucharist in His remembrance throughout the ages as the way to connect all people who were baptized into His Death and Resurrection, and who follow Him in their life, to Him so that they could grow in that same love that Christ first showed us.
    The Resurrection, for its part, is the proof that Christ is who He says He is.  People saw the Lord die.  They saw Him expire on the Cross.  But when He was raised from the dead, that was a shock to most.  It certainly shocked the Apostles.  The Resurrection proved that nothing was more powerful than Christ, and that He truly was divine.  No one had risen before by their own power, and it has not happened since.  While the many healing miracles gave proof to the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection closed any doubt that our Lord was greater than the prophets, some of whom had also healed people, and had even raised people from the dead.  But no prophet raised Himself from the dead.  And so, when the tomb was empty; when our Lord appeared and showed His wounds, first to Mary Magdalene, and then to the Apostles and Blessed Mother gathered in the Upper Room, there was no doubt that this Jesus was different, an unlike any who had come before Him.  
    And, as we celebrate Pentecost today, we know that the Father sent the Holy Spirit through Christ the Son to the Blessed Mother, Apostles, and disciples gathered in that same Upper Room, at which point they could not help but speak about Christ, who had suffered and died, and who had risen from the dead.  And the Holy Spirit gave them the ability to speak in many languages, so that all could understand in their own native languages.  The dispersion of Babel was undone in the unified gift of tongues; the hope of Moses and the prophecy of Joel that all would speak for God as prophets came true; the dry bones of faith that the disciples had was enlivened by the courage that the Holy Spirit gave them to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and Messiah.  
    But we also are in the Upper Room, each time we gather in this sacred space.  We assemble to have Christ provide His Body and Blood once more for us, as we are obedient to His command to do this in His memory.  We who have been baptized into His Death and Resurrection, and who do not have any major departures from following Christ are invited to taste the Bread of Angels.  
    The Bread of Angels gives us the new life of the Resurrection and raises us from the coma of daily life through which we can so easily sleepwalk.  Christ said in John chapter six that if we do not eat His flesh and drink His blood, we do not have life within us.  When we worthily receive the Eucharist, we are given the new life of Christ, the life of the Resurrection dwelling inside of us and connecting us to the one over whom even death has no power.   
    But it is not meant to end there.  The Upper Room is not only the place where we sacramentally enter into the Paschal Mystery; not only the place where we rise with Christ through our reception of Holy Communion.  It is also the place from which, like the disciples, we are sent out by the Holy Spirit to share the Good News that God has taken flesh and dwelt among us; that sin and death have been conquered in Christ; and that we can have access to that eternal life through union with Christ.  The Holy Spirit works to push us out of here to share the Gospel by word and deed to those who have never heard the proclamation of Christ, or who have heard it but who have fallen away, or who have heard it and have remained faithful, but need a new invigoration to continue living out the life of Christ in our daily circumstances.

    We, as Catholics, tend to be really good at the first two parts of the Upper Room: the Eucharist and the Resurrection.  We tend to be really good at being fed and receiving new life.  But to ignore the third scene of the Upper Room, the gift of the Spirit, is to remain dry bones.  Perhaps we may even have muscle and sinew in us, but we do not have spirit to make us alive.  
    Our challenge today and every day is to take practical steps to share the Gospel.  When we notice a co-worker who is struggling, to ask them if we can help, especially by listening to them and praying with them.  When we see someone bound in the slavery to sin, to let them know that their actions are leading them further away from God, and to offer our assistance to bring them back, perhaps by bringing them to confession with us, and then to Mass.  When someone has good news, to celebrate with them and say, “Praise God!”, from whom every good thing has its origin.  There are so many other ways, but these are just a few of how we take what we have received, and share it with others.
    Our Mass is not meant to stay here within these walls.  Yes, we come to this Upper Room to receive the new life of the Resurrection in the Eucharist.  But our daily worship of God, for which the Eucharist strengthens us, is meant to be extended into each hour of every day in our homes, in our cars, in our workplaces, and in our recreation.  Our religion is not simply about coming together into a sacred place once or more a week.  Our religion is also about acting differently, treating others differently, and bringing them to the truth and healing that only Christ can provide.  In the ways that are proper for our individual lives, may our deeds and words speak “of the mighty acts of God,” [the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.]

What is Truth?

 Sixth Sunday of Easter
    “What is truth?”  It may not be the best thing to quote Pontius Pilate at the beginning of a homily, but as we hear about the Holy Spirit today in the Gospel, and how He will “‘teach you everything and remind you of all that [Jesus] told you,’” it seems an appropriate question.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate who pleads our cause against Satan, the father of lies.  
    While we may have a general internal understanding of what truth is, it may be harder to define.  Truth is what is real, what is actual.  Truth allows us to interact with the world in a way which allows us to succeed.  Truth exerts itself and demands obedience, even if we don’t want to give it.  For example, the truth about gravity may be inconvenient, and we may want to ignore it, but if we jump off a cliff, hoping to go up, we will be sorely disappointed (and probably dead!).
    But truth isn’t only about physical realities.  Truth concerns both what is available to our senses, and what is beyond our senses, we might say both the physical and the metaphysical.  Pope St. John Paul II wrote an entire Encyclical about truth called Veritatis splendor, the Splendor of Truth, and writes that truth “enlightens man’s intelligence and shapes his freedom, leading him to know and love the Lord.”

    Truth is not up for debate.  Truth, like God, simply is, which is why it makes perfect sense for Christ to say in the Gospel, “‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”  Because of the Incarnation, we can say that truth is not merely a set of propositions; truth has a face.  
    Truth does not change over the centuries, even if our understanding of it does.  Truth does not change depending on the type of government, or the political party in charge.  Truth is a light in the darkness that helps us walk on safe paths, without which we can often stumble and fall.
    But society for the past decades has struggled with truth.  Society has questioned if there even is such a thing as truth, has denied that there is truth altogether, and now can often only speak of voicing “your truth,” as if it changes not only for every time, but even for every person.  But if truth is different for every person, then communication is altogether impossible, as words presume a set meaning, an expression of a real idea, not simply our own invention of ideas based upon what we want something to be.  And this trend of questioning truth has found its way even into the people who profess, week after week, belief in God who is Truth Itself, and who reveals the truth about Himself to us out of love.
    It is vogue now, as it often has been in every century of the Church, to question this or that Church teaching, not for the purpose of understanding it more, but for the purpose of rejecting it.  Because some truths are hard for a given culture and time.  In the fourth and fifth centuries, as we came to understand Jesus Christ more, we discovered that explaining who Christ is could be difficult, but the easier answer didn’t account for who Christ had to be to save us.  He is fully God and fully man, unbegotten, consubstantial with the Father.  It would have been easier to say, like the heretic Arius, that Jesus was simply a special creature of God, above us, but not God.  That would have seemed to have been better to preserve the oneness of God.  But then, if He was not God, He could not save us.  But then, if He were not one of us, He would not be under the cost of disobedience that we acquired through sin.  And so we held to the hard truth, that Jesus Christ is one hundred percent God, but one hundred percent human, and that God, while one, is a Trinity of Three Divine Persons, while still one in substance.
    Lies are often easier, and less complicated, at least at first.  It’s easier to say, “Yes, I love this food!” that looks more like the charcoal you use in a grill.  And yet, even those “white lies” as we call them can lead to hurt and pain when, as most often happens, the truth is discovered (in this case when it’s discovered by your spouse that swallowing has suddenly become quite difficult).  And that’s just with small issues.  Imagine being told, “I love you,” by a person who is just using you.  You think that he or she really cares for you as a person, and you give yourself to him or her, trusting that you will not be betrayed, only to have that hope dashed against the rocks and your heart broken by someone who was not concerned about you, but only about him or herself.  
    Many times we know what the Church teaches, but we don’t want to accept it, because it was hard.  It was likely hard for those first Christians, especially those who were Jewish, who saw their faith as simply the right way to be a good Jew, to accept the truth revealed by the Holy Spirit to the Apostles that being a follower of Jesus didn’t require circumcision or the following of dietary laws that had been given by Moses.  It was hard, but it was the truth.  And the truth was revealed and preserved by the Holy Spirit, using the cooperation of the Apostles.  It wasn’t simply that old men wearing pointy hats decided to go one way, as is so often parroted when the Church holds fast to an unpopular teaching.  
    But just as gravity forces itself upon the individual, whether he or she likes it or not, the truths of our faith are also as stubborn; they cannot be wished away.  So if we wish to have a happy life, which comes from following the truth, not only here on earth but especially if we hope to go to heaven, we are called to subject ourselves to the truth, even when that’s hard.  If we wish to call ourselves follows of Christ who is the Truth, then we are called to follow the truth as revealed through the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, no matter how hard it may be.  Ask the Holy Spirit today to help you know the truth, for the truth will set you free to be the person you are made to be, in the world as God made it.

The Spirit of Truth

Fourth Sunday after Easter In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As we are getting closer to Pentecost, our Gospels start to focus more and more on Christ leaving this world and the sending of the Holy Spirit. We hear our Lord today promise to send the Advocate to the apostles, who will lead them into all truth.

To be honest, the Holy Spirit is probably the least acknowledged Person of the Blessed Trinity. Christ is often the first, only because of the Incarnation and His taking on our human nature. Because of this, we naturally are drawn to Him. And the Father easily comes next, as a Son needs a Father. Most of our prayers are addressed to the Father, through Christ our Lord (Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, Fillium tuum…). The Apostles’ Creed, the earliest baptismal creed that we have, professes faith in the Father, and in the Incarnate Son and the major events of His saving life, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, but then just continues, “And in the Holy Spirit.” It wasn’t until the Council of Constantinople in 381 that we get the expansion of our understanding of the Holy Spirit. He is professed as, “the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son (that last part, in Latin, Filioque, being added some centuries later), who, with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.” St. Paul describes, especially in his first Epistle to the Corinthians. the gifts of the Holy Spirit and some of the charisms that can accompany the work of the Holy Spirit. St. John in his first Epistle describes the Spirit as one of the three witnesses to our Lord (along with water and blood). With the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, there was an explosion of interest in the Person of the Holy Spirit, but some (including many of those who love the Usus antiquior) were a bit skeptical of this focus on the Holy Spirit, if, for no other reason, than some of the liturgical innovations that accompanied it. What’s interesting is that, as far as theology, charismatics tend to be in step with traditional Catholics as far as being obedient to the teachings of the faith through Scripture and the Magisterium. But the Holy Spirit is given to us all, not only in Baptism, but especially in Confirmation, and works through all the seven sacraments. It is by the power of the Holy Spirit that the work of Christ continues to this day. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is demonstrated by extraordinary gifts like speaking in tongues, or words of prophecy (we hear about these charisms in the New Testament, but they didn’t stop after that). Other times the Holy Spirit is demonstrated by an attentiveness to doing God’s will in the present moment, those nudges that we get to assist this poor person with money or food, or a different way of expressing the faith to a person who is struggling, which seems to immediately help that person understand what we are saying. We need not be afraid of the Holy Spirit, any more than we need be afraid of the Father or the Son. Every good gift, as St. James says today in the Epistle, comes from above, from the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. But I want to focus today on another way the Holy Spirit is revealed, which is mentioned directly in both the Gospel and the Epistle: and that is the revelation of the truth. We live in a world which both demands obedience to certain truths, all the while denying that there is any objective truth. We are told that science is to be believed by all (usually only science that favors certain policies or agendas). But then we are told that there is no truth outside of scientific facts (which is a self-defeating statement, because if there is no truth, then the statement that there is no truth is not true). One of the reasons why the Catholic Church is so often under attack is because we claim that there is truth, and that it has been revealed by our Lord through His Church. Any group that opposes the Church has to call into question the Catholic Church’s authority to proclaim the truth. I remember reading an article about how the New York Times works very hard to undermine the Catholic Church because the Grey Lady wants to be the bearer of truth (through its own ideological lenses), and does not want any competition. But we know that truth is not simply a set of propositions. Truth is a Person, a Person with a human nature and a human face, Jesus Christ. That is why we insist so much on truth, because it is an expression of faith in the Incarnate Lord. Our lies, no matter how small, are denials of Christ, who refers to Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But even Christ says that the Holy Spirit will reveal to us more truth, truth that the Apostles couldn’t bear during our Lord’s public ministry. And we know that this promise of Christ, this gift of the Holy Spirit to help us know the truth, has been preserved unbroken through 2,000 years of the Church. Doctrines do, indeed, develop, but truth does not; only our understanding of the truth expands. St. John Henry Newman likens the development of dogma as the growth of a human: the person has to remain the same, it cannot change, even while the limbs and features grow.

The Holy Spirit is the great Easter gift. When it comes to faith and morals, we don’t have to make it up, and rely on merely human wisdom (which is so subject to error). God Himself promises to reveal what we need to know about the truth, and that, when the Mystical Body of Christ teaches, it is without error. What a great assurance that is for us, especially in these days when everything seems to be changing and re-examined on an almost monthly basis! The promise of the Advocate who reveals the truth to us is the stabilizing factor as the barque of Peter is tossed about by the waves. May we hold fast to the truth always, given to us by the Father of lights, through His Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, in the power and protection of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

Physical and Spiritual

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

From the Church of the Multiplication

    Last Saturday night, I somehow managed to pop out a couple of ribs.  I was not doing any strenuous activity, so I joked Sunday morning at Mass that 36 is the new 80.  I can tell you that I was very aware that something was wrong (even before I knew exactly what it was).  At the same time, I was due for confession and arranged to meet Fr. Jim Rolph after Mass on Sunday.  We joked that, even though my soul had the more serious pain from my sins, the pain in my body was crying out for more attention.
    In our readings today, we see a distinction between the physical and the spiritual realms.  Isaiah in the first reading and Jesus in the Gospel are dealing with physical realities.  Isaiah says that if we are thirsty, we should come the water of the Lord.  If we have no money, we can still approach the Lord and eat.  And Jesus, after healing people’s illnesses, recognizes that they will need food, and He cannot simply send them away to their homes, but gives them bread and fish, multiplied in a miraculous manner from five loaves and two fish.
    Often times when it comes to religion, we focus on the spiritual only.  And the spiritual is important.  But Catholicism deals not only with the spiritual, but also with the bodily needs.  The Letter of James says, “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?”  We can’t simply ignore the needs of the poor and think that we’re living as a disciple of Jesus.  After all, in Matthew 25, Jesus condemns those who did not provide for the physical needs of the least of his brothers. 
    As followers of Jesus, we should look for opportunities to assist those who are in need.  We cannot simply say that it’s only the work of Catholic Charities or of the government to help the poor.  To the extent that we’re able, we are called to help those who need help.  I know that sometimes there are scams where people claim to be in need, but aren’t, and that makes it hard to know when to give to others.  One good piece of advice is, if a person asks for money, and you’re not sure if they truly need it, offer to go buy them a sandwich or a drink from a local restaurant and give it to them.  If they’re truly in need, they’ll take the help. 
    If you listen to the Holy Spirit, you can also tell whether God is nudging you to assist others.  Just a few weeks ago I was at McLaren getting some blood work.  As I was waiting, a woman probably in her 50s was talking about how the lab had given her the wrong test for her illness, and this was her second trip to the hospital that week.  She talked about how she had to use extra gas to get back to McLaren and get the new test, and I could tell that it was a hardship for her.  At that moment I felt that nudging in my conscience to offer to assist her.  I asked her if I could help her with gas money, and handed her a $5 bill.  I know it only got her a couple of gallons, but she said it would help her make sure that she could make it back home without getting stuck on the side of the road.  I don’t say that to brag, but just to illustrate how those circumstances can happen.
    But at the same time that we are required to assist others with bodily needs, we’re not simply fighting a physical battle.  St. Paul reminds us that, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”  Those are all spiritual things, at least for the most part.  St. Paul says elsewhere that we don’t battle so much against earthly powers, but against spiritual ones.  It’s not only the things that we notice with our senses, there are so many more things happening on a spiritual level of which we need to be aware.  When we abstain from meat on Fridays, or do some sort of physical penance, it’s not the steak or the drumstick that we’re fighting against.  We’re fighting against our fallen humanity which wants to give in to whatever desires the body has at any given moment.  And the fallen angels are trying to push us to give in. 
    The Church on earth is described as the Church Militant, because we’re in a fight.  And while we do sometimes face oppressive governments that want to hamper our faith life, more often than not we’re fighting spiritual battles that want to take us away from God.  We can’t pretend that we’re not at war, any more than a soldier could pretend in Normandy, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan that he wasn’t in a battle that meant life or death.  Pretending the battle isn’t happening means losing the battle.  So each day we need to put on the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of peace, the shield of faith, and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God. 
    Humans are a union of body and spirit.  Both are important and need care.  Often times, we are more attentive to the needs, desires, and pains of the body.  But we can’t forget the spiritual realities, either.  Our call, as followers of Jesus, is, to the best of our ability, to address whatever bodily needs we can, as well as fighting those spiritual battles, equipped with all the spiritual defenses and weapons that God gives us.

Living Icons of the Trinity

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

    You might think that it’s strange that the most fundamental part of our faith, the belief that God is a Trinity–one God, three Divine Persons–can’t really be explained.  Our modern mind tends to think that if something is fundamental, then it should be the easiest to explain.  The more advanced, less necessary things are usually harder to explain.  That's certainly true for math.  Addition, like 1+1=2, is much more fundamental and much easier to understand than calculus.  And yet, think about something that is most fundamental in life also can’t really be explained: love.  We can talk about what love is like; we can recognize love when we see it; but it’s often hard to explain precisely what love is.  Even Bishop Barron’s excellent definition, that love is willing the good of the other, itself calls for further understanding.  What does it mean to will the good of the other?  What is the good that we should be willing for the other? 
    And yet, while God in Himself is beyond our finite minds, He does not leave us without images and some understanding of who He is.  In fact, just as the Trinity is the fundamental teaching of our Catholic faith, so one image of the Trinity is the fundamental building block of society: marriage and family life.
    People often chide the Church for being backwards about marriage and the family.  Or they may say that the Church has too many rules for couples and families or couples who want to increase the size of their family.  But if marriage and the family is meant to be an icon of the Trinity, an icon of the most important, most fundamental teaching of our faith, doesn’t it make sense that the Church would go to extreme lengths to help her children be the best icons and examples of the Trinity that they can be?
    How is marriage and the family an icon of the Trinity?  Well, to begin with, the Trinity is a communion of Persons.  God revealed His oneness through the Old Testament, and that oneness was guarded carefully by the Chosen People, especially living in the midst of pagan cultures that often had many gods or goddesses.  But even in the beginning, God gave hints about the fact that His oneness was not a solitary existence, but an existence of communion, an existence of union with others.  In the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we hear, “‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ […] God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them (emphasis added).”  If we go ahead to the next chapter, we see that Adam is not meant to be alone, and that animals, pets, are no substitute for human love.  God gives Adam an equal partner, Eve, to be his wife, and to live as a communion of persons. 
    We read in St. John’s first epistle in the New Testament that God is love.  Love, of its very nature, is not inward facing, but outward facing.  To love is an action that requires another.  And so, if God is love, then God, who is one, still mysteriously has an outpouring of that love.  And, of course, that love is eternally poured out to His Son, Jesus.  From all eternity, God the Father pours out everything that He is, except His identity, which cannot be given away, to God the Son.  And God the Son receives all of that love, and also, eternally, pours out all He is, except His own identity, back to the Father.  Isn’t that what love is supposed to be like between a husband and a wife?  Aren’t they supposed to give all of who they are, except their identities, to the other, and receive that full gift of love from the other?  Don’t we see problems with married couples precisely when someone holds something back: a secret one keeps; a lie someone tells; a grudge someone holds onto?  I often tell people: love isn’t 50/50.  Love is 100/100.  Divorce is 50/50.  The image is not the reality; the Trinity is not a sexual communion.  But the image still holds that a man and a woman in marriage are called to give entirely of themselves to the other, as a living icon of the Trinity.
    But, even love does not stop between the two.  The eternal love of the Father and the Son is so strong that it eternally breathes forth a Divine Person, the Holy Spirit.  The communion between the Father and Son is not closed in on itself, but, as a true relation of love, is open to the other.  Again, this is where words fail us, because the Holy Spirit is not “other,” but the same one God.  Still, we talk about the Holy Spirit as an eternal reality of the love between the Father and the Son. 
    So with marriage: to truly be an icon of the Trinity, the couple must be open to that love creating a new person.  That doesn’t mean that Catholics have to have as many kids as possible.  But it does mean that, if couples are truly loving, they responsibly cooperate with the procreation of new life in accord with how God has made the male and female body and do not turn to artificial means either to achieve or to restrict procreation.  Openness to life is part and parcel of Catholic marriage because we do not believe in a “binity,” only Father and Son, but a Trinity, a communion of Three Divine Persons.  As with marriage as an icon, the family of the icon is not a one-to-one correlation.  You can’t stop being open to life after you’ve had one kid because there’s only Three Divine Persons.  And even senior couples who marry, or couples who find that they cannot conceive, can still be open to life (even though their bodies cannot express that openness), by not keeping their love to themselves, but allowing it to overflow either by adopting or fostering children, or by acts of charity in the parish or community. 
    When one considers that marriage and family are icons of the Trinity, living reminders of who God is in Himself, it is not a surprise that the Church works so hard to encourage couples and families to live that vocation out in particular ways, to better communicate what they are imaging.  We do not understand the Trinity in itself, and we never will.  But thanks be to God for families who remind us of who God is, a communion of love!