Unity and Diversity

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  A buzzword these days is “diversity.”  And while people can associate the socio-political term with some level of mistrust, when it comes to diversity in the Catholic sense, we need not fear.  We don’t fear diversity, because it is also bound up with unity.  And this connection between diversity and unity bases itself in the Most Holy Trinity, who is both One God and Three Divine Persons.
    While not directly pointing to the Trinity, it intrigued me that St. Paul, in the epistle we heard today, kept going back to threes: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and “Who is above all, and through all, and in all.”  Again, this is not to equate the word “Lord” with the Father, “faith” with the Son, and “baptism” with the Holy Spirit, nor any individual Person with being above, through, or in all.  But there is something providential as God inspired St. Paul to write in a way that points to the oneness and threeness of God.
    Beginning with God’s oneness, His unity, we even get a glimpse of this in the Gospel.  When asked about the greatest commandment, our Lord replies with the second half of the shema, one of the great credal expressions of Judaism: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.  Therefore you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.”  The unity of God forms the foundation of the commandment to love God.

   The diversity, if you will, of God, started to reveal itself most clearly in the Incarnation.  We can look to the Baptism of the Lord, when the voice of the Father spoke as St. John baptized our Lord, and the Holy Spirit hovered over our Lord in the form of a dove.  Time and time again, our Lord claims authority which only God could have, especially seen in the power of forgiving sins.  And in the Gospel of John, the people almost stone Christ, which makes him ask, “‘For which of these [good works] are you trying to stone me?’”  The people reply, “‘We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.  You, a man, are making yourself God.’”  And at the great commission at the end of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ commands that his disciples to baptize “‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’”  
    Certainly, this believe in our Triune God developed over the centuries after the Ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Indeed, the word Trinitas, Trinity, was only first coined by Tertullian, who died in the year AD 200.  Creeds would follow from Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon that would clarify how we understood our one God as well as the Trinity of Persons.  But the kernel of the truth of our belief in who God is was present from the beginning.
    So, when it comes to the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, we see both unity and diversity operating, just as unity and diversity are attributes of God.  There is one God, but the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Spirit the Father.  There is one Church established by Christ, but that one Church has different expressions across the world with different gifts and charisms.  The temptation is to overemphasize unity or overemphasize diversity.  But that would be like excluding either the Three Persons in favor of one God, or excluding the oneness of God in favor of the Three Divine Persons.  But the truth is not expressed fully when one or the other is excluded.
    So for us, God calls us to profess, though one baptism, one faith in the one God.  To reflect the unity of God we hold fast to what God has truly revealed as necessary for salvation, including those statements codified by Ecumenical Councils and Popes, as well as the teaching the Magisterium.  To vary in professions of the divinity of the Son or the Holy Spirit tears away from the unity that God desires for His Church.
    On the other hand, there are diversities in practices of how we live that faith out that vary place by place.  St. Monica struggled with the fact that Romans fasted on Saturdays, while the Milanese did not.  St. Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, said that when he was in Rome he fasted on Saturdays, but when in Milan, he did not.  Liturgically, from the beginning, there rose up legitimate differences in how the followers of Christ, united in one Church, worshiped.  While most of the Roman world spoke Greek, and so Greek was likely used in many of the earliest liturgies, Latin was introduced not too long after Christianity ceased to be a persecuted religion.  Maronites, the Catholic Rite (R-I-T-E) based in Lebanon, still uses Aramaic, as it has from the beginning, the language our Lord spoke, in at least part of its liturgy.  And as the Gospel spread, the Mass came to be celebrated in various languages, though each language was often codified and does not always match the current way that same language is used (e.g., Slavonic versus Church Slavonic).
    But this variety of languages and rites resembles Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles and disciples the ability to speak in different tongues so that those who had gathered in Jerusalem for the feast could understand the preaching of the Gospel.  Still, while the languages were many, the faith they professed was one.
    So, as Catholics, we can welcome diversity in a Catholic sense, because it is also connected to a unified mission and proclamation, mimicking the way that our one God is also Three Divine Persons.  In the Mystical Body of Christ, we need not all have the same task or vocation, any more than all our body parts need to be the same.  But those diverse body parts do need to work together for the proper functioning of the body, and so the diverse members of the Church need to utilize their gifts and talents in a unified way for the proclamation of the one Gospel in the one Church that our Lord founded.  May we, the diverse members of the Mystical Body of Christ, be held together for common purpose by our Triune God: Father, Son, and 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.”

Saintly Instructors

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Catholics are not generally known for their knowledge of Scripture.  This is particularly sad because the entire New Testament was written by Catholics, guided by the Holy Spirit.  But still, Catholics do not do well in Bible memorization compared with our Protestant brothers and sisters. 

Still, if there’s one passage from Scripture that every Catholic knows, it is certainly the passage from today’s Gospel: “‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind…[and] you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Not a bad quote to have memorized, as “‘the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’”

But, we have to admit, the Law of Love, as it has come to be known, is pretty broad.  It lacks a certain amount of details.  What if I think that it’s perfectly fine, even if I’m not sick or homebound, to sit in my back yard all day Sunday, admiring God’s beautiful creation, but never going to Mass?  Is that loving God with my whole heart, soul, and mind?  Some would certainly say so, though probably not those who are here, because they’re probably outside, in their back yards, admiring God’s creation instead of coming to Mass.  But who’s to say?  Or what if I think that it’s quite loving to steal a little bit of money on an irregular basis, because I need the money more, and my large company won’t really miss it; they have enough profit without this little bit of cash?  Is that loving my neighbor as myself? 

Certainly, if this were the only thing Jesus had said, then we could rightfully critique his vagueness.  But, of course, we have the rest of Scripture which helps us to know exactly what is the loving thing.  We hear a little bit about that in the Book of Exodus, as God tells us that loving our neighbor means not oppressing the foreigners, widows, or orphans, because their cries to God are precious and are always heard, and God will repay.  We certainly also have the Church, the Body of Christ, which teaches with Jesus’ authority on earth as to what we should or should not be doing, believing, etc.  It is the Church’s particular mission to guide Her children, that is, us, into a life of truth and holiness.  And in order to do this effectively and without error in matters of faith and morals, Christ gives a special charism, a special gift, to His Church, so that she never errs in faith or morals so that we can have a true compass to help us to know what exactly it means to love God and love our neighbor.

But another guide comes from our second reading.  St. Paul states that the Thessalonians became imitators of him and of the Lord.  St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians also said, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”  St. Paul puts himself out there as a model to be followed, because he is modeling his life on Jesus.

We have tons of options for role models today.  We have American Idols, athletes, actors and actresses, musicians, family members, and many others.  And while I would certainly encourage us to learn follow the example of our secular role models when they are worth following (when they are living according to the Gospel), as Catholics we have family members, long since dead in many cases, who say to us by their deeds, if not by their words, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

St. Monica & St. Augustine

These role models that we should have, these Catholic ancestors of ours, are the saints.  They are the true role models, the people that we should truly be following.  Many years ago it was “Christian cool” to have a bracelet that said WWJD—What Would Jesus Do?  But, as Catholics, we could have just as easily had bracelets that said WWMD—What Would Mary Do? or WWPD—What Would Peter Do? and those are only two saints.  Each day of the year the Church puts before us a saint: some we celebrate at Mass, others are more local saints and never get big celebrations.  But all of them help us to know what it means to love God and love our neighbor. 

St. Thérèse

      Are you a mother or grandmother whose children have fallen away from the faith and lived not such a holy life?  Look to St. Monica, who won the conversion of her son, St. Augustine, by her tears after Augustine had wondered into just about every main heresy, had a child or two out of wedlock, and was far away from home for a while.  Are you a young man who loves adventure and the outdoors?  Look to Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, who was secretly very generous to the poor, and who loved to explore God’s beautiful creation (while still attending Mass on Sundays), and whose famous phrase “Verso l’alto” means to climb towards the top, to be the best not only in competition, but especially in love of God and of neighbor.  Are you daddy’s little princess?  Look to St. Thérèse, who was her dad’s princess, and knew that, although she could never do big things in her life, she still wanted to do small things with great love.

Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati

The Church is full of the example of saints who show us in their own circumstances how to love God and love our neighbor, according to their state in life: whether priest, deacon, wife, husband, king, queen, poor person, wild person, religious, child, you name it.  They are models to us of a life of holiness, sometimes after very sinful parts of their life.  The more we read about the lives of the saints, the more we will understand in any given situation what it means to truly love God and truly love our neighbor as ourselves because we will have learned how saints have loved in similar circumstances.  And then, if we love God and love our neighbor, then maybe others, centuries from now, will look to us for help from heaven, to show them what it means to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  All holy men and women of God, pray for us!!