On Pilgrimage with our Lord

First Sunday of Lent

Mount of Temptations

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of my hopes during this Jubilee Year was to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  There is nothing quite like traveling to the land which our Lord made holy through the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery.  I have been there three times before, but the sites help one go even more deeply into the Gospels by seeing the places where our salvation happened.  As we hear this Gospel for the first Sunday of Lent, I can see in my mind’s eye the Mount of Temptation, which stands near Jericho, the traditional place in the desert where Satan tempted our Lord.  Or, as we get closer to Holy Week, to walk the Way of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, or stand at Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and especially to see the empty tomb in that same church.  
    But most people, whether in the past or in the present, could or cannot physically travel to the Holy Land.  In the past it was expensive and dangerous.  Today the expense is more the issue than anything (the holy sites are generally very safe, even right now with the animosity and fighting between Israel and Hamas).  But St. Francis of Assisi developed the Stations of the Cross, originally just for Franciscan churches, to help people draw closer to the saving events of our Lord’s life from a local church.  And even beyond the Stations of the Cross, we are invited to, even if only spiritually, travel with our Lord in these forty days of Lent.
    During Lent we are meant to be on our own pilgrimage with the Lord for forty days.  We spend forty days in the desert, evoking the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert between their exodus from slavery in Egypt to their entrance into the Promised Land, as well as the forty days our Lord spent in the desert after His baptism, leading up to His temptation by Satan.
    The desert of Lent is meant to test us, to see of what we are made, and to discover the areas in which we still need to grow.  If we think back to the Chosen People wandering in the desert, at first they were ecstatic about their freedom.  The Egyptians had given their riches to the Israelites, so the liberated slaves had precious materials for their new home to which they traveled.  But fairly early on, they started to regret leaving Egypt, even though they were slaves there, and wanted to go back because, even with as bad as it was, they were familiar and comfortable with the bad, which seemed better than the unfamiliarity with a future, unknown, good.  They cried to God for water and food, and even created a false god after Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai.  The Promised Land was their home, a land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a land they had left some four hundred years earlier, a land they had forgotten.  While the journey to Canaan was not an exceptionally long distance, because of their lack of faith, just as they were at the door of the Promised Land, they had to wander in the desert even longer than originally intended.
    Instead of lacking faith, our Lord’s forty days in the desert demonstrates what Lent is supposed to be: still difficult, still a test, but a test that we can pass because He did.  Our Lord hungered; our Lord thirsted.  But He did not doubt God’s care for Him, and He did not give in to the temptations of the devil.
    If we are honest, we are more like the Israelites than like our Lord.  Our baptism sets us free from Satan and sin, and God gives us the treasure of His grace, His life, to help us on our way home to heaven, our true Promised Land.  But along the way we doubt God.  We do not trust Him to provide all that we need.  We create false gods whom we feel will lead us better.  We forget that we are made for heaven and union with God, and in our selective amnesia, we make our path to God even longer and more difficult than it needs to be.
    So this Lent, our goal as we travel on pilgrimage with Christ is to be more like Him, and less like the Israelites.  As we fast and abstain, as our stomachs growl, we should remember that we do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.  As we pray, we do so not to put God to the test, but to bring the desires of our heart to God so that they can be purified and answered according to His will, not to our own insecurities and drive to be in charge.  As we give alms, we recognize that true power does not come from money and possessions, the false gods that we create, but from worshipping God alone and allowing Him to exult us.  
    While the desert is difficult, and tests us to trust more in God and less in ourselves, the desert is not forever.  God does not abandon us to wander around for eternity.  Christ has opened heaven by His Death and Resurrection, and wants us to end up there if we will follow His path through the desert.  The pilgrimage to heaven may be difficult at times, and we may want to turn back to what comforts we think that slavery to sin gives us, or look to other gods of our own making that we think we can control.  But if we follow Christ this Lent, and truly seek to allow Him to put to death in us anything which is not of Him, we will find the Promised Land where angels will minister to us as we worship in perfect happiness our true God: [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen]

Hearing or Listening

First Sunday of Lent
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  There would come times my youth when I was sitting on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons and eating cereal, and my mom would be talking to me, letting me know what chores I had to do that day or any special events that were happening later in the day.  I was sure I could do two things at once, so I would try to hear what she was saying while also not missing key plot points in my Saturday morning shows.  She would (often correctly) not believe that I was listening, and would ask, “Did you listen to what I said?”  “Yep,” I would reply, to which she would continue, “Then what did I say?”  My answer would betray whether I was simply hearing or whether I was listening.
    The Gospel we heard today, hopefully to which we listened, deal precisely with those two aspects of receiving sound: hearing and listening.  Maybe that was not clear, but as we heard about the temptations of our Lord, we could garner an important lesson about the difference between hearing and listening.
    To start, though, we should go back all the way to the Book of Genesis, to the beginning, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden [as we heard in our first reading].  God had told them that they could have any good fruit to eat, except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Perhaps Adam and Eve were listening to God when He was speaking thus, or perhaps they were not fully giving the attention that listening requires, and just responded, “uh huh.”  In any case, Eve certainly did listen to the serpent, the Devil, who asked, “‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’”  Eve seems to know what God says, but she has already agreed to listen to the Devil, and so she gives in to the temptation to disobey God.  She then brings Adam into her disobedience, and since Adam represented all humanity, all of humanity fell in Adam’s disobedience (as St. Paul states in his epistles).  
    Hearing means receiving the auditory stimuli.  Listening means understanding what is being said, and taking that understanding to heart.  Look to the Gospel today, and Christ, the new Adam, hears the Devil tempting Him, but does not listen.  The Devil three times tries to get our Lord to listen, by tempting Him with sins against temperance (a disordered desire for food), against trust (putting God to the test), and against humility (putting someone or something else in the place of God).  Our Lord certainly hears what Satan is saying, but pays no more attention to it than a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons when mom is talking.  What Christ does listen to is the Scriptures, as He is able to respond with God’s Word: “‘One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”; “‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”; “‘The Lord, your God, shall your worship and him alone shall you serve.’”  The Savior had not only heard what God said, but understood its deeper meaning and took it to heart, which allowed him to recognize the lies of the enemy, and to let them run off his back like water on a duck.  

    Temptation is hearing what the devil says to us, and we cannot help but be tempted, because the devil and his fallen angels so frequently do their best to draw us away from God.  He might say, “It’s not that bad”; or “it’ll feel so good”; or “no one will get hurt”; or even, “What you want is good, so go for it however you can.”  Those are the lies that seek to pull us away from God.  If we only hear them, then there is no sin, just as our Lord did not sin when Satan tempted Him.
    However, if we believe those lies, if we listen to Satan, that is when we act on those temptations, and that is when we sin.  Parents, teachers, coaches, and others probably told us when we were younger that we can only listen to one thing at a time.  When it comes to the spiritual life, that is true.  We either listen to God and take in what He tells us, or we listen to the devil, and take in what he tells us.  If we’re listening to God, we may hear the devil tempting us, but we don’t fall away.  If we’re listening to Satan, we ignore the voice of God in our hearts, what we call the conscience, which helps us know what to do and what not to do.

Tomb of St. Benedict in Monte Cassino

    Listening is so important in our spiritual life.  In fact, the first word in the Rule of St. Benedict is “Listen.”  The full sentence is: “Listen continually with thine heart, O son, giving attentive ear to the precepts of thy master.”  Again, listening means taking something into the heart, and making it our own.  To what should we listen?  To the precepts of our master, the laws of God our Father given to us through the Scriptures, and the laws given to us by our Holy Mother, the Church.
    Lent is the perfect time to work on our listening.  What messages do we take in to our lives each day and each week?  To whose voice are we more attentive?  One of the great ways to make sure that we listen to God is to read His Word.  Yes, Satan could quote Scripture, but when we’re familiar with the entire story; when we take into our hearts the message that God has for us in the Bible, we can better recognize the lies that the devil tells us.  In fact, sometimes I’ll counsel people in the confessional that when they feel tempted, they should, whether outlaid or to themselves, simply say, “That is a lie.”  I use this sometimes in my own spiritual life when I am undergoing temptation.  I’ll say, “That is a lie,” or “That is not from God,” and often times the temptation flees away immediately.  Sometimes I have to repeat it a few times.  But the key is that my mind and my heart are able to block out the sounds of Satan, but hold fast to the Word of God.  Yes, I may have no choice but to hear the temptations, but I do not have to listen to them and give them credence.
    This Lent, let’s work on our listening.  Be attentive to “every word that comes forth from the mouth of God,” so that we do not “put the Lord, your God, to the test,” and do worship and serve him alone [through our Lord Jesus Christ, his Son, who lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.  Amen].

Fighting Temptations and Healing Wounds

 First Sunday of/in Lent
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]. Last week I did my taxes, and because I started to work partially in the City of Flint last calendar year (when I became pastor at St. Matthew), I have file taxes for Flint.  But, because I only worked part of the day in Flint last year, I had to see how many days I worked, and then how many of those days I worked in the City of Flint, to see how much of my wages Flint could tax.  As I looked through the year, week-by-week, I saw some of the highlights of the year, and also some of the lowlights.  My calendar connected me to memories, some of which were delightful, some of which were not so delightful.
    Many of those painful memories from last year were due to my own sinfulness and wounds that I have developed throughout my life, and the reactions that can sometimes happen when those wounds become irritated by the everyday happenings of life.  Some of my own wounds are the fear of abandonment, the desire to be wanted, and the desire to be successful.  You may have the same, or maybe very different, wounds and sins.  But we all have them.

Mount of Temptations in Israel

    As our Lord entered into His time of temptation in the desert, He took upon Himself, not His wounds or sins, because He didn’t have any, but He did take our wounds, sins, and temptations.   The three that He underwent might be categorized as temptations related to physical appetites, amazing feats, and power.  But Christ enters the desert to do battle with the devil, but also show us how to battle the devil with using the same tactics our Lord used.  
    Just as Jesus was in the desert for 40 days, so our 40 day Lenten pilgrimage allows us to grow closer to God and work on our sins and wounds.  As St. Paul says, now is the acceptable time for entering into this battle with our fallen self and with the devil, because now is the time of salvation.  Each day that we put off dealing with our wounds and sins is another day that the infection grows deeper, and becomes more painful when we want to debride the wound.
    So what does Christ show us?  First, He shows us that fighting wounds, temptations, and sins should be rooted in who we are.  Satan begins his temptations with: “If you are the Son of God.”  The enemy seeks to call into question who we are.  In order to fight our wounds, we need to recognize that we are the beloved children of God in the one Son of God, Jesus Christ.  When we operate out of that identity, we are less likely to seek our identity in lesser goods.  How easy it is for us to root our identity in who seems to want us, or what we have accomplished.  But those things are fleeting.  Friends can fall away; our achievements, especially if they are not rooted in God, can come crumbling down.  But God is the sure foundation upon Whom we can build our house and base our worth.  
    Secondly, Christ shows us that we should go to Scripture to fight against attacks of the devil.  Yes, Satan does quote Scripture in the passage we heard today, but Christ uses Scripture to show how Satan’s quotations of the Word of God is off.  Sometimes we are afraid of the Scriptures, and sometimes they are not readily clear or intelligible, or their meaning needs some unpacking by the Church’s magisterium, or teaching office.  But the Word of God is always a good place to go to fight off temptations, and you can reference the passages in the Catechism if you have questions about the deeper meaning.  Our psalm/gradual and tract from today, talks about how God will protect His servants.  That is what God does for us.  Our guardian angels want to fight off the temptations with us, and attack any of the fallen spirits that seek to do us harm.  Not even a lion or a dragon could stand a chance if we stay close to the Lord and trust in His power to keep us safe.  
    To resist sin and temptation, and to have our wounds healed, we need only ask God, and He will come to our aid.  God wants us to be holy and whole.  He knows how easy it is for us to operate out of false identities, not rooted in Christ, which then lead us to give in to temptation and fall into sin.  He knows beforehand what we often only find out after the fact: that giving in to temptation, sinning, and letting our wounds rule us is self-destructive and does not bring us happiness, even if it sometimes brings us passing pleasure.  
    Take advantage of this season of Lent.  Make this the acceptable time to be healed of sin and wounds through the Sacrament of Penance.  Ask God to help you to see where and why you hurt, and where and why you so easily fall into particular sins.  Those sins and wounds do not define you.  You are the beloved child of the Father, who with the Son and Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Into the Lenten Desert

First Sunday of Lent

St. Anthony being attacked by demons

    St. Anthony of the Desert, also known as St. Anthony of Egypt, is considered the Father of Monks.  According to St. Athanasius, who wrote his biography, St. Anthony, while twenty years old, heard the Gospel of the rich young man, that, in order to be happy, he had to sell his riches and follow Christ.  So he got rid of most of his possessions and land, gave his sister into the care of some local Christian virgins (no one knows how she took his decision), and eventually went into the wilderness of Egypt, and lived to the ripe old age of 105 (a blessing in addition to having the name Anthony).
    Why does St. Anthony go into the desert?  Why does Jesus go into the desert after His baptism, as heard in the Gospel today?  What’s the big deal with deserts?
    To begin with, it was the opposite of where man was supposed to be.  We heard in Genesis how God put Adam and Eve into a garden in Eden.  The garden had everything they needed for food and sustenance, and apparently it was warm enough where walking around without clothes wasn’t a problem, so certainly, the garden was not in Michigan!  But the point is that gardens are places of life, whereas deserts are places of death.
    For the Israelites, the desert was also the place of great testing after the Exodus from Egypt.  Recall that the desert was where the Israelites wandered for 40 years, after they doubted that God could take care of the giants who were occupying the land of Canaan, where God had promised to settle the Chosen People. 
    Last, but not least, just as the garden was seen as the property of God, the source of life, so the desert was seen as the property of the devil, the source of death.  At the Day of Atonement, the priests would send the goat, who had previously received the sins of the nation on it, into the desert to be handed over to the demon Azazel. 
    So Jesus, and St. Anthony in imitation of Him, goes into the desert, and there He is tempted.  Both Jesus and St. Anthony went there to battle Satan.  St. Matthew writes in his account of the Gospel that Jesus battled Satan verbally (Jesus, of course, won).  St. Athanasius records that St. Anthony was tempted in the desert with all sorts of temptations, and St. Anthony did not give in to those temptations; he won his contest. 
    For us, then, Lent is going into the desert.  The desert isn’t a fun place, but it’s a necessary place for us to grow in our relationship with God.  It’s a place of battle, and that means we have to fight.  But it’s the only way to get back to the garden.  In Lent we fight against our fallen earthly desires in order that our desire for heaven can be strengthened.  In Lent we fight against our temptations to sin, to be disobedient to God and obedient to Satan.  In Lent, we fight against hiding from God because of our shame, and we run to God to ask Him to heal the wounds the sin has created and clothe us with His holiness. 
    Lent is a privileged time to grow in holiness.  Jesus didn’t grow in holiness when He went into the desert, because He is holiness Himself.  But He gave us an example so that we could grow in holiness.  St. Anthony grew in holiness when he went into the desert, and gave us an example of how fasting, extra prayer, and concentrating on our relationship with God transform us by the power of God’s grace into the man or woman that God wants us to be. 
    Entering the desert for us can be more time for silence.  Not only for the young, but especially for the young, silence can feel like death!  To a society so used to having access to the internet all the time on the phone, or music all the time, or some sort of stimulus for our ears and eyes, silence can seem as barren as a sea of sand.  But it’s also a great way to become more accustomed to hearing the Word of God, which often is only audible in silence.
    Entering the desert for us can be making more time for prayer: speaking with and listening to God.  It seems like every year we get more and more things to do, and prayer often gets shoved out of the way, even before we ditch exercise!  And yet, without prayer, we can’t thrive as God wants us to thrive.  Again, it may feel deadly to set aside even another 5 minutes each day to tell God what’s on our hearts, and to listen to hear what God’s heart wants to say to us.  But it’s also a great way to know if we are following God’s will or our own will.
    As we enter this Lenten season, this Lenten desert, let’s follow the example of Jesus, and the example of St. Anthony.  Let’s go into the desert to fight our temptations and to do battle with Satan, a battle that we can assuredly win if we’re connected to Christ, as St. Anthony was.  Don’t be afraid of the dryness of the desert; don’t be afraid that it’s too difficult.  Enter the desert with Christ and St. Anthony, as a way to enter the Garden when we come to Easter.