Why Are We Running?

Easter Sunday

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Forrest Gump, after returning home from the Vietnam War, and after he sold his shrimping company, and after he had tried to figure out what to do with his life, got off his porch and, as he said, “That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run.  So, I ran to the end of the road, and when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of town.”  He ends up running through his county, through Alabama, and across the United States.  In reflecting on his super marathon, Forrest says, “For no particular reason, I just kept on going.”
    While I have run the CRIM once, and sometimes run as part of my cardio workouts, I’m more in the camp of those who run solely because they’re being chased or chasing after someone.  And as for being chased, as long as you’re not the slowest, generally you’re ok.  
    But John’s account of the first Easter Sunday talks about Sts. Peter and John running to the tomb.  They run there to see if what St. Mary Magdalene said was true: that someone had taken the Lord.  John, who wrote the Gospel, adds what I like to think was a little fun jab at Peter: “They both ran, but the other disciple [that is, John] ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.”  Peter would have been in trouble if they were running from a bear.
    But they both ran with a purpose: to see the empty tomb.  They saw the burial cloths, and the cloth that had covered the head in a separate area.  They believed Mary Magdalene, that someone had taken the body somewhere else, as St. John makes clear, “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”  It would not be until the Risen Lord appeared in the Upper Room that evening that they would know that He had risen from the dead.  
    Do we, like Peter and John, run towards the resurrection?  Or do we, like Forrest Gump, run for no particular reason?  As followers of Christ, we should run towards a goal, not aimlessly.  Our life should be a run towards the risen Christ in heaven.  If we’re just running, with no goal in mind, we never know where we might end up, and it might not be in heaven.  
    As we go through each day and the different activities of life, we can treat the parts of the day like smaller races: waking up and getting myself and/or the kids ready–100 meter dash; working in or out of the home–3200 meter run; making dinner and cleaning up the house–400 meter dash.  And as we begin each race, we should do so with a prayer.  Maybe it’s a simple prayer as you wake up, like a morning offering, of even the short pious phrase, “My Mother, My Confidence!”, entrusting our day to the intercession of the Blessed Mother.  Maybe it’s the sign of the cross as you enter your car to drive to work, or as you begin a load of laundry at home.  Maybe it’s the Angelus on your lunch break.  Maybe it’s Grace Before and/or After Meals.  Maybe it’s a pray of thanksgiving as you put your kids to bed or go to bed yourself.  But praying throughout the day makes sure that we’re running towards a goal, and not just running like a chicken with its head cut off.  
    If we don’t focus our energy, we run towards other goals than heaven–earthly prosperity, power, fame–which do not endure and will not save us.  Or, it’s more like running on a treadmill, which expends the same amount of energy, but without actually going anywhere.  To share in Christ’s Resurrection, we have to want to get there.  Simply making our legs go back and forth won’t necessarily get us closer to the new life that Christ wants for us and that fulfills our human nature.  How sad would it be to find out, at the end of our life, that we ran the wrong way, or even didn’t run any distance, but only ran in place.  

The empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

    Today, let us join Sts. Peter and John, running toward an empty tomb, because Christ has risen from the dead.  Let us run the race that God has put before us, not aimlessly, but with our eyes fixed on our goal: heaven.  Each day we can run the small and long races, which hopefully push us closer to eternal life.  We use prayer to make sure we’re on the right track, the path that leads to heaven.  
    Forrest Gump later in the movie says, “I had run for three years, two months, fourteen days and sixteen hours….I’m pretty tired.  Think I’ll go home now.”  He had run for years, but without a purpose, without reaching a goal.  May our race of life have purpose, like Peter and John, and, spurred on by the grace and mercy of God, lead us to heaven.  [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]

New Life

Easter Vigil
    It is a special moment in a family’s life when a child first learns to walk.  The child usually takes the first steps a bit gingerly and awkwardly, but as the child’s leg muscles and core develop, and as the child learns balance, he or she gains more independence concomitant with more mobility.  While there is a period where the child will go back and forth between crawling and walking, with the mastery of the skill of walking, the child gains a new form of life, and parents have to exercise increased vigilance over the child in his or her new life.
    Tonight as we celebrate the beginning of Easter at this Vigil Mass, we celebrate new life.  All of our readings told of some form of new life.  We heard about the beginning and new life of literally everything in the first reading as we heard God create the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.  We heard about Isaac’s new life after his father, Abraham, was willing to sacrifice Isaac, though God stopped Abraham at the last minute.  In the third readings we heard about the new life that Israel received after passing through the waters of the Red Sea, with their oppressors, the Egyptians, being destroyed in the same waters after the Israelites made it through safely.  Isaiah prophesies about new life, as he spoke for God in the fourth reading: “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back.”  Israel receives new life from its renewed covenant with God.  Likewise, in the fifth reading, Isaiah talks about the new life that comes when one receives the word of God, just like the fields receive new life from the snow and rain and the seed sown in the ground.  The prophet Baruch reminds the people that life comes from following the commandments of God, and abandoning their sinful ways.  And the prophet Ezekiel in the seventh reading speaks for God and tells the people that, while they turned away from God, and God let them feel the consequences of their sins, He will give them new life and prove His holiness and fidelity, so that the nations may know that He is the true God.  St. Paul talks about the new life that comes from baptism and dying with the Lord so that we can “live in newness of life” by rising with Christ.  And the Gospel is the climax of the focus on new life as we heard the angels proclaim that Christ had been raised, and Jesus Himself met the holy women on their way back to the Upper Room.

    My dear brothers and sisters, tonight is all about new life.  We enter into the new life that Christ won by His Death and Resurrection.  We renew our covenant with the Lord, the covenant began at Holy Baptism when we died with Christ so to rise with Him to newness of life.  And for some of our brothers and sisters, tonight will be the beginning of new life for them.
    Our Elect will receive newness of life through Holy Baptism, as God washes away all their sins, adopts them as His own children, and makes them members of His Holy Church.  Our candidates, those who were baptized in other Christian ecclesial communities, will join with our Elect in receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation, after they profess full faith with us, and they and even adults baptized as Catholics earlier who never completed the rest of the Sacraments of Initiation, will be given the new life that comes from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  And then all those who have not yet made their first Holy Communion will receive new life into them by sharing for the first time in the Body and Blood of Christ, the truly unblemished Lamb who saves us from death, just as the blood of the unblemished lamb over the lintels saved the Chosen People in Egypt from the Angel of Death, which wiped out the first born.  
    Whether we are receiving new life through the Sacraments for the first time, or renewing our covenant of new life with God tonight, God calls us to continue to live in new life, not in death.  It would be odd for a 5-year-old to return to crawling on the ground all the time, rather than walking.  We should approach our old, sinful way of life in the same way: it would be odd to go back to that.  Sin holds us down.  The new life of Christ gives us the freedom to run to God with the dignity of our heads held high on our own two feet.  The temptation will be to treat tonight as a beautiful ceremony, but only a ceremony that doesn’t change how we live.  Instead, God calls all of us to recommit to putting behind us our old habits of sin, and live in the new life of grace that Christ won for us.
    Tonight, Christ has risen from the dead.  Tonight, Christ takes your hand and invites you to walk with Him in the new life of holiness.  Tonight God reminds us that we should be dead to sin, and alive in the new life of Christ.  Alleluia!!

God's God-Forsakenness

Good Friday of the Passion of the Lord

    Most people, when they first learned it, were astonished to hear that a saintly woman like St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa, suffered great spiritual desolation as she worked to build her Missionaries of Charity. She once said to her spiritual director, “The place of God in my soul is blank.  There is no God in me.”  For someone who loved others so much, in such dramatic ways, I think most struggle to understand how a person could love so generously without a daily experience of God who is love.  And yet, she did.
    As we hear the Passion Narrative–we get John’s version today and we heard Matthew’s version on Palm Sunday–we hear about how Christ took upon Himself the weight of sin.  Not just the sin of His contemporaries, or even the sin that had taken place from Adam and Eve to Him, but the sin of all time.  And since sin is the separation from God, in some mysterious way, the Father allowed the Son, in His human nature, to experience the full weight of sin, which is why, as we heard Sunday, Christ cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Christ goes to the limit of what Bishop Barron calls “God-forsakenness” for our salvation.

    When we think about the pain of Good Friday, we often think of the physical pain that the Lord endured.  We might think about the pain from the nails piercing His Sacred Flesh, or the crown of thorns, puncturing the skin around his head, his hair matting with dried blood.  Or the blood on His back from the scourgings, dried and attached to his tunic, which was then taken from His Body, re-opening those wounds.  We might consider how He struggled to breathe as His Body hung upon the cross, His lungs filling with fluid as He slowly asphyxiated.  Christ redeemed all human pain united to Him by taking it upon Himself.
    But Christ also redeemed all spiritual pain through his own spiritual suffering.  Again, it seems odd to think of co-eternal Son of God going through desolation.  How could God not experience God’s presence?  And yet, in some mysterious way, Christ was allowed to taste the full effect of sin, which separates the person from God and His sanctifying grace and love. 
    Perhaps we have not had such a strong and drawn-out experience like St. Teresa of Calcutta.  Maybe we have never had a moment where we felt like God abandoned us or left us.  But I’m willing to bet many of us have had at least a few moments where we wondered where He was when we needed Him the most.  I bet many of us have had times when we go to pray and we have no desire to be there, and we feel like no one is listening.  God through Christ redeemed even those experiences where we feel the farthest from God, so that, even though maybe we don’t feel anything, we can know that He is there, because He went there already through His own Passion and Death.  
    The temptation in times where we feel like God does not care or is not present is to give up.  We don’t feel like praying so we skip our prayers.  We pray, but we don’t get the response we want or get the response when we want it, so we stop praying.  We pray, but it doesn’t even have the feeling of satisfaction of rest, and there is a tangible lack of the presence of God, so we run away from that experience and change our prayer habits to pray less so we don’t have to feel that lack of presence.  This would be equivalent to Christ coming down from the cross, as the Pharisees jeered at Him to do, because of the pain of His Passion.  
    Instead, God invites us to know that He is present, even when He feels absent, because He has gone to the utter limit of God-forsakenness on the cross to prove His love for us, and to prove that we cannot go anywhere that He has not already been.  And not only that, but He’ll stay on that cross with us, even if we don’t feel Him there, to redeem the experience of desolation for us.
    As you come forward to venerate the cross today, bring any of those times when you haven’t felt good in prayer, or you haven’t received the response you wanted, or maybe you have even felt like God wasn’t there or didn’t care.  Because when we bring those experiences, and any other suffering, to the cross of Christ, we know that, in due time, God will raise us up and give us new life from what we suffered.  Come, let us adore.

Sacramentum Unitatis

Mass of the Lord’s Supper

    In 1971, the Hillside Singers released their version of a British popular song by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway.  In the “Hilltop” version, as it was called, the producers of a Coca-Cola commercial used the song to promote their own pop, and suggested that if everyone would sing this song and buy each other a Coke the world could live in perfect harmony.  This commercial stood in the context of the on-going cold war with Communist Russia and the Vietnam War.
    Some 55 years later, wars still rage and the world and our country desire unity.  It seems like every election comes down to a slim majority determining the track of the country for the following years.  We equate compromise with cowardice.  Citizens in our country operate on very different philosophies about the human person and how society should operate, even including how to define men and women (if a person even admits that such a definition is possible).  We are a divided nation, perhaps not this divided since the Civil War.
    Our church, too, seems ever divided.  Some, even those who hold sacred office, seem to want to change unchangeable Church teaching.  Bishops and Cardinals sling verbal attacks at each other.  It seems we fight our own ecclesial war between progressivism and traditionalism, even if most of the soldiers are keyboard warriors.
    But singing a jingle and buying Coke (the drink, not the drug) will not bring unity.  The unity that we seek cannot come from our own making, though we do have to cooperate with it.  The unity we seek finds its source in Christ, not in us.  And as God assembles us tonight to celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, we celebrate the Sacramentum unitatis, the Sacrament of unity, and the one priesthood that our Lord established.

    The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity because it unites us with the one head of the Church, Jesus Christ.  When we receive worthily Holy Communion, unlike other food that becomes part of us, we become part of the Body of Christ, which we have just received.  Through the Eucharist, Christ brings together all those who believe in Him to be one with Him and one with each other.  The Didache, a second-century Greek ecclesial text talks about how many grains are gathered together to make the bread that becomes the Eucharist.  The many grains, ground into one batch of flour, join to each other through the water of baptism, and then bake in the fire of the Holy Spirit to become bread, which becomes the Body of Christ.  Likewise, many individual grapes are pressed through suffering to become juice which ferments over time to become wine, used to become the Blood of Christ.  Unity comes from diverse individuals, but all united through Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit, and suffering, which joins us to Christ.  
    But unity with Christ can only come when we submit ourselves to Christ.  The reason why the non-baptized, and even the baptized who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church, cannot receive Holy Communion is because Christ is the ruler for unity, not us.  And Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  We cannot reject parts of the truth that Christ has revealed, and then claim unity with Truth Incarnate.  That would be a lie.  Unity does not come from rejecting what we know to be true until we get to a lowest common denominator of truth, but from embracing the truth has Christ Himself has revealed it through His teachings in the Scriptures and in the Church.  
    Both the Eucharist and the priesthood bring about unity because they find their source and power in the one Jesus Christ.  When we conform our lives to Him, we find the true unity because we can join ourselves, diverse as we are, to Him.  He brings us together as different parts of His Mystical Body to cooperate with each other and do what we cannot do on our own.  I do some things well, but other things not as well, or even poorly.  You do other things well, but not maybe the same things I do well.  When we bring our gifts to Christ, He allows them to work together so that we support each other, rather than combatting each other or each trying to do everything on his or her own.  
    Coca-Cola won’t bring us unity, catchy jingle or not.  Politics will not bring us unity, no matter who has the executive and legislative branches and how many laws they pass.  True unity, the unity that we desire, can only come from Christ, who both instituted the priesthood and the Eucharist tonight.  May our worthy reception of Holy Communion, made possible by my consecrated hands, but through no worthiness of my own, unify us so that we can find the peace and harmony we all desire.

The Greatest Love Story

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  As a kid I disliked today’s Gospel and the Gospel we’ll hear on Good Friday, both of which are Passion Narratives (today’s from St. Matthew and Friday’s from St. John).  I disliked them because they are so long, and I already knew what happened.  The Lord celebrates the Last Supper, goes to the Garden of Gethsemane, gets arrested, goes through a sham trial, is turned over to the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, carries His cross to Golgotha, and dies.  

    As an adult, the Passion Narratives are still long.  And I still know the story.  But it’s the story of how God showed His love for us.  It’s like “The Princess Bride” or “Band of Brothers.”  I know what happens; I can probably quote a fair amount of lines.  But I return to them because they speak about the deepest meanings of life: love and sacrifice.  But as much as “The Princess Bride” and “Band of Brothers” talk about love and sacrifice, the Passion Narratives tell us about the greatest love and the greatest sacrifice.  The greatest love because God’s love for us is infinite; the greatest sacrifice because God, the source of all life, experienced death so that we, who deserved death, could return to the source of life and enjoy eternal life in heaven.
    In “Band of Brothers,” the early focus, and a theme throughout, is “Currahee,” a Cherokee word which means “we stand alone together.”  In Christ’s Passion, He stands alone.  And yet, we stand with Him now.  We stand alone together as Christ suffers for us and pays the price for sin, death, though He had no sin.  Life contends with death, as we will hear on Easter Sunday in the sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes: Mors et vita duello.  But we know that life will win.  As Westley says in “The Princess Bride”: “Death cannot stop true love.  All it can do is delay it for a while.”  Nowhere is that phrase more true than in Christ, whose heart stopped beating after He died on the cross, but whose love never stopped and will never stop for us.
    We know the story.  We know what happens.  But we need to hear it again, however long it takes, because all time comes back to this one week when the Son of David and Lord of David entered into His city with shouts of joy, and was led out of His city by a foreign government, which was cajoled to act by His own religious leaders and people, and He backed up the words He spoke at the Last Supper with action: “Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.”  This is the greatest love story, the greatest sacrifice story of all time, greater even than “The Princess Bride” and “Band of Brothers.”  But it’s not just a story; it’s the truth.  And the truth has set us free from sin and death.  [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]

Compassion in Passiontide

Passion Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  When we hear the word “passion,” the first thing that comes to most of our minds is probably a strong emotion or desire.  We talk about a person driven by his or her passion.  Or we say that something was done in the heat of passion.  Sometimes passion even takes on a sense of lust, like the phrase “passionate kissing.”  

    But today’s celebration of Passion Sunday has nothing to with a strong desire or emotion.  And it certainly has nothing to do with lust.  Instead, Passion Sunday takes its name from the Latin word passio, which means suffering (very different from the way we often use the word passion today!).  When we talk about a martyr’s death in the Church, we often speak about the saint’s passio.  Today begins our two-week special focus on the suffering of Christ, leading up to and including His Passion, which happened beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane and culminating by His suffering on the cross as the Roman soldiers crucified Him.
    We start to get a sense of this from the Gradual and the Tract today, as we hear about the enemies of Christ and those who fight against Him, as prophesied by the psalmist.  The Gospel account surely starts this sense in which some of the Jews turned against the Lord.  They even sought to stone Him to death in today’s Gospel passage.  And our epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews draws for us the comparison between the death of Christ and the death of a sacrificed animal, and how much more efficacious Christ’s sacrifice was.
    How do we approach Passiontide, this time of the Passion of the Lord?  We start with compassion.  Compassion comes from two Latin words, cum meaning with, and passio, meaning, as I said earlier, suffering.  We suffer with Christ.  Hopefully we do not start suffering with Christ only today.  All of our Lenten practices should be a way that we suffer with Christ.  St. Paul talks about how he suffers with and in Christ in the first chapter of his epistle to the Colossians, verse 24: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church.”  Christ’s suffering on the cross forgave all the sins of the world for all time.  However, because Christ joins us to Himself through Holy Baptism where we become a member of His Mystical Body, the Church, when we suffer, Christ suffers.  Paul had heard this message earlier, when the Lord spoke from the heavens and asked Saul (as he was called then) why Saul persecuted Christ.  Those who had been baptized, whom Saul persecuted, were part of Christ, and so Christ suffered through them.
    But suffering with Christ doesn’t happen by default.  Suffering with Christ means that we purposefully offer our pain, our frustration, our fatigue, our stress, our penances with Christ’s suffering on the cross so that they can be salvific: vehicles of God’s grace.  This is what the sisters (or maybe your parents) meant when they told us to “offer it up.”  We offer our sufferings to Christ for our own holiness, or for the holiness of others.  If we don’t offer it up, then our pain, our frustration, our fatigue, our stress, our penances are simply lacks of goodness, fullness, or wholeness, but provide no benefit to us.
    Suffering with Christ also means offering our love to Him as we think back on what He endured for us.  When someone we loves suffer, sometimes we try to take that suffering away.  But when the suffering cannot be taken away, we simply stay with the person to assure them that they’re not alone.  When a young man breaks up for the first time with his girlfriend, there’s nothing his parents can do to stop that suffering.  But they can be there for the man to help him through the heartache and help him realize that he is still loved, even if it’s no longer by that young woman.  We cannot take Christ’s sufferings away, but we can remain with Him to let Him know that He is not alone.  
    On the cross, Christ called out with the words of Psalm 21: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  As Christ took all sin from all time upon Himself, He felt the consequence of sin, alienation from God, even as He remained united to God in His Divinity.  But Christ also felt the loneliness of knowing that most of His closest friends, the Apostles, had abandoned Him in His time of need.  As we walk through Passiontide, may we be more like the Blessed Mother, St. John the Apostle, St. Mary Magadalene, and the other righteous women, who stayed with Christ at the foot of the cross, letting Christ know that He is not alone.
    This Passiontide, our goal is to be compassionate.  Certainly suffering with Christ through His sufferings and crucifixion, but also suffering with those with whom Christ identifies: the different members of His mystical body, our brothers and sisters, especially in the Church.  May we not be impassible, incapable of suffering, but unite our sufferings to Christ on the cross, and sharing our love and devotion to the one who suffered agony for our salvation: Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.   

Proving His Identity

Fifth Sunday of Lent–Third Scrutiny
    With the increase of AI and internet bots, it’s not uncommon for webpages that require a log-in to also require you to verify you’re human.  Apparently, all it takes to be human is the ability to select pictures with bridges, traffic lights, or motorcycles.  It strikes me as funny the different times and situations when we have to prove our identity.  In an ever-more-automated world, I suppose we pray the price for security with electronic hoops through which to jump.
    In the totally un-automated time of Christ, He still had to prove who He was.  If we go through the Gospels we see Jesus proving His divine identity to the people.  Sometimes it’s a whole crowd, other times it’s just the disciples or very few apostles.  We have the miraculous catch of fish when Jesus calls Peter to follow the Lord.  We have the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (which maybe led Peter away from believing in the Lord’s goodness).  Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding when it ran out.  Then there’s the healing of the paralytic, lowered through the roof, where Jesus forgives the man’s sins and then heals the man of his paralysis.  There’s the multiplication of the loaves and fish for thousands at different times.  Jesus heals the blind and the deaf and mute.  He calms the storm when the Apostles are in the boat and afraid they are about to drown.  He walks on water, and even invites Peter to do the same.  He expels demons, including once into a herd of swine.  He heals the centurion’s servant from afar, and raises to life the daughter of Jairus and the son of the widow of Nain.  Lepers approach Jesus, and not only does Jesus not catch leprosy, He heals them of it.  Two weeks ago we heard Jesus reveal private details of her life to a Samaritan woman.  Last week we heard of the healing of the man who was blind from birth, something that was unheard of, as the man testifies.  
    But apparently, even with all these miracles, people still wondered who Jesus was.  Even with all these miracles, Jesus often bemoans the people’s lack of faith, and their ever-continuing doubt about His identity.  They even accuse Jesus of being in cahoots with the devil when Jesus casts out demons from people, and accuse Christ of breaking the Law of Moses.  In His own home town and in Capernaum, Jesus cannot do many miracles because of their lack of faith.

    Today’s Gospel shows the culmination of all of Jesus’ signs or miracles.  After four days of being in the tomb, Jesus raises His friend, Lazarus from the dead.  There was no way to claim this was a parlor trick or a sleight of hand.  Lazarus was clearly dead.  And not just mostly dead (as Miracle Max declares in “The Princess Bride”), but dead as a doornail.  In fact, as the Jews knew, based upon their concern at rolling back the stone that there would be a stench, putrefaction, where bacteria starts to break down tissues, would have started in 2-3 days after death, or 1-2 days before Jesus arrived in Bethany.  Still, Jesus prays, and raises Lazarus from the dead, and restores bodily wholeness to Lazarus.
    Certainly this would prove Jesus’ identity, even more than clicking boxes with bridges, traffic lights, and motorcycles.  And yet, as we will hear next week on Palm Sunday, while many people believed–the crowd that would welcome Jesus in as the Son of David–there will still many who did not believe: certainly the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees, and maybe even Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.  
    Do we believe that Jesus is who He says He is?  Do we take His miracles as proof of His divinity?  Or do we doubt?  Certainly, belief requires faith, which makes the leap from what is known to what is unknown or cannot be proven scientifically.  But faith is also a form of knowledge.  And when that faith has reason to assist it, even if we are not 100% sure, we can have a certitude in our faith.  For example, I’m relatively sure that my car is in my garage right now.  I can’t see it right now, so I don’t have scientific proof that it’s there, but I remember parking it there yesterday, and the garage door, last time I checked, was still closed and intact, so that I don’t have any suggestion that someone else has taken it without my permission.  But, strictly speaking, I only know it’s there by faith.
    When bad things happen to us, we can doubt in the presence of God, or that God truly loves us.  We wonder why God would let us suffer so much?  How could a good God let evil happen?  The devil tempts us to abandon these true stories we have heard from the Gospels where God proves His love for us, because what we want didn’t happen, or because we had to undergo something bad.  
    In the midst of these temptations to doubt, our Lord invites us to look at the evidence: His teachings that help us live a happier life; His miracles which prove that He is God.  Look especially to this miracle, the culmination of His previous miracles, as the nail in the coffin (pun intended) that God can do anything.  But even greater than that, is the miracle that we will hear about over the next two Sundays: how God, in the Person of Jesus, died for us so that the reign of sin and death could be ended, and the punishment due to sin, which first entered the world through Adam and Eve, could be remitted.  And then, to prove that nothing has power over God, God will raise Jesus from the dead to show us that we, too, can have new life if we are joined to Him through Holy Baptism and through following His way of life.
    My dear elect, you are also signs to us of God’s love and the veracity of what Jesus said.  You have come to believe in Him, through your own pilgrimage of faith, and your choice strengthens our faith.  In these last few weeks, doubts may enter your mind.  But have confidence in the choice you have made, and do not listen to the temptations of the evil one.  God does not only tell us to believe in Him, He gives us miracles and signs which attest to His Divine identity and His power and grace.  God desires to give you new life through His Death and Resurrection.  Yes, faith is required, but it is not a blind-faith, but rather a reasonable belief that God can do all things, because we have heard and experienced through the millennia how He has done all things, even beyond the laws of nature.
    All of us may have doubts from time to time.  We may wonder if our faith will be rewarded, or if it’s just a desire.  Look to the miracles in the Gospels and through the Church for 2,000 years.  Look to the witness of the martyrs who died rather than give up their faith.  Soon we will celebrate, once more, how Christ once-and-for-all proved His love and His power: through His Death and Resurrection which gave us freedom from sin and death, and opened the kingdom of heaven for us.

Cadets

Fourth Sunday of Lent

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Over the past ten or so years, the Michigan State Police has re-vamped its Cadet Program as a way to get young men and women connected to the State Police while still college-aged.  Part of the expectation is that they use the time (for which they get paid) to make sure they are physically fit enough to be admitted to recruit school.  Recently I was present when a few cadets, including our two cadets at the Flint Post, did a baseline assessment of their physical fitness.  They had to do 32 sit-ups and 30 push-ups (each within a minute), do a vertical jump and reach at least 17.5 inches from their vertical arm extension, and do a half-mile shuttle run in 4:29.  Most cadets don’t simply do this physical test cold: they work at surpassing the standard before they take the test.  But if they don’t pass it at first, they have more opportunities before they are accepted to reach the physical standard and hopefully enter the 20-week academy to become a Michigan State Police Trooper.
    Just as the cadets have to keep their eyes on the goal of becoming a Trooper, the Church sets before us today the goal of making it to heaven.  For the gradual today we pray Psalm 121: “I rejoiced when they said to me: let us go to the house of the Lord.”  For the tract we heard Psalm 124: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, that stands forever.”  And we will return to Psalm 121 at the Communion Antiphon, as we hear: “Jerusalem is built as a city, strongly compact.  It is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.”  Of course, while the psalmist had the earthly Jerusalem in mind, God, the divine author, had the Jerusalem above in mind.  We rejoice because we go on pilgrimage through life towards heaven.  And when we trust in the Lord, nothing can shake us, because we are like heaven, which endures even as the ages pass.
    St. Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, also references the Jerusalem above, which is like Isaac, whereas Sinai, the mountain of the law, references the earthly reality.  The Apostle challenges us not simply to look to the rules, but to the freedom that comes from allowing God’s grace to transform us, and the freedom that comes from conforming our wills to God’s.  During our Lenten pilgrimage, we do well to keep this in mind.  Our goal should not just be not eating meat on Fridays, or certain extra prayers, or generosity to the Church and the poor through almsgiving.  Those practices, like the law, do not save in and of themselves.  But when we utilize those penitential practices to live a life more like Christ, that is, allowing those practices to put to death in us anything that does not come from God, we gain freedom because we live as God created us: in accordance with His will.
    It can be so easy to keep the law mentality that St. Paul critiques in the epistle.  We set out penances for ourselves and presume that they will save us.  We take on a Pelagian mentality that we earn our salvation by the good works we do, and God simply approves of our struggle and rewards us for it.  But our penitential practices, like the law, does not save.  Christ saves us; we do not save ourselves.  But we follow God’s eternal law and we chastise ourselves with Lenten practices in order to discipline our flesh and realize that all too often we live more like an animal, by instinct and drive, than like a child of God, living by following the will of God and the higher ends of the spiritual realm.  
    We don’t teach, like the Manichaeans, that the body is evil, but we do know that it operates under the weight of sin and concupiscence, and desires things we should not desire, or desires things at inopportune times.  We strive to live, not just by bread, but by the Word of God.  We pray because we need communion with the Father to ignore the temptations of the devil.  We give alms because generosity with others, especially those who will not return payment, makes us more like our heavenly Father who makes the sun shine on the good and the bad, and makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust.  

    And just like the cadets not only have to work out to be able to do their push-ups, sit-ups, and run, but also have to eat well to stay in shape, we hear the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish in today’s Gospel, which starts out the famous Bread of Life discourse, which is St. John’s treatment of the Eucharist (rather than the synoptic Gospels which focus on the Eucharist at the Last Supper).  The Eucharist is the spiritual food that we need, not only to help us during our Lenten penances, but also to help us on our pilgrimage to heaven.  When we receive Holy Communion in a state of grace, God strengthens our souls to more easily choose the good and reject the bad.  He gives us the Body and Blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, to transform us and make His will our own more and more.  
    We are all cadets, not striving to be Michigan State Police Troopers, but striving to be the saints that God called us to be in Holy Baptism.  To do that, we have to keep our mind on our heavenly goal, and eat the right spiritual food that will strengthen us towards our divinely-appointed end.  May our Lenten practices and our worthy reception of Holy Communion keep us in good spiritual shape so that we can appear, without trepidation and with a clear conscience, at the judgement seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.   

God's Timing

Fourth Sunday of Lent–Second Scrutiny

    Why did it take so long?  A person might ask this question under any set of circumstances.  Maybe a person asks this question when he or she finally finds the right person to marry.  Maybe a person asks this question after discovering how to put behind harmful habits or patterns of behavior.  Maybe a person asks this after a particularly long train finally clears the railroad crossing.  Maybe it’s a seminarian after 8 or 10 years of seminary on the eve of his ordination to the priesthood.
    This question came to mind when reflecting on the healing of the man born blind, which we heard today in the Gospel.  We don’t know exactly how old the man was.  But he was old enough to give testimony to the Pharisees, which likely means that he was probably at least in adolescence.  But his parents were still alive, so he wasn’t exceedingly old.  For argument’s sake, let’s say he was around 20 or 25 years old.  So, why did it take 20 to 25 years for God to heal him?  Jesus said, “it is so that the works of God may be made visible through him.”  
    When we think about how things should go, we do so with our own vantage point and our own assumptions of how reality should be.  We can be like Samuel who presumes that God’s reasoning will be like ours.  But as the choice of King David showed, and as God Himself told Samuel, He does not see things the same ways we do.  Samuel thought that the best looking son should be king.  But God saw David’s heart, how devoted David was to God, and so chose the least-likely son of Jesse to be king.
    If you were to ask a seminarian, he would probably gladly eliminate a year, or two, or six from seminary formation, which can be academically rigorous and often pushes a man beyond what he thinks he can do.  But, of course, in the eight to ten long years of formation, the seminarian learns very important theology and how to best serve the people of God,  as well as how to celebrate the sacraments.  If you would have asked me in my second of eight years of seminary, I probably would have said I was ready enough to become a priest.  But I learned a lot about God, the Church, pastoral guidance, and how to be a good priest in the six years that followed.  Not every part of seminary was enjoyable, and sometimes not everything was even useful, but it helped form me into the priest I am today.
    It seems odd to think that it was not better for God to heal the man born blind earlier.  But who knows how receptive the man would have been to believe in Jesus later if God had healed the blind man earlier.  But because the healing happened at that point, not only did the blind man come to believe in Jesus, but it also helped the disciples to believe that Jesus is God.  
    Sometimes we might wonder about God’s timing.  We might think that something should have happened earlier, or that a different result should have happened.  And maybe in our mind our reasoning even makes sense.  But God sometimes sees things differently than we do.  And while it may seem cruel at times, God’s ways are always for our salvation and holiness and are made out of love.  God cannot do otherwise than act out of love, because God is love.  Anything else would be a contradiction of God’s nature.  
    Admittedly, this takes great trust and faith.  Because God is infinite and we are finite, we only get glimpses into His will, permissive or directive.  But when we trust in the love of God and His plan, we can accept timing that doesn’t make sense to us.  Sometimes the good is simply the growth in virtue that can only come through struggle.  A child often thinks that a parent is cruel when the child has to eat vegetables instead of ice cream.  But it’s not cruel, but rather helps the child eat food that will help it develop healthily.  We are God’s children, and our loving Father sometime wants us to develop differently than we want to develop.  Sometimes we would rather not grow in virtue, but God wants us to grow in virtue.  So we are allowed to go through crucibles which help us, by God’s grace, to grow in virtue and further our trust in God.
    My dear elect: as we celebrate the second scrutiny, you might have asked yourself on this or other occasions why God allowed you to wait until now to discover the truth and become a child of God and open your pathway to heaven.  I wish I could give you each a detailed answer, but what I can say is that, in Divine Providence, now was the perfect time so that the works of God might be made visible through you.  You see, when a person is baptized, especially adults, the faith of other Catholics is reinvigorated.  And perhaps other non-Catholics might decide to investigate becoming Catholic more because they see you becoming Catholic.  Who knows?  Maybe someone here needed your witness, your desire for baptism, to bolster his or her own faith.  If you would have come to faith earlier, perhaps that person would have lost out on what he or she needed.  But only God knows that.  We can only trust that, for you, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation, as St. Paul says.

Bl. Solanus Casey

    There’s nothing wrong with wondering, ‘Why now?  Why not earlier?  Why not later?’  But, on this side of eternity, we will never know exactly why.  Still, today God invites us to trust in His loving will, His Divine Providence.  After we ask this question, our response should be, “God, I may never know why you chose to allow things to happen as you did.  But I praise you, God, for your will and how it moves me closer to the end you desire for me: eternal happiness in heaven.”  To quote Bl. Solanus Casey, “Blessed be God in all his designs.” 

A Fragrant Aroma

Third Sunday of Lent
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  When we think about powerful senses in humans, the sense of smell may not immediately come to mind.  Sure, for dogs like bloodhounds we might think about the sense of smell as powerful, but human noses aren’t always the most sensitive, especially if you had COVID.  But, in reality, the sense of smell, while not as strong as in other animals, has a certain power to it in humans.  Even though my grandparents have been dead for almost six years now, I can still imagine the smell of their houses, and sometimes if I smell the perfume my grandmothers wore, it brings them immediately to mind.  Or have you ever noticed that schools tend to have the same smell, even after decades have passed since you attended classes there?  Or there’s something about the smell of a roast in a crockpot that just makes you feel at ease.  
    St. Paul, in the epistle today, tells us to be imitators of God and live in love, “as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.”  We probably don’t think about this, but when Jews offered sacrifices in the temple, there was probably a nice smell in the air: the smell of roast lamb, or beef, or even grains and wine cooking.  I’m sure among pagans, people imagined that the gods enjoyed the smell of roasting meat just as much as they did, and that the smell would appease their gods.  Even Genesis 8:20-21 says: “Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and choosing from every clean animal and every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar.  When the Lord smelled the sweet odor, the Lord said to himself: Never again will I curse the ground because of human beings.”
    So what is this odor or aroma that pleases God?  Sometimes in the church we talk about the odor of sanctity, though in other speech we tend to use the word odor for a negative smell, which is probably why we use the word aroma when we mean a positive smell.  To me, the smell of holiness would probably smell like Sacred Chrism, which is olive oil with a balsam perfume added to it, or the smell of nice incense.  
    But, of course, St. Paul is not talking about an aroma that our noses can pick up, but rather that we offer ourselves as a sacrifice to God, and that our sacrifice pleases God, like the smell of roast lamb pleases many people.  And the thing that dies in our sacrifice to God consists of our sinful self, while our holy self rises to God like a pleasing aroma.  No longer are we roasting lamb or oxen or birds, nor do we burn up grain, wine, or oil, but we offer ourselves to God the Father, united to the cross of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We don’t destroy stuff in order to appease God, but we ask God’s grace to destroy in us all that God does not find worthy.  
    In Isaiah 1:11, God says, “What do I care for the multitude of your sacrifices?…I have had enough of whole-burn rams and fat of failings; In the blood of calves, lambs, and goats I find no pleasure….To bring offerings is useless; incense is an abomination to me.”  But in the same chapter in verses 16-17 God says, “Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes; cease doing evil; learn to do good.  Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.”  The point of sacrifice was not simply to cook something for God.  God intended the sacrifice to remind the people that they had to destroy that which was evil in them, and live for what was good, especially caring for those who could not care for themselves: the unjustly condemned, the orphan, and the widow.  

    All the sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed to the one efficacious sacrifice of Christ on the cross, the truly unblemished Lamb of God.  But what pleased God with the sacrifice of Christ?  That He willingly gave up His entire self to God, trustingly putting Himself in the providential arms of the Father.  Psalm 50, the Miserere, anticipates this when it says, “For you do not desire sacrifice or I would give it; a burnt offering you would not accept.  My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn.”  Or Psalm 39: “Sacrifice and offering you do not want; you opened my ears.  Holocaust and sin-offering you do not request; so I said, ‘See; I come with an inscribed scroll written upon me.  I delight to do you will, my God.’”
    God does not want sheep or goats or oxen, or even bread, wine, or oil.  What He wants is us: all of us.  But unlike animal or food offerings, when we give them to God, we lose nothing.  In fact, when we offer ourselves to God, we gain everything.  It’s like the exchange in the Eucharist: we give God bread and wine (which is truly meant to represent ourselves), and He transforms it by the power of His grace into the Body and Blood of Christ, a gift we could never achieve on our own, and which strengthens us to give ourselves to the Father by joining us to the one perfect sacrifice of Christ on the cross, though we celebrate it in an unbloody manner.  
    This Lent, we should recommit ourselves to smelling good.  Not because we have showered and washed off the grime of the day; not because we have put on deodorant to mask our body odor; not because we use cologne or perfume to make ourselves smell manly or womanly.  But we should seek to have the odor of holiness, a virtuous life of grace, the fragrant aroma of a life offered entirely to the providential love of the Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.