Like Fr. Mulcahy

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Whenever I ask my parents what they want for their birthday or Christmas, they usually say they don’t need anything.  There may be a few things that they might pick-up for themselves, but they’re usually not that communicative about what those things are.  And the things that I usually think of that they probably would enjoy, are a bit out of my price range for gifts. 

As we begin our five-week trek through John chapter 6 today, we start with Jesus feeding the 5,000 plus.  We heard a similar story in our first reading from the Second Book of Kings with the Prophet Elisha.  Elisha has twenty barley loaves for 100 people, and Jesus has five loaves and two fish for over 5,000 people.  When Philip says that they don’t have enough, Andrew replies that they only have a little, and certainly not enough for everyone.  But Jesus takes that little, and miraculously multiplies it so that everyone has enough, and, in fact, there are twelve wicker baskets left over.  God provides for His people, even when all they have is just a little gift.

I’m a pretty big fan of the TV show “M*A*S*H.”  And, as you might imagine, I identify a bit with Fr. Mulcahy.  But it goes beyond the fact that he’s a priest chaplain in the show, and I’m a priest and chaplain in real life.  Fr. Mulcahy is a little naïve, doesn’t get the big crowds for Sunday services, and doesn’t have much that is spectacular about him.  In one of the episodes, he has to compete against a great runner for a competition between two different units.  And even though the other runner is far superior, Fr. Mulcahy does not back down and runs his best race anyway.  I won’t spoil the episode for you by telling you what happens, in case you want to watch it.

I’m a bit like Fr. Mulcahy.  I’ve lived a fairly sheltered life.  People don’t generally look at me with the word “spectacular” on their mind (in fact, one of my great disappointments in life is how little time I have spent and spend on my own physical fitness).  I’ve got no great talents (one of my classmates has a special charism of healing).  I enjoy learning but I’m not a great student or teacher (one of my other classmates learns foreign languages with ease and has his doctorate).  I work hard at preaching, but I’m no Bishop Barron or Fulton Sheen, let alone St. John Chrysostom.  I’m just Fr. Anthony Strouse, with a few small talents from a small town, doing his best to lead people to God and run a parish.

But, like Fr. Mulcahy in “M*A*S*H,” I can honestly say that I try to give what little I have to God, and He uses them to bring about some good.  I know it’s God, because it’s far beyond what I could have ever done on my own.  God takes this pipsqueak of a man, with an average amount of small talents, and does great things, just like He did almost 2,000 years ago when He fed all those people.  There’s nothing spectacular about five loaves and two fish.  But God made it more than enough through Jesus.  

Maybe some of you are the brightest in your field, or the richest, or the strongest, or the most socially connected.  Praise God for those things and use them for His glory.  But if you’re like me, and don’t have much to offer the Lord, I would invite you today to give it to Him anyway.  How? you say.  Well, as you might have noticed in my three years here, I’m big on the liturgy, and celebrating it well.  And part of celebrating that well is for all the people at Mass to give Jesus everything, even the smallest thing, that has happened since you last came to Mass.  Just give it to Jesus.  Tell him about it in your prayer before Mass begins.  Visualize putting whatever it is you have with the bread and the wine that are brought forward.  And as you listen in silence to the Eucharistic Prayer I say, see the angels taking those small things and big things to God the Father in heaven, through Jesus Christ His Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  And then God will do something great with it.  I don’t know what it will be, but when we give our best gifts to God, no matter how small they are, He always receives them as the best gift from His children, and transforms us and the world by it.  

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe letting the liturgy transform us by offering ourselves to God the Father through Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit won’t have a huge effect.  Maybe its just a cockamamie belief of mine that I picked up through years of study.  But I don’t think I am wrong on this.  And I think the Mass can transform us if we truly offer ourselves with the bread and the wine.  Now, it hasn’t made me a strong stud, I still don’t have the gifts that many of my brother priests do, and I’m certainly not a saint yet.  But I know it’s helping to change me, for the better, and helping me become the saint that God wants me to be.  

So maybe try it out yourselves, if you’re not already.  In these moments of silence after the homily, think of what you want to give God, no matter how insignificant you think it might be.  After all, if God can feed 5,000 plus with five loaves and two fish, imagine what He could do with you!

Wasting Time with Jesus

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Brad Paisley, one of the great country music singers of our time, has a song he released in 2005 called, “Time Well Wasted.”  He goes through all the things he could have been doing, things that were very practical, like raking leaves, washing the car, etc., but talks about how spending time with his love was “time well wasted.”

America, in particular, has a thing against “wasting” time.  We place work and productivity on a very high pedestal.  And there’s something good about that.  Work can be sanctifying if we unite it to Jesus, and producing new ideas and new products helps to better society.  But the temptation in our prodigiousness, the excess of that virtue of working hard, is working too hard, and missing out on the important things of life.  I remember when I was studying in Italy how things would close down for a few hours around lunch.  Now, I don’t mean to offend, and certainly I don’t want to stereotype too much, but in Europe, Italians are not known for being hard workers in the first place.  But they always make sure to take a break in the middle of the day for pranzo, lunch, and a nice riposo, a nice nap.  And while we might think that’s a waste of daylight, there’s something good about spending time with family and friends to enjoy a leisurely meal and rest.  The work will always be there, but as some people learn in tragic ways, friends and family are not always with us on earth.

Bishop Barron, in his new series on the Mass, talks about how the Mass is the ultimate form of play.  That might seem counterintuitive, given how serious we take the Mass.  But, think about children and how seriously they take playing.  Or think about sports and how seriously we take playing those games.  There are rules, there are expectations, there are uniforms.  So often, we think that the most important thing is work, and we play if we have time.  But play can be more important, especially when we talk about the Mass.

It’s no secret that people don’t go to Mass anymore.  We notice it as we look around, and as we prepare for the transition to two Masses per weekend.  So why are Masses so scarcely populated, and not just here in Flint, where people continue to leave the city, but around the United States and around the world?

Jesus, after His disciples had returned, invited the apostles to go off “to a deserted place and rest awhile.”  The ones whose very title, “apostle,” means one who is sent out, need time to rest with Jesus.  And what do we do at Mass, if not rest with Jesus?  We worship God, and that is most important, but just like the Jews on the Sabbath, we rest, and worshipping God allows us to rest from our labors, not because we are lazy, but because we imitate God in resting from His work of creation.  I think that part of the reason for people not coming to Mass is that they expect the Mass to provide something that it’s not meant to provide.  If you want to be entertained at Mass, then you will surely be disappointed, because the Mass is not a movie or a show.  If you want an emotional or spiritual high, then you may be disappointed, because the Mass is not meant to appeal to every personality style and temperament every week.  If you want music that speaks to you each and every time, then you’re putting way too much pressure on the Mass, because Catholic music, truly Catholic music, is meant to be adding dressing to Scripture.  Can we be entertained at Mass?  It happens; some priests are funny, and others, like me, are just funny-looking.  Can we get an emotional or spiritual high?  It can happen, and praise God when it does!  Can music touch our hearts in a way that mere words cannot?  Sometimes the words put together with a certain musical setting hits us right in the feels.  But Mass is meant to help us worship God and rest in Him.  

I know that’s a tough message.  I know it’s not the message we want to hear, because we want to be entertained, we want the high, we want the feels.  But too many sheep have wandered away from the fold because what they want from the Mass is not what the Mass is meant to give.  Sometimes even priests have mislead and scattered the flock by overly inserting themselves in the Mass, making the Mass a performance of their personality, instead of celebrating the Mass as the Church asks.  And I also know that sometimes, despite my own best efforts, my homilies are boring.  Our sound system could also use some updating. 

But I invite you to come to St. Pius X each weekend after your weekly work of spreading the Gospel to rest with Jesus and to worship Him, who brought us near by His blood, and who reconciled us to God through His Body through the Cross.  Sunday sports may sound more enticing.  The lawn may need mowing and the laundry may need cleaning.  The kids may be a handful and may be noisy.  But come to Mass anyway, to rest with Jesus.  And since you all already do come to Mass, tell your kids, tell your godchildren, tell your friends that Jesus knows you need a rest–not entertainment, not an emotional or spiritual roller coaster, but rest.  Receive the Body of Christ.  Taste the fountain of immortality.  Waste time with Jesus and worship Him who gives you the precious gift of rest in Him.

Domesticated Prophets

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

According to the most scholarly of sources, Wikipedia, dogs were domesticated sometime around 14,700 years ago, based on a dog being buried near a human grave.  Since then, we have many different varieties of domestic dogs that are called, because of their long association with humans, man’s best friend.

What our early ancestors did with dogs, we have done with Biblical prophets: we have domesticated them.  We have taken out, or chosen to ignore, many of the wild traits, in order to make it more comfortable to live with them.  But prophets have always been quite eccentric people that were not, at first blush, the best spokesmen for God.  Moses, the first great prophet, was slow of speech and tongue, according to his own words.  And he, by the power of God, changed a staff into a snake, caused the Nile to turn to blood, and brought a number of plagues upon Egypt.  Samuel, the great prophet who anointed the first kings of Israel, Saul and David, killed the Amalekite King Agag because Saul, was ordered by God to kill King Agag, but refused to do so.  Elisha was jeered at by some small

boys, who said, “‘Go up, baldhead!” and he cursed them, and two she-bears came out of the woods and tore them to pieces.  In chapter 20 of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, God tells Isaiah, “Go and take off the sackcloth from your waist, and remove the sandals from your feet.  This he did, walking naked and barefoot.”  And it says in the next verse that this happened for 3 years.  Jeremiah told the king that Jerusalem, the place of the great Temple of the Lord, was going to be destroyed, and no one believed him.  And St. John the Baptist, the last and greatest of prophets, wore a camel-hair tunic and ate locusts and honey.  None of these seem to be people that civilized folk would want to be around.

And perhaps that is part of the reason they were never accepted in their home towns, as Jesus said in the Gospel today.  We tend to think of the prophets as nice guys who were able to tell the future.  We make them pretty well-dressed, white-bearded men.  But they railed against the injustices of their day and often became very unpopular in the process (walking around naked for 3 years can tend to make a person unpopular).  In many cases, they spoke out against the king, because he was the leader of the people.  But no matter whether they spoke out against a person or a situation, they always spoke the words that God gave them to say.

It’s cliché, but as prophets, God calls us to give comfort to the afflicted and affliction to the comfortable.  Jesus, as the source of prophecy and the Prophet about whom Moses spoke, to whom the Chosen People needed to listen, lived this out in a most perfect way.  To the Pharisees and scribes, those who were assured about their own righteousness, Jesus did not have great words to say, calling them “broods of vipers” and “white-washed sepulchers.”  But to the sinners, those who were often excluded from the daily life of Israel, Jesus preached love and acceptance, even while calling them, too, to conversion.  The woman caught in adultery is not stoned for her sin, but is told to go and sin no more.  The Samaritan woman at the well was convicted by Jesus about her many husbands, but she is also encouraged to drink the living water that comes from Jesus so that she can have eternal life.

There are parts of our life that God calls others to confront in us, and parts of our life that need the comfort of God.  When a person does not realize the conversion that needs to take place, God calls us to issue strong, dramatic words to help that person realize his or her need for God and a change in life.  When a person is beat up by the world, and despairing of any chance of redemption, God calls us to issue tender, loving words to help that person realize how much value he or she has.  We are not called to be nice, to say, “but that’s none of my business,” when we see sin and its effects in others.  But we are called to be prophets, by virtue of our baptism, who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.  

I’m not suggesting that we should walk around naked, not even for a day.  I’m not saying that we should curse people who make fun of us and send she-bears after them to tear them to pieces.  I’m not saying that we should threaten the destruction of a church.  But we also have to be careful about only saying things that people want to hear, things that do not make demands on life or call for conversion, things that do not challenge.  

God has called us to be prophets, and that in itself is a radical demand.  God calls us to speak His Word in our daily lives so that others can either turn from the evil they’re doing and live, and/or know just how much God loves them and wants the best for them.  Do not take the wild nature out of our prophetic call!  God save us from domesticated prophets!!

Death and Resurrection

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Death.  It’s scary.  It seems so final.  What is beyond death is, generally, unknown.  It is the biggest change a person goes through in life, after being conceived and born.  We do everything we can to avoid death: we create new medicines; we buy creams to try to keep us looking young; we spend lots of money to fight death.  And yet, death comes to us all, some as young people, some as old.

Fighting death is, in one sense, natural for us because we were not made for death.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve cared for the Tree of Life, which would have allowed them to live forever.  But they were cast out of the garden, and banned from that tree.  And, as our first reading stated, “God did not make death.”  Death entered the world because when our first parents rejected God, they rejected life.  St. Paul says it this way in the Letter to the Romans: “Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned…”  Everything in our being knows that we are made for eternal life, and yet we all have to experience death, and so we fight against it.

But, we need no longer fear death, because Jesus has conquered it by His Death and Resurrection.  Jesus gave a foretaste of that in today’s Gospel.  The woman with hemorrhages was getting worse; perhaps she was close to death.  But she went to Jesus because she had faith that He could make things better.  The little girl, the synagogue official’s daughter, was already dead by the time that Jesus got to her.  But her parents had faith, and she was returned to them.  Jesus unbound the power of death and gave new life.  Now, in both cases, the woman and the girl, they would later die.  But their faith changed the approach to death.  They followed Jesus’ command that we heard, “‘Do not be afraid; just have faith.’”

Death, for those who have faith in and follow Jesus should not be something that we fear so much.  Yes, we still may be anxious about the unknown, and we should not do anything to speed up our own death, but we need not be afraid if we have faith.  

In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” a story is told about the Deathly Hallows and three brothers.  Two of the three brothers try to cheat death.  But the third brother gained Death’s cloak of invisibility, and hid from death for many years.  After a long life, the third brother gave his cloak of invisibility to his son, and, as the story goes, “greeted death as an old friend.”  That’s not quite our view of death as Christians, but there is something that rings true in that story.  As believers in Jesus, death is not something we fear, but something that we can greet as a friend, because it is the necessary transition from this life to the life to come.  St. Augustine says that the only Christian who should fear death, is the one who has not truly followed Jesus, because eternal life will not be a life of joy, but a life of eternal torment.

If we are not afraid, if we have faith in Jesus, death is that which is the conclusion of our trials and testing on earth, and the beginning of our reward.  The student who has studied is not afraid of the final exam, but sees it as the necessary way to move towards graduation.  Our final judgment is not based on what we know, but, as St. John of the Cross states, whom we loved and how we loved.  But it still can allow us to graduate, to move on, to pass over, from this Valley of Tears to the eternal banquet of the Lamb of God in heaven.  

But death need not only be thought of in terms of our final breath.  We experience little deaths throughout our life, and our approach to those little deaths should be no less occasions of faith in what Jesus can do.  There’s the little deaths that happen in our family life: when we realize that our little baby is no longer a baby and is becoming more independent; when we lose a job; when, despite years of Catholic education and formation in the home, a child breaks our heart and stops practicing the faith.  There’s also little deaths that happen in our faith life: when we lose a pastor that we love; up 75 a bit and then down 475, St. Mary in Mt. Morris announced last Tuesday that, effective immediately, the school is closed; in our own parish as we make the transition to two weekend Masses from three.  All of those and more are little deaths in our lives.  We can fear it, we can fight it, we can kick and scream about it, or we can be not afraid and have faith in Jesus, trusting that He who brought us to all those situations and more will carry us through it.

Because our faith and our hope is in what is beyond the death, and that’s new life.  When Jesus rose from the dead He blazed a trail for us so that where He has gone, we hope to follow.  And although we have never seen what is on the other side of our own death, we have seen what is on the other side of Jesus’ death, and that is new life, transfigured life, glorified life.  To gain that new, transfigured, and glorified life, we need only follow Jesus and His way.  As we face death, in its many forms, Jesus invites us today: “‘Do not be afraid; just have faith.’”