"What is truth?"

Fourth Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  We might say that we live in the age of Pontius Pilate.  What do I mean by that?  Pontius Pilate, while trying our Lord in the Praetorium, skeptically asked Christ, “What is truth?”  Pope Benedict XVI warned us of the effects of relativism, of the assertion that there is no such thing as objective truth.  But our times have continued down the path of relativism, despite its inherent contradictions.
    We use phrases like, “live your truth.”  We have media outlets of all kinds, conservative and liberal, who twist the truth to promote their agendas.  We have fact checkers, which would seem to be a good thing, except they, too, consider facts from a particular perspective, and their results do not always ring true.  Those who have great power or great prestige often say one thing, but then do not live up to what they say, or live in a way contradictory to it.  We even have leaders of the Church who openly posit teachings which the Church has taught is wrong and contrary to what our Lord revealed.  In the midst of all this, is it any wonder that people doubt if there is truth, or find themselves asking the same question as the governor of Judea: what is truth?
    Our Lord today tells us that He will send us the Spirit of truth, who will lead us into all truth.  The Savior doesn’t modify the truth, or say that He will help us to know our truth.  The Holy Spirit will teach us the truth.  Truth, by definition, is one, like God.  It does not admit of variations, even though people may have different perceptions of it.  There was a picture floating around Facebook a while back, and I suppose, in the best light, it was trying to help us look at things from another perspective.  It showed a number on the sidewalk in chalk, and two people arguing about whether it was the number 6 or the number 9.  But, as one commenter pointed out, someone put the number on the sidewalk, and intended it to be a 6 or a 9.  So even with perspective, there is still an objective truth, a reality to which the image refers. 
    And truth cannot change based upon the time in which one lives.  Our understanding can certainly grow and develop, but the truth is eternal, again, like God.  It’s not as if the world was flat at one time, until we started to learn more about the earth and the solar system, and then it became spherical.  It was always spherical; we just thought, from our base of knowledge, that it was flat.  Or, to use an item of faith, it’s not as if God was a monad until the New Testament, and then He became a Trinity.  God was always a Trinity of Persons, but we didn’t fully understand that until our Lord revealed it to us. 
    To live a successful life, we have to acknowledge the truth.  Otherwise, truth will exert itself in painful ways, no matter how much we try to ignore it.  I do not have to believe in gravity, but if I try to ignore it while walking off the roof of a building, gravity will impress upon me that it exists whether I want it to or not.  And, depending on the size of the building, my desire that gravity not exist may prove fatal.  I may want to walk through walls, but if I try, I will end up getting a serious headache and body ache. 
    The same is true with the truth about how God made the world when it comes to religion.  Just because we do not want something to be true, does not make it less true.  A person who does not believe in God will come face to face with that false opinion when he or she stands before God in judgement.  A person may convince him or herself that saying God’s name in vain doesn’t really matter, but at some point he or she will recognize the truth of the pain that the violation of that commandment brings.  Yes, our ability to know that truth, whether our ignorance was vincible or invincible, conquerable or unconquerable, will affect God’s judgement of us.  But the reality will impress itself upon us, and perhaps cause us a longer time in Purgatory, or perhaps even mean our eternal damnation.
    On a much happier note, we have children today who are making their first Holy Communion.  They are receiving our Lord in the Eucharist for the first time.  They have come to recognize that what looks like bread and wine is not bread and wine, but has become, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of the priest, the Body and Blood of Christ.  You, my dear children, fulfill today the words of Psalm 8: “on the lips of children and of babes / you have found praise to foil your enemy, / to silence the foe and the rebel.”  Though there is still a lot of truth you need to learn, you have come to understand the truth that our Eucharistic Lord gives Himself to us at each Mass so that we can eat His flesh and have life within us, even though it looks like ordinary bread. 
    And the way that you receive, kneeling and on your tongue, helps to demonstrate the truth that you have come to learn.  If it were only a matter of eating regular food, we would pull up a table and chairs and have you eat like normal.  But because Christ gives Himself to us, we kneel down in adoration, and allow Him to nourish us, like a baby bird receives its nourishment from its parent in its mouth.  In some ways, children, you are wiser than some adults, and know a truth that they have rejected.  Hold on to that truth.  Never doubt what Christ has taught us through the Scriptures and through the Church, that if we wish to have eternal life within us, we need to eat His flesh, which is the Eucharist.
    And for all of us, pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us all into the fullness of truth.  Not just the opinions that we like or that seem easy for us; not just the soundbites that support our pre-conceived notions; but the truth, the reality of how God has made the world.  There is real truth, because God exists who can ground the truth in Himself.  Our goal, aided by the light of the Holy Spirit, is to acknowledge the truth and live according to it, the truth that grounds itself in our Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Staying Connected

Fifth Sunday of Easter

    As a child, we had one telephone in the kitchen, and a cordless telephone in my parents’ room.  The kitchen phone hung on the wall, and had the super-long cord, which was great because you could take it into the living room, but then you also, every so often, had to dangle it from the second story railing so that it could untangle.  This will come as a shock to some of the younger people here, but when people called you, you didn’t know who was calling until they identified themselves.  And if you were on the phone, no one else could call you, unless you had a second line (which we didn’t). 
    Back then, the best way to connect with people, of any age, was to actually see them, whether at school, or at the mall, or by going over to their house.  You would meet up and talk with each other, in person, and learn what was going on in their life.  As a kid, you might play together outside, or explore woods around the house, or just eat a snack together.  You might even spend the night, like times at grandpa and grandma’s house, which usually meant amazing food and maybe even a fishing trip or watching grandpa work on something in the shed.
    With the assistance of today’s technology, we can, as we say, connect with each other in ways we couldn’t before.  We can send pictures of ourselves (appropriately) to others, or maybe post a picture of what we’re eating for dinner.  We can send someone a quick text to check in, unless it’s very serious, and then we might actually call someone (but, again, only if it’s serious).  If it’s really sentimental you might FaceTime, or maybe even do a Zoom meeting to see what the other person is doing.
    And yet, with all that technology, with all our capabilities to “stay in touch” with each other, young people are more disconnected today than before, with many who are very active on social media saying that they feel lonely, though they have the opportunity to see what others are doing 24/7.  So as much as we think we’re connected to everyone, perhaps we’re not as connected as we think.
    Jesus tells us today in the Gospel that if we want to have life, we have to be connected to Him.  This doesn’t mean that Jesus is our Facebook friend (a person we just keep in a list of contacts that reminds us of his birthdays and shows us pictures of Him); or that we ‘gram with Jesus (take pictures of holy stuff and stuff we think he would like); or that we follow His short sayings on X (formerly known as Twitter).  In order to be connected to Him we have to develop a real relationship with Him, which means spending time with Him and getting to know Him personally, not just through a platform.  There are no shortcuts to having a relationship with Jesus, and it doesn’t come through social media.  We cannot substitute time anything else for time with Jesus.
    Of course, this means that we have to make sure and create time for Jesus, because our lives are filled with so many things.  We have responsibilities at home and responsibilities at work.  We wake up, get ready for school or work, get to school or work, spend the day learning or working, come home to do homework or make dinner, maybe clean up a little or spend time with family, and then we go to bed.  So the days are full.  But if we value something, or in this case, someone, we make time.  All of those activities are important, but Jesus is even more important than those.  So can we carve out some time for prayer, for speaking and listening to Jesus, in each day? 
    It may mean getting up 10 to 15 minutes earlier, so that we can read over the Scripture for the day or pray a rosary or chaplet of Divine Mercy.  I have a friend who has had a fifty-minute commute to work for the past few years.  He developed a new routine of praying a Rosary or Chaplet of Divine Mercy while driving, and then listening to the readings for the day in a podcast. 
    It may mean giving up some time on the television or on a game or show on a tablet to do some devotional reading or learn about a saint.  Or it can mean trying to pray together as a family for some minutes before the kids go to bed.  This can be as simple as asking each child to say one thing for which they are thankful, or seeing if they have something or someone they want to pray for.  Or maybe reading a Bible story together as a family.  But making sure that there is time for Jesus in our daily family life.
    Lastly, St. John reminds us in the second reading that staying connected with Jesus also means filling His commandments.  Whether it’s going to Mass every Sunday and Holyday, or being honest, or keeping God’s Name holy, or not missing the precious gift of human sexuality, or praying for those who do us wrong, or any of the other commandments that Christ, whether through Scripture or through the Church, has given us, if we wish to remain in Christ, to stay with Him, we follow His will, rather than just our own.  Both prayer and fidelity to what God has revealed to us connect us to Christ, and allow His life to flow through us. 
    Despite all of our technological advances in communication, we are often more disconnected than ever before, because the things we think connect us only do so in a fleeting way, and not in the deep ways that our human natures truly crave.  Make time for Christ; prioritize Him in your daily life.  If you do so, you will remain with Christ, not only on this earth, but in the new heavens and earth that will come.

Praying for Kings and Governors

Third Sunday after Easter
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  We’re knee-deep in election time again, and that means that the usual cantankerous atmosphere almost inherent in a two-party system will saturate our lives until at least November.  Among Catholics, we will hear the usual arguments about how you can’t call yourself Catholic and vote for fill-in-the-blank.  This is to dismiss those arguments; one’s voting should reflect one’s religion and how one best thinks the common good can be achieved.  I enjoy true policy debates, but we don’t really get those anymore, because good policy often cannot be contained by a pithy soundbite. 
    The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council spent a bit a time talking about how the laity should take upon themselves the transformation of the secular order by the values of the Gospel.  Participation in politics can help this transformation (or harm it, depending on how a layperson lives and for what policy he or she advocates).  And, I will admit, I used to enjoy doing a deep-dive into politics and the machinations of power and control.

Statue of St. Peter at his basilica in Rome

    But St. Peter admonishes us today to subject ourselves to the king or governors.  If you stop to think about it, this statement is a bit startling, as the leader of the general government was the Roman Emperor, who would eventually put St. Peter to death for professing the true faith.  Maybe at this point the local governors didn’t antagonize Christians as much, but it was a governor, Pontius Pilate, who put our Lord to death.  And yet, we are supposed to subject ourselves to them. 
    The early Christians, I’m sure, would have appreciated a more Christian-friendly administration.  But they certainly did not place their hope in this or that political authority.  They focused their lives on waiting for the time when they would see Christ again after He had ascended to the Father.  They didn’t ignore their earthly lives, but the took seriously the call of St. Paul to fix their minds on things above, not on things on earth.  I don’t think they suffered any illusions that the world would embrace Christ and His followers, because they had opposed them from the beginning.  They knew that this time between the Ascension, when they would not see Christ, and the return of Christ in glory, when they would see Him again, was a time of labor pains, that would include sorrow and suffering, but that Christ would grant them a joy that no one could take from them.
    This doesn’t mean that we can’t work hard to elect good people, especially good Catholics, or that you, as the lay faithful, shouldn’t participate in the electoral process.  We need people to stand up for life, from natural conception to natural death.  We need advocates for the poor and the disenfranchised.  Policies like subsidiarity, which keeps as much control as locally centralized as possible, and solidarity, which recognizes our inter-connectedness with each other, regardless of race, socio-economic status, or religion, make sense not just for Catholics, but have been time-tested as the best way to deal with legal and social issues.  But without Catholics participating in politics, these time-tested principles won’t find their way into public discussion.
    Still, as Catholics, we straddle heaven and earth.  We have a responsibility to do things as well as we can here on earth, but our eyes and especially our hopes are based in heaven.  We don’t ignore what happens in our city, State, country, and world, but we also know that the solutions to what ails our city, State, country, and world are not found in any law or political policy or personality.  The only thing that can turn things around at any level is a strong relationship with Jesus, and a firm commitment to following His will. 
    While it has looked different in the 2,000 years of its existence, we are the only “government,” if you will, that has endured.  The Roman Empire, which first persecuted us and then endorsed us, faded away, first in the West, then in the East.  The Holy Roman Empire came and went.  The monarchies of Europe and the dynasties of the Far East have changed throughout these two millennia, some more than others.  The Communists, who tried to eliminate religion, are merely a shadow of their once proud power, but even they are only around a century or less old.  No institution can outlast the Catholic Church. 
    While keeping our eyes fixed on heaven, we pray for our political leaders, even the ones with whom we don’t agree; even the ones whose policies are obnoxious to us; even the ones who cite their Catholic baptism while endorsing laws and policies that contradict the Catholic faith.  Perhaps those prayers will change their hearts.  Perhaps they will be receive a conversion, either to deepen their faith and grow in their knowledge of the truth, or to repent of their evil actions.  If we can’t even pray for them, then we need to go back to our own faith and remember that our Lord taught us to love, not only those who agree with us, like the hypocrites do, but even our enemies and those who persecute us.  In that way we begin to reflect the divine image in which we were made and love like our heavenly Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit is one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Benedict and Dominic

Fourth Sunday of Easter
    Throughout the past decade, especially as the United States started to drift away from the Judeo-Christian culture that had previously permeated the secular environment, people started to ask the question of what we should do as Catholics.  Even as many as ten years ago we came to realize that we could not rely on the federal or State governments to support people living out their faith, and, in some cases, the government grew very antagonistic towards Catholics and how they lived out their faith (think of the Obama administration’s seemingly hell-bent desire to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives in their health plan). 

St. Benedict

    So some proposed a solution, based upon an historical precedent, which gained the moniker “The Benedict Option.”  While Pope Benedict XVI did reign during some of the past decade or so, the reference looked back much farther to Benedictine monasteries that preserved Catholic literature and formation from the barbarian advances all throughout what had formerly been the Roman Empire.  This perspective advised that Catholics form small communities and basically hunker down until the barbarians (those who attacked the Church) destroyed themselves (as those who promote the culture of death eventually do destroy themselves). 
    There’s a certain solace in the bunker mentality when you feel like you’re under attack.  While the analogy will limp given its drastic nature, living the faith right now can seem like fighting in the midst of World War I.  The trenches seem much safer, because if you try to advance, you’re going to get mowed down by gunfire or mustard gas.  So you stay low and just try to ride the war out, hoping to survive to the next generation.
    But, besides the fact that Benedictines were responsible for a lot of missionary activity, even during the Middle Ages (St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Ansgar, and St. Boniface, just to name a few), this bunker mentality, while sometimes appropriate and certainly lived out beautifully by cloistered monks and nuns, misses what our readings reference today. 
    In the passages leading up to our first reading, St. Peter and St. John had been arrested because they healed a crippled man in the name of Jesus.  Peter didn’t cut bait and run.  He, the Prince of the Apostles speaking for the other apostles, proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead, and that He was the only way to salvation.  He proclaimed the Gospel because he knew that it was the truth, the truth which would set people free.  Any of the Apostles could have simply stayed in the Upper Room and quietly taught people about Jesus, trying to avoid publicity and controversy, but they didn’t.  They proclaimed Christ boldly, even in the face of persecution.  And the Church grew because of their witness.

St. Dominic

    This is what one author termed the “Dominican Option,” named after the Order of Friars Preachers.  St. Dominic only had a few cloistered nuns praying for him and his few friars, and yet he sent the friars out to the major universities of Europe, and his order grew almost exponentially.    It seemed like foolishness, even to some of the first friars, but St. Dominic said, “The seed will molder if it is hoarded up; it will fructify if it is sown.”  The Dominicans imitated the Apostles and spread the Gospel far and wide.
    Part of the animus for this is what Christ proclaimed in our Gospel today: “‘I have other sheep that do not belong to his fold.  These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.’”  Christ desires that all people would belong to His one flock, the Catholic Church.  He desires that all people are united in charity and in truth.  This won’t happen such an effective way if we rely simply on hunkering down and having more babies than the pagans who surround us (though I would say that having babies according to God’s will and your own discernment is another beautiful way to pass along the faith).  Yes, we can form communities of men and women who purposefully follow Christ, and not simply because someone told them to or because their family always did it this way.  Yes, we need to form people to understand the Gospel so that they can be able to preach it (and we’re striving to do that through our faith formation groups of all ages). 
    But at the end of the day, we cannot stay in our bunkers; we cannot remain in the trenches.  We should have the magnanimity to try to win souls for Christ, to help them see that following Him is not only the path to heaven, but a way to live life more joyfully and with more fulfillment than if we try to live life on our own terms and follow our own patterns of sin.  If Christ’s desire that we all join His flock are to come to fruition, then we have to cooperate with Him and share that good news with others.  And not just on the worldwide church level: if we wish our parish to grow, then others need to join us.  And the way that others join us is through people convincing them of the truth of the faith and having them be baptized or enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.  Yes, we also welcome and encourage our young families to engage in the very countercultural act of supporting life and having babies according to God’s plan, but we also have to bring others in.  We are growing, but if we each lived with the zeal of St. Peter and St. John, then I would need to add at least one more Mass because we had so many people joining the Catholic Church and our parish. 
    Yes, things are rough for the Catholic Church right now, and I don’t see them getting noticeably better any time soon.  Yes, some of us will support the work of spreading the faith by our prayers and attendance at Mass.  But most of us need to get involved in sharing the good news, or telling others why they should follow Christ and why they should be Catholic.  If we don’t share the seeds of the Gospel, they will become moldy.  But if we sow the seeds of the Gospel in the hearts and minds of those we encounter, they will bear fruit thirty, sixty, and one hundredfold.

Staying on Christ's Path

Second Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Generally there are two kinds of people in life: those who blaze trails and those who stay on the trails that have already been laid out.  In our own American psyche we tend to elevate those who blaze trails.  Think of Lewis and Clark, cutting a path through the wilderness as Sacajawea helped them to explore the Louisiana Purchase.  Or think of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.  Certainly there is more danger for those who “boldly go where no man has gone before" (to quote Star Trek), but there is also generally more excitement as you see and experience things that no one has experienced before.
    Contrast this glorification of those who make their own trails with what we heard St. Peter say in his first epistle about Christ, who left us, “an example that you should follow in his footsteps.”  Our first pontiff is not encouraging us to make a new trail, but to follow in the one that Christ made, He who is the shepherd and guardian of our souls (the Greek and Latin word is bishop or overseer).  We are not to make our own way on the path of salvation, but to follow Christ.
    This, of course, does not signify an aping of everything Christ did.  We don’t have to pack up and leave Michigan for the Holy Land, and wander on foot around Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Capernaum.  The way in which Christ wants us follow Him means that we seek to conform our lives to His in our own vocations and jobs.  And we do this because He has not only blazed the trail for us, but He is the trail for us, as He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life [emphasis mine].” 
    There is only one way to the Father, and that is through Christ, as He also said at the Last Supper: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”  If there were other ways to salvation, then Christ’s suffering would have been superfluous.  The trails that others blaze lead to wolves and bad pastures.  The trail that Christ lays out for us leads us to safety and green pastures.  Our way needs to be Christ’s way, or it is no way to heaven at all.  As my spiritual director has often been quoted as saying, Frank Sinatra’s hit, “I Did It My Way” is the theme song of Hell.
    But despite Christ laying out a clear path for us, and instructing us to follow Him, others throughout the centuries, and even we to this day, continue to try to forge our own path to happiness.  Whether we’re blazing a trail ourselves, or simply following other teachers or gurus, we do not always follow Christ.  And part of that is because following Christ involves sacrifice.  St. Peter demonstrates this for us as he reminds us that Christ suffered for us, and that the path of Christ that we are to follow involves setting aside vengeance when others make us suffer, and even includes the cross.  Our lives are not all suffering and pain, but to follow Christ means that we will experience suffering and pain from time to time, because that is what happened with Christ. 
    So we try to find ways that are easier, that do not involve pain or suffering.  But when we do that, when we seek to avoid pain at all costs, we find ourselves among wolves who are ready to devour us.  Recently, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith came out with a document, Dignitas infinita, which treats offenses that go against the dignity of the human person.  One of those offenses is in vitro fertilization, or IVF.  There is real pain in wanting to conceive a child and the body not responding accordingly.  Not just for women, but especially for women, the ability to bear a child correlates closely with her feeling of self-worth.  And the voices of the hirelings who tell couples that God would want them to conceive a child in any manner because it would make them happy, or that God wouldn’t want a person to undergo pain, tempts like the voice of a siren.  But IVF makes a child a commodity to be acquired at any cost, requires the sin of self-stimulation of the man, and introduces a doctor as the material agent of conception.  Often, with IVF, many embryos are implanted in the woman’s womb, in case some don’t take, but if multiple do, abortions are encouraged to make sure the body isn’t overwhelmed.  The whole process includes many acts contrary to God’s will. 
    The path that Christ has blazed may involve not getting what a couple exactly wants, but it leads to heaven.  And it opens up opportunities for adoption, or simply being an uncle or aunt that can shower that love on nieces and nephews.  And most importantly, it keeps one on the path to heaven, which is the destination of the path of Christ.
    Dignitas infinita also treats gender dysphoria and its many manifestations.  It demonstrates that attempting to change a person’s God-given biological sex through hormones or mutilating surgery does not lead to true happiness, since it seeks to contravene God’s plan.  Instead, the document encourages understanding the deep psychosexual wounds that can lead a person to think that he or she is in the wrong kind of body or is sexually attracted to a person of the same sex.  What seems easier is to allow a person to determine how he or she wants to express the self.  It can definitely feel easier to live out of wounds because they feel so familiar, even if they do not give us wholeness. 
    Instead, the path that Christ lays out is starting with the fact that God does not make mistakes, and that if He made us male or female, that is part of His plan for us.  It also includes extra love and attention to help a person uncover the sources of those wounds and work through them to find integration of the whole person.  That work of dealing with wounds is often very painful, just like it would be physically painful to clean out an infected cut.  But it leads to a greater happiness than ignoring the problem or treating the problem like normalcy could ever achieve. 

    And, in spite of our failings, of any kind, whether those mentioned in Dignitas infinita or any other sins that we may have committed, the good news is that our Lord is the Good Shepherd who seeks after us, not just calling out with His voice, but even tracking us down in the wilderness of sin, and putting us upon His shoulders so that we don’t even have to walk back on our own.  Christ does not want us to wander away, but if we make that error, He will always search after us and seek to bring us back to His path, as long as we have breath in us.
    There is a place and a time for blazing our own paths and trails.  If sailors had never crossed the Atlantic, or the first Americans had never crossed the Appalachians, or Lewis and Clark would have never explored the Louisiana Purchase, then where would we be as a country?  But when it comes to our salvation, Christ desires not that we make our own trail, because it doesn’t lead to where He created us to be, but that we follow the example He left us.  He calls to us in love, as the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  Amen.

Mercy in the Present Moment

Second Sunday of Easter/Low Sunday
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Today we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday.  The paradox of mercy is that we all want it regularly accessible, but we can often struggle to actually dispense it.  When someone has wronged us, we can so easily focus on justice and how the other person should make restitution for what he or she has done.  But when we have done something wrong, how quickly do we run to God and ask for His Divine Mercy, hoping that we can obtain it without too much effort.
    Our Lord reminds us of our obligations to share with others the mercy that we receive in the parable of the unforgiving steward.  If you remember, the steward owes the master a large amount of money, and cannot pay back the debt.  When about to go to debtor’s prison, the steward pleads with the master to give him more time, and the master forgives the debt.  But when the steward sees fellow workers who owe him a much smaller amount, the steward throws them into debtor’s prison, despite them using the same plea that the steward had used earlier with the master. 
    That call to mercy reflects what God has already done for us.  His mercy, which was won at the price of the Blood of the Son of God, granted us freedom from the bonds of sin.  It released us from the hold of Satan so that we could freely continue as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  If we are adopted sons and daughters, then our vocation is to live like our heavenly Father, whose mercy endures forever, as Psalm 118 (117) states. 
    Part of living a merciful life means showing mercy to ourselves.  St. Faustina, the great apostle of Divine Mercy, once said, “The past does not belong to me; the future is not mine; with all my soul I try to make use of the present moment.”  How easy it can be to dwell on our past mistakes, or hope that we can make up for sins in the future.  Instead, God invites us live in the present moment, because that is all we have. 
    As far as the past goes, we can all say, to one degree or another, that there are things we wish we would have done differently in the past.  For some of us, that means major deviations from the type of life Christ wants us to live.  For others, that means smaller veers away from the path of holiness.  But we all have things that, in hindsight, we should not have done.  On this Divine Mercy Sunday, God invites us to commend our past to Him, and no longer be shackled by past mistakes, no matter how big or how small.  Sometimes this is done by making a general confession or life confession, where, in an appointment for confession with a priest (not at the usual weekday times), one gives all the past sins that he or she can remember to the Lord to be washed clean in His Blood.  But, aside from those rare times, we should not bring up past, confessed sins.  Because ruminating on those past sins and treating them like they still exist is lacking confidence in the power of God’s mercy.  Satan will often try to get us to act as if past confessed sins are not forgiven, but we should reject that temptation as a lie from the father of lies.  Yes, each act has a consequence, and sometimes those consequences reach into our present.  But, if we have confessed our sins, we can trust in the mercy of God and know that the sins are no more.
    As for the future, it can be easy to act like everything depends on us; that we have to do everything to save ourselves, and so we fret about what might happen.  Just as God wants us to entrust our past to Him, He also wants us to entrust our future to Him, a future that is purified by the mercy of God.  We don’t know what the future will hold.  We know that our present choices affect our future, but God can mercifully guide our future in spite of our present choices.  It is a mercy not to worry about what might happen, because we can spend so much energy and time on fretting about what could be, but what might never be. 
    As a planner and a type A personality, this is probably the hardest way for me to accept God’s mercy.  It is so easy for me to get worked up and lose sleep over how something will turn out, or if someone meant something by a particular choice of phrasing.  If, instead, I am doing my best to seek the will of God and do it, then no matter what I know God will help me through whatever consequences may come from any of my actions, good or ill.  There is a real freedom in not trying to be God and be in all the possibilities of the future.  It is part of God’s mercy that we don’t worry about what tomorrow holds.  Today, as our Lord says, has enough concern for itself.

    Mercy means living in the present, because it is all that we have, and it is the only opportunity that we have to reach out for God’s mercy, and share God’s mercy ourselves.  God’s redemption, His act of mercy, stretches into all time: past, present, and future.  But we can only accept and share that mercy in the present, because that is the only time in which we operate.  The Apostles in the Upper Room could have worried about how they had abandoned the Lord at His Passion.  Peter could have worried about how he had denied even know the Lord only a few days before.  The disciples could have wondered what this Risen Lord would do with them in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.  Thomas could have fretted not being in the Upper Room when Christ first appeared.  Instead, Christ invited them to be in the present moment, to receive His peace, a true gift of the Holy Spirit.  Instead, Christ gave His Apostles the power to extend that mercy in a formal and sacramental way so that the work of mercy, culminated in the Cross, could be accessed by generations of followers of Christ.  Christ did not encourage them to worry about the past.  He did not encourage them to plan for the future.  He only invited them to receive His peace in the present moment.
    [Mia, God’s mercy has brought you here to us as a catechumen.  Though not fully, you already belong to us by your desire for baptism.  As you continue to come to know the Lord in the coming weeks, you will see how God has worked in your past to bring you to this day, but you will also remember ways that you lived according to your ignorance of Christ and His Church.  Give that to God and His mercy, which will be poured over you in the waters of baptism.  You may worry about living as a Catholic after you are baptized, and if you will have the strength to continue in the path to which God called you.  Entrust that future to God’s mercy, and know that He will give you the strength to follow Him.]
    God wants to show us His mercy.  He wants us to share His mercy with others, but also to be receptive to His mercy ourselves.  He does not invite us to dwell on the past, nor to fret about the future.  Instead, in His mercy, He invites us to live in the present, and to be vessels and vehicles of the mercy of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.