Motivation Matters

Quinquagesima

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Motivation matters.  When I first started exercising five or so years back, I did it because my friends exercised.  Then I continued to work out because I wasn’t super pleased with the way my body looked, and wanted bigger arm and chest muscles and more toned abs.  And while I still like working out with friends when I can, and while I am still working on growing muscles a little and trying to get away from the “dad bod” look, what really motivates me right now is that I know working out helps me be the best person I can be, as well as reduces stress and releases endorphins.  Working out is part of a healthy lifestyle: anima sana in corpore sana (asics).  
    As we get ready for Lent (and buckle-up: it’s here on Wednesday), we likely have a number of practices we want to take on for penance.  Maybe it’s eating less of a certain type of food, or maybe adding extra prayers to our daily prayer routine, or maybe donating time or money to the poor more.  These, in addition to our usual Lenten practices of fasting on Ash Wednesday, the Lenten Ember Days, and Good Friday, as well as abstaining from meat on Ash Wednesday, the Lenten Ember Days, and Fridays should bring us closer to God and put to death the old, sinful man in us who acts more like a toddler and wants immediate gratification always.
    But why do we do these things?  Does the Church want us to earn our salvation?  We can’t.  Does the Church want us to go on a diet?  Maybe it would be a healthy practice, but our food penances have nothing to do with our waistline.  What motivates us to take on penances, not only during Lent, but throughout the year?
    The Apostle tells us today that our motivation should be that special type of love we call charity: the love the mirrors, to the best of our ability, the love of God.  No matter what we do, St. Paul says, even if it looks like it is a powerful demonstration of God’s grace in us, if we do it without love, we gain nothing.  Love, he tells us, has to motivate our every action.
    And charity, as a special type of love, does not spring from thinking of ourselves first.  When we think of ourselves first we are like Olympic athletes who train only so that they can get an award and beef up their athletic resume or brag that they stand as the best in the world.  So many times when we do penances we may rely on selfish motivations, even if they are clothed in generosity or piety.  When we act out of the desire to have something for ourselves, we do not demonstrate charity.  We are then like the hypocrites that our Lord will condemn on Ash Wednesday who fast and give alms in order to be seen.  Instead, God calls us to act out of charity, out of the desire simply to please the Beloved, God Himself, no matter what it could mean for us, or even if we gained nothing at all.  True love doesn’t do something good so that I can get something good back.  True love does what the beloved wants simply because the beloved wants it, without thought of repayment.
    Truth be told, we all probably struggle with mixed motives.  Even our best acts probably do not find their entire root in charity, but are commingled with a little selfishness.  All too often, we are blind to our selfishness and hidden motives that infect all our deeds.  And so we, like the blind man our Lord encountered near Jericho, need to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”  And maybe our selfishness, our pride, our vainglory tells us not to cry out to Jesus, because we’re good enough, or it’s close enough.  But we need to persist and cry out again and again, “Son of David, have pity on me!”  We need to ask the Lord to help us to see ourselves and see our mixed motives, and then ask that the Savior send His grace to purify our motives and change our self-interested love into true charity, the love which seeks only to please God.
    Will we ever fully be there?  Probably not on this side of eternity.  We will always see ourselves dimly, as in a mirror.  But if we keep crying out for God’s help to love as He loves to the best of our ability, then we will see God face to face one day, where our love will truly be selfless, will truly mirror the charity of God.  
    In this last Sunday before Lent, we should all examine our Lenten practices in the light of, “how does this help me grow in charity?”  We don’t have to do them perfectly in charity, but we should strive to do them as perfectly in charity as we can.  May we not take on penances in order to look holy, or to seem to others to be pious or ascetic, or even because we hope to get something good out of it, but may our penances help us grow more deeply in love with the one who saves us: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Bars Low and High

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time–Rite of Sending
    Do the red and say the black.  When it comes to the sacraments, that’s what the Church asks priests and deacons to do.  The red refers to the rubrics, the words literally written in red type-face, that say what to do.  The black refers to the words that the minister should say.  When the priest or the deacon does the red and says the black, we know that God makes the sacrament take place.  So, for example, if the priest, while pouring water over the head, says the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” the person truly has received baptism.  If the priest changes the words, or uses a different liquid other than water, the sacrament didn’t take place.
    But that’s a pretty low bar.  Sometimes a priest will say, “As long as I do the red and say the black, I know I’m good.”  But there’s so much more to exercising ministry well than just doing the minimum.  A priest who deeply loves Jesus and wants to communicate that saving, sacramental grace will do more than just the least required.  I could say in a monotonous and quick-paced voice, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and people’s faith that this person has just become a child of God and a member of the Church and had original sin washed away would not increase.  Do we really want our celebrations of the sacraments, especially by those ordained to act with the power of Christ, just to be the minimum?

    You may wonder right now what that has to do with you?  I’m not, after all, preaching to a seminary crowd, even if we have future priests in the pews.  But in our Gospel, Jesus, the new Moses, gives a new law that goes beyond the bare minimum and actually helps support the conversion to which God calls all His children.  The Ten Commandments are good and help us to lead a good life.  But they’re more of the minimum, not the fullness of living as a child of God.
    Not many, if any, of us have murdered someone, which the fifth commandment prohibits.  I can honestly say, as I’m sure many of you can, that I have not even planned on how to murder someone because I wanted them dead.  I have not even planned on getting a room with a woman of ill-repute to commit adultery.  I have never considered putting my hand on a Bible to make God as my witness and then lying.  So I, and probably many of you, have managed to reach the low bar of not breaking those three commandments.
    But how many times have we harbored serious anger in our hearts?  How many times have we wished ill on another person because of some wrong they have done to us?  Or in what ways have we used another person, even if only in our minds, to give us some sexual gratification?  How many times have we wished that we could get away with adultery without suffering any consequences?  How many times have we lingered on a image, be it in person or online, of a scantily clad member of the opposite sex?  Or when are the occasions where we “bend” the truth, or convince ourselves that it’s only a white lie and it won’t hurt that many people?  Or when do we make the mental calculation that a small lie will not hurt someone else’s feelings?
    What Christ reveals to us today is that He calls us not only to do the right things, but to go deeper and make sure our hearts really belong to Him.  If we truly wish to follow Him, we have to allow His grace to transform every part of our lives: not just our external actions, but even the desires of our hearts.  Some transformation of the world would certainly happen if no one murdered another, or committed adultery with another, or swore to God and lied.  But imagine how much better life would be if we didn’t give room for rage and vengeance, and didn’t use others at all as objects of our lust, or we knew that a person’s word meant clearly what was said.  As Louis Armstrong sang, “What a wonderful world”!
    My dear catechumens: today you will be sent, in a manner of speaking, to the Rite of Election.  Your formation up to now has included how Catholics are to live, what they are to do and what they are not to do.  But you hopefully have been growing more and more in love with God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  And during these next weeks, especially during the Scrutinies during Lent, we will ask God to draw you even closer to Him, and transform your hearts.  While a major change will occur at your baptism, where God will wash away all your sins, you, like all of us, will need to continue to work on allowing God’s grace to transform our hearts and desires throughout the rest of your life.  
    But God promises, both to you and to all of us, to give us what we need to meet, not just the low bar, but even the higher bar of Christian perfection.  God promises, especially through our worthy reception of Holy Communion, to make us disciples not only on the outside, but on the inside, where our actions begin.  Especially through our upcoming Lenten observances, may God help us to live as a people transformed from death to life, from darkness to light, from sin to holiness, so that we can be effective witnesses of the power of the Gospel and transform this world, by the power of God’s grace, to be the place He originally created it to be. 

Eden, Heaven, and Sacrifice

Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Matthew Church
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  “I can worship God anywhere, I don’t need to go to church.”  We hear this phrase, sometimes from teens who don’t want to go to Mass, sometimes from adults who feel the same way.  And I think most, if not all, of us have had experiences of God outside the walls of this building, be it a beautiful sunset or a powerful storm, or maybe the calm and peace that come from time spent with a loved one.  

    And while when people enter this building for the first time, most tend to lose their breath for a bit, or look all around and say or whisper, “wow!”, why bother assembling in a place to worship God?  Why do we spend large amounts of money to build and maintain churches like this?  Why does the Catholic Church assign one of the greatest importances to celebrating the day a building was dedicated?
    It all has to do with what churches should do, and there are, I would argue, three primary goals for a church: remind us of Eden, point towards heaven, and celebrate a sacrifice.  The more a church does all three, the more we can truly call it a beautiful church.
    First, churches should point us to Eden.  In the Garden of Eden, God and man walked together as friends.  God was still God, and we were not, but there was a strong and close relationship between humanity and God.  The strain that came from work and the pain that came from childbirth didn’t exist, because they only came to be through sin.  The harmony that existed between God, humanity, and the rest of the created world was the only reality.  Man and woman didn’t lust after each other, even though they appreciated each other.  The break of that trifold relationship of God-man-nature only broke down when Adam and Eve tried to usurp the place of God and committed the original sin, a sin which they passed down to their descendants, even to us in the present day.  
    The ordering of the Church should remind us of the original order and harmony of the Garden of Eden.  We see hints of vegetation in our capitals on the columns, there are ordered other plants in the wallpaper in the sanctuary, like heads of grain and bunches of grapes, there are animals that are staying calm like the pelican image on the front of the high altar and fish in the wallpaper.  There is also a harmony that exists among the created items that make up this building, working together to provide a solid, intelligent structure.  In the church, we also have a harmony with each other and with God, which is why, at the beginning of Mass, we ask pardon from each other for any faults we have committed in the Confiteor.  When a church lacks any sense of the harmony of nature and the harmony that exists between God and humanity, it lacks a certain beauty.  Also, we don’t find this ordering anywhere else, because outside of this building, the effects of sin still run rampant between us and God, each other, and us and nature.  The order that exists here simply doesn’t exist outside in the same way.

St. Pier Giorgio Frassati

    Secondly, a church should point us towards heaven.  Why do we have so many images of the saints?  Why aren’t Catholic Churches just whitewashed walls?  Because heaven has numerous occupants.  It’s never been “me and Jesus” alone.  To be in union with the Lord means that we are also in union with those who are already united to Him in heaven.  That cloud of witnesses, from Abel to the Sts. Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis (to name two of our newest canonized saints), join with us in the in-breaking of heaven on earth.  Churches use precious materials because St. John describes heaven, in the Book of Revelation, as filled with precious materials.  Churches do not only look to the past and the Garden of Eden, but also look to the future and the place we want to end up, in heaven with God.  When we worship God at Mass, all the angels and saints join with us, and we with them, in a liturgy that echoes how heaven is described in the Bible.  As much as Shoeless Joe Jackson can ask Ray Kineslla in the classic movie “Field of Dreams” as he walks into the corn field from the baseball diamond Ray built, “Is this heaven?”, we know that heaven is not a place on earth.  But in the church, we get a glimpse of heaven breaking into earth in a way that happens no where else other than in churches.  
    Lastly, we celebrate a sacrifice.  Churches are not simply lecture halls where one can hear a rousing sermon (though I’m sure you’re moved by the current homily).  Churches are not concert halls where one simply hears music, being Gregorian chant or Christian rock.  Churches are places of sacrifice.  And how do we know this?  From the earliest days of the Church, church buildings contained an altar.  St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died around the year AD 107, who learned the faith from St. John the Apostle and whom St. Peter ordained a bishop, referred to a feature in the Christian celebration with the word thusiasterion, a Greek word that means altar, when talking about the Eucharist that the bishop celebrated.  Tertullian (who died in AD 240) and St. Cyprian (who died in AD 258) also speak about altars when describing the Eucharistic table.  
    But altars only exist for one reason: for sacrifice.  The first Christians understood the Eucharist as a sacrifice, but not as a new sacrifice, but the joining to the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on the cross.  And Christ allowed us to join in that sacrifice through the ritual He Himself gave us at the Last Supper.  In the church building we fulfill the Lord’s command to do this ritual in memory of Him that unites us mystically to the offering of the Lord on the cross on Calvary.  No where else in nature does God randomly change bread and wine into the Body and Blood of His Beloved Son in an unbloody manner.  Only when we come to a church building do we have this opportunity to join ourselves to the sacrifice that saved us from sin and death and opened heaven for believers.  
    So no; you can’t worship God in the same way anywhere else other than a church building.  And that’s why, 107 years ago, our predecessors put aside large amounts of money to begin the building of this church building.  That’s why, through the decades that followed 1919, priests and people worked to beautify this sacred temple to help it reflect Eden, heaven, and the sacrifice of the Lamb.  May we continue the good work they began in Christ, and may this holy building continue to give us rest from our earthly labors and communion with God and each other as we seek to see the Lord Jesus Christ [who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen].

Following Christ May Not be Easy

Septuagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One would be forgiven for thinking that, once one truly believes in Christ, everything goes easily.  We have a desire for doing right, and we want that desire and those righteous actions to carry with them the consequence of ease.  And certainly, even Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics points to how the truly virtuous person exhibits virtue without too much struggle.  A person who truly has the virtue of courage will exhibit courage, rather than cowardice or rashness, in his or her actions, and will not need to think about it much, because a virtue is a stable disposition or habit to choose a particular good.  
    At the same time, a person who exhibits every virtue is rare.  And so there is a kind of struggle that takes place as that person seeks to life a fully virtuous life.  A man may never struggle with remaining faithful to his wife, but he may struggle with telling the truth, or displaying magnanimity (greatness of soul), or tempering his desire for food.

    St. Paul talks about striving for self-mastery and living a virtue, and compares it to running a race.  He notes that only one person wins a prize for first place, and says that we should run so as to win, rather than simply seeking a participation trophy.  He even says that he competes and subjects his body to penances, in order that he might also win.  
    He then also talks about how all the Jews received a sort of baptism in Moses, whether through the cloud or through the sea, and all participated in a foreshadowing of the Eucharist through the spiritual food and spiritual drink that was Christ.  But the Apostle notes that most of them did not please God.  
    What we can understand from this is that just because we are baptized; just because we receive the Eucharist, doesn’t mean that we can rest on our laurels.  While both are important sacraments that, respectively, make us adopted children of God and give us spiritual strength to live as children of God, receiving sacraments doesn’t mean that the graces work in us necessarily.  The fault lies not with the grace that God gives, but with our receptivity to those graces: with how we allow the grace to operate in our lives.
    We refer to these two aspects of the sacrament with two Latin phrases: ex opere operato, and ex opere operantis.  Ex opere operato means “from the work having been worked,” and refers to the objective reality that the sacraments have, as long as they are celebrated as the Church intends (the right words, the right stuff, and the right minster).  Ex opere operantis means “from the work of the one working,” and refers to the subjective reality and fruitfulness that the sacraments have, which is based upon the holiness of the minister and the recipient.  The former steers us clear of the heresy of Donatism, which stated that an evil minister could invalidate a sacrament, even if he did everything else correctly, and the latter steers us clear of magic, which takes the approach that, no matter what, just say the right words and do the right things and a change takes place, no matter whether a person opens him or herself up to the graces that God wants to convey.  

    This helps us understand why some baptized Catholics do not live up to their call to be saints.  Did the baptism not take?  Of course it did (as long as the minister celebrated it validly)!  But that recipient might be putting up a block to those graces through personal sin after the fact, or maybe the minister gave bad catechesis and treated baptism like an empty ceremony that doesn’t accomplish anything.  
    This helps us understand why, after we receive the Eucharist, sometimes we still want to sin.  The joke is that in the church we’re all pious and grateful for the Body and Blood of Christ, but then as we try to pull out of the parking lot we lose our temper and act like heathens who do not know Christ’s command to love one another and be patient.  
    And this is why we do our penitential practices, especially in the upcoming season of Lent.  We don’t do penance to earn salvation; we can’t earn salvation.  That’s the heresy of Pelagianism.  But our penances help discipline us to open ourselves to the graces that God wants to give, because our sin puts up obstacles (the theological word is obex) to the fruitfulness of God’s grace.  When we fast, when we abstain, when we give alms, we recognize our need for deeper conversion and to rely on God, rather than on ourselves or the goods of the world.  We make more room for God so that the spring of grace He has given us in baptism flows unobstructed, and so that the sacramental grace transforms us from the inside out.  
    Some get this from the beginning, like the workers whom the master hired at the beginning of the day.  For others it takes a long time, like those who only worked for the last hour.  But if we allow God’s grace to transform us into the saints He wants us to be in baptism, even at the last moments, then our hope of eternal salvation can be strong.
    We all likely have ways that need to grow in virtue, and our upcoming Lenten season is the perfect time to open ourselves up more to God’s grace so that we can grow in virtue.  May we run so as to win the prize, knowing that it is God who makes any good work possible and completes any good work that we began by His inspiration: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Clogging the Drain

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Growing up, my dad and I were outnumbered, three females to two males.  One of the practical realities of having three women in the house was that hair could be found everywhere.  In most places it was just an inconvenience (like on couches, countertops, etc.).  But, when it came to bathroom sinks and tubs, it had a more significant impact.  Yes, men also shed hair a little, but when long hair starts going down drains, it has the tendency to clump up and block the drain, creating a blockage that can slow or even stop water flowing down the drain, requiring Drano or snaking the drain, if it gets bad enough.
    Pride is like the clumps of hair that blocks the drain of God’s grace.  Pride puts up an barrier (the Latin word is obex) to the flow of God’s life that He gives through the sacraments and the sacramentals (like the Rosary, daily devotions, reading of Scripture, etc.).  The opposite of pride is humility, which comes up in all our readings today, if not explicitly, implicitly.  
    What is it about humility that makes it such a great virtue?  Our own times don’t seem to value humility, and probably would see humility as a denigration of our self-esteem.  We live in a world where, if I think it, it must be true.  That’s the logical reasoning behind the phrase, “live your truth.”  It makes the individual the judge of reality, rather than starting with reality and adjusting to what reality gives us.  Imagine for a second that your truth is that gravity doesn’t exist.  You will quickly learn that “your truth” doesn’t really matter as you try to walk off a cliff.
    Humility does not primarily consist, however, in self-deprecation.  Humility is, according to such saints as St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day we celebrated last Wednesday, and St. Teresa of Avila, the acknowledgment of the truth.  Pride goes above who we are; self-deprecation does not give ourselves enough credit.  The truth stands in the middle, where we recognize who we truly are and who we are not.
    So how does humility mean a clean pipe, not filled with clogs of the hair of pride?  Humility allows our hearts to be open to God’s grace because it recognizes that we stand in need of God’s grace.  And then, when God’s grace flows, it allows us to accomplish what God wants and what will truly make us happy.  If I don’t think I need God because of my pride, or if I don’t think God would ever want to work with me (self-deprecation), I close myself off to God’s grace, and therefore close myself off to the power that allows me to do truly great things, which are only possible by God’s grace.  If I act as if I am God, why would I open myself up to God’s help?  If I don’t think I have anything good or worthy in me, I wouldn’t think that God would send His grace to me anyway, and would miss out on those opportunities.  
    God chooses the humble because He knows He can work with them.  The people “humble and lowly” from the first reading receive refuge and safety from God because they know they need Him, rather than trusting in political power, whether of themselves or of neighboring kingdoms.  The ones the world considers fools, “the lowly and despised of the world” from our second reading, God elevates because His power can work through them.  If we could have saved ourselves we would have done it.  But we couldn’t.  Even the best couldn’t open up heaven, because pride is exactly what closed it off.  Adam and Eve wanted to be gods on their own terms, even though, when they didn’t try to be gods God walked with them and provided everything they needed.  They had a healthy love of God and each other, as well as the creation entrusted to their care.  Only when they strove to be gods on their own terms did they begin to hide from God and hide their bodies from each other, and eventually even the animals started to avoid them.  

Church of the Beatitudes in the Holy Land

   The Beatitudes of the Gospel show us ways to be humble.  The poor in spirit are those who know that they need God; those who mourn know that all true comfort comes from God; the meek do not strive after things beyond them; those who hunger and thirst for righteousness know that it cannot come merely from their own efforts; the merciful recognize they are not perfect and need to receive and show forgiveness; the clean of heart understand that not all their desires should be followed; the peacemakers aim for the peace that comes when people receive what is their due; those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness know that they do not always have to restore right order on their own, but that true righteousness comes from God; those who are injured for the sake of Jesus understand that vengeance belongs to God, and He will repay, either through allowing repentance or in the justice which only God can perfectly give.  Those are tall orders, but when we live opposite the beatitudes, we clog our souls with blockages to God’s grace and we live in the misery that is the opposite of beatitude.  
    As we get closer to Lent, perhaps now is a good time to think of how your Lenten practices can help you grow in humility.  I know I still have a long ways to grow in this virtue that allows me to be a conduit of God’s grace.  May God, especially through the Sacrament of Penance, snake our souls with His mercy so that we can live a humble life, and allow God to do powerful things through us by His grace.