Attachments

First Sunday of Lent

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  When I was in college, Facebook was just starting to be a thing.  At first I refused to get on Facebook because I felt it tried to redefine the meaning of friend.  After a few years, however, I finally caved and set up my own account.  As the years progressed, I got more and more involved and I got sucked in to wanting to have a lot of Facebook friends, though I wanted to know the people in real life, not just online.  As a parish priest, this wasn’t too hard to do, as more and more people from the parish wanted to be Facebook friends.  When the diocese announced new assignments, I would get new requests from future parishioners who wanted to check out my personality via Facebook.  I started to post more and more pictures, and would give everyone a happy birthday greeting as Facebook reminded me.
    Fast forward to a couple of months ago.  I was speaking with a friend who had pulled back from Facebook.  This friend encouraged me to do the same simply as a way to disconnect from unnecessary time on social media.  I agreed to limit my Facebook interactions to twice a day, and backed off of posting pictures and even birthday greetings (so in case you wondered why I didn’t tell you Happy Birthday on Facebook, that’s why).  What I noticed startled me.  I had grown so used to checking Facebook throughout the day, especially on my phone between activities or even while eating meals or watching TV, that my thumb almost naturally wanted to click on the app on my phone every time I went do to something else on my phone.  My thumb seemed to automatically slide up over the app.  It was at that moment that I knew I needed to disconnect majorly from Facebook, though I still post my homilies and post pictures for the parish through my desktop account.  One of my Lenten practices is not to use the Facebook app on my phone at all.

    I think the thing that made Facebook so alluring is that I had fomo: the fear of missing out.  I also subconsciously wanted to brag about where I traveled, or wanted to keep track of the fun things other people did.  Wishing people happy birthday or congratulating people on engagements or babies being born was a good use of Facebook.  But even though my current phone was cordless, I certainly had created an invisible cord between me and my Facebook app that made it harder to back off of Facebook.
    Lent is a perfect time to check the sins and unhealthy habits that have become like second nature to us.  We might not think, at first, that some of our habits are such a big deal.  We may even have good aspects that go along with unhealthy habits or sins, as no action is usually entirely bad.  But as we begin our Lenten observances, taking a step back from things we know we don’t need but which we act like we do need them gives us a chance to focus more on love of God and neighbor.  If you’re anything like me, there are probably things that are not, at their core, sinful.  But they become sinful because we give them so much time and attention or we use them as a crutch to carry us through suffering that we don’t want to undergo.

    Think about abstinence from meat last Wednesday and on Fridays: objectively speaking, it’s not the biggest deal in the world not to eat meat on those days.  We eat much more beef, poultry, and pork than any other generation in the history of the world.  And yet, give us one day where we’re not allowed to do something, and sometimes we can go crazy.  We may even enjoy fish or seafood on days when we get to choose it, but if the Church tells us we can’t do something, we can interiorly throw a temper tantrum that we can’t have what we want when we want it.  When something we want is threatened, we can act quite irrationally.  We become like Gollum in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings who became so attached to the One Ring that it consumed him and made him crazy for the Ring, though the Ring didn’t care for him.
    And in that regard our annual Lenten observances help us to clear away unnecessary things, of any kind, and help focus us more towards God.  Again, they don’t have to be bad to be an unhealthy attachment.  They can simply be neutral attachments that we make unhealthy because of our dependence on them.  
    And the key is not simply giving them up for 40 days, but where we go during those 40 days and where we go after that.  During Lent, do we use the extra time or the sacrifices to draw us closer to God?  Do we unite the ways in which we miss a certain type of food, or certain apps or online activities to the cross of Christ?  And when Lent is over, will we go back to unhealthy attachments by splurging in those foods or apps, or might we recognize that we don’t have to use those things as much or at all in the future?  There are so many different things we can give up that I can’t give a hard and fast rule for whether we need to drop something entirely from our lives or not.  But it’s a good thing to consider.  
    As we hear our Lord go into the desert to fast and to be tempted, we, too, enter into the Lenten desert to leave behind us things that hinder our ability to live as the saints God wants us to be.  Don’t let the fear of setting aside something beloved keep you from the greater love and relationship you can have with God by giving up something unnecessary, however precious you think it is.  Lent helps us to remember what we heard in the Gospel, “‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.’”  [The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen].

No mo' FOMO

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

A little over a month ago, on one of the very few nice days that we had in May, I decided that I was out of shape (that reality had been true for some time), and I should do something to get in shape.  So I decided to do a 30-minute run around the exterior of the parking lot here at St. Pius X.  And then I decided to try to keep it up around every other day.  And then someone suggested that I run the CRIM, which I foolishly agreed to do.  So I’ve been running about every day or two, usually doing 5 miles, but once a week trying to get in a 7.5-mile run.

A few months ago, I would have told you that I would only run if I were being chased, or chasing after somebody.  And I can confirm that I never have a smile on my face while I run.  Yes, you do get the endorphins (the good feelings) after you’re done, but the fact that you get them after you’re done running should say something about running in general.  I can tell you that there have been no few amount of times where, during a run, I wonder what in the world I’m doing, and I just want to give up.  But I keep on pressing forward, at least until I attain my goal of running the CRIM.

Jesus in our Gospel tells us to keep going.  He tells us not to look back to what was before, but to continue following Him.  There will be all kinds of excuses about why we can’t follow Him, but He tells us to ignore those, and press on forward.

One of the plagues of today’s culture, especially among the youth, is FOMO–Fear Of Missing Out.  I can’t tell you the number of young adults that I have spoken with over my nine years as a priest who convey to me their fear about experiences that they really want to have, but which may pull them away from a current education, job, or even significant other.  There is a general lack of perseverance, of sticking with something for the long-haul, simply because it gets tough, or challenges appear.

Following Christ is not for sissies.  It gets tough, and there are many temptations to veer off course to something else, maybe not even something bad, that catches our eye.  As a priest, in my three parish assignments, there have been times–during my four years in East Lansing, during my two years in Adrian, and yes, even during my three years here–where I take my eye off Jesus ahead of me, and want to look back and wonder if I made the right decision.  At first, as I entered college seminary, I was more like Elisha, telling my mom and dad goodbye, and then just going for it.  But whenever a trial would present itself, and each parish has its own trials, there would be a little voice (like the one in cartoons that comes from a little red guy with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork) asking me to think about what life would have been like if I wouldn’t have  gone through the seminary and been ordained.  But the voice of the little angel on the shoulder with the halo and wings would respond with what Jesus said today: “‘No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.’”  And, by the grace of God, I have persevered and been filled with such joy by remaining faithful to how God has called me to be a saint.

But it’s not just for priests.  For married couples, too, there’s the temptation to cut bait and run.  To be clear, I’m not talking about physically or verbally abusive situations, where a person needs to leave the marriage for his or her own physical or mental health.  Marriage is tough; it takes perseverance.  For me as a priest, I had eight years for the seminary staff to prepare me to be a priest.  For married couples, it’s usually around 8 months, and it’s not daily preparations; it’s a day here, a weekend there, etc.  And yet it is no less demanding of a vocation, and the temptations to look back also present themselves.  But that’s why it’s so important, when discerning marriage while dating, to make sure that it’s a person with whom you feel God is calling you to spend the rest of your life.  

There will be challenges that married couples will need to face together.  Many of you here can speak to that better than I can.  Many of you here have celebrated 25, or 30, or 40 or even 50 years together as a married couple, and some of you are even working towards 55 or 60 years of marriage.  What I notice about successful marriages is that they both work at following Christ, and, more often than not, they don’t give in to that temptation to look behind them at what could have been.  That’s true if you marry when you’re 19 or 22 or 30, whether you have 3 children or 5 or 8.  Don’t look back at what could have been; face forward toward Christ and where He is calling you to be as a couple.

And for those not married or not considering a vocation to the priesthood, Jesus’ words are still applicable.  It is not helpful in our relationship with Christ to look back and think what could have been.  It’s not helpful to give in to FOMO, to the fear of missing out, and never make that commitment towards doing something great, no matter how hard it is.  That goes for the simple act of making it to Mass every Sunday and Holyday; that goes for choosing to avoid places where you know you’ll be tempted to wander away from God; that goes for choosing to serve others rather than serve yourself.  

In the life of a disciple, there will always be moments where we wonder what life would have been like if we would have chosen B instead of A, gone left instead of right, given in to temptation rather than following Christ and His plan for our life.  Don’t look back; don’t second-guess yourself.  Keep your determination to follow Christ and you’ll find the joy that comes from persevering and finishing the race that God has set before you.