No Man is a Failure who has God as his Friend

Nativity of the Lord–Second Mass

   In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  While there are many classic Christmas movies, one of the great is “It’s A Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart.  But, truth be told, it’s not the most joyful Christmas movie ever.  In the second half of the movie, after we’ve been introduced to George Bailey by an angel named Clarence, we see Bailey, a good man, go from failure to failure, as his absent-minded uncle loses a significant deposit that kept his bank in business, and then he foolishly decides that everyone would be better off if he hadn’t existed.
    How many of us here have been in George Bailey’s shoes?  Maybe not wanting to jump into a freezing river off a bridge, but wondering if our life has made a difference, or if anyone would really notice if we didn’t exist.  Maybe we feel like they would be better if we didn’t.
    Clarence, George’s angel, grants, if even for small while, George’s wish and shows George just what an effect he had on others: from his family, to those who benefited from his reasonable loans, to local citizens.  Spoiler alert: George realizes just the impact he has had on others’ lives.  He recognizes that when one gives of himself, when one treats others as human beings and not as means to gain power or money, one becomes rich, no matter how much or how little one has.  George recognizes that, despite what seems like earthly failures, he is, as his brother Harry calls him, “the richest man in town.”  Or, as his angel, Clarence, writes in the front cover of his Bible, “No man is a failure who has friends.”
    How poor we humans were, even the Chosen People of God.  We found ourselves trapped in cycles of sin.  The greatest king God had provided for His people, King David, was long dead, and his descendants no loner occupied a throne.  Even the voice of prophets had fallen silent.  A foreign, pagan power controlled the Holy City and daily oppressed the ones whom God had promised never to abandon.  We walked in darkness.  We were poor.

    And yet, “the kindness and generous love of our God…appeared.”  At the moment we had lost hope; when despair had almost taken us, God sent us an Angel of Salvation, the Angel that the canon references when it says, “command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty,” Jesus Christ, the fullest messenger (𝛼𝛾𝛾𝜀𝜆𝜊𝜍 in Greek) that God ever sent.
    And God revealed to us that we were not poor, as long as we enjoyed friendship with Him.  As long as we remained close to God, we had everything, because “everything belongs to you…and you to Christ, and Christ to God,” as St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians.  
    But it was not only the Chosen People who felt the sting of their poverty.  Even we, who have been washed clean from original sin and made the adopted children of God in Christ through Holy Baptism can feel like George Bailey.  We can feel like we don’t add anything to society, or even our friends or family.  Life gives us lemons, and we make sour faces.  
    The Good News is that God found us worth saving, though we had no worth in ourselves.  The Good News of the Incarnation is the grand love story of God for His People, who, though they walked in darkness, God did not abandon, but illuminated.  God doesn’t have to show us what life would be like without us; He shows us that we are worth humbling Himself and taking on our frail humanity in order to prove His love for us.  Our debt consists of much more than $8,000 that Uncle Billy lost and Mr. Potter took.  But like the village that rallied around George Bailey, God gives us what we need so that our debt does not mean that we are lost to eternal bondage to sin and death.  And unlike the fellow citizens of Bedford Falls, we didn’t do anything for God.  He owed us nothing.  And yet He still gave, up to and including the Precious Blood of His Beloved Son.  If the donation of money from George Bailey’s neighbors signified their support for the banker who had carried them through the Great Depression, financed their homes and businesses, and saved them from foolish decisions, how much more does the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery show us just how much God supports us and loves us.  
    And this gift from God, the reason for Christmas, truly changed the world.  Without Christ we don’t truly understand human dignity and individual liberties.  Without Christ we mark time altogether differently.  Without Christ we don’t have universities, hospitals, magnificent cathedrals, the scientific method, so many things that we take for granted.  But, above all, without Christ we don’t have salvation, and the kingdom of heaven remains locked to us, which would be the saddest fact of all.  
    But God gives Himself to us, to prove just how much we mean to Him.  Though we are poor, like the shepherds in Bethlehem, God calls us to Himself by the voices of other messengers, other angels, to let us know the good news that our lives have value beyond what we could ever imagine, no matter how good or how bad our lives seem to go.  
    One of the reasons that “It’s A Wonderful Life” continues to be a Christmas classic is because it tells a timeless truth on the silver screen: even when we are at our worst; even when life seems to crash down all around us; even when things seem the darkest; God loves us and values us and is willing to pay any price to save us and help us walk in the light.  If I may be so bold, I would slightly change Clarence the angel’s words to George Bailey, as words that we should always keep at the front of our minds, not only at Christmas, but every day: “No man is a failure who has God as his friend”: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

On Pilgrimage

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord/Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  On this past Christmas Eve, Pope Francis opened the 2025 Jubilee Year, choosing as its theme “Pilgrims of Hope.”  There are numerous opportunities to gain plenary indulgences during this Jubilee, including pilgrimages to our Cathedral in Lansing, to two of the three churches on the pilgrimage to Kentucky that we hope to do in June, or to certain churches in Rome and Jerusalem.
    We hear in our Gospel of the first pilgrimage of our Lord to Jerusalem for the two-fold purpose of celebrating the purification rites for a woman who had given birth, in accord with Leviticus, chapter 12, and the redemption of the first born son, from Exodus, chapter 13.  Our Blessed Mother offers the sacrifice for her purification, and our Lord is given back to God as the firstborn son, remembering how the angel of death passed over the Israelites who marked their lintels with the blood of the lamb.
    This idea of pilgrimage to the Temple, for various reasons, finds its root in the Old Testament, which our Lord fulfilled.  Generally, a good Jew would travel to the Temple each year at least for the Feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Booths.  The temple signified the dwelling place of God, and so all the people would travel to God’s home to be near Him and to thank Him for freedom from slavery and the life of the firstborn (Passover), for the blessing of produce and giving of the law (Pentecost), and the blessing of the harvest and exodus from Egypt (Booths).  But in each case, one traveled to be near God.

Simeon and the Christ Child

    In Christ’s first pilgrimage, the Holy Family did not, technically speaking, need to go to the Temple to find themselves close to God.  They had God with them at all times!  And yet, they still humbled themselves to obey the Law.  Yet, in that Law, God came into His temple in a new way, unlike even when He dwelt in the Temple of Solomon in His presence with the Ark of the Covenant.  By their humility, the Holy Family participated in the fulfillment of the prophecy of Malachi that we heard in the first reading/epistle: “there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek.”  And in the fulfillment of this prophecy, another promise is fulfilled, that to Simeon, whom God promised would not taste death until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah, His Anointed One.  And from that fulfilled promise, Simeon also prophesies that Christ will be the rise and fall of many in Israel, and that a sword of sorrow would pierce Mary’s Immaculate Heart.  
    So how are we on pilgrimage to God?  Our life is meant to be a pilgrimage, not to Lansing, or Kentucky, or Rome, or Jerusalem, but to the heavenly Jerusalem, the Temple not made with hands.  Bethlehem to Jerusalem is a 5.5 mile walk.  You could easily get there and back in a day.  But Jerusalem was built on a hill, and so there were ups and downs.  This time of year in Jerusalem it is around 60 degrees, but there is also rain at this time of year.  So the Holy Family maybe dealt with sun or rain.  Likewise, in our life, which passes before God like a day, there will be ups and downs.  Some days trying to live as a disciple and love God and neighbor as He commanded will be easy; other days it will be difficult.  There will be sunny days where we are full of smiles while following the Lord and there will also be rain when we feel like God has absented Himself from our life, or like the cross He has allowed us to carry seems too heavy.  But you can’t get to the destination of a pilgrimage by stopping.  Sometimes little breaks may be necessary for rest, but the point of the pilgrimage is to keep moving.  
    And as we go towards the heavenly Jerusalem, we, too, should seek the purification of God.  Sin darkens our soul.  It makes us unworthy of temple worship, unworthy of being in God’s house because our actions have communicated that we don’t want to be with Him, and prefer our own ways to His.  It clouds our intellect so that we cannot understand what God wants us to do and how He wants us to love Him and others.  But God offers us purification through the Sacrament of Penance.  He washes us clean by His Precious Blood so that we can enter the Temple and bask in the warmth of His presence.  
    Pilgrimages are also based on hope.  We hope that we will arrive.  Nowadays, as we travel by car or bus or plane, or sometimes all three, our travel is less unsure.  But pilgrimages were historically a matter of walking, and you didn’t know where you might stop, or how safe the way was, or even if you would arrive.  So on our pilgrimage to heaven, we have to have hope.  We hope that God will protect us from anything that seeks to do us harm.  We hope that God will help us arrive at our final destination.  We go from what is seen, our starting point, to what is unseen, our destination.  In the end, until Christ returns in glory, only God knows who arrives safely, unless God grants the Church a knowledge that some have already arrived (our canonized saints).  But we hope that our loved ones are there, cheering us on, encouraging us not to give up, not to turn aside to other false gods or paths that lead away from God, and to persevere through the hills and valleys, the sun and the rain.  
    May this Jubilee Year inspire in us the hope that we will arrive in heaven someday, where Christ will welcome us all as parts of the Mystical Body of the Son redeemed in the Temple forty days after His Birth, the Light of Salvation for all peoples, Jesus Christ[, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  Amen].

Sanctifying our Families in the Temple

Feast of the Holy Family

The Holy Family in flight to Egypt

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  As we come to this Feast of the Holy Family, we once again have the opportunity to reflect on how we can grow as holy families, whether our family is an individual, a couple, or a couple with children.  The Church sets before us a unique family as a model, as the mother is sinless, the husband and wife are celibate, and the child is God, but they show us the way to be like them, though we are not sinless or God.
    And this year what struck me was the Gradual, from Psalms 26 and 83.  In the English it reads: “One thing I ask of the Lord, for this I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life;” “Blessed are they who dwell in your house, O Lord, they shall praise you for ever and ever.”  As the Church has prayed, she has chosen to include these two verses from two psalms into the way we worship God and thank Him for the gift of the Holy Family.
    To be a holy family, our goal must be the house of the Lord.  The psalmist certainly thought about the Temple in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit inspired him to write this psalm.  And for a good Jew, to be close to God one had to go to the Temple, where His presence dwelt, especially in the holy of holies with the ark of the covenant.

    And so for us, no matter what our family looks like, we should strive to be close to God every day.  As a family that may include this temple, where God dwells in the tabernacle in a special way as our holy of holies.  But it also means being close to God throughout the day, even when we cannot make it here to this beautiful temple.  Because, as the Apostle reminds us, we are the temple of God since the Holy Spirit dwells within us through Baptism, Confirmation, and the other sacraments we have received.  
    This should give us comfort when we can’t make it to daily Mass, or even those times when we cannot come to Sunday or holyday Masses because we are sick, or we’re caring for a sick parent or child.  Even if we cannot physically be in a church, God is close to us, in fact, closer than we are to ourselves.  He walks with us each day, whether we go to work, or work at home with or without the kids, or enjoy the rest of retirement, or travel on vacation.  
    In fact, Solomon constructed the Temple to be like a new Garden of Eden.  There were pomegranates and leaves, animals, a bronze sea, lights from candles, and bread.  Genesis says that God accustomed Himself to walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening, and in the Temple one could have contact with God.  But since the veil of the Temple at the time of our Lord was rent, and the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost, we can find God, not only in a building, but also in our daily lives and in the silence of our hearts.
    But, the Temple also created a more stable meeting tent that the Jews traveled with in their Exodus, which God gave to Moses based upon heaven.  And so the Temple points us not only to the past in the Garden of Eden, but also to the future in the heavenly Jerusalem, the temple not made with hands.  And to be a holy family, we should keep our eyes and our attention on that heavenly temple, where we hope to worship God night and day with the angels and saints, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts.”  Whether we are trying to keep our attention on heaven for ourselves, or trying to help our spouse keep his or her eyes on heaven, or trying to teach our children about how wonderful heaven will be and how we have to learn to make choices that get us closer to being there, to be a holy family means to keep our eyes on the prize and keep heaven in mind.  Our family Rosary, or going to Mass as a family, or learning and living out the virtues as a family all help us focus on being with God for ever in heaven, or at least that’s what they’re supposed to do.  It’s not just about the doing or the teaching, but about preparing our family, no matter its size, for the life that never ends, which we hope will be in heaven for us.  
    Keeping our eyes on heaven also means trusting in God, who supplies all of our needs in heaven.  And in that sense, it struck me that our Lord exhibited this in the three days that He was in the Temple area, as Mary and Joseph returned to look for Him.  Our Lord was twelve years old, and yet He survived in the Temple for those three days without parents to feed him.  I imagine he received some help from the teachers with whom He dialogued, but I know that Christ did not worry about what He was to eat or drink or wear, as He would later encourage us to not worry about such things in the Sermon on the Mount.  He was with His Father, and He knew His Father would take care of all things for Him.  So will God the Father do with us who are His adopted children through baptism: He provides, directly or indirectly, for what we need, and invites us to trust His will for our life, especially when it doesn’t match what we wanted to happen or what we thought should happen.  God may not will difficult times for us, but anything difficulties He allows help us to trust in Him and trust how He will take care of us even in the midst of our struggles.
    So, to be a holy family, focus on dwelling in the house of the Lord every day.  Maybe you can’t make it to Mass every day, but make time for God with daily prayer, especially silence, if you are able.  Sometimes it may be a simple sign of the cross as you care for your children, or a fervent prayer, “Jesus, help me!” when the chaos seems more than we can handle.  Or maybe its the less-than-five minutes to pray the Angelus each day at 6 a.m. and/or noon and/or 6 p.m.  Or maybe it’s a holy hour, especially during our Monday times of adoration.  But blessed are those who can dwell with the Lord each day, no matter where they are.  Those who seek to be with God will certainly be a holy family and will prepare themselves for the heavenly Jerusalem, where God–the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit–lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen. 

What's in a Name?

Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Shakespeare famous wrote in his play, “Romeo and Juliet,” “What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  Today as we celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus, we may fall into the same nominalism error that Shakespeare seemed to espouse, that names don’t really make any difference.  But names contain power and access.
    When God first reveals His Name to Moses in the theophany at the burning bush, God reveals Himself as “I AM WHO AM,” or, more simply, “I AM.”  This doesn’t sound like a name to us.  But that’s on purpose.  When we know someone’s name, we have a certain power over that person.  When I stand in a crowded room with my parents with a fair amount of noise, I might say “dad” numerous times without him hearing me.  But, if I were to say “Robert,” it would likely gain his attention.  Or, when a pope dies, to make sure he is dead, they tap him with a decorative small mallet and whisper his baptismal name, figuring that he would respond to the name his parents called him.  When we know a name, we have power, as that person’s attention is turned to us.  But even God did not grant His Chosen People to have power over His Name.  He promised to be with them and to turn to them whenever they called upon Him, but they could not say His name.  In fact, they would simply use the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “Lord,” instead of using the Hebrew word for I AM, which is abbreviated by the consonants YHWH. 

Pope Benedict XVI, of happy memory, asked Catholics not to use this sacred name in the Mass, out of respect for our Jewish brothers and sisters.  Only one time, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, would the high priest, standing before the ark of the covenant, utter the sacred Name of God.
    When our Lord, at least once, in the Gospel of John, referred to Himself as “I AM,” He taught us of His unity with the Father in divinity.  And the people recognized this.  They rise up to stone our Lord for blasphemy.  While some of the I AM statements in John work grammatically and could be interpreted simply as indicative statements using metaphors, the one that stands out is when Christ says, “Before Abraham came to be, I AM.”  That sentence makes no sense, unless Christ is identifying His oneness with the Father.  
    But, just as the prohibition against making images of God changes with the Incarnation, so does the relationship between God’s People and His Holy Name.  Part of the humility of the Incarnation was that God had a name that the people could freely use.  The name of Jesus means “God saves.”  It does, in a sense, define Him, as our Lord is the salvation of God.  No longer is the name not to be uttered at all, but it can be called upon freely in times of need.  Peter and John will heal a lame man “in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean.”  The people come to believe at this great act and Peter’s preaching, such that Peter and John are arrested and stand on trial before the Sanhedrin for what they have done.  That’s where our epistle comes in.  St. Peter proclaims that there is no other name by when men can be saved other than Jesus, a teaching the Church has continued throughout the centuries.  It is the name at which, as we heard in the Introit from St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, every knee should bend, whether those in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, because Jesus Christ is Lord.  Again, Lord was the term that a Jew would have used for God, so St. Paul is affirming the divinity of Christ through His Name.
    The custom of preaching during the Mass is not to use the name of Jesus too often.  I refer to Him as the Lord, or the Savior, or the Redeemer, or simply Christ.  But we should not be afraid to call upon the name of our Savior in time of need, because He has given us His name so that we can receive help.  In the Orthodox Church, there is a practice of simply saying the name, “Jesus” as one breathes in and out.  This beautiful prayer can calm us when we are anxious, and rely on the strength of the Holy Name to cast aside anything that seeks to harm us.  When exorcists cast out demons, they do so with the power of the Holy Name, at which the demons have no choice but to obey, because the power comes, not from the priest, but from Christ Himself.  
    So names are important.  The Holy Name of Jesus is the most important name, because it identifies who God is and what He does.  Whereas in the Old Testament, the name of God was used only rarely, our Lord invites us to call upon His Holy Name whenever we are in need, whenever we are giving thanks, whenever we pray as a church.  May the Holy Name of Jesus protect us from all assaults of the enemy, and may we receive salvation through the Holy Name of Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Humility and Poverty

Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the foci (plural of focus) of St. Francis of Assisi (or, as the Dominicans call him, our Holy Father St. Francis), and the Franciscan Orders, is the humility and poverty of God.  This shouldn’t surprise us much, as Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (as he was baptized) gave up his family’s wealth and prestige to become a begging or mendicant friar and took the name Francis.  He literally (and I use that word properly) stripped off his family’s wealthy clothes and put on a rough, brown habit, and relied on the generosity of others to survive.  And through this poverty, and with the assistance of our Holy Father St. Dominic, they did much to rebuild the Church, which had so greatly fallen into disrepair.
    But poverty and humility don’t only regard physical possessions or wealth.  Our Lord shows us great humility and poverty in His Incarnation.  And yes, the Gospels are clear that the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph did not have much wealth (they had to present the poor family’s offering of two turtledoves or pigeons to redeem their firstborn son).  But the poverty of Christ comes from recognizing how much He gave up to take our human nature onto Himself.  As pure spirit, before the Incarnation, Christ had no limits, experienced no lack, and existed in pure actuality.  After the Incarnation, Christ could be seen in only one place, few the pangs of hunger and thirst, and would grow from potentiality to actuality throughout His life.  The King of the Universe could be mocked by his neighbors.  He could get splinters and feel pain while working with St. Joseph in his workshop.  
    But beyond that, Christ subjected Himself to the Law of Moses.  Our Lord gave the Law to Moses, and knew its deeper meaning, as He would preach in the Sermon on the Mount.  But, as one like us in all things but sin, He subjected Himself to a Law to which He, as Lawgiver, should never have had to follow.  The Law was for children as a tutor.  He needed no such tutor.  And yet, He did not consider it beneath Himself to obey the law in all its commands.  He received circumcision on the eighth day (as we will hear on Wednesday); His parents redeemed Him in the Temple 40 days after His birth (as we will celebrate on Candlemas), which is the earlier passage of today’s Gospel; He went to the Temple for Passover and the Feast of Booths and the Day of Atonement.  He who would declare all animals clean to St. Peter in a vision, obeyed kosher laws.  He would pay the temple tax, though He was the Lord of the temple and the object of its worship.  
    And He did all this so that He could redeem those under the law, so that we might not simply be servants or slaves (though St. Paul will still use these words from time to time), but sons and daughters in the Son of God, so that we could have the same access to the Father that He has.  What great humility for the one who did not sin, which the Law was meant to guard against, to live according to the Law!  What great poverty that He would live under the same rule as slaves, though He is Son.
    So how do we demonstrate this humility and poverty?  Or are we too important to humble ourselves and live under the rules of others, even when they seem not to apply to us (as long as they don’t go against our conscience)?  Kids will often confess disobedience to their parents in one way or another.  I know I disobeyed my parents when I was a child (shocking, I know!).  I will often remind them that our Lord, when He was a child, obeyed Mary and Joseph, even though Christ made and redeemed Mary and Joseph.  Christ, strictly speaking, owed no obedience to anyone; He is God.  And yet, if Joseph told Him to wash His face, or help His mother with dinner, or join in in the workshop, Jesus would yes, “Yes, Abba.”  If the Lord of all Creation can obey human parents, then we, who are not divine, can certainly give our best attempts to obey our parents and what they say.
    How about when Holy Mother Church asks us to do something: how do we respond then?  Some laws are man-made.  They are rooted in what we believe, but they are not directly from God.  Do we take time to obey them, or do we figure that we know better and don’t need to be shackled by such limiting regulations?  When the Church asks us to do penance to unite ourselves to Christ on the cross on Fridays, do we do that, in one way or another?  When the Church asks for some support in prayer, can we add a little prayer time to our daily habits, or do we complain that we pray enough, and are too busy to add another devotion?  Certainly devotions are not necessary, but they can sometimes help.  
    It is so easy to think that we know best, and we shouldn’t have to do something because it doesn’t apply to us, or won’t have an effect on us.  But Christ, through. His Incarnation and Nativity, shows us how to humble ourselves, and how to live in poverty, maybe not of possessions or money, but in poverty of spirit.  May the humble Christ Child, whom St. Francis, il Poverello, the little poor one, loved so much and imitated, help us all to be a bit more humble, a bit more poor, so that we can be more like our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Not Mine

Feast of the Holy Family

    One of the things that we learn from a young age, which is not necessarily good, is the concept of “mine.”  Certainly there is a natural, perhaps genetic, reaction to items that we need to survive.  But anyone who has dealt with a toddler who has learned the word, “mine,” can attest that it quickly goes beyond basic necessities of life like food and drink, and becomes the M.O., the modus operandi, or way of operating, when it comes to just about anything.  And toddlers have a grip strength that seems to defy logic.  Hopefully, the child grows out of this obsession with mine, though some adolescents, and even adults are still fixated on what is mine, such that they sound more like the seagulls in “Finding Nemo,” or like Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings.”
    Contrasted with the idea of mine is the family, as we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family today.  Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, had experienced difficulty in conceiving, and had wept copiously in the temple, such that Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk.  But she, with God’s help, conceived and gave birth to Samuel, and, as promised, she returned Samuel to God after she finished weaning Samuel.  
    This probably does not make sense to us.  We would never give up a child.  But this theme of a child that belongs to God runs through the Old Testament.  Think of Isaac, the son of Abraham.  Or Samson, whose father and mother couldn’t conceive, but who received the blessing of a child as announced by an angel, as long as the parents didn’t drink alcohol or eat unclean foods.  And their son, Samson, could not cut his hair.  In fact, the Mosaic law commanded that every firstborn son had to be presented to the Lord in the Temple and redeemed with a sacrifice, as Mary and Joseph did with Jesus, which we will celebrate at Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord.  So offering one’s child to the Lord was not unknown to the Jewish People before the birth of Christ.
    But even after the birth of Christ, we should offer our families to God.  No, I’m not saying that when you child is misbehaving you can drop him or her off at the church and not have to worry about the child again.  But we should be ready to offer our family spiritually to God each and every day.
    Because, after baptism, before we belong to anyone else, we belong to God.  Yes, naturally we belong to our human family, but the bonds of baptism bind us to God in a way that supersedes our bonds to the human family.  That is how Jesus can say that if we cannot give up father and mother, we cannot truly be His disciple.  Most of the time we don’t have to give up family to follow God, but if our family asked us to do something wrong, our first allegiance should be to God.

    For husbands and wives, that means that your spouse, who is probably the most precious person to you in the world, doesn’t really belong to you.  He or she belongs to God, and your vocation as a spouse is to help your spouse get to heaven, because that’s where God wants him or her to be.  In the Episode III of “Star Wars,” Anakin Skywalker turns to the dark side because he cannot stand the idea of his wife, Padmé, dying, and so the Sith Lord, Emperor Palpatine, tricks Anakin into following him with the promise that Palpatine will help save Padmé’s life.  He forsakes all the good he could do for the opportunity to hold on to his wife.  Ironically (spoiler alert), Anakin himself ends up killing Padmé in his anger towards her for not going along with his conversion to evil.  Certainly, husbands and wives should love each, and sacrifice their own good for the other.  But your spouse belongs to God first and foremost, who allows you to be a good steward in caring for your spouse.  But you do not fully possess him or her.
    For parents, this applies to children, as well.  Your child is yours.  But your child is primarily God’s.  You are called to help the child know God and follow God.  Sometimes children will thank you for this and make this part of your vocation easy.  Sometimes children will not like you making sure that you know about God and about how following Him leads to perfect happiness.  And, to a certain extent, we can’t control how children end up.  But parents are responsible for doing all that they can to help their children grow in the faith through prayer, Bible reading, instruction, and even discipline to help children grow in virtue.  From the second you have your child baptized, you acknowledge that your child is “on-loan” to you from God, and God will want to collect on that loan with interest.  God doesn’t want your child to remain a child in the faith, but to grow to adulthood in his or her relationship with God.  That is the interest God expects on what He entrusts to you.
    So please, by all means, care for your family members: your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings.  But do so recognizing that they are not primarily yours.  We cannot be toddlers when it comes even to our families and say “mine” all the time.  To paraphrase St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, you are not your own.  You belong to Christ, and Christ to God the Father.  May we each find ways of offering our family to God each day, and helping them get to our true home in heaven.

Becoming a Holy Family

Feast of the Holy Family

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  As we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, perhaps some of us think that holiness as a family is always just beyond our reach.  What can be difficult is that God is the ultimate judge of holiness.  He knows the inner working of our hearts, our motivations, how praiseworthy or culpable we truly are for our actions, etc.  While there are objective norms for being holy, our participation in those norms, and how close we come to them, is always an act of faith.  But today I wanted to outline a few important points, first in general and then directed at fathers, mothers, and children.
    First of all, from our Gospel today, we learn that holiness does not mean that we never make mistakes.  We know the story well, that our Blessed Mother and St. Joseph accidentally leave behind our adolescent Lord in Jerusalem, figuring that He’s with other family members.  It’s not until after a day of traveling that they realize they left Him behind in Jerusalem.  We know that Mary never sinned, and the Gospel doesn’t really put blame on St. Joseph either.  So holiness includes doing our best but sometimes not quite getting everything right.  I’m sure that both the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph felt awful about leaving Christ behind in Jerusalem, and they likely experienced the panic that any parent has when he or she can’t find a child.  But they were not at fault.
    Secondly, holiness can, of itself, seem beyond our grasp, like a goal that we can never reach on this side of heaven.  But holiness is, more often than not, continuing to do our best, even if there are falls from time to time.  An Orthodox monk by the name of Elder Thaddeus put it this way:
 

The Holy Fathers and the Saints always tell us, “It is important to get up immediately after a fall and to keep on walking toward God.”  Even if we fall a hundred times a day, it does not matter; we must get up and go on walking toward God without looking back.  What has happened has happened–it is in the past.  Just keep on going, all the while asking for help from God.

Repentance is a sign that you are seeking holiness.  It is only when we give up, when we stop trying to be as God created us to be, that we fail.  Even if you don’t think you’re holy yet, and I know I’m still working on it, keep striving for holiness.  God is the only true judge of whether or not we are being the saints that He called us to be in Holy Baptism.
    For each member of the family, there are particular attributes that help us know that we are truly trying to be a holy family.  And I want to mention just a few today.  Certainly these admonitions are not exhaustive; there are many more that help us to be saints.  But hopefully these will help you to be a holy family, like the model Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
    Fathers: your witness of living the faith is of the utmost importance.  Recent studies have shown that when the father of the family takes the faith seriously, his children are much more likely to continue practicing their faith after they leave the home.  Your love for your wife (first) and your children, a love which you often demonstrate by sacrifice, pays dividends.  By the way you treat your wife, you show your sons how a man should treat a woman, and you show your daughters what level of respect they can demand from young men when they start to date and seek a husband. 
    The words you use (and don’t use) are important; even more so the actions that prove which words you truly value.  We are in need of masculine witnesses of faith in our times when masculinity in general is under attack.  Do not be a chauvinist, but do not be afraid of being a man, willing to sacrifice for a greater good.  Make sure your family makes it to Mass each Sunday and Holyday, and that confession is a regular part of your family life, too, with your wife and kids able to see you enter the confessional, proving that you, too, have your faults that require God’s forgiveness, even as your seek to imitate the love of God the Father in your family home.  Bless your wife and children.  Entrust them to the care of their guardian angels daily.  In this way, you will be holy fathers of a holy family.
    Mothers: faith and trust so often come easier for you, which is why so many women are active in the life of faith and of the parish.  You help your husbands to continue the process of changing from a boy to a man.  A boy thinks only of himself; a man thinks of the other; a husband has been trained to value you and your children more than himself.  Your husband wants to do what is best, and you can help him see things, not only from his perspective, but also from yours.  You help him to value and support what is tender in him, especially when it comes for caring for you and your children.
    Your connection with your children is always different than your husbands, since you bore each child for nine months before their father even got a chance to connect with them.  They often look to you first for guidance, and especially for that maternal love which is gentle when comforting a husband who has the “man flu” or a child who is sick or hurt, but which love is ferocious when defending a child under attack from the outside.  Like Mary, your heart is often pierced with many sorrows, but you demonstrate how to suffer them patiently, with trust that God will make all things right in the end. 
    Your witness to the faith is also so important, and imitates the witness of the Blessed Mother who was attentive to God’s will, and pondered the working of God in her heart.  You help your husband and your children learn quiet meditation and how to listen for the voice of God in the silence.  We need holy women in today’s society, which do not seek to be the same as men, but which seek to compliment authentic masculinity with the feminine genius.  Pray for your husband and children daily.  Entrust them to the care of their guardian angels daily.  In this way, you will be holy mothers of a holy family.
    Children: you, more than your father and mother, are constantly in a state of becoming.  Your life as a child always develops, from a small life in the womb, to a baby, to a toddler, to a child, to an adolescent, to a teenager, to an adult.  You are constantly bumping into rules and limits as you discover who God made you to be.  There are so many influences in your life: first family, then friends, then a boyfriend or girlfriend.  Amid all these changes in your lives, seek God first.  Seek His guidance first.  Your parents will be good, but not perfect, examples of what God wills for you.  Learn to emulate what they do well; learn to avoid what you observe of their struggles.  Both are helpful for your growth in holiness.
    Be patient with your parents.  Just as you don’t know how to become the person God wants you to be perfectly, so they don’t know perfectly how to raise you to be that person.  You didn’t come with an instruction manual.  You will make mistakes, and so will they.  But be respectful of them and, until you’re an adult, obedient to them.  Look to them to understand when love needs to be tough, and when love needs to be gentle.  Pray for them each day of your lives, as you are not always easy to raise.  Commend your parents to St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary each day.  In this way, you will be holy children of a holy family.
    You can each be a holy family.  I can be a holy family.  It does take discipline and sacrifice.  Holy families always seek God’s will, and do their best to follow it when known.  Persevere in trying each day to be holy, as all you have is each day.  If you do your best to cooperate with God’s will, He will complete the good work He has begun in you, through Christ Jesus the Lord, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Blessing of Children

Feast of the Holy Family

    During Christmas we so often focus on children.  One of the greatest blessings in a family is a child.  A child signifies the fruit of the love between a husband and wife.  A child means that the human race has one more person to continue it.  The child shares certain traits with its parents.  A child means an increase in love, not only from the mother and father, but also, in a mysterious way, from the child itself, who can do very little on its own.  For this reason we celebrate with baby showers or diaper parties; we prepare food for the new parents; we offer to help in any way we can, especially during those first few very difficult months.
    And while all of this rings true for the earthly birth of a child, it is also true for the spiritual rebirth of a person, of whatever age.  A baptized person is the fruit of the love of God.  A baptized person means there is one more disciple, one more follower of Christ.  A baptized person is called to develop the traits of God the Father.  A baptized person means an increase of love from the Most Holy Trinity, but also becomes a vessel of love to return to the Trinity the love he or she first received, but also to share that same love of God with others.
    Right now our society and even our members of the Church at times struggle with welcoming earthly children and with passing on the faith to the next generation.  While it is no longer a constitutionally protected activity in the US Constitution, the citizens of Michigan voted to make abortion a protected activity within our State Constitution.  Our governor has touted how much easier it is now to get an abortion, and has tried to convince others to move here so that they can have abortions whenever they want to.  Apparently the math is lost on her that, when we encourage the killing of the next generation, it doesn’t help the population grow; you can’t add people by subtracting people. 
    While I will also never fully appreciate the challenges in raising a child, and a couple’s discernment through prayer and reflection of how many children to conceive using Natural Family Planning, as well as with compassion for those who want children but who cannot receive them, those who prayerfully choose to have more than two children are often, whether jokingly or not, ridiculed or their intelligence questioned.  “Don’t you know what causes that?” they are sometimes asked.  I once heard a person say, in response, “Yeah, and I like doing it!”
    Spiritually, too, some families struggle to pass on the faith.  In some extreme cases, they advocate delaying baptism until the child can choose for him or herself.  If we were to extend this analogically to the other important aspects of life, the foolishness of this position becomes quite apparent: I’m not going to feed my child until she can decide what she wants to eat; I’m going to let my child choose what clothes to wear, or whether to wear any at all; I’m not going to love my child until he asks for it.  Loving parents force all sorts of things of their kids that they need: food, clothing; and love, to name a few. 
    Kids are smart, too.  They can tell what parents prioritize.  So when sports always or often comes before Mass; when families don’t pray together in the home; when the name of Jesus is more often used as a curse word than to invoke God’s blessings; kids figure out if faith is something that happens when convenient, or if it is a regular part of family life.  People wonder why there are fewer attendees at Mass.  Frankly, it’s because attending Mass, learning about the faith, and prayer are not prioritized in many families.  Kids don’t learn how to follow Christ, or that it makes any real difference, so they stop going to church and growing in their relationship with God as soon as they can. 
    God promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars.  And while Abraham struggled with seeing how this could happen, God fulfilled His word when Abraham and Sarah conceived Isaac, whose descendants quickly multiplied in Egypt, and who became a nation, a group of people in their own right.  But it went beyond Abraham’s physical descendants.  The Gentiles, the non-Jews, who were joined to Christ through baptism, also becomes descendants of Abraham, because Christ is a son of Abraham.  God fulfilled His promise through physical and spiritual means.
    But for this to happen, Abraham had to have faith in God, and offer to God the sacrifice of his family.  This happened in a very dramatic way through the almost-sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminded us.  For us, this means offering our family to God, not through death, but through their lives.  Is Mass a priority for you as a family, or is it something you get to if it’s not too inconvenient?  Do you pray at home each day as a family?  Do you pray before meals?  Do you share the stories about Jesus, and, as the children grow, the teachings of the Church?  Another great tradition that has been lost is for a parent to sign their children with the sign of the cross on their foreheads before they leave for school or just to hang out with friends.  This simply gesture, which is proper to parents, reminds the children that they belong to Christ through baptism, and asks Christ, along with their guardian angels, to watch over them wherever they go.  The faith becomes as natural a part of life as eating, getting dressed, and going to school or work.
    Children are a great blessing.  They are, not only the future, but the present.  If we wish our society and our church to grow, we should support life, including helping mothers who have little to bring their children to birth.  We should make sure that, in our families, the faith life is not optional, but is part of how we live every day.  And if you can’t have children for whatever reason, find ways to help other parents and other families.  Because families who center themselves on God and not on the lesser goods of the world help make our society and our church better places to be, filled with more of the grace of God.

The Shepherds

Nativity of the Lord: Mass at Night
    Merry Christmas!  As we assemble tonight to celebrate the birth of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, we do so at the same, or at least a similar time, as the shepherds just outside of Bethlehem.  Luke records that the shepherds were “keeping the night watch over their flock.”  And yet, in the midst of the darkness, “the glory of the Lord shone around them” as they witnessed angels and heard one of the first proclamations of the beginning of the Gospel, that, “‘today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord.’”

Painting of the shepherds from Shepherds' Field in Bethlehem

    I started a tradition when I became a priest to add, each year of my priesthood, to a Fontanini nativity set.  In the first year I had to buy the basics, and besides Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and the angel, the only other figure who was included was a shepherd and two sheep.  There’s something about the shepherds that belongs at the heart of the nativity, just slightly behind the necessary figures of the Holy Family themselves.
    Perhaps part of their importance connects to how many times in the Old Testament God refers to shepherds.  Psalm 80 states, “O Shepherd of Israel, lend an ear, you who guide Joseph like a flock!  Seated upon the cherubim, shine forth.”  Probably one of the currently most popular psalms, 23, states, “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.”  God appoints Joshua, son of Nun, “that the Lord’s community may not be like sheep without a shepherd.”  God likewise calls David as the king to shepherd God’s people by ruling over them. 
    God also condemns bad shepherds.  In Jeremiah he states, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the flock of my pasture…I myself will gather the remnant from my flock…and bring them back to their folds.”  Through Ezekiel God says:
 

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!  […] I myself will search for my sheep and…I will bring them back to their own country and pasture them….In good pastures I will pasture them….I myself will pasture my sheep; I myself will give them rest…The lost I will search out, the strays I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, and the sick I will heal.

Shepherds hold an important place in the Old Testament, both as an image of God who cares for His people, and as a warning for those who have authority but do not exercise it well.
    Many have also noted that shepherds were poor.  They did not, beyond their flock, have much to their names.  They recognized their dependance on God, and relied on Him to provide for their livelihood.  And so it is the poor, those who not only lack material goods, but also who recognize their need for God, who first hear the message of the Gospel, and are drawn to worship the newborn king, “‘wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’”
    Tonight the Lord invites us to come before Him like the shepherds, no matter what our adjusted gross income.  We come in our poverty of spirit, our recognition that we need God, and bow before the Shepherd of Israel, the one who leads us to good pastures, who rules over us, who seeks us out when we are lost, and places us upon His shoulders when we are injured.  As Psalm 100 states, “we are his people, the flock he shepherds.” 

Door of Humility

    Poverty in spirit is an exercise in humility.  At the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, there is a door, which was added in the sixteenth century, that was built purposefully with small dimensions.  Practically, it kept people from bringing horses and cattle in the church.  But that was quickly theologized and the door was called the “Door of Humility,” because each person, no matter how rich or how poor, how powerful or how insignificant, had to bow down to be able to enter.  As we come before the Lord, we bow down in the presence of our God and King.  While not required, kneeling when we receive Holy Communion, is a beautiful expression of our humility and poverty in spirit as we receive the same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.  And during the Creed, we usually make a profound bow from the waist when we mention the Incarnation, but tonight, the day we came to know it happened, we genuflect, lowering our very bodies in each case which is meant to remind us to humble our souls as well. 
    Lastly, while not part of tonight’s Gospel passage or pericope, verse seventeen of this same chapter states, “When [the shepherds] saw [the infant lying in the manger], they made known the message that had been told them about this child.  All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds.”  This great celebration is not something that the shepherds could keep to themselves, nor should we be able to keep this great celebration to ourselves.  When we appreciate God as our shepherd; when we recognize the great humility that God first showed us by taking on our human flesh, with all its limitations and weakness, we should share that news with others.  So many celebrate Christmas, but they have forgotten what it means, beyond presents and big meals with family and friends.  Christmas, at its heart, is about the Lord, our Shepherd, seeking us out, and taking us upon His shoulders so that He can carry us to the verdant pastures of repose in heaven.  God did not have to do this.  God would not have lost anything in Himself if He had let us pay the price for our disobedience in Adam.  But so much did He love us, that He got rid of the bad shepherds who only cared for themselves, and shepherded us rightly, taking us to Himself in love and truth. 

    Tonight, may the lights of this great temple shine like the angels in the heavens.  May our celestial hymn of “Glory to God in the highest,” not only ring out in the ceilings of this church, but re-echo outside and in the witness of our lives, so that others may also come to adore our newborn King, and find the life that God desires for all His sheep.  

Holy, Not Easy-Living, Families

 Feast of the Holy Family
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The Book of Job is one of the great books of the Old Testament.  The main message of the book is that one can do everything right and still have bad things happen.  It was the prevailing wisdom that if good things happened, God was blessing you, and if bad things were happening to you, God was punishing you for something you did wrong.  
    I think that we can often fall into that same mindset: if something good happens to me, then I must have done something good, or God is rewarding me.  If something bad happens to me, then I must have done something bad, or God is punishing me.  This can certainly creep in to our understanding of family life.
    It can start with even searching for a good spouse: if I cannot find someone to love, someone with whom to spend my life, then I must be doing something wrong.  If I fall in love and the other person reciprocates, then I must have done something right.  Honestly, sometimes finding the right person takes time, and God can allow you to go through lesser relationships in order to learn more about yourself, or about the qualities that you would want in a spouse.  The key, of course, is to be willing to commit your entire life (better and worse, sickness and health, prosperity and poverty) to a person whom you will help to get to heaven.  And some couples who look perfect together sometimes are just infatuated, which they hopefully find out before the enter into the life-long commitment of marriage.
    It can continue with trying to have children.  Over the past two years, I have become more aware and more sensitive to the realities of miscarriages.  Whether it’s my best friend and his wife, family friends, and/or parishioners, I have come to understand better the deep pain and heartache that come from a miscarriage.  I have spoken with mothers who simply want to have a child, but it doesn’t seem to happen; mothers who love their unborn baby, but whose baby, nevertheless, dies in the womb; mothers who try to avoid all the things that could lead to a miscarriage but who still have to go through that agony.  How easy it can be to ask the question, “Why is God punishing me?  What have I done wrong?”  In the midst of that pain and heartache, we know that God would never kill a child to prove a point, or to get back at a parent.  Why some miscarriages happen or why God would allow it can remain a mystery.  But we know that God walks through that valley of the shadow of death with parents, and never leaves them without His consoling love.  
    Or, it can happen when the children are grown and are making their own decisions.  Despite the best parenting, children can make bad decisions and choices.  It is so easy for parents to take those decisions and choices personally, and presume that the bad choices are because of bad parenting.  But even in the best of circumstances, people can sin and can do things that they shouldn’t.  Look at St. Peter: he was one of our Lord’s closest friends, the leader of the apostolic college, and had great zeal for protecting the Lord.  And he still denied that he even knew the Savior during His Passion.  Would we accuse Christ of skipping over something that He should have taught Peter?  Or not loving Peter enough?  Of course not!  Children, especially adult children, have free will.  We can give them every good thing, and they can still walk away from those good things.  I think especially of the uncountable number of Catholics who have walked away from their Catholic faith, even though their parents did their best to give them a good foundation in the faith.  Or consider an adult child who, while being raised to say no to drugs and underage drinking, makes a choice to try a controlled substance or decides to drive drunk and ends us dying.  Free will is meant for us to say “yes” to Godly things, but it can also be misused to say yes to death and no to the life God offers.  
    So what do we do as families?  Do we give up?  Do we let our lives be governed by fate or the pagan idea of karma?  No.  We give our families the best chance of success by being strong in our faith in Christ.  We hold fast to the Church, trusting that, if we do our best, then hopefully others’ free will can be used for God’s purposes.
    If you’re seeking a spouse, we pray, like Tobiah and Sarah, to find the spouse that God wants for you so that you can come together, not out of lust, but out of doing God’s will.  If you’re seeking a spouse and not having much success, you might recognize that God wants you to grow in your trust of Him and His plan, rather than forcing things with your own plan.  You trust that God will reveal, at the right time, a person who can help you grow in holiness as a married person, if that is God’s plan for your life.
    If you’re married and trying to have children, by all means, use the knowledge of the human body that God has given to doctors and scientists.  But if your attempts at conception are not fruitful, or if you have to mourn the loss of your child who did not survive outside of the womb, know that the love that you have for your child is not wasted.  God is love, and so the love that the child in your womb received was a participation in God, and God will help you, either to conceive a child, or God may call you to adopt and share that love with a child whose parents could not support that child that they conceived.  Don’t give in to the temptation to play God by in vitro fertilization or surrogacy, which are both gravely contrary to God’s plan for human conception, but seek God’s will and God’s plan for sharing the love you have for a child.
    And if, after having children, they wander away from a virtuous life, whether the human virtues or the theological virtues, don’t give up praying for your children.  Don’t blame yourself, either.  Free will allows us to love, but when used poorly it can be very painful.  Still, it is better that we can love than not to be free.  Do your best to draw your children back to a virtuous life if they have strayed, and lead by an example of joyful and loving obedience to the truth.  Use prudence on when to protect adult children and when to let them experience the consequences of their actions.  But love them always, even if that love has to be from afar.  

    As we celebrate the Holy Family, it can be easy to think that if we simply do the right things, life will be easy and without burdens.  But look at the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: Joseph died before Christ was 30 years old, making Mary a widow; Mary had to allow her son to perform His ministry of preaching, which led to His death on a cross; our Lord did everything right, and yet was rejected by His People, and even abandoned by most of His closest friends.  If the Holy Family had struggles, even though two out of the three of them never sinned, then we, who are sinners, will also have trials and tribulations.  But, like the Holy Family, bring them to our loving Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, world without end.  Amen. 

Cut It Out

 VIII Day of the Octave of Christmas & Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  God, in calling Abram out of Ur in modern-day Iraq, said many amazing things to him.  We hear at the beginning of Genesis, chapter 12, that God tells Abram, “Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.”  That, in itself, took a giant leap of faith.  Abram was being asked to leave the fertile crescent, the birth-place of civilization, as scholars call it, for an unknown land inhabited by unknown, and possibly hostile, people.  It’s hard enough for us to pack up our entire life and move to a different place.  Imagine doing it without having a home to which you were going, not knowing exactly where God was going to settle you (and whom you might have to dislodge to stay there), and doing it at the age of 75 years old.

    God also promised Abram, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”  Abram and Sarai (later Abraham and Sarah) were well past the childbearing years.  They had no children.  And yet God promised that he would make of them a great nation.  This must have seemed odd to them.  And yet Abram trusted in God to do the impossible.  This makes Abraham’s almost sacrifice of Isaac much later even more incredible.  God had finally given Abraham and Sarah a son, Isaac, and so perhaps they thought that becoming a great nation could actually happen.  But then God asks Abraham to sacrifice that son, that fulfillment of the promise, that promise of hope for the elderly couple.  And yet, Abraham is willing to do it (though God stays his hand at the last minute).
    Before that, in chapter 17, God appears to ninety-nine year-old Abram (who had conceived Ishmael with his slave, Hagar, but was still childless with Sarai), and says:
 

I am God the Almighty.  Walk in my presence and be blameless.  Between you and me I will establish a covenant, and I will multiple you exceedingly.  […] You are to become the father of a multitude of nations.  […] I will make you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings will stem from you.  […] I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now residing as aliens, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession; and I will be their God.  […] This is the covenant between me and you and your descendants after you that you must keep: every male among you shall be circumcised.  Circumcise the flesh of your foreskin.  That will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.

Luckily, Abraham was open to God’s will.  Because, put in his place, I think most men would have said, “You want me to do what?  To my what?”  
    And yet this was the sign of those who believed in and followed God.  And this sign of the covenant endured even to the time of our Lord, who, though He was the Lord of the covenant, was still joined to Israel by His Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and His foster-father, St. Joseph, in a powerful way that united Christ to Israel as the People who belonged to God, the sons and daughters of Abraham.  Even for those who needed to be joined to Israel, this was a difficult sign.  Indeed, when the Bible talks about God-fearers, it speaks about those who wanted to become Jewish, but who had some issue preventing them from joining.  One can imagine that the thought of circumcision kept any number of adult men converts from becoming fully Jewish and part of the covenant.  God our Savior, who had no need to become part of the covenant, still underwent this sign.
    But the sign had a spiritual meaning in addition to the physical act.  The prophet Jeremiah prophesies: “Be circumcised for the Lord, remove the foreskins of your hearts, people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Or else my anger will break out like fire, and burn so that no one can quench it, because of your evil deeds.”  Circumcision was a physical cutting away.  But God also intended it to be a spiritual cutting away of all that was fallen and of disobedience to God.  The covenant was not only to be part of one’s flesh, but also part of one’s heart, spirit, and soul.  
    Christ Himself, while He was subjected to the covenant as an infant, Himself established a new covenant in His Precious Blood, and a new sign of the covenant was given that had both a physical and a spiritual aspect.  That new sign was baptism.  The water washed one clean of original sin, but it also meant a washing away of all that is fallen from that point on.  It made men and women part of the new Israel, the Church, gathered from all the nations, as a people who belong to the Lord.  
    But think of the humility that Christ underwent in being circumcised!  He who is Lord of the Sabbath is certainly also Lord of the Covenant, and so is not bound to it.  But He allows the cutting of His flesh in anticipation of giving His flesh for the life of the world in His Passion.  He subjects Himself to the Law, though He is the Lawgiver.  And He does the same in His baptism in the Jordan, as John baptizes Christ, though John asks to be baptized by Christ.  
    This is a great model for us when it comes to humility.  How often do we bristle when we have to do something that we don’t think we should have to do?  How quick do we make known our importance, and how we think things should go?  But this is not the example of our Savior.  Like Abraham, Christ, the Son of Abraham, trusted in His heavenly Father, and went where the Father told Him to go, did what the Father told Him to do, and said what the Father told Him to say.  “Like a lamb,” Isaiah prophesied, “he was led to the slaughter, and he opened not his mouth.”  Yet, if we bear one unrighteous punishment, how quickly do we open our mouths to protest our own innocence?
    God does not call us to be doormats, but on the other hand, sometimes He allows the just to suffer unjustly for their own sanctity, their own growth in holiness.  The day after Christmas we celebrated St. Stephen, who was martyred though his only crime was to witness to the fact that Christ was the long-awaited Messiah.  The day after that we celebrated St. John, who, while not a martyr, was exiled to Patmos as a Roman punishment for following Christ; the day after that we celebrated the Holy Innocents, who could not even confess Christ with their lips, though they took His place with their deaths; the day after that we commemorated St. Thomas Beckett, who died at the hands of King Henry II for standing up for the rights of the Church.  These past days of the Octave haven been filled with witnesses who suffered unjustly.  Their witness should spur us on when we have to undergo sufferings much lighter than theirs.  

    I would also add Pope Benedict XVI to those who suffered unjustly, but utilized it for his own holiness.  He was often attacked in the media, was called “God’s Rottweiler,” despite his gentle and humble disposition, and suffered other attacks, simply for holding true to the unchanging teachings of the Church.  Yet I never remember him complaining once about those slings and arrows.
    God promised Abraham that he would become the father of kings and many nations.  Abraham remained faithful to God, even in hard times, even when the sign of that covenant meant the stripping away of flesh.  Christ subjected Himself to the Law, and paid the penalty for our sins, though He Himself was the Lawgiver and free from all sin.  What witness will we give through the new circumcision of the heart, holy baptism, by which we become united to God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

New Year, New You

 Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    In recent years, people have posted pictures of themselves at or shortly after New Year’s Day with the phrase, “New Year, new me.”  Usually it’s a picture of them at the gym, or going for a walk, or doing some other exercise.  As we start a new calendar year, it is easy to see how we want to start afresh, or start some new habit that will improve our lives.
    We tend to focus on the physical changes that we can make in our life, because we interact with our bodies so regularly.  While we can miss the incremental changes that happen day-by-day, we can look in the mirror and see how those small changes each day have led to bigger changes.  But when it comes to the soul, seeing those changes takes more effort and is less obvious.  
    But what can you commit to in this new year for your spiritual life?  What changes can you make to improve your relationship with God, and improve how you love God by loving your neighbor?  Some people go for the big changes, committing to major changes in practice.  I recently spoke with a young man who is doing Exodus 90, a program for men that is meant to help men grow in their spiritual life and relationships.  Exodus 90 includes 90 days of committing to a daily holy hour (an hour spent in prayer, often times in front of the Blessed Sacrament), and reading daily reflection on the Book of Exodus; cold showers, regular exercise, and 7-hours of sleep per night; no alcohol, sweets, eating between meals, soda or sweet drinks; no TV, movies, or televised sports; no video games and only using the computer and mobile devices for work, school, or essential tasks; fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays; and checking in with a group of men who are also doing Exodus 90 to be accountable and to encourage each other in the ascetical practices.  In case you’re wondering, I’m not doing that, though I know priests and laymen who have done Exodus 90 and found it very helpful for their spiritual life.
    But if you don’t want to do something big, does that mean you can’t do anything?  Of course not!  And I would encourage us to look at the Gospel for ways that we can do small things each day that can make a big difference.

    First, we heard that Mary “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”  Mary had a lot going on.  The conception of Jesus was especially miraculous; she was 9 months pregnant, and then had to take a journey to Bethlehem to register for the Roman census.  Then she gave birth in a cave, because there was no room for her in the inn.  Then, shortly after giving birth, shepherds (strangers to Mary and Joseph) show up to see what the angels had told them about.  No doubt, they told Mary and Joseph what the angels had said, and how they were singing “Glory to God in the highest.”  But she was able to think about these things, and how God was working in her life and in the lives of others around her.  She reflected on the struggles, but how God had gotten them through those trials, and how others were coming to see this newborn King that she had carried in her womb for nine months.  She probably prayed with some concern to God about how everything would work, but she also probably thanked God that it did all work out, and praised Him for sending angels to help others know about her special child.
    What is your prayer life like?  What do you take to God?  Do you pray?  A great spiritual practice, one that is easy to start, is to simply take 5 minutes each day, or take smaller chunks of time throughout the day, and see what God has been doing.  Reflect on your struggles, but also reflect on how God is getting you through them.  Thank Him for His care and concern for you.  Praise God for the little and/or big ways that He has shown His love for you.
    Second, St. Luke tells us that “the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”  Having encountered such a wonderful experience of God, they cannot help but speak about it.  They praise God in prayer, but I’m sure they also told other shepherds about what they saw, and thanked God that they had been privileged to see God work in such a powerful way.  
    God works in powerful ways in your life each day.  And that culminates in the miracle of the Eucharist in which you get to participate each Sunday and Holyday, and some of you even are able to attend Mass on a daily basis.  Jesus told the disciples, “‘blessed are you eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.  Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.’”  We get to encounter the same Jesus who said that in the Word proclaimed, in the Eucharist consecrated for us, and in the ways God makes Himself known to us each day.  Share that with others!  FAITH Magazine offers ways that people share their faith, but you can do it without being featured in a magazine.  People in our parish have experienced miracles, and they are quick to share them with me.  I’m glad to hear them, and I hope that they share those miracles with others, to help them know that God is real and does great work.
    Lastly, today’s Gospel ends talking about Jesus’ circumcision, which happened 8 days after his birth (today is the eight days after Christmas).  Even this helps us know how to grow in little ways.  We probably all know that circumcision involves cutting off.  In our spiritual life, there are always things that we can metaphorically cut off.  Jesus Himself told us in the Sermon on the Mount, “‘If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.  It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.’”  God wants us to cut out the sinful parts of our lives.  That can be done in simple ways, sometimes going directly after the sin, like not engaging in gossip, or not taking the Lord’s name in vain.  But it can also mean cutting out good things in our life, in order to help us focus on the higher things of life.  I have encouraged this before, but I would encourage all of you to abstain from meat on Fridays, not just of Lent but throughout the entire year.  Even if you like fish (which I do), cutting out your options for what you can eat is a good way to die to our own wills, and simply feeding ourselves whatever we want, whenever we want.  Or, you could abstain from games or websites on a phone.  Or something else that may be just has hard.  Whatever you cut out, especially do it on Fridays, as a day the Church has always called us to sacrifice little things, to acknowledge and thank God for the sacrifice Christ made on the cross.
    As we begin the Year of our Lord 2023, we have a chance to allow God to renew us and to grow closer to Him.  Sometimes we will commit to big acts for God.  Other times we may commit to smaller acts.  But the key is that we strive to do the things that help us love God and neighbor more, so that God makes us new with His grace more and more each year. 

Charlie Brown and the Meaning of Christmas

 Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord

    I’m pretty sure my mom’s favorite Christmas show is  “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”  I’m sure we’re all familiar with the story: Charlie Brown wants a great Christmas, there’s a school Christmas play, Snoopy has decorated his dog house over the top, and the tree that Charlie Brown picks is a small, pitiful tree that barely has any needles left on it.  The play is falling apart, Lucy is being her usual self, and nothing seems to be going right.  Enter Linus, who, responding to Charlie Brown’s query if anyone knows what Christmas is about, says:
 

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them, “Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

There is so much that goes on at Christmas, so many things that we prepare for, so many parties to attend, presents to buy, houses to clean, that sometimes we forget what Christmas is all about.  And we’ve celebrated it so many times, that perhaps it has lost some of its newness and power.  Perhaps we have become numb to the real meaning of Christmas, what Christmas is all about.
    To properly understand the real meaning of Christmas, we have to start at the beginning.  Adam and Eve had offended God by disobeying Him and seeking to be God on their own terms.  They were sorry.  God accepted the apology, and sought humanity out time and time again, but humanity kept distancing itself more and more away from God.
    Christmas, then, is about God making the ultimate move of reconciliation.  We could not approach God on our own.  We were hopeless that anything could be done to fully restore what we had broken.  And knowing that we had caused the pain, knowing that we had done wrong, we stayed to ourselves.  But God didn’t leave us to ourselves.  He sent us someone who could reconcile us to Himself, and someone who could do so without shaming us.  Christ was and is one like us, but without sin.  He took on our human flesh so that we could be comfortable in the presence of God again.  God became man so that man might become God.  Rather than seeing us continually suffer by our separation from Him, He came to us so that we could be healed.
    And He came in a way that utterly disarmed us.  The Incarnation was like the Trojan Horse, because how could we not accept one so tiny and fragile?  How could we not smile at a cute baby, whose face looked like ours, but was truly the face of God?  It would be like being estranged from a dear friend or family member, not knowing if we could ever be amicable with them again because of the pain that we caused, but then that dear friend sends us a little gift, something that we treasure, as a way of restoring that relationship.  We certainly did not earn that gift, and would never have expected it, but that friend sent it anyway, and the healing could commence.  

    The real meaning of Christmas is God’s love and mercy for us doing the unthinkable: lowering Himself beyond all expectation, just so that we could be reunited with Him.  The snow is beautiful (though you may think otherwise having driven in it to get here); the glimmering trees and the presents that often are under them give us passing happiness; the favorite and timeless songs that we sing give our hearts a certain levity.  But all those things will pass, and will be put away for another twelve months.  The love and mercy of God will remain, long after the snow has melted, after the trees have dropped all their needles and the presents are forgotten or broken, after you can only find Christmas songs on YouTube or Spotify.  
    Are we willing to embrace that mercy?  Are we willing to accept the love of God offered to us to restore us to friendship with God?  It seems like a silly question, but sometimes, after we know we have done something wrong, we fear even accepting an offer of mercy and love, because we so define ourselves by our faults and failing.  We think that the broken relationship cannot be made whole again.  Or we are afraid that, having restored that friendship, we will break it off again once more.  
    As the angel said to the shepherds in the field at Bethlehem, “Be not afraid.”  We are not the sum of our failings, as Pope St. John Paul II once said.  God can make what is broken whole again.  And yes, we may offend God again, but God, through Christ, will reach out His hand again when we turn back in sorrow for our sins, and will not reject any who come to Him, even if our sins were like scarlet.  And he will not do so begrudgingly, but with great haste and intention, because He would rather lower Himself and take on human frailty; He would rather die than have one of His beloved be separated from Him.  So great is the love of God that He will go to any lengths He can to save us.
    That is what we see at Christmas.  That is what we experience in the Incarnation.  That is what we celebrate today, every Sunday, and even every day as the priest, and the people united with him interiorly, offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  God loves you so much that He became like you.  Accept that great gift of love and mercy, and allow it to transform your life today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that you will have.  We broke off our friendship with God, but God has given us the opportunity to be His adopted sons and daughters in the Incarnate Son of God.  That is the real meaning of Christmas.  That is what Christmas is all about.