"Do you also want to leave?"

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

So the second week of August was not a great week for me.  It was one of those weeks, I know you’ve had them, where everything seemed to come together, but not in a good way, but in a way that kept draining me emotionally and spiritually.  I had my regular responsibilities of taking care of parishioners, which is both something that gives me joy and something that tires me out, and then my grandmother was dying (she passed away on Tuesday, 7 August), and then the news came out about Archbishop McCarrick and how he is accused of abuse of minors and engaging in homosexual relationships with seminarians and priests.  I buried my grandmother on Friday, 10 August, buried a parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Davison on Saturday (because their church wasn’t available).  Then the weekend schedule, then continuing with my usual parish duties with a few hospital visits, and also working with the State Police trying to comfort a woman whose husband had just committed suicide and left her four children fatherless.  And then the grand jury report came out of Pennsylvania, talking about the horrific crimes perpetrated against children, some which could best be described by the word diabolical.  Let’s just say my emotional and spiritual tank were running on E.  

Bishop Mengeling, when he was still bishop of Lansing, would often say that he quit frequently, usually at the end of the day.  And I can honestly say that at points, especially as the news about Archbishop McCarrick and the priests in Pennsylvania came out, I wondered what sort of organization I was working for, and whether it was worth it.  I don’t mind all the work, and in fact I love helping others find God in difficult times, especially sickness and death when God seems so absent.  But to hear about so many brother priests who were priests in name only, who did not serve God’s people but preyed on them, that just killed my morale.

So today’s Gospel really hit home.  Jesus is finishing with what we call His Bread of Life Discourse.  He has told the people that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they do not have life within them.  He has told them that what He is giving them is even more precious than the manna that God gave them in the desert.  And what do His disciples, those who followed Jesus, do?  “‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’”  And they mostly leave.

What’s interesting is that Jesus doesn’t stop them; He doesn’t run after them to say that they misunderstood, that they were thinking about eating human flesh, when He was talking about the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine.  He doesn’t even expand His teaching where He is.  If it were a numbers game, Jesus was not doing what He should have to keep His attendance high.  All Jesus does is ask the Twelve, the Apostles, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And honestly, in the midst of my fatigue, my lack of energy, my disgust at people who betrayed Jesus and misused the sacred office entrusted to them by Jesus, I felt like Jesus asked me, “Do you also want to leave?”  

There are a million reasons to leave the Church.  In heaven she is the immaculate bride of Christ, but on earth, she is made up of sinful members, sometimes very sinful members.  And I don’t have to look beyond myself to find a sinner in the Church.  There are myriad historical examples of the Church not doing what she should have, even if we take off our modern way of thinking, which would have been very odd to those who lived centuries and a millennium before us.  We’ve had popes, bishops, and priests who fathered children why claiming to live a chaste life; we’ve had lay people in public office who claimed to be doing the will of God even while they were anything but godly in their governance; we’ve been on the wrong side of history more times than we’d like to admit.  Sometimes pastors make decisions that we don’t like, that we think are bad decisions.

But while there are a million reasons to leave the Church, there’s only one real reason to stay: Jesus.  If Jesus really is God, and if the Church is really the Mystical Body of Christ, then even when the Church on earth messes up and does horrible things, my faith in Jesus can still remain.  If Jesus said that we need to be baptized, to be born again in order to have eternal life; if He said that unless we eat His Body and drink His Blood we do not have life within us; and if He set up His Church in such a way as to continue that power to make His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension–His Paschal Mystery–present for us through bishops and priests, then even when some whom He has chosen as priests act in a polar opposite way than Jesus, it does not shake my faith in Jesus and His Mystical Body.  It may break my heart, first and foremost for the victims who suffered so horribly, and then for an institution that I love which is going through a very painful purification from its sinful members.  But it doesn’t make me leave, because my faith was never in those individuals, but it was in Jesus.  They were supposed to lead me to Jesus and act in His name, but they weren’t Jesus Christ Himself.  

In the midst of this trial, Jesus asks us, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And you’ll have to decide how you will respond.  Maybe you want to leave because of the horrendous news over the past few weeks.  Maybe you don’t like the new Mass schedule.  Maybe you have a different reason that makes you want to leave the parish or the Church.  But to that question from Jesus, asking if I want to leave, I have to make my own the words of Simon Peter and Joshua: Master, to whom shall I go?  You have the words of eternal life.  I have come to believe and am convinced that you are the Holy One of God.  As for me, I will serve you, Lord.

Entrusting our Family to God

Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Last week my sister and brother-in-law celebrated their 9th wedding anniversary.  I remember the day of their wedding pretty clearly: I wasn’t a priest or even a deacon yet, so I was in charge of cantoring the Mass; there was lots of snow on the ground, but it was about 50 degrees, so it was very foggy; there were 5 priests concelebrating the wedding (including now-Bishop Raica, now-Msgr. Vincke, two priests from the Diocese of Lansing and one from the Archdiocese of Detroit; perks, I guess of having a seminarian for a brother, and a dad who works for a parish in DeWitt).

I also remember, a little more than 5 years ago, when they told us that they were pregnant with their first daughter, Evelyn.  I remember wondering how my mom would take being a grandmother, because, generally, grandma is a word that is associated with those who are a bit more mature (a kind way of saying older), and I wasn’t sure my mom was ready for the very real and public acknowledgment that she was, in fact, more mature.  But, I couldn’t have been more wrong!  My mom was very excited to be a grandmother, and she has loved spending her time with her two granddaughters, my niece Evelyn and my niece and goddaughter Adelaide.

We heard in our first reading and our second reading about Abraham becoming a father with his wife, Sarah, for the first time, at an age which would be described as really mature (that is, really old).  And God fulfills His promise to Abraham through Isaac, who is the beginning of the descendants of Abraham more numerous than the stars in the sky.  Abraham must have wondered if God was going to fulfill His promise, but Abraham trusted in God to be true to His word, and it happened.  And that trust was put to the test when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Of course, God stayed Abraham’s hand before he could complete the sacrifice, but even then, Abraham trusted that God could raise from the dead an heir as we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews.  Of course, the author to the Letter to the Hebrews, traditionally St. Paul, sees in Isaac and Abraham a foreshadowing of Jesus, whose Father, God, did not stay the executioner’s hand, but let His Son be sacrificed so that we could go to heaven.

And that’s where our Gospel comes in.  Even as an infant, being offered to the Lord as the firstborn by the sacrifice of two doves, Jesus’ destiny is set.  Simeon, the just man, awaiting the Messiah, sees Jesus and knows that God has, again, been faithful, in not letting Simeon see death until he saw the Messiah.  But he also prophesies that Mary, Jesus’ mother, will have her heart pierced by sorrow, which is certainly the case when Mary had to watch her own Son die, naked on the cross.  

Children are, more often than not, the fruit of family life.  In fact, in order to be married, you have to be open to children (unless you’re past childbearing age).  It’s one of the goods of marriage, and even for those who are of childbearing age who cannot conceive, adoption is a great way of having children.  In either case, having or adopting a child should be the response to God’s will for a husband and wife.  Look what happened to Abraham when he tried to take God’s promise into his own hand: he and his slave, Hagar, conceived Ishmael (Sarah at first said it was ok, but then mysteriously changed her mind after Abraham started spending a lot of time with Ishmael).  When we try to replace God’s plan with our own plan, it tends to mess things up.  And we know, by what Jesus has said through His Church, that natural conception or adoption are the only good ways to bring a child into the world.  Sometimes, yes, that conception has to be helped by hormone treatments or vitamin supplements.  But when processes like in vitro fertilization are used, or when people decide they have a right to have a child on their terms, and not as part of God’s plan, our relationship with God is damaged by the sinful means or by selfish desires.  Children, no matter how they are conceived, are always blessings.  But we always want to be sure that the way we welcome a new life into a family is according to God’s plan, and not only according to our plan.

Instead, the Lord invites us to entrust our families to Him.  And that goes not only for how to welcome a new child in the family, but even before that.  The Church requires that Catholics get married in a Catholic Church, or get a dispensation from the local bishop from that requirement, because as a new family is formed, the Church wants to make sure that God is a part of that decision and is involved in the life of the new family.  And when that family, by natural conception or adoption, brings a new child into the picture, then the family is also invited to help that child with the life of faith by having the child baptized and living out that faith daily with the child.  This means going to Mass each Sunday (don’t worry if the baby or little child acts up or is noisy; it’s what kids do); praying at home before meals and sometime during the day or night (for me it was usually right before bed); showing unconditional love and forgiveness to the best of our ability; treating others as we want to be treated and as we would treat Jesus.  All of those things go into making a family holy, like the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  And that all starts by trusting God, by having faith in God and His plan, just like Abraham did.  We sin, and we mess up, when we take matters into our own hands, as Abraham himself did a few times.  But God invites us to trust in Him always, and so find salvation for ourselves and our families.