God's Timing

Fourth Sunday of Lent–Second Scrutiny

    Why did it take so long?  A person might ask this question under any set of circumstances.  Maybe a person asks this question when he or she finally finds the right person to marry.  Maybe a person asks this question after discovering how to put behind harmful habits or patterns of behavior.  Maybe a person asks this after a particularly long train finally clears the railroad crossing.  Maybe it’s a seminarian after 8 or 10 years of seminary on the eve of his ordination to the priesthood.
    This question came to mind when reflecting on the healing of the man born blind, which we heard today in the Gospel.  We don’t know exactly how old the man was.  But he was old enough to give testimony to the Pharisees, which likely means that he was probably at least in adolescence.  But his parents were still alive, so he wasn’t exceedingly old.  For argument’s sake, let’s say he was around 20 or 25 years old.  So, why did it take 20 to 25 years for God to heal him?  Jesus said, “it is so that the works of God may be made visible through him.”  
    When we think about how things should go, we do so with our own vantage point and our own assumptions of how reality should be.  We can be like Samuel who presumes that God’s reasoning will be like ours.  But as the choice of King David showed, and as God Himself told Samuel, He does not see things the same ways we do.  Samuel thought that the best looking son should be king.  But God saw David’s heart, how devoted David was to God, and so chose the least-likely son of Jesse to be king.
    If you were to ask a seminarian, he would probably gladly eliminate a year, or two, or six from seminary formation, which can be academically rigorous and often pushes a man beyond what he thinks he can do.  But, of course, in the eight to ten long years of formation, the seminarian learns very important theology and how to best serve the people of God,  as well as how to celebrate the sacraments.  If you would have asked me in my second of eight years of seminary, I probably would have said I was ready enough to become a priest.  But I learned a lot about God, the Church, pastoral guidance, and how to be a good priest in the six years that followed.  Not every part of seminary was enjoyable, and sometimes not everything was even useful, but it helped form me into the priest I am today.
    It seems odd to think that it was not better for God to heal the man born blind earlier.  But who knows how receptive the man would have been to believe in Jesus later if God had healed the blind man earlier.  But because the healing happened at that point, not only did the blind man come to believe in Jesus, but it also helped the disciples to believe that Jesus is God.  
    Sometimes we might wonder about God’s timing.  We might think that something should have happened earlier, or that a different result should have happened.  And maybe in our mind our reasoning even makes sense.  But God sometimes sees things differently than we do.  And while it may seem cruel at times, God’s ways are always for our salvation and holiness and are made out of love.  God cannot do otherwise than act out of love, because God is love.  Anything else would be a contradiction of God’s nature.  
    Admittedly, this takes great trust and faith.  Because God is infinite and we are finite, we only get glimpses into His will, permissive or directive.  But when we trust in the love of God and His plan, we can accept timing that doesn’t make sense to us.  Sometimes the good is simply the growth in virtue that can only come through struggle.  A child often thinks that a parent is cruel when the child has to eat vegetables instead of ice cream.  But it’s not cruel, but rather helps the child eat food that will help it develop healthily.  We are God’s children, and our loving Father sometime wants us to develop differently than we want to develop.  Sometimes we would rather not grow in virtue, but God wants us to grow in virtue.  So we are allowed to go through crucibles which help us, by God’s grace, to grow in virtue and further our trust in God.
    My dear elect: as we celebrate the second scrutiny, you might have asked yourself on this or other occasions why God allowed you to wait until now to discover the truth and become a child of God and open your pathway to heaven.  I wish I could give you each a detailed answer, but what I can say is that, in Divine Providence, now was the perfect time so that the works of God might be made visible through you.  You see, when a person is baptized, especially adults, the faith of other Catholics is reinvigorated.  And perhaps other non-Catholics might decide to investigate becoming Catholic more because they see you becoming Catholic.  Who knows?  Maybe someone here needed your witness, your desire for baptism, to bolster his or her own faith.  If you would have come to faith earlier, perhaps that person would have lost out on what he or she needed.  But only God knows that.  We can only trust that, for you, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation, as St. Paul says.

Bl. Solanus Casey

    There’s nothing wrong with wondering, ‘Why now?  Why not earlier?  Why not later?’  But, on this side of eternity, we will never know exactly why.  Still, today God invites us to trust in His loving will, His Divine Providence.  After we ask this question, our response should be, “God, I may never know why you chose to allow things to happen as you did.  But I praise you, God, for your will and how it moves me closer to the end you desire for me: eternal happiness in heaven.”  To quote Bl. Solanus Casey, “Blessed be God in all his designs.” 

Entitlement

Septuagesima

The Strouse House

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  We live in an age of entitlement.  And we are, in a way, the victim of our own success.  The generations that came before us created great wealth and success, and kids grew up seeing the results, rather than the sacrifices it took to get to those results.  And I certainly cannot claim that I have not lived a privileged life.  First of all, I live in the most prosperous country in the world, a gift I did not earn, but which came to me simply by birth.  Secondly, I grew up in a middle-class family, who didn’t have it all, but we never wanted for anything.  I never knew true hunger (despite what I may have said during my teenage years); I never worried about having a nice home (I grew up in a two-story log cabin).  If I grew out of my clothes, we went to the store to get new ones.  Now, my dad, being the fiscally conservative man that he is, never bought us the most expensive clothes or shoes, and always used coupons to save money for the food we needed (not necessarily the food we wanted) from the grocery store.  So I learned the importance of stretching a dollar and not spending more than I could afford.  But it was normal for our family to go camping in an RV in the summer, and even to take trips to Florida every five years or so.
    But these days, many people I know presume that, when they start out, they have to have everything I had (or more) from the beginning.  They need streaming services; they need nice vacations every year; they need brand-name clothes and the most recent electronics; they need a nice house in a nice neighborhood before they can get married or have kids (though couples seem to get dogs very quickly).  Those are nice, but those are not needs.  If you can afford them, great!  But you can do just fine in a first home that maybe only has two rooms, and needs some TLC; you don’t have to have every streaming service to watch all your favorite shows; you don’t have to go on tropical vacations every year, or even every five years.  And, most importantly, no one owes you any of that.
    But more dangerous that our natural entitlement mentality is the supernatural entitlement mentality that we heard in the Gospel.  The master promises a just payment for a day’s work.  And the people who started at the beginning of the day shouldn’t have expected anything more than what they received.  But when they saw the master handing out what they agreed to, even though they only worked for a smaller amount of time (sometimes only a couple of hours!), they felt that they were entitled to more, since they did more work.  And when they didn’t get more, they complained.

Me as a seminarian

    In seminary, our rector (think president and principal in one job) warned us early on about thinking the Church owed us anything.  “All you are entitled to as seminarians,” he would say, “is a Christian burial, the same as anyone else.”  Here we were, giving up at least a portion of our lives in the prime of our life, for God and His Church, but that did not entitle us to anything special.  It was the call God gave us, and following God’s will should have sufficed in itself.
    In the parable those who started at the beginning were those who had it all together.  They were probably the holy people of the day, who didn’t do anything majorly wrong.  There were probably Pharisees and scribes in this group, but probably not just Pharisees and scribes.  Those who came later were those who came to follow God, though they had not always done so.  These were the people like Jewish tax collectors and sinners.  Those who came at the end of the day may have been likened to the Gentiles, non-Jews, pagans, who heard the message and started to follow our Lord (we hear a couple of times in the Gospels about Greeks who wanted to follow Christ).  To all, Pharisee, sinner, and Gentile, the Savior offered eternal salvation if they followed Him.  But some felt they should get more because they followed more faithfully or for a longer period of time.
    But salvation is not like money.  And all that our Lord has promised us is eternal salvation, as well as our daily crosses; no more, no less.  What seems like a lighter cross to one, may be heavier to another.  We cannot compare.  What seems like a shorter time for one to accept the faith may have come about through many years of strenuous searching, whereas the faith may come more naturally for others and not require as much, even though it’s lived out longer.  It’s like being given a free, all-expenses paid vacation in Aruba, where it’s sunny all day, eighty-four degrees, with a slight breeze to keep us from getting hot, and complaining because our chair isn’t as close to the pool as another person’s.  

    Spiritually, God promises to give us all we need to get to heaven.  And as Catholics, we have it a bit easier.  We have seven primary ways, the Sacraments, that God gives us His sanctifying grace, including the Sacrament of Penance which cleanses us from sin if we do go astray in minor or major ways.  We have the Church to help us know what believing in Christ and following Him should look like.  We have sacramentals and devotions like Rosaries, Stations of the Cross, and blessings that help us in our daily life to strengthen our relationship with Christ.  We have the entire Word of God, both in Scriptures and in the teachings of the Church to assist us in responding to the offer of eternal life that God gave us in Holy Baptism.  What else do we need?  
    But how often do we look at another person and what he or she has, or what he or she doesn’t have to endure, and we get spiritually jealous.  We complain because it seems like God loves that person more.  But if we have the love of God, then what does it matter what the other person has?  Is God’s full love not enough for us?
    God, strictly speaking, doesn’t owe us anything.  But out of His goodness and love He gives us everything we need for salvation, starting with the perfect gift of His Son who died for us, so that we wouldn’t have to be slaves to sin and suffer eternal death.  God chooses to bind Himself to us as a loving Father so that, if we respond to that love, we can be with Him for ever in heaven, in perfect happiness.  May we not be entitled, in any way, but be grateful for all that God has given us: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Throw Your Life Away!!

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            As a seminarian, it was not uncommon to hear people talk about certain seminarians, and say, “Why is so-and-so throwing his life away?  He has such great potential!”  Bishop Mengeling, when we were on retreat as seminarians, would sometimes use that phrase to remind us of what we were doing with a twist, that we were truly throwing our life away for the Lord, just as a married couple throws their life away for each other.

            We often don’t think of throwing our life away as a positive thing.  That’s not the phrase we use to celebrate big events like an ordination, or a wedding (though the phrase may be tossed around at bachelor or bachelorette parties, or by heartbroken girls who would rather have a seminarian as the father of their children instead of being a spiritual father).    It generally has a negative connotation, as if we are wasting some sort of potential.  And yet, in our Gospel, the Lord is very clear: “‘whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.’”  It is as if Jesus is saying, “If you try not to throw away your life, you will, but if you throw away your life for me, you will truly preserve it.”

            When a man and woman pledge themselves to each other as husband and wife; or when a man is called to be a priest and responds to that call; or when a man or a woman respond to the call to be consecrated for the sake of the Kingdom; all those people are throwing away their lives.  The married couple is promising to stop looking for someone better with whom to share their entire life and with whom to have children.  The priest is promising to devote his life first and foremost to God, so that he can serve His people.  The consecrated man or woman is promising to devote him or herself to Christ and be a witness of what life will be like in the Kingdom of Heaven, especially through witnessing the evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience in imitation of Jesus who was chaste, poor, and obedient. 

They are throwing away other opportunities that could have come up in their life in the future.  The husbands are throwing away the possibility that they will meet another woman, and the wives are throwing away the possibility that they will meet another man, who will be a suitable partner, a lifelong companion, and the person with whom they want to share physical intimacy and raise children.  The priest is throwing away the possibility of marriage and having biological children of his own so that he can have deep intimacy with Christ and be the caretaker of His bride, the Church.  The consecrated man or woman is throwing away the possibility of being a father or a mother, and, in the case of men and women religious, is throwing away the accumulation of wealth and the ability to direct their lives how they want, and when they want, and where they want.

And yet, as proof of what Jesus says (in case we don’t take Him at His word), the happiest people I have met are those who have thrown away their lives and not looked back.  I see it in couples that have been married, for example, for 50 years, who have spent a lifetime together, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to live out their faith, and while things haven’t always been easy, they always, without fail, say to me that they would do the same all over again if they had the chance.  I see it in the consecrated men and women, like Judith Stegman, a consecrated virgin, or Sr. Dorothy, our Director of Campus Ministry, or Sr. Liz, our Director of Senior Ministry, in the joy that they have found in consecrating their lives to Christ.  And I also see the overwhelming majority of my brother priests, who, though they have left all to follow Christ and serve His people, are already receiving 100-fold for what they have left behind.

What concerns me a little is that our culture does not encourage us to throw everything away for marriage, or consecrated life, or priesthood.  Whether it’s middle or high school students, or the college students at MSU, or even adults, so many are afraid to make any commitment, just in case there’s something better around the corner.  As a culture, we are afraid of commitment because it means that we may have to give up the future goods that we think we might possibly get by holding out.  Even in marriage, there is a general societal view that, if things don’t work out, you can always break it off in case you find something or someone better.  We see it especially in couples living together while dating or engaged, pretending to live a married life with each other under the same roof, in the same bed, but free to call it off in case something better comes along.  Only in marriage is that decision to throw it all away for the other protected, because both spouses commit to that marital love for the entire duration of their lives.  And sadly, Jesus’ words ring true that those who try to save it all, end up losing it.  Some studies state that 67%, or 2 out of 3 couples that live together before marriage, end up divorcing, and that it’s often in the first decade of their marriage. 

Is throwing it all away easy?  Certainly not.  There are times when a couple, or a consecrated man or woman, or a priest, feels the weight of the cross.  There are times when disciples have to experience people who metaphorically beat their back, or pluck their beard, or spit on their face.  But, when we throw it away, with God’s help, when we lose our life for the Son of Man and the gospel, then we can say with the prophet Isaiah from our first reading, “The Lord God is my help, therefore I am not disgraced; I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame…See, the Lord God is my help.”  When we lose our life for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel, it is then that we, in fact, find it, and save it for eternal life.