Don't Let the Old Man In

Second Sunday of Lent

    Not long before Toby Keith died, a little more than a year ago, I heard a song that he released in 2019 called, “Don’t Let the Old Man In.”  While the song sings of death, personified by an old man, for us Catholics, the old man is Adam, our fallen, sinful self, while the new man is Christ, raised from the dead and sinless.
    And as we hear the readings today, we get the comparison between the old man and the new man.  St. Paul speaks about those whose “minds are occupied with earthly things.”  These are people to follow their passions, whatever they might be.  They live more like animals than humans.  And because they do not live up to their human potential, they become “enemies of the cross of Christ,” tending towards destruction by following whatever desires they may have.  This is the description of the old man, the first Adam, who gave up happiness with God out of pride and gluttony.
    The old man, the disobedient Adam, always seeks his own will over and against God’s will, no matter what the subject matter.  The old man spends money as he wants, without any reference to God; eats whatever he wants, without any reference to God; pursues whatever he wants, without any reference to God.  In all these cases and more, God is, at best, an afterthought, and, at worst, not considered at all in one’s actions.  The old man, St. Paul says, is earthly, and was addressed on Ash Wednesday: Remember, man, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  

    But the Gospel we heard today, the Gospel of the Transfiguration, shows us what the new man can be.  Christ receives transfiguration from the Father to show the three great Apostles what will happen after the Passion and Crucifixion.  But that foresight connects to obedience, obedience to the Father’s will, no matter where that leads, even if it leads to the cross.  Moses, who appears on Mount Tabor with the Lord and Elijah, also received a much smaller gift of transfiguration when he beheld God.  His face radiated, so much so that people would have him cover it up because they were put off by it.  Moses would only remove his veil when he entered the presence of God.  But, St. Paul also says that it was a radiance that faded.  Whereas the radiance God desires for us in heaven will never fade away, just as the radiance of Christ never fades away.
    That radiance comes when we stop living like the old man, doing it “my way,” and when we, by the grace of God, open ourselves up to God’s transforming grace, His life, so that it begins to change us from the inside out.  We start to transfigure when we do it God’s way.  Sin blocks the light of Christ that we received at Holy Baptism from shining through us.  Repentance, especially through the Sacrament of Penance, cleanses us from the mud of sin so that the light of Christ can shine through us and glorify God.
    St. Paul mentions those who treat their stomach as a god, who follow their appetite at all costs.  During Lent we often hear critiques about fasting and abstinence.  People will say that they like fish, or that going to Red Lobster hardly seems like a penance.  But part of the abstinence and fasting is that we humble ourselves in observing obedience to a church law.  I read an article recently about whether one could eat an Impossible burger on Fridays during Lent, since it’s not meat.  The response was that, if one is simply trying to find a loophole to not eating meat, then it would probably not be ok to do.  But, if one truly saw eating the Impossible burger as a penance, then it could be ok, since it is not meat.  And, for those who feel it’s easy not to eat meat on Fridays, do it throughout the year.  Because of my fallen will, the times I want meat the most are the times I’m not allowed or supposed to have it.  Or try following the Ember Days, which are four times a year of additional abstinence and fasting.  The old man will probably start rearing his head and crying out for attention, trying to pull us away from penances that we want to do to bring us closer to God.
    We demonstrate the transfigured life of the new man when we display kindness to a co-worker who puts us down; or when we show friendship to someone who is friendless; or when we do not seek undue attention and puff ourselves up by bragging about our achievements; or when we treat even our enemies with human dignity and respect.  Living the life of the new man is about asking what God wants us to do in this moment.  And the more we practice it, the easier it becomes.  As we think about the saints, for many of them towards the end of their life, living a Christ-centered life didn’t require as much effort, because they had trained themselves to think with the mind of Christ and love with His Sacred Heart.  
    We don’t have to live like the old man.  We don’t have to fall to our passions and let them rule us.  That is the precious gift we were given in baptism.  So, to quote the last verse of Toby Keith’s song: “When he rides up on his horse / And you feel that cold bitter wind / Look out your window and smile / Don’t let the old man in.” 

On Pilgrimage with our Lord

First Sunday of Lent

Mount of Temptations

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of my hopes during this Jubilee Year was to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  There is nothing quite like traveling to the land which our Lord made holy through the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery.  I have been there three times before, but the sites help one go even more deeply into the Gospels by seeing the places where our salvation happened.  As we hear this Gospel for the first Sunday of Lent, I can see in my mind’s eye the Mount of Temptation, which stands near Jericho, the traditional place in the desert where Satan tempted our Lord.  Or, as we get closer to Holy Week, to walk the Way of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, or stand at Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and especially to see the empty tomb in that same church.  
    But most people, whether in the past or in the present, could or cannot physically travel to the Holy Land.  In the past it was expensive and dangerous.  Today the expense is more the issue than anything (the holy sites are generally very safe, even right now with the animosity and fighting between Israel and Hamas).  But St. Francis of Assisi developed the Stations of the Cross, originally just for Franciscan churches, to help people draw closer to the saving events of our Lord’s life from a local church.  And even beyond the Stations of the Cross, we are invited to, even if only spiritually, travel with our Lord in these forty days of Lent.
    During Lent we are meant to be on our own pilgrimage with the Lord for forty days.  We spend forty days in the desert, evoking the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert between their exodus from slavery in Egypt to their entrance into the Promised Land, as well as the forty days our Lord spent in the desert after His baptism, leading up to His temptation by Satan.
    The desert of Lent is meant to test us, to see of what we are made, and to discover the areas in which we still need to grow.  If we think back to the Chosen People wandering in the desert, at first they were ecstatic about their freedom.  The Egyptians had given their riches to the Israelites, so the liberated slaves had precious materials for their new home to which they traveled.  But fairly early on, they started to regret leaving Egypt, even though they were slaves there, and wanted to go back because, even with as bad as it was, they were familiar and comfortable with the bad, which seemed better than the unfamiliarity with a future, unknown, good.  They cried to God for water and food, and even created a false god after Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai.  The Promised Land was their home, a land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a land they had left some four hundred years earlier, a land they had forgotten.  While the journey to Canaan was not an exceptionally long distance, because of their lack of faith, just as they were at the door of the Promised Land, they had to wander in the desert even longer than originally intended.
    Instead of lacking faith, our Lord’s forty days in the desert demonstrates what Lent is supposed to be: still difficult, still a test, but a test that we can pass because He did.  Our Lord hungered; our Lord thirsted.  But He did not doubt God’s care for Him, and He did not give in to the temptations of the devil.
    If we are honest, we are more like the Israelites than like our Lord.  Our baptism sets us free from Satan and sin, and God gives us the treasure of His grace, His life, to help us on our way home to heaven, our true Promised Land.  But along the way we doubt God.  We do not trust Him to provide all that we need.  We create false gods whom we feel will lead us better.  We forget that we are made for heaven and union with God, and in our selective amnesia, we make our path to God even longer and more difficult than it needs to be.
    So this Lent, our goal as we travel on pilgrimage with Christ is to be more like Him, and less like the Israelites.  As we fast and abstain, as our stomachs growl, we should remember that we do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.  As we pray, we do so not to put God to the test, but to bring the desires of our heart to God so that they can be purified and answered according to His will, not to our own insecurities and drive to be in charge.  As we give alms, we recognize that true power does not come from money and possessions, the false gods that we create, but from worshipping God alone and allowing Him to exult us.  
    While the desert is difficult, and tests us to trust more in God and less in ourselves, the desert is not forever.  God does not abandon us to wander around for eternity.  Christ has opened heaven by His Death and Resurrection, and wants us to end up there if we will follow His path through the desert.  The pilgrimage to heaven may be difficult at times, and we may want to turn back to what comforts we think that slavery to sin gives us, or look to other gods of our own making that we think we can control.  But if we follow Christ this Lent, and truly seek to allow Him to put to death in us anything which is not of Him, we will find the Promised Land where angels will minister to us as we worship in perfect happiness our true God: [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen]

Ordo Amoris

Quinquagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I try to communicate accurately as much as I can, though I do sometimes err.  As a third order Dominican, the truth occupies a special place in my life and in my interactions with others.  When I make decisions, I try to have all relevant information that I can, to help me arrive at the right decision for a particular circumstance.  The more accurate information I have, the better decisions I can make, whether for the immediate present moment or even for the future.
    But truth, while greatly important, should not occupy the highest priority in our life.  St. Paul tells us that love, or charity (that type of love that reflects the love of God) is what is most important.  God could have given you special charisms, like speaking in tongues or prophecy.  You could know everything.  Your faith could be so strong that you, as our Lord said, move mountains or trees.  You could be the most generous person alive, giving away all that you have to the poor.  You could even offer up your body.  But if you do not love, all of that counts for nothing.
    What a good gut check!  How easy we can find it to do the right things.  We check off the lists of the precepts the Church asks us to follow: we go to Mass; we give money to support the parish; we pray daily; we abstain from meat on Fridays or do some other penance.  But even if we do all those things, if we do them without love, there is no merit for us.  All our daily deeds are like dehydrated food.  They have what they need to sustain us, but we need the water of love to rehydrate the food and make it edible once more.
    What many Catholics struggle with today is understanding what love is.  So many people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, do not understand love.  They reduce love to an emotion or a desire.  They make non-sensical statements like “love is love.”  Or they react like children who want candy from the check-out line and say that if we really loved them, we would let them do whatever they wanted.  But that’s not how St. Paul describes love.  Love doesn’t seek after itself.  If I do not display patience with another, I’m not loving that person.  If I’m only looking out for myself, I’m not loving.  If my desires are perverse and contrary to nature, I do not desire love.

    Recently, our Vice President mentioned a teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas: the ordo amoris or order of love.  He referenced it in regards to the ongoing immigration debate.  I’m going to side-step the immigration debate, and simply focus on the ordo amoris, which will hopefully help you decide how best to implement what is most loving.  If you want the actual and full treatment from St. Thomas Aquinas, you can go to the Summa Theologiae, the Second Part of the Second Part, Question 26.
    The general order of love is: God, self, neighbor.  We then further delineate neighbor into family, city, country, and world.  We should love God above all else.  We owe everything to God as our Creator, and the first commandment our Lord gives us is to love God with all of who we are (and He cites the Book of Deuteronomy).  The second law is that we should love our neighbor as ourself.  But to love our neighbor as ourself, we have to love ourself first.  Love of self can be sacrificed for a higher good, the love of God, as we see in martyrs, or in parents for their children, but we need to have a proper love of self.  Lastly, we love others after God and self, based upon how close they are to us.  Generally speaking, the closest to us are family members, then members of our community, then other people.
    If we follow this to its natural conclusion, it makes perfect sense.  If I didn’t believe that there are priorities in love, then I might skip Mass on Sundays to spend time with a friend playing basketball or drinking bourbon.  Or if I don’t have a hierarchy of loves, then when I give money to charitable contributions, I should give the same amount of money I spend on groceries each week to each of the following: my parish; my Diocese; my local food pantry; the homeless shelter; each religious order that exists; each food pantry that exists in the US; each homeless shelter that exists in the US; every orphanage around the world; every charity around the world; etc.  Of course, that would lead to poverty, and the family would lack necessary goods, to which they have a right, while others, who are not even known to us, would receive the same financial support.  

    The Holy Father rightly brings up the parable of the Good Samaritan as our Lord reminds us to care for our neighbors who are not like us.  The Samaritan had no family or even national connection to the man left for dead.  But the man on the brink of death was close to him, and the Samaritan could do something at that moment to help the man, without neglecting any of his other legitimate responsibilities.  The man was in immediate need of assistance, and so, even in the ordo amoris, the Samaritan, like the priest and the levite before him who failed, had a duty to assist as a way of expressing love.
    The Scriptures also challenge us to remember that love of God cannot fully be divorced from love of neighbor.  St. John writes in his first epistle: “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”  Love of God, strictly speaking, does outweigh love of neighbor.  I should be more concerned with what God thinks of me than what my friends or family think of me.  However, more often than not, we show God we love Him by loving the people He loves, that is, our neighbor.
    The argument of modern society is that we should love everyone equally.  To the extent that we generally will good for all people, that is true.  But we cannot, strictly speaking, actually love every single person on this planet equally, because we have closer ties with some than with others, and the resources by which we show our love are limited, even while love is not limited.  So we should order our loves, putting God above all else, then myself next, then my neighbor, and my neighbor starting with my family, then my friends, then my other communities both locally and internationally.  I also have to order my love so that I deal with what is in front of my face: the rich man had a duty to care for poor Lazarus because Lazarus was at his doorstep and needed the rich man’s help.  
    But we also have to understand what love is and what love is not.  Love is not just a feeling, or license to do whatever we or another want to do.  Love means willing the good, for ourselves and for others.  If we allow a person to do that which is harmful, or if we want to do something which is harmful, we are not loving.  
    We could do so many good things, or have so many spiritual gifts.  But love, willing the good of the other, has to undergird all of what we do.  Otherwise all of our good deeds and actions are worth nothing.  If we ever have a question about how love looks, then gaze at the crucifix.  Because that is the greatest example of love: to lay down one’s life for God and for neighbor.  If our actions connect us to the cross of Christ, then there is good chance that they are truly loving actions, and therefore join us to the God who is Love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Proven by Testing

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Aerial picture of the house that exploded

    On Monday, 22 November 2021 just before 9:30 p.m., I was preparing to got to bed in my old rectory at St. Pius X parish.  All of the sudden I saw a large flame down the road, felt the house shake, and heard a loud boom.  The house not even a block away from the rectory had exploded from (we later learned) a natural gas leak from a faultily-installed appliance.  
    As a chaplain with the Michigan State Police, much of my training has been for emergency situations.  But, up to that point, I had never been on my own in the case of a real emergency.  I always had Troopers who would take the lead, and I would try to assist them with what they said I needed to do.  
    After I saw, felt, and heard the house explode, I said, “Lord, have mercy!”, called 911 to give any information I had, and then rushed to get my State Police jacket on, find my flashlight, and run to see what had happened.  As the fire engines from Flint Fire Department started to arrive on scene, I then started directing traffic so that emergency vehicles could get access to the scene.
    Often, we don’t know what we will do unless we are tested.  If we are wise, we make plans for disasters, or maybe we just daydream about scenarios where we are the hero, but until that situation arises in our life, it’s just theory.  When life throws a situation at us where we need to react, we find out if our planning or our daydreaming was just wishful thinking, or if we really could respond in a heroic way to a life-changing event.
    The same is true in our faith life.  In order to find out our true physical strength, we have to test our muscles and put them under pressure.  In order to find out our true spiritual strength, and what virtues we have, by the grace of God, cultivated in our life, we have to be in situations where we can choose virtue or we can choose vice.  It doesn’t matter if we think we are a saint and we would never choose evil.  Only when we are in a situation when we can choose either to do good or to do evil do we really learn how much we value following God’s way rather than our own, or the way of the world.  
    Take, for example, being put into a situation where we have done something wrong, maybe even something small, but someone notices and asks us if we are responsible.  Maybe we even have friends around us to add to the situation with some peer pressure.  When asked if we did something wrong, would we tell the truth, or would we lie?  The lie may seem easier, and may, whether for a short or even a long time, keep us out of trouble.  But we know that lying is wrong, a sin against God who is truth.  So what do we do?  It is so easy to fold under the pressure, and give in to what we think will be easier and cause less punishment for us.  Maybe we even convince ourselves that it’s not that bad, or that we can do so much more good if we are allowed to lie in just this one case.  But, of course, if we start to lie now, we are more likely to lie later.  And a basic principle of morality is that you cannot do evil to achieve a good: it makes the whole scenario evil.
    In the upcoming forty days of Lent, we will test our spiritual muscles out again.  Our acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (or the lack thereof) will tell us exactly what kind of fruit our life of grace has borne thus far.  When faced with a spiritual struggle, our true mettle comes out, what we are made of, and we learn where we need to grow in following Christ.  God reveals to us our shortcomings, not to beat us up with them, but to help us to know the ways in which we need to open ourselves to His grace to be better followers of Christ.  God gives us this special time to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel so that we can rejoice even more in the new life that Christ won by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and live that new life ourselves.
    Our catechumens who will be sent today by us to the Rite of Election, will also be tested in these weeks of Lent.  In the scrutinies, the Church will ask them to review their own life and put behind them all that does not conform to Christ.  They will reflect on how much their thirst for the new life Christ gives; on the areas of their life in which they are blind to sin; on the death that sin has caused in their lives.  But it won’t end there, just as Good Friday is not the end of the story.
    Because God wants to help us through these trials.  We cannot grow in holiness on our own.  Without God’s grace, we have no chance to live a holy life.  So as we grow in awareness through our trials, don’t be afraid to call upon God and ask for the help that we each need to live the new life of Christ.
    Until we are tested, we don’t really know how we would react.  May these upcoming Lenten days test us, show us our shortcomings, and open us to the grace and mercy of God who strengthens us to follow Christ on his pilgrimage through the desert.  May we allow God’s grace to make us bear good fruit as we remove the splinters of sin from our lives. 

The Authority of Suffering

Sexagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  To whom do we listen?  Whom do we vest with authority?  That seems to be the topic of the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth chapters of St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.  And since our Collect today asks for the help of St. Paul, the Doctor of the Gentiles, I thought it fitting to focus in on those questions.

St. Paul

    Because St. Paul is encouraging them not to listen to the so-called experts who profess to correct the Corinthians and how they should believe.  Instead, the Apostle adjures them to listen to him, not only because of his bona fides, but because of his sufferings.  Yes, he is Hebrew; yes, he is an Israelite; yes, he is of the seed of Abraham.  But the false apostles have not suffered for the faith as St. Paul has: through labors, imprisonment, scourging, stoning, shipwreck, perils all around, and hunger and thirst.  But not just suffering: St. Paul also claims glorious visions of heaven.  And all of that is why St. Paul has a claim to authority to which the people of Corinth should pay attention.
    We so often do exactly what our parents and teachers warned us not to do in childhood: judge a book by its cover.  We look for the finest outside image, rather than looking deeper into the person.  We estimate that the ones who have all the answers are those who look the best.  But they often do not.  
    And if it’s true for the Apostle to the Gentiles, it rings even more true for the Lord who called him to preach to the Gentiles.  Well did Isaiah prophesy about Christ, “He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us to him.  He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain, Like one from whom you turn your face, spurned, and we held him in no esteem.”  Yet this rejected God-Man saved the world, and communicated God’s message of reconciliation, not the fair-looking Pharisees in their fine robes and lengthened phylacteries.  
    And to drive home the point, J.R.R. Tolkien develops this same truth in “The Lord of the Rings.”  Aragorn is the rightful heir of the throne of Gondor.  And yet, from his wandering in the wilderness with the Dúnedain, he is rough and bears, at the surface, no kingly visage.  Still, Frodo recognizes, when they first meet, some goodness in him.  Frodo says, “‘I believed that you were a friend….I think one of [the enemy’s] spies would – well, seem fairer and feel fouler.’”  Frodo looks beyond the outward appearance and goes more deeply to see the regal nature of a man so many brushed aside as a mere Ranger.

    Or even consider Frodo himself.  In the end, it was not a wizard, or the son of the Steward of Gondor, or even the fair elf who understood or had to bear the weight of the One Ring.  Frodo, though small and easily written-off, was the only one who could fight effectively the evil that the Ring contained, and, even with some resistance, eventually bring it to Mount Doom where it could be destroyed.
    We do learn some lessons from those who have not had to endure suffering.  You don’t require your doctor to have had cancer in order to seek treatment from him or her.  Though I’m celibate, I am called upon to help married couples in their relationships.  Sometimes there is a wisdom that comes from not struggling through the midst of a problem.  But suffering through something and coming out on top speaks for itself, and provides an authority that those who have never experienced that suffering can never fully understand.  Like Jacob from the Book of Genesis, sometimes we have to wrestle with God all night before truly understanding His plan.
    This should encourage us in our own suffering, whether allowed by God or by our own making.  By going through the fight, by chastising our bodies as we will do in this upcoming Lent, we understand more about God and about ourselves, and how we can respond to His grace better each day.  As we wrestle with God to remain close to Him, even amidst the temptations of life, we understand better His plan and the work of His grace in our lives.  If we remain on the sidelines and take no risks to become saints, we may look better on the outside, but our relationship with God will be shallow and not fulfill us as much as we would like.
    It is as President Theodore Roosevelt said so marvelously, a quote that was echoed in the CBS cop-drama, “Blue Bloods”:
 

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

As we approach the forty days of Lent, the Quadragesima, may we prepare to enter the arena of self-disciple and conversion.  May we not stand on the sidelines and pretend like we know what it means to enter the desert of self-denial, though we look quite good.  But may we spend the forty days in the desert with Christ, allowing His grace to put to death in us all that is not of Him, getting mangled and beat up and coming out looking none-the-better, but truly knowing what it means to suffer for and with Christ in order that we might take hold of the gift of eternal salvation He offers us: who with the Father and the Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.

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.

Remembering the Reason

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Routines, while generally beneficial, can also lead to a certain amnesia about their purpose.  And in an age where we seek out something new and exciting, routines can make less and less sense, especially when the routine calls something out of me, and I don’t see the immediate returns on my investments.  

My JV Soccer Team Photo

    When I was a freshman at Lansing Catholic high school I played JV soccer.  We were bad.  We lost a lot of games.  Some of the cause of our losing record one could trace to the league in which we played, with much larger schools like Okemos and Mason.  But, speaking honestly, we also didn’t have a lot of skill, and I would include myself in that assessment.  We were all ok athletes, but not of us excelled at soccer.  And the routine of going to practice, which I rarely enjoyed, or playing games, where we rarely won, got old.  So, after my freshman year, I quit soccer.  I lost sight of why I played, so I quit.  And it’s a choice I regret to this day.
    In our Catholic faith, much can seem like routine.  Take even where you find yourself today.  I would bet that, for at least some of you, you come to Mass out of routine, out of habit.  What we saw before, but especially after COVID, were people who no longer found that routine helpful, or at least they didn’t appreciate what they could get out of practicing one’s faith (which cannot be limited to attending Mass on Sundays, but definitely needs to include attending Sunday Mass as a minimum), so they quit.  Only now, some four years later, do some parishes find themselves with a similar number of people attending as in 2019 (though St. Matthew actually grew during COVID).  
    So, in our second reading today, St. Paul gives us a reminder as he writes his first letter to the Corinthians.  Some, even then in the first fifty years of Christianity, when the Catholic Church was all there was, had already forgotten the importance of what they had first received.  They had not seen the resurrection, and they started to doubt those who had.  So they started to reject the resurrection of Christ, even while still keeping some loose connection to the Church.

    But St. Paul takes them to the heart of the issue: “If the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins.”  People knew that things were not the way they were supposed to be, that they were not the people they were supposed to be.  They missed the mark for which they were aiming (the Greek term 𝛼𝜇𝛼𝜌𝜏𝜄𝛼 means missing the mark, but is also the word for sin).  And St. Paul preached that there was a way that they could not only hit the mark, but that they could enjoy eternal happiness in heaven.  They knew, as we do, instinctually, that death was not normal, which is why we fight against it so much.  And St. Paul told them how they could live for ever.  They did have to die, symbolically, in the waters of baptism, but if they did, they would live forever if they followed the way of life Jesus set out for them.  And Jesus was worth following because He showed us the way.  He showed us, in His resurrection, that death did not have to have the final word.  At first it looked like sin and death conquered Jesus, on Good Friday, but on Easter Jesus showed us that He conquered sin and death; they could not keep Him down.  
    And that is what the Church has continued to proclaim for some 2,000 years.  For 2,000 years the Church has reflected on the life of Jesus and told us what is consistent and what is inconsistent with following Him.  We can reduce all the dos and don’ts of Catholicism to how we live for Christ and according to His teaching: from going to Mass every Sunday to not having sex before marriage; from serving the poor and the needy to being honest in all our words and dealings; from not idolizing money or power or fame to choosing to love and be kind to every person, regardless of their money or power or fame; from teaching that marriage is only between one man and one woman for life to helping to us to know that our bodies are a gift from God and reveal, even in our God-given gender, something important of who we are.  All of this, and all that the Church asks of us and teaches us, comes down to following Christ in the way He showed us.
    But when we forget this, either due to the routine nature of the faith or for any other reason, we easily walk away.  We forget what a precious gift God gave us in giving us the opportunity of new and eternal life.  If the resurrection is false, then we are “the most pitiable people of all.”  Not only because we have all these rules that often require real sacrifice and giving up what comes naturally to us, but especially because if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then we are still trapped under the oppression of sin and death, and no matter how hard we try to avoid or cheat death, it will be the end of us.

The empty tomb in Jerusalem

    But, I can tell you, that Christ is alive.  I have been to His tomb in Jerusalem, and it is empty.  I trust the eleven apostles who saw the Risen Christ, with the marks of His crucifixion, in the Upper Room.  I trust St. Paul, who saw the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, where Paul was going to arrest Christians and persecute them for believing in the Risen Christ.  I trust the people who, for two thousand years, have received that good news from the apostles and passed it down to us, because if they lied, they would have no reason for joy, especially when giving up their lives.  But especially those who died for the faith, the martyrs, joyfully accepted death rather than deny what they knew to be true: that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and has saved us from sin and death.
    Gentlemen on the hockey team: I am willing to bet there were people last year who got sick of practicing, who hated the drills that coach put them through, and who wondered if it was even worth it.  Maybe there were people who even decided not to play last year, because how much practices called them to sacrifice the year before.  But for those who stuck with it, who pushed through the routine, a big, ole’ ring and a beautiful trophy became their prize, a prize I know you hope to duplicate this year.  Heaven is better than a championship ring and trophy, infinitely better.  Yes, sometimes the faith may seem routine, and may call for sacrifices that you would rather not make on given days.  But keep your eyes on the prize.  Keep eternal life and joy in your mind.  And you will not be disappointed.

Groundhog Day Delayed

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Even though Groundhog Day was last Sunday, you may feel like we’re in the movie with Bill Murray as we come to today.  After all, it’s another Super Bowl Sunday with the Kansas City Chiefs playing, and the Lions not.  But, we also celebrated this exact Mass, that of the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, on 11 November 2024, just 3 months ago, because we celebrated the Resumed Fifth Sunday after Epiphany to fill in the last weeks of the Sundays after Pentecost.  The Sundays after Epiphany and before Septuagesima this year are more plentiful than they were last year.
    Luckily, the Word of God is living and effective, and is a treasure that cannot be fully mined or a spring that can fully be drained.  If we think we have exhausted the meaning of Sacred Scripture, the deficiency is in us, not the Word of God.
    It is so easy to look at the list that St. Paul gives us as something we just have to do, virtues we have to check off a list.  We strive to show mercy, humility, modesty, and patience.  We aim to bear with one another and forgive each other, and especially to demonstrate charity towards all.  Maybe sometimes some of those are more difficult than others.  But we get so wrapped up in what we should do, that we end up in a kind of Pelagianism where we earn our salvation.  Maybe consciously or subconsciously we think to ourselves: ‘If I am merciful, then God has to let me in to heaven.  If I just muster up the right amount of patience, then I don’t have to worry about eternal salvation.’  We end up trying to save ourselves, which is impossible for us, since it was also impossible for Abraham, Moses, and David, whose holiness probably exceeded our own.
    How easy it is to put the cart in front of the horse!  We want to earn God’s love and God’s favor.  We figure that if we just do enough good things, or avoid enough bad things, then God will be happy with us and we can rest easy.  But notice that St. Paul encourages us to certain behavior because we are already the elect of God.  St. Paul gives us moral laws, behaviors to follow, because we are already the beloved of God.  We don’t do certain things so that God will love us.  God loves us, so we do certain things and live a certain way.  
    St. Paul takes for granted, as do the epistles that we hear each week, that we already know that we belong to God the Father as His beloved sons and daughters in the Son of God.  That is the great gift of our salvation!  We had nothing that could close the gap that original sin had created.  We had no goodness in us that even approached deserving to be saved.  St. Paul writes in his epistle the Romans, chapter five: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us….Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”  
    So God’s saving love comes first, and then what we do is our response to that love.  If we think about it like dating, it also makes sense.  If the other person doesn’t love us, no matter how many good things we may do for that person, it doesn’t create that love.  However, if that person loves us, then we want to be better, we want to show our appreciation for that love.  And we show that appreciation by doing the things that help that love to grow.  We can’t earn the other person’s love, but once we have that love, if we truly love the other person, we change ourselves freely and to the best of our ability to show gratitude for that love.
    Or, to use a similar example that our Lord uses in the Gospel, God’s love has already been sown into the fields of our heart.  Weeds do sometimes pop up, but we pull them up at the proper time in response to the desire that our field be clear so that the fruit of Christ’s love can grow as fully as possible, and not lose out to the weeds.  It’s not as if we can clear the weeds from our entire field, and then God will sow His love in us.  
    I often preach a fairly rigorous message about living upright lives.  I myself try to do whatever I can to live as Christ and His Church have taught, and I like the rules and the clear delineations of what the expectations are.  But it’s good for me, and for you, to remember that we don’t earn God’s love.  Nothing we could ever do could make God love us.  God has already loved us, so much that He allowed His Son to die for our salvation.  What we do is the response to God’s love, not the catalyst of His love.  
    You, brothers and sisters, are already chosen by God for salvation.  You, brothers and sisters, are beloved by God because, after Holy Baptism, He sees and loves in you what He sees and loves in His Son, Jesus Christ.  Do not seek to be worthy of God’s love; it will never be enough.  Open yourselves to His love, and return that love by putting on the mind of Christ, and living the life that He lived: mercifully, humbly, modestly, patiently, and charitably.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Angry Woman Meme

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    It’s a little old now, but there’s a famous meme where a woman is sitting at a table, yelling and pointing, while a white cat, sitting at the table, ostensibly across from her, has a snarky look on its face.  People put in all sorts of dialogues between the woman and the cat, some of which are pretty funny.  If I were to make a meme based on today’s readings, the woman would say, “God calls sinners!”, while the cat would respond, “He calls them to repent.”  
    After all, in all three readings, we hear about sinners whom God calls.  In the first reading, God calls Isaiah to be His prophet, to speak for Him.  But Isaiah knows that he is a sinner.  So he says, “‘Woe is me, I am doomed!  For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips!’”  In the second reading, St. Paul acknowledges that he is not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church.  And finally, in the Gospel, Jesus calls St. Peter to follow Him, but Peter demurs, saying, “‘Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.’”  
    God knows that Isaiah, and St. Paul, and St. Peter, were all sinners.  God’s omniscience cannot be fooled.  But He does call each of them to do His will: Isaiah to speak for God as His prophet; St. Peter to be the first pope and head of the apostolic college; St. Paul to be the Apostle to the Gentiles.  And with each person–Isaiah and Peter and Paul–God offers them His mercy.  Isaiah receives an ember, touched to his lips, which takes away his sins.  Jesus asks St. Peter three times if he loves Him, and then gives Peter the mission of caring for Jesus’ flock.  St. Paul, who loses his sight when he encounters the Lord on the road to Damascus, regains his sight and is baptized through a follower of Jesus, Ananias.  
    So yes, God calls sinners.  And yes, He forgives their sins.  But He does so in order that they repent and change their ways, which is exactly what Isaiah and St. Peter and St. Paul did.  They left behind what the old man in them, the old Adam, to be exact, and they put on the new man, the new Adam, Jesus Christ, and lived according to His will, rather than their own.  God didn’t call them to Himself so that they could go back to their old ways.  God didn’t want Isaiah to use his speech for sinful matters.  God didn’t want St. Peter to go back to fishing.  God didn’t want St. Paul to return to persecuting His Church.  He met them where they were at, yes, but He led them to a new place, a new mission.

His Eminence, Francis Cardinal George

    In our laziness, our sloth, we can miss that second part.  We’re very happy that God meets us as we are.  It warms our heart that God would choose us, sinners though we are, to share in His life.  But when it comes to leaving the past behind, and going where God wants, no longer just where we want to go, we balk at the change and choose to remain in our past.  This is why so many people love the horrid hymn “All Are Welcome.”  It’s the first part of the call of Jesus to any person.  He welcomes sinners and tax collectors to dine with Him; that is true.  He does not condemn the woman caught in adultery, or the Samaritan woman at the well.  But the story doesn’t end there.  He tells them not to sin anymore, and gives them, by His presence, what they need to change their life to conform to His.  It is as His Eminence, Francis Cardinal George, used to say, “All are welcome, but on Christ’s terms, not their own.”  
    Today, as we admitted Jenna, Raegan, and Skyler to the Order of Catechumens, we saw the witness of one whom Christ called.  Ladies, you, like all of us before we were baptized, have original sin.  Original sin is an obstacle that following God as He desires.  But God has overcome that obstacle to invite you to follow Him by becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.  God met you where you were, but now He calls you deeper into relationship with Him, to put out into the deep waters that might be scary, and which take you way from anything in your past which is not of God.  But He doesn’t leave you alone as you put out into the deep waters. He goes with you, and we also, now that you are a catechumen, promise to support you, pray for you, and help you as you prepare for baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist.  
    We stand before you as those whom the Lord has also called, though we are sinners.  And we do not claim that we follow Christ perfectly.  But each time we fall, each time we sin, Christ reaches out for us again, and encourages us to put that behind us as He forgives us in the Sacrament of Penance, and strengthens us to say yes to Him and no to anything contrary to Him and His teachings.  He has called us, too, to deep waters, and sometimes we fear to go with Him, but He calls us, and we hope to follow as best as we can.
    Because the Lord doesn’t want us to wallow in our sins of the past.  He doesn’t want us going back there because our sins don’t give us life.  They don’t give us happiness.  They don’t allow us to be the people He has called us to be.  Only by following Christ, by making His life our own, by living according to what He has taught us through the Scriptures and the Church can we truly be happy and be fully ready for heaven at the end our life.
    So you, and we, are sinners.  And God has called you, and us, to leave that sinfulness behind.  He desires to burn away our sins like with the Prophet Isaiah; to open our eyes like St. Paul; to call us to leave behind our old way of life like St. Peter.  May you, and we, have the courage to answer that call, repent, and be faithful to the Gospel.

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].