The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, July 27, 2008 (Romans 8:28-30)

[Given at St. Mary of the Pines Retreat Center in Chatawa, MS at the parish church of St. Therese]

How can it be that all things work together for good for those who love God?  Are there not instances of disasters that have come upon people who love God?  I think of a story told by Elie Wiesel about some faithful Jews in a Nazi concentration camp during Word War II.  They decided to put God on trial for having turned His back on the covenant of His promises to His chosen people by His silence during the Jews' greatest time of need.  They found God guilty; and then they went and prayed their evening prayers together!  Despite the guilty verdict, they gave God praise anyway.

That is the quality of those who love God: they trust Him anyway, despite all evidence to the contrary, they trust Him - even unto death.  Is this not the witness of Jesus on the Cross?

How does one acquire this quality?  How does one develop such a trust in God that, deep down in the marrow of one's being, there is a conviction that I am loved by God and all will be well?

How do we get there?  The path is shown by today's selection from Romans, Chapter 8.  The path involves being predestined, being called, being justified, and being glorified.  Let me explain.

Predestination is a dicey word and most uses of this word run the risk of becoming heretical.  Here's what it does mean.  From all time, even before time, indeed before the creation of the world God knew you by name and knew everything about you - including your being born and raised in an environment conducive to your being baptized and, bit by bit, becoming conformed to the image of Jesus.

But God's knowing all about you ahead of time does not rob you of your freedom.  Everyone who is baptized is free to accept or reject the call to be conformed to the image of Christ.

Some people attempt to think they are being conformed to Christ, or living up to their baptismal call, but by their own terms!  Such a person thinks: I'll buy these elements of the Gospel, but not those.  Think of "cafeteria Catholics" who pick and choose what they'll agree to.  This is self-justification, not the kind of justification that comes from God.

It's the Lord who justifies us.  We do not, and cannot, justify ourselves.  Being justified means being in a right relationship with God; and this happens only when we use our free will to conform our lives to the life of Christ - not picking and choosing, but wanting to do God's will in all things, no matter how difficult, and no matter how often we fail. 

The one who is justified by God in Christ is not someone who justifies behaviors that are against the Gospel, but rather when faced with falling short of the Gospel, this person says, "O God, be merciful to me a sinner."  This is the right stance before God, not "I'm fine the way I am."  In this justified stance, I know I am a sinner in need of the Lord's merciful love.; and this stance is what makes me be in a right relationship with God.  I am, therefore, justifiedby knowing that I need God.

Then comes the glory!  What is glory?  Glory is getting our way - like a football team winning the Super Bowl.  That's glory!

But for the Christian, glory is having lived our lives so close to Christ that, no matter what life deals us, year by year, we are conformed more and more into the image of Christ.  This is how God gets the glory!  God gets His way with me.

And we will know that we are well on the path to glory when we can say, and mean it when we say it, that all things do indeed work together for the good of those who love God.

News blackout

The events at World Youth Day '08 in Sydney Australia seem to be given short shrift in our American media, but if you'd like a good recap of what has gone on there with a half a million people, check out the July 19th blog posting of Whispers in the Loggia

That particlar posting has links to all the main events and papal speeches and sermons given by Pope Benedict.  It also has some great pictures of the events.

This coming week I will be going on an 8 day retreat, so I will resume blogging in early August.  In the meantime, keep Jan Altevogt in your prayers.  Her upcoming surgery is more complicated than any of us wished.  No word yet on the exact date of the surgery.  She has given 5 years of her life in the service of our school community, so we owe her at least our prayers.

Romans 8:26-27 - Homily for Sunday, July 20, 2008

In this jubilee year of reflecting on the apostle Paul, let’s think of how his relationship with God matured so as to reflect on how our relationship with God may mature.  

Paul was a Jew, a very well educated Pharisee, meaning he was a law-abiding member of the fast growing movement that was eventually able to win the hearts and minds of Jews worldwide especially in 70 AD when Jerusalem was destroyed.  The ideal, which Paul aspired to and was zealous for, was to be a good man and to help other Jews be good men and women, by being faithful to the Torah.  This is somewhat similar to a common way of thinking in our own time, namely, being a good person is where we can stop our spiritual growth.

Then Paul got knocked to the ground when he heard Jesus say to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?  Thus begins a profound revolution in the way Paul sees things.  He comes to know Jesus in a direct way, in a mystical way.  

After this moment of conversion Paul goes into the desert for three years and enters into a mystical union with the Lord that he describes in 2^nd Corinthians: “I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven.  And I know that this person (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows) was caught up into paradise and heard ineffable things, which no one may utter.” So, let’s just say that Paul knew all about the experiences of mystical union with Christ which are tastes of heaven.

This brings us back to today’s selection from Romans 8 about the Spirit’s aiding our prayer with inexpressible groanings.

To understand what Paul is saying about prayer, let’s look at the steps of the prayer life:

1. The first step in the life of prayer is to realize that I am loved by God.  This most easily happens if I am raised in a family of unconditional love.  It takes no great leap from knowing I am unconditionally loved by my parents to see that I am unconditionally loved by God.  A lot of people, however, do not grow up in unconditional love, so their growth in union with God may be delayed and may be skewed by their not knowing unconditional love.
2. The 2^nd step is to allow the Unconditional Lover to show me how I am separating myself from God by making choices that bring distance into the relationship.  In other words, I allow the Lord to show me my sin so that I may call upon the Lord to save me from my selfishness.  For some people this is when God makes His first appearance in their life.
3. Once I know the Lord as someone I too am persecuting, then I am drawn into an ever deepening relationship of love. As the Lord purifies me, bit by bit, I find that I yearn to be with the Lord, I seek to spend time in prayer with the Lord, and I want to know everything I can know about the Lord.  This is when I read the Gospels and get to know them inside and out.  This is when I learn how to pray the rosary and even the hardest parts of our religion begin to make sense to me.
4. As my prayer life grows in fidelity and in being conscious of the Lord every day, I go through spiritual difficulties.  I feel as if my prayer is never adequate.  I become frustrated, and I am tempted to give up.  All of this is part of my spiritual growth and my spiritual groaning.  Ah, yes, groaning!  I yearn for greater union with the Lord but I feel that my prayer is not working.  At the same time, my yearning for the Lord is even more intense.
5. The most important thing at this point in our prayer life, and this is the key to this selection from Romans 8, is to keep faithful to prayer even if it’s frustrated groaning. For, “the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the holy ones according to God’s will.”    

Homily for Sunday, July 13, 2008 (Romans 8: 18-23)

I thought of a few images to explain today’s selection of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  So, here goes:

• • Imagine you are an entrepreneur and you’re deciding to start up a new business.  There are many things to do and many traps to be avoided.  The start up phase can be excruciating, especially when the big idea doesn’t get traction with other investors.  You pour yourself out, undergo great testing, and may perhaps have to face the temptation to give up.  And when all is said and done, the great project may fail.  But if you really believe in your project, you become a plugger and keep at it, fighting off the discouragement and pushing forward with hope.  Or, you may find that the road to the big idea has to go through a major transformation into a newly defined big idea.  Or, you could simply give up and count yourself as a failure.
• Imagine you are a professor working in the university in league with some major corporation to find a solution to some insurmountable problem society is facing.  Think: energy or security.  You are being paid not only with dollars to produce a big solution, but you are also being paid in the meaningfulness of your mission.  However, every time you see a potentially stellar solution, problems become evident and make you go back to the drawing board.  You too may be tempted to give up and think of the whole project as a waste of time.  Or you may decide to tweak your passion into a related field where you hope to find greater success.
• Suppose you are a coach for some sports team.  You see the idealism of the teammates, you know your own competence, though each team calls forth different skills.  Through trial and error you get your team ready to enter the season.  Then come the wins and the losses.  And the personality quirks of the fans, parents, and the team itself.  Behavior problems seem to cloud the team’s success, but you plug away, facing each challenge, and yet may wind up with a losing season.  But, you do not give up.  You learn from the season, what mistakes can be turned in leadership lessons for yourself as the coach; and next year you try again.  Or, you could just crawl into some corner and hope no one remembers you.

Is it not clear that this is the way it is?  "We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit [by our baptism], we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."

 

We who have the first fruits of the Spirit also face the same intensity of creation’s subjection to futility.  In fact, Paul says, all of creating is waiting in eager expectation for futility to give way to fulfillment, or what Paul calls the redemption of our bodies, and the freedom of the children of God.

 

This chapter of Romans is God’s invitation to us to enter into such an abiding union with God that no matter what happens, we know deep in our hearts “that the sufferings of the present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.”

 

This is not mere optimism.  It is not a Pollyanna approach that pretends “everything is beautiful in its own way.”  This is not a Stoicism that endures all difficulties as if to find only satisfaction in enduring enormous odds.  No, that which Paul is calling us to is the virtue of hope.  And hope, when it seeps in to our inner being, does not disappoint.  Hope comes from a love affair with God.  Hope is based on a living, enduring relationship with God in Christ Jesus so that, in the end, I know all will be well, I believe in the life of the world to come, and I therefore endure all things for the sake of Him who first loved me. 

 

Or, to put this in the words of Job, But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust;  And from my flesh I shall see God; my inmost being is consumed with longing [for Him] Whom I myself shall see: my own eyes, not another's, shall behold him.    

(Job 19:25-27)

A lesson from history

July 11th is the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order.  He lived roughly from 480 to 547 AD.  A reflection on the impact he had on history will help us understand why Pope Benedict chose his name when he became pope.

During the lifetime of Benedict, the Roman Empire was collapsing and Western Europe was heading into the Dark Ages. 

To help us understand today what Benedict's word was like, let's say it was as if these things happened in our day:

• Imagine if our United Staes government collapsed, and with it the economic and security systems also collapsed.
• Imagine if there were no money to fix the highways, no money to ensure the safety of air travel, no money to fund educational institutions, no money to provide for any healthcare whatsoever, no money for the military and police, no money for ensuring health standards for food and no means to get the food to hungry people, and no money for the hungry to buy food.
• Imagine if the boundaries of states collapsed and city-states started fighting over resources with no one to stop the strongest from violating the weak.
• Imagine if traveling became impossible not only because of a broken infrasture but also because travelers, even from one town to another, would be faced with attacks by violent robbers.
• Imagine that the whole order of how things operate fell apart. That's what it was like in the time of St. Benedict.

No wonder Benedict went to a remote spot to get away from it all and to pray, begging God to show the way.  Other men sought him out, also realizing that the times were disastrous.  So, Benedict gathered whoever came to him and formed a community, an abbey, within which education would continue, structure would be provided, security would be found, food would be provided (and wine too, maybe even brandy!), and God would be praised almost hourly in psalms and hymns.

This was such an appealing life in those dark times that many men came to join, and women in separate monasteries with similar structures.  As they grew in numbers they spread out all over Europe, setting up abbeys and monasteries by sources of water, building not only buildings but centers of hope for the dispersed populations who were living in terror.  These abbeys and monasteries "hired" the local people to work the farms, trim the vines in the vineyards and make wine, eventually training the people with some talent in the skills of the monks and nuns.  And in time these settlements came to be the great cities of Europe, preparing their world for the eventual emergence of Western Civilization.

This is what St. Benedict started, by the grace of God.  1500 years later, our pope sees that we are in a time similar to the dawning of the Dark Ages when education is failing by being focused only on the material, when security is being threatened by a backlash against the relativism that says that anything is OK, and when the light of Christ is being extinguished by a secularized society that has "tired of its own culture, a world that has arrived at a moment in which the need for God is no longer felt, and much less so of Christ, and in which, consequently, it seems that man might construct himself." 

This is why Pope Benedict chose this saint's name as his own. 

Where have all the children gone?

Where have all the children gone?  I found our parish's 100th anniversary book as I was going through things in the office that haven't been looked at for some time.  The 100th anniversary was in 1975 and the book had the whole history of the parish from 1875 on, and pictures of the 1975 parish families.  I was stunned by the plethora of very large families.  Family after family had 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or more children.  It was the ordinary way of families to be large.  Our most recent parish directory has picture after picture of singles, couples, and families of 1 or 2 or rarely 3 children.

What happened in that one generation since 1975 that en masse a widespread decision was made to have fewer and fewer children?  Was it that the children of large families did not like their family experience and did not want to replicate it in their own lives?  Was a decision made that expressed a value in things rather than in people?  The houses those large families lived in now look like matchboxes compared to the large homes that now house comparatively tiny families. 

A peek into the Spanish Mass on Sundays will show that there are hordes of children there.  Those relatively poor families have huge families.  In a generation or two, will the immigrants' children also have fewer and fewer children?  When these families crawl out of poverty into the middle class will they also discover that they cannot afford children?

This preference for things more than for people is such a widespread phenomenon, but will it last?  And are we so influenced by the culture that we make our central decisions based on the direction of the winds of our epoch in history more than on the Gospel?

Damien the Leper - soon to be Saint Damien

Sometimes when I pray the Our Father and come across the line, "thy kingdom come," I am carried away in my mind's eye for a moment to Hawaii.  So far in my life, the most heavenly place I have been is Hawaii.  So, when I read this week that Damien the Leper is about to canonized a saint, I cheered.  For someone to become a canonized saint by the Catholic Church, there has to be a second miraculous healing of 2 different people whose deadly conditions left no hope other than Heaven's intervening.

Audrey Toguchi of Hawaii had a form of cancer that her doctor described as surely fatal, "Nobody has ever survived this cancer.  It's going to take you."  Audrey is the granddaughter of a leper who was exiled to the part of Molokai that was the leper colony where Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest, served as priest to the lepers, eventually becoming a leper himself. 

Audrey and her two sisters visited Blessed Damien's grave and prayed for his intercession.  Shortly thereafter her healing began and turned into a miraculous healing that medicine could not explain.  This second miracle ascribed to the intervention of Damien the Leper was just recognized as authentic by the Vatican.  The date of the actual canonization will be set in the fall.

One event in Father Damien's life that describes his sanctity was his desire to go to confession, but no priest would risk going to the leper colony to minister to this minister of the most rejected people.  He sent word to his bishop, begging for some priest to come to him, so the bishop himself came by boat but everyone on the boat did not want to get close enough for a meeting between the two.  So Damien shouted his confession to the bishop on the boat and received absolution by the bishop shouting back to him. 

Update on Jan Altevogt

This past week a Pet Scan determined that Jan does not have cancer anywhere else in her body, except for the kidney.  This week, we hope, she will find out what surgery will be done on the kidney.  When we know the actual day, we'll organize another vigil before the Blessed Sacrament to pray all goes well.  Keep her in your prayers.

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2008

Last Sunday the Christian world began a year long celebration of the birth-of-Saint-Paul, a year long commemoration of the man who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament.  Pope Benedict inaugurated the Jubilee-Year-of-St-Paul last weekend by making clear the goal of the Pauline Year: “to learn-from-St-Paul,-to learn the faith, to learn about Christ, [and] finally to learn the way of [an] upright life.”

            To help achieve this goal for myself and for you, I have decided to preach on the Letters- of-St-Paul-as they come along.  So, let’s begin by looking at today’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

            Ah!  Romans!  Most major spiritual revolutions of reform in the church’s history come from taking the Letter to the Romans seriously, particularly-St-Augustine-laying down the basis of medieval theology, Martin Luther’s Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation that followed.  So, as we look into Romans, let us ask the Lord to open us to its transforming power by asking the Holy Spirit to guide us as-we-study-St-Paul.

            “If you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

            What are these quintessential Pauline phrases, “to live according to the flesh” and “to live according to the Spirit”?

            If we don’t get this right, then we’ll-think-that-St.-Paul-has a negative understanding of the body, the body’s functions and desires.  Some people love to quote-St-Paul-as they throw a diatribe against homosexuals because “those who do such things will not-enter-the-Kingdom-of- God.”  Other people have taken Paul’s sins of the flesh to refer only to sexual sins.  All of this is missing the boat.

            “Living according to the flesh” in Scripture means living without God’s presence and help in our lives, in every aspect of our lives.  Leaving God out of our choices results in our choosing selfishness and the opposite of God’s ways, living as if God did not matter, living as if we had no responsibility to God or to the welfare of humanity. 

            On the other hand, “living in the Spirit” means living with God’s presence and help in our lives, living responsibly.

            In-Galatians-St-Paul-says that living in the Spirit results in the growth of the virtues, like an increase in love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, fidelity, generosity, self-control, and yes, chastity.

            He also tells us in Galatians, which was Paul’s first draft of writing Romans, that living as if God did not matter, “living according to the flesh,” produces an entirely different set of results:

Yes, sexual sins, but also idolatry (that is, regarding something, anything, as more important than God), sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions (like at the work place getting into ‘these people against those people’), occasions of envy, drinking bouts and the like.

            To this long-list-St-Paul-says, I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not-inherit-the-Kingdom-of-God.

            In that long list of how we can live as if God did not matter, who of us can say we are free from all those vices?  So much, then, for singling out one behavior as beyond the pale.  All of us are in need of redemption, no one is free from the need to be saved from our tendencies to give in to one vice or another.

            As long as we are “debtors to the flesh” in the broader sense, as long as we live as if God had nothing to say to us about our choices, then we will be trapped in a lesser way of life than the way the Lord is calling us to, “life in the Spirit.”

            The one fruit of the “life in the Spirit” that I want to close with is self-mastery.  If we allow the Spirit of God to reign within us, then we become the most free of all people.  Having control of our bodies, having control of our tongue, having control over our moods and dispositions, having control over our hurt feelings are all by-products of “living in the Spirit.”  And is this not worth undergoing a transformation of our minds?  As we move through Paul’s Letters we will be invited again and again to true freedom as well as self-mastery.

Lord, I want to walk this earth the way You walked it

Sometime this fall my publisher will be publishing a book I wrote as a guide through the season of Lent.  It deals with the problems of evil, sin, suffering and death, among other things.  While I was proof reading it today, I thought to give a taste of the book in this space by quoting one of my quotes, a prayer by a Jesuit by the name of Joseph Tetlow, SJ from his book, Choosing Christ in the World.

Eternal Lord of all things, I feel Your gaze on me.

I sense that Your mother stands near,

and the great beings crowd around You,

angels and powers and martyrs and saints.

If You will help me, please,

I would like to make an offering:

I want it to be my desire, and my choice,

provided that You want it this way,

to walk this earth the way You walked it.

I know that You lived in a little town,

without luxury, without great education.

I know that You refused political power.

I know that You suffered: Leaders rejected You.

Friends abandoned you. You failed.

I know. I hate to think about it.

None of it looks romantic to me, or very useful.

But it seems to me a toweringly wonderful thing

that Your divine majesty might call me

to follow after You. Amen