The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, August 30, 2009

Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile.

It is fascinating to go shopping at King Soopers or Safeway or Costco and then switch off and go to Whole Foods or Ideal Market.  It’s like going to a different world.  The whole ambiance is different.  And the food items and prices are in fact remarkably different.  If we had, of necessity, to watch our pennies, I doubt that we’d be getting ourselves off to Whole Foods to shop.

    Organic is the brand name for evidently better food, safer, more nutritious, and better for us and our family’s health.  There’s a whole industry built around crops raised without artificial fertilizers; and there are magazines to alert readers about what is good and what is not good for our health, what additives make a product dangerous, and what genetic engineering does to crops and those who eat them, and what steroids in meat do to the consumer.  It seems like everybody is into the organic food craze, even if it’s very expensive.

I wonder how many of us are challenged, then, by these words of Jesus today:  "Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile."   

    I don’t think Jesus would be telling us to disregard sound wisdom on how food items are prepared; nor would he be telling is that organic is not important.  But I do think we today are as obsessed about such things just as the scribes and Pharisees were obsessed in His day about not eating this, or that, and caring to an extreme degree about how things are prepared.  Imagine the horror of actually eating a jelly donut!  Talk about being defiled!

    I think these words of Jesus challenge us on our priorities.  We live in one of the healthiest places on earth. And collectively we are among the healthiest people on earth.  Most of us, not all, are trim, fit, full of vigor and are very careful about what we put into our bodies.  These are very good things. 

    However, the challenge from Jesus is that we need to be just as concerned about what comes out of the deep recesses of our hearts.  It’s not the food we eat that defines us; it’s the quality of our soul that defines us.

    Let’s look at it this way: do we consider our physical health as being far more important than our spiritual health?  Do we put more concern and effort into our diet and our exercise than we do in advancing our relationship with God? 

    Too many of us received a religious education of a seven year old and stopped there.  Maybe some of us were religiously formed even at the level of when we were confirmed, but stopped growing up spiritually.  Most people who have issues with Church teachings or practices are still thinking, religiously, like a 12 year old.  And too many have not developed in the spiritual life to know how to pray and do it daily and seriously.  No wonder the world and individuals are in distress! No wonder we become plagued with "evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly."  These things happen because we are not yet intimate with the Lord.

    Let’s be honest: how often do we pray?  Twice daily? Or less?  How often do we pray the rosary?  Daily?  Or rarely?  How often do we go to confession?  How often do we pray with our families?  Ever?  How often do we read our Bibles?  Daily?  

    How can we expect to mature in Christ if we never spend time with Him?  If the sum total of our spiritual practices amounts to getting ourselves to church on Sunday, well, that my friends is simply not enough.  If all we do is go to Mass on Sunday, then we are starving ourselves all week long. And what’s worse, we show up at Mass not with a soul full of a passionate yearning for Communion, but with a dry sponge of a soul that sucks the very life out of the Sunday gathering.

    My brothers and sisters, we can do better.  We absolutely need to be as concerned about our spiritual health as we are about our physical health.  We need to be just as careful about what comes out of the deep recesses of our hearts as we do about what we put into our bodies.

The power of the Word

A parishioner sent me an e-mail about something she witnessed while entering our church last Thursday.  To understand, it's important to know what a number of years ago our parish went through a process of discernment to decide if we would move out of downtown Boulder to a place outside of town that would offer us more room to expand our school and our parking lot.  We discerned that we would stay in downtown Boulder.  Here's what happened last Thursday:

As I approached SHJ today for the 4:00 hour of Adoration, I saw two young men walk past the [stone sign] in front of the church, back up and one take a picture with a cell phone.  "What's so interesting?" I asked.  "The saying on the rock," they both said, "It's so cool."  I laughed thinking they must be CU freshmen exploring Boulder and everything is cool. But, the one with the cell phone said, “No, seriously, that Bible quote is so cool."

   Seriously, this is why we needed to keep SHJ in downtown Boulder; the subtlety of its presence, of His presence.

  It's so cool: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, Jer, 1:15 

 

Homily for Sunday, August 23, 2009

For a whole month our Sunday Gospel readings have been from John, Chapter 6 - culminating in today’s question that goes to the core of who we are as Catholics:  “Do you also want to leave?”

    Jesus had just the day before miraculously turned five loaves and two fish into a massive banquet for thousands.  The people were agog with fascination and went in search of him.  When they found him he began teaching about himself as the True Bread come down from heaven, that if they eat of this bread they will never hunger, and that if they drank his blood they would never thirst.  Indeed, he taught that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink, which we believe to this very day in the Eucharist.

    In today’s final selection from John, Chapter 6, we see that many of his disciples found this saying too hard to accept; they returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.  Yes, believing that during Mass the bread and wine do indeed become the body and blood of Christ is hard to accept, especially if one’s faith is not deep. 

    But what does having a deep faith mean?  It means that one has thrown one’s lot in with the Church completely.  It means not making a chasm between one’s faith in Christ and one’s faith in his body, the church. It means that one has entered into such a deep relationship with the Lord Jesus that following him, being close to Him, and being faithful to him is the most important thing in our life.  It means that one hungers for him, and no longer sees Sunday merely as a day of duty but as my encounter with the Bread of Life, an encounter I cannot live without.

    Some people wear their faith like a jacket: they put it on sometimes; and take it off at other times.  This is straddling the fence and is unbecoming of someone who feasts upon the Body and Blood of Christ.  So, if you are sitting on the fence, the Lord says to you: “Do you also want to leave?”

    Other people seem OK in their faith until some crisis comes along and challenges their faith.  Their doubts and inner struggles become too much for them, or so they think.  These are fair-weather friends of the Lord to whom the Lord says: “Do you also want to leave?”

    Others are conditional Catholics who think of themselves as Catholic but do not believe what the Church teaches on this or that, and have created their own rendition on what it means to be Catholic.  To these the Lord says: “Do you also want to leave?” and they answer, “I’ll stick around but on-my-own-terms.”

    Other people are cultural Catholics, Catholic in name only, and show up at holidays and weddings and funerals.  They have no deep relationship with the Lord and they answer Jesus’ question, “Do you also want to leave” by saying, “I already have, but don’t tell anybody.

    And lastly, some, a chosen few it seems, are true believers who believe with all their heart and soul, who would die for their faith ever before abandoning their faith.  These are the ones who answer Jesus’ question, “Do you also want to leave?” by saying “No!  Not for all the doubts in the world, not for all the scandals in the Church, not for all of the contradictions of my fellow believers, not for all my own inner struggles would I ever, ever want to leave you Lord. With the apostle Peter I say: ‘To whom else shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.’”

    My friends, we live in an era of increasing hostility to religion and to God Himself, an era when it is very hard to be a true believer, very difficult to stand up for our beliefs and practices that are regularly ridiculed even by people we love.  But just as Joshua put it to the Israelites as they entered the Promised Land, so I put it before you:  Decide today whom you will serve: the false gods of the country in which we are dwelling, or the Lord God who became flesh in Jesus Christ, who gives us his body and blood to feast upon and by whom we can have strength to hold fast to the Lord, come what may.  Decide whom you will serve.

    As for me, my brothers and sisters, as for me and my household, the household of our parish, we will serve the Lord.

What's the impact 46 years after banning the Bible from public schools?

In 1963 the reading from the Bible was banned from public schools.  What’s the impact now 46 years later?

 

Well, last Saturday evening I attended a very fine local production of Godspell, a 1970 musical that in 1971 started a long running success as an Off Broadway production.  The structure of the musical is that a variety of Jesus’ parables (mostly from the Gospel according to Matthew) are interspersed with a variety of modern music set primarily to lyrics from traditional hymns, like “Day by Day.”.  In the 1970’s everyone who was educated knew well the parables of Jesus, even if they were not believers in Him.  For many in our culture the Bible was good literature.  Notables, who were never baptized, used the Bible frequently in their speeches and writings, like Abraham Lincoln, for instance.

 

This local production of Godspell was put on by a director and producer of a children’s acting troupe here in Boulder County.  The children and teens are from the general public and are not attached to any school or religious outlook.  I attended because the lead character in the play was one of our parish teenagers who had graduated from our school a few years ago.

 

During the intermission I got to visit with the director/producer.  She has worked with helping children and teens become grounded in acting for 40 years, so her experience is long and her protégés have reached some success in the acting world.

 

She told me that she was surprised that most of the children today had no frame of reference for any of the Bible stories or parables.  In fact, so many of the parables in Godspell made no sense to them at all and had to be explained.  It made me proud indeed that the one who did the explaining was the graduate from our school.

 

So, 46 years after the banning of the Bible from public schools it is now two generations of Americans who have grown up without the common grounding in the values and stories of the Bible.  Whether people believe or not, the memory is no longer within our society.  No more memory of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, King David and Bathsheba, Ahab and Jezebel, the prophets Samuel, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, the Babylonian Captivity, John the Baptist, Jesus and the Apostles, the parables, the crucifixion, death and resurrection of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Paul and the foundations of our Church.  It’s all gone!

 

Look then at what a gift our parish’s school has to bring to the future generations.  Not just a memory of all that has made us the people we are, but also a living faith that is sent to be yeast in the dough and a light shining on a hill.

 

Consider supporting our school, or any Catholic school, even if your children are already raised. Helping struggling families by supporting of scholarship fund would go a long way in helping spread the Gospel to another generation! 

Homily for Sunday, August 16, 2009

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you.”

    Some of my family members, who went to Catholic school when they were in elementary and middle school, now attend a church that is one of the fastest growing churches in the country.  It’s not Catholic.  It’s a non-denominational church that draws a lot of young families and is, from what I understand, rather thrilling to attend.  It’s upbeat.  It has a huge parking lot, fabulous music, audio visuals that engage the mind and the emotions and theater style seating.  It does not have the Eucharist.  Oh, they have a side table with bread and grape juice available, almost with the message: if you need that, there it it is.

    I used to be pastor of a mega-church and I know well the thrill of what you can do with a huge and vivacious Eucharist-based congregation of 5,000 people, an ample parking lot, no expense of running a school, and therefore lots of money to put into things that feed the mind and the emotions.

And I look at us and see that we have a postage sized parking lot, an inner city location, a huge Hispanic population and a school that is a huge investment because we are committed to teaching young people to know, love and serve the Lord and get a first class education in the process.  But we have the Eucharist!

What makes having the Eucharist so far more valuable than all those things that we cannot compete with?  “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you.” 

The Eucharist has been celebrated for 2000 years in every circumstance imaginable: in open air structures that hardly look like a church, in open fields in missionary outposts all over the world, behind hedges in the penal days of Irish history where attendees would be arrested for being at Mass, in gothic cathedrals, in parish churches in every economic bracket there is, and on the back of a truck in war zones.

Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the wealth or poverty, the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ - for 2,000 years.  All these centuries Jesus becomes physically present to his people whether they are happy or sad, healthy or sick, young or old, black or white or brown or yellow.  They feed upon him, take him within, commune with him, are nourished by him, enlivened by him, strengthened by him, encouraged by him, formed by him, challenged by him.

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you.”  Even until now in the 21^st century we have believed in this word of the Lord and have understood it as Transubstantiation, meaning the Jesus is not just a figment of our imagination, not just a historical memory, not just someone to shout about, not just our Redeemer, not just our Savior, but is in fact our food and drink.  “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

What a treasure we have been given!  We call this presence of our Lord in the Eucharist, the Real Presence.  With what care we must approach the Lord when we come to Holy Communion. What a heritage we have to pass on to future generations! 

 So, I ask, is it important that we compete with bells and whistles to win over people who have been raised by the entertainment industry?   Shouldn’t the Real Presence speak for itself?  Is it that we assume everyone understands the Real Presence?  But they don’t get it?  Do we need to rethink how we teach the meaning of this sacrament?  Do we need to be more reverent?  Do we need to verbalize within our families what it is that we are doing when we get ready for Mass?  Do we need to be more prayerful as families, more accustomed to a family meal so the Eucharist makes sense of the Church’s family meal? Or do we not really believe in the literal truth of the Real Presence?  Well, in today’s Gospel they found Jesus’ teaching really difficult: “How can this mean give us his flesh to eat?”  We’ll see next Sunday that they found this teaching altogether impossible to accept, and many of His disciples deserted him.  We will see that Jesus did not beg them to come back, or say, you must have misunderstood me.  No, his teaching still stands: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you.”

On maneuvering through hard times

Here are some spiritual direction tidbits for all of us during this prolonged bad economy. I hope they help.

 

• If your personal/family finances are doing OK then it is time to be very grateful to the Lord and to be as generous as you can to those who are in need.  One never knows when the floor can fall out beneath us, so be grateful to the Lord and pray for those who are facing hard times. The spiritual dynamic here is that when in a state of consolation, enjoy the consolation, but store up a spiritual reserve for the day when desolation comes.  Almsgiving (giving to the poor) is one of the most potent forms of spiritual weaponry.

 

• If your personal/family finances are tanking, then know that you have entered upon a time of desolation. In times of desolation we tend to make bad decisions, so invite the Lord in on every decision, not only on finances but especially on giving in to the desire to blame someone, either yourself or others.  If you made bad decisions, then learn from the mistakes and move on.  If a loved made poor decisions, then voice the issue as you see it and then move on.  Do not stay in the blame game.  Fix the problem. Don’t make it worse.  Seek out the best wisdom you can find, from people whose judgment you respect.  And do not cave in to the tendency to sit on a pity pot, or become bitter or fearful, or worried about what other people might think.  As the Lord said, “Fear is useless, when is needed now is trust.”

 

• Whether you are in good times or in hard times, it’s a time for all of us to learn a greater degree of trust in Divine Providence.  And Divine Providence may be suggesting that we all need to learn some new virtues, like the value of being frugal, saving for a rainy day, being generous, and steering clear of consumerism.

 

• Many people allow money worries to steal their peace of mind.  If there is something to be learned, then learn it.  But we should have much greater concern about our salvation and the state of our souls than the state of our 401 (k).

Homily for Sunday, August 9, 2009

How could Elijah walk into the desert for 40 days, sustained by two meals before he left?  And how could it be that in the Eucharist Jesus gives us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink; and how exactly does that give us eternal life?  To answer these questions let’s go on what might seem to be a digression.

    While I was on vacation one of the books I read was My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor.  The author is a neuroanatomist, a brain scientist. 

She was intensely involved in the amazing amount of progress that has been made in the scientific study of the brain, when, suddenly, in her thirties, she had a massive stroke that shut down most of the left hemisphere of her brain.  The left hemisphere is where judgment happens, even the judgment that determines that the sidewalk, with its lines and edges is safe to walk on.  The left side of the brain is where critical conclusions are drawn that guide us in so much of what we do, like being able to read, add and subtract, think in terms of inches, feet, miles or kilometers. 

It is this area of the brain that provides us with a constant flow of inner chatter in our mind.  Like: I think I’ll get a glass of water; or, that guy’s frown means he’s having a bad moment, or, it’s time to do my homework, and so on.  This is also the area of the brain that feeds us what seems like a steady flow of negativity:  I shouldn’t have said that; or, I’m just not smart enough; or, one negative thought after another – about myself, or about others.  This is the area where truth is measured and lies are crafted. If left unchecked, this is the side of the brain that produces bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, reviling and all forms of malice.

This left side of the brain went almost completely silent during and after the author’s stroke.  With hard work, and with a team of helpful and patient people, it took 8 years for her to recover from her stroke. 

Being a scientist, she was able to chronicle what having a stroke was like, and what she was able to do with the right side of her brain.  The book is a powerful read for anyone who has a family history of strokes and for anyone who is caring for someone who has had a stroke.

What did she learn about the right side of the brain? This is where peace reigns: there's no inner chatter; no negativity.  Instead, there's a sense of being at one with the universe; one with God; of being in heaven.

The right side of the brain is where compassion reigns.  This side of the brain is designed to counterbalance our left side’s judgments, criticisms, and critical thinking.  The scientist had to force herself to want to recover her left side of her brain and allow back into her consciousness that inner chatter in her mind.  But now she had the insight to control the chatter and not allow the negativity to take over.

The application: The great divide between the Eastern way of thinking and the Western way of thinking is connected to which hemisphere of the brain is emphasized, and which side is de-emphasized. Since the Enlightenment Western man has developed to an even greater degree the exercise of the left side of the brain but has pretty much ignored the right side of the brain.  That means that we in the West have ignored that place in our heads where the Lord speaks to us, where the Lord nourishes us, where the Lord gives us His peace that the world cannot give, where He leads us to know our oneness with God, our oneness with all of humanity and our oneness with creation.  This is the scientific locus of religion in the brain. 

Without an adequate respect for this side of ourselves, we have an undeveloped sense of mystery, we are diminished in our understanding of truths that cannot be measured; and we do not believe that one double portion of a meal could sustain Elijah for his 40 day journey, nor can we grasp God’s presence within us. How, then, can we even begin to grasp the Real Presence of the Lord in the Eucharist?  How, then, can we cooperate with the Lord's Presence to augment our sense of union with God and others?  If we only knew that the Eucharist is the Lord's way for us to tap into the mystery of the right side of our brains!

I believe that the biggest challenge facing people of faith today is the lack of faith of those whom we love and live with or work with.  Today’s skepticism and cynicism on religious matters is like a constant murmuring within our society; and it’s contagious.  It’s the result of an overly active left side of the brain, left uninfluenced by the right side of the brain. 

The angel of the Lord told Elijah, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!”  And what better food for the journey is there but the Eucharist of the Lord?  Jesus tells us clearly today, “Stop your murmuring.”  Exercise that right side of your brain and believe that this food will give you eternal life.