The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, May 1, 2011

“Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe!”  That’s you and me!  We have not been able to put our finger into the nail marks and our hand in the wound in the side of the Risen Jesus, but we believe.  So, this particular Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter, is a time to celebrate our faith, to be grateful for our faith, and to beg the Lord for the grace to grow in our faith.

This is also “Divine Mercy Sunday.”  This is the Sunday when we hear in the Gospel the words of Jesus when He gives to the Church the Sacrament of Penance, the way to experience the forgiveness of sins we commit after Baptism.  It is the sacrament of mercy.

And this is also the Sunday when Pope John Paul II is beatified so that he will now be referred to as Blessed John Paul II - until another miracle is confirmed and he will then be canonized as St. John Paul II.

Let me put the beatification of Blessed John Paul II into the context of history.  

For 2,000 years our Church has meandered through history always buffeted by the vices of each particular epoch of history; but also giving superb witness to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ who founded the Church.  We heard in today’s epistle reading, from the First Letter of St. Peter: 

Although you have not seen him you love him;
even though you do not see him now[,] yet [you] believe in him, [and]
you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,
as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

In every age in the history of the Church, the Lord raises up truly extraordinary people who are graced by God to help others come to a deep and profound faith.  They make believing possible.  They are sent by God to address particular needs at particular times in history.  Yet God so graces them that what they teach is true for all ages, not just for the time period in which they live.

Every epoch in history has such witnesses to the faith, whether they are martyrs who die for the truth of who Jesus Christ is, or they are canonized saints who bore such effective witness to Christ that they left an immeasurable impact on their contemporaries, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta or St. Faustina whose mystical experiences gave us the image of Jesus as the Divine Mercy.  

But on rare occasions there are absolutely extraordinary witnesses to Christ, persons who live in such a way as to authenticate what they believe and teach, and who are intellectual geniuses who actually turn the course of history.

Pope John Paul II was such a person.  It is no wonder that he is being beatified only 6 years after his death.  When he became pope, there was a general state of alarm about the conflict between the socialist Soviet empire and the world’s democracies of the West, particularly the United States.  The Cold War was still raging causing a pervasive sense of fear throughout the world: fear of nuclear extinction, fear of atheism conquering the world, and fear of the meaningless of human life.

The age of doubt of the Enlightenment had morphed into an age of rejecting belief in God: the blatant atheisms of Communism and Nazism, and the more subtle form of atheism: a materialistic view of life that says that only what we can see and touch is worthy of us.  Those invisible realities like character of soul, virtue, holiness and selflessness gave way to selfishness, meaninglessness, and what we might call a lack of soul.   When Karol Wojtyla was elected pope the Age of Fear had seemingly rendered religion to be irrelevant and meaningless.

When Karol Wojtyla stepped out on that balcony after his election he began his ministry as pope by proclaiming, “Be not afraid.”  Thus began a globetrotting ministry of a pope who went to all corners of the world to put their faith in Jesus Christ, so that people everywhere might:  

“come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.”

During his years as pope, Communism collapsed as a result of his direct challenge to the atheism that had held millions of people captive even within their own souls.  During his years as pope, he brought his philosophical mind to bear on all the intellectual battles of modernism and post-modernism.  Like St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1200’s, Blessed John Paul II formulated a systematic way of understanding what we believe as Catholics, and what we have to say to a world that had lost hope in the future.  His intellectual and pastoral achievements were God’s gift to our age, an age of fear that has become an age of terror.  

“Be not afraid!” is as valid a message today as it was back in 1978.

 

Easter Sunday, 2011

Happy Easter!

Usually I write my homily out so as to be able to put a copy of it here in the pages of my blog.  But I was as dry as dust after the Triduum; and nothing was coming to me for an Easter Sunday morning homily.  In my prayer, however, the message I received from the Lord was that He would take over.  So, with just a barebones approach and a copy of a prayer I composed many years ago, I settled into a confidence that "it will not be [me] speaking but the Spirit of the Father."

I should do that more often.  The Lord indeed did take over.  At the end of the homily I asked those present to repeat after me a Prayer of Commitment to Jesus Christ, a prayer from a catechism I wrote some years back.  Here's the prayer:

Lord Jesus

I want to love you above all things

and I reject

all forms of selfishness

and destructive behavior

that keep me

at a distance from you.

 

I choose you,

Lord Jesus,

as my Lord and God.

I want my whole life to revolve around you

and your ways.

I want to follow in your footsteps

and imitate you

in living a life dedicated to you

by living a life of compassion.

 

Fill me with your Holy Spirit;

and give me an abiding joy

that comes from living in your presence,

for you are Lord forever and ever.

 

 

 

 

Good Friday Homily, 2011

There is such a thing as the banality of evil.  This was a term created, I think, by Hannah Arendt, a Jewish writer writing in 1963.  Her piece was entitled, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

She was trying to address how seemingly good people could buy into the Nazi horrors that overtook so many people before and during World War II.  Her idea was the the great evils in history are not usually perpetrated by heinous, evil fanatics or sociopaths.  Instead these evils insinuate themselves into the culture so that what is objectively evil appears to be normal, the way things should be.  Think of how abortion, which has always been evil, or perversions of justice and ethics and personal behavior are all now becoming normalized.  Normalizing what has previously been unthinkable is the process by which a people turns against their values and embraces evil in such a way that one evil after another becomes not only thinkable but is now the norm.

How does this happen to people who are otherwise good persons?

In Pope Benedict’s recent book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, the Holy Father reflects on what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane.  He talks about how the apostles kept falling asleep while the Lord underwent his agony when he “began to be greatly distressed and troubled.”  He told them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch.”  This was not the first time Jesus told his disciples to be vigilant.  Think of this message in so many parables where he says, “Stay awake, for you know not the day nor the hour.”

In the Garden this vigilance is called for with great urgency as has vigilance been called for at major points in the history of Christianity.

“Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One.  Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth.  In its state of numbness, the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad, so as to continue in the self-satisfaction of its own comfortable existence.  Yet this deadening of souls, this lack of vigilance regarding both God’s closeness and the looming forces of darkness, is what gives the Evil One power in the world.” (p. 153)

Our age has fallen into this trap.  We no longer think that we are in the grip of evil; and no matter what we do, we do not think that we are damnable.  We have grown numb to evil.  We no longer have a sense of the gravity of sin.  We have tamed evil and made it our pet.  This is the tenor of our times, and not for the first time in history.

The Good Friday Service and its proclamation of the Passion of our Lord breaks through the banality of evil.  We are invited to come face to face with Jesus who faced down the whole foul flood of evil.  In the Garden he saw the power of the lies, the folly of proud people, not wanting their comfort zone disturbed as they give evil a pass.  Jesus saw in the Garden how evil masks itself by normalizing all the wiles and cruelties that destroy, debase and crush life.  

Remember how Jesus had said earlier in the Gospels, when the apostles wanted the glory without the cross, Jesus said that he had to “drink from the chalice prepared for him,” meaning that he had to face the vast power of sin and death, all the horror, filth and baseness that demean and destroy souls, ripping them away from the Kingdom of God.

When we come forward in a little while to reverence the cross, we are not kissing a piece of wood.  We are kissing, or touching with profound respect, what the cross of Jesus means: that on Calvary there was a collision between light and darkness, between good and evil.  It was the critical moment of decision in human history.  Jesus did not run from the power of evil.  He did not deny how dreadful it is.  He faced it.  And he faced how you and I have added our own iniquities to that terrifying chalice that he drank to the dregs.  He faced down how you and I have added to the woeful human condition of the banality of evil that causes so much suffering in humanity.  

As we reverence the cross, let us be drawn quite personally into the sufferings of our Lord and hear Him say to us in the quiet of our hearts: My beloved, I shed those drops of blood for you.  And then, let us by His grace reform our lives and refuse to normalize the unthinkable.

 

Homily for Holy Thursday, 2011

I have heard it said that every AA meeting is the same: folks gather; the meeting begins; they have readings from a special book, called the Blue Book; and the same stories are told over and over, “Hello, my name is (whatever) and I am an alcoholic,” or a drug addict, or an over eater, or whatever is that individual’s addiction.  Then those who speak tell the story of their disastrous addiction and how they found new life in surrendering to a Higher Power.  Some people go to AA meetings numerous times a week, and some only once a week.  If someone falls away from attending, that person’s sponsor calls to make sure everything is OK and lovingly urges the backslider to come to the next meeting.  Why?  Because those who attend AA meetings know that if they don’t keep to this regimen of doing the same thing every meeting, at least every week, they will self-destruct and go back to their addiction at an even worse degree, as if they had never stopped.

It’s the same thing, week after week, story after story yet it never gets old because someone at that meeting needs to hear it for the first time, or to hear it with new ears so as to maintain sobriety and be saved from their worst selves.

Do you see how AA meetings can help us appreciate the ineffable gift Christ Jesus has given us in the Eucharist?  For 2,000 years we have been meeting every week (or every day, for some) doing the same thing, telling the same story, using our special book that reminds us of how disastrous life can be for those who do not find their reason for being in the Eucharistic action.  Not only does the Eucharist assist us to surrender to the Ultimate Higher Power, but even more miraculously we are taken in by the Lord Jesus as He surrenders Himself with us bonded to Him in His self-gift to the Father in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar.

We who attend Mass faithfully know that without the Eucharist, without sharing the biblical stories of disaster and salvation, without the exquisite union of Holy Communion, we would die.  Without this intimacy with the Lord, we would shrivel up spiritually and fall away from the saving grace of our Lord.  We know that without the Eucharist we would soon fall away from aligning our lives with Christ and we would begin to think in such a worldly way that we would be no different from other people who do things like the pagans.  We know that we cannot think of life without the Eucharist! 

Then comes tonight’s glorious celebration of the Holy Thursday Liturgy with the still stunning story of the washing of the feet.  Isn’t it peculiar that the Gospel according to John has no rendition of the words of institution, “This is my body” and “this is my blood”?  

Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul all give the account of the “words of institution,” as they have come to be called; but not John.  Instead, John gives us the washing of the feet.  Earlier in his Gospel, Chapter 6, John goes into great detail on the meaning of the Eucharist, and on its absolute necessity for eternal life.

The scholars say the John wrote this Gospel 60 to 70 years after the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ.  By then it was well established what the meaning of the Bread of Life and Cup of Eternal Salvation meant for the Church.  It would seem, though, that John saw that, though the still young Church had a good grasp on the vertical relationship with God, it was seriously lacking in the horizontal element.    No wonder, then, that in the three Letters of John, the Beloved Disciple went to great extents to urge his readers to understand that “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God.”  To be true Christians we must, yes, feed upon the Eucharist without fail, but we must also serve each other, love each other, care about each other.

When an AA member stops attending the meetings, the sponsor’s job is to connect with the struggling member to help her find her way back.  

In our day, I think AA puts us to shame in our not engendering within us the same degree of concern for those who have fallen away.  That’s the horizontal element that John’s foot washing ceremony points to, for us, today.  AA members do not brow beat the backslider, but they know that the backslider is in serious trouble and they do whatever they can to be helpful.  

May tonight’s liturgy be for us a rediscovery of how the Eucharist is of life and death importance for those who have been given this gift.  And may the Lord stir up each one of us to speak with a prophet’s courage to do whatever we can so that not one of these least ones will be lost.

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent

Have you noticed the flow of the Sunday Scriptures through Lent?  We began with the Temptation in the Desert as we considered our attraction away from God and towards sin.  

On the Second Sunday of Lent we reflected on our call to be persons of prayer as we watched Peter, James and John enter the cloud of prayer and witness Jesus in his glory in the Transfiguration.

On the 3rd Sunday of Lent, we watched Jesus evangelize the woman at the well and as we did that, we were encouraged to come to terms with the deepest thirst in our lives: our thirst for the Lord.

On the 4th Sunday of Lent we heard of the healing of the man born blind.  We came to realize, like the man born blind, we too come to see life differently when we look at life through the eyes of faith.  Like the blind man, we too move from being frightened and helpless to being mature disciples who are filled with courage.

Now, today, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, when the great drama of our salvation is unwrapped for us so as to enter into the mysteries of Holy Week, today we come face to face with our mortality and what faith in Jesus does for us when we face the ultimate encounter with death.

The movement of Lent moves us to be more convinced and more mature as disciples of Christ: we admit that we must resist the temptation to live inauthentically; we commit ourselves to grow in the sublime discipline of prayer; we beg the Lord to give us the gift of faith so as to believe in the courage-filling quality of faith in Christ that dispels all fear; and this week we desire to face death when it comes with the absolute certainty that the love of Christ conquers even death itself.

When I was hovering between life and death for the 5 days I was in a coma, I was wrapped in a sense of overwhelming love, encountering God in such an extraordinary way that I never want to forget what it was like to almost die.  That experience was God’s gift to me, to be shared with you, that death is colored by our faith in Christ so that with St. Paul we also can say: “If the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the One who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.” 

The ultimate encounter is with a God of love.  The bottom line of our faith as disciples of Christ is that each one of us is unique, unrepeatable, and destined for eternal happiness with our Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you believe this?

 

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Lent

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

Around the time our Declaration of Independence was being signed by our country’s founding fathers, an Englishman by the name of John Newton wrote the lyrics of Amazing Grace, which includes the lines, I “was blind but now I see.”  An obvious allusion to today’s account of the curing of the man born blind.  Newton had been a slave trader transporting captured Africans from the west coast of Africa to the markets in the New World.  

Involved in this abysmal business for some years he underwent what we Catholics call a conversion of heart, and what some Christians call being born again.  Until his conversion of heart Newton was blind to the dreadful thing he was doing.  All of us know what it’s like to live in the darkness, before we come into being light in the Lord, being involved in the fruitless works of darkness, things done in secret that are even shameful to mention.

At some point in life, everyone needs to undergo a similar conversion of heart as John Newton underwent.  He went from being a lucrative slave trader into being the main person responsible for the end of slavery. 

On the outside, we can all look pretty good, but we are reminded by the prophet Samuel today that “not as man sees does God see, because man looks at the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.”

The cure of the man born blind is this Sunday in Lent’s strong call to us to discover a new way of seeing.  It’s like philosophy’s rediscovery over the past 30 years of the importance of virtue. Actually it is called virtue ethics.  In virtue ethics the issue is: what kind of person am I?  And what kind of person am I becoming?  What is my disposition and character?  What virtues do I wish to foster and develop?  

Notice how the man born blind develops as he can now see clearly: Before the man born blind was healed, he was dependent on the crowd from whom he begged alms.  Likewise, before we undergo a conversion of heart, before we let the Lord into our lives to help us see differently, we can go along with the herd mentality, which today is increasingly secularist in its worldview. 

When I was in high school our principal, Sister Mary, used to get on the public address system during homeroom period and give the student body a little talk to set the tone for the day.  One of her constant themes was the invitation to “dare to be different.”  She was not espousing oddity, but she knew full well that teenagers highly value the opinion of their peers and can lose their footing by simply going along with the crowd.  Dare to be different, she’d say.

How should we dare to be different today?  

The spirit of our age is an all pervasive secular spirit that sees God and religion as irrelevant.  After all, how does the life of a disciple of Christ differ from the life of a really good person who has little or no belief?  Do I the Christian give bread to the hungry?  So do many wonderful unbelieving men and women, simply because of their humanity.  Is the secular outlook so bad if there’s not much difference between really good people who are believers and really good people who are nonbelievers?

What does it mean to “dare to be different” in this secular age?  Yes, being a person of virtue, but something more than that.  For the Christian a generosity of heart for the poor, or any other virtue, rises from our growing identity with Jesus Christ.  For the Christian every virtue is inspired by, sustained by and emboldened by the habit of our heart to imitate Jesus.  The Christian’s desire is to be in relationship with God, to do God’s will, yes by being virtuous, but also by praising, and reverencing, and serving God in the very process of acting out any and all virtues.  For this kind of virtuous person, the disciple of Christ, an increase in the virtues comes from contemplating the life of Christ, which has been the whole agenda of Lent, this year and very year.

The blind man, when healed, and when challenged, grew in his understanding of Jesus: from seeing him at first as “the man called Jesus,” then as “a man from God,” then as “a prophet,” then he became a defender of Jesus who did what no one has ever done before: open the eyes of a man born blind, and finally as someone who could say, “I do believe Lord,” and, the Gospel says, “he worshiped him!”

May we continue our journey towards greater union with God.