The Heart of the Matter

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter - 4/22/2012

This time of the Easter Season in the RCIA process is a time called “mystagogia,” meaning a time to enter into the mysteries of the faith.  Without this part of the conversion process, the faith can remain a matter of knowledge of facts, teachings, and details of the commandments, the sacraments, the doctrines and the general expectations of what makes for a good Catholic.

There is so much more, however, that only comes to us after we have been baptized, and if we have been instructed in these mysteries.

As you probably know, the RCIA process is intended not only for converts to the Catholic faith, but also for the whole parish, especially through the various rites and scrutinies, in Advent and Lent.  So also with the Easter season, the time of mystagogia.  The invitation to the whole Church is to utilize this season so as to grow into the mystery of the faith.

So, let’s take today to look more intently into the process of spiritual development.  What does it look like if we take our baptismal faith with ever greater seriousness?  What are the stages of spiritual development.  After going through these, let’s each of us figure out where we are in our development, and where we want to be.

There are 4 stages of spiritual development:

Stage One looks like this.  The person in Stage One has not yet decided to turn his or her life around and heed the words of St. Peter in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles: “Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away."

People in Stage One are narcissists.  It’s all about them.  All the time.  They do not think that they commit sin; and therefore they have no need to repent.  The truth for these folks is that they think they can do anything, can improve themselves, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  This narcissism (we used to call it pride) fuels all the vices of greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth.  They may say that they know God, but they do not keep His commandments, “and the truth is not in them.”  

The most we can do to help people in the first stage is to catechize them, teach them, warn them, in the hope that when God’s time is right, they “may turn to God and be saved,” as Scripture says.  In the meantime, they tend to not need religion, the sacraments or God Himself.  For these people the devil is hard at work to keep them right where they are.

And how does the Holy Spirit work in the hearts of these Stage One people?  Here the Holy Spirit will allow them to suffer the absence of God and the pain of feeling alienated from God.  Why does the Holy Spirit allow this?  To turn them around so as to trust in God, to hope in the future, and to be persons of love, and also, sometimes, to prevent people from destroying themselves.

Entering into Stage Two is marked by people starting to realize they need God.  They find themselves saying within their hearts short spontaneous prayers to the Lord: Lord, I need You.  Or, Lord, I desire You.  Or, Lord, I yearn for you.  Or, Lord, help me.  Or, Lord, turn this bad thing into something good.  Or, Jesus, I trust in You.  Or, Lord, save me.  The life of prayer takes on a new ugency; and it's only by a devout prayer life that one will progress spiritually.

For Stage Two people, they will know they are progressing in the spiritual life if they can see that their trust in God is increasing.  If they can see that their hope in the future is increasing.  And if they can see that their love of others is increasing.  Stage One people won’t even care about all of this.  For a Stage Two person, a sign that an evil spirit is toying with them is if they see a decrease in these virtues, and if they run into discouragement.  Discouragement is a sign that you’re off target and probably need to go to confession.  

Stage Two people will occasionally go back to Stage One thinking, perhaps becoming negative again, maybe even falling into old sins they thought they left behind.  But they still want to do God’s will in all things; and they will soon enough go to confession to let God’s grace turn their lives back to their path to "life on high with Christ Jesus."

People in the 3rd and 4th Stages will understand better than those in earlier stages the role suffering plays in the Christian’s life.  They will become familiar with a spiritual dynamic called the Dark Night.  That’s when a person has to be weaned off of worldly sensuality by various kinds of inner sufferings.  Being as attached as we are to sin, giving up these sins is a wrenching experience.  And many people, sadly, don’t want to go through the process until they face it in purgatory.  It’s a process of purgation, of being set free from all of our unfreedoms and from all of our addictions, so that we can be utterly free to be in complete union with God.  That complete union with God, also called the "mystical marriage" is the 4th Stage. It's like living on earth as if you were already in heaven.

Where are you in these stages of spiritual development?  Where do you want to be?  And where do you think God wants you to be?  

 

Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday - April 15, 2012

In 1931 a Polish nun was chosen by God to be the recipient of spectacular mystical visions and visits from our Lord Jesus Christ.  The Lord’s intention in these visits was to work through this woman to help the Church throughout the world to rediscover the essential call of the baptized: to realize that God is rich in mercy and that all the baptized are called to pray for mercy and to bestow mercy on others.  Thus began the Divine Mercy devotion that spread throughout the Church like wildfire. 

Do you not find it intriguing that this push from the Lord to focus on mercy was happening just a few miles away from a country that was so distraught by economic distress that they soon enough fell into the spell of a man who would lead the whole country into the exact opposite of mercy: mass genocide.

How can a Christian people be led so far away from what is good and holy as to embrace a truly evil man as their leader?  It must be either insincere practice of faith, or a severe misjudgment of what the faith calls us to.  

In these visions to the now canonized saint, Faustina, Jesus tells her of His distress at the lack of fervor of so many souls who do not grasp His mercy and love.  He told her:

“How painful it is to Me that souls so seldom unite themselves to Me in Holy Communion.  I wait for souls, and they are indifferent toward Me.  I want to lavish my graces on them, and they do not want to accept them.  They treat Me as a dead object, whereas My Heart is full of love and mercy.  In order that you may know at least some of My pain imagine the most tender of mothers who has great love for her children, while those children spurn her love.  This is but a feeble image and likeness of My love.”  

In these visions the Lord showed St. Faustina an image of His Sacred Heart with a visual depiction of the reality of what happened when He was pierced in the heart upon His death on the cross, when blood and water flowed down upon the human race: the blood of His holy passion which we take in every time we receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ when we receive Holy Communion, and the water of baptism which unites us with the Heart of Christ by a bond that cannot be broken.  This is the image we bless today.  

When Pope John Paul II canonized Saint Faustina on April 30, 2000, he declared this Sunday within the Octave of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday.  He had already back 20 years earlier written an encyclical, entitled in English: Rich in Mercy.  He who had lived under 2 forms of atheism, first under Nazi occupation and then much longer under Soviet tyranny, knew what it is like for people to forget the mercy of God: they embrace what is not God.  

In his appeal for a rediscovery of who God actually is, a God of mercy, he wrote: 

“If any of our contemporaries do not share the faith and hope which lead me, as a servant of Christ and steward of the mysteries of God, to implore God's mercy for humanity in this hour of history, let them at least try to understand the reason for my concern. It is dictated by love for man, for all that is human and which, according to the intuitions of many of our contemporaries, is threatened by an immense danger. The mystery of Christ, which reveals to us the great vocation of man and which led me to emphasize in the encyclical Redemptor Hominis his incomparable dignity, also obliges me to proclaim mercy as God's merciful love, revealed in that same mystery of Christ. It likewise obliges me to have recourse to that mercy and to beg for it at this difficult, critical phase of the history of the Church and of the world.”

How else can we explain the Risen Lord’s first message to the apostles, to be ministers of forgiveness:  “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

How else can we explain the patience of the Lord with doubting Thomas but by seeing the Risen Lord as rich in mercy?  How else can we explain our reason for hope that the Lord in His great mercy will deal with us patiently and mercifully?  And how else can we explain our lives as Christians but as persons of mercy?  As persons of forgiveness, as a Church of forgiveness, and as people whose mercy must be so palpable that this unbelieving age will come to rediscover the mercy of our God by the mercy they find in us?

 

Easter Homily 2012

Jesus Christ is risen today!  Alleluia!

Let me approach this Easter as if you were not believers.  Let us suppose for the moment that you, for whatever reason, had not yet come to know Jesus Christ, or His message called the Gospel, and that you had come here because you had heard that a man was risen from the dead.  Let’s suppose also that you were open to hearing about this Jesus and his being raised from the dead and were curious.  Let’s also assume that you do believe there is some kind of God.

Let me, then, introduce you to Jesus.  Who is he?

Jesus lived at a certain point in history, 2000 years ago, at a certain place in the Middle East, now called Israel.  Like all human beings, he was born, he lived, he suffered, like the rest of us, and he died.  During that time before his death he revealed to us what God is like.  He not only taught about the love of God, but his teaching poured out in his working miracles of healing and forgiveness.  

He revealed that the justice of God is not vengeance and retribution, but forgiveness and mercy.  He also revealed that suffering is not meaningless but is to be shared with all people as the way of redemption, the way of becoming who we are really meant to be; and he went this way in what is called the Pascal Mystery: the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, now truly risen from the dead.  

His revelation of who God is includes an invitation to enter in ever increasing ways into the very mystery of God, that through our union with Christ we learn that He is God, God in the flesh, that God has so entered into human existence, that “spirit and blood now have a place in God.”  For Jesus Christ is truly human and truly divine.  

This man Jesus Christ is not a story about some deceased individual, albeit a truly inspirational teacher, who came back to life at a certain point in time.  No, this Jesus truly rose from the dead, and now no longer is subject either to death, or to the deathly things of unredeemed humanity.  But in his resurrection an ontological leap has taken place, a shift in being itself, a new thing has happened: humanity has entered into another dimension, a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.

This Jesus, risen from the dead, has by his death on the cross reversed the ancient tendency to be selfish, to return evil for evil.  In him, the human race has ceased to be in rebellion against God and has entered into communion with God.

Jesus was born, lived, suffered and died at specific points in time, but his resurrection is not the same kind of historical event.  The resurrection did in fact happen at a specific moment, on the third day after his crucifixion, but the essence of the resurrection is that it opens up a new space that transcends history.  His resurrection is something new, a new type of event; and it is open to all of us.

Pope Benedict in the 2nd volume of his book, Jesus of Nazareth, describes the resurrection of Jesus as an “evolutionary leap.”  Benedict says, “Jesus’ Resurrection points beyond history but has left a footprint in history.  Therefore, it can be attested to by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind.”

Those witnesses were the apostles, who went from being uneducated fishermen and other such workers drawn by Jesus into his inner circle to hear his words, see his deeds, and witness his death and resurrection.  He, after rising from the dead, commissioned these ordinary men to bring this message to the world.  If all this had not actually happened, if the resurrection were not true, there is no way a small group of uneducated Galileans could have persuaded the people of the Roman Empire to embrace a crucified savior.  If Jesus were not truly raised from the dead, where would have come their willingness to die as martyrs?  

As St. Paul says in Corinthians 15: "And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised.  For 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.  Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.  If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all."

But we do believe; and because we believe, we are the most blessed of all!  Happy Easter!