The Heart of the Matter

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent, 2/24/2010

Every now and then, when I was growing up, my father would tell my brothers and me, “Don’t ever forget that you are descended from the kings and queens of Ireland.”  When I got older I learned that there were kings and queens in Ireland many, many, many centuries ago.  That’s quite a family history to pass from one generation to the next, even through centuries of the most dire poverty in my ancestral home in Ireland which was one of the poorest sections of the country.

    It was my father’s way of doing what Moses did in our first reading, from Deuteronomy.  Moses gives the words to tell the family history to the Jews about Abraham, the wandering Aramean, whose descendants became the 12 tribes of Israel, who suffered as slaves in Egypt, became free by going through the Red Sea and were given the Holy Land as their own. That Promised Land memory is still at the core of being Jewish even to this day.

    So too do we recall our history every time we gather for the Eucharist.  We come together and confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord because of His passion, death and resurrection.  We say it again and again at every Mass: The Creed gives us words to tell our family history, the Eucharist recalls our family meal as central to who we are, the Memorial Acclamation gives our lips the words to confess that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

    St. Paul tells us, however, that our faith cannot just be lip service.  Paul says, “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”

    In recent weeks I have been driving home the need for believing in our hearts who Jesus is.  And I labeled as a heresy the secret belief many of us have, that we earn our acceptance from God by being good, sinning less, and being a better person.  There is a temptation for all of us who are secret heretics, to think that we really don’t need to believe in our hearts that Jesus is Lord. 

Do you remember the huge flap in the press 10 years ago when the Vatican put out a document called, Dominus Iesus, which in English is: Jesus is Lord?   

Imagine the effrontery of the Catholic Church to state unequivocally that “the theory of the limited, incomplete, or imperfect character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, . . . is contrary to the Church's faith. [The theory that what is revealed in Christianity can be found to be to that found in other religions, is contrary to the Church's faith.]  Such a position would claim to be based on the notion that the truth about God cannot be grasped and manifested in its . . . completeness by any historical religion, neither by Christianity nor by Jesus Christ.”

    In other words, the truth simply put is that Jesus is Lord.  

    As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus was tempted in the desert.  So are we tempted in, oh, so many ways.  But the most serious temptation of our time is to think that that belief in the heart, about who Jesus is, is just one way among many ways to wend our way through life.  No!  “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”

    We don’t have to jump to wondering how non-believers will fare in the Judgment.  That’s for God to figure out.  But our belief that is anchored in our hearts is that Jesus is the one who justifies us, forgives us, makes us be in right relationship with the Father and with each other.  In other words, we need to be reminded again and again who we are.  And who are we?  We are sons and daughters of God, brothers of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

By our baptism we are not just descended from the kings and queens of some ancestral homeland.  We are brothers and sisters of Jesus who is Lord, who is God, who redeemed us, justified us, and who makes us right before God and man.

    Let us today recommit ourselves to Jesus as Lord.  Let us ask Him to help us be faithful to Him, to hunger for Him, to desire Him, to center our lives on Him, to love as He loves, to do as He would do, and to pass on this dignity of who we are to the next generation.

Unabashed devotion

Every Thursday, from early morning until late at night, we have adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in our church.  The consecrated Host is displayed in a monstrance, in what the Catholic Church calls Exhibition of the Blessed Sacrament, for people to come and spend quiet time before the Real Presence of the Lord Jesus.  Many people come all day long and spend a few minutes or a whole hour in prayer before the Lord. 

What's especially touching is to see the unabashed devotion of the Hispanics.  Sometimes they go up to the sanctuary floor and kneel with arms outstretched in supplication.  No self-consciousness.  They are truly before the Lord and they know it.  And sometimes as they depart, they walk backwards, never turning away from the Blessed Sacrament as they leave church. 

Have you ever been to Lourdes?

This French shrine, dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, sits in the mountainous region near the border between France and Spain.  When I visited there many years ago I was amazed to find out that the experience is focused on the Lord Jesus, with the apparitions of the Virgin Mary (that happened there in 1858) serving only to bring people to a greater union with her Son.

An example of that focus on Jesus is Pope Benedict's presence there this weekend and his leading a procession of the Blessed Sacrament around the grounds of the shrine.  Here is the prayer he prayed:

Lord Jesus, You are here!
And you, my brothers, my sisters, my friends,
You are here, with me, in his presence!
Lord, two thousand years ago, you willingly mounted the infamous Cross in order then to rise again and to remain for ever with us, your brothers and sisters.
And you, my brothers, my sisters, my friends,
You willingly allow him to embrace you.

We contemplate him.
We adore him.
We love him. We seek to grow in love for him.

We contemplate him who, in the course of his Passover meal, gave his body and blood to his disciples, so as to be with them “always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20).

We adore him who is the origin and goal of our faith, him without whom we would not be here this evening, without whom we would not be at all, without whom there would be nothing, absolutely nothing! Him through whom “all things were made” (Jn 1:3), him in whom we were created, for all eternity, him who gave us his own body and blood – he is here, this evening, in our midst, for us to gaze upon.

We love, and we seek to grow in love for him who is here, in our presence, for us to gaze upon, for us perhaps to question, for us to love.

Whether we are walking or nailed to a bed of suffering; whether we are walking in joy or languishing in the wilderness of the soul (cf. Num 21:4): Lord, take us all into your Love; the infinite Love which is eternally the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, the Love of the Father and the Son for the Spirit, and the Love of the Spirit for the Father and the Son. The sacred host exposed to our view speaks of this infinite power of Love manifested on the glorious Cross. The sacred host speaks to us of the incredible abasement of the One who made himself poor so as to make us rich in him, the One who accepted the loss of everything so as to win us for his Father. The sacred host is the living, efficacious and real sacrament of the eternal presence of the saviour of mankind to his Church. . . .

This was the last prayer of our Master, our Beloved … May it also be our own prayer, and not only at our last moment, but at every moment in our lives:

Father, I commit myself into your hands; Father, I trust in you; Father, I abandon myself to you; Father, do with me what you will; whatever you may do, I thank you; thank you for everything; I am ready for all, I accept all; I thank you for all. Let only your will be done in me, Lord, let only your will be done in all your creatures, in all your children, in all those whom your heart loves, I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you, Lord, with all the love of my heart, for I love you, and so need to give myself in love, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.”

How can we help our young people know the Lord?

   I have a desire to do something that right now seems impossible.  That is to have perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in our parish church as a way for the whole parish to put our bodies as well as our souls into praying before the Blessed Sacrament for one hour per week (besides Mass) for our young people and all the students at the university.  Why?  So that they may be safe from harm and come to know the Lord.  Imagine if the college students knew that a parish was praying around the clock for them!

   It seems impossible, but a parishioner here recommended taking a lesson from a story about St. John Neumann (1811-1860), an early Bishop of Philadelphia.  Why not start with just 40 consecutive hours?  The story goes this way:

   Loving his Eucharistic Lord and wishing to dramatize the Blessed Sacrament and to center spiritual life in his diocese around Him, he dreamed of bringing the Forty Hours Devotion to the United States.

   At first the idea was received coldly.  People on all sides told him:  "You can't do that!  If you left the Blessed Sacrament exposed in churches for over forty long hours, don't you know what would happen?  The ignorant and the impious would profane and dishonor it."

   The idea might have died there except for what happened one night.  The Bishop had been writing letters for hours and he grew so weary that he fell asleep at his desk.  When he awoke an hour or so later his papers were a charred mass.  Whether a puff of wind had blown a letter into the flames of a candle, or whether the candle had overturned, he could not tell.  Only one letter remained intact, except for charred edges.  Picking it up, he saw that it was the only letter he had written that evening about the Forty Hours Devotion.

  At this discovery he dropped to his knees  It seemed to him that a voice was telling him:  "As this writing was saved from the flames, so shall I preserve My Son, present in the Blessed Sacrament, from profanation and dishonor.  Wait no longer.  Carry out your plans."

   The Bishop again eagerly took up his pen.  Letter after letter he wrote on through the night, ordering the celebration of the Forty Hours Devotion in every church of his Philadelphia Diocese.  The custom spread . . . throughout the entire United States.