2021 September-October: Homilies & Reflection

Homily of the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 3, 2021) 
Genesis 2: 18–24; Hebrews 2: 9 – 1; Mark 10: 2 – 16 

On the profoundest level, our readings today concern themselves with creativity: human and divine. To begin with, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus settles the question of marriage.  He bypasses Moses and appeals to God’s original order of creation.  Unlike man-made laws, which can be changed, the order of creation is written into our natures both physically and spiritually.   Physically wife and husband become “one flesh”, and their union produces new life, children.  And this requires that they become “one spirit”.  This union is God’s doing and we cannot break it. “…what God has joined together, no human being must separate”. St. Mark follows the discourse on the sacredness of marriage immediately by the story of the blessing of the children.   

Why did he do that? There’s a momentous connection and it has to do with the issue of separating. The account of people bringing their children to Jesus is one of the few occasions when the Gospels tell us that Christ became really angry.  What provoked his anger was the intolerance of his disciples who saw these children being put forward as a nuisance, a waste of time.  Surely they and Jesus had more important things to do than be involved with children. His disciples, rebuking their parents,  wanted to send the children away, get rid of them just as they had wanted to send the hungry crowds away prior to the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes.  In both cases their answer to people who presented difficulty was to separate them, get rid of them, scatter them to the wind.   

One of the most common biblical names for the devil is ho “diabolos,” derived from the term “diabalien” (to scatter, throw apart). Sin is a scattering power.  od the Creator, on the other hand, is the great gathering force.  Jesus becomes angry with his disciples precisely because they still tilt in the devils’ direction.  They still offer destructive solutions, not yet understanding that such answers lead only to greater disintegration and “scattering”.  They have yet to learn what a harsh taskmaster sin really is.  A first false step always forces another more serious one.   “Let the children come to me. What is being joined here you may not separate” Jesus will not tolerate their becoming agents of destruction.  Rather he is trying to lead them along a more creative path.   

Over the millennia different cultures have invented many so-called creation myths.  All deal with the creation of something or other.  But none ever got so far as a Creator of existence itself, or of the creation of everything that exists from nothing, as did the Hebrews. Hebrew has a unique word for this unique concept, found in no other language.  The verb “to create” – Hebrew bara – always refers to something God alone can do.  God alone creates in the strict sense, including matter itself.  We human beings cannot create in this way.  But we can be “creative” by giving new form to matter that already exists.  But God alone can make something out of nothing. In other words, to create something means to give existence.  To make means to give new form, to change something that already exists.  What is created is not changed, but made to exist in the first place. Using symbolic language, Scripture tells us that God took the dust of the earth and made the first human body, but the “breath of life”, the soul, he created directly form nothing. (Gen. 2:7) Thus was established the order of creation.      

Matter does not evolve into spirit.  The most complex chemistry, the most sophisticated computer, will never achieve consciousness or a free will.  They’re two are totally different levels of being: one physical the other spiritual. The very highest mode of making of which we are capable; the closest we come to creating is “procreating”.  Procreating is cooperating with God’s most important act of creation, which is not the calling into existence of worlds, galaxies and the rest of time and space, but the creation of a human being, with an immortal soul, destined to exist eternally. “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female…” When God creates a new human soul out of nothing, he does so only when a man and a woman make a new child’s body out of their previously existing matter and genetic form by physical communion.  In spousal union we fashion a new body offered to God who responds by effecting the creation of a new soul.  He grants women and men the dignity of being his instruments in the transmission of life.  That’s why sex is holy. 

Something is holy when it’s good in its complete being or nature.  As such it ought to be respected and correctly used.  Misuse of anything holy – to destroy it, throw it away or scatter it, is called moral abuse.  The holier something is the more seriously harmful this moral abuse is. We have rules for the careful preservation and use of things that are precious to us like great works of Art.  We don’t for small things like ball-point pens.  That’s what the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes are, and that’s why God has elevated the treasured union of spouses to a sacrament in Matrimony. 

In the news every day we hear of Catholic churches around the world, the sacred temples where the Mass is offered, being attacked, defaced and destroyed.  I’m sure no one here would dream of doing such a thing to our church. Yet we seem to have few misgivings about doing just that to our own bodies which are temples of the Holy Spirit.  People today by the millions casually cripple or destroy their God-given ability to procreate with no thought for the often devastating consequences. Today’s Gospel is a sort of wake-up call. 

Sadly, the majority of our leaders today are stranded exactly where the disciples of Jesus were: blindly offering destructive solutions to contemporary problems.  For instance sterilization, euthanasia, abortion and the death penalty are not solutions to problems.  Instead they’re setbacks, creating ever greater problems. When life is cheap the effect can only be dis-integration, “scattering”. The results are all around us and easily seen: less and less do things seem to hold together - countries, institutions, families, marriages, and individuals.  Increasingly the ‘new normal’ seems to be that we are expected to remain for life at the level of voracious, petulant children – “consumers” in the terms of market research. 

It does not have to be this way.  As intelligent and creative members of the Church, the Body of Christ, we are perfectly capable of effectively answering and reversing today’s ruinous tendencies. First, our leaders desperately need our prayers. For our part, we can work to inform ourselves, replacing the culture’s tragic misinformation and confusion, especially surrounding life issues, with an understanding of the truths of our Faith: clear, easy-to-understand facts regarding both the world and ourselves. Then, and this is crucial, we must resolutely and courageously live these truths as effective examples to all around us. A child stands at the center of Jesus’ message today, presented to us as a model not because of any supposed innocence of children but because of their complete dependence on, and trust in, their parents.  This should be our attitude in faith toward our Creator. This child-like stance is, in fact, the true definition of Christian adulthood. 

Homily of Friday , October 1, 2021

It is a sort of pleasing irony, at least I think so, that yesterday we celebrated the memorial feast of one of the most cantankerous, angry, and sometimes nasty saints in the book of saints, that is Saint Jerome. And today we celebrate the feast of Saint Therese, whose whole life was geared to charity and living in her community with kindness and thoughtfulness. This is something about her teaching, a description of her teaching by Brother Joseph Schmidt, a Christian Brother who has written a couple of good books about Therese. He says, describing her teaching: “To catch the blood flowing from the hands of the crucified and to participate in his suffering and pain was above all to bear with Jesus the suffering of ordinary life, the pain of the human condition, the pain of being displeasing to oneself; in personal weakness, in inadequacy, and in incompleteness, the pain thoughtlessly or even deliberately inflicted by others. It meant not to retaliate, not to be vindictive or violent, not to be discouraged or self-indulgent. And here are some quotations from Saint Therese which illustrate that, I think. She says: “It is only through love that we can render ourselves pleasing to the good Lord, that Love is the one thing I long for. The science of love is the only science I desire.” Again: “I know of no other means to reach perfection than by love. To love, how perfectly our hearts are made for this.” And then: “You ask me for a method of attaining perfection. I know of love - and only love. Love can do all things.” And then finally this statement of hers: “I understand now that charity consists in bearing with the faults of others and not being surprised at their weakness and being edified by the smallest task a virtue we see them practice.” That. I suppose. describes her life, or her attempt at living charitably in her monastery.

Homily of Thursday, September 30, 2021

Saints are meant to be imitated, but not in all things. That is especially true of today’s saint, Saint Jerome, the great fourth and fifth-century Doctor of the Church, the great translator of scripture, interpreter of scripture that we saw in today’s prayer, the Collect. Saints are meant to be imitated. What about Saint Jerome is it that we should imitate? A lot of his personality we should not imitate - go find out, if you read more about him. But two things: first, to give his mind, his intelligence, skill, which was great, to God‘s service, totally. To do the best he can; to do the best you can. All of us should do that: to try to use our intelligence or skills etc., whatever we are given, whatever we have, to develop them the furthest we can and to give them to God to the best of our ability; to do them to the best of our ability. And, most importantly, his promotion in life of asceticism. Asceticism is training, discipline, some sort of usually self-denial like fasting and so forth. Our innate powers can be more fully ourselves; get rid of the impediments to be the best selves we can be. But more importantly, to let God work in us, as we see in today’s gospel where the Seventy-Two are untouched by baggage, either money or other things, that get in the way, that impede them, slow them down. They don’t have any of those things. They can proclaim the gospel powerfully, that God can work in them fully and touch hearts and do a lot of other cool things, impressive, impressive things. The great tragedy of modern life is that we often will try to use our natural skills, and often to the best of our ability, but not the supernatural power that God offers. And so our success level is much less than it should be, or there’s no success at all. 100% us, our best selves, fully order, fully present; 100% God – through all that awesome power, that supernatural power: there will be nothing to compare to it. The incarnation happened for a reason. We cannot do it by ourselves, even with the best of our abilities. We cannot be the best people we can possibly be. We need us, to be sure, but we need God also, even more so. He perfects our nature. He has an awesome supernatural power that perfects our natural power and brings forth things that we could not do ourselves, like the preaching of the Seventy-Two, like the disciples themselves who do incredible things, to preach the kingdom, to heal souls, to drive out demons etc. So we need asceticism that is real, not just playing at it on Sundays, et cetera. We need to live a life that’s fully ourselves and fully God, the beautiful synergy of God in us. Our free will and our free effort, and God’s free power, to be most open to God’s power. Let us live as best we can as saints, trying harder and harder. We can be more and more our best selves: 100% us, 100% God. And we will be happy individuals and also, more importantly, more accomplished and successful individuals.

Homily of the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 26, 2021; 7:00pm School Mass) 

Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!" These are powerful words from the prophet Moses, and they are especially prophetic words. Although Moses knew nothing about the sacraments; he didn’t know about the Church - Catholic or Protestant; he didn’t know about the Trinity or the Holy Spirit. But he knew a lot, experienced a lot, of the spirit of God. Those of us here who have received the Holy Spirit at Baptism, and those us who have received the Holy Spirit at Confirmation. We are Spirit filled… or at least we were… or at least we should be. Where were Eldad and Medad that day? Why weren’t they at the meeting tent with Moses? And who and where are Eldad and Medad among us today? Who was that man driving out demons in Jesus name, and why would he be doing that if he wasn’t following Jesus with the other disciples? Who and where are such other people driving out demons today?

Today there are those among us responding to the Spirit’s call doing the Holy Spirit’s work, but they do not make a show of themselves. Driving out demons is not at all like in the movie “The Exorcist.” The demons today also do not make a show of themselves, they certainly don’t want to be recognized as demons - and not only do they go out to possess individuals, but also seek to corrupt all of society. Where we find their work of corruption going on, there we too can find those spirit filled people - other Christs, working to repair and build up; many are our fellow Christians, but also there are Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists and even atheists and agnostics who only speak good about Jesus, working for His kingdom and not against it, working to cast out demons, saving human bodies and souls from destruction, because whatever harms the body also harms the soul.

There are demons of ignorance and division. There are demons of unbelief and doubt. There are demons of drug addiction and alcoholism. There are demons of poverty and economic exploitation. There are demons of hate, violence and war. There are demons of sexual exploitation. There are demons of Racism and Nationalism. There are demons of mental illness and depression. There are demons of selfishness and greed, which St James speaks of in the second reading. There are demons of pride, power and lust, and sexual gratification. And the worst demons of all, there are demons of despair. Despair demons are the worst because they convince those they possess that there is no way out, that it is impossible to get free from demons. Just this week a talented bright young man who had graduated from our school in St Louis, Missouri last May, overcome by some demon, took his own life. Between September 11 and September 20, two undergraduate students at Saint Louis took their own lives.

All these demons affect us too, we who are destined to be saints, because we all are sinners now, and in different ways we tend to believe that we can do a little business with these demons, purchase a little of what they offer and not be tainted by the transactions. The Church, our Church, is there in the trenches fighting these demons… Of course, through the sacraments, especially Eucharist and Reconciliation. But the Church is there in many institutions, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, homeless shelters, food banks, charitable associations and such. And the Church that is there in the trenches is also us, people like us… filled with the Holy Spirit and responding to the promptings and call of the Holy Spirit to extend the mercy, the grace, the compassion and help of God to those who need it most, those possessed by personal and social sin. That mercy, grace, compassion and help, that is the good news, the Gospel.

So Eldad and Medad are figures foreshadowing us, who have been baptized. In Baptism we in fact all become prophets as Jesus Christ, as well as kings and priests, yes even you ladies, kings and priests. We are empowered to act as He did, living and preaching the Gospel, healing, saving bodies and souls. Eldad and Medad illustrate the empowerment of lay people as envisioned by the Second Vatican Council, what all of us should be. There are ministries in the Church, ministries right here in this community - the community service club for one - that could use your help, the help of your time, your talent, your person and your Spirit. Listen for the promptings the Holy Spirit is giving you. Eldad and Medad foreshadow all people of active, positive good will, those people who the Church says have experienced the baptism of desire.

Now, in the Gospel, those casting out demons in Jesus’ name, they were acting as prophets, doing Jesus’ work. But the disciples obviously thought that Jesus belonged exclusively to them alone. Not so. God is bigger than any one of us or group of us and is at work prompting goodness and demon fighting in all people of good will. I have heard it said that today, there is no sense of sin. People don’t believe in it anymore. If so, that is a great victory for the demons. Certainly not many people believe in demons, because they can only conceive of them as cartoon-like beings with horns, a tail and wearing a red suit, or like something else they’ve seen in a movie. Such people would not put much store in Jesus’ words today. Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. There are consequences for sinning, negative consequences.

But God is an ocean of Mercy that can more than absorb all the sin in the world, if only the world would come to that Ocean. That is our task as Christians, and as apostles of goodness of whatever faith we are to first bring ourselves to this ocean, and then bring others to it by living and proclaiming the Gospel by our actions, not just by talking the talk but walking the walk. By getting the message across, the good news, that God is real and alive, that he is on our side, that He has defeated for us all the demons, even the demon of death, and if we are on His side, we share fully in his victory. With this Good News, we can drive out the demons of despair, and all the other demons will follow.

Homily of the 26th Sunday in Ordnary Time (September 26, 2021; 930am Mass) 

The past Sundays, we’ve been reading in the second lesson at Mass from the letter of James in the New Testament. It is not really, the scholars will tell you, a letter: it is an exhortation. And the other thing about it is that it is very Jewish. That is to say, if the Christian references were taken out, it could be read in a synagogue on a Saturday in those times. And the third thing that’s unusual about it in the New Testament, is that it’s written in very good Greek. All the writings in the New Testament are in Greek, you know. Most of it is not very good Greek, except, they say, in Saint Luke’s writings in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles. But it seems that this letter of James is in very good Greek, and that we don’t know exactly who the James is. At least, the scholars say it would not be the apostle James, and it would perhaps be the James who we would think of as the leader, maybe even the bishop, the first bishop, the first leader, of the church in Jerusalem, who was known for his strict keeping of the Mosaic law and for his piety in general, and who was put to death as a martyr in the early church. 

Be that as it may, the exhortation of James is part of the new testament and is therefore the word of God. It is a very practical letter. It doesn’t fool around. It is not full of abstractions. As an example of that, at the end of it in chapter 5, it says: Is anyone among you suffering let him pray. Is any cheerful, let him sing praise. Is any among you sick, let him call for the elders (that is, the presbyters, that is, the priests of the church), and let them pray over, him anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. So, you have here are a very early witness to the sacrament of the sick, calling the priest and they will anoint him and pray for him. Notice that it says priests, and in the Armenian Christian church they do, if they can: they have more than one priest come for an anointing of the sick. Another place in the New Testament where you have oil being used to anoint the sick is in Mark’s gospel when Jesus sends out the disciples. They cure people, it says, anointing them with oil. And this text goes on and says: Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another. So there you have a witness to what we would call confession or reconciliation or penance. Now it was not as it is described here done as it is today, most certainly, but it is there: confess your sins to one another. The church says now go to a priest a priest who presumably has been trained to hear confessions and knows not to talk about it out of the confessional. 

At the beginning of the letter, you have this call, notice: “…Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. For the anger of man does not work for the righteousness of God.” That is sort of the basic teaching. James is against sins of talking. “Therefore, put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness and receive with goodness the implanted word that is the word of God which is able to save your soul.” Now here is good advice: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.” James is saying it doesn’t do just to listen at church, or he would say in the synagogue: do what you are told to do. “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in the mirror, for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty (that is the gospel” and perseveres… shall be blessed in his doing.” One of the things that’s interesting is Martin Luther did not like this epistle of James, because it contradicts him. He said we are saved by faith alone. Saint James says faith without works is dead and cannot save. You have to have works and this is one of those points he says: “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue he deceives his heart” – notice that we’re good at that deceiving ourselves – “this man’s religion is vain (useless); Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows.” That’s Old Testament talk for people who are poor, who are deprived, who are in desperate need. Religion pure and undefiled is to visit, help, orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. That’s his word to us for today
 

Homily of Saturday, September 25, 2021

When things are going well, for the majority of people, things will always be well. When things are going badly, they will always be going badly. It is a common reality of people, not for thoughtful people, critical people, etc. But the majority of people. When things are well they will always be well; when things are bad they always will be bad. We see the first of these realities in today’s gospel. Now it is true that the apostles are not yet illumined about lots of things about who Jesus is, about what he has to do, etc. But I am that for a lot of them, even though they were told by Jesus himself about the badness that would follow, it was hard to imagine badness. They didn’t want to ask him about it at all, because they couldn’t imagine what this could be; because things were going really well – miracles and crowds, etc. Later on in the gospels, you know, when things are going bad, and Jesus seemingly has been defeated, etc., they can’t imagine things will turn out well, because things are bad. There is a good example in this for us about the spiritual life. In the spiritual life, it will not be all good or all bad – it will be alternating phases of goodness and badness. When things are going really well and God is blessing us, is transforming us, we have great warm fuzzies, etc., in prayer and so forth, you can be sure that to lead you to further heights God will give you bad things, internal, external or perhaps both. To purify you, to elevate you, so that you can keep on going upward, in a spiral to him. And when things are going badly, you can be sure that they won’t last. This is a way of challenge, a means of transformation, etc., etc. To keep on advancing in the darkness. Good times, bad times – none will last forever. When things are going well, be ready for badness – enjoy it, while it lasts, to be sure – but know that bad things will follow, to make you better, to make you more transformed, etc. And when bad things are happening, it’s not going to last. You’ll get through the darkness eventually, the disaster, eventually. It’s never all good or all bad, always. And that’s good to know. It’s good to know in the spiritual life, as in life in general, because our goal is the spiritual life, to be great saints. So we will have phases of goodness and phases of badness. And if we know that none of these will last too long, that these are a means of further progress, we will become the saints we are meant to be. 

Homily of Wednesday, September 22, 2021

We see in today’s gospel that Our Lord gives to his twelve key disciples power and authority over demons, over diseases, and the power to proclaim the gospel. And people actually believe it, it is something transforming, the kingdom, as he calls it. Another part, a later part of the gospel, he talks about how even greater things will be given to them, once he ascends to the Father, greater things then they already appeared to be. All very impressive. Nowadays, we feel it’s a great day when we don’t read in the newspapers some scandal, some horrible reality about  bishops and churchmen and priests and so on. It’s a good day when they’re not arrested or sent to prison or charged with something that no Christian should ever be charged with, period. We think that is a good day. Where is this power that we see manifest in today’s gospel? Where is this capacity to proclaim the kingdom that we see in today’s gospel? It is still there, I think, if we followed God truly, more truly than we have been. If we pray more, etc. that power more and more will come to us, and we will manifest he miraculous, we will manifest the power of God and proclaim the kingdom more convincingly. In the early 19th century, the great Russian saint, Seraphim of Sarov was asked: why is it that in earlier days God was more present, miracles more common, etc., etc.? He said: Nothing is lacking but a firm resolve. I think that is as true today as it was in the days of the apostles, in the days of St. Seraphim of Sarov, and today. If we try harder, if we be more faithful disciples, if we pray more, if we give ourselves more faithfully to the gospel, we will experience the power of God more intensely; we will manifest the presence of God more powerfully, the kingdom will be proclaimed more insightfully; people will believe, miracles will happen, etc. It really is up to us. Nothing is lacking but a firm resolve.

Homily of Tuesday, September 21, 2021

St. Matthew’s gospel is the gospel of the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets of what we call the Old Testament. Jesus came, he says, not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. St. Matthew’s gospel is full of examples of where that happened in the life of Our Lord and in his ministry. This is what the scripture professor, Luke Timothy Johnson, says about the gospel: “Matthew is the gospel of the church. Not only is it the only gospel to use the term “church,” but both its contents and structure indicate an interest in providing clear and coherent guidance to a community of believers. In contrast to the Gospel of Mark’s rather marginal early existence, in contrast, Matthew has been from the beginning the gospel most used by the church in this worship, and in consequence, it has provided the text for the most preaching and commentary. Already quoted directly by Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 115), it was given a full scale commentary by Origen (ca. 185-254). So far as ecclesial use is concerned, Matthew is the most successful edition of Mark’s Gospel.”

Homily of Saturday, September 18, 2021

Jesus tells us a parable in today’s Gospel. A sower goes out, and sows seeds. Some falls on the path, where it is trampled and the birds eat it. Jesus later tells his disciples this stands for those who hear the Word of God, but fail to internalize it, so when the Devil comes around, he takes it away from them so that they cannot be saved. Some falls on rocky soil, sprouting quickly but disappearing equally quickly and producing no fruit. This represents those who receive the Word of God quickly and joyfully, but lack the root to sustain belief when temptation and tribulation arise. Some seeds fall among thorns, starts to grow, but gets choked out by the thorns, and the plant dies without producing fruit. This represents those who are too preoccupied by the cares of the world, and have too much else going on in their hearts to sustain and support the Word of God. Some of the seed falls on good soil, where it produces fruit. These are those who embrace the word with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance. They are not spared from the trials, temptations and worries that prevented the path, rocky soil, or thorny ground from being suitable. However, because they clear the ground for reception of the Word through faith and good works, they are truly able to bear good fruit: they are able to fulfill their vocation for God. 

The greatest example we have been given of this is the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we commemorate on Saturdays through the year when there is not another feast. She is the model of rich, fertile soil capable of sustaining and bearing the Word of God. After all, she is the Mother of the Word of God Incarnate, the Mother of God, the Theotokos. By her humility in living her life according to God’s will, in spite of the sorrows, in spite of the “sword that would pierce her heart,” in spite of the Cross itself, Mary kept true to the will of God, true to her vocation, and true to her son, the Word of God, whom we are also called to nurture within our hearts so that we too may produce good fruit. 

Homily of Wednesday, September 15

Everybody loves Love, and the joy and happiness that Love brings. Nobody likes suffering, difficulty and disappointment, and yet they go together, as we see in today’s gospel. If we love someone, their suffering, their difficulty, their pain becomes our pain, our suffering, our difficulty. We see that most powerfully in the image of Our Lady at the foot of the cross: Our Lady of Sorrows. She participates in the suffering of Christ. She feels his pain powerfully, because she loves him. And the more she loves, the more she feels his pain. That sounds terrible, but also it can be turned around, because of our own baptism, because of our own reality in Christ. Christ loves us, and in our darkness and our difficulty, in our pain, in our suffering we are not alone. Christ is there transforming, healing, lifting etc. We experience suffering and pain, and loss and disappointment, and all of us – again, all of us – experience all those things, and a lot more. Christ is there. We are not alone. He is with us and he lives all these realities to a whole new level. He makes them better, makes them more doable, makes them more bearable, and transforms and transfigures them. So we honor Our Lady in today’s feast. Our Lady of Sorrows, her sorrow, the passion of her son, and our own personal passion, our own personal difficulty –and all of us have them, some big some small, whatever, everybody has them – Christ enters in. We are not alone, and he transforms and transfigures them and brings us to paradise.

Homily for the Opening of the School Year (Monday, September 13, 2021)

Welcome to the 2021-22 school year, the 96th school year here at PAS. It is good to have you back, and to have with us the class of 2025. Today we are celebrating the Mass of the Holy Spirit, to ask especially for the Spirit’s blessing, guidance, inspiration and protection for us and for the work we are just beginning. As we know God through his revelation to us as a Trinity of three divine persons, we can fairly easily comprehend the Father and the Son. But the Holy Spirit is a great mystery.

St. Paul speaks of the Spirit’s many gifts to us as individuals… They too are hard to comprehend. Just you try to understand someone speaking in tongues. And if you deliberately tried to prophesy, you would be a false prophet; you would fail. Yet to each of us, Saint Paul says, there is given some personal manifestation of the Spirit, some way the Holy Spirit wants to and can work through and in us for some benefit to ourselves and to others. And so today we are asking the Holy Spirit to wake us up to our gifts to recognize them and to stir us to use them. In the Gospel we just heard Jesus prays: "I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” I’m sure you don’t like to think of yourselves as child-like. But child-like here does not mean child-ish; it means fresh, unspoiled… the young at heart, precisely those who are open to the surprising workings of the Spirit. So you who are young have an advantage over us who are older and more bound by our pre-conceptions. That’s why in the Rule of St Benedict    , which is the basic governing document of this Abbey, St. Benedict says that the Holy Spirit often speaks through the youngest

The French poet and diplomat Paul Claudel wrote: “Youth is not meant for pleasure but for heroism.” Not that I really know anything about them, but I gather one of the attractions of video games is to achieve virtual comfortable heroism. Are you thirsting for real greatness and a noble purpose for your life? I know one thing…there is greatness within you. We do make a point of admitting to Portsmouth young people with the potential for greatness. But in what does your own greatness lie? To answer THAT, you need the Holy Spirit to help you discover and understand it, to give you the knowledge to develop it. And then give you the courage to use it, and the wisdom to know how and when to use it, and the reverence to order it to the glory of God and the good of others. In what does your own greatness lie? That is what you are here at PAS to find out, and what we are here to help you find. One thing we do know, you are called to be saints, to be great in holiness. 

You may learn in history about the event that was called The Children’s Crusade in 1212. 150,000 young people set out on their own initiative to do what the knights of Europe had failed to do. But they were betrayed. Whatever those unfortunate young people lacked, they succeeded in that, greatness in courage and holiness in spite of those who didn’t believe in them and those who took advantage of them. Crusades of young people today do not need to end in abject failure. It was the school children and teenagers of Birmingham, Alabama facing police clubs, firehoses and dogs, who brought an end to racial segregation there.
It was teenagers and young college students that sat in at segregated lunch counters in Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga and endured abuse and violence to end racial segregation there. The first summer I took St Louis students to Chile. The high school students there organized a national strike all by themselves and brought about needed changes in that country’s funding of education so that all students rich and poor had equal opportunity.

What can you do, you ask? Look at Greta Thunberg, and her crusade to slow down climate change, a crusade joined by thousands of teenagers in Europe. You can do great things, you can make more real God’s kingdom on this earth, God presence and power in your own life, if you listen, pray and respond to the Holy Spirit working in your life and your world. Don’t be afraid to think big. The Prophet Joel speaks of the youth having visions. At least have a vision…: a vision of God and your unique, gifted place in his creation. Blessed are the eyes that see what you can see. 

Come, Holy Spirit! Fill the hearts of your faith-filled students here, and their teachers, and set them aflame with your love. Send forth your spirit, and they shall be re-created and so you shall renew this world! O God, you who teach your faithful ones by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, grant that we all may be truly wise and always rejoice in His help. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, Our Lord. Amen.

 

Homily of the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 12, 2021 (Mass with New Students) 

In the Gospel we hear about the response of the Apostles, when the time came for them to answer the key question about the man who had called them from their nets and boats and businesses. It was rather like their mid-term exam; the time arrived for them to answer to Jesus the question: Who do you say that I am? It is a question we all have to answer, not on a Theology quiz, but for real, for life, from our heart. The answer that we heard Peter give was and is amazing, and is the key to what makes our religion distinct from the religion practiced by Jesus, the apostles and their contemporaries, or for that matter from any other religion then and today. Who do you say He is?  Does he have any relevance to you? You know how and where Jesus ended up: first as a convicted criminal, a perfect sacrifice, then as our savior, the first to rise from the dead, and finally reunited with His father, our Father, in that state of being we call heaven. That was all in the future when Jesus asked the apostles the question: Who do you say that I am?

To all appearances, Jesus was just a man. a holy man and a wonder worker, a healer yes, but there were others of those. Where really had he come from? What made Him the way he was? Peter knew, and that was and is amazing. We know today a lot more than Peter did then or ever could have. We know from our faith that Jesus while God was human like us in all things, except sin. Yet we overlook what this really means. And what it means can help us know and appreciate Jesus all the more. His being fully human means that He was not God masquerading as a human being, like God wearing a Human Being Halloween costume. Jesus was not pretending and just going through motions. He was real as a human being, as real as you or I. Like us, he got tired, he got angry, he laughed, he cried. And that great mind-boggling mystery of God being a limited, weak, emotional and sensual human being, the mystery which we call the Incarnation, is the very heart of reality and truth itself. Jesus had a body like ours that had to grow from infancy to adulthood. As a baby, He was utterly dependent on his mother and father for food and warmth, and they had to change Jesus diapers. Because Jesus learned like any other human child, he undoubtedly went through the terrible two’s and just as undoubtedly Mary had to spank him to teach him human limits. There is in fact a famous painting of this. Jesus’ early childhood would have been marked by some anxiety, because his family’s life as an exile in Egypt would not have been easy without a permanent home. Joseph and Mary were not a rich couple who could stay at the Nile Hilton. They were poor people who had run for their lives. There is and was a time for every purpose under heaven.

Although the gospels tell us about Jesus’ birth, they do not and cannot tell us about the life of Jesus as a senior citizen, because that time did not come in his human life. And unfortunately they do not tell us about his life as a teenager, but we know he was a teenager, and for just as many years as you will be and I was. And that is and should be important to you. Think of it; God in the person Jesus was a human teenager, experiencing all that any human being does in those years of rapid growth… anxiety and exhilaration. Although they don't say much, from what the Gospels do tell us and what our tradition tells us, we can understand and visualize Jesus the teenager somewhat. He made his parents worry. They tell us that the youth, Jesus, left a group of pilgrims, returning from visiting the temple in Jerusalem, without asking permission. When they found him after three days, he talked back to his parents, ever so nicely perhaps “Why were you looking for me? Don’t you understand I have more important things to do?” When he did this his parents did not understand. He was trying to figure out who he was, just like all teenagers. It is normal for young persons as they grow up to begin to resist parental control, to push back as they test their independence. And Jesus was independent. But He must have wondered just how he was supposed to act in certain situations. He must have thought that his parents were keeping him from experiencing life the way He thought he should. He must have felt that his way was the right way, that his parents didn’t really understand or remember just what it meant to be young and looking for meaning in your life. He must have wondered why they were so uptight when there was so much to be done!! Of course, Jesus went through puberty like any human being; he had a physical sexual awakening which required discipline and self-control. We know Jesus liked parties as an adult; he must have liked them as a teenager, although in his culture they would have been much different from what we experience in social life. He was probably bullied because He was somehow different, too serious, other worldly. There are several stories in other traditions about him using his divine power to get even with boys who had given him a hard time. These stories may have had their origins in the hard times he did have.

At the age of thirteen, he would have mastered Hebrew – which was not his native language – from studies in the local synagogue school. We know as an adult Jesus could read and write and not many could. So we know he was smart. As a carpenter, he would have known geometry. At this young age, he would have finished with his formal schooling, having mastered everything taught by local Rabbi and elders. Perhaps He would have dreamed of further study at a school in Jerusalem, Babylon or Alexandria. His family must have struggled with such questions about his future. Ultimately he took up the trade of his father as a carpenter. We know Joseph is not around later during Jesus' later ministry. Tradition tells us Joseph, the patron saint of a happy death, died sometime in Jesus’ youth. So, did Jesus put his life on hold and stay in Nazareth to help support his mother and extended family? It seems likely. So he stayed in Nazareth instead of going to the big cities. Nazareth was a small town of questionable character from the point of view of other Jewish towns, because Nazareth was at a trading crossroads only a few miles from Sephoris, a Graeco-Roman town where all kind of things went on. Nazareth was exposed to its traditions and culture, and therefore thought by the more conservative neighboring villages to be too liberal in its culture, not Jewish enough. Any new ideas that came out of Nazareth would be considered suspicious and subversive. That’s why when Jesus went public people asked: "What good ever came out of Nazareth?" Jesus would not have been expected to amount to much. This must have been very humbling to the Son of God as a young man.

The great monastic writer Thomas Merton wrote: We do not exist for ourselves alone and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and to also love others. This is not merely a helpful suggestion, but is the fundamental law of human existence. Think of it. Jesus, although God, had to learn this from human experience, just as you and I must!

Finally we know Jesus left home in his mid to late 20’s. Apparently he went to follow his cousin, John the Baptist, living in the desert, wearing skins, eating locusts and honey, almost like a hippie in a commune. For how long we don’t know. Undoubtedly His family was not pleased. Although he did not sin, Jesus had a great sense of and understanding of sin, of its effects on humanity in separating us from God; Jesus himself suffered all its effects of rebellious human emotions, ignorance, fatigue, temptation, confusion. All those effects you and I experience. Then Jesus had a conversion experience, a point at which he determined to do something about the sinful human condition; and so he was baptized. And then everything changed. Life changed. Whatever He may have thought before this, when He came up from the water, the sky opened and His Divine Father and the Holy Spirit fully revealed themselves to Jesus’ humanity, that He was God the son of God. And after this great revelation, the young man Jesus, full of power, talent and grace and promise, was strongly tempted for a long time, 40 days and 40 nights, to use all this for his own advantage. Resisting these powerful temptations of power, wealth and the body to his weak human nature, He submitted to the will of God to save us, out of love, pure and selfless love. It is this man Jesus, in answer to whose question Peter made his amazing profession of faith. God has made everything appropriate to its time and there is a time for every purpose under heaven.

It is this same Jesus who has brought us together this morning, young and old; it is this Jesus who invites you to deepen and live your faith in Him. It is this Jesus who resides in us and among us and nourishes us in the Eucharist we celebrate. It is this same Jesus, a fully human man and fully God, who looks you in the eye and asks: Who do you say that I am? What is your answer? And another question logically follows: What are you going to do about it? This is the time for that purpose, to discover that …the work God has done in you, for you to do for all of us. The answer, if you find it, you will find is as amazing as Peter’s answer.

Homily of Thursday, September 9, 2021

“Whoever marries the spirit of the age will soon be left a widow.” This quotation, from William Inge – not the William Inge who’s the author of “Come Back, Little Sheba”, but rather the William Inge who is the famous gloomy dean of St. Paul’s in London, England, is very apropos of today’s saint, St. Peter Claver. St. Peter Claver is famous for being the apostle to the black slaves of Colombia, who would come in vast numbers from the slave coast of Africa to serve in the plantations and other places of British or in this case Spanish America, and they would be treated horribly. He worked among them his entire life. But why is this quotation I gave you earlier apropos of today’s saint? They seem very different. It is always the temptation of Christianity to try to find the thing that is most popular, that is most obvious, most attractive, and use that as a wedge to enter the world, to find a way the gospel can enter the world, through what is already somewhat popular. It’s historically been always the temptation, a temptation we presently suffer. We have a great saint, who worked among those the least taken care of, the most neglected, the most marginal, the most mistreated. That’s very, very popular to do, nowadays. Not in his day. Not in his day. In his day, to work with these people was the least, most repulsive, the most vile thing you could do. People stiffed him. People ignored him. People pushed him to the side because he did all this. He did it not because it was popular or unpopular, but because it was Christian. I think today’s gospel tells us more powerfully what Christianity is. It demands not just A but also… Z. Not just B but also N. Not just O, but X, etc. The full range of the complete Christian. The great danger is to make one aspect, the most popular aspect, the only aspect we talk about or involve ourselves in or even follow. How many friends of mine will say, “Christianity is A, B, and C, what about the rest of it.” I say, “Oh, they don’t like that part of it at all. They would rather not have that part, that part is not attractive to them." Well it’s all one thing. St. Peter Claver did what he did not because that was the popular thing or the unpopular thing, or because they were black or tapioca or whatever. It was because it was the Christian thing to do. Love our neighbor, do good to those who need help…could be popular or unpopular. And that is the example, that is the idea for us. Some parts of Christian doctrine are popular. They will always be popular. It’s nice to be nice to the nice, you know; love, how can you beat love, and all this other cool stuff that is popular everywhere. The rest of the gospel is not popular. In fact, a vast chunk of the gospel is not popular, particularly among Christians. And our goal is to live the whole thing, not just the popular bit, not just the part people like, that’s to do well, that will do well in focus groups, etc. The whole gospel. Our life, our happiness, etc. are the whole gospel; what we offer the people is the whole gospel, as Peter Claver did. He didn’t do this because it was popular; he didn’t do this because this that or whatever, some expert told him this or whatever. He did it because it was the Christian thing to do, and that’s what we should do. And that’s pretty damn demanding. That’s very demanding, as you heard in today’s gospel. It’s very demanding. Let us imitate this great saint in everything he did. The best thing of all is to be the full Christian – to bring people to Christ, who transforms and transfigures even the most horrendous of situations. To give our all. And if we give our all, despite how we may be treated or not treated, we will find our happiness.

Homily of Wednesday, September 8, 2021

This is from an address on this feast day by Pope John Paul II. He said: "On this feast the faithful look to Mary with ardent trust and stirring hopes, conscious how, in God’s plan, that birth gave a concrete beginning to those salvific events in which Mary was to be closely associated with her Son. We should therefore be filled with exultation as we commemorate Our Redeemer’s mother. ‘Indeed,’ St. Peter Damian said, ‘if Solomon, and the whole people of Israel with him, celebrated with such a plentiful and magnificent sacrifice for the dedication of the material temple, what and how much joy will the birth of the Virgin Mary bring to the Christian people? For into her womb, as into a most holy temple, God descended in person to receive human nature and deigned to dwell among men visibly.” To the Child Mary let us offer our humble prayer today for the world and for the Church.

Homily of the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 5, 2021)

“He has done all things well.” I am sure that many of us have seen or heard the AT&T commercial, Wi-Fi commercial, set in a hospital. For those who haven’t, and this is from memory, it occurs in a hospital. There is a man in a bed in a dressing gown, ready for an operation of some sort. His wife is there, his kids are there, the nurse is there filling out some forms, and the wife asks, “Have you worked with Dr. So-and-so before?“ And she says, “Yeah, he’s okay.“ Of course, the patient, the husband, the father, gets all very nervous. “Just okay?“ And we see in the hallway the doctor saying, jocularly, in a very laughing fashion, “Guess who just got reinstated? I did, just get reinstated, kind of, more or less,” etc. etc. He continues on. And the last thing that’s across the whole thing is: “Just okay is not okay.” Which is true. The Lord did all things well, and we should do all things well. 

The tragedy of so much of modern life is that we do all things in kind of a half-assed way, a mediocre way. We do just good enough, a good enough kind of thing, the good enough kind of work, a good enough kind of effort. If we tried our best, if we gave it our all, maybe imperfect to be sure but our all, if we did it for God, it would transform reality. It would transform us. And that’s the goal of the Christian life. It’s not okay to be okay. It’s not okay to be okay, just like the commercial, A very funny commercial, by the way. We are called to greatness, to be excellent, to be superb, a lot better than okay – OK?  We are called to be what we are called to be. That is, saints. Do all things well. If we do all things well, the power of God comes to us, because nature presupposes it needs grace for its completion, its perfection, its fulfillment. If we are going to do all things well, both natural and supernatural, that is both human and divine, in a phenomenal synergy, a phenomenal unity, we will produce extraordinary things, even miracles, as our Lord did, as we see in today’s gospel. So, people can now see who could not see before, and hear who could not hear before; other kinds of things. 

As we know, perhaps, from history, a few of us who have studied history, the Reformation said: “Well, the age of miracles is over; forget about that sort of stuff; that happened a long time ago; the supernatural happened a long time ago. We live in the real world.” Well, the real world is supernatural and natural combined. It is the perfection of nature by God himself, by the power of God, the grace of God. Miracles can still happen if we do all things well. If we seek excellence, we will be happier, we will be a lot more effective, and God knows the world needs it. We need it. We need it. The world needs people to do things well. And if we try, again it’s imperfect, we are imperfect, we are still learning. We make mistakes, we have failures, we have sin. We go the wrong way, etc. But if we try our best, God gives the grace always. He’s always giving the grace to make all things better, and all things well. We are called to a supernatural existence. It’s not enough, this world is not enough, this world is not enough. It needs the supernatural realities that God came with, that Christ came with to make it whole, to make it complete. If this is all we get, we’ve been gypped. I’ve said that many times, I believe that profoundly. If this is all we get we have been gypped. This is not enough, even for the best of us, the luckiest of us. We are called to something better much, much better - eternal life, eternal life: and eternal life begins now. And how can we, pathetic creatures that we are? And most of us are pretty pathetic, at least I am pretty pathetic. We do it by doing all things well, at least trying to do all things well. And something extraordinary will happen to us, something wonderful will happen to us and to everything around us. The world around us, people around us and our families and our children and our spouses, etc. God’s grace will transform everything. This is a zero-sum society. There is no exit. Unless God offers it, and he does, in his grace. 

When I went to Columbia many, many years ago, I took a class at Barnard on Greek tragedy with Helen Bacon, a very extraordinary teacher, very famous teacher in her day, long dead, of course. No matter who you are, the most successful person you meet, it has to end for you, tragically. Life is inherently tragic, because you die. You disappear and all you make disappears with you or soon after you... For the believer, one who lives by doing all things well, life is not a tragedy, but a comedy. It can end well. It will end well. We try our best, we make mistakes, we grow, we learn, we understand better, we move forward, we make all things well, as best we can. And if we do so, we will find what God made for us. Again, this is not it, this ain’t it, for all of you who are thinking this is it: this is not it. We are called something far more far more, better, and it has begun now, if we do all things well.