Homily for Ash Wednesday, Feb 18 - 7p St. Margaret Mary

Readings:   http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/021815.cfm

There was a popular business management book, written by Steven Covey, that was wildly popular not too many years ago.  It’s called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  And I think Covey’s “Habit #2” is especially appropriate as we begin the Holy Season of Lent this day.  Habit #2 goes like this – Begin with the End in Mind.  Begin with the End in Mind.  Meaning, whenever you set out to do anything, tackle a project, take a class, or run a business, it pays to think ahead to the end, before you begin.  Think ahead, before beginning – what is it I want to achieve?

The Company I work for does this – long before 2015 began, there was a feverish push to put together an operating plan for the upcoming year – what do we want to achieve, and what’s our strategy to get there?  A golfer isn’t very successful if she just walks up to a putt and hits it without standing behind the ball, crouching down low to see the slope in the green, and spending a moment to visualize the ball going into the hole.  Even sitting down to write this homily, I had to have a picture in my mind – what do I want the good people to take away from this – what’s my message going to be?

So now here we are at the beginning of Lent, and I think it makes sense for us to pause and think ahead to the end of Lent – what is it that we want our Lent to achieve?  Do we just give up chocolate and other than that, go about our business?  Or do we stop to think – what’s this holy season about, and what is it going to look like at the end?  What’s my faith, what’s my relationship with Jesus Christ, going to look like at the end?

For if our relationship with Christ is no different forty days from now than it is now, well our Lent will have been a failure.  Wasted time.  Wasted sacrifice.  No, we should envision now that come Holy Thursday and Good Friday we will be different people.  Living differently.  With a stronger faith in the Lord, a deeper, more intimate knowledge of the Lord, and most importantly, more in love with the Lord!  And so much more on fire to serve the Lord and our fellow humanity.

So if that’s the end, the goal, to be living differently, in deeper relationship with the Lord, more in love with the Lord and His people, how are we going to get there?

First of all, by putting First Things First, which is Steven Covey’s “third habit.”  The First Thing, of course, isnt’ a thing at all – He’s a person.  Intentionally make the Lord the center of your day, and the beginning, and the end.  We do this by spending time with Him – first of all in prayer.  No love relationship thrives, or even survives, without constant, close, intimate communication, and this is especially true in our relationship with Christ.  To grow in that relationship, we must spend time alone with Him, speaking to Him, and then simply listening to Him with our hearts. 

Spending time with Him could also be daily Mass, daily receiving Our Lord, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, or in quiet Eucharistic adoration, or Stations of the Cross.

Putting first things first in our relationship with Jesus also means seeking healing in that relationship.  Pausing to reflect, during this holy season, on my sinfulness – what I have done, and what I have failed to do.  Where am I failing, what sinful habits do I have?  Or what is it that I know deep down inside is wrong, but I rationalize away?  And what sins do I have that I don’t even realize are sins? 

If we make an honest assessment of the state of our souls, we will realize how much we’ve failed the Lord, fallen short of the goal.  But rather than to despair of our sinfulness, He beckons us to come to Him for forgiveness, healing and strength to go forth.  We Catholics are so blessed to have the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we experience in a tangible sense Our Lord’s unfailing love and mercy, and we receive the grace and strength to go and sin no more.

Sacrifice is an important part of any relationship, and this is especially true of our Faith.  We fast, we give things up, for a purpose – to empty ourselves of attachments to stuff, to things, so that we can be ever more securely attached to the Lord.  And our hunger pangs, or the whiff of a cheeseburger on a Friday, should remind us of the magnificent sacrifice Our Lord made for each of us on that Friday 2000 years ago.

And, we give alms – but we give not only of our money, but also of our time and talent.  If our love relationship with Jesus Christ is growing, how can we not be growing in love for His people?  We will want to pour ourselves out for Him and His people, as He did for us on the Cross.

Sisters and brothers, we begin Lent with the end in mind.  And we look to where we’ll be, where our faith, our relationship with the Lord will be, on Easter Sunday morning, when we celebrate His glorious resurrection.  But it’s important to realize, I think, that the real “end” we need to keep in mind is our own Easter Sunday, when it’s our own glorious resurrection we will celebrate.  You see, we only are given so many seasons of lent in our lives, and if we look around the Church this evening, well it’s certainly possible that someone you’re seeing won’t be with us a year from now. 

So we should take advantage of this holy season while we have time.  “Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

Homily - 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Feb.14/15 at St. Cecilia

Mass readings:   http://usccb.org/bible/readings/021515.cfm

Good evening/morning.

            My wife and I were over at the Cathedral last Saturday for the Scouting awards ceremony.  Boy scouts, girl scouts, cub scouts and brownies – all there to receive Catholic religious awards that they had worked very hard learning the faith to achieve.  We were there because our Godson and his brother were receiving the “Ad Altare Dei” medal – meaning “to the altar of God.”  Quite an award for a young man.

            Bishop Matano was there to distribute the medals, and he gave some brief closing remarks, including the story of his own experience in scouting as a boy back in Providence RI.  I was quite impressed that he was able, without hesitation, 50 years or so after his youth, to recite the Boy Scout law, which goes – “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”  I wanted to go up to him and ask him if he really remembered that or if he stayed up late Friday night studying it, but hey, he’s the bishop, so I kept my mouth shut.  But given how quickly he rattled it off, I think he remembered it well.

            Now the first ten adjectives of that Boy Scout law didn’t surprise me - trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful and thrifty.  Sounds like a good description of a disciple of Jesus, in fact!  But the next word really caught my attention, and it’s a word at the center of today’s Gospel –  “clean.” A Scout is clean.  The leper wanted to be clean.  “Lord, if you wish it, you can make me clean.”  “I do will it, be made clean.”

            I think it caught my attention because, face it, we live in a world that isn’t so “clean,” and in many ways it’s not as clean as it was not too many years ago.  Certainly concerns about it being physically clean - the cleanliness of our air, waters and earth - but I’m talking now about spiritual clean-ness. Not that our world has ever been very clean, to be sure.  But let’s talk about spiritual cleanness, about spiritual leprosy, in our own lives.

            Leprosy, in Jesus’ time, was a catch-all for a host of different skin diseases, most quite contagious, and the lepers were excluded from the community as the first reading from Leviticus describes.  But it was also thought to be a punishment – a punishment for sin!  And so it was seen as much a spiritual condition as a physical condition.

            Now very few people today, at least in the civilized west, suffer from anything like the skin diseases then called leprosy.  But who doesn’t suffer from some sort of spiritual leprosy? Some blotch of sin on the soul? Or some bad habit, disordered passion or desire, or addiction? 

            Maybe it’s anger.  Frustration that things, and people, or even the way our lives are turning out, aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, not the way I’d have them.  Many of us live what can only be described as angry, bitter lives, devoid of peace, of joy.  Is that “clean?”

            Or foul language – Our Lord says that things that defile us come from within, and when a cuss word or swear word comes out of me, especially in traffic, I have to stop and wonder “what is going on inside of me that would come out with that ?”  Is that clean?

            Perhaps it’s a grudge.  A long-simmering rift in a relationship that ought to be close and loving.  A situation barren of lifegiving forgiveness and reconciliation.  And is that clean?

            Maybe it’s the love of money – obsessing about money, grasping and clutching and failing to recognize that all we have, all we’ll ever have, is God’s gift to us, entrusted to our stewardship, entrusted to us to share.

            I mentioned habits and addictions – could be eating, or smoking, gambling, alcohol.  Whatever enslaves us and keeps us from true freedom.

            The habit, or addiction, to pornography is front and center in the news as a certain movie opened this Valentine’s Day weekend. A movie that’s all the buzz of the secular media.  A movie, and a book, that is said to be objectively pornographic.  Does anyone think to ask – is that about romantic love?  Real intimacy?  Does anyone even stop to protest – “hey, that couple isn’t even married!” 

            But as “unclean” as that movie appears to be, at least it’s honest about itself and out in the open.  My sister was visiting a few weeks ago and remarked about how much cleaner New York City is since she lived there, since they’ve cleaned up Times Square of all its porn shops.  I said that’s more the case that it’s readily available these days with a click of the mouse.  I ask again – is that clean?

            Brothers and sisters, we are coming into the Holy season of Lent, and whatever our “un-clean-ness” is, and we all have our own, we have these forty days to stop and examine our consciences, our conduct, the way we think and act, and we have the chance to kneel before Our Blessed Lord and beg Him- “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”  And I assure you, He will be moved with pity, moved with compassion, and He will give us His great grace, and wash us clean. 

            If we bring our sinfulness before Him, He stands ready with open arms of forgiveness.  We Catholics are so blessed to have a special Sacrament of healing and forgiveness, where if we kneel before Him, kneel before His priest who listens “in persona Christi” – “in the person of Christ” – we can hear with our own ears those most beautiful words – “I absolve you of your sins.”  Which is the same thing as “I do will it – be made clean!”  He will forgive us, heal us, strengthen us, make us clean, make us Holy.

            If only we ask, if only we beg – “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”

Homily from Daily Mass - Friday Feb 13 - 6:30a Christ the King

Today's Mass readings:  http://usccb.org/bible/readings/021315.cfm

We continue our readings through the first few chapters of the bible - what a rich passage from Genesis, huh?  Adam and Eve and the original sin, the sin by which sin entered the world, by which death entered the world. 

If we examine ourselves, we see so much in this story that rings true to our own experience –temptation and questioning God’s law, as if it were ridiculous. The tempter lying and pitting the couple against God.  Rationalization – “she saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.”  How could that be wrong?

Then, once the couple realizes they had sinned, they were ashamed and they hid from God. Their sin was a wound in what had been a perfect relationship with God.

I don’t know about you, but as a sinner it sure rings true for me – temptation, rationalization, feeling the shame of having sinned, feeling the distance the sin has caused in my relationship with God, and feeling, frankly, like hiding from Him.

But what really caught my attention as I read and prayed on this passage were these words of the serpent – “your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods and you will know what is good and what is evil.”

Which raises the question – how do we know what is good and what is evil?  Aquinas taught that God places that knowledge deep in our hearts, in what we call natural law – the ability to reason good from evil. 

But our passions, our desires, our self-interest often get in the way and confuse us. We so often reject what we know deep down is the right thing!   And, like Adam and Eve, we sinners have a human tendency to rationalize evil and call it good.  So, by ourselves, we cannot know for sure good from evil!  We need to be taught, we need to learn. 

The Church teaches of the primacy of our conscience, but our consciences need to be well-formed!  We Catholics are so blessed to have the three-legged stool of holy scripture, sacred tradition, and the teaching authority of the Church as ordained by Our Lord to teach us, to guide us, to form our consciences.

But so often we reject what we are taught! While this reading presents the first example of humankind rejecting God’s authority, we live in a time, I suppose it's always been a time, since Adam and Eve, in which rejection of authority has more or less become the norm.

So with the holy season of lent upon us, let us use these days to examine our consciences, our beliefs, and our conduct.  To ask ourselves – what does God and His Church teach that I reject, that I rationalize?  Why do I have so much trouble accepting what God and His Church are teaching me?

And through prayer, fasting, almsgiving, works of charity, and frequent participation in the sacraments of Eucharist and Reconciliation, may we by God’s grace come more and more to do the good and reject evil. 

May God have mercy on us all

Despite the fact that it has an upcoming case on its docket, the Supreme Court refuses to stop a Federal District Court judge's order that Alabama begin recognizing so-called "gay marriages" at once.  The institution of marriage, founded on the God-created complimentarity of the sexes and for the procreation, care and education of children, is under severe attack in our once-great nation. 

Because of the Supreme Court's lawlessness (making laws where there were none), more than 57 million unborn children have been butchered in our nation since 1973, and for every one of those victims killed, there was a mother and father hurt and scarred.

And now the Supreme Court is about to do the exact same thing - lawlessly overturn the laws of nearly every one of our states and by raw, judicial fiat, usurp the constitional powers of the states and Congress and create out of whole cloth a new "right."  And in the process redefine that which was defined by GOD.

Our nation is quickly rejecting the moral foundation upon which she was founded, and will suffer the consequences - she is a tower burning, destined to fall, and the SCOTUS is pouring gasoline on that fire.

May God have mercy on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has single-handedly kept abortion-on-demand the law of the land, and will now author the "opinion" that our constitution guarantees a right to homosexuals to marry each other.  Mr. Kennedy is, apparently, the most powerful person in our nation, reports to no one, and has a job for life.  Well let me tell you this, Mr. Justice - you do report to someone and you will have to account for your life to HIM.

May God have mercy on the United States of America. 

Homily Jan31/Feb 1 2015 - Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Christ the King 4:30p and 10a, St Margaret Mary 8a

Today's readings:   http://usccb.org/bible/readings/020115.cfm

            

            So – let me ask - was anybody listening to that second reading?  Especially the married folks!?  To quote St. Paul - an unmarried man is anxious about things of the Lord, but a married man is anxious about things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided.  And St. Paul goes on to say the same of unmarried and married women.  What are we to make of that, huh?

            Well, first of all, I think it helps to think of this entire reading as an answer to someone’s question, sort of like a biblical Jeopardy game show.  “I’ll take Paul of Tarsus for $600, please, Alex.”  And the question I can imagine someone asking Paul is this - “you speak highly of marriage, so why are you not married, Apostle Paul?”  And so Paul attempts to explain – because I am anxious about things of the Lord alone.  Because I’m not married, I’m able to devote myself to pleasing the Lord and Him alone.

            In so answering , Paul gives a very practical reason for celibacy.  To focus only on the Lord.  It’s not uncommon in Catholic circles to hear someone declare that the answer to the lack of priests is to let priests marry.  In answer to that argument I would tell folks to look at permanent deacons, who are allowed to be married when ordained – the numbers of new deacons are falling far short of the numbers retiring, so we’re rapidly gaining a deacon shortage, too. 

            It reminds me of a conversation I had with my boss Ed Fritz in Jamestown NY 25 years ago.  Ed had been a Lutheran pastor and one day he said to me, “Edward, you Catholics have it right.  There was no way,” he said, “that I could give myself fully to my wife, my kids and my flock.  I was giving short shrift to all of them, so I had to get out.”  And so this Lutheran ex-minister was instead running a furniture factory.  Ed Fritz, I think, was a real-life testimony to the wisdom of Paul’s teaching in this reading.

            But to understand it fully, you have to understand that Paul and the believers of his day expected that Christ was coming back any moment.  That they were living in the end times.  If Christ is coming back any day, Paul seems to be saying between the lines, don’t be concerned about anything of this world, “adhere to the Lord without distraction.”

            Now even though we don’t expect the Lord to return tomorrow, Paul helps you and me to understand the call to a celibate lifestyle in much the same way.  For the priest, nun brother or monk, by their forsaking of marriage, forsaking marital intimacy, by their singular focus on the Lord, by their very lives point to eternity.  Celibacy points past this world to the eternal wedding feast, where Christ and His Church are to be joined in eternal intimacy.  The celibate proclaims by his or her very life St. Paul’s words “to live is Christ!”

            This is a beautiful thing that I don’t think we Catholics appreciate enough about our Church, about the men and women who devote their entire lives in service of the Lord, in service of His Gospel, and love of His people.  And Pope Francis, by his declaring this the year of Consecrated Life, indeed asks us celebrate Consecrated Life, celebrate celibacy.  For to consecrate oneself entirely to the Lord is, in a real sense, heroic!

            You know, we don’t have enough heroes in our world any more.  Actors, actresses, political figures?  Find a hero among them.  Can’t do it.  But in my view, anyway, we have heroes right here among us, whose very lives, whose virtues of poverty, celibacy and obedience stand in stark contrast to this money-crazed, hyper-sexualized, me-centered world in which we live.  Yes, I consider our priests Joe, Paul, Morgan, Warren and Norm to be heroes.  And our sisters – Virginia and Dorothy and the others who are parishioners here.  They remind me, they point me by their lives, to the eternal kingdom.  And - that love of Christ can be powerful enough to oneself totally to the Lord.  That, to me, is heroic.

            To be sure, they are like the rest of us imperfect, even at times sinful men and women, and if we expect perfection from them, we will surely be disappointed.  But we can and should appreciate that they are giving their lives to God and to us, and we should pray constantly for our priests, sisters, and brothers, for them to faithfully and joyfully live their vocations out of pure love of the Lord and His people, and we should daily thank God for them, too.

            Now at the risk of preaching a second homily, what does all this say about us married folks?  Well let me just say this – there is a crisis of vocation to married life every bit or more serious than any crisis of vocation to religious life.  Fewer couples are getting married, and those who do are far too often tempted to let the anxieties of this world, and, frankly, the brokenness and sinfulness of this world, enter our marriages.  Many marriages, which always start out with such hope and optimism, end in pain and divorce.

            So it’s important to remember that we married couples have a real Christian vocation, too.  I don’t think St. Paul meant in any way to downplay the vocation of marriage in his letter to the Corinthians.  No.  We married couples, too, are on a mission.  In a world, a culture in which self-satisfaction, self-realization are held as the be-all and end-all, Christian married couples are also called to be counter-cultural. 

            Sisters and brothers, we married couples are called to be a witness to the world that real, self-sacrificing, forgiving and healing love is possible.  We, too, are called to give ourselves completely to the Lord, by giving of ourselves totally, freely, faithfully and fruitfully to our spouses.  That by giving of ourselves completely in love to each other, we may be an image, an icon if you will, of the love of Jesus Christ Our Lord and His bride, the Church.  “Love one another as I have loved you,” our Lord commands His disciples in John’s Gospel, and we have a vivid image of that love right here, and each of us in the vocation of married life is called to be, by our very lives together, a vivid image of that love as well.

            Brothers and sisters, as we approach the altar of the Lord and receive in communion His very Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, let us pray for our priests, religious, married couples, lay single faithful, widowed and divorced.  That each in our own way, according to our own calling may, with great love and joy and faithfulness, live out our mission as disciples of the Lord, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.