Sacrifice engenders new life

Homily: 13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A

Friends, the readings for Mass for these weeks that we are in have, as their general theme, teachings about the costs and rewards of discipleship.  Today, that teaching centers around a more particular theme, that of how a life of sacrifice engenders new life.  So, let’s take a look at our readings and see what I mean.

In today’s first reading we have this delightful little story, featuring the prophet Elisha.  It’s almost “cutsey”, isn’t it?  Elisha is a roving prophet and this woman of influence has pity on him so she invites him in for dinner and then this becomes a pattern every time Elisha comes to town.  This happened enough that the woman goes so far have a little room built onto her house for him so that he’d have a place to stay and not just a place to get a meal.  Among all of the stories of Elisha where he can seem to come off as harsh, this story is actually pretty sweet.

We see, of course, that there is more to the story: more that strips away the sentimentality of it and gives a depth of emotion to the scene.  The woman is noted as being a “woman of influence”, meaning that she (also meaning, “her husband”) had money.  It would have been easy for her to ignore Elisha as it is likely that he wouldn’t have run around in the “influential” circles in Shunem.  Yet, she didn’t.  Rather she took notice of him and showed him hospitality, simply because she recognized him as “a holy man of God.”  We see, then, that she was not only a “woman of influence”, but also a “woman of faith”.

Still further, we find out that she and her husband were childless; and, it seems, not for lack of trying.  Rather, it seems (because of Elisha’s servant’s response) like she and her husband had been married for some time, but had not yet conceived a child.  Could you imagine what it was like for them then to build a room for someone else on their house?  Most of us can imagine (and some of us have experienced) what it is like to have a deep longing to have children, yet be unable to conceive.  Try imagining, then, deciding to add a room to your house for a passing guest without thinking about the child for whom that room was always meant.  Now imagine just how hard it must have been for her to do that.  Yet she did; and, as it seems from the reading, she did it without so much as a word to Elisha: meaning that she did it simply because, as a holy man of God, he deserved that hospitality, and not because she had hoped to win favor from God.

Yet, she did win favor from God, didn’t she?  When Elisha first stayed in the room that she and her husband had prepared for him, he inquired as to what could be done for them.  When he heard the news that they were childless and that the husband was almost too old to be a father, he spoke the delightful prophecy that God would favor them and bless them with a child: a male heir for their family.  Imagine now the shock this woman must have felt hearing this prophecy.  Imagine the delight when, some weeks later, she discovered that she was indeed pregnant!  Yes, we see that there is a depth of emotion to this story; and in it, a beautiful lesson of how the sacrifices that this woman made—sacrifices made in faith to serve one of God’s servants—truly engendered new life for her and her husband.

In the second reading, Saint Paul gets more theologically specific about how sacrifice engenders new life.  He reminds us that it was Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross that brought us new life and that we must also sacrifice and die to ourselves so that this new life in Christ might take hold of us and engender new life in us and in those around us.  Saint Paul reminds us that this dying and rising to new life takes place spiritually and sacramentally in us through baptism.  This is to be for us a permanent reminder that, one day, it will take place for real: for we all must die someday, but if we believe in Christ and live as his disciples a resurrection to an eternal, glorified life awaits us.

Saint Paul reminds us that we must think ourselves as “dead to sin”.  This is because sin leads to death; and so, the more we deaden ourselves to sin (that is, the more that we make sacrifices of ourselves for others, instead of choosing to serve ourselves alone), the more the new life that we have in Christ can take hold of us: renewing our lives and engendering new life in the world around us.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus clearly makes demands of his disciples: telling them that, if they want to be his disciple, they cannot love father or mother, son or daughter, more than him.  Rather, he says, those who wish to be his disciple must take up the cross (yes, the horrific Roman execution device!) and follow after him.  Then he speaks paradoxically, saying: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and who ever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  Let’s break this down a bit, shall we?

First, is Jesus saying that we cannot love our father/mother or son/daughter?  No, of course not.  For some reason, it’s easy for us to think (when we are thinking abstractly) that it has to be all one way or all the other: that is, that our love must be exclusively for one to the detriment of the other.  But in reality, we realize that, when we deeply love someone, it causes our love to grow, doesn’t it?  We realize that our love is not a “zero sum” game, but rather that, when given to the right person, it actually expands our love and makes it possible to love more!  Jesus knows this; and he knows that when his disciples love him first and above all that their love will expand exponentially, making it possible to love everyone else—including father/mother and son/daughter—with an even greater love than they first thought possible.

Author Fr. Francis Fernandez says it this way: “To love our neighbor in God is not to go about by a long and circuitous route in order to love him.  Love of God is a short-cut to our brothers.  Only in God can we really understand and love all men, immersed even as they are in their errors and we in ours, and in spite of those things that humanly speaking would tend to separate us from them or lead us to pass them by without a glance in their direction.”  This is beautiful!  Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, everyone who can hear me: this means that, if you say “I love you” to someone, but haven’t striven to know and love God with all of your heart first, then you are cheapening your love for them!  Because you cannot really love them fully until you love them in and because of your love for God.  This is what Jesus means when he says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

This paramount love for Jesus is what unravels the paradox.  For when I love Jesus enough to take up the horrific Roman execution device and follow him—meaning, when I decide to lose my life (that is, sacrifice my life) for him—then I will find new life and a true, pure love with which I can love others and engender new life in them, as well.

Let me back up again, a moment, because perhaps we have gone too “abstract” again in our thinking.  This “true, pure” love of which I spoke will not be passionate (though it may have passionate moments).  Rather, this true, pure love will look more like a radical hospitality: an openness to our core to recognize and receive each person we encounter with the same generosity of spirit with which Jesus recognizes and receives each of us.  This manifests itself in the little ways that Jesus enumerates: “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet (like in the first reading)… whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man... whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple...”  These are not moments of passionate love, but rather small acts of radical hospitality.  Nonetheless, Jesus tells us that these small acts of radical hospitality—these small acts of sacrifice—will earn for those who offer them a generous reward.

Friends, full-disclosure, I’m about to turn this homily into a pitch for our Offertory Giving Renewal program, but I hope that you receive it with the sincerity that I prepared it.  It is not a slight of hand for me to say that one of the “small acts” that demonstrates our love for Christ above all is to commit ourselves to supporting our parish financially.  Rather, it is true.  So true, in fact, that it is one of the five “precepts of the Church”: that is, one of the five, fundamental ways that a Catholic Christian demonstrates that he/she is truly a follower of Christ (the other four being, “attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, confess your sins at least once a year, receive Holy Communion once a year during Easter, and observe the days of fasting and abstinence as prescribed by the Church”).  These are not the only ways, of course, but they are the fundamental ways: demonstrable behaviors that show that you are committed to Christ and his Church.  Returning these cards which you received in the mail this past week, indicating your sacrificial financial commitment to this parish and thus to the Christ’s Church, is an important spiritual act: one important act among many that demonstrates that you have chosen to take up your cross and follow after Jesus.

Many of you have returned these already, and I am grateful.  Most of you who haven’t will return them in the coming weeks and I am grateful, in advance, for your responses.  I know that this is a difficult time for all of us and I trust that each of you will respond in the way that you are able.  I simply ask that you will, like the Shunemite woman who looked to her love of God when she decided to provide for the prophet Elisha, look to your love of God when you discern the commitment that you are able to make to Saint Mary’s over the next year.  Your sacrifices will surely engender new life in this parish and will help to grow and expand love in your own hearts: love that manifests itself in a radical hospitality that this world so desperately needs.  The radical love engendered in the sacrifice of Jesus that we re-present to the Father here, on this altar.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 27^th & 28^th, 2020

The Body is our food for the journey

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Homily: The Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus – Cycle A

I can’t remember if I first heard this on a visit to Haiti or if it was on a visit I made to rural Guatemala, but it is a story that is nonetheless emblazoned in my mind.  It’s the story of what poor children do in that country when they have to go days without substantial food.  As I was told, children who become desperately hungry will begin to make mud cakes—literally putting water on dirt and forming it into a cake—and that they eat them.  Even though there is no great nourishment for them in them, they do it just so that they can put something in their stomachs to ease the hunger pangs.  Fortunately, I never saw a child doing that.  Fortunately, because I think that I would be traumatized by it.  Nonetheless, even the thought that children might do that saddens my heart.

I bring this up today because it is a truth about our human nature—that is, about our human instinct to survive: that threats to our lives will make us do things that we otherwise would never consider doing.  Food is so essential that our bodies are literally hard-wired to generate pain when we go long periods of time without food so that we never neglect our bodies’ need for food.  This pain, as we see in the story about impoverished children, can make us look even to the dirt of the ground as a way to alleviate it.

Today, on this great feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus—Corpus Christi—we heard from John’s gospel, chapter 6: more specifically, the end of chapter 6, which is the climax of this “Bread of Life” discourse.  In it we hear Jesus declare that his flesh is “living bread” and that his blood is “true drink” and that those who eat and drink of it will live for eternity.  This is an absolutely ludicrous statement and the “Jews” in the passage tell us why: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”, they ask.  Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, but we know the answer, don’t we?  At the Last Supper, Jesus takes bread and says, “This is my body... take and eat” and he takes a cup of wine and says, “This is my blood... take and drink”.  Connecting these two passages, Catholic Christians have always concluded that the bread and wine that we offer on the altar is transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Jesus so that we might eat and drink them.  They are not completely “transformed”: meaning that their “forms”—that is, the appearance of bread and wine—don't change.  Rather, they are transubstantiated: meaning that their substance—that is, what they are in their essence—is changed.  No longer bread and wine, in their essence, they become the Body and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine.

Perhaps we’ve never asked this question, but it may be worthwhile to ask: Why did Jesus do this?  Why did he say that one must “eat his flesh and drink his blood” in order to have eternal life?  Well, because he knew our human condition.  He knew that hunger is a fundamental human experience and that, if he didn’t connect our fundamental desire to go on living indefinitely with the thing that is most closely connected with ongoing living—that is, with hunger and satisfying that hunger—we would look towards worldly ways alone of satisfying our hunger and would miss the one thing that could sustain us into the eternal life: life for which we instinctually know that we are made.  And because we are human and live in time—meaning that we’ll continually return to the experience of hunger throughout our time living in time—Jesus made this eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood something that we could do over and over again.

This is what we celebrate today: but only secondarily.  The first thing that we celebrate today is the fact that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, united himself to a human nature (body and spirit).  Even if Jesus hadn’t given us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, it would still be necessary to honor the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus: simply because God lowered himself to be confined to our human nature and walk among us.  Secondarily, but no less importantly, we celebrate that Jesus has given us his human/divine flesh to eat and his human/divine blood to drink so that we might overcome the limitations of this world (in which all persons inevitably die) and live, like he lives, forever.  This great sacrifice for us (made effective by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus) is so great that we continually offer it back to the Father as an act of Thanksgiving for so great a gift.

We were in a bad spot, though, these past few months.  This awesome food (and I mean that literally: this food that is awe-inspiring)… this awesome food was kept from us.  Better, we were kept from it.  The coronavirus pandemic meant that nearly all of us were deprived of this living bread and true drink for over two months.  This, as most of you noted, I’m sure, was a very serious thing.  If the Body and Blood of Jesus is our “food for the journey” towards eternal life, then to be deprived of it for months at a time puts us at great risk of starvation.  A number of you reached out to me and said over and over again that you are literally starving—that is, feeling hunger pangs—to return to the Eucharist.  We encouraged you over and over again to make “spiritual communions”: to invite Jesus into your heart spiritually until you could receive him in the fullest way that you can receive him in this world—that is, under the form of bread and wine—again.  “It’s not the same”, many of you said.  And you were right.  If it was “the same”, then what Jesus said in John chapter 6 was ludicrous and what he did at the Last Supper was pointless.  Our bodily reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus is essential.

So why did God allow us to experience this great hunger?  I mean, many of us could have died of starvation, right?  Yes, that’s true!  Or worse yet, many of us could have turned to the mud and made cakes to eat just to try and satisfy those pangs.  Many of us did just that: we turned away from God and towards the lower things of this world to try and placate our hunger, since God didn’t seem to want to give his “true food” back to us.  Worse, I say, because it’s possible to stay alive on mud cakes and because of that we begin to believe that we no longer need the “true food” of heaven.  So, then, given all of these risks, why did God allow us to experience this great hunger?  The first reading tells us.

In it, Moses is giving his “farewell” speech to the Israelites on the cusp of entering the Promised Land.  Moses reminds them that “[God] therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”  Just before this, Moses said that God afflicted them for 40 years in the desert “so as to test them... and to find out whether or not it was their intention to keep his commandments”.  The affliction was a test and a teaching: a test to see if they’d remain faithful to him; and a teaching to show them that he will sustain them by his word.

For these months of separation from our bodily reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus, we have been tested to see if we would remain faithful to him and, hopefully, we have learned that God’s Word is always with us to sustain us, even when the “bread from heaven” becomes unavailable to us.  Too often, I think, we overlook the Liturgy of the Word at Mass and see the Eucharist only as receiving Holy Communion.  That’s incredibly important, for sure; but it ought never be separated from the whole: that is the proclamation of the Word of God that also sustains us on our journey.  This is part of the reason why Bishop resisted distributing Communion outside of Mass: so as not to separate the Word, which sustains us, from the Body, which also sustains us.

Friends, it is truly good that we are back here together to celebrate this great feast that speaks to the lengths that God took to bring us, his greatest creation, back into communion with himself: going so far as to unite his divine nature with our human nature.  May the joy that we feel in this celebration—the joy of a restoration of our unity with him, spirit and body—sustain us and inspire us to lead others to this same fullness of unity; so that, as Jesus prayed at the Last Supper, we all may be one in the one body of Christ.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 13^th & 14^th, 2020

Who God is, beyond our perceptions

Homily: Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – Cycle A

          As a former engineer, my brain is wired for science.  What I mean by this is that it is wired in such a way that, when I see something that I don’t understand, I automatically begin to wonder about it and try to figure it out.  Quite frankly, most of us are wired for science in some way: usually in a very practical way.  Here’s what I mean.

          Say that you enter a room with which you are unfamiliar.  It’s a little bit warm in the room and you observe that there is a ceiling fan.  You know a thing or two about ceiling fans, but you’ve never turned on this particular fan, so you set yourself to figuring out how to turn it on.  You think, “Maybe the wall switch will turn it on”, and so you flip the wall switches.  If that doesn’t work you think, “Maybe I need to pull the chain on the fan to turn it on”, and so you reach up and pull the chain.  If that doesn’t work you think, “Maybe there’s a combination of the wall switches and the chain that need to be aligned to turn it on”, and so you begin to turn switches on and off, pulling the chain at each setting.  If that still doesn’t work, we think… what?  That it’s broken… of course!  You’ve observed, hypothesized, tested each hypothesis and observed some more, and when you’ve run out of hypotheses you draw a conclusion.  That, my friends, is science; and we do it almost every day.

          As much as I love science, because I love figuring out how to make things work, I do have one big problem with it.  You see, the problem with science is that it equates perception with reality.  In other words, science makes conclusions about reality based solely on what it can perceive.  In my example above, we concluded that the fan was broken because no switches or combination of switches would start it spinning.  We made a conclusion about reality based solely on what we observed.  The reality, however, could be that the fan functions perfectly well, but that the switch may be broken or maybe there wasn’t any electricity wasn’t flowing to the system.  In other words, there could be factors beyond our perception that could contribute to the reality.  Science does not always admit these factors and so sometimes draws incorrect conclusions about reality.

          For people of faith there is no other proof of the limitations of science than when we think about God.  Imagine for a moment that you didn’t know much about God (and let’s assume that you at least give credence to the fact that there is a God: that is, an all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe).  What would you do to figure out more about him?  Well, you’d observe, I suppose: you’d listen to what people said or wrote about him.  Then you might hypothesize about what he’d be like, followed by observing to see if you’re hypothesis was correct.

          Doing that you’d find out that people say that God is loving, kind, and merciful; that he has the power to control everything that happens in the universe; that nothing happens without his knowing about it and either making it happen or, at least, permitting it to happen.  Then you’d say, “Well, if that’s the case, then things should be pretty good around me.  People ought to be living in harmony with one another and there should be peace, because a God of love and kindness, who can control what happens in the world, would surely desire there to be love and kindness throughout the world.”  Having formed your hypothesis, you then observe the world and what would you see?  Love and kindness in many places, for sure; but also hatred, violence, and discord in as many, if not more places.  Having observed this, your conclusion might be: “God is not who people say he is, because what I perceive does not conform to that proposed reality.”

This is the error that many people in our society make today: they perceive a world broken and disharmonious and they conclude that, if God is who people say that he is, then he wouldn’t allow the world to be like this.  But since the world is this way, then God must not be who people say that he is.  Rather, he must be (at best) a mythical creature meant to make people feel better about living in this broken world or a weak God: a deity who can (perhaps) create, but cannot control the universe.  In either case, the conclusion leaves people with no reason to believe in him.

          The problem with this, of course, is that there are factors outside of one’s perception that contribute to the reality.  In other words, the reality of God is greater than our perception.  Thinking purely theoretically, we can somewhat easily conclude that there must be a God: an all-powerful being—the uncreated creator—who created all things.  Just imagine trying to figure out how any one of us got here (that is, to exist).  You’d begin walking down the sequence of causes and would quickly realize that, ultimately, “nothing” never begets “something”, but that in order for there to be “something”, there had to be something first—a something that didn’t rely on another something to bring it into existence.  This “something”—this creator which itself is uncreated—is what (Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us) we call “God”.  See, no bible quotes needed, just theoretical speculation and we can conclude that something akin to who we call “God” must exist in order for anything in the universe to exist.

In order to know that God is benevolent, however—that is, from a perfectly theoretical standpoint—we would have to do a lot more work.  To see that all creation works towards the propagation of life, instead of against it, and that this propagation is a good thing, could lead us to conclude that God is good: or, at least, has the good of creation in mind.  But to know God as we know him, as loving, kind, and merciful, or, as we celebrate him today, as a communion of persons, is something that we can know only if he, himself, has revealed it to us.

          Thankfully, this is something that he has revealed to us; and it is not something that he has revealed solely by some sort of divine declaration (even though he has done that).  Rather, he has revealed this to us also by his actions.  In the book of Exodus, we read that God declared himself before Moses to be “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity” and God proved this as time and again he spared the Israelite people from destruction, even though they had repeatedly offended him.  So gracious and merciful is he—and so deeply in love of his creation—that, as we read in the Gospel, God eventually “gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  In doing so, he not only proved, once again, that what he said about himself is true, but he also revealed an incredible truth: that he is a communion of persons within himself.  And how do we know that Jesus truly is the Son of God and, thus, God himself?  Not just because he said so, but also because of the works that he did: healing the sick, driving out demons, raising the dead, and most prominently, of course, raising himself from the dead.

          Thus, the celebration that we come to today: the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.  Today we are able to know and, thus, celebrate who God is in himself: not because we somehow perceive this with our senses; but rather because of the gift of Faith that has been placed in our hearts and because of the works that he has worked in the past (and continues to work today) that go beyond our ability to test scientifically.  In celebrating God as Trinity, we not only celebrate who he is, but also what that means for us.  We know that God is Love and so is a community of persons.  Because of this we know that, when God creates, he creates in love.  We know that, having created human beings to be persons, like himself, he created us solely so that we might share in his divine life, which is love.  Finally, we know that, when we turned away from him in sin, he did not shun us, but rather came close to us, becoming one of us in his Son who would make atonement for our sins and, thus, make it possible for us to share in the divine life once again: that is, to find the peace and harmony with him and one another for which our hearts constantly long.

          And so, my brothers and sisters, as we celebrate today who God is in himself, let us rejoice also in who we are in him: beloved sons and daughters destined to spend eternity with him.  This joy cannot be complete, though, if we try to hoard it for ourselves and neglect our neighbor; and in times like these when it is clear that disharmony and hatred is causing so many of our neighbors to suffer, we cannot stand idlily by.  Therefore, let us also commit ourselves to follow the admonition of Saint Paul to the Corinthians and “mend our ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, and live in peace” so that “the God of love and peace will be with us” and all those scientific skeptics might begin to see the truth that we proclaim: that the reality of God does match up to who he has revealed himself to be, that he cares about each and every one of us, and that he desires that each and every one of us dwell with him in eternal light, happiness, and peace.

          My brothers and sisters, out community desperately needs this witness!  Let us seek to be the image of God in which we were created and work to build in our place a communion of persons whose love brings harmony and peace to the world.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 7^th, 2020

The consequences of saying, "Jesus is Lord".

Homily: Pentecost Sunday – Cycle A

Friends, it is truly good to be with you here today as we celebrate this great feast of Pentecost.  After so much time apart, I am so grateful that you can once again join me in-person to worship God and offer him thanks in the Mass.

Many have called this feast of Pentecost the “Birthday of the Church”.  This is a bit of a contradiction, however, as many others have said that when the soldier pierced our Lord’s side on the cross, and blood and water flowed out from his side, that this was the birth of the Church.  Perhaps, then, it is better to say that Pentecost is more of the “rite of passage” day, when the “child” is acknowledged to have matured and thus is ready to accept the responsibility of being among the “adults”.  I like this because this means that Pentecost isn’t just an amazing “sign” (the rush of wind, the tongues of fire, and the speaking in different languages), but rather a commissioning: a “sending forth from the nest” for the Church to go out and to do something of its own in the world.

This, of course, is what we celebrate today: that the Good News that human kind has been redeemed from suffering and death through Jesus Christ has been sent out into the world so that all men and women might be saved.  We celebrate because we are beneficiaries of this good news, and because we, too, have been given the gift of being able to share this good news with others.

Lest we get too caught up in ourselves, however, we also remember that what we celebrate today is the revelation of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God the Father and God the Son—who dwells among us as God’s abiding presence with us.  Jesus is Emmanuel—God with us—not just in his human nature (which now no longer dwells with us, but dwells in glorified form for eternity in heaven and in sacramental form in the Eucharist), but Jesus is Emmanuel now in the Person of the Holy Spirit.  It is this Person whom we worship today and whom we invoke to bring forth a new springtime of evangelization—that is, of proclaiming this Good News—to the world.

This proclamation is not something remote from us—as if it is something the Holy Spirit does in disembodied form—but rather it is something very close to us.  In fact, it is a task that has been given to each of us as a consequence of our baptism and confirmation.  As Saint Paul indicated in the second reading today, any of us who proclaim that “Jesus is Lord”, do so only by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.  This proclamation is a gift—the gift that we all need—but it carries with it a responsibility: a responsibility about which each of us should examine ourselves to see if we are fulfilling.

I am a fan of Dr. Jordan Peterson, who is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.  Dr. Peterson has gained a lot of notoriety over the past few years as someone who contradicts a lot of the “mainstream” cultural ideas about how to be happy and fulfilled in your life.  He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, but also an absolute realist and a scientist, and someone who has a great desire to see people set free from suffering, much of which has its roots in a person’s psychology.

Dr. Peterson has a great respect for the Bible and plumbs the depths of the text to extract from it profound truths about human psychology.  Because of this, many people have concluded that he must believe in God and, perhaps, even be a Christian.  He’s been asked many times whether or not he believes in God and he always hedges: meaning that he won’t say that he does, but he also won’t say that he doesn’t.  On a few more recent occasions, he has ventured to say why and I’ll try to share briefly how I understand his response.

As a clinical psychologist, he knows how crucial it is to psychological health that what we ascent to as true, psychologically, and what we then do in practice must align.  In other words, because of what he knows about how the human mind works, he knows that hypocrisy is psychological disaster for people.  Thus, for him, to say “I believe this to be true” means that he better be conforming his life absolutely to whatever consequences that declaration demands.  For him, the demands associated with saying “I believe in God” are nearly impossible for most people to fulfill (himself included); and so, instead of answering the question “Do you believe in God?”, he’d rather retort, “How dare you say ‘I believe in God’ if your life isn’t absolutely conformed to the demands that such a statement makes on you?”  Therefore, in response to the question, “Do you believe in God?”, he will often say, “I strive to live as if I believe.”  An honest answer, even if to some it could seem like a “cop out”.

I myself have been challenged by his response and have thought about it a lot.  I’ve often thought that I'd like to hear his thoughts about the statement in the Gospels made by the man whose son was possessed by a demon and who came to Jesus asking him to heal his son.  When Jesus asked the man “Do you believe?” the man said, "Yes, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!"  Dr. Peterson asks, "How dare I say I believe if I’m not actually putting all of myself into living in accord with that believe?"  That’s a darn good question.  His question begs the question, though: "Can I be striving imperfectly to do that and still say that I believe?"  I think so; and I think that this phrase helps me to say that: "Yes, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!"

The problem for us, I think, is that almost every one of us skips over the challenge of the first question (“How dare I say...”) and jumps right to the second and its response (“It’s okay to say ‘I believe’ without living it perfectly”).  Thus, we can excuse our lack of commitment—that is, our lack of willing absolutely everything in our lives to be in conformance with the demands of that statement—solely because we've made an intellectual ascent: "I believe".  Belief, Dr. Peterson is saying, and to say "I believe", is to "wrestle with God", because to will that absolutely everything in our lives would be in conformance with the demands of discipleship—that is, the demands of what it means to say, “I believe”—is a life-long wrestling match.

Francis Chan is an evangelical preacher and he recorded a little video in which he was asked what it meant to surrender completely to God.  In it he brought up that there had been discussion in recent years among evangelicals about whether one could separate accepting Jesus as “Savior” from accepting him as “Lord”.  He declared that that was impossible: that we cannot receive the salvation that Jesus won for us without placing ourselves under his Lordship.  I think, however, that this is exactly what Dr. Peterson is getting at.  I think that, in practice, many of us who say “I believe” live this way: “Thank you, Jesus, for saving me. I look forward to ‘cashing that in’ at the end of my life. I’ll see you then.”  Nevertheless, there has to be some room for our imperfection, right?

Therefore, on this great feast of Pentecost, I might have this to say to Dr. Peterson: "How dare we say 'I believe'? Because the Holy Spirit urges us to do so. How dare we then neglect the consequences—the demands—of that statement? This might be the better question.”  Because, my friends, to neglect the responsibility that comes with that statement, and then still to say "I believe", makes that statement completely devoid of meaning.  Do you want to know why so many people are turning away from religion all together?  Because they look at people who say “I believe” and they see (at least outwardly) that it doesn’t seem to mean anything about how they live, and so they think, “Why bother?”  And so, NO, perhaps we shouldn't dare say "I believe" until we are (to use Jordan Peterson's style of speaking) DARN SURE that we are ready to accept all of the responsibility that comes with saying it.  Better, perhaps, to say, instead, “I believe, but I ask the Lord daily to help my unbelief” (that is, to help me daily to contend with and overcome the ways that I fail to live in accord with that belief).  My friends, the ones who have done this best, we call "saints".  The ones who have refused to do this are in hell.

Today, as we worship the Holy Spirit, whose revelation we celebrate, and as we commemorate (and celebrate) the manifestation of the Church, let’s challenge ourselves to face the full reality of what it means to say “Jesus is Lord” (that is, “I believe”); and thus turn to that same Holy Spirit, asking him to fill us with the fire of his seven-fold gift so that we might boldly manifest the Church once again, proclaiming “the mighty works of God”, and bringing forth a new Pentecost: a fruitful harvest of believers to give glory to God for all ages to come.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – May 31^st, 2020

Bodily Communion with God

The Ascension of Our Lord: Cycle A

          Over the years, the feast of the Ascension has always been a “tough nut to crack” for me.  Not necessarily in the facts, of course.  Those are pretty straight forward.  Jesus finished instructing his disciples after his resurrection and then was taken up, body and spirit, into heaven where he is now seated at the right hand of God the Father.  The challenge for me, rather, is in what the Ascension means for us.  Compared to some of the other great mysteries of our salvation—the Incarnation, the teachings and miracles of Jesus, the Passion, and the Resurrection, to name a few—the Ascension leaves me with something somewhat difficult to get in touch with.

          Take the incarnation for instance.  The Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, for us and for our salvation, humbled himself to become one of us, in our human nature.  This is something I can get in touch with.  Every time I celebrate the beauty of a newborn life, every time I am delighted by the coo of a little baby or a toddler’s joyful outburst of laughter, I get in touch with the awesome mystery of God’s humility: that the all-powerful God of the universe would lower himself to become vulnerable like us and place himself at the mercy of his creatures.  Yet, he never lost anything of his power.  In spite of his apparent weakness, coming among us in a weak human nature, he remained the all-powerful God.  Thus, for us, this is a reminder that we need not be afraid of our weakness if the power of God dwells in us.

          Or how about the mystery of Christ’s ministry on earth?  That one’s easy to get in touch with.  Jesus Christ, the Son of God, shows us what it means to be human, to be created in the image of God as male and female, to be created to be in communion with each other and with God.  The narratives in the Gospel give us ample material to help us see how Christ demonstrated for us how we are to live as brothers and sisters.  There is a lifetime of fruitful meditation that can be made on this mystery alone as we strive to conform our lives after the pattern of Jesus’ life.

          Then, there’s Christ’s Passion.  No doubt that since the release of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ few of us would have difficulty getting in touch this great mystery.  I personally have never escaped a viewing of this film without feeling the tinge of guilt knowing that our Lord was willing to suffer so greatly and to die so that I, even in my sinfulness, might be made clean.  For us this is a reminder that we can never take our sins for granted.  Christ suffered for each one of them and so, out of love for him, we must strive daily to eliminate even the smallest sins from our lives.

          And if you’ve ever heard the sound of a clump of dirt hitting the top of a casket of a loved one, then you, too, will be in touch with what Mary and the others felt when the stone closed over Jesus’ grave on Good Friday.  Their experience of hopelessness at this apparent loss is a witness to each of us in the losses that we experience in our lives.

          Always linked to Christ’s Passion, of course, is the mystery of the Resurrection, where the sorrow of death was converted into the joy of new life, literally overnight.  We have touched the joy of the resurrection whenever we’ve tasted the bitterness of despair but then were surprised by a miracle that turned that situation around.  Imagine someone you know who needs an organ transplant.  No doubt, this friend or relative’s hopes of finding a donor are daily tempered by doctors and others who remind him/her about how difficult it is to find a donor.  Now imagine him/her getting the news that a donor had been found.  I imagine that must feel like God is giving him/her a new life: as if he/she had literally been raised from the dead.  The resurrection, for us, is the enduring hope that suffering and weakness do not have the final word in this world, but rather that God, the all-powerful, can and will destroy these limitations for those who put their trust in him.

          Yes, these are all great mysteries of the faith in which I can immerse myself, plumbing the depths of them and letting them soak into my bones.

          Today, however, the Church presents us with the feast of the Ascension, when Jesus, in his glorified human body, is taken up into heaven.  Now, let’s think about that for a second.  What we are saying—which is what Scripture reveals to us—is that Jesus, in bodily form, exists somewhere… out there… To me, that has always been hard to wrap my mind around.

          Over the years, however, I’ve started to realize that the Ascension in fact reveals something remarkable.  In order to see it, though, we have to look beyond the Ascension itself.  We have to look at how it fits into the bigger picture.  Here’s what I mean: In two weeks, we will celebrate the feast of the Holy Trinity; and I think that if we start there, we can see just how awesome the mystery of the Ascension is for us.

          The great mystery of the Holy Trinity is that God is perfect love within himself.  He does not need to go outside of himself for anything.  He is complete: the Lover, the Loved, and the Love they share: three persons perfectly united in one divine nature.  Because God is perfect love in himself, he needs nothing outside of himself: not us, not the universe, nothing.  Yet, out of his goodness and his desire that others should share in this perfect communion of love, he created the universe and gave us the privileged place in it for the sole purpose of freely choosing to enter into his perfect communion of love.

          In our freedom we chose against him and separated ourselves from him forever.  He never forgot us, though, and in the fullness of time, he sent his Son to become one of us in order to make possible again our communion with God.  As Saint Athanasius said: “God became man so that man could be made God.”  After his death and burial, Jesus rose in a glorified human body.  His resurrection was not just spiritual, but corporal, that is, bodily.  And when he returned to the Father in heaven, he did so in that same glorified human body.  Do you realize what that means?  It means that Jesus now dwells forever in the pure act of love that is the Holy Trinity in a glorified human body.  Said another way: The Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, has always and forever dwelt in the Trinity in spiritual form (even while he was incarnate on earth), but now, since the Ascension, he dwells also—somehow, mysteriously—in bodily form: and not just any body, but a glorified human body.

          My brothers and sisters, this is a reason for great rejoicing!  As humans here on earth, we know how difficult it is to experience true communion with another person.  This is because all of our expressions of unity must be mediated through our bodies.  A handshake, a hug, a kiss, giving gifts and saying things like, “I love you.”  These are all ways that our communion with others is expressed, but also limited because we have bodies.  And we know this, even more acutely now, since this pandemic has further limited our already limited means for experiencing communion with others.  Christ’s ascension, however, promises us that our bodies, once glorified, will no longer be a barrier to communion, but rather a conduit: a means for entering into perfect communion with God.  What it’s like to be a spirit only?  I can’t imagine it.  Knowing that my hoped-for communion with God will somehow be bodily?  Now that’s something that I can get in touch with. /// Yet the Ascension is even more than that.

          You see, the Ascension is not just about Jesus returning to heaven to mount his throne where he lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever—which is an awesome mystery in itself.  But it is also about how much more God desires to give us.  If Jesus remained with us here on earth, let’s be honest, it would be pretty amazing.  We know how wonderful it is to have Christ-like people in our lives and in our world.  Just look at how large of an impact that someone like Pope Saint John Paul II had on our lives: someone who, for many, so embodied Christ’s way of life that it was like Christ was still walking with us.  I could only imagine, therefore, how much more wonderful it would be to have Christ himself, in his glorified human body, here with us today.  Yet that would only be a fraction of what God truly longs to give us.  Remember those words of Saint Athanasius: “God became man so that man could be made God.”  Although it was not necessary for him to do so, Christ returned to the Father in bodily form so that we—who can only come to him in bodily form—could also enter into his perfect communion of love. ///

          My brothers and sisters, the lesson of the Ascension for us is a lesson in letting go.  On the day of his resurrection, Jesus told Mary Magdalene, “Stop holding onto me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”  Forty days later, his disciples would need to let go of his bodily presence among them so that they could be open to being filled with “the promise of the Father,” the sending of the Holy Spirit that was spoken of in the first reading.  This Spirit would guide and strengthen them to work for the coming of God’s kingdom, knowing that bodily fulfillment in this life is not the end for which they were striving, but that, following the path of the Savior, its fulfillment would be in the glorified life still to come.

          This is the same Spirit promised to us.  Thus, we, too, must heed the words of Christ and let go of our desire for fulfillment in this life.  In doing so, we will make ourselves able to endure bodily limitations and privations in this life precisely because they point to the glorified bodily life that awaits us who remain faithful to Christ: the one who made this glorified bodily life possible.

          Friends, as we enter this last week of the Easter Season in which we are returning—slowly and cautiously—to our communal life, we find ourselves in a “mini-Advent” of sorts.  Before he ascended into heaven, Christ instructed the Apostles to wait for the advent—that is, the coming—of the Holy Spirit, who would equip them for their mission to proclaim the Good News of salvation throughout the world.  Perhaps we can spend some time this week “watching and waiting,” examining our lives and identifying some things of which we still need to let go so that we can make space for the Gift of the Holy Spirit.  In doing so, we will not only make ourselves ready to fulfill Christ’s commission to “go and make disciples of all nations”—a commission that the world desperately needs us to fulfill—but we will also prepare ourselves for that great day when we will be welcomed, body and spirit, into the communion of love that is God: the glory of eternal life in heaven.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – May 24^th, 2020

What's really essential

Homily: 6^th Sunday in Easter – Cycle A

Friends, at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  If we look back to earlier in this discourse (which, we recall is happening at the end of the Last Supper), we remember that Jesus said to them, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”  Putting the two together, we can perhaps, then, hear Jesus say to his disciples “If you love me, you will love one another as I have loved you.”  And how did Jesus love his disciples (all mankind, really)?  He sacrificed his own life so that others may live.  Thus, the instruction, right at the beginning of this Gospel passage, is full of weight: “If you love me, you will make a sacrifice of your own life so that others may live.”

Now, in communities throughout our country, have we not seen this commandment lived out over these weeks of lockdown?  Of course we have!  From those charging in on the front lines to confront this virus directly, to those working extra hours to make sure there’s milk on the shelves of the grocery; from those who have shifted classrooms to living rooms, to those who keep the bus running on time; from those who have become the sole companions and protectors of the most vulnerable among us, to those manning cameras to keep us connected to our faith... In big and small ways, we have all been called to make sacrifices in our own lives so that others may live.  Assuredly, we’ve not been perfect in making these sacrifices, and not all of our sacrifices have been of equal weight, but we have all been called to make a sacrifice of our lives so that others may live and we have decided to try to do so.

What also has come into sharp relief from this “forced” living of Jesus’ command is a clearer sense of what is “essential”, right?  The lockdown left only those public services and businesses open that were deemed “essential”.  In the first weeks of the lockdown, perhaps we were clamoring that hair salons and barber shops were “essential”.  Even though our opinion of that may not have changed, my guess is that now we’re more inclined to clamor about how things like relationships, communion with other persons, physical presence, and the sense that you can become greater than you are today are actually the true essentials.  The loss of much of the activities of our normal lives has led to a loss of these “experiences” that we value on a deeper level and we have come to realize that while the activities may be deemed “non-essential", the human experiences that they provide certainly aren’t.

That said, our readings today take us even a step deeper into this understanding of what is “essential”.  As I’ve already described from our Gospel reading today, we heard Jesus’ words to his disciples at the Last Supper: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments...”  He goes on to say that, when they keep his commandments, he will send them an Advocate “to be with them always … the Spirit of truth...”  We remember that, last week, we read Jesus’ words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  If Jesus is the truth, and if he has promised to send the Spirit of truth to be with them always, then that Spirit is his Spirit; and since he is in the Father and the Father is in him (as he has said multiple times in this discourse), then this Spirit must also be the Spirit of the Father.  Not only is this a slightly veiled revelation of the Trinity, but it is also a promise: that the world will no longer see him (because it only sees fleshy things), but they will see him because his Spirit will be in them, helping them to recognize him in all things.

What, therefore, is “essential” in this?  The indwelling of the Spirit in us.  How can we continue to live in a world with so much suffering, when life, once predictable, no longer seems predictable, but rather out to get us?  By maintaining contact with the Spirit dwelling within us.  And why?  So that we can see Jesus in all things.  And when we see Jesus in all things, we see hope: just like when we look at the crucifix we see the absolute darkest part of humanity, but we see Jesus there—he who died on the cross but now lives—and so we see the hope that good can come from that suffering—that good can conquer evil—and thus that we, if we stay faithful to him, can enjoy life without suffering one day.

Let’s look also to the second reading and the words of Saint Peter in his first letter.  The first line of that reading says: “Beloved: Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”  “Sanctify Christ...”  Peter is instructing us that Christ must be “set apart” in our hearts.  This is the meaning of “to sanctify”: that is, “to make holy”, or, in other words, “to set apart as consecrated to a sacred purpose”.  If we are “setting Christ apart for a sacred purpose” in our hearts, what, then, is that purpose?  Peter tells us.  “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”  Ohhhhh.  Well that sounds all pious and lovely, doesn’t it?  It is.  But it is also a weighty statement.  What we translate as “Lord” in English is the Greek Kyrios or the Latin Dominus.  From the Latin translation, we also get the verb “to dominate”, meaning that to be Dominus means to be the one who has authority over a thing.  Thus, we see now that when Peter instructs us to “set Christ apart for a sacred purpose in our hearts”, that purpose is to be Dominus, that is, the one with ultimate authority over our hearts.

But wait, our hearts are what tell us what we really want and what will make us happy.  If I let Christ be Lord over that, I’ll be sad at least some of the time, won’t I?  Before I answer, let me ask you this: when lockdown was first implemented, what were you sad about?  A lot of people that I talked to were sad that they couldn’t go to their favorite restaurant or bar or take their spring break vacation like they had planned.  After about a month, most of those same people had started to say, “I don’t miss the restaurant or bar as much as I miss being with other people.”  If our hearts could be wrong about what we really want when it comes to things like this, couldn’t they also be wrong about the weightier things of life?  Certainly, they could (and they often are).

Just before lockdown sent our school children home for the year, I had started to spend my sessions with them going through an old booklet titled “A Little Catechism in the Language of a Child”.  It was a question-answer format book and the kids loved it because a) they always want to show what they know and b) it spurred a lot of great questions.  One of the questions was “Why must we believe everything God reveals to us?”  And the answer is beautifully simple: First, God knows everything, therefore he cannot be wrong; and second, God is good—perfectly good—and therefore he will never lie.  And wasn’t this the very first temptation?  The serpent tempted Eve by saying, “Look, God is wrong; surely you won’t die! And so, he is lying to you, because he doesn’t want you to be like him.”  And she fell for it.  But God knows everything so he cannot be wrong.  And he is goodness itself, which means that he will never lie.

Does it make sense now why it is essential that Christ is sanctified as Dominus in our hearts?  If our hearts can be fickle with what is truly good for us, and, therefore, sometimes wrong about what is good for us, and if we have a resource to which we can turn who cannot be wrong and who will never lie to us, then why would we be afraid to allow him to have authority over our hearts?  Well, the reasons are many—as much psychological as they are spiritual—and so, the important thing is that we recognize that this task—sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts—is essential for us and thus that we give ourselves to it constantly.

Friends, after all of that, I think that we can pull something together to walk away with today on this 6^th Sunday in Easter.  In a way, Jesus has said to us today: “If you love me, you will sanctify me as Lord in your hearts and, thus, you will keep my commandments.”  This, without doubt, is essential.  If you have not included this in your “essential activities” during this time of lockdown, I urge you to pray intensely and intentionally to allow Jesus (through his teachings and example, and the Spirit that he has given to us) to be “sanctified as Lord” in your hearts.

In this time in which we have been separated from him sacramentally, I know that we all deeply feel the truth that these sacramental encounters with his grace are truly essential.  But if we do the hard, but good work of sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts during this time, well then the sacramental grace that we receive in the coming weeks will be like rocket fuel in our hearts and make us ready “to give an explanation to anyone who asks us a reason for our hope”, to suffer for doing good, in solidarity with Christ, and to acknowledge his good works among us and, thus, to cry out to God with joy.  May the Spirit of truth, who remains with each of us in this time of separation, help us to persevere in this good work and, thus, to usher in a new springtime of life in the Church, our community, and our world.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – May 17^th, 2020

The way of mercy

Homily: 5^th Sunday in Easter – Cycle A

“Do not let your hearts be troubled...” I kind of wish we had this message back on March 18^th, when we first entered into this situation!  It feels, perhaps, a little late now, because our hearts have been long troubled by this extended lockdown.  But let’s step out of the context of our own situation, and back into the context in which Jesus originally made this statement.  Perhaps, then, we’ll be able to make more sense of how Our Lord’s words can speak to us.

This passage comes at the close of the Last Supper.  Just prior to it, Judas Iscariot has left to betray Jesus to the Jews, after which Jesus announces to the remaining eleven that he’s “going away” and that where he is going, they cannot follow him.  Peter finds this awfully strange and makes a bold statement (as he’s wont to do): “No way! I’m going wherever it is that you are going. I’ll even lay down my life for you!”  Jesus corrects him and says, “LOL, not only will you NOT do that, you’ll do the opposite! In fact, you are going to DENY me... three times... TONIGHT.  You can imagine the “stunned silence” that followed.  Imagine with me back to the beginning of February.  Now imagine if I said to you, then, “Hey, things are going to shut down completely in a month and you won’t even be able to come to Mass.”  You would have all been like Peter and said, “Ha! Yeah right! We will never let that happen!”  Fast forward to March 18^th and... stunned silence.  Friends, this is where Jesus starts this passage with his first and closest disciples; and this is where he starts this passage with us... Do not let your hearts be troubled...

Now, let’s look at the disciples in the ensuing hours: The disciples would watch Jesus be arrested, tortured and murdered... Do not let your hearts be troubled...  They discovered that his body had been buried and the tomb closed... Do not let your hearts be troubled...  They would hear that “murderous threats” were being spoken about them... Do not let your hearts be troubled...  I imagine that they all felt pretty helpless to do anything and that they were despairing that what they had hoped for would ever be possible again.  But has this not been our experience?  Some of you have lost loved ones during this time (whether to the coronavirus or for other reasons).  Perhaps you didn’t even get to attend the funeral.  Many more of you are desperately separated from loved ones because of a need (yours or theirs) to be protected from infection.  Some of you have lost jobs and more in terms of material security.  Some of you have lost milestone experiences (like prom and graduation).  In all of this, we’ve experienced our own helplessness and, perhaps, despair that we’ll ever get back that for which we had hoped and into that Jesus says, Do not let your hearts be troubled...

In Matthew’s gospel, we hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who mourn...”  Perhaps, in the midst of all of this, this “Beatitude” seems much more like a “pious platitude”, unhelpful in the face of real suffering.  Trappist Monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton has something to say about that, however, and I’d like to share a bit of an extensive quote from him that might help put this into perspective.  In his book, No Man is an Island, Merton wrote:

“’Blessed are they that mourn.’ Can this be true? Is there any greater wretchedness than to taste the dregs of our own insufficiency and misery and hopelessness, and to know that we are certainly worth nothing at all? Yet it is blessed to be reduced to these depths if, in them, we can find God. Until we have reached the bottom of the abyss, there is still something for us to choose between all and nothing. There is still something in between. We can still evade the decision. When we are reduced to our last extreme, there is no further evasion. The choice is a terrible one. It is made in the heart of darkness, but with an intuition that is unbearable by its angelic clarity: when we who have been destroyed and seem to be in hell miraculously choose God!”

He continues:

“Only the lost are saved. Only the sinner is justified. Only the dead can rise from the dead, and Jesus said, ‘I came to seek and to save that which was lost.’”

Finally, he adds:

“Some men are only virtuous enough to forget that they are sinners without being wretched enough to remember how much they need the mercy of God.”

Friends, could it be that God is allowing this to remind us of our desperate need for his mercy, to remind us that we are lost and in need of saving, to remind us that we are sinners who need a redeemer?  My friends, let us be in agony because of this pandemic and the sacrifices it has demanded of us (most especially separation from the Eucharist).  Yes, let us be in agony, but let us not despair!  Remember the crucifixion: Jesus went to the depths of the darkest place of humanity and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?!?”  Yet he had already told us what it was all for: “Do not let your hearts be troubled... I am going to prepare a place for you.”

My friends, this time is not a time for despair, but a time for mercy.  Do not let your hearts be troubled by this time of chaos, confusion, and sorrow.  Rather, have faith in God; have faith also in the one whom God has sent, Jesus.  Where he is going in this time, you know the way.  Wait, we know the way?  Yes, Thomases, we know the way: “I am the way...” Jesus said.  The Way, is the way of mercy.

Jesus has entered the depths of humanity in order to redeem it in its depths: in your depths and in my depths.  Our way, therefore, is the same.  We must enter into the depths of our own humanity to find the wretchedness that still exists there so that God’s mercy might penetrate to it.  And we must enter into the depths of others in their sins against us so as to bring God’s mercy there when we forgive their offenses.  Merton says that, “We must forgive them in the flames of their own hell, for Christ, by means of our forgiveness, once again descends to extinguish the avenging flame. He cannot do this if we do not forgive others with his own compassion.”

Friends, soon enough Jesus will return to “take us to himself”.  Perhaps even sooner, we will be returning to him, here in our churches.  When we do, will we truly be seeking him?  Or will we be seeking the comfort of the familiar?  Our challenge is to be sure that we are seeking him.  We can do this by embarking (or re-embarking) on the Way of mercy, in Truth, who is the Life: the way of deep forgiveness that comes from a place of true humility and compassion—that is, the way that brings deep and lasting healing—the way that leads into the life, who is Christ.  To do so will not only make our return to him joyful in the depths of our souls, but will also be the cause of a great renewal in our Church and in our world.

Friends, Jesus promised his disciples that “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do and will do greater ones than these.”  This is the crux of why we need to set ourselves on the Way that is mercy.  For what are the greatest works that Jesus did?  Without doubt, the conversion of souls; and he brought souls to conversion by forgiveness, by mercy.  Thomas Merton wrote, “God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.”  What is the point of evangelization except to give witness to the fact that God is living and among us and that he wants to give us life, through mercy?  The conversion of even greater numbers of souls through mercy are the greater works that Jesus has promised that we will accomplish.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled... I am the way, the truth, and the life... whoever believes in me will do greater works than these...”  Friends, may we today, even in the midst of our ongoing sufferings, find the grace to echo the words of Our Lady and say, “Father, let it be done unto me according to your word.”

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – May 10^th, 2020