Frustration works for our good

Homily: 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B

A number of years ago, while I was still in the seminary, I spent time in Guatemala in order to study Spanish and immerse myself in Hispanic culture.  I remember that one of the things that struck me about life in Guatemala was how frustrating it seemed be for the Guatemalan people.  All of the infrastructure things that make our lives here relatively comfortable—things like, good roads, new cars, convenience stores, etc.—are relatively underdeveloped there (if they’re even developed at all).  I imagined that this meant that their daily lives are probably filled with frustrations as they try to accomplish even what I might consider to be the simplest tasks; because, for example, maybe the electricity shut off, or the gas station was out of fuel, or the road washed out in the heavy rain last night.  They, I supposed, are a people very familiar with frustration.

On some level, however, all of us are familiar with frustration in one form or another.  When your pen runs out of ink, or your coupon is expired, or you leave your leftovers on the table at the restaurant… these are all examples of how we experience frustrations even in the smallest things of our daily lives. Now, while this may seem weird, I want to propose to you that all of those frustrations have a purpose.  Yes, a purpose.  Believe it or not, frustrations are meant to be a signal to us that something isn’t right.  In other words, much in the same way that the pain that we feel in our hand when we touch a hot stove has as its purpose to warn us that we are doing something to harm ourselves, so too frustrations have as their purpose to remind us that the world is “out of order”. 

Why do we need to be reminded that the world is “out of order”?  Well, because our souls long for things to be “in order”.  Let’s think about this for a second: if being “out of order” was the way things were supposed to be, then we wouldn’t get frustrated because everything would seem to be just as it ought.  For example, in a world where “out of order” is the way things are supposed to be, if I were to blow out a tire on my car during a trip I wouldn’t get frustrated because I would be able to say to myself “Well, I expected this to happen because that’s how the world works.”  But “out of order” is not the “order” of things, and so we become frustrated when “out of order” things happen.  We instinctively know that “out of order” isn’t right and so we experience discomfort when we encounter it as a sign to remind us that it isn’t right.

And this is so important for us, and here’s why.  You see, when I think about it, I find that there are two basic ways that we deal with frustration: either 1) we confront it and try to overcome it (that is, we try to put back “in order” what is “out of order”) or 2) we resign ourselves to being frustrated and thus give up on trying to overcome it altogether (in other words, we accept that being frustrated with “out of order” is the only way that it can be).  Because there are so many things that are outside of our control in this world, we more often than not deal with frustration in the second way that I described.  The danger of this is that, if we are constantly facing frustrations, we might quickly lose hope that anything really ever could be “in order” again.  This can lead us into apathy, which numbs our sense of frustration, thus causing us to forget that there is an ideal “order” for which we should be striving, and “out of order” becomes the “way things are supposed to be”.

In the first reading, we heard an encouraging proclamation from Isaiah.  In his proclamation he is talking about how God is coming to vindicate his people from their enemies and he is using terms of restoration: that is, of restoring things that are “out of order” so as to put them back “in order”.  In other words, Isaiah is saying that, when God’s vindication comes, things that had been out of order—like eyes that are blind, ears that cannot hear, legs that cannot be used for jumping, and tongues that cannot speak—will be restored to order—for the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap, and the mute will speak.  He proclaimed this to them so that they wouldn’t become resigned to accept what they couldn’t change and thus become apathetic to how “out of order” everything was.  In God’s eyes, it was better for the people to have a healthy sense of frustration, for that would keep them longing for the order that he planned to restore for them; and so, would strengthen their faith.

As Christians we know that God sent his Son Jesus to vindicate us from our enemies and thus to restore order to the world; and the stories recorded for us in the Gospels are meant to support this claim.  Today we heard of how Jesus opened the ears of a man who was deaf and of how he freed the tongue of that same man who also had a speech impediment.  This was a sign that Jesus had come to vindicate God’s people as he put back “in order” that which was “out of order” in this man.  When he suffered and died on the cross Jesus made atonement for our sins; and when he rose from the dead he put back “in order” that which was most “out of order” in us: as he restored mankind’s ability to be in communion with God, which is the very reason for which man was created.

Friends, none of you would be surprised if I told you that we are walking around in a world that is still gravely “out of order”; and none of you would be surprised if I told you that the Church has, in many ways, become “out of order”, too: this, in spite of the fact that Jesus left us the Church precisely to be the place in which we might experience the world put back “in order”.  I believe that God is permitting these scandals to come to light so that we might become highly frustrated once again and, therefore, by cooperating with his grace, put things back “in order” in his Church.

If we are going to do so, we have to pay attention to one extremely important thing.  Brothers and sisters, we cannot put the Church back in order if we are walking around deaf to God’s word.  In other words, God’s Church will never be restored to be the sign of a world put back “in order” as long as her members continue to ignore God’s Word—the Logos, the eternal Truth by which “order” is possible.  The “Ten Commandments” are known in the ancient Greek as the Decalogue—literally, the “Ten Words” of God: commands given to us to show us what the world looks like when it is “in order”.  Given the fact that 75% of Americans who identify as Catholic don’t attend Mass on a weekly basis and that a significant percentage of American Catholics have divorced and remarried without an annulment or have married outside of the Church, it should be pretty clear that a great majority of us are walking around deaf to these Ten Words of God.

Thus, the challenge for us is this: Ask Jesus to open your ears to hear these Words and then ask yourselves, “Am I truly (and I mean truly, without excuses) following them?”  If not, we must repent, confess our sins to a priest and receive absolution, and then strive with all our might to order our lives according to these Words once again.  Brothers and sisters, without your striving—without my striving, without Bishop Doherty’s striving, without Pope Francis’ striving—the Church—God's sign of a world “out of order” put back “in order—will continue to be an ineffective one that people ignore.  By our living witnesses, however, (imperfect though they may be) Christ’s power to open ears to hear his word and loosen tongues to proclaim his praise will flow through us; and the world, with all of its frustrations, will begin to look more and more like the kingdom of God: a place of order, harmony, and peace.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, let us not be afraid to allow the Holy Spirit to illumine for us all that is “out of order” in us and then to bring those things to Jesus, who will forgive us and restore them to order for us.  And let us hold on to hope: the hope that we have in the fact that Jesus has vindicated us; and that the world of perfect order that our hearts long for—the kingdom of God—will come to us when Jesus himself comes again to make all things new.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – September 9th, 2018

Lost in the landscape

          Don't let yourself fall into the same old habits this Lent!  Let Jesus turn over the tables of the familiar in your hearts!  Pray, Listen, Act, and Repeat, and you'll have the best Lent ever because you'll be closer than ever to Jesus.

(Side note: I'll be making the Cursillo weekend this coming weekend, so I won't be posting a homily.  Perhaps, however, I'll think to post some reflections about my experience.  Please pray for me and the men making the Cursillo weekend with me!)

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Homily: 3^rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle B

          There’s a certain danger in the familiar.  Familiarity tends to lull us into complacency.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but complacency can leave us vulnerable to being caught off-guard by things.  Familiarity also leads to routine.  As humans, we are creatures of habit and we like when things are predictable.  Thus, we have a “morning routine” in which we repeat pretty much the same acts every morning so that we don’t have to think about what we need to do to get up and get on with our day.  The problem with this kind of familiarity is that the surrounding world quickly fades back into the landscape and no longer registers in our consciousness as something of which to take account.

          I’ve suffered from this myself.  When you travel to Saint Meinrad, where I went to seminary, there’s an approximately 8-mile strip of Indiana Route 62 that you must navigate after exiting Interstate 64 coming from the east.  In my first years at the seminary, this was one of the most enjoyable parts of the trip as I passed in close proximity to fields and farmhouses, some complete with hens pecking around in the front yard.  After six years, however, this strip of road became so familiar that I practically could navigate it with my eyes closed.  At times I experienced that I had passed some of the “milestones” along the way without having acknowledged that I had seen them.  Because I was so familiar with the road, the surrounding landscape no longer entered my consciousness.  I think most of us can recognize this experience in our own lives: in our commute to work, our schools and classrooms, our offices and office buildings, in our neighborhoods, and often too in our relationships things become familiar and thus fade out of our consciousness.

          In our first reading today, we heard the recounting of the Ten Commandments.  For many of us, I suspect that listening to these being read is kind of like making that drive down Route 62: as it goes on we might stop and think to ourselves, “Wait, did he/she say the 6^th one?  I don’t remember hearing it.”  For many of us, the Ten Commandments are perhaps so familiar that they’ve become “part of the landscape” and no longer impact our daily consciousness.

          The ancient Jews also fell into this trap of familiarity.  They had had the Law for many years and most people were very familiar with it and with its demands.  Thus, they no longer thought about the Law, but rather had worked their lives around it.  So much so that they turned the Temple Cult—that is, the sacrificial offerings that were prescribed by the Law—into a business for profit.

          Then Jesus breaks into the scene and disrupts the familiar.  He sees the way that Satan, the father of lies, had distorted the truth of what the Temple Cult was supposed to represent: man, in a special relationship with God, offering sacrifices both in worship and homage of the all-powerful creator of the universe and in atonement for offenses against Him.  Offerings, meant to restore and maintain that special relationship, had been distorted into cold demands and business transactions and that is what Jesus was driving out.  By turning over the tables of the familiar, Jesus was hoping to reawaken an awareness of the true relationship to which God had called them.

          The zeal with which Jesus desired that the Temple—his Father’s house—be free from defilement is the same zeal that he has for our hearts.  He wants to turn over the tables of the familiar in our hearts and drive out any distorted images of self, of God, and of what God asks of us so that we can once again see the beauty of the relationship to which he has called us: both collectively as the People of God and individually as adopted sons and daughters.  The difference between Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple and his cleansing of our hearts is that he cannot just burst into our hearts without permission—for that would violate our dignity.  Rather, he must wait for us to invite him in so as to shed light on anything that is untrue, that is unholy in our hearts and our lives.

          My brothers and sisters, if all we have done this Lent is take up our old familiar practices then we have little more to hope for when we arrive at Easter Sunday than a feeling of relief for not having to maintain that discipline any longer.  The challenge we have before us today is to make this Lent somehow different by allowing Christ into our hearts, by exposing to him all of those aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of—the ways, perhaps, that we have become complacent in following his commandments, most especially to worship him alone—and by cooperating with him in the hard work of driving out all that isn’t pure, that isn’t true from our lives.

          Now, Jesus knows that this isn’t easy for us.  He knows that the world is constantly going to pull us towards the comfort of familiarity.  And so he doesn’t expect us to do it all at once.  He simply asks that we begin.  A simple way to begin this work of conversion, that is, of opening our hearts more and more to Christ, is to follow these four steps: pray, listen, act, repeat.

          Pray:  First we must pray that God will help us to examine our consciences and identify those things that need to be driven out.  As he reveals them to us, we need to pray that he will reveal to us some way that we can act to overcome that disposition or attitude in our lives.  For example: perhaps we recognize that we struggle with selfishness.  And so we pray that God will reveal to us someone with whom we can practice being selfless in the coming week.

          Listen:  Once we’ve identified our vice and asked God to show us how we can overcome it, we need to listen—not just in the silence of our prayer time, but also as we go through our day—for God to reveal to us how, in the concrete circumstances of our day, we are to act to drive out this vice from our hearts.  In other words, we listen for that little voice saying to us “Wait! Don’t be selfish here!”

          Act:  If we are sincere in our prayer and attentive in our daily living, we will soon see how it is that God has asked us to give of ourselves in a way that overcomes our vice.  It will click like a light bulb going on.  When this happens we are called to respond.  It usually will be unexpected, but when we respond to these intentionally prayed-for promptings of the Holy Spirit, our hearts slowly change and we become more and more open to allowing Christ to dwell in us and to direct our daily lives.

          Repeat:  Once you’ve responded then the hard part truly begins because maintaining this practice over a lifetime, without allowing yourself to become complacent because of familiarity, is truly a challenging task.  It is a task, however, that will make you a saint.

          My brothers and sisters, we can only overcome bad habits by cultivating good ones and if we try to do it ourselves, we are bound to fail.  If we let Christ direct the way that we cultivate these good habits, however, then our efforts are not only going to be sustained but they’re going to bring joy to our lives as well.

          And so, if your Lent has gotten a slow start, don’t worry… because there’s an app for that: pray, listen, act, repeat.  My brothers and sisters, let Christ turn over the familiar in your hearts so that the joy of the Resurrection—the joy of true liberation from the mundane familiarity of the world—may be yours this Easter.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – March, 7^th & 8^th, 2015

Jesus turns over the familiar

Greetings friends!  Here is the homily that I preached this past weekend in Jeffersonville.  I am particularly sure that the Holy Spirit was directing this one because even though I had no contact with whoever it was that wrote the Prayers of the Faithful for the parishes at least half of them matched up almost perfectly with different aspects of my homily.  Praise God for that!

As always, if you have any feedback (positive and constructive) I'm happy to hear it!
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Homily: 3^rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle B

          Familiarity breeds contempt… at least that’s what the modern proverb says.  What this saying is, well, saying is that as we come to know someone more deeply, we realize just how much we actually don’t like that person; that is that with familiarity comes knowledge not just of the person’s attractive traits, but also of their more ugly ones (and we all have them, don’t we).  I think, in a certain sense, we can all see some truth in this saying.  But there’s another aspect of this saying that also carries some truth: that is, that familiarity also breeds complacency.

          We can see this in our daily routines.  If you’ve lived in Jeffersonville for some time, the landmarks that you used to notice as you went about your daily tasks—such as taking the kids to school, or making a run to the grocery store, or even just commuting to work—after a while just kind of fade into the landscape.  After years of living in this one place, you might even find that the features of your neighborhood no longer seem to register in your consciousness.

          This can happen with people, too.  Our co-workers, classmates, close friends, brothers and sisters, and even our spouses become so familiar to us and part of our daily routine, that the appreciation of how special they are to our lives is not something that enters our daily consciousnesses.  And so, while this familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, it does often breed complacency.

          In the first reading today, we heard the recounting of the Ten Commandments.  For many of us, I suspect that listening to these being read is kind of like making our daily commute: we were conscious that we began the trip, but when we got to our destination we weren’t quite sure how we got there.  In other words, the Ten Commandments are perhaps so familiar to us that they’ve become “part of the landscape” and no longer impact our daily consciousness.

          And this is nothing new.  The ancient Jews also fell into this trap.  They had the Law for many years and most people were very familiar with it and its demands.  Thus, following the precepts of the Law had become for them like our daily routine: nothing more than part of the daily landscape through which they had to navigate.  And this to the extent that they turned what is called the “Temple Cult”—that is, the sacrifices offered in the Temple both in homage of God and as an atonement for sins—into a business for profit.

          That’s when Jesus breaks into the scene and disrupts the familiar.  He saw the way that Satan had distorted the truth that the Law represented—that is, that it was a way for God’s chosen people to remain in “right relationship” with Him—and turned it into a Law of cold demands and business transactions.  Jesus saw that this had become so familiar to the people that they simply accepted it as the conditions for living as the People of God. By turning over the tables of the familiar, Jesus was hoping to reawaken in them an awareness of the true relationship that God had called them to.

          The zeal with which Jesus desired that the Temple—his Father’s house—be free from defilement is the same zeal that he has for our hearts.  He wants to turn over the tables of the familiar in our hearts and drive out any distorted images of self, of others, of God, and of what God asks of us so that we can once again see the beauty of the relationship he has called us to: both collectively as the People of God and individually as adopted sons and daughters.  Yet, unlike the Temple, Christ cannot just burst into our hearts and start turning things over.  God created us for freedom and for him to do so would violate that dignity.  And so this Lent—as he does throughout the year, but particularly in this holy season—Jesus calls us once again to open our hearts to him and to give him permission to shed light on anything in them that is unholy, that is untrue, and thus to drive them out, so as to purify his “temples of the Holy Spirit.”

          My brothers and sisters, if all we have done this Lent is take up our old familiar practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, then we have little more to hope for when we arrive at Easter Sunday than a feeling of relief for not having to maintain these disciplines any longer.  The challenge we have before us today is to make this Lent different by “opening wide the doors to Christ,” which was the clarion call of our late Holy Father, Bl. Pope John Paul II.  We do this by turning our gaze away from ourselves and towards others.  In prayer, we ask God to show us ways that we can overcome our sinful habits by turning towards our neighbor and offering a word of encouragement, a gentle correction when they need it, a helping hand in their difficulties, and a humble acknowledgement of how we’ve hurt them in the past that is accompanied by a sincere desire for forgiveness.  Then we return to God, offering him our successes and our (inevitable) failures and asking again for the grace to recognize our weaknesses and to trust in his help to overcome them.

          This work, of course, is uncomfortable.  It is uncomfortable because we have to give up our control to Christ and make ourselves vulnerable to him and to others.  But that’s ok, because, as our current Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI has said, “the world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort; rather you were made for greatness.”  My brothers and sisters, this Lent cannot be just about “sticking it out” to the end, but rather it must be about achieving the greatness we were made for.  And so, let Christ—the Christ we encounter here in the sacrifice we offer and in the meal we share—turn over the familiar in your hearts.  If you do so, then you will be truly ready to encounter anew the joy of Easter.

~ Given at Saint Augustine and Sacred Heart Parishes, Jeffersonville, IN - March 10^th-11^th, 2012