You Cannot Separate the Munera

Priest, Prophet, and King

In baptism, each Christian rises to new life in Christ and is anointed priest, prophet, and king.  To this threefold sharing in the identity of Christ correspond three munera, or aspects of his saving mission: the priest sanctifies, the prophet preaches, and the king governs.  The ontological change brought about in baptism therefore also enacts a commissioning in which the Christian receives the grace and the responsibility to exercise these munera in union with the risen Lord.  I remember well the lesson that our venerable canon law professor, Gianfranco Ghirlanda, drilled into our heads again and again when speaking of this commissioning: you cannot separate the munera.  Authentic Christian discipleship requires a continuity and harmony among the three: a Christian cannot authentically preach the faith without offering prayer and sacrifice, cannot offer sacrifice without serving others as Christ has served us, cannot serve others without telling them of the great gift we have received in Christ. 

The way in which the munera are exercised undergoes a transformation in the man who receives the sacrament of Holy Orders.  Christ’s example shows us that this ministry is profoundly human and relational, also entailing the full breadth and scope of the munera: one united action of teaching, sanctifying, and governing.  How many of the events in the life of Christ clearly demonstrate this three-fold harmony in his ministry.  We need only to look to the Last Supper, where Christ first arranged for the upper room to be made available, then taught his disciples and prayed for them, then bent to wash their feet before finally rising to break the bread and offer the chalice.  Every element of the last supper was important and was part of Christ’s ministry – not only the breaking of the bread.  Jesus is not only the one who offers the Eucharist – he is also our teacher and our Lord.  And likewise, a bishop or priest cannot only be the one who sanctifies – he must also be one who teaches and who governs.  Thus, from the earliest days of the Church, it has been clear that a bishop cannot authentically preside over the Eucharist while at the same time abdicating his duty to teach the faith or govern the local church. 

In recent years, however, an understanding of this necessary unity of the munera has been undermined, and particularly in the ministry of priests.  In the common understanding, and even among many members of the clergy, it is often either explicitly or implicitly held that priests are ordained as ministers who share only in Christ’s ministry of sanctification.  Often one hears “Father, if only you did not have to worry about the practical concerns of the parish and could just focus on the spiritual matters.”  And it is common today to speak of the priest and of priestly ministry in a way that resembles the work of a magic man – of one who whisks into the room, waves his hands and makes something holy, and then moves on to the next place.  But clearly such an understanding of the priest cannot be reconciled with the actual priestly ministry of Christ, who did not just sweep in and sanctify.  This mistaken notion that focuses the identity and ministry of the priest almost exclusively on the work of sanctification has had widespread negative repercussions in the Church. 

Reticence in the Laity to Follow the Teaching and Governance of Church Leaders.

How many conversations in recent years among priests have unfolded something like this: “Did you read the editorial page this morning?”  “Yes, I assume you’re referring to Betsy’s letter to the editor?” “Can you believe that?  And she is a daily communicant!  I just don’t understand how she could really believe that.”

Today we often find faithfully practicing Catholics who either blatantly dissent from the Church’s teaching or who openly oppose the leadership and authority of their priests or bishop.  It is an everyday occurrence.  Many of us assume that such dissent and disobedience are the signs of a lack of faith – that if the person just had more faith they would believe what the Church teaches and be more respectful of the clergy.  While faith certainly plays a role, I think it is important to also recognize how an impoverished understanding of priestly ministry has also fed into this problem.  If I believe that the priest shares only in Christ’s ministry of sanctification, or at least only fully in this aspect of his ministry, whereas I believe that Christ’s ministry of teaching and governing are not intrinsic or at least not entrusted in their fullness to those who have receive holy orders, then it seems perfectly logical that I could go to Mass and yet at the same time reject the teachings and the authority of my bishop and his priests.  I would say to myself “Well he is out of his element.  He should stick to what God has given him to do: which is to sanctify.”  And I would be more inclined to resent the bishop or priest for attempting to teach or govern with authority, because I would see such authority not as having come from God by virtue of his sharing in the Christ’s ministry, but instead as coming from his own desire for power and control.  Why would I follow someone who is trying to push me around or tell me what to think of his own authority? 

Diminishment in the Number of Priestly Vocations.

Vocations to the priesthood have been growing throughout the United States in the last decade, and yet this growth has not been even.  Some diocese have had an incredible boom in the number of men entering the seminary, whereas others have seen anemic growth.  Why?  People opine continually, and clearly there are many factors that affect the overall number of vocations.  Yet a critical factor that I do not believe is given nearly enough attention is the extent to which the understanding of priestly identity and ministry operative in a diocese or religious community affects its ability to attract vocations. 

Men do not have a vocation to be a magic man, particularly a celibate magic man.  If the understanding and exercise of priesthood and priestly ministry are impoverished to entail sacramental ministry alone, it is very possible that men who have an authentic vocation to priestly ministry will not feel called.  And this is particularly the case for men who are intelligent and have leadership ability.  Articulate and intelligent men know that God would not call them to a vocation that did not allow them to use the intellectual gifts that he had given them in service to the Church.  And so if they do not understand that the ministry of preaching and teaching is intrinsic and essential and defining of priestly ministry, they will be less inclined to be open to a priestly vocation.  Similarly, those men who possess strong leadership ability and administrative skills will be less likely to consider a vocation to the priesthood if their understanding of priestly ministry either does not include or includes an impoverished sense of the ministry of service and governance exercised by the priest.

Damage to Community

The priest is ordained to ministry in the Church in persona Christi… capitis.  This last word is often left out, particularly among those who promote an impoverished notion of the priesthood.  The priest is called to act in the person of Christ the head.  Jesus is not the big toe of the body.  He is the head who shows his humility precisely in that as head he bows low and serves, even to the point of death.  For the toe to bow low means nothing, but for the head to bow demonstrates true humility.  As Saint Paul so eloquently wrote: “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, he emptied himself. (Phil 2:6-7)”  So it must be for the priest.  The priest is given and must be understood to possess real authority not only sacramentally, but in matters of teaching and governance as well. 

The undermining of the priest’s authority in non-sacramental ministry undermines his sense of responsibility to act in service of and for the good of the body.  And so it is common to find a correlation in priestly ministry between the loss of authority and absence from ministry.    This absence, the 9-5 syndrome, the complaining of being overworked, the multiple days off and extended periods of vacation, make more sense when the priest thinks that his ministry is supposed to be merely sacramental.  Pastoral council meetings, managing staff, teaching at vacation bible school, and going to the woman’s sodality meeting – these are all seen as impositions and activities that lie outside of the priestly vocation.  And so the priest quite easily can begin to excuse himself from building up and maintaining community life in his parish because he does not see such activities as being intrinsically tied to his ministry as a priest.  Instead, he becomes a sacramental accessory to the life of the parish, and may say things like “This is your parish, you decide what you need to do.”  And many of those who seek to dominate particular parts of parish life may encourage him in this thinking and commiserate about how overworked the poor priest is.  “Poor Father, you have so much going on, don’t bother coming to the meeting – we’ve got it covered.” 

Lack of Subsidiarity and the Adoption of Secular Governance Models

Another symptom of the impoverishment in understanding of priestly ministry manifests itself at the diocesan level. Since a magic man is clearly not capable of running a parish, it becomes necessary to institutionalize and even require lay positions and structures that can fill this void in priestly ministry.  Large diocesan offices must be created to oversee finance and business administration and to direct religious education.  These offices, in turn, begin to communicate and work directly with lay staff and volunteers from the parishes, rather than the priests themselves, since the work of teaching and governance is no longer considered to be intrinsic to priestly ministry.  Soon, lay staff outnumber ordained clergy and religious, and because of this shift toward  non-clerical hierarchies within the diocese, the model of governance adopted by the bishop and his lay staff is increasingly influenced by secular employment practices. 

The context of governance within a diocese that is envisioned by Lumen Gentium and by the codes of canon law is nowhere to be found.  While finance and administration meetings may begin and end in prayer, the spiritual relationship of shepherd and flock that is at the heart of Christ’s priestly ministry entrusted to the apostles and their successors is seriously compromised.  Fewer and fewer administrative decisions are made by those who have been directly entrusted with the salvation of those under their care and have received the grace of holy orders to carry out their ministry. 

Conclusions

What results when the three munera of priestly ministry are separated in favor of a purely sacramental model is destructive to the life of the Church.   Vocations to the priesthood are lost, dissent from church teachings and authority among the laity is fostered, parish community is weakened, and priests become apathetic and frustrated.  A priest can only carry out Christ’s ministry as he is baptized: priest, prophet, and king.  Just as Christ stooped to wash his disciples feet, so must the priest stoop to pay the bills, oversee a youth minister, or attend the finance council meeting.  The priest acts in the person of Christ the head, in the person of Christ who is the bridegroom to the Church, in the person of Christ who offered himself, priest, prophet, and king, to his beloved. 

Take Nothing For the Journey But A Walking Stick

Homily for the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2012

Take nothing for the journey but a walking stick-- no food, no sack, no money in your belt.
Some days these instructions to the first disciples sound pretty good.  Perhaps especially on those days when we’re trying to register the car, paying taxes, cleaning or painting the house.  Just a walking stick.  Ahh…

But a family can’t survive with just a walking stick.  In order to develop the gifts we’ve been given, each of us requires many things.  And so as we hear Jesus’ instructions to the 72 in the gospel today, we know that he cannot have meant for this command to be literally followed by all of us.  Yet we are all disciples, to be those who announce the good news in our world.  We all share in the same prophetic ministry of the 72 who Jesus sent from Jerusalem to preach the Gospel.  So we can’t just say, well none of this applies to us.  We know that Christ’s teaching about the need for disciples to live a life detached from material things must apply at least in principle to us too.  But how are we to understand and live a Christian detachment from the material world that is appropriate for our state in life?  How are we who must raise families and live in the real world to be faithful to this teaching?

What a great question!  I hope that you ask yourself this question all the time.  How am I, how are we, how is my family called to live in a way that keeps material things in their proper place? 
This is really a question that you must ask, because it is not the role of the priest to dictate the concrete choices that each family must make regarding the material goods that they possess.  42” tv?  Ok.  44”  Nope, too big.  2 smart phones, ok.  3?  Nope, over the line.  No, the hierarchy does not produce documents that go through and detail exactly what you need and don’t need.

Yet the fact the magisterium does not delve into these financial matters does not mean in the least that our choices with regard to material possessions are unimportant or unrelated to faith.  On the contrary, one of the most visible ways that Catholics who live in the world demonstrate and proclaim their faith is by their attitude and treatment of material goods.  How you and I choose to spend our money, how much stuff we have and how much we are preoccupied with our stuff says something about our priorities, about what we think is important.  And being a follower of Christ has to change your priorities, has to change what you think is important. 

If you and I, who believe that heaven is our final destiny and that what matters on this earth more than anything is loving God and others – if our monetary choices are the same as people who don’t believe in heaven and who think that money, power, and pleasure are the goal of life, than something has gone horribly wrong.

Let me close by making this very concrete.  If I showed up tomorrow for Mass driving a Ferrari at a time while our parish is facing a budget shortfall.  You would be scandalized.  And rightly so.  You would wonder about my priorities, my integrity.  You would maybe even wonder about my commitment to the Church and the faith.  My credibility as a spiritual leader would be seriously compromised, not only among Catholics, but especially among non-Catholics.
Now what if I showed up in a Mercedes?  Probably there would still be a lot of talk.
What about a Volvo?  Probably less.
A Ford?  I think that passes the safe priest car standard.

How do I decide?  There is no church document or diocesan policy telling me what kind of car I should drive.  But clearly, that choice matters – not only for me, but for the Church.  In fact this monetary choice probably has as much impact on the community, or more, than any homily that I might give.

Now, you might say, well Father you are different from the rest of us – you represent the Church.  You are a priest and you are supposed to be detached so that you can point us to heaven.  True, very true.  But just because a priest more visibly represents Christ does not mean that none of you do at all.  Far from it.  Every Christian represents the Church, personifies the Church very clearly and directly in the place where they live and work.  And each of us, priest or not, is supposed to point others to heaven in our own way and according to our state in life. 

Does that mean that we all have to drive a Ford?  Of course not.  Does that mean that no one can drive a luxury car?  Of course not.  Some of us have received greater opportunities and greater material wealth.  That, in and of itself is not bad at all, but a good thing.  In fact, we might say that stuff, things, money represents an opportunity for us who are disciples of Christ, an opportunity to witness to the greatest goods of faith, love, truth, and beauty by the way that we manage our wealth. The things that we choose to have, the attention we give them, speaks to the world about our priorities, about what we think is important.  Monetary choices have spiritual and moral implications – and so we must prayerfully and prudently make sure that the monetary choices that we make are consistent with our faith and witness to its priority in our lives.

In a society that tends toward consumerism, we who are charged to proclaim the Gospel must be constantly on guard that our witness does not falter.  We must continue to ask ourselves “Are the monetary choices of my family witnessing to the priority of faith in Jesus Christ in our lives?  Have we begun to obsess over things or have we become distracted by them – are they keeping us from giving our attention to God and to those around us?  Are we generous to those in need and to efforts to promote what is good and true and beautiful in our community?  Are we truly grateful for the things that we have? 

We must all ask these questions, priests and deacons laypersons alike.  We cannot be content to simply follow in the footsteps of those who seek mere earthly treasure.  Our material wealth, our  belongings, are meant to be at the service of the great commission, the command that we have all received to proclaim the good news of Gods kingdom.  And so wealth cannot be the prized possession for the Christian, instead wealth must be understood as an opportunity.  An opportunity to witness to the true treasure in life: our faith in Jesus Christ.

God Did Not Make Death

Homily for the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2012

God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.  These are the opening lines from our first reading from the book of Wisdom today.

I don’t know how much more clear about this God could be. 
He is the God of the living, not the dead.  He did not make death, he does not like death, death is his enemy.  God wants us to live.
And yet, how many people, how many Christians, have struggled with this teaching!  Even today many, many people, maybe some of you, carry this tormenting thought, a tremendous weight upon your shoulders: the thought that the death or suffering of a loved one was or is a punishment willed by God.  That God wanted it. 

What a tormenting thought.  On top of the pain of watching someone close to us go through the pain of suffering and death, the thought that their suffering, their death, was caused by something that they did or that we did to anger God, to incur his wrath and condemnation.

Not only is it a tormenting thought, it is a thoroughly anti-Christian thought.  It is, if I may say so, straight from hell.

So today might we ask the question: well, where does this idea come from, the idea that God would want or approve of suffering and death?  We know that God is a loving God.  He created us in love.  He has told us again and again that he wants us to live with him in his love.  So why do we have such a hard time believing that he doesn’t want suffering and death for us?

I think there are two reasons:
1. We know that God is all powerful.  If he were not, death and suffering would not be a problem.  God could just shrug his shoulders and say, “I don’t know what happened here.  I was trying to save her, but things just happened, and next thing I knew, I couldn’t.  That might work if things just happened without God knowing about it.  But he knows everything, he keeps everything in existence at every moment.  So if God is in charge and people suffer and die, then it seems like we are put into a position where we have to say that God must have somehow approved?  Who can he blame?  He’s the one who is all powerful and who could save us, right?

2.  A second reason for this mistaken idea is perhaps a bit more subtle, but pervasive.  Often it seems that bad things happen to bad people and it seems that good things often happen to good people.  You treat people miserably and hatefully, they tend to despise you.  You are generous and loving, and others tend to treat you well in return.  And God himself tells us that he rewards those who do what is right, and that the way of sin leads to death.  This is true, but it is a teaching that can easily be twisted, resulting in a very mistaken notion: that when bad things happen, it must be because someone did something wrong, and that when good things happen, it must be because God loves us.  How easy it is to fall into that one, a subtle twisting of the truth that can make us begin to think that suffering and death are a punishment from God for those who do not please him.

And that is why we hear the Lord loud and clear in the scriptures today.  God tells us, he insists: he does not want anyone to die.  He is the God of the living.  He wills that we be healed, he wills that we live.  And of all the mistaken notions that Jesus came to correct, this is one of the greatest: that suffering and death are a sign of God’s anger and punishment.

Christ's whole life radically and completely corrects this mistaken notion, in his ministry, in his teaching, and finally in his passion and death.

Jesus spent his whole ministry healing the sick and suffering and even resuscitating those, like Jairus’ daughter, who had died.  He did not heal them based on their holiness, he did not heal them because they deserved it.  He healed them because they asked, or because they had faith, or just because: he showed that God loves us and wants us to live not because of what we do, but because of who we are, his beloved sons and daughters in Christ, made in his image and likeness.

And Jesus explicitly taught us something new about those who are truly blessed – he gave his disciples the teaching of the beatitudes.  Who are the blessed ones, he asked?  Those who are happy?  No, those who mourn.  Those who are free of pain?  No, those who suffer.  Those who are approved of by all?  No, those who are persecuted.  He taught his disciples and he teaches all of us very clearly that suffering and death do not mean that you are distant from God.  That actually it is when we take up our crosses and follow him that we are most closely united to him and surrounded by his love.

But then, finally, because he knew, I think that we would still not really comprehend, Jesus proved the depth of God’s love, he proved that God would never want to harm us or see us suffer. 
How?  He submitted to suffering and death himself.  The sinless Word of God, perfect in holiness, who had never offended God and who walked in his ways, suffered and died the worst of deaths imaginable.  And so Jesus showed us in his passion and crucifixion that suffering and death cannot possibly be the sign of God’s anger or wrath or distance from us.  God cannot be distant from himself, so he was not distant from the cross, and so he is not distant from suffering and death.
And so as followers of Christ, our understanding of the mystery of suffering and death must be completely transformed.  It is no longer to be feared, because rather than being a punishment, it is a sharing in God’s very life, the life of Christ who suffered and died for us.

His suffering and death on the cross show us that even though God has allowed death to enter into his creation through the devil’s cunning and Adam’s sin, those who suffer or die are never distant from God or unloved. 

No, in fact the Lord shows us that he is often closest to those who suffer and die, and that the greatest saints are often those who were intimately united with him in the suffering and in death.
So what is death?  What is suffering, if it is not punishment, if it is not a sign of God’s distance from us?  I’ve only been ordained 5 years, and it’s hot. 

But we can at least say this: our tradition teaches us that it is first and foremost a mystery, a part of this world that cannot be entirely understood in this life.  A reality of life in this fallen world that God allows for reasons that we often cannot understand.  But Jesus has shown us this: that in entering into suffering and death with him, they are transformed: they no longer are a sign of God’s wrath or anger or condemnation. 

Death’s sting has been lifted.  Christ entered into death and suffering so that they could become, like the rest of life, an opportunity for us to encounter God and his great love for us, and to respond to his love in faith and trust. Talitha koum.  Jesus told them and tells us.  Do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid of suffering, do not be afraid of death.  Suffering and death are not the worst of evils.  They can't be.  Because through and in the midst of them God gives us eternal life.

Preparing a Path to Christ in Our World

Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, 2012

Today we celebrate how God prepared a people, prepared a nation, sent prophets and a law into the world to receive the gift of his Son.  Might we ask, well why didn’t he just surprise us?

A question: if we had not been prepared, would  we have noticed the life and death of a simple, solitary man?  One who, in the estimation of this world was not of any note?  How many people who lived more than 2000 years ago could most of us list off the top of our heads?  I imagine the list would not have more than 20 names for most of us, maybe  even fewer than 10. 

Well, we might ask, why didn’t God become man as one of those people whose names are listed in the history books?  Why didn’t he become a great king and mighty ruler?

But we know the answer to that question, don’t we?  In Christ God wanted to reveal to us his saving power in the midst of weakness and darkness, which is where we need his salvation.  And so he needed to prepare us, needed to prepare a people to recognize in the humble frame of his Son Jesus, who was crucified like a common criminal, not just another tragic story of the suffering of this world, but the very image of God himself.

Today we celebrate the final stage of that preparation: with the Nativity, or the birth, of St. John the Baptist, and we celebrate that time of preparation that God spent getting the world ready for his Son.
Now, this is a very important feast for all of us, because think of how many people we run into each day – former Catholics or others, who are distant from the Church or who do not see any need for the Church.  How many who live in our families – our own children and grandchildren.  We cannot simply spring the faith on them.  Surprise, you get to come to Mass with us!  Here’s a Bible!  But what do we do? I think this is a question that really gets to many of us.  We pray for those we love who have left the practice of the faith, and that is certainly important and needed. 

But today we can also learn from the way that God prepared his people before Christ’s birth, we can learn from the feast that we celebrate today how we too can help prepare the way for Christ to enter the lives of our brothers and sisters who have either fallen away from the faith or who never had faith.
So how did God prepare his people to receive his Son?  I think we can see three stages:

First he impressed upon them that life is a gift that he gives to us because he loves us.  This truth of God’s goodness and of the goodness of life is something that most people recognize – that each day we are alive not by our own power, but by the power of another.  And this is really the first foundation stone of faith.  To recognize that we are dependent on God, and that God is good to us.  The first 3 of the 10 commandments focus on this teaching, Genesis focuses on this teaching.  God worked to help the Hebrew people recognize their reliance on him, and to become more and more grateful for his goodness.  We can see in the Psalms that they responded to his revelation with praise and thanksgiving.  Even in hardship, they took to heart God’s goodness.  They were grateful for what they were given.

And I think that more than many things, this is one of the most important preparations for Christ that we can make in our culture.  If you are not grateful for your life and for what you have, then you will not want to love God or love Jesus Christ.  If we are able to live a spirit of gratitude and to point out to those around us that we have no right to what we have.  To avoid any sense of entitlement, and instead to recognize our complete reliance on God.  Without gratitude, without a sense of thankfulness to God, there can be no love of God.  How do we live gratefully?  How do we help our families to be grateful?

Gratitude to God is the most fitting motivation to go to Mass.  To thank him for what he has given us during the rest of the week.  Not seeking what we can get out of Mass, but seeking instead to give God what we can of our lives in order to thank him for his generosity.

In a second stage, From this gratitude for everything, also comes the sense of duty or obligation to respond.  When someone gives you a gift, even the most basic of human cultures have understood that it is only right to say thank you.  That is what we do here at Mass – we do what we ought, as receivers of such great gifts: we say thank you to God.  And we can see that in the law, God showed his people how to respond to his gifts: to respect and honor life, ones parents, the truth, the material things of this world.  And we too, prepare the way for Christ when we show others through our actions and words that we know that the gifts we have received deserve to be honored and respected.   Gratitude should mature into respect and honor.

In the third and final stage of preparation, God revealed to his people how weak and incapable they were at adequately respecting and honoring his gifts.  He showed them their sins. He showed them their infidelity – how they had turned to other gods instead of him.  How they had wasted the gifts he had given them, trampled the lives of the innocent he entrusted to their care.  He showed them that they needed forgiveness and repentance.  That final stage culminated in John the Baptist, who preached repentance.  Repentance for a people who were incapable of loving God and honoring God as they should.  A grateful but sinful people are the only people who need a savior, someone to help them offer God fitting praise and thanksgiving.  And when they recognized that, when they recognized their need for God, their need for a savior, they were ready for Jesus Christ. 

Of all St. John the Baptist’s virtues, perhaps the greatest was his humility.  He was grateful to God for what he had been given and for his work of announcing Christ.  He had a profound sense of responsibility and of his duty to respond to the God who had given him his life by serving him.  And so he went into the desert and preached repentance, proclaiming that he was not worthy to even untie the sandal straps of the God he served.  May we follow his example of humble and grateful service, and may we be that voice in the wilderness that proclaims God’s praise and our need for his mercy and forgiveness.

God is in Control. Yes, It's Going to Be Alright.

Homily for the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2012

The themes of growing and planting are strong in our scripture readings this week, and they come at the perfect time of year.  Many of you, I’m sure, have been getting gardens in during recent weeks and with only a few months of favorable weather here in Maine, the landscaping efforts in our community are in full swing.

Jesus clearly understood and loved the natural world.  He may have been a carpenter by trade, but when it came time to tell a parable about the kingdom of God more often than not he used an example from farming or nature, not carpentry.

And I think our Gospel passage today gives us a bit of an insight as to why.  Jesus points to the mystery of God’s work in the growth and life that we find in the natural world, a growth and life that is beyond our understanding and our ability to control.  You can take a piece of wood and form it with tools, determining exactly what it will look like.  A seed, the weather, gravity, these realities are something altogether different.  While we can have an idea of what has happened, and is happening and what will happen in the natural world, we cannot control it in the same way that we can control ourselves.

It’s fun to watch a baby figure out the difference, to figure out, for example, that it’s fingers are distinct from the rest of the world.  It is an early stage of the natural psychological development of a human being – the recognition of the difference between myself and everything else.  Slowly a child discovers that the world is not a blank slate that he or she can simply write on – that there are certain natural forces at work in the world that are mysterious and powerful and must be respected.  How many of you have worked so hard to help your children to figure out how to live in a world that is alive with the forces of hot and cold, gravity and momentum, light and darkness, viscosity and density, growth and decay, hunger and thirst, life and death.  The world teaches quickly teaches us that we are not in control of everything that happens around us.

This is the lesson of nature, if you will, the less of the natural kingdom. 
Now if this lesson is learned in a context in which we don’t know God or of his goodness and that the world is made for us in love, these forces can be viewed as antagonistic.  Laws of nature are an imposition and they threaten us.  And the natural response to nature when it is perceived as a threat is to do everything in our power to control nature and natural forces and to subdue them.  To bring the world into conformity with what we want because we don’t trust the world to care for us.  Instead, the world must be tamed and conquered – in our quest for survival against hostile forces we become slaves to the fear of survival.

But Jesus shows us the perspective of faith.  When we understand God’s goodness and that when he created the world he created it to be good, rather than our lack of control seeming to be a threat and liability, we understand that a world in God’s hands is in far better hands than our own.  And so rather than try to subdue the world and make it conform to what we want, we seek to understand the world around us and with trust we work to cooperate with the forces that are at work in the world.  You can only do that if you trust the maker, if you trust that God has created this world in love.  And that is why genuine Christian faith should always tend us toward good environmental stewardship. 
In recent years some have tried to argue that the Christian emphasis on human dignity and unique role tends to our domination of the natural world, but that is a horrible distortion of the message of Christianity.
In reality, our faith allows us not to be afraid to cooperate with the world because we know that it is good.  And this understanding of the natural world as good and as governed by forces that are good and come from God also encourages us to explore the world and learn about it.  To seek to understand more about God by seeing his handiwork.  To marvel at his creation, to thank him for his providential care, to praise him for the wonders that he works around us.

But there is also a more profound and important teaching in the parables that Jesus offers us today, a teaching that doesn’t have so much to do with the natural kingdom, but with the Kingdom of God. 
What he teaches us is that just as the natural kingdom is beyond our control and yet should not frighten us because it is in God’s hands and his control, so it is for the kingdom of Heaven.

In other words, God has put just as much care and effort into the project of our salvation, the work of God to save us and give us eternal life.  To the natural laws he has added divine commands –and similarly, they are not to threaten or to control or restrict us, but to give us happiness and freedom. 

Just as God has designed the earth to provide us with food and water and what we need to nourish and sustain our earthly bodies, so he also has given us the sacraments and the scriptures in order to nourish and sustain our souls. 

And so, just as we should not fear the mysterious forces and natural laws at work around us, so neither should we fear the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst.  Like the natural world, God’s grace cannot be controlled or tamed.  And so the response that gives us freedom and peace is cooperation, not fear or antagonism.   Jesus teaches us in the Gospel today: the seed sprouts and grows, we know not how.  Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.  Do we see our lack of control as a threat?  Or as an opportunity to turn to God with trust, asking him to help us to cooperate with his grace so that he can give us freedom and peace and happiness, not only in this natural kingdom, but one day too in the kingdom of heaven.

Sons and Daughters of the True and Living Sacrifice

Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2012

Sacrifice.  As we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi this weekend, all of our scriptural readings center very directly on the religious practice sacrificing for God.

For most of us, I imagine the idea might seem very foreign and strange.  Sprinkling people with the blood of bulls?  Where did Moses come up with that idea?

If we look at ancient religions, and at the Jewish religion in particular, we can see that sacrifices were offered to God for at least three reasons. 

The first was as expiation, or in an effort to restore justice when the community had sinned against God.  We can see many examples of this throughout the Old Testament, that a scapegoat is offered to God to appease him for the sins of the many.  And in our own day we embrace a certain sense of this in our judicial system – the idea that in order to restore justice, something must be taken away from the guilty party – in minor cases it is money, in more serious cases their freedom when we imprison them, and in some cases that Catholic teaching condemns, our government even seeks to restore justice by taking the life of the guilty party.

A second occasion when sacrifice was offered to God was to ratify a solemn agreement or covenant.  This is the kind of sacrifice that we see Moses offering in our first reading today,
a sacrifice that confirms the seriousness of a commitment being made to God.  In offering the sacrifice, the people are saying: if I break the commitment that I am making today, may what happened to those bulls happen to me.  It is a sacrifice made to seal a bond.  We might think of this same form of sacrifice in, for example, the practice of blood brothers, or think of the case of when bond is collected in order to hold someone to a court date.

And a third occasion was in praise of God – a sacrifice of praise.  The Old Testament is full of accounts of massive displays of ritual sacrifice made after great military victories or other triumphs. 
In gratitude for God’s favor, the desire was to show God their thankfulness by offering him the best of what they had.  It is a natural impulse that we all have toward someone who has been good to us, we want to repay them, to show our gratitude by offering them something that is dear to us in return.

Each of these themes of sacrifice, or occasions of sacrifice to God were a part of the Jewish faith, and they prefigured the sacrifice of Christ that we celebrate at Mass.  If you think of it, we hear all three sacrificial themes outlined in the prayers of the Mass each week, don’t we?  That the Mass is a sacrifice of expiation, offered for the forgiveness of sins.  That the Mass is a sacrifice that establishes a covenant and binds us into a communion with God and with one another.  And that the Mass is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that is offered to God on behalf of the whole Church.

But is something entirely new and different about the sacrifice of Christ that we offer at Mass compared to the sacrifices that prefigured his in the Old Testament.  And this is because the sacrifices of the Old Covenant were incomplete and unfulfilled, they were meant to lead to Christ and were not adequate in themselves.  The problem was this: everything that we might try to offer to God in sacrifice is already his.  This problem gradually came to the attention of the Hebrew people.

The prophets, like Isaiah, began to make the dilemma clear: thus says the Lord: “What do I care for the multitude of your sacrifices?  I have had enough of whole-burnt rams and fat of fatlings; In the blood of calves, lambs, and goats I find no pleasure.  When you come to appear before me, who asks these things of you?”  And we hear in Psalm 50 “For every animal of the forest is mine, beasts by the thousands on my mountains.  I know every bird in the heights; whatever moves in the wild is mine.  Were I hungry, I would not tell you, for mine is the world and all that fills it.  Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of he-goats?”

We have nothing of our own to offer.  Everything that we have has been given to us by God.  Even our most precious possession, our very life, is a gift from God.  And so the sacrifices that we are capable of making to God on our own, without his aid, are incomplete and lacking.  They are the equivalent of giving someone a gift that they have given to you in an attempt to thank them.  You can imagine how that might work at home: after an argument you wish to make amends: here, please take this gift back that you gave me at Christmas – really I mean it, I want you to have it.

Without Christ, our sacrifices for God are empty gestures striving toward completion, longing to be joined to a real sacrifice, to a real gift that can be authentically given to God, a gift that is perfect.  And the prophets realized that.  They saw that they needed a Messiah, they were in search a true high priest who could offer a true and authentic sacrifice to God, one that would truly, and not symbolically, gain expiation for our sins, that would truly, and not symbolically, ratify a new covenant, and that would fittingly praise and thank God for his gifts.

And the high priest who offers the perfect sacrifice is Christ.  Perfect because as God he can authentically offer the sacrifice of his life: because it is his in a way that our lives are not our own.  And so Jesus tells us in the Gospel that the Father does not take his life from him, he gives his life freely and completely on the cross in a way that none of us could because we are not the origin of our own life, we are not God incarnate.  But Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for us because he is not only God also human.  As he offered his life on behalf of all humanity, he gave all of us the ability to participate in his one eternal offering of his life, in his one, eternal offering of expiation, communion, and praise. 

That’s what happens at Mass – we are given the ability to participate in the one, eternal, offering of Christ that is the fulfillment and perfection of every sacrifice ever offered to God.  As members of Christ’s body through baptism, we are joined in his sacrifice, and we are given the work of uniting our sacrifices to his sacrifice, insofar as we take up our crosses with him, dying to ourselves with Christ and offering everything we have to the Father with him. 

So sacrifice is not an archaic or outmoded idea, a strange and foreign practice of ancient religions.  It is at the heart of who we are and what we do as Christians.  But the good news is that in Christ, we no longer bumble around struggling to offer things or animals or people in sacrifice to God that we hope will appease him and make him happy.  No, we are sons and daughters of the true sacrifice, the one, true, authentic sacrifice offered by the our high priest, Jesus Christ, a sacrifice of expiation, of communion, and of praise and thanksgiving.

Catholic Spirituality

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, 2012

Today as we celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, we have an opportunity to reflect a bit on the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, and on what that means for you and I who are members of the body of Christ that is animated by the Spirit.  In other words, we have the opportunity to reflect on the Church as a Spiritual reality, to speak of Catholic Spirituality. 

For a number of reasons, it seems that we don’t hear about Catholic spirituality or the Catholic spiritual life all that often.  I think that part of the reason is that we’ve been influenced by a culture that promotes a concept of the spiritual that is opposed to the religious or to the institutional.  How many times we hear people use that kind of reasoning when they attempt to rationalize not going to Mass: “Well, I don’t need to go to Mass to be a spiritual person.”  “Mass doesn’t do anything for my spiritual life.”

When we hear this kind of idea expressed, we might have a tendency to just react: “Well heck, if that’s what it means to be spiritual, then we had better not encourage that in our kids.  No spirituality for you.  You are going to church.  None of that pie in the sky spirit mumbo jumbo.  Next thing we know you’ll be smelling like patchouli and wearing crystals and getting piercings. 

But what a horrible loss for the Church, to lose the sense that who we are, at our most profound depths, is a spiritual reality, a spiritual body.  That what ties us together is not so much that we do the same things or believe the same things, although those are important expressions of our unity, but that we have the same life dwelling within us. 

So we must address this opposition of the religious to the spiritual: this common impression that the spiritual is opposed to a church, to an organization.  How can we, on this great feast of the Holy Spirit, articulate Catholic Spirituality, explain what it means to be both a religious and a spiritual people?

The first way, I think, is to make sure that we understand all of the sacraments and religious experience of the Church as profoundly spiritual in nature.  In other words, celebrating Mass on Sunday is the most spiritual thing that we do.  It can be easy to lose the deeper awareness that here as we come together, the Holy Spirit moves within us and around us with great power and freedom.  The Holy Spirit allows the word of God to enter into our hearts and minds, calling us to deeper conversion.  The Holy Spirit dwells is at work during the celebration of the Eucharistic prayer to consecrate the bread and wine so that they become for us Jesus’ body and blood and to consecrate us so that we become his body alive in the world.  The Holy Spirit is at work within us, helping us to receive and to respond to the gift of Jesus’ very life in the Eucharist. 

Now, all of this working of the Holy Spirit happens in mystery, invisibly and we have to work to become more perceptive and responsive to the life of the Spirit.  And so I think that it is important that we prepare for Mass well.  The Church asks us to fast for an hour, but I think it is also important to set aside for a time before Mass the concerns and distractions of daily life – to prepare ourselves mentally so that we can enter into what it is that we are doing.  It’s hard to make a shift from crazy life into Mass mode in 2 seconds flat – you end up sitting in the pew or up here, and maybe your body is still, but your mind is going 100 miles an hour.  Well we are not going to be as receptive to the Holy Spirit at work if we haven’t prepared a bit.  That is what Vatican II meant when it spoke of the active participation of the people – first and foremost it means an interior participation or openness to what the Holy Spirit is doing here: a receptivity.  That means that in general it is incredibly important that we nurture a tone of the sacred here – a tone that helps us remember that God is at work among us, that his Spirit is alive in this time that we spend together in a particular and unique way.  We have been brought here for a purpose – we are here to be fed and strengthened and given the grace that we need to be able to live holy, virtuous lives in the world. The challenge for each of us is to really take with due seriousness what is happening here at Mass or when we celebrate any sacrament.  That doesn’t mean being overly nervous or stiff or stern, but to be reflective and attentive to the deeper, spiritual movements and realities that are unfolding around us, trying to let go of distractions and worldly concerns.

But I think the greater challenge, for most of us, is figuring out how to retain an authentic Catholic spirituality for the rest of the week so that when we show up here we don’t feel like we’re landing on Mars.  To be alive in the spirit, truly alive in the Spirit, means that the relationship must endure beyond these walls.  Love is not true love if it is only alive when we are with the beloved.  No, true love persists, it is faithful, it pines for the beloved, is always reflecting on the beloved, remembering, scheming, meditating. 

How do we bring the life of the Holy Spirit with us from this place into the rest of our lives so that when we come here, to this upper room, we are drawing upon a relationship with the Holy Spirit that is ongoing and alive during the rest of the week?  Mass is meant to build and strengthen a people who are alive in the spirit – it is not meant to resurrect us from the dead.  That is confession.

And so on a feast like Pentecost it is a good opportunity to look at our interior lives, look at our prayer.  To recommit ourselves as we enter ordinary time to maintaining a daily prayer life, to going to confession on a regular basis, so that Mass can be the source and summit of our spiritual life, but not the totality of it.  Yes, without a daily spiritual regiment we can find some benefit at Mass, we can enjoy certain elements of the community and prayer, but the deep spiritual intimacy that the Lord wants to strengthen and grow within us is not be possible if we are not spending a substantial amount of time with him throughout the week.  Mass can only be a spiritual experience for spiritual people, and the way that you become a spiritual person is by spending time and effort learning to listen and cooperate with the promptings of the Holy Spirit during the rest of the week.

Our celebration of the Eucharist is meant to be an intensified encounter that happens in an existing and committed relationship of love between God and his son or daughter.  We are meant to come to Mass as spiritual people, men and women with active and flourishing spiritual lives.  St. Bernard of Clairveau spoke of a sacrament as a kiss from God.  But in order for a kiss to be authentic, in order for it to be beautiful, it must occur in a relationship where faithful love exists well before lips meet and well after they part.  And that means for us that we must strive each day to carve out and nurture a real and genuine spiritual life.  Because it is this life of the Spirit that gives meaning to everything else: that must be at the heart of every Catholic endeavor.  Religion is not true religion, is not authentic, unless it is rooted in spiritual lives: and that means men and women, you and me, each day in our homes and workplaces and community faithfully working to live with and in the Holy Spirit we have received in baptism.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.

In Christ We Can Be In Heaven by Love

Homily for Ascension Thursday, 2012

The sense that many of us might have in listening to the end of the reading today is one of departure, of goodbye, of loss.  Jesus rises up into the clouds after giving parting instructions to his disciples. 
And yet the Church teaches us on this day not to see the mystery of the Ascension so much as that of a departure as that of an arrival.  An arrival of the body of Christ, the humanity of Christ, in heaven.  And therefore an opportunity to reflect on our heavenly identity, the identity that we share as members of his body.

St. Augustine began his Ascension homily with these words: “Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him.”
“For,” he said, “just as he remained with us even after his ascension, so we too are already in heaven with him, even though what is promised us has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies.”

We already are in heaven?
I think of some of our parishioners who are suffering with various illnesses, or those who are out straight juggling a million things, or are working constantly – more than they want to – worried about finances.  All of the challenges of life in this world.  And yet St. Augustine says that we are already in heaven. 

But his explanation on this day, I think, can be an inspiration to us.  Listen to what he says:
“Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear.  He showed this when he cried out from above: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? and when he said: I was hungry and you gave me food.  Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him?  While in heaven he is also with us; and we, while on earth are with him.  He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love.  We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love.”

“In him, we can be in heaven by love.”
Jesus ascended into heaven today by the power that he has as God, St. Augustine tells us.
But we, with God’s grace, are given the mysterious and beautiful ability to ascend to heaven through our love.

That’s something to get your mind around – to think of your life as an ascension – a gradual attainment of heaven, a journey toward final union with God.  But that is God’s hope for each of us – that we, who are members of Jesus’ body, are a part of the ascension that we celebrate today.  That we are joined with countless others to Christ, our head, as he goes home to meet the Father.  That each day, through lives of generous service to God and neighbor, we ascend a little more, rise a little more to the full stature of our calling.

St. Paul encourages us in our work, as he encouraged the first Christians so many centuries ago:  “Brothers and sisters, I urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call.”

“In Christ, we can be in heaven by love.”  We all seek heaven – seek intimacy with God.  We seek peace and joy and fulfillment.  St. Augustine also said “Our souls are restless until they rest in you.”  That restlessness can be overpowering sometimes when we feel so limited or overwhelmed by the circumstances of daily life.  And so today is a day to celebrate because Christ has revealed to us that this life need not be merely a restless wait for the return of our savior.  That we can already join him as he ascends to the Father.  When we embrace the pathway of the cross, the pathway of sacrificial love, we are drawn nearer to him and so heaven draws nearer to us.

Can You Be A Good Christian and Not Be Religious?

Homily for the 7th Week of Easter, 2012

Yesterday you may have seen the article about religious practice in Maine in the Bangor daily news.  Religious practice and affiliation in New England is lower than anywhere else in the country, the article reported, and by quite a bit.  Among so many people, it seems that religion is seen as an imposition, a structure and even an obstacle to true and authentic spirituality. The attractiveness of religion, the blessing of religion, seems to be lost on the majority of people in Maine.  And even among those who claim some religious affiliation, I wonder how many of them would speak of their religion is something that they tolerate.  The less religion the better. 

Now this loss of the religious in our culture is especially problematic for us Catholics.  Because of all of the various religions that dot our theological landscape, the Catholic Church epitomizes, for better or for worse, religion.  When someone is worried about demons in the basement, they call the priest.  Even non-Catholics call the priest.  They want an exorcism, not a meditation session.  There is a reason that Dan Brown wrote his novels about mysterious and secret organizations within the Catholic Church, not the Unitarians.  And there is a reason why the social teaching of our Church, and not some huge mega church, sets off such harsh response and condemnation.  Our Catholic faith, our heritage, thoroughly and undeniably looks, smells, and sounds religious. 

So in response to the rejection of religion what do we do?  I suppose we could try to run away from our religious identity, trying to emphasize the ways that you can get away with being Catholic without being too religious, playing down the history of the Church, playing down the role of the magisterium, playing down the importance of the sacraments.  But once gutted of its religious aspects, what remains?  Just another human institution, another ideology, another form of entertainment.  And not a very good one at that.  The Catholic Church is only beautiful, only makes sense, as a religion.

And so at what point do we have to just come to terms with that:
yes, I am a part of a very old, very mysterious religion that is run by a bunch of old men who wear strange hats and who symbolically wash my feet each year as a sign of how they are to lead us.  And yes, we do believe very odd things, ancient mysteries about God and about angels and saints that have been handed on to us for generations.  And we don’t just have services, we come to Mass where we do all these ritual movements together, we sing strange songs and memorize and chant all of these rather cryptic prayers (especially after the new translation).  I mean, if we take a step back and look at ourselves for a moment, look at what we are doing – even without the Latin, without the incense, it is very clear what we are doing here: we are being religious.

And that is not a liability, it is a gift.  Because what is not always understood is that human beings are inherently religious.  Watch a baseball game or a concert – look at the common ritual.  Why all the movies with religious themes and symbols?  We are made to do things together, and particularly, we are made to worship God together.  And young people, even though they may have been told that they don’t need religion and that it is bad for them, are still attracted to it.  To be a part of something bigger than yourself.  To be united to others in meaningful activity. 

And so in response to our current religious crisis, the Church, rather than denying its religious identity, needs to begin once more to show the beauty and blessing of being a part of this religion, of being a religious person, an active member of the Church.  For decades now, the secular has been romanticized, it is time that we started to romanticize the religious.

To say things like “Why pray to God by yourself when you can do it with a bunch of other people in a beautiful place with beautiful music and using beautiful prayers that you didn’t even have to make up?”

Why settle for trite poems and country music songs at the funeral home, when your loved one could be prayed for and treated with the honor of a son or daughter of the living God at a funeral Mass? 

Why the stress of wedding planners who want to make the perfect picture on some remote beach where you get sand in everything and no one can hear what you’re saying, when you can come to a church that was built by your ancestors to shelter you from the elements so that you can focus on the love that God is blessing between you on that day?

And furthermore, when did a walk in the woods ever help a poor person in need?  When did being a good person ever build hospitals and schools and homeless shelters?  And when did Jesus say that that’s what he wanted for us: to just be good people?  No, he never said that.  He said he wanted us to be one, one with each other and one with him, just as he is with the Father.  Not one in some vague spiritual sensation of good feelings, but one in truth.  That means one in action, one in thought, one in word, one in deed.  United to the vine as branches, members of the flock he shepherds, stones in the building that he raises, sons and daughters in the family of believers.  A religion, a beautiful religion – so human, and yet so yearning for the divine.  Marked by the grittiness and earthiness of a lived tradition handed on by countless millions of real, human hands over two thousand years. 

"Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one.”  Jesus wants us to be together – and not just as a penance.  He wants us to find joy and meaning in worshiping him together, in praying together.  He wants us to be able to share in the excitement of learning more about our faith, to encourage one another in deepening our knowledge of the divine.   He wants us to reach out to help the suffering and the needy with others by our side, sharing in the blessings that come from caring from those who are less fortunate.  To use the gifts that he has given us together, building upon one another as we are being built up into his body, the Church. 

Can you be a good person and not be religious?  I don’t know, perhaps.  Can you be a good Christian and not be religious?  No.  You can’t baptize yourself.  You can’t give yourself communion.  You can’t write your own Bible.  You can’t bury yourself.  And thank God.  We can do it together with him. 

Courage and Peace, Dialogue and Conviction

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, 2012

This is my commandment: love one another, as I love you.
No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

In recent months the culture wars just have been heating up, and that shows no real signs of abating as we look ahead to such a controversial presidential election and referendums.  And our Church, we as Catholics, have been kind of thrust right into the middle of things.  I’m amazed at how many politicians are making references to their faith in justifying their support of certain policies, on both sides of the isle.  Not the constitution, or some other civil document, but the bible, or even the teachings of the saints. And I think that’s because politicians know, as we all know, that faith is an important motivator for so many of us.  That it gets right to the heart of who we are and the choices that we make.

But this whole trend is worrisome for the Church, I think. 
The teachings of the Church are being interpreted increasingly as political statements.  So if you emphasize one set of teachings, you are assumed to be with one party, if you emphasize another, you are thought to be with the other party.  And it’s dividing our church, it’s dividing the people from one another, the bishops from their people, women religious from their bishops, priests from everyone – just lots of division.  We’re right in the middle of a giant game of tug of war, and the Church is getting pulled in every direction.  Heck, even moms are controversial topic just in time for mother’s day!

What does Jesus tell us in the Gospel today: remain in my love. 
And you know, it would be nice if we could just pretend that his words to us mean that we can just flee from this troubled time.  Hole up in the house or with people who are easy to be around.  Get more pets – sometimes they are easier to talk to than people.

But we are called to more than that.  We have the duty to live out our faith even in the midst of these polarized and trying times.  We have the responsibility to live as men and women of courage and peace, of dialogue and conviction. 

Maybe we don’t hear those words together too often: courage and peace, dialogue and conviction.  But that’s what it is to be Catholic, I think.  To be rooted in the truth, but rooted at the same time in love of others.

You and I cannot pretend that there is no right and wrong, that there is no such thing as good and evil.  Jesus tells us in the gospel, we must follow his commandments if we are to remain in his love.  It  is a task of the utmost seriousness, to do what is right and good and holy. 

But chief among those commandments is the command to love.  And so that means we must be willing to lay down our lives.  Not just willing, but perhaps we might say that we have the responsibility to practice each day in little ways that effort of dying to ourselves for the sake of others.  To work on living the virtues.

We have, at this unique time, the opportunity to show this unique form of courageous love to our culture:  not to be silent when people are saying things that are not true or are misleading or wrong, but at the same time not to resort to power tactics, to sink into the muck of political rhetoric and name calling.  And to speak more with our actions than with our words.  To let others tweet and twitter, to focus more on concrete acts of service and charity.  To recognize that in our cynical culture, words are increasingly of little value.  In order to be authentic witnesses, we must speak first with our choices, with our actions.  And our primary witness, as men and women of faith, must be through lives of faithful and generous service.  To be known for our kindness to others, particularly within our families and with those who are suffering or alone.  To be sure that we are reaching out to those in need,  taking care of the stranger.  In short, we must be willing to embrace a sacrificial way of life, to love others in the way that Christ has shown us.

You can’t love people you don’t know.  So I hope as you look at this summer, you and your family will work to get out of the house more.  To reverse the trend that seems toward greater and greater isolation and division from one another.  Turn off the television, step away from the computer.  Make the extra effort to go out, to leave the comfort and security of your home and to enter into the world that God places before us, a world that is in need of our Christian witness.

St. John encourages us in our second reading today:
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God.

A Jesus Follower. Period.

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter, 2012

I recently came across an article about an accomplished protestant preacher who was diagnosed with Lou Gerigh’s disease a number of years ago.  The prognosis, that he had 3 to 5 years to live, sent him into a profound crisis. 

“I went from 100 miles an hour to zero miles an hour overnight,” he said. “That was a shock to my system.”

His response to the disease surprised him.  “I thought that if I knew I was going to die, I would really read the Bible and if I really was going to die, I would really pray,” he said. “I found the opposite to be true. I could barely read the Bible and I had great difficulty praying. You get so overwhelmed with your circumstances, you lose perspective.”

He spent months floundering.  Without realizing it, he had built his identity, his life, on his work, on his ministry.  And so losing the ability to minister meant that he felt that he was losing himself.  Living a hundred mile an hour life he had rooted his life in activities that would not endure, he had set up idols that came crashing down around him when his health failed.

Fortunately, with much prayer and interior work, he has come through his identity crisis.  And he made a comment that struck me and I think resonates with our scriptures today.  “I am no longer a preacher,” he said. “Today, I would say I am a Jesus follower. Period.  Having a terminal illness forced me into a situation where I grew in understanding of what it means to obey Jesus.”

A Jesus follower.  Period.  “Children,” St. John tells us in our second reading, “let us love not in word or speech, but in deed and truth.”

In truth.  What does it mean to be a Jesus follower in truth, not just in word and speech? 
St. John tells us: to really live with and in Christ, actively working to love him and follow his example so that his Spirit will be alive in us.  To be branches thoroughly attached to the vine.  To have the life of the vine flowing through us.  That’s what makes us Christians and makes us  into a Church: that we are united to Christ.

If preachers and priests like myself are always at risk of losing sight of this profound truth of our identity, must it not certainly be the case that we must all be on guard? 

Why do you think the Church insists that we come to Mass on Sunday?  In order to fill the pews?  In order to build institutional strength?  To prop up the offertory? 

No, no, no.  Because the Eucharist is the primary way that Christ unites us with himself, that he gives his life to us.  They way that he feeds us with his body and blood is exactly like the way that the sap flows through a vine into branches.  And as his life flows into us, it is meant to transform us and to help us to reflect the image of his son in the unique way that we are made to be Christ-like.  We are not called to believe in Christ so much as we are called to live in him – with our whole mind, body, and soul.  All of us are made to be transformed by his life and to be more and more each day animated by a new life – to die to ourselves and to rise to new life in Christ. 

Christ is to be our life – inside out, top to bottom.  He is the pattern in which we are made, and he is the measure by which we are measured. 

And so we cannot say “If you do this and this and this and this – if you follow these rules, if you live like this person, if you belong to this group, if you accept these teachings, then you will be a bonified Jesus follower.”

The definition of the true Christian, of the true Catholic, is one in whom the life of Christ dwells deeply and fully and beautifully and freely – one who is truly himself or herself because he or she is truly one with Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity.

Discernment is Not a Personality Quiz

Homily on the 4th Sunday of Easter, 2012

I’m not sure if you’ve ever filled out one of those online personality quizzes before?  They have a million of them now on facebook, or whatever.  You answer a series of questions – “I like to be in charge” Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree.  “I generally try to be helpful to the people around me” Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree…. 
And then, after finishing twenty or thirty or so questions you are told that you are particular personality type.  And you can put that personality type on your wall in facebook so that everyone.  Sometimes it does that automatically, as I found out a few years ago.  Your personality type: hell on wheels.  What?!  And of course: “If you are unhappy with the result, click here to take the quiz again.”  Click!  Quick, answer the questions – this time trying to think happy thoughts.  “Your personality type: Mr. whine and complain.”  Well what kind of personality options do they have on this thing anyway?  “Life of the Party” “Computer Geek” “Mad Max” “Codependent Copycat.” 
Here I was, hoping for insight to the question of my being, who I am, who God made me to be, how I fit into the world – and that desire was ruthlessly twisted by this manipulative online game in order to entertain my virtual friends.  If it weren’t for the fact that most of them succumbed to the same quiz and now are sporting similar epitaphs on their walls, it would be truly humiliating.

I remember back when I was in high school, at a youth ministry camp we spent all kinds of time on a more sophisticated personality quiz, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.  I imagine many of you are familiar with it.  I remember when I was getting ready to leave for the seminary and a close friend of the family who was not Catholic found out.  He was quite disturbed: “But you are an INFP!  You will be miserable in a world dominated by ESTJs!” 

It is a profound human desire: the desire to know who we are and where we stack up in this world.  To know our vocation in life.  This weekend is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations.  And one of the things that we talk about all the time is the importance of promoting a culture of vocations, a culture of discernment in our Catholic parishes, in our community.  I think that part of the way that we can work to do that, is by contrasting a healthy discernment culture with this kind of unhealthy labeling and personality typing that is so common in our culture today.
The personality typing, or the other forms of personality labeling that we see so often today prey on the natural desire in the human person to know who he or she is.  Unfortunately, we are many times too quick to give to some stupid test or some seemingly objective source the power to suggest to us who we are based on incredibly superficial characteristics or answers to superficial questions.  And when we do so, we allow our desire to know ourselves and our destiny, to be in control of our lives, to drive us to place in the hands of another a power that only God should have, the power to judge us and to give us a vocation.  Probably each of us has met someone who has gotten caught up in this mess.  They have given over to a person or a seemingly objective test the ability to categorize them.  “Well I can only do this because I am an _________ sort of person.”  Fill in the blank. 

But  the reality is that no man made category, no personality type, can ever describe a human person.  Sometimes categories and types can be helpful, sometimes… but very rarely, I think.  Far too often they instead become obstacles, limiting factors that close us off from the freedom that God wants us to have in discerning his will, discerning our vocation, who he made us to be.  We end up becoming far too preoccupied with ourselves, with our own strengths and limitations – with naval gazing.  And we lose our grasp on the complexity and the mystery of the truth about who we are.  We lose touch with the freedom that we are given in Christ to work out our vocation with God.

Discerning a vocation is an entirely different process from filling out a personality quiz.  First of all, it never ends.  You don’t come up with some neat answer.  You are a __________.  God always leaves us with a certain mystery about who we are and about who he is and about his will for us.  It is always somewhat disconcerting.  But that makes sense.  Because a vocation is not a role or a job or a category that we are to choose or accept.  It is a pathway that we are invited to walk as we seek to live out our baptismal call to holiness.  It is the way that we are made to reflect God, the way that God’s life is meant to unfold within us.  And so it is mysterious and beyond our ability to comprehend or control.  And we never cease that discernment.

And the way that we grow in our understanding of our vocation is rather counter intuitive.  It is precisely not by spending our days looking at the intricacies of our own personalities and gifts and talents.  We risk becoming completely self absorbed and deluded when going down that path.  Most of us tend to be horrible judges of ourselves and our needs and our strengths and weaknesses.  We tend to try to live someone else’s lives, to live the life we want rather than the life we’ve been given.
 
No, to grow in the understanding of our vocation, we must grow in our understanding of Jesus Christ.  He is the one who reveals us to ourselves.  His life acts like a mirror – a perfectly clear mirror.  When we pray, when we come to know him and speak with him, he reveals to us who we are.  He is our good shepherd, he knows his sheep better than they know themselves.  He made us, we are made in his image and likeness.  He knows us authentically, from the inside out, and it is only in knowing him that we can know ourselves authentically. 

And so to discern a vocation is not a process of isolated self awareness, nor is it a matter of following your dreams.  It is a matter of a mysterious dialogue, a discussion with the good shepherd.  Of rooting our lives on the stone that was rejected by the builders but that must become the cornerstone of our lives. 

We are made to build our lives on that rock of Christ’s life in us, even in a world that tries to pretend that fulfillment and happiness come from some sort of individual self-awareness and ego driven pursuit of your dreams. That is a true culture of vocations – a culture that speaks to Christ, that asks him to show us who we are and what we are made to be.

You are Witnesses of These Things

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter

You are witnesses of these things. 
A witness: it is one of the most important titles that was given to the first Christians and which continues to be given to us.  Witnesses testify to what they have seen and what they have heard.  They give testimony.

John’s Gospel and letters speak often of the testimony of both Christ himself and of his followers.  Jesus tells his followers that he testifies to the truth, that he testifies to the will of the Father, to what he has seen and heard.  And those who follow him, Jesus taught, continue this same activity – they are witnesses, they testify to what they have seen and heard, they testify to the truth.

It is interesting that in Greek the word for testimony and for witness are the same in origin: martyrion.  Martyr has now come to mean one who gives the life for the faith, but the origin of the word was not so bloody – one who gives testimony, one who is a witness to the faith. 

And after the empty tomb, after the road to Emmaus, Jesus begins to make clear to his disciples, and therefore to us, that we are to be these martyrs, these witnesses.  Most of us are not martyrs by blood – our witness need not cost so much.  But we are all called to the same faithfulness in our witness.

It is a testimony that must continue in every age, in every place until the Lord comes again – we continue the very testimony of Christ himself about God’s loving plan of salvation.  We are called to be witnesses to his love, to embody in our lives, in our choices, a clear testimony to God’s life within us.  A clear testimony to the risen Christ whose salvation has transformed and redeemed and continues to redeem. 

How easy it is to forget, I think – that we are on the stand.  That others look to us.  Being Christian is a public stance, a public position.  The world looks at us, we are – all of us – in the court of public opinion.  It might be harder for someone who wears a collar around his neck to forget that, but the truth is no less real for any of us.  In fact, I wish every Christian had the opportunity to be so aware of their public witness.  You know, it makes you think twice before you start speeding around or cut someone off.  Or when someone asks you for money.  Or if you’re tempted to get some expensive thing you don’t need.  It’s a bit of a check: “Wait - I’m a priest, I better think about the witness I’m giving here.”  But that should be something we all say to ourselves on a regular basis: “Wait, I’m a Christian, I’m a Catholic, I better think about the witness I’m giving here.”

Because whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we represent Christ in our world.  We are his witnesses.  We testify to the truth of his teaching by the way that we live our lives. 

And so when we do good, it is not only for our own salvation, our own benefit.  It is testimony, it is a witness to our faith and to the life of Christ that dwells within us.  And when we fail, we not only damage our relationship with God, we become false witnesses and compromise the credibility of the Gospel in our world.

It is humbling and sobering to realize that much of the credibility of Christ’s teaching rests on our witness, our testimony.  He has chosen us, he has sent us here, to Bangor Maine, to be his witnesses.  To testify through our choices to the truth of God’s redemption and salvation at work in the world.

May God help us to be good and faithful witnesses. Not so much within these walls where it is fairly easy, but in our homes, in our workplaces, in our community.  In a world that hungers and thirsts for Christ’s redemption, that wants to believe it is possible, but that needs faithful witnesses in order to be convinced of the truth.

The Witness of Risen Wounds

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter, 2012

Thomas – doubting Thomas.
Many have said that we live in a disillusioned age.
We have seen so many of those who have been held up in the public eye come crashing down – from politicians to sports figures to religious figures – so many highly publicized failures and deceptions have perhaps made us a little on the jaded side of things.  And so the encounter of St. Thomas is important for us.

We forget that before the resurrection, when the Lord lay in the tomb, his body beaten and broken, it not only felt like defeat to the disciples, but it probably also felt like they had been horribly misled.  The Lord Jesus had told them that he would usher in a new age.  He had told them that he was going to make all things new.  He told them that God’s kingdom would prevail.

And then all of that came crashing down – and not in a spectacular final finale – but in the most humiliating and miserable way imaginable.  He was crucified like a common criminal. 
He did not even put up a strong defense.  He did not respond to his accusers.  He was beaten, heckled, led by a mob to a hill and crucified between two thieves.  And even there – no eloquent speech from the cross, no long, drawn out battle – he asked for something to drink and gave up his life quickly, dying before the other two criminals. 

It cannot be overstated how much the disciples must have felt abandoned, misled, and disillusioned. 
And we might imagine St. Thomas’ response: “Well I am done with all of that.  I was taken.  I don’t know what I was thinking – how was I so naïve as to think that Jesus would usher in a new kingdom?  To spend three years wandering around with this carpenter from Nazareth who claimed to be God’s son?  He deluded us all.  I’m going to just go back to my life as it was before – from now on I will trust the things that I know.  And what are those things?  Well, you’ve got to just be concerned with the here and now – not fairytales.  Take care of your own.  Try to live a good life.  Work hard.  Make something of yourself.  Be a good neighbor.”

Maybe that’s why Thomas was not with the 12 on that day that the Lord first appeared.  Maybe he thought he was getting busy living, moving on, trying to put the past behind him. 

In fact, when he saw the disciples show up at his door, I wonder if he was happy to see them.  And I wonder if he was all that happy to hear their news. “We have seen the Lord!  He has been raised!”  More delusion.  Couldn’t they just let it go? 
They had been misled; it was time to move on.  Enough of this nonsense.  Unless they could show him that Jesus was going to help with putting daily bread on the table, forget about it.  He was not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.  He had been down that road before.  He did not need a messiah that desperately.  "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."  A disillusioned man, a man who felt he’d been burned.

There are many of them in our world today.  We know many of them, some of us may even put ourselves in that category from time to time.  People who have given up on the big ideals, on promises of salvation, on miraculous endings.  People who would rather not believe and be proven wrong, than believe and be disappointed.  People too proud to risk being thought gullible.  Who will never bank on an unproven conviction, never step out on a limb, never hazard an opinion, lest it come back to bite them.

But the irony of Thomas, the irony of the disillusioned man is this:  that even as he may have accused the others of escaping from the real world in their thoughts of the Risen Christ, it very well may have been Thomas who was the one escaping.  And escaping into a dead end: disillusioned with the spiritual life, how easy it is to turn to a life consumed with the things of this world: work, financial security, hobbies, and recreation.

When our hopes for heaven were dashed, we take the second best option and embarked upon the task of building our own proxy heaven on earth.  That’s what happens.  When all that remains is the mundane, we are quickly consumed by earthly concerns.  Soon, we are headed down the path of spiritual disillusionment that our culture knows all too well: the path of isolation, workaholism, anxiety, bitterness, fatigue, and ultimately despair.

That is inevitably what happens when we try to create heaven, when we try to raise ourselves from the dead.  That’s what happens when we lose the faith and hope and trust that God loves us and has the power to raise us up and give us eternal life.  Spiritual disillusionment leads to complete disillusionment.  When we lose faith in God’s power to save us and bring us new life, we necessarily begin to embrace a culture of death.

So what does Christ tell Thomas and tell us?
"Put your finger here and see my hands,
 and bring your hand and put it into my side,
 and do not be unbelieving, but believe."

Christ cures Thomas’ disillusioned heart, and he wants to cure every disillusioned heart by showing our hearts his wounds.
They are the proof of his resurrection from the dead.
Proof that light can come from the darkness.
Proof that pain and suffering can find healing.
Proof that sins can be forgiven.
Proof of the reality of eternal life and the source of our hope to one day be able to find that life with Christ in heaven.

He shows Thomas, and he shows each of us, that Christians cannot be a disillusioned people, that we who are the Body of Christ are called to continue the witness of his body, the witness of his risen wounds, the witness of the resurrection, when new life conquered the darkness of sin and death.

We Christians must refuse to escape down the path of worldly self-indulgence and anxieties, but instead embrace the work of the Christian disciple: to show another path, the life giving path of faith in Christ, risen from the dead.

Alleluia!

Homily for Easter Sunday, 2012

Alleluia!  We have finished our Lenten observance and we can speak this great word of praise once more.  Alleluia!  My goal in this homily is to see how many times I can say it.  Set the world record.  Because there is no word that more adequately describes or sums up Easter, what we are doing today, than Alleluia.

It’s one of the few words that we can say and hear knowing that Christ himself spoke and heard the exact same word. Not a translation – but the very sound of the word – maybe there was a bit more of a ha to it, but Alleluia is a Hebrew word that has come down to us untranslated for 3000 years. 
Actually, alleluia is a word made up of two Hebrew words:  Hallel and Yah.  Yah, is short, an abbreviated form of God’s holy name, Yahweh, a name so holy that the Hebrew people did not dare to speak it fully.  And Hallel – Hallel is often translated into the English word “to praise.” 
But Hallel has a more complex meaning.  It really has more of the sense of a joyous song or shout of praise, a glorious boasting in God.  It speaks of a joyful frenzie, almost – in fact, it was a word sometimes used to describe someone who acted madly and foolishly.  A sense of glee, a sense reckless abandon. 

That’s the Hallel – the state of one overtaken by a joy so full, so overpowering, that he or she cannot remain silent, cannot remain still, cannot remain alone – a joy that must reach out to others, that must be expressed as loudly and fully and exuberantly as the human body is capable. 
We get a sense of the Hallel when watching the scene of a sports team that has just won a great championship, or an army that has just won a great battle, or a whole people when a despot has been overthrown.  It is the cry of a victorious people, a profoundly moving and unifying experience – it is what celebration is meant to be.

And that is why we, who bear the name of Christ, who are his disciples and followers sing the hallel today.  Because it is not some distant savior who has risen from the grave, it is not an unknown or uncaring God who now lives and reigns forever. 

It is the Lord Jesus Christ!  He has revealed himself as our brother, taken on our flesh and blood, called us his own, making us his brothers and sisters.  He is our healer and defender -  who gave his life over for us, who battled the powers of hell for us and faithfully loved us to the end.  Our God – not just any God – no, our God, the one who we are rooting for and who roots for us - who has come into our world and done battle with the powers of hell in order to free us from our sins.  And today he has won the victory.  Today his plan is accomplished.  He rises, victorious from the dead – the gates of hell, the chains of death, the stain of sin – obliterated.  The tyrant of this world has been overthrown – our savior has freed us. 

And because his flesh is our flesh, his blood our blood, His victory is our victory.  His resurrection is the promise of our resurrection, his glory the pledge of our future glory. 

Alleluia.  Today we celebrate the greatness of our God, the genius and beauty of his loving plan of redemption.  We set aside the turmoil, the strife and struggle of this world, our eyes lifting heaven-ward in praise and thanksgiving.  Not fleeing from the darkness or escaping the trials of our time, but remembering for a moment the bigger picture – the eternal truth revealed to us in Christ.  That today good triumphs over evil – our good, our hope, our salvation.

And so it is not only our duty, it is not only our salvation, it is not only right or just – it is our joy to give God thanks and praise for the wonders that he has done for us.  Alleluia.

Faced with the Cross We Pray

Homily on Good Friday, 2012

Fight or flight – the two natural responses to evil, to pain, to sin, to suffering.  We see so many of those around Christ respond in one of these two ways as he endures his passion and death.  Most of his disciples simply flee.  Peter at first draws his sword and strikes a servant, but then flees as well.
It seems that they were pretty clear on the fact that Christ did not want them to revolt, that his was not a kingdom of earthly power and might.  That  violence was not the response to evil for those who would follow in his footsteps.

So rather than fight, they fled.  But that was not Jesus’ desire either.  Beginning at table with them at the last supper, and then intensely in the garden, he told them and showed them by his example the way to respond to the assaults of the evil one: to pray.  At table with them he prayed.  In the garden, he prayed.  In the cell we can only imagine that he spent the night in prayer.  And on the cross he prayed.  His dying breath was a prayer.

Neither to fight or to flee.  But to fix one’s whole being, to the extent possible, on God and on his will.  To place one’s whole heart and mind and will in the hands of our Lord. 
There is no other adequate response to evil, to sin.  In a pitched battle against evil and suffering we will lose.  And death and suffering will follow us no matter how much we might try to flee from them.  Jesus shows us that our fallen world can only find redemption, can only be freed from sin and death one way: united to God and his will.  And the way that we are united to God is in prayer.

In a few moments we will turn to God in prayer, in the Universal Prayer that takes on particular importance on Good Friday each year.  We turn our hearts to him in solemn prayer, and in doing so we follow his command and his example of what to do when we are faced with the cross.  We pray.  In fact, I think we could say that we venerate the cross twice tonight.  First in our prayer, and second as we, in procession, in action.

In our prayer, we are most closely united to Christ at this moment, at the moment of his death.  In fact Christ continues to pray through us to the Father from the Cross of this altar each time we celebrate the Eucharist – that God’s will may be done.  In our communion in the prayer of Christ we are united to Mary and the women at the foot of the cross, and those disciples who, throughout the centuries have faced the cross of evil and suffering in our world in prayer.

Facing the cross we neither fight nor flee, we pray.  May God give us the grace to be faithful, to keep watch, united to his Son in prayer on behalf of our world this day.