Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Liturgy

  • Saturday of the Second Week of Christmas

    Saturday of the Second Week of Christmas

    Today’s readings

    As we get ready for the solemnity of the Epiphany tomorrow, we actually have one of the three traditional Epiphany stories in today’s Gospel reading.  We always think about the three Kings as the Epiphany story, and that is, indeed, the first and most remembered of them.  But there are two other stories of the Epiphany in our tradition.  The second is what we will celebrate on Monday: the Baptism of the Lord, and the third is what we read today, the Wedding Feast at Cana.

    You’ll recall that the word “Epiphany” means a “manifestation:” a manifestation of who Jesus is and what he came to do.  In this story of the Epiphany, Jesus, having gathered his disciples and on the verge of his ministry, changes water into wine.  But we know the symbolism of these things.  Whenever we see water in the Scriptures, the Church thinks of Baptism, and whenever we see wine in the Scriptures, the Church thinks of the Eucharist, the blood of Christ.  Here gallons of water, set aside for washing – another baptismal image – are miraculously turned into the best wine ever, poured out in superabundance to quench the thirst of those who gather for a feast.  Clearly these are Eucharistic images for us.  In this Epiphany, Jesus is revealed as the One who provides life-giving blood, the best wine ever, for all those who are baptized, all those who follow him in faith.

    What we need to take from this Epiphany story is that God wants us to be Epiphany as well.  God wants to use us in some way to reveal his love and grace to others.  It doesn’t have to be a big and incredible experience.  It might just be doing, as Saint Therese of Liseaux used to say, little things with great love.  Then others can see Christ at work in you and me.  Then we can be Epiphany and shine the bright light of Christ’s love in a world that is very dark and ponderous and weary.  How do we do that?  Mary’s instruction is all that we need to hear: “Do whatever he tells you.”

  • Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    Mary is the mother of God the Word, according to his human nature.

    That’s the formula that my Christology teacher in seminary, Sister Sarah, made sure that we memorized about the nature of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s relationship with her son, Jesus.  I’ve been thinking a lot about motherhood in these days.  These are some of the reflections that have led up to my celebration of this great feast:

    You might know that my sisters and I have been taking care of my ailing mother, pretty much 24/7, for the last few months.  It’s difficult in many ways, especially emotionally, but it’s also a blessing.  We have the holy opportunity to spend these last moments, however many or few of them we may be granted, with her.  She who has been mother to us for all our lives now requires some of the care she selflessly offered to us.  Jesus certainly knew that his own mother would require the same when he gave her as mother to John the Beloved at the foot of the Cross.

    Also in these days that we mourn the loss of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, I was reminded he spent his final days at the monastery Mater Ecclesiae, Mother of the Church.  Mary was no doubt a special consolation to him in his last days, he whose devotion and dependence on her for all of his seventy-one years of priesthood was well-known.

    My other reflection this week was remembering my trip to Rome several years ago, and seeing, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the wonderful sculpture of the Pieta by Michelangelo.  You can’t help being taken by the sculpture as you enter the basilica, and looking on the sorrowful face of our Blessed Mother, knowing the sorrow that every mother has when she loses a child.

    And so we come to this great feast of Mary, whose cooperation with God’s plan for her, made possible the salvation of all the world.  She who was full of grace, cooperated with that grace, and loved the Child entrusted to her all the way to the Cross.  She was mother to Jesus, mother to his disciples, and mother of a Church that would be born at his Resurrection.  She embraced true motherhood from that fiat to the angel in her home at Nazareth, to the empty tomb, and beyond.  She continues to mother the church and us fledgling disciples as we make our way to our true home in heaven one day.

    So today, on the octave day of Christmas, which we still celebrate as Christmas Day, we are blessed to remember the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God. We do this because we all know that Mary’s faith made possible our own lives of faith and even more wonderfully made possible the salvation of the whole world and everyone ever to live in it. She was the one, chosen by God, to see the Gospel come to life before her very eyes. She intimately beheld the Word, she held our God in her faithful and loving hands, treasuring each moment in her heart.

    So Mary’s faith is a model for us, a goal which we disciples must strive to attain.  God’s call will often take us into unknown territory, as it did for our Blessed Mother, but in faith we are called to say “yes” to his plan for us anyway.  God’s call will often call for sacrifice and even sorrow in the short term, as it did for our Blessed Mother, but we are still asked to give all that we have.  Mary did that without a second thought or a moment’s regret.  How willing are we?  Can we take a leap of faith, make a fiat, and cooperate with God’s work in our lives and in the world?  We have no way of knowing where that might lead us; just like Mary, that might lead to heartache and sorrow; but just like Mary, it may lead to redemption beyond belief, beyond anything we can imagine.

    So, Mary is the Mother of God, and Mary is also the Mother of the Church, leading its members to her son Jesus and to faith in God.  She is mother of priests, caring for us in a special way and interceding for the faithful work of our calling.  She is the mother of mothers, interceding for them and showing them how to nurture faith in their children.  She is the mother of the faithful, showing us how to cooperate fully with God’s plan.  She is mother of Scripture scholars and those who just love and study and proclaim the Scriptures, having seen the Word unfold before her and treasuring it in her heart.  She is the mother of disciples, having been the first of the disciples and the most dedicated of them all.  And she is the Mother of Mercy, who gave birth to our Savior and birth to our eternity.  She is the Mother of God, and our mother, and we cannot sing our Christmas carols without singing our thanksgiving for her.  We honor her faith and example today, and we ask for her intercession for our lives, for our families, for our Church and for our world.

    Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

  • Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

    Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

    Today’s readings

    Our Liturgy today gives us some appropriate readings for the last day of our calendar year. We have the end and the beginning in the Scriptures, just as our minds and hearts are reflecting on the end of this year and the beginning of the year to come.

    In the reading from the first letter of Saint John, we are told that we know it is the last hour because of the appearance of the antichrists.  We don’t have to worry about who the antichrist is, we are told, because there are so many of them: those who have rejected the faith and live according to their own whims.  If Saint John saw many of them in his own day and age, we certainly can see plenty of them now, can’t we?  We live in a society that is, as Saint John says, “alien to the truth.”  We have to battle the antichrist element around us all the time.

    But if the end of all things is bad news, the beginning is Good News.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.  We don’t have to worry about battling the antichrist element on our own, because as our Gospel says, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  That is what we continue to celebrate on this Christmas Day: God did not abandon us to the power of death and darkness, but instead came to dwell with us as a human being, taking on our fallenness, embracing our brokenness, and redeeming all that is anti-Christ in and around us.

    Today we realize one of the essential truths of our Church’s theology: the already and the not-yet. Because Christ has taken flesh and been born among us, we are already redeemed. But it is not yet perfect, because we can see so much anti-Christ around us, and even, sometimes, deep inside us. In the wonder of the Incarnation, Christ, God the Word, has revealed God’s glory to us. We long for the day when we can behold that glory face to face.

  • Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent: O Key of David

    Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent: O Key of David

    Today’s readings

    We humans put up all sorts of barriers.  Some are necessary, like the walls of prisons, or the sound barriers along a highway.  Some are sad, like the old wall that used to separate East and West Germany.  Others are exasperating, like the wall along the frontier into Mexico.  The physical barriers that we accept every day keep us safe and warm, define our space, and keep us in our place.  Not sure if that’s always good or bad, but there it is.

    Perhaps the saddest barriers that we put up, though, are the spiritual barriers that keep us from God, or the spiritual barriers that are intended to keep God from being God, or are intended to force God to do what we would want.  How often do we want God to answer our prayers in our own way, or not at all?  Are we sometimes afraid of what God would do if we really let him open the dark places of our lives?  Are we like the Israelites who could not bear to even look at Moses lest they be enlightened by the radiance of God at work in him?  The spiritual barriers that we put up as some kind of laughable defense against God are heartbreaking, because they succeed only in defeating the outpouring of God’s mercy on us in this time and place.

    During these final days of Advent, during Vespers or Evening Prayer, we pray what are called the “O Antiphons” which explore some of the prophetic titles of the coming King.  So today, for all of us locked up inside barriers of our own making, the “O Antiphon” prays:

    O Key of David, O royal Power of Israel controlling at your will the gate of heaven: come, break down the prison walls of death for those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death; and lead your captive people into freedom.

    In today’s Gospel Mary found out that nothing can stand in the way of God’s plans, that the Key of David can even unlock the barren womb of her cousin Elizabeth to provide a herald’s voice for the coming of our Savior.  Perhaps today we can allow the Key of David to unlock the dark places of our hearts so that we can see a miracle happening in our own lives too.

  • Saturday of the Third Week of Advent: O Wisdom

    Saturday of the Third Week of Advent: O Wisdom

    I know that list of names can be daunting to process.  It might be hard to figure out the reason we even proclaim it.  But I love it!  It always strikes me that this list of characters, which is basically the human family tree of our Lord, is so much like any of our families’ history.  Forty-two generations of the pilgrim people Israel led by people of greatness, and, well, people of something else.  Some of them were heroic like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judah and to some extent David and Solomon.  But some of them were pretty wicked, especially Manasseh, whose wickedness in shedding innocent blood incurred God’s wrath such that he allowed the Babylonian captivity that took place during Jeconiah’s reign.  So we have forty-two generations of saints and sinners, great men and flawed men, all leading up to the Incarnation of Christ, who was the only remedy to the cycle of sin that spiraled all through the story.

    Today we begin the more intense period of Advent that extends from December 17th through the morning of Christmas Eve. During this time, the Liturgy leads us to yearn all the more longingly for the presence of Christ.  Just as forty-two generations of a mix of wisdom and foolishness could only be remedied by the presence of Christ, so the foolishness of our time calls for that same remedy.

    And we don’t have to do all that much imagining to see the foolishness of our own time, do we?  All we need to do is turn on the news and see the sad folly of those we have elected.  Or we can log into social media and see the antics of people famous for being famous, or read hateful rants by internet trolls.  We can also bring to mind our own foolishness, the sin in our lives.  We too need the coming of Christ to put an end to our foolishness.

    During these last days of Advent, we pray the “O Antiphons,” from which we derive the verses in the Advent Hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”  The verses are also used during Evening Prayer.  Today’s is “O Wisdom,” and the verse from Evening Prayer is “O Wisdom, O holy Word of God, you govern all creation with your strong yet tender care: Come and show your people the way to salvation.”  We trust the governance of God, the Creator of creation, to satisfy our longing for wisdom with the presence of the Incarnate Christ.

    Come, Lord Jesus and bring us peace. Come, Lord Jesus and put an end to the world’s foolishness. Come, Lord Jesus and bring us your Wisdom. Come quickly and do not delay.

  • The Third Sunday of Advent

    The Third Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.
    Indeed, the Lord is near.

    That quote, from the fourth chapter of Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians, is also the proper entrance antiphon for today’s Mass of the Third Sunday of Advent.  That focus on joy and the nearness of the Lord is the reason for the rose colored vestments and candle that are emblematic of this day of the Church year.  We are reminded that, even in this semi-penitential season of waiting and preparation, there is joy because the object of our hope is arriving soon; our Lord is near and nothing will stop his entrance into our history, into our world, into our lives.

    And that, I think, is very welcome news.  Into a world that has historically and often been marked by sadness, our Lord comes with his Divinity to take on our humanity, and raise it up to glory with him.  Our God who, as the Psalmist says, keeps faith forever, has turned to us in our need and become one of us, giving us a completely new life, where sin and death and disease have no power over us.  Our God remembers his promises: he “gives food to the hungry.  The LORD sets captives free.  The LORD gives sight to the blind; the LORD raises up those who were bowed down.  The LORD loves the just; the LORD protects strangers.”  Our God is not a god who sets events in motion and then steps back to see them all flounder in desperation, but instead, he is a God that cares for every one of us as if we were the only one on earth.  Our God would have come to save us even if we were the only one who needed saving.  Let that sink in for a minute: if we were the only lost one, God would come looking for us!  Indeed we ought to rejoice!

    We know our need for a Savior, for sure.  We could mention all the strife in our world that certainly causes us anxiety, as well as our own personal sadness: sin, family troubles, illness, death of loved ones, employment difficulties, and so much more.  We often get caught up in all that this world brings us, and we forget that we are meant for so much more, that our God created us for reasonable happiness in this world and joy forever with him in the next.

    But as much as we know our need for joy, it’s so difficult for us to truly experience it.  We look for it in all sorts of ways: social media, binge watching television, overindulging in food and drink, and so much more.  When we can’t find joy we get depressed and think we’ve been abandoned by God.  But, friends, joy isn’t a feeling, it’s a decision.  Our entrance antiphon doesn’t tell us to feel joyful, but to be joyful: rejoice! 

    So how do we do that?  Well, as I said, joy is largely a decision.  We rejoice because the Lord is near.  He is with us in our sadness, he is with us in our joy, indeed he brings the joy of his loving presence to all that we are going through.  He does not abandon us in our anxieties but instead listens as we pray to him.  Our Lord is as near to us as our next quiet moment, our next embrace of someone we love, our next act of kindness. In a very real way, joy comes from bringing joy to others, or even just spending time with them.

    I had a glimpse of this the day before Thanksgiving this year.  We were having my aunts and uncles over to the house for the big feast, and I was doing a bunch of cooking.  My Aunt Marilyn volunteered to come over and help me get ready, and Mom was sitting in her wheelchair at the table, peeling potatoes.  As I stood there working with them, I was just taken by the joy of being with them.  I’ll always remember that.

    In these later days of Advent, people of faith light a candle of hope and rejoice in the light of Christ!  People of faith can rejoice because even in times of sadness and despair, the presence of our God is palpable, realized in stories of heroism and seen in acts of charity and grace in good times and in bad.

    And so today we rejoice because our Lord is near.  We light that third, rose-colored candle on our Advent wreath.  We look forward to celebrating the Incarnation, perhaps the greatest and best of the mysteries of faith.  That God himself, who is higher than the heavens and greater than all the stars of the universe, would humble himself to be born among us, robing himself with our frail flesh, in order to save us from our sins and make his home among us for all eternity – that is a mystery so great it cannot fail to cause us to rejoice!  Indeed that very presence of God gives hope even in the worst of times – THE LORD IS NEAR!

    These final days of Advent call us to prepare more intensely for the Lord’s birth.  They call us to clamor for his Incarnation, waiting with hope and expectation in a dark and scary world.  These days call us to be people of hope, courageously rejoicing that the Lord is near!  Come, Lord Jesus!  Come quickly and do not delay!

    In our silent time after the homily today, I invite you to pray with me.  I want you to picture Jesus coming to you, approaching you, and extending his hand to you.  He wants to give you a message of hope and encouragement.  He wants to tell you that you are important to him, that he came to save you.  What is he saying to you as he approaches? What is hopeless in you right now that he offers to sustain you through?  What is he saying to you on this day of rejoicing?

  • The Second Sunday of Advent

    The Second Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    Have you ever had the feeling hat things were just not right? I don’t mean not right like you got the wrong order at Portillo’s, or your postal delivery person gave you the neighbor’s mail. I mean, really, really not right, in a fundamental sense, like the world was off its axis in some way. I think these days we’ve gotten a sense of that after having been through a particularly contentious election season, still coming out of the pandemic, the hateful rhetoric directed toward those who revere life from conception through natural death, and in view of the violence in our cities and all around the world. It seems in some way that we are more adrift than ever.

    And perhaps even a bit closer to home, we could all probably think of times in our lives when things just haven’t been right: times of transition, times dealing with the illness of a loved one, or family difficulty, times when we have been looking for new work or trying to discern a path in life. These are unsettling times that we all have to experience every now and then.

    So in view of the craziness in our world, and the sadness that sometimes happens in our own life, it’s easy to get to feeling like things are just not right.

    And God knows it isn’t right. The whole Old Testament is filled with God’s lament of how things went wrong, and his attempts to bring it back. The fourth Eucharistic Prayer sums it up by saying to God, “Again and again you offered a covenant to man, and through the prophets taught him to hope for salvation.” But, as we well know from our studies of the Scriptures and its proclamation in the Liturgy, again and again humankind turned away from the covenant and away from the God of our salvation. Ever since the fall, things just haven’t been right.

    So what is it going to take for all of this to turn around? What is going to get things whipped back into shape? Well, frankly, nothing ever changes if nothing ever changes. Things don’t suddenly become right by continuing to do the wrong thing. I really think the only way things will ever change is by starting over. And that’s what I believe God is doing, in our time, throughout all time, and particularly in this Advent time.

    Today’s first reading speaks of this new creation: a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse. It’s quite a visual: The bud that blossoms from God’s new creation is something completely different, something incredibly wonderful, something that would never be possible in the old order: “The wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them.” None of those species would ever get along in the old creation, of course; none of them would ever have been safe. But in the new creation, all of them will know the Lord, and that knowledge will give them new life, a new direction, new hope and a new salvation.

    In today’s gospel reading, Saint John the Baptist is front and center.  He is the forerunner, paving the way for the coming Savior, his cousin, by calling people to repent and by baptizing them for the forgiveness of sins.  In the midst of that, he proclaims the coming of Christ who will do things in a new way: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” The all-consuming fire of the Holy Spirit will burn away all that is not right and heat up all that has been frozen in listless despair for far too long. That fire will force a division between what is old and just not right, and what is of the new creation: “He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  John’s message is one of complete annihilation of the old order so that a new, beautiful creation could take root.

    Now, all of these are nice words, and the idea of a new creation is one for which I think we all inwardly yearn. But what does it really mean? What does it look like? How will we know that we are moving toward new creation and new life? I think Saint Paul gives us a hint in the second reading today: “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are to be people who think and act in harmony with one another and with Christ. We have to be people of unity.

    Which is, as most things are, so much easier to say than to actually do. For one thing, if we are really to be created anew, that means that some of the old stuff has to die: the death chambers have to be closed, the chaff has to be burnt up in the fire. Our old, stinkin’ attitudes have to be abandoned: resentments have to be put aside, rivalries have to be ended, forgiveness has to be offered and accepted, jealousies have to be thrown away. All of that festering, disease-ridden thinking has to be put to death if we are ever to experience new life.  It has to be annihilated so that the new creation can take root.

    We have to be a people marked by new attitudes, new grace, new love. We have to strive for peace and justice – real peace and real justice available to everyone God has created. We have to be a community who worships God not just here in Church, but also out there in our daily lives: a community that insists on integrity, a community that genuinely cares for those who are sick, in need, or lost, regardless of who they are, what they look like, or how it is they got lost. We have to be a people who worship God first every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, who confess our sins with hope of God’s mercy, who give priority to prayer in the midst of our crazy lives.

    Most of all, we have to be a people who are open to being re-created. If we are not willing to put to death our old stinkin’ selves and embrace new attitudes and ways of living, if we are not in fact willing to take up our crosses and follow Christ, then we will never annihilate the old mess so that the new creation can take root. We have to cooperate with God’s new creation, we have to be eager to let God do something new. We have to be willing to live out of boxes for a while, so that the transition can take place. We have to have unwavering hope that giving ourselves to God’s re-creation will be worth it, if not immediately, then certainly in the long run. We have to truly believe our Psalmist’s song: “Justice will flower in his days, and profound peace, till the moon be no more.”

  • The First Sunday of Advent

    The First Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    I don’t know about you, but I always find this weekend after Thanksgiving to be a little strange.  Here is a weekend when we can barely clear the plates at the Thanksgiving dinner table before we have to make room for Christmas.  And I’m not talking about the religious observance of the Incarnation of our Lord, but rather all the secular trappings of that holy day.  It begins about Halloween, or maybe a little earlier, when you start to see the stores slowly make room for the Christmas stuff.  They sneak in some “holiday” signs here and there, and start to weave the garland into the end of the aisles, just past the Halloween costumes.  On Thanksgiving day, you get about a thousand emails from every store or business from whom you’ve ever purchased anything.

    And then there’s Black Friday itself, which now starts bright and early on Thursday morning – Thursday, you know, Thanksgiving Day.  We then get to be treated to Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.  What a commercial mess this has all become, what a sad commentary on what makes our society tick.  We barely have time to gather up the pumpkins and corn stalks and autumn leaves before we have to set out the Christmas stockings and brightly-lit trees and candy canes.

    Now, I will say this.  There are times in my life, this year included, when the joy of Christmas is definitely welcome, and I’ll celebrate it as long as I possibly can.  So I’ve been listening to Christmas music, and have watched more than my share of Hallmark Christmas movies with Mom over the past several weeks.  I like to celebrate Christmas all the way until February 2nd, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.  So I’m in it too.

    But I find that this rampant consumerism is really just part of the ambient noise of our society.  From television to social media to email spam to Christmas jingles on the store loud-speakers, the noise never seems to stop.  Whether it’s political bantering and bureaucratic infighting, or the latest pop culture scandal, it seems like there’s always a lot of noise going on.  And we could add to that our own noise: sin in our lives, unaddressed family strife, and so much more.  It’s no wonder we often have the television on as background noise, we seem to clamor for it.

    But all that noise comes at the peril of our spiritual lives.  The noise fills up the space that God wants to use to speak words of encouragement, solace, or challenge.  When we are constantly listening to other things, we can’t hear the voice of God who wants to be part of our lives, who wants to give us himself.

    The emotions we feel at this time of year are palpable and often conflicted.  The Church knows this, and in Her great wisdom, gives us the season of Advent every year.  It’s a season that recognizes that there is this hole in our hearts that needs to be filled up with something, and can be filled up if we will just be quiet and make space.  That something isn’t going to be an item you can pick up on Black Friday, or a trite holiday jingle, or even a peppermint mocha latte.  Those things can’t possibly fill up our personal sadness, or the lack of peace in the world, or the cynicism and apathy that plague our world and confront us day after day.

    And so in our readings today, rather boldly, the Church is telling us to cut out all of this nonsense and get serious about our eternity.  Because if we’re only living from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, we are going to be left behind with our cheap electronics and gaudy trinkets, and have none of the real riches of the Kingdom of God.

    And so our first reading, from the second chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy, has us taking a step back to look at our lives: “Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.”  We need to go a little higher and look down on what we’ve become in order to see how we fit into the bigger picture.  Do we see ourselves as concerned about peace and justice in the world, looking out for the needs of the needy and the marginalized, blanketing our world in holiness and calling it to become bright and beautiful as it walks in the light of the Lord?

    Or do we take part in those deeds of darkness that Saint Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans today?  Do we participate in these dark deeds to the point of giving scandal to those who carefully watch the activities of people of faith?  If we do, then Saint Paul clearly commands us to get our act together: “Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us conduct ourselves properly…”

    So this Advent season is clearly about something more than hanging up pretty decorations for a birthday party.  It’s about something more than perpetuating rampant consumerism and secularism.  And it’s definitely about more than participating in the same old noise we encounter all the time.  The stakes are too high for that.  Because while we are distracted by all of that ambient noise, we are in danger of missing the joy for which we were created.  Just as in the days of Noah, as Jesus points out in our Gospel today, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, so it will be in the coming Day of the Lord.  Just as those oblivious ones were surprised by the flood, we too are in danger of being surprised by the second coming.  God forbid that two men are hanging lights on the house when one is taken and the other is left.  Or that two women are getting some crazy deals at Kohls and one is taken and the other is left.  Or that two people are having a Twitter feud and one is taken and another is left.  We have to be prepared, because at an hour we do not expect, our Lord will certainly return.

    Don’t get me wrong: the return of our Lord is not something to be feared.  Indeed, we eagerly await that coming in these Advent days.  I’m just saying that if we aren’t attentive to our spiritual lives, if we don’t create a space for silence and reflection, if we aren’t zealous about living the Gospel, if we aren’t intentional about making time for worship and deepening our relationship with the Lord, then we are going to miss out on something pretty wonderful.  And that pretty wonderful thing isn’t in the far-off, distant future.  If we quiet ourselves and open our eyes, He’s right in front of us, walking with us, calling us to become more than we are, to become the glory for which we were created.  We have to stay awake, we have to turn off the noise, we have to live in the Lord’s daylight and not prefer the world’s darkness.  We have to eagerly expect our Lord’s birth into our hearts and souls, right here and now, and not in some distant day.

    Or we’ll miss it.  God forbid, we’ll miss it.

    So I am going to give you some quiet time right now, and also after Communion.  I want to give you an opportunity to pray in that silence. 

    So, in these moments of silence, I invite you to take a moment to call to mind something positive you’ve been meaning to do.  Maybe it’s a practice of prayer, or getting up on time, or exercising regularly, or reaching out to a friend or family member you haven’t talked to in a while.  If you’re like me, you could come up with a whole list of those things, but I want you to call to mind the one that is most tugging on your heart right now.  In these moments of silence, I invite you to talk to Jesus about that thing.  Offer it to him, and ask him for the grace to accomplish it, or at least begin it, in these Advent days.  And then listen for his support of you in that endeavor.

  • Saturday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    You know I’m going to be all corny and wish you a happy new year’s eve, right?  But that’s indeed where we are.

    Our readings have been reminding us that the night is far spent and the day is drawing near.  We are called upon today to remain vigilant so that we do not miss the second coming of the Lord.  And it is well that we receive that warning today, on the cusp as we are of the new Church year.  This is the last day of the Church year and tomorrow, well even tonight, we will begin the year of grace 2019 with the season of Advent.  The day draws ever nearer for us.

    As the day draws nearer, we will need less and less of the light that has been given to us in this world.  The first reading says, “Night will be no more, nor will they need light from lamp or sun, for the Lord God shall give them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.”  St. Augustine says of that great day: “When, therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ comes and, as the apostle Paul says, brings to light things hidden in darkness and makes plain the secrets of the heart, so that everyone may receive his commendation from God, then lamps will no longer be needed. When that day is at hand, the prophet will not be read to us, the book of the Apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the testimony of John, we shall have no need of the Gospel itself. Therefore all Scriptures will be taken away from us, those Scriptures which in the night of this world burned like lamps so that we might not remain in darkness.

    “When all these things are removed as no longer necessary for our illumination, and when the men of God by whom they were ministered to us shall themselves together with us behold the true and dear light without such aids, what shall we see? With what shall our minds be nourished? What will give joy to our gaze? Where will that gladness come from, which eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, which has not even been conceived by the heart of man?” (Tract. 35, 8-9) And of course, the answer to that, is we shall get our light looking on the face of Christ himself.  As Advent approaches, we pray earnestly for that day: Come quickly Lord, and do not delay!

  • Thanksgiving Day

    Thanksgiving Day

    Back in seminary, during the last summer before I was ordained a priest, I did my Clinical Pastoral Education at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.  It’s a level one trauma center, so it’s a busy place with a lot of, well, trauma.  In C.P.E., we were placed in a group with other students, so we are all learning pastoral skills and processing pastoral experiences together.  I had a very good, but challenging time in that program.  I was assigned to the emergency room, along with a cardiac floor, so let’s just say it was never boring!  But it wasn’t boring for any of my peers either; that summer there were an unusually large number of traumatic deaths that we each had to deal with.

    During one of our prayer and reflection times, we read the last two lines of the Gospel we just heard: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.  For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”  Our reflection was that, in the midst of all the chaos and trauma, we had indeed seen some incredible moments of grace: family reconciliations, selfless service to others in need, families coming together to support each other.  Those moments were really holy ones, and blessed were our eyes indeed for having the privilege to see them.

    These days, as a pastor of this little country parish, as Bishop Conlon used to like to joke with me about, there’s always something going on.  What’s broken today?  What’s going on in the school that needs love and attention?  Which staff member is going through difficult life stuff that needs me to support them?  What meeting do I have to go to or even run?  What conflict needs resolving?  I’m almost never bored, as I’m sure you can imagine!

    I remember an evening a few years ago, after a long day of meetings that culminated with a wonderful Parish Pastoral Council meeting, I went back to the rectory and finished folding my laundry.  I picked up some bed clothes, looking forward to relaxing a few minutes, finishing my prayers for the day, and going to bed.  At that very moment, I got a call for an anointing.  So I got in the car, and headed out, and anointed the loved one of one of our parishioners.  As I was praying with them, I reflected how very grateful I was, even though exhausted, to be there.  That they trusted me enough to reach out in their need was a privilege, and the opportunity to support them one of the worst days of their lives was a great grace to me.  I could have been bitter that I didn’t get my moments of relaxation, but instead I was overwhelmed by the grace of the moment.  I was thankful, as I always am, for being a pastor of this little country parish!

    Many of you know that in the over the last few years, my mother has been ill, and sometimes declining.  This year we have been having to give her 24/7 care, which was no doubt hard for her to accept, except that it was done by her loving children.  She is certainly grateful that she has us to take care of her, but she felt, and to some extent probably still feels, that she is a burden.  She expressed that one Sunday afternoon when we all got together to talk and lay out a plan of care.  She began by saying, “I know I am a problem for you guys.”  With tears in my eyes, I said, “I think I can speak for Sharon and Peggy and myself when I say that we feel so privileged to be able to walk through this time with you.  Yes, it’s hard, but sometimes the hard stuff is worth it.”  One day Peggy texted us in our group text, “I helped Mom take a shower today and I washed her hair.  I’m so thankful I can spend this time with her.”  You see, blessed are our eyes to be able to look on our mother and care for her, just as she has so often cared for us.

    We could all tell similar stories.  The grace is there, sometimes hidden in the craziness of life, but for eyes blessed to see it, there are moments for which to be thankful.  Many of them.  Every day.  Because gratitude is a decision, not a feeling.  We can decide to be bitter and resentful for all that life throws at us.  Or we can be Eucharistic people – people of gratitude – grateful for the grace that sustains us when everything is falling apart.  Grateful for the moments of blessing that are happening even in the hardest situations.  Grateful for the people and the community that we get to walk with through this crazy life.  Grateful for the relationship with God who gives us, always, way more than we give him, freely, unconditionally, abundantly, undeservedly.

    I think we all know a little about how Thanksgiving started.  We learned in school that the pilgrims gathered in the autumn of 1621 after a year in the New World.  It was a year of rich harvests, and their gathering was a feast of giving thanks to God for what he had done for them.  They were thankful because they had survived.

    But Peter Fleck, a Unitarian minister, suggested some years ago that maybe that wasn’t it at all.  Maybe what was really true was that they survived because they were thankful.  Think about it, that year could not have been an easy one for them.  They were in a new land, vastly different from what they had been used to.  They had grown crops they weren’t used to and survived disease.  After all of that harrowing experience, they were still grateful.  Maybe that “attitude of gratitude” was why they survived.

    As Catholics, we are a people who constantly choose to be grateful.  Our Eucharist is the Thanksgiving feast par excellence.  Every time we gather to celebrate Mass, we remember that God in his infinite mercy sent his only Son to be our Savior.  He came into our world and walked among us, filling the earth with his most merciful presence.  He journeyed among us, a man like us in all things but sin.  His great love led him to bear the cross for our sake, dying the death we so richly deserved for our many sins.  And then he did the greatest thing possible: he burst out of the grave, breaking the chains of death, and rose to new life.  Because of this grace, we have the possibility of everlasting life with God, the life we were created for in the first place.

    Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we remember this awesome mystery.  Not only that, our Eucharist brings us to the hour of that grace, giving us once again a share in its blessing.  As a Eucharistic people, we Catholics are a people of gratitude.  That’s what defines us.

    So how would a people defined by gratitude celebrate this Thanksgiving day?  Certainly we have made the best possible start: gathering for the Eucharist to give thanks for the presence of God and the grace he pours out on us.  Then we take that grace to our families’ own Thanksgiving feasts and beyond.  As we gather around the table today, maybe we can stop to reflect on God’s magnificent presence in our lives – in good times and in bad.  And then use that gratitude to make the world an awesome place – or at least your corner of it!

    Gratitude is contagious – in a good way!  When we make it a constant spiritual practice to reflect on how God has blessed us, when we take the time to thank someone for something little they did that made us smile, when we show our gratitude by reaching out in service to others, others can become grateful people too.  A watching world looks at us Catholics to see if we really are who we say we are.  When we live as grateful people, our Eucharist is authentic and our witness is exhilarating.

    Like those pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving, maybe our gratitude can become the source of our survival through the hard times and the source of our joy in the good times.  Maybe we can not just survive, but actually thrive, because we are grateful people.  May we never cease to sing the praise of God and to cry out in songs of thanks and praise!