Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Liturgy

  • The Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s gospel reading is a rather heartbreaking story, to be honest.  The rich young man is obviously a follower of the law and a religious man, because he is able to talk to Jesus about his observance of the law.  But when Jesus tells him to let go of what he has in order to gain eternal life, he walks away dejected because he has so much.  We don’t know what ultimately happens to the rich young man.  Maybe he did go and begin the hard work of letting go, selling his possessions and giving to the poor.  And maybe he just couldn’t do it.  But at least he knows what he has to do.

    I think that far more heartbreaking than this story of the rich young man is the story of modern men and women, rich and not-so-rich, young and old alike.  I am more heartbroken for these because as much as the rich young man in the gospel story asked what he had to do to gain eternal life, too many of today’s men and women have lost the desire even to ask the question.

    I hope your heart is breaking too.  These are not words of joy and blessing that Jesus is speaking to us today.  They are words of challenge.  He wants to light a fire under us and smack us full force out of our complacency.  “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”  So many people are not with us here at Mass today.  Whether it’s soccer or football or work or sloth or whatever, they are missing, and our gathering is the poorer for it.  Many of them will feel guilty about missing, perhaps some of them will even confess it.  But far too many of them don’t care or don’t even know that they should care.  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    People today, even maybe some of us gathered here today, are so greatly focused on getting ahead, becoming rich in the things of earth, skyrocketing careers, being well thought of – we are so embarrassingly rich in all these ways.  But none of those things are going to get us into heaven, into the kingdom of God.  We are all being told today to go, sell those paltry, fading glory things and give to those who are poorer, so that we can all enter the kingdom of God together.  Will we too walk away, like the rich young man in the gospel, dejected and depressed because we have too much to let go of it all?  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    In this respect life month, we might find we are too rich in other ways as well.  We may cling to the way that we’re thought of and so encourage or at least look the other way when a mother ends a pregnancy.  Or we’re so concerned about the value of our homes and the safety of our riches that we tolerate the death penalty.  Or the care of a loved one takes us away from our work so we don’t care for those loved ones the way we should.  But we are a people who are gifted with life from conception to natural death, and we are called to reverence that life and celebrate that gift.  We have to let go of anything that gets in the way of that.  How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

    Taking hold of the kingdom of God necessarily means we have to let go of something.  That is the clear message of today’s gospel reading.  What we have to let go of is different for all of us, but clearly there is a rich young man or woman in all of us, and we have to be ready to give up whatever gets in our way, or what we will end up letting go of is the kingdom of God.  And that would be truly, horribly, unforgivably heartbreaking.

    “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”

    And so what do we do?  Do we give up, throw up our hands, and walk away dejected because we know it’s all too much – that what we have to let go of is beyond our capacity to do it?  Certainly not.  For us, truly, it may be impossible.  But nothing is impossible for God.  God hears that desire for eternal life in us and opens up the way to salvation.  He gave his Son to live our life and die our death and rise to new life that lasts forever.  That same glory is intended for all of us too.  All we have to do is let go – as frightening as that may well be for us – let go, and let God worry about the implications of it all.

    And Jesus points out that this will not be easy.  Those who give up their riches to follow him will receive blessing, but also challenge: they will receive “receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”  There will be persecution in this life.  Not everyone will get why we are letting go.  And that makes the letting go so much more difficult.  But the rewards of a hundredfold here and a million-fold in the kingdom are worth it.

    So let’s pray with this Gospel reading now.  I’d like you to close your eyes and put the stuff that you’re holding onto in your hands.  Whether they are possessions, ambitions, improper relationships, patterns of sin, whatever they are – put them in your hands and close your hands around them.  Hang on to them tight, and try to remember why they are important to you.  Then, imagine Jesus, coming to you, reaching out to you, offering you eternal life – everything you ever hoped for.  Do you reach out and accept it, dropping the stuff you were hanging onto?  Or do you keep hanging on and let the Lord pass you by?  Spend a little time now, quietly, speaking to Jesus about what you’re hanging on to, and ask him for the grace to let go of all that, and accept what he really wants to give you.

  • Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I love that Jesus uses that phrase “the finger of God.”  If things are done by “the finger of God,” it shows a God who is active in our world and interested in our well-being.  It can be hard, sometimes, to see that.  We get caught up in all the complexities and tragedies of daily life.  But God is still at work, if we can pause and look around and see that.

    Joel the prophet in our first reading is calling on the people to get themselves right so that they can witness God’s power.  Joel foretells the Day of the Lord which will be full of darkness, gloom, and somberness.  The people will need to fast and pray and cry out to God in order to be ready for it.  Those who are ready will be like the dawn spreading over the mountains and will become a “people numerous and mighty,” by the finger of God.

    In the same way, Jesus is able to cast out demons by the finger of God.  But the fickle crowd doesn’t want to see that, and so they throw crazy accusations that Jesus is acting by the power of Satan.

    Our hearts are certainly not as hard as theirs are, so we would never refuse to see God at work in a given situation.  But we do tend to be distracted enough to miss the “finger of God” at work in the craziness of our day to day business.  The Psalmist has the right idea today: “I will give thanks to you, O LORD, with all my heart; I will declare all your wondrous deeds.”  Let’s be on the watch today, then, for those wondrous deeds, recognizing the finger of God at work in our lives.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Try as we might for perfection in our journey of faith, we all of us stumble and fall sometimes.  That’s just the way, unfortunately, it is in this fallen world.  But that being the case, we have in our Liturgy of the Word this morning some saints who can accompany us on this precarious journey.

    We will be immersed in Jonah’s story for the next few days.  This story is not at all about the great things Jonah did.  It is more about the journey of discipleship that was Jonah’s life, and about the wonderful things that God did in and through the rather unwilling disciple who was Jonah.  Today’s reading has Jonah finally doing what God asked him to do.  Fresh out of the belly of a big fish, Jonah finally realizes that God’s call in his life is not optional.  So he does what he is told to do, and accomplishes the conversion of the evil city Nineveh.  But Jonah’s story is not done yet, and we’ll see this week the ups and downs he still has to endure.

    And then we have the story of poor Martha in today’s Gospel.  I often think that Martha gets a raw deal in this story.  Someone had to make the food!  But I think the real message of this Gospel story is that neither Martha nor Mary had salvation all wrapped up.  Because there are times when we definitely have to be Mary, sitting at the Lord’s feet in adoration, prayer and praise.  But if we are never Martha, our faith is useless.  There has to be a balance between our spiritual life and our service, or, in the words of St. Benedict, between our prayer and our work.

    So for those of us who haven’t yet achieved spiritual perfection, the message is that we have lots of saints in Scripture who are on the journey with us.  The point is to keep moving on the journey, so that we will one day reach perfection in that kingdom that knows no end.  And may God be glorified in the belly of the big fish or in Nineveh; in our Martha days and our Mary days, in our prayer and our work.

  • The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    If you’ve been to any number of Church weddings, you have probably heard today’s first reading, and part of the Gospel proclaimed.  Obviously we usually leave out the part about divorce, but these readings are quite popular for weddings.  The reason, of course, is that the story is about how man and woman were created for each other.  The totality of the readings we have today, though, are challenging.  We do have that piece about divorce there, and it does present a challenge in these days when so many marriages fail.

    Jesus’ point here is that the Christian disciple is called to a level of faithfulness that transcends the difficulties of life.  We can’t just throw in the towel and walk away when things are difficult: marriage vows make demands of people – I say that in every wedding homily I give.  In the very same way, ordination promises make demands of priests.  We have to pray for the grace to be faithful in good times and in bad.  But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

    That being the case, I want to take this opportunity to make some points and dispel some myths about the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, remarriage, and annulment.  I do this because I know it is the source of pain for so many people, perhaps some people among us today.  It’s important that we all understand these teachings so that we can help one another live faithful lives and avoid making judgments about others which are best left to our Lord.

    The first myth is that divorce is a sin that excommunicates a person from the Church and does not allow them to participate in the life of the Church or receive the sacraments.  But divorce is not a sin in and of itself.  It may well, however, be the result of sin, and a consequence of sin.  Whatever led to the divorce, on either or both sides, may in fact have been sinful.  Those who are divorced, however, remain Catholics in good standing and are free to receive the sacraments including the Eucharist, sacramental absolution in the sacrament of Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick.  However, they remain married to their partner in the eyes of the Church and are not free to remarry, unless they receive an annulment.  Those who remarry without an annulment have taken themselves out of communion with the Church and then, and only then, are not free to receive the sacraments.

    The second myth is that an annulment is really just “Catholic Divorce.”  Annulment is instead recognition by the Church that a valid marriage, for some reason or another, had never taken place, because, for some reason, one or both of the parties was not free to marry.  These reasons may include extreme immaturity, a previous and undiscovered prior marriage, or entering marriage with no intention of remaining faithful or of having children.  Pope Francis added some other reasons a few years ago, including a fictitious marriage that enabled one of the parties to enter into citizenship, a very brief marriage, stubborn persistence in an extramarital affair, and the procurement of an abortion to avoid procreation.  In addition, Pope Francis somewhat simplified the process of an annulment in order to decrease the amount of time it takes to proceed.

    A third myth is that those who are marrying a non-Catholic who had been previously married are automatically free to marry, since the non-Catholic’s marriage did not take place in the Catholic Church.  But for the good of all, the Church presumes marriages between non-Catholics to be valid, so their previous marriage would have to be annulled before a Catholic is free to marry them.  This is a very often misunderstood principle.

    A fourth myth is that the Church always insists that the parties stay together.  Certainly, that is the Church’s preference: today’s readings show that the permanence of the marriage relationship is the intent of God.  However, we all understand that there are circumstances in which that may not be possible.  The Church would never counsel someone to stay together in a relationship that is abusive and puts one of the parties in danger.  That is completely unacceptable. If you are in an abusive relationship, whether the abuse is physical, verbal, or emotional, you need to seek help and safety.  The Church will support you in that decision.  If you find yourself in that kind of relationship, whether you are married or not, I want you to see someone on our staff immediately.

    Finally, there are some misconceptions about annulment proceedings that I want to clear up.  First, if you do receive an annulment, that does not mean your children are illegitimate.  The Church sees children as a gift from God, and thus never takes away their status as sons and daughters of God.  Second, people think annulments are too expensive.  They are not.  The cost of an annulment in our diocese is less than $1000, not the tens of thousands of dollars people had thought was necessary in the past.  And, under no circumstances will an annulment be denied if a person cannot meet those expenses.  Having said that, I always tell people that there are other costs in an annulment, most of which are emotional.  An annulment dredges up all sorts of things that may have been suppressed, and that’s never going to be painless.  But that kind of pain is part and parcel of any healing, so when you are in the right place for it, if you think your marriage was invalid, you should speak to someone who can help you begin the process.  That person is called a field advocate, and here at Saint Mary’s, that would be me, Father John or Father Ramon, and also Dr. Doug Muir, and Georgette Wurster.  Please feel free to speak with any of us, any time.

    What it all comes down to is this: we must all do what we were created for.  Relationships and vocations are opportunities to do that, but to be effective, we must choose to be faithful.  And we must choose faithfulness each and every day – maybe even every moment.  When life throws stuff at us, as indeed it will, we must choose to be faithful anyway.  But if brokenness destroys that grace, we should turn to the Church for guidance, reconciliation, and mercy. Just as man and woman cling to one another and become one flesh, so all of us are called to cling to God and become one with him. The Sacrament of Matrimony foreshadows the relationship that God has with the Church and the world.  We are all called to be caught up in God’s life and live forever with him.

  • The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!

    When we think about prophets and prophecy, I think our minds always take us to ancient days.  All the prophets we tend to think about lived many centuries ago: Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Amos and all the rest, right up to John the Baptist who was the last of the prophets of old and the beginning of the prophecy of the new.  All of it culminating in the person of Jesus Christ, whose prophecy was the voice of God himself.  But I think our readings today call us to look at prophecy in a new light, and to be open to the fact that there are many more prophets than we can think of right away, prophets that are a bit more contemporary than Moses and Elijah and all the others.

    For Moses, prophecy was a huge task.  He bore the responsibility of bringing God’s message of salvation to a people who had become used to living without it.  He was to inaugurate the covenant between God and a people who had largely forgotten about God, or certainly thought God had forgotten about them.  His prophetic burden was great, but God offered to take some of his prophetic spirit and bestow it on the seventy elders.  So seventy were chosen, a list was drawn up, and a ceremony was prepared.

    Two of their number – Eldad and Medad – were missing from the group during the ceremony, but the spirit was given to them anyway.  But this had Joshua all bent out of shape.  How could they be prophesying when they had not taken part in the ritual?  So he complains about it to Moses, who clearly does not share his concern.  He accuses Joshua of jealousy and says to him, “Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!”

    Moses’ vision for the ministry was bigger than himself, bigger than Joshua, bigger than even the chosen seventy.  And he makes a good point here.  What if every one of God’s people knew God well enough to prophesy in God’s name?  What if all of us who claim to follow God could speak out for God’s concern for the needy, the marginalized and the dispossessed?  What if every single one of us, when facing a decision, would immediately consider what God wants in that moment?  The world would certainly be a much different place.  Joshua’s concern was that the rules be followed.  Moses’ concern was that God’s work be done.

    And so there’s a rather obvious parallel in the first part of today’s Gospel.  This time it’s John who is all bent out of shape.  Someone was casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and even worse, whoever it was was apparently successful!  Jesus, of course, does not share John’s concern.  Jesus’ vision of salvation was bigger than John’s.  If demons are being cast out in Jesus’ name, what does it matter who is doing it?  If people are being healed from the grasp of the evil one and brought back to the family of God, well then, praise God!

    I think the point here that we need to get is that true prophecy, and really all ministry, doesn’t always fit into a neat little box.  During the rite of baptism, the person who has just been baptized is anointed with the sacred Chrism oil – the oil that anoints us in the image of Jesus as priest, prophet and king.  It is part of our baptismal calling for all of the people of the Lord to be prophets.  And so we really ought to be hearing the word of the Lord all the time, from every person in our lives.  Not only that, but we should be speaking the word of the Lord in everything we say and do!

    What I got to thinking about as I re-read these scriptures in preparation for preaching today was, what if everyone was a prophet?  What would that look like?  What would it be like if we were all true to our baptismal call to be a prophet in today’s world?  First of all, if we were all used to the fact that even ordinary people carry the prophetic message, we might not be so offended by it.  Just as the prophets of old were ignored, or worse, beaten or killed for their message, that same thing happens all the time today.  In some areas of the world, those who prophesy are considered so much of a threat that they are put to death for their beliefs.  And even here, where we have those freedoms, people are so offended by true prophecy that they consider it a personal attack and decide that people who bear witness to the truth are considered hateful.  Wouldn’t it be nice if that whole situation didn’t exist, because people were used to looking for the prophetic message?

    Then, of course, having heard the prophetic message, all of us prophets would be eager to carry it out.  The poor would be taken care of, people would live and do business with integrity, governments would be truly taking care of the common good rather than special interests, human dignity and respect for all life would be accepted as common practice, real peace would be not just a possibility, but a reality.

    Friends, we have to stop being afraid of the prophetic message, because prophets might be everywhere.  God gives us all people who are prophetic witnesses to us: people who say and live what they believe.  They might be our parents or our children, the colleague at work, the person who sits next to us in math class, or even the neighbor who seems to always want to talk our ear off.  At the basic level, one of the most important questions that arises in today’s Liturgy of the Word is, who are the prophets among us?  Who is it in our lives that has been so gifted with the spirit that they challenge us to be better people and live better lives?

    Prophecy is a huge responsibility, and we are all tasked with it.  Being open to that prophecy is a challenge to humility.  We might be the prophets, or we might be the ones hearing the prophets, but in either case we have work to do.  Prophets need to be faithful to God’s spirit, and hearers need to be open to the word and ready to act on it.  Prophecy nearly always calls us to a radical change.  May God help us to recognize the prophets among us, and make us ready to hear the word of the Lord and carry it out.

    Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!

  • Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    We’ve all heard this gospel parable about the sower and the seeds dozens of times. We know, then, that the seeds are the Word of God: not just some words, but Word with a capital “W,” which is Jesus himself, God’s eternal Word, spoken to bring life to a world dead in sin.  We know that the seeds are that presence of Christ which fall on hearts that are variously rocky, or thorny, or rich and fertile.  We’ve heard the parable, with Jesus’ own explanation, as well as homilies about it, so many times.

    What stood out to me this time as I read it is how very easy it is to not receive that Word and grow in it.  All it takes is losing our focus: paying attention to something that seems (at least at the time we see it) more enticing than the Word of God.  Then we wither up on that wrong path.  Or we might not tend to the Word of God in our hearts and then some temptation or tragedy comes along and we perish on the rocky ground.  Or we may even, through neglect, get choked out by the things of this world.

    Obviously, we need to provide rich soil for the word to grow.  And, this time of the year, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about it.  The liturgical cycle usually conforms to the calendar, more or less, and so why this parable about sowing seeds now, right on the verge of autumn when the harvest is pretty much over? Nobody in their right mind sows seeds this late in the year, certainly not in our climate!

    But God does.  He sows the Word among us all the time: every day and every moment.  It’s not just once for the season, and if the seeds don’t grow, then try again next year maybe.  He is constantly sowing the seeds in us, urging us to make of our hearts rich, fertile soil for the Kingdom.  And we do that by enriching the soil through reception of the Sacraments, participating at Mass, enlivening our prayer life, being open to the Word.

    The Sower is out sowing the seeds of his Eternal Word all the time.  Let’s give him fertile ground, that we might yield a rich harvest.

  • Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings are a kind of blueprint for the life of the disciple.  We see that those who surrounded Jesus as his core group were but a few selected people.  We have the Twelve, of course, but also some women.  Common to all of them is that nowadays we would probably not see any of them as qualified for the job of being in the Savior’s inner circle.  The Twelve themselves were a ragtag bunch, tradesmen, fishermen, tax collectors – none of them were even particularly distinguished in their chosen careers.

    The women mentioned were similarly unqualified.  The Gospel says that they had all been cured either of evil spirits or infirmities.  But they also provided for the ministry out of their means.  So it’s a humble group that surrounds Jesus, and clearly, that was fine with him.  He came, after all, to save those who needed saving, not those who had no use for a Savior.

    Paul tells Timothy that those who would be disciples must “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.”  They must “compete well for the faith” and thus “lay hold of eternal life.”  Jesus chooses anyone he wants; not merely those who are outstanding in qualifications.  Blessed indeed “are those who are poor in Spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

  • The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    Today’s readings

    In a lot of ways, this is a strange feast we are celebrating today. Think about it. This is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which in Jesus’ day would have been as big an oxymoron as one could possibly imagine. No cross would ever have been thought exalted in that day.  That’s why they nailed Jesus to it: they thought by putting an end to him in such a horrible way, no one would ever speak his name again. It’s like us saying that we are going to celebrate the exaltation of a lethal injection chamber. There is nothing exalted about an instrument of execution: it’s tortuous, humiliating, and as dark as one can get.

    So to get from that to where we are now is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle, of course, of the highest order! God used this instrument of punishment to remit the punishment we deserved for our sins. God used the epitome of darkness to bathe the world in unfathomable light.

    And he didn’t have to. The cross is what we deserved for our many sins. Today’s first reading gives us just a glimpse into the problem. The Israelites, fresh from deliverance from slavery in Egypt, are making their way through the desert. Along the way, they pause to complain that God’s food, which he provided in the desert, wasn’t good enough for them. They had chosen slavery over deliverance; food that perishes over food that endures unto eternal life.

    But we’re there too, right? We often choose the wrong kind of food, get off the path, and choose slavery to our vices and sins over new life in Christ. In fact it was because of all that that Jesus came to us in the first place. God noticed our brokenness and would not let us remain dead in sin. So to put an end to that cycle of sin and death, he sent his only Son to us to die on that horrible cross, paying the price for our many sins. But, that death may no longer have power over us, he raised him up, cheating the cross and the evil one of their power, and exalting the Holy Cross to the instrument not of our death, but of our salvation.

    Because of the Cross, all of our sadness has been overcome. Disease, pain, death, and sin – none of these have ultimate power over us. Just as Jesus suffered on that Cross, so we too may have to suffer in the trials that this life brings us. But Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, a place where there will be no more sadness, death or pain, a place where we can live in the radiant light of God for all eternity. Because of the Cross, we have hope, a hope that can never be taken away.

    The Cross is indeed a very strange way to save the world, but the triumph that came into the world through the One who suffered on the cross is immeasurable. As our Gospel reminds us today, all of this happened because God so loved the world.

    We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think, as a pastor, the issue I wrestle with most is the suffering that is out there.  People come to me in their suffering, and that is a great privilege, a holy space.  The father in me wants to be able to say a quick prayer and take all the suffering away, but of course, that’s now how this works.  And so I have accompanied parishioners, and even my own family members, as they suffer.  Suffering, unfortunately, is part of our life on earth, and we all do it at some time or another in our lives. 

    A lot of us, truth be told, have the same outlook as Saint Peter.  We don’t want to think about suffering as part and parcel of our life here on earth.  Today’s Gospel tells us that, after leading the Apostles in a little discernment about who Jesus was, Jesus then begins to foretell his own suffering and death.  And we know that that suffering and death was absolutely necessary to pay the price for our sins.  But Peter, and probably the others as well, didn’t want to think about that.  They were still under the thinking about what the Messiah was supposed to be according to Jewish scriptures, and that Messiah wasn’t supposed to suffer and die.  So Peter begins to audaciously rebuke our Lord, and our Lord then rebukes Peter.

    I think this year, we’ve seen an awful lot of suffering.  Many of us have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or have had a loved one pass away from something else during that time, but the pandemic prevented us from accompanying them.  Others have lost massive amounts of business during that time or suffered financially from the economic downturn.  Even if none of that touched our lives, the pandemic affected the way we live from day to day.  Grandparents couldn’t hug their grandchildren.  We were not able to travel or visit loved ones near or far.  Many couldn’t come to church, even when things opened up a bit, and had to avoid large gatherings or public places of any kind due to a concern about their immunity.  We had to re-think absolutely everything we did, and frankly we still are.

    This weekend, I think too, about where I was twenty years ago.  We all remember that fateful, horrible, 9-11 day, when it seemed like the world was crashing down around us.  Nobody traveled in those days either.  In those days, we had to re-think the way we did so many things, and we don’t take our safety for granted in the ways we did before that day.  We also continue to remember the loss of so many people in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania – people whose lives ended quickly at the start of a workday, and those who gave their lives to help others.  There was more than enough suffering to go around on that horrible day.

    And all of that is to say nothing about the day-to-day suffering we all experience.  The illness and loss of loved ones; the brokenness of our families; the loss of a job or opportunity; the effects of sin and addiction, whether our own or that of those close to us.  The list goes on and on.  The real truth of life in this world is that there is suffering, and none of us gets a free pass.  Even Mary, full of grace, had to watch her Son suffer and die.  Even Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and he himself suffered a terrible, painful, humiliating death.  None of us gets out of this life unscathed.  In some crazy sense, we all are united in the fact that we all suffer, some time and for something.

    And so it is in fact audacious and even offensive that Saint Peter rebukes our Lord for talking about suffering.  Peter himself will suffer a similar fate as that of his Lord, being crucified upside-down.  Every one of us, in some way, has to take up the cross and walk with it, because it is only in doing that that we can make our way to the resurrection.

    I remember a time when I was going through a very difficult time in my priesthood.  One of my good friends came to visit me and brought me a wood carving of Jesus carrying the Cross.  She told me that she hoped it would help me pray through that difficult time and would help me to take up my own cross, as Jesus said we must in today’s Gospel.  Her prayers, and those of so many others, buoyed me up during that time, and reflecting on the Cross made me realize that I had to be there right then, and had to trust our Lord to bring me where I needed to go.

    And the truth of this, friends, is that we have it a lot easier than our Lord did.  We just bear our own suffering; he had to take with him the suffering of every person embroiled in sin in all of time.  We have him to help us take up our crosses and to help make those crosses lighter; he had no one except for Simon of Cyrene who helped him begrudgingly.  His death had to blast open the gates of heaven; we will just get to walk through it, if we follow him and live the gospel.

    Jesus never ever promised to make all our suffering go away.  But he did promise never to abandon us, and he did engage in suffering when he chose to come to earth.  That, friends, is our salvation.  So we have to suffer in this world, we have to deny ourselves and take up the crosses that lay before us.  Because that is the way to follow our Lord who beckons us to come to him.

    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake
    and that of the gospel will save it.

  • Labor Day

    Labor Day

    Today’s readings: Genesis 1:26-2:3 | Psalm 90 | 1 Thessalonians 4:1b-2, 9-12 | Matthew 6:31-34

    One of the things that I remember vividly about my childhood is how hard my parents worked. My Dad worked more than one job at a time for several years. And in his main job, he was with the company for well over forty years, finally retiring from the company he worked for since his late teens. My mother, too, worked outside the home, and still does on a part-time basis. They encouraged me to work as well, and the experience of the work I did in my late teens is something that I carried with me throughout my pre-seminary work years, and continue, really, to benefit from to this very day. And that’s how work is supposed to be: participation in God’s creation, enhancing our human dignity, bringing forth our gifts, and helping us to be better people. Work should also help us to sustain our lives and our families, and to provide for their needs, including health care and retirement. The Church has consistently and loudly taught these truths about work ever since Pope Leo XIII’s ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum, published in 1891.

    As we observe Labor Day this year, though, I think we still have work to do on those principles. Far too many people don’t have the resources that work provides. The bishops of our nation publish a yearly Labor Day statement, and this year they write about the fact that so often labor is viewed as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold, rather than as a participation in the ongoing creative work of God and an expression of the dignity of the human person, which is rightly work’s purpose.  They note that, in the sadness of COVID-19, the national human trafficking hotline handled a 40% increase in calls in the month following stay-at-home orders, especially as seen in communities of color.

    COVID also spiked job loss, and I think just about anyone could think of someone they know or know of who has lost work during the pandemic.  The bishops write: “Adults in lower-income households were more likely to experience employment income loss than those from higher income households. And women accounted for more than half of the job losses during the first seven months of recession, even though they make up less than half of the workforce.”

    They also write about the loss of more than 600,000 people to COVID-19 and the impact that has had on families: “It is especially heartbreaking that up to 43,000 minor children in the U.S. have lost a parent as a result of the pandemic. The families who lost a breadwinner are now more financially vulnerable, with a projected 42 million people in the United States experiencing food insecurity this year, including 13 million children.”

    In response to all this, they call on Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, in which he calls on people of good will to reject “the reality that women are not yet recognized as having the same dignity as men, that racism shamefully continues, and that those who are poor, disabled, unborn, or elderly are often considered dispensable.”  Instead, he invites us to work for an economy that “has at its heart a concern that all of humanity have access to land, lodging, and labor,” which are common aspects of Catholic Social Teaching.

    Finally, the bishops note that “the pandemic has presented us with many shared experiences.”  We’ve been through a lot, together, and they call on us to go forward together in ways that build up every person.  As Pope Francis has said, “Once the present health crisis has passed, the worst reaction would be to fall even more deeply into feverish consumerism and forms of selfish self-protection…”

    And so on this Labor Day it is especially appropriate that we reflect on the Genesis story of the creation of the world, showing the work of our Creator God and the blessedness of the sabbath rest on the seventh day.  We are reminded that all of our work is meant to be an ongoing act of participation of the creation and re-creation of the world by our Creator God.  Our Gospel reading today calls us to get this right, because when we do we can let go of worry and trust that seeking God’s kingdom first, everything will be given to us besides.

    Labor Day is in fact a wonderful time to step back and look at the meaning of work.  Labor Day reminds us that we don’t have permission to write off human labor as some kind of necessary evil or a commodity to be bought and sold.   We are reminded that the economy exists for the good of people, not the other way around.   We must truly venerate all labor, that of our own efforts as well as that of others.  We must vigorously defend the rights and dignity of workers, particularly of the poor and marginalized.  And we must always offer all of this back to our God who created us to be co-creators with him.  May we pray with the Psalmist this day and every day, “Lord give success to the work of our hands!”