Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: The Church Year

  • Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It seems like just yesterday that John the Baptist was baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River.  Oh wait, it was just yesterday!  But today’s reading fast forwards a bit and takes us to a time after John has been arrested.  John isn’t dead yet, not yet out of the picture, but clearly he is decreasing, as he said in Saturday’s Gospel reading, so that Jesus can increase.

    And Jesus is certainly increasing.  His ministry is kicking into full swing, and he begins by preaching that the kingdom is at , and he begins to call his followers.  Simon and Andrew, James and John, two sets of brothers, two groups of fishermen, give up their nets and their boats and their fathers and turn instead to casting nets to catch men and women for God’s kingdom.

    You know, even though today is the first day of Ordinary Time, we continue some aspects of Christmas and the Epiphany right up until February second, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.  So today’s Gospel fits right in with that.  Today’s Gospel gives us a little more light to see what Jesus is up to.  He calls us all to repentance and to accept the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  He says to us just as he said to Simon, Andrew, James and John: “Come follow me.”  The year ahead can be an exciting spiritual journey for us.  Who knows what Jesus will do in us and through us and with us to further the kingdom of God?  We just have to answer that wonderful invitation – “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

  • Saturday after Epiphany

    Saturday after Epiphany

    Today’s readings

    “He must increase; I must decrease.”

    By these words, St. John the Baptist indicates that the Epiphany, the manifestation of our Lord in the flesh, is complete.  John’s disciples have got it wrong; they took offense at Jesus baptizing when he himself had been baptized by John.  They assumed that because John had baptized Jesus, that Jesus must in some way be inferior to John.  But John knows his mission as the Forerunner.  He knows that his ministry was one of paving the way for Jesus and the Gospel.  He knows that his own baptism was a mere precursor of the baptism that Jesus would bring, a baptism that imparts the fullness of the Holy Spirit to all believers.

    “He must increase; I must decrease.”

    St. John the Evangelist tells us in his letters that we are to be on guard against those who come in the name of Jesus but are not of him.  We must be wary of pretenders and totally turn away from false idols.  He has spent this past week in our first readings giving us the standards of discernment that help us to know the Truth.  Anyone of the Truth will testify to the Incarnation of Jesus in the flesh.  Anyone of the Truth will love deeply, and will love neighbors as well as God.  Anyone of the Truth, he tells us today, will cast out sin, from himself and from others.  Even though he may not be perfect, still he will battle sin and turn to Christ incarnate in the flesh for the indwelling of the Spirit, for the grace of his baptism.

    “He must increase; I must decrease.”

    Christ came in the flesh because, as the Psalmist tells us today, the Lord takes delight in his people.  As his people then, must also delight in him.  We must remember that we are all in the service of the one who came to set us free.  We must remember that our own thoughts, our own desires, all of these are not the be-all and end-all of existence, and quite often, we must die to them in order that God be manifested among us.  As we offer and prepare our gifts for the Eucharist today, may we also offer the decreasing of ourselves in order to pave the way for the increasing of Jesus Christ.

  • Thursday after Epiphany

    Thursday after Epiphany

    Today’s readings

    The feast of Epiphany is a celebration of the fact that Christian life looks like something.  Because Jesus has appeared on the earth and taken our own human form, because he has walked among us and lived our life and died our death, we know what the Christian Way looks like.  We know that the Christian life consists of embracing our humanity, with all its weaknesses and imperfections.  We know that it consists of living our own lives well, mindful of the needs of others, forgiving as we have been forgiven, and spreading the light of the Gospel wherever it is that God puts us.  The Galileans in the synagogue in today’s Gospel were amazed at Jesus’ speaking words of grace.  We too are called to do this so that all will recognize in us the presence of Christ.

    Because Christ is still manifest among us.  Every encounter with someone else is an opportunity for Epiphany.  It is an opportunity for us to look for the presence of Christ in that other person, and for them to see Christ at work in us.  How we do that depends on the situation, certainly, but it must always be our top priority if we are eager to be called Christians.  John’s words in the first reading are clear, and are words of indictment on those times we forget to be the Epiphany to others: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

    Christ is made manifest in all of us and among all of us.  In the ordinariness of our lives, we can find Christ’s grace abundantly blessing us, or we can reject it.  If we make it our priority to be Christ’s presence in the world in every encounter with a brother or sister, we may find that we are blessed with epiphany upon epiphany, constantly growing in God’s grace.  This is all part of our faith, of course, and it is this faith, as John tells us, that conquers the world.

  • Monday after Epiphany

    Monday after Epiphany

    Today’s readings

    “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

    Perhaps our devotion for this Epiphany week should be to pray the Mysteries of Light of the Rosary.  Epiphany is a time of manifestation, of light coming into the dark place that our world can be at times.  We long to see, and more than that we long to see Christ, the one who comes with peace and justice to make all things right.

    Today’s Mystery of Light, then would be “Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God with its call to repentance,” the third Mystery of Light.  Those, in fact, are his very words this morning.  This preaching is accompanied by the great and mighty acts of healing, which have the crowds flocking to him in droves.  They definitely see in Jesus a light that shines into the darkness of their lives, marked as they are by illness both physical and mental, but also perhaps overwhelmingly spiritual.

    But there were all sorts of people who didn’t flock to Jesus.  Many saw him as a charlatan and thought his healings were smoke and mirrors.  They preferred the darkness.  The same is true today.  Many hear the word and turn away from it.  Many hear of the kingdom with its call to repentance and choose to reject it.  But we cannot be that way.  We have the Light, and we are called to live in the Light.  Living in that Light, as the Psalmist tells us, gives us the nations for our inheritance.

  • The Epiphany of the Lord: Journey and Vocation

    The Epiphany of the Lord: Journey and Vocation

    Today’s readings

    “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”  This was the question those magi asked after their long and harrowing journey.  They had observed the star at its rising and were proceeding to pay tribute to the newborn king.  They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  We know the story well enough; we’ve heard it so many times.  But maybe this time, we can make a resolution not to lose sight of this wonderful event in the year to come.

    We celebrate Epiphany today, and Epiphany is a revelation, a manifestation of God here among us earthly creatures.  Epiphany is God doing a God-thing so that we will sit up and take notice.  But it takes some awareness to perceive such an Epiphany, such a wonderful event.  We, like the magi, have to ask the question, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”

    To answer that question, we well might look toward our manger scenes, or assume we’ll only find him in church or in our prayer books, or in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  And, of course, we will find the Lord there – those are wonderful places to start.  But the event of the Epiphany of the Lord reminds us that God wants to do a God thing in us in all sorts of circumstances.  So now we have to find God at work, at school, in our homes, in our community.

    Can we see the Lord in the demanding customer, the needy co-worker, the sulky teenager, the hovering parent, the snippy public servant?  We have to.  We dare not ever miss the opportunity to seek out the newborn King in every situation!  How could we ever turn up our nose at an opportunity for grace?  Why would we ever knowingly miss a situation that could help us grow in holiness?

    Finding the Lord is a journey that we all must make, at every stage of our lives.  God wants to do God-things in us all the time, leading us this way and that, helping us to know him in more profound ways and more relevant ways at all the stops and starts of our life-long journey of faith.

    For all of us, as we pursue the question of where is Christ in our lives, and as we make the journey with him, we are called also to discern our vocation.  Everyone has a vocation: some as parents, some as single people, some as ordained priests or consecrated religious.  God has a plan for all of our lives, and it is up to us on this Epiphany day, as well as every other day, to continue to seek clarity of that plan and to be certain we are following it as best we can.

    Where is the newborn king for us?  Are we ready to make the journey?

  • Christmas Weekday: The Most Holy Name of Jesus

    Christmas Weekday: The Most Holy Name of Jesus

    Today’s readings

    Not everyone has St. John the Baptist around to point out the Messiah to them.  Lots of us, I think, at one point or another, would have loved to have been in the sandals of those apostles when Jesus was passing by.  As much as we believe that Christ is present in every person, place and time, I’m sure lots of us would love to have St. John the Baptist point out when we’re missing Christ’s presence in some person or situation.  It’s harder when you don’t have the Forerunner showing you the way.

    But not everyone even recognized Christ – or at least who he was – in that time and place either.  St. John tells us in our first reading that people don’t recognize that we are children of God because they didn’t recognize God in Christ in the first place.  So if we miss Jesus in some situation or person, well, our mistake is not unique to us.

    During the Christmas season, we are celebrating the Incarnation: the presence of God among us.  Of course, this isn’t just about the presence of God among us two thousand years ago, but his real presence among us in every person, in every place and blessing, and especially in the Eucharist.  During this time, we might gaze on the manger and long to have been there gazing into the face of Christ.  We can gaze into the face of Christ today by taking time for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament or time to reach out to someone in need.  During this time, we might imagine ourselves next to the Manger on that night long ago, and long to have been there, holding the Christ Child in our arms.  In a few minutes, we can come to the Altar and receive our Jesus and hold him in our hands in the Eucharist, receiving him body and blood, soul and divinity.  Jesus is just as incarnate, just as Emmanuel, God-with-us, now as he was back then.

    We will be strengthened by the Word and the Eucharist today to go forward and see Christ all around us.  Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!

  • The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God

    Today’s readings

    One of the ways that I think we come to know about ourselves and our families, is the shared memories and stories that our parents and senior members of our families share with us over time.  I always enjoyed hearing stories from my grandparents about Mom and Dad, and my aunts and uncles, when they were growing up.  Now, we get to hear stories about me and my sisters.  Those are sometimes a little harder to enjoy!

    I wonder if Jesus felt the same way about the stories about him that Mary must have told.  Luke tells us of all the amazing things that were observed and said about Jesus, even in his infancy, and all these things are what Mary kept and reflected on in her heart.  I think it’s fair to say that she may not have understood all of them at the time, or at least she didn’t know where they were leading, although she certainly knew that her son was someone very special, the Son of God.  And so she keeps all these things and reflects on them in her heart.  She is the first, really, to receive the Gospel – observing it, as it were, while it was happening and unfolding.  And so she is the model for all of us hearers of the Word; we too catch little phrases or episodes that we later reflect on in our hearts.  When we first hear them, it might well be that we don’t understand them.  But we know that we can later reflect on them in our hearts, and the Holy Spirit will reveal their meaning.

    The Church gives us this wonderful feast of Mary on this, the octave day of Christmas.  In a very real way, the Church still celebrates this day as Christmas Day – that’s one of the wonderful things about being Catholic.  We get to celebrate this glorious event for many days.  But to celebrate the eighth day of Christmas as the feast of Mary, the Holy Mother of God is a wonderful and appropriate thing to do.  We all know that we are indebted to Mary’s faith, a faith which made possible the salvation of the whole world and everyone ever to live in it.

    More than that, Mary’s faith is a model for us.  Much like Mary, we often do not know where God is leading us, but in faith we are called to say “yes” anyway.  How willing are we to do that?  We are often called upon to take a leap of faith, make a fiat, and cooperate with God’s saving plan for us and for others.  Just like Mary, 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 will lead to redemption beyond belief, beyond anything we can imagine.

    And so, yes, Mary is the Mother of God.  And let me tell you, this was a doctrine that came without its price.  People fought over whether a human woman could ever be the mother of God.  How would that be possible?  But the alternative, really, would be to say that Jesus was not God, because we clearly know that Mary was his mother.  So to say that Mary was not the Mother of God is to say in a very precarious way that Jesus was not God, and we know just as surely that that would be incorrect.  Jesus was fully human but also fully divine, his human and divine natures intertwined in his person without any separation or division or degradation of one nature at the expense of another.  And so, as theologians teach us, Mary is the Mother of God the Word according to his human nature.  Every once in a while, when I’m feeling particularly theologically courageous, I reflect on that statement and marvel at its beauty.

    So, Mary is the Mother of God, but 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 completion of our mission.  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 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.  She is the Mother of God, and our mother, and we cannot sing our Christmas carols without singing her praises too.  We honor her faith and example today, and we ask for her intercession for our lives, for our families, for our Church and 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.

  • The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

    The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

    Today’s readings

    One of the great snapshots of Christmas for me has always been the manger scene.  Ours is a bit banged up and the worse for wear, but it still gives us a glimpse as to what God is doing at the Incarnation of Christ – an amazing moment in time!  The centerpiece of the manger, of course, is the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  The birth of Jesus couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time or in more difficult circumstances.  But it was precisely this timing that changed everything: for the world, and for the Holy Family.

    But I am aware that the idyllic holiness, peace and love the crèche depicts is often quite foreign to the experience of many families, including many families in this assembly.  I know there are families where communication is anything but good.  There are families who may never have known the kind of love that is shared between Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  There are families who struggle with abuse: physical, sexual, or emotional.

    Even in the “best” of families, there is often hardship.  I know there are families who struggle to keep up with all the activities that are expected of them.  There are families who can’t find time to have a meal together, let alone take a trip together.  Families often struggle to make ends meet.  There are families who struggle with the changing needs of children as they grow older.  Families may be separated by great distance, or may have suffered the sickness or death of one of the members.  Other families may find themselves changing roles as a parent, the one who provided for his or her children, grows old and becomes ill and then becomes the one in need of care.

    Families can be and are the source of our greatest joys and our deepest anguish.  Sometimes all in the same day.  The truth is, and perhaps you find yourself thinking this as you sit there and listen to these readings today, none of our families is perfect.  Few of us would rush to describe our families as well-functioning, let alone holy.  And so we can sit there and look at the manger and find its serenity meaningless in the hectic anxiety of our day-to-day family lives.

    But maybe we need to look a little deeper or listen a little harder today.  “Holy” and “perfect” are not the same thing.  We don’t need to be perfect to be a family.  That was true of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as well.  Would a perfect family have lost their child on the way home from a trip?  I don’t think so, but that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?  Mary says to Jesus when they find him that she and Joseph had been looking for him with “great anxiety.”  Those of you who are parents can well imagine the anxiety and can totally identify with what Mary and Joseph had to have been feeling.

    Jesus’ response shows the struggle that so often happens in families when the children are trying to grow up faster than the parents would like to see.  He is becoming aware of his mission and feels ready to take it on.  They still see him as a child, a child for whom they feel great responsibility, not to mention great love and concern.  This story is the last time we see Jesus until he begins his ministry at the age of about thirty.  It has been theorized that the reason for this is that he was grounded until he was thirty.

    I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the point is that even in the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there were struggles.  Nothing was perfect in that family, not even from the beginning.  Right at the beginning, there was a hint of scandal about the pregnancy; they had to flee for their safety; they suffered from poverty and violent threats.  Like many modern families they suffered under political and military oppression, had to settle far from their original home and had to start a new life in a foreign place.  Two thousand years may separate the modern family from the “Holy Family,” but there is much to link us, much that we share.

    So supposed to see in the Holy Family is something perhaps different from perfection.  Perhaps it is faithfulness.  Faithfulness to God and faithfulness to one another: indeed, it is this faithfulness that leads them to the holiness we celebrate today.  Look at the way the situation in the Gospel reading today was resolved among them.  Even though they were panicked and anxious about the disappearance of their son; even though they did not understand what was going on with him, yet they appreciated his uniqueness, and Mary kept all of these memories in her heart, kept them to be sorted out and understood much later.  And even though Jesus was ready to grow into adulthood and ready to begin his mission, yet he understood the concerns of his parents and continued to be obedient to them as he continued to grow in wisdom and grace.  They were faithful to one another.

    Our first reading today from Sirach addresses these same concerns.  The family members are instructed to care for one another, to honor one another, to love and respect one another all their days.  Even as parents age and the roles become reversed, still we are to respect them for all they have been for us.  We are called to be faithful to one another.

    I continue to be aware that even as I pull that theme of faithfulness out of today’s Scriptures, that can still seem insurmountable to many of you.  Why should you be faithful when the hurts inflicted by other members of your family still linger?  That’s a hard one to address, but the call to faithfulness is still there for all of us.  And we’re not told to be faithful just when everyone else is faithful.  Sometimes we are called to make an almost unilateral decision to love and respect the others in our families, and let God worry about the equity of it all.  I know that’s easier to say than to do, but please know that this Church family supports you with prayer and love as you do that.

    Every single one of us is called to be holy, brothers and sisters.  And every single one of our families is called to be holy.  That doesn’t mean that we will be perfect.  Some days we’ll be pretty far from it.  But it does mean that we will be faithful in love and respect.  It means that we will unite ourselves to God in prayer and worship.  It means we will love when loving is hard to do.  Mary loved Jesus all the way to the Cross and watched him die.  What we see in the model of the Holy Family for us is not perfection, but faithfulness and holiness.

    That holiness will make demands of us.  It did for Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  Our church still has the Nativity scene on display; we are still celebrating Christmas Day.  But today’s story of Jesus in the temple reminds us that our faith in the Incarnation does not stop at the crib.  The Gospel already has hints that Jesus’ disciples will be asked to make a break with the past and accept a new life of sacrifice.  Just as Jesus is beginning to show signs of moving beyond the safety of a small family and entering a larger world and responding to its needs, so too must we move out of the confines of the safe and serene and enter and respond to the areas of need that the world presents to us.  It will take holiness for us to be able to do that.

    Holiness demands that we seek it; it doesn’t just descend from above.  If we want holy families, and we certainly should, we will have to make decisions and even sacrifices to pursue it.  We will have to make an honest priority of worship; attending Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation as a minimum without fail.  We will have to surround our families in prayer, praying at meals, teaching and reviewing prayers, praying together at night, reciting the rosary together, reading the Scriptures together.  Holy families are not going to be perfect in these things, but they will not fail to pursue that holiness every single day.  It takes a daily decision to do that; but that is the vocation of the family in the world.

    Jesus, emerging from childhood to adulthood, reminds us that in his name, we must be ready to live faithful and holy lives, regardless of whether others are doing the same, and no matter what the personal cost.  Because the cost of rejecting holiness in our lives is just too great, and the loss of an earthly family is nothing compared to losing our place in the family of God.

  • The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    Today’s readings

    Right here in the middle of the joy of the Christmas Octave, we have the feast of what seems to be an incredibly horrible event.  All of the male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem two years old and younger are murdered by the jealous and, quite frankly, rather pathetic Herod.  But not only are his plans to kill the Christ Child (and thus remove any threat to his reign) thwarted by the providence of God, but also the horror of this event is transfigured into something rather glorious in terms of the Kingdom of God.

    As I said, in some ways, this is a horrible feast.  Sadly, this year, the events in Newtown, Connecticut make this feast all the more poignant and disturbing.  Add that to the millions who have been slaughtered by abortion, and the many children who die in inner-city violence every year, and we see just how precarious childhood can be in our time.  But the Church, in recognizing the contribution of the Holy Innocents to the kingdom, turns all of this sadness into hope and asserts that this is just the beginning of the world’s seeing the glory of Jesus Christ.  As disgusting and repugnant as Herod’s actions are to our sensibilities, yet these innocent children bear witness to the Child Jesus.  Saint Quodvoltdeus, an African bishop of the fifth century writes of them:

    The children die for Christ, though they do not know it.  The parents mourn for the death of martyrs.  The Christ child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to himself.  But you, Herod, do not know this and are disturbed and furious.  While you vent your fury against the child, you are already paying him homage, and do not know it.

    To what merits of their own do the children owe this kind of victory?  They cannot speak, yet they bear witness to Christ.  They cannot use their limbs to engage in battle, yet already they bear off the palm of victory.

    I think the key to making sense of all this is in the first reading.  The line that really catches me, because it seems almost erroneous in light of the horrible event we remember today, is “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.”  We can see all kinds of darkness in an event like the murder of innocent children.  Yet only God could turn something that horrible around to his glory.  They may have lived extremely short lives on earth, yet their lives in eternity were secured forever.  They become some of the first to participate in the kingdom that Christ would bring about through his Paschal Mystery.