Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: The Church Year

  • The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    Today’s readings

    Prayer is one of the most important elements of the Christian life, of the life of a disciple, and yet it is also, I think, one of the most difficult to master.  When I’ve mastered it, I’ll let you know – although it might be from beyond the grave!  Still, it’s something that we work at every day of our lives, and the working it out should be one of our greatest joys.  In today’s Liturgy of the Word, we have just one element of prayer, and that is the element of persistence in prayer.

    Now I’m going to be real careful here.  Lots of people give some lousy advice about prayer: if you just pray hard enough and long enough, everything will eventually work out all right.  I’m not going to tell you that, because things often don’t work out perfectly no matter how much we pray, and they almost never work out the way we’d like them to.
    So why even bother praying?  Well, hang in there, we’ll get to that.

    We have a wonderful image of prayer in our first reading.  I invite you to raise your arms with me if you’re able, and leave them raised until you can’t any more.  This is what Moses had to do to keep the Hebrew army in a winning position against Amelek and his warriors.  The minute Moses lowered his hands to rest, things went ill for the Hebrews, but as long as his hands were raised, things went okay.

    Now, again, I proceed cautiously here, because I don’t think things always work out perfectly as long as we pray.  But there’s an element of this analogy that is very important, I think.  And that element is that sometimes it’s hard to be persistent in prayer.  Sometimes you get tired.  Maybe your arms are not yet weary, but they might soon get there.

    I can think of a few times in my life when I’ve grown weary of praying.  One of them was in my late thirties when I was trying, once again, and once and for all, to figure out what God wanted me to do with my life.  I prayed and prayed and prayed, and it didn’t seem like God was answering at all.  I finally grew weary of prayer and told God that he should give me a big challenge and whatever it was, I would do it.  Then one day, the day of the Easter Vigil that year, I got a letter in the mail from a friend and it made everything crystal clear.  Six months later I was in seminary.

    Sometimes in our weariness we have to let go of what we think we would like God to do for us and just let God be God.  But how are your arms doing?  Are you weary yet?  Well if so, you’re in good company.  Moses found that to really be persistent in prayer, he needed friends – Aaron and Hur – to hold him up.  That’s true for all of us, I think.  There comes a point when we need to admit that we need friends to hold us in prayer, to take some of the burden of prayer when persistence has become difficult.  If you haven’t already, you can put your arms down now.

    I honestly don’t really know what to make of the gospel reading.  I mean, are we really supposed to think that God is an unjust judge who has no respect for anyone?  Obviously not.  I think that we’re supposed to see in this little parable that if even an unjust judge – one who neither fears God nor respects any person – if even that judge will eventually give in to the widow pleading for just judgment, well then how much more will our God who is infinitely just and doesn’t just respect us but loves us beyond all imagining, how much more will he pour out his blessings of justice on all of us?

    Which isn’t to say that he will definitely answer our prayers the way we want them answered.  Those persistent prayers will be answered in God’s way, in God’s time.  He may say “no” or he may even allow something evil in order to make something good of it.  We may have to bear the burden of disease or the sadness of the death of a loved one, in order that we might be healed in other ways, that we might come to know God’s love in the midst of our burdens.

    When we persist in prayer, sometimes it the change that happens is not the situation, but ourselves.  We may grow in grace in some way that we would not otherwise experience or even expect.  We may grow in our capacity to love, or in our awareness of the needs of others, or in our ability to be steadfast in the midst of chaos.  All of these give honor and glory to God, which after all, brothers and sisters, is our ultimate purpose in life.

    So let’s get back to that question that I asked at the beginning of the homily.  Why even bother praying if we’re not going to get what we want.  I think we pray for three reasons.  First, we pray to grow in our relationship with God who is our friend.  As in any relationship, we open ourselves up to conversation, watching for God’s response, accepting God’s will and his desire that we grow in love for him.

    Second, I think we pray because God genuinely cares about us.  If we are to grow in love, we have to know that he is open to us and desires that we communicate our needs, our hopes, our fears, our deepest longings to him.  It’s not that he doesn’t know these things already, but the process of expressing them in prayer helps us to know those needs in deeper ways and helps us to be aware of God’s action in our lives.

    Third, I think we pray because that’s how we grow in holiness.  The more that we bind ourselves to God by receiving his mercy and grace and knowing his love for us in prayer, the more we become new people, new creations.

    The Psalmist reminds us today that “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”  Every prayer may not be answered in our time and in the way that we’d like.  But by persisting in prayer, we will eventually and always become something better.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    I love that there were short verses for the psalm today, and we got to repeat this refrain from the Psalmist over and over.  If you think about it, and if you really enter into it, it becomes a kind of mantra, a way to center ourselves and open ourselves up to the Lord in this Eucharistic celebration.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    Because we are all in need of the Lord’s mercy, aren’t we?  Whether it is sinfulness, addiction, illness or infirmity, anxiety, worry about a family member, uncertainty about a job or the economy as a whole, we all have to realize that so much of the time we are in desperate need of the Lord’s love and mercy.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    And we come to the point that we know that the only thing that can help us is the Lord’s mercy.  We may have tried so many times on our own to cure ourselves or make the pain go away or focus on the positive or not cause waves, we know that of ourselves, ultimately, we are unable to fix the things that really vex us.  Sin takes hold, circumstances beyond our control confound us, powerlessness causes frustration.  And then, all of a sudden, we remember the One we were trying to hide from, or with whom we didn’t want to bother with our troubles.  But in the face of our own powerlessness, we must turn to the one whose power can overcome all.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    And so that powerlessness eventually, inevitably intersects with the loving power of our merciful God, who desires so much more for us than we would settle for.  And then we really do let God’s mercy come to us.  Because it was always there in the first place; never withheld.  We had just to let it come to us, had to be open to it, had to be in the place where we could receive it and come to the point where we could acknowledge our need for it and our gratitude for receiving it.  And when we at last arrive there, and that mercy comes to us, how overwhelmed we can be, how transformed, how loved we can feel, how cared for.  God’s mercy is always there, we have just to let it come to us.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

  • Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    So, what’s the big deal about seeking a sign?  Don’t we all need a sign from God every now and then so that we can be sure we are on the right path?  Otherwise, how are we supposed to know the will of God?

    Well, yes, signs are necessary and helpful events in our spiritual journey.  And Jesus was never stingy about giving signs.  After all, he healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the multitudes.  Who could have possibly missed the signs and wonders he was providing?  The thing was, the people, especially the religious authorities, were cynical and hard of heart, and they soon forgot the wonders he had done.  So they wanted to see Jesus do things they were pretty sure he couldn’t do; in other words, they were asking for a sign not from an attitude of faith, but an attitude of cynicism.

    And Jesus had no intention of playing that game.  These people would get no further sign, at least not until the sign of Jonah.  So what did that mean?  Well, as we remember, Jonah was swallowed up in the belly of a big fish for three days, then disgorged on the shores of Nineveh.  Jesus was foreshadowing that, in the same way, he himself would be swallowed up in the grave for three days, then raised to new life.  These cynical people would just have to wait for that great sign, and even then, they certainly wouldn’t believe.

    And so, yes, we can ask for a sign.  We can ask God to help us to know we have discerned the right path.  But we always must ask from the perspective of our faith, being open to whatever God shows us, being open to silence if that’s what he gives us, ready to follow him, sign or no sign, wherever we are led.  God is always there, even in our most difficult quandaries, ready to give us confidence by his presence.

    And never forget that we have already received the sign of Jonah, and that sign is incredibly good news for all of us!

  • Saturday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

    In today’s gospel reading, Jesus has just been given a great complement and he responds to it kind of brusquely, I think. Earlier in this eleventh chapter of Luke, Jesus has taught the disciples to pray, teaching them what has become known as the Lord’s prayer. Then there is the discourse on the need for persistence in prayer that we heard on Thursday. Then a teaching on demons. And now this. From this point on in the chapter, Jesus will turn up the heat on the people’s prayer life. Nothing less is effective. Nothing else is acceptable.

    And so we hear the same invitation: “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” We have been taught how to pray. We have been given tools in Scripture and in the Church. So the question is, have we observed that teaching? Has our prayer become persistent? Is it the life blood of our relationships with God and others? Does prayer sustain us in bad times and give us joy in good times?

    Observing the word of God takes many forms. Most likely, we think of the service we are called upon to help bring about a Godly kingdom on earth. And that is important, make no mistake about it. But that same word calls us to a vital relationship with our God, a relationship that raises the bar for all of our other relationships. That relationship with God can be a blessing to us and to our world. But we can only get there by prayer. We have to make time for the one who always makes time for us.

    “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

  • Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    There is a deep-rooted desire in each of us for connection with our God.  This is not surprising, since God made us for himself.  Some people, of course, are more aware of it than others; you all would not be here for Mass this morning if you were not aware of it.  The answer to that connection, as we have been taught, is prayer.  And the kind of prayer that Jesus teaches us today is not an ethereal prayer to a distant deity.  Instead, it is a prayer of love to God our Father, relying on his will for us, begging his forgiveness, and asking him to make of us a repentant and forgiving people.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Balance is one of the most important things that we can achieve in life, and yet it is a goal that often seems so fleeting.  That is particularly true of the spiritual life.  So many people find it difficult to have balance in their spiritual lives, even the saints.  Yesterday’s feast of Saint Francis reminded us that even he struggled with balance between contemplation and active preaching.  Eventually his rule of life led to embracing both.

    Today’s gospel reading calls each of us to strike balance.  Martha usually gets the bad rap for not responding to Jesus in the right way.  But I think it’s worth noting that both of them were going all-or-nothing in their way of hospitality.  Martha was cooking and cleaning and serving like nobody’s business.  Mary couldn’t be torn away from the Master Teacher, to whose words she clung with all her strength.

    Sometimes we are called to active service.  Martha is our model for that today.  Sometimes though, and perhaps more often than we embrace, we are called to contemplation, to be present before our Lord and to know his words and his love for us.  In our busy lives, I think we often miss that, and so perhaps the reproach Jesus gave to Martha is one we need to hear too.

    Martha and Mary are, in the end, models for the spiritual life.  If we fast forward to the story of the raising of their brother Lazarus, we find Martha professing the faith and Mary working through her grief.  They have both grown, and perhaps to some extent found balance.  We too have to find that balance between active service and contemplation, and whatever we do, make sure that we cling to Jesus as best we can.

  • The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: Respect Life Sunday

    The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: Respect Life Sunday

    Today’s readings

    How wonderful are the words we hear in today’s Gospel! “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” This raises important questions for us: how deep is our faith? What have we accomplished by faith? What has our witness to the faith looked like?  Has our tiny faith been powerful enough to move the deeply-rooted trees of ignorance and doubt that plague our world? On this Respect Life Sunday, we are particularly confronted with the issues of life and how we have given witness to the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.

    The basis for the movement to respect life, brothers and sisters, is the fifth commandment: You shall not kill (Ex 20:13). The Catechism is very specific: “Scripture specifies the prohibition contained in the fifth commandment: ‘Do not slay the innocent and the righteous.’ The deliberate murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere.” (CCC 2261) And that would seem simple enough, don’t you think? God said not to kill another human being, and so refraining from doing so reverences his gift of life and obeys his commandment.

    But life isn’t that simple. Life is a deeply complex issue involving a right to life, a quality of life, a reverence for life, and sanctity of life. Jesus himself stirs up the waters of complexity with his own take on the commandment. In Matthew’s Gospel, he tells us: “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, “You shall not kill: and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” (Mt 5:21-22)

    Our Savior’s instruction on life calls us to make an examination of conscience. We may proclaim ourselves as exemplary witnesses to the sanctity of life because we have never murdered anyone nor participated in an abortion. And those are good starts. But if we let it stop there, then the words of Jesus that I just quoted are our condemnation. The church teaches that true respect for life revolves around faithfulness to the spirit of the fifth commandment. The Catechism tells us, “Every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God.” (CCC 2319)

    And so we must all ask ourselves, brothers and sisters in Christ, are there lives that we have not treated as sacred? Have we harbored anger in our hearts against our brothers and sisters? What have we done to fight poverty, hunger and homelessness? Have we insisted that those who govern us treat war as morally repugnant, only to be used in the most severe cases and as a last resort? Have we engaged in stereotypes or harbored thoughts based on racism and prejudice? Have we insisted that legislators ban the production of human fetuses to be used as biological material? Have we been horrified that a nation with our resources still regularly executes its citizens as a way of fighting crime? Have we done everything in our power to be certain that no young woman should ever have to think of abortion as her only choice when she is facing hard times? Have we given adequate care to elder members of our family and our society so that they would not face their final days in loneliness, nor come to an early death for the sake of convenience? Have we avoided scandal so as to prevent others from being led to evil? Have we earnestly petitioned our legislators to make adequate health care available for all people?

    Every one of these issues is a life issue, brothers and sisters, and we who would be known to be respecters of life are on for every single one of them, bar none. The Church’s teaching on the right to life is not something that we can approach like we’re in a cafeteria. We must accept and reverence and live the whole of the teaching, or be held liable for every breach of it. If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. On this day of prayer for the sanctity of life, our prayer must perhaps be first for ourselves that we might live the Church’s teaching with absolute integrity in every moment of our lives.  We must take our tiny mustard-seed-sized faith and nourish it so that it will grow into a living witness of faith in action.

    Our God has known us and formed us from our mother’s womb, from that very first moment of conception. Our God will be with us and will sustain us until our dying breath. In life and in death, we belong to the Lord … Every part of our lives belongs to the Lord. Our call is a clear one. We must constantly and consistently bear witness to the sanctity of life at every stage. We must be people who lead the world to a whole new reality, in the presence of the One who has made all things new. We have heard the Lord’s teaching and the teaching of the Church in union with the Holy Spirit. Now we must respond as our Psalmist urges us: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    We should all be paying very close attention to the words of Job in our first reading.  It started yesterday, and will go on for a little while.  It’s important for us to hear from Job, because we have been, are, or will be where Job is any number of times in our lives.  Job is on a journey that will deepen his faith, but it won’t be pretty.  As always, it will involve some suffering as he moves along the way.  And for much of it, it seems like God is silent and one wonders if God is even there.  Job will see that God is with him all the way, even when he seems absent.  Job’s story will be one that can inspire us as we journey through the sufferings that this life brings us sometimes; and Job’s story can be one that helps us move to deeper faith too.

  • The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time [Cycle C]

    The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time [Cycle C]

    Today’s readings

    The past two weekends, we have had the first reading come from the book of the prophet Amos.  I love Amos.  He doesn’t mince words, and you can usually tell what he’s getting at right away.  Today, though, I think it’s a little harder to understand what he means.  The line that jumps out at me is the line, “Improvising to the music of the harp, like David, they devise their own accompaniment.”  It almost sounds like a good thing.  David, of course, was a wonderful musician, so why would it be a bad thing that they are able to devise their own accompaniments, like David did?

    Well, let me tell you a story from my own life that might shed some light on it.  This, too, is a musical analogy.  Back when I was in my early twenties, I was taking voice lessons. I had a really good teacher who taught me all the mechanics of voice as well as some music theory. He also tried to teach me how to play piano, but that never took. But I have to admit, sometimes I took things for granted and let my practicing slide. And that’s exactly what I had been doing that for a couple of weeks at one point.  The lesson right after that went okay, but I have to admit I didn’t really learn anything because I hadn’t put anything into it. At the end of the lesson, we sat down and talked for a while. Mostly my teacher was talking and I was getting an earful. But I thought he was praising me for my abilities and progress – the words he used were very positive and I left feeling really good about myself. But afterward, while I was driving home, I started to feel the kick in the pants that the talk really was. I got the message, loud and clear.

    I think that’s what Amos is doing here.  Listen to that line again: “Improvising to the music of the harp, like David, they devise their own accompaniment.” Again, it almost sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t at all. David could devise his own accompaniment, because he was singing those Psalms with the voice of God. But if everyone in our choir devised their own accompaniment, we’d have a cacophony. So here Amos is making the point that devising their own accompaniment meant that they listened to what they wanted to hear, not what God was telling them.  They did whatever they wanted to do, because it seemed like God was blessing them.  It’s kind of like the expression, “she dances to her own music.” It’s not a compliment at all.

    The rich man in today’s Gospel devised his own accompaniment too. He ignored poor Lazarus every single day of his life. He knew Lazarus’s need, and maybe he even thought he’d get around to helping Lazarus one day. Or maybe he thought, “What good can I do, I’m just one person?” Perhaps he thought, “If I give him something to eat, what good will that do, he’ll just be hungry tomorrow.” He probably came up with all kinds of excuses about why he couldn’t help Lazarus right here and right now. He was devising his own accompaniment.

    And we all know the story about the rich man. Someday becomes never. It’s eventually too late: poor Lazarus dies and goes to be with Father Abraham. But in an ironic twist of fate, the rich man also dies, presumably soon after. But it seems that Lazarus and the rich man end up in different places, doesn’t it? The rich man learns that devising one’s own accompaniment does not help one to sing a hymn of praise to the Lord, and his choice in life becomes his choice in the life to come. If one doesn’t choose to praise God in life, one won’t have that option in the life to come. Devising our own accompaniment comes with drastic consequences.

    Even in death, the rich man is devising his own accompaniment.  Even now, he does not see Lazarus as anything more than a messenger to do his own bidding.  “Father Abraham,” he cries out, “have pity on me.  Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.”  When he learns that’s not possible, he tries another tack:  “Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.”  He never sees Lazarus as a brother, and that’s why they’re in different places.  That’s why there is that great chasm that Father Abraham talked about between them – the rich man built it!  Devising our own accompaniment means that we separate ourselves from the community, we literally excommunicate ourselves.

    One of the principles of Catholic social teaching is solidarity with the poor and needy.  This was a topic that the prophets, like Amos, preached about all the time. Solidarity with the poor is the teaching that says we need to be one with our brothers and sisters, and not ignore their presence among us. I became very aware of this as I walked around downtown Chicago one time. I had come with some money to give to the poor. But on the train ride home, I realize that I had just quickly given some of them some money, and never really looked at any of them. They were my brothers and sisters, and I didn’t take the time to look them in the eye. Solidarity calls me – calls all of us – to do just that. We have to step out of that universe that we have set in motion around us and realize that Christ is present in each person God puts in our path. We have to step out of our own cacophony where we have devised our own accompaniments and step into the symphony that God has set in motion. We have to be one with all people.

    God knows about this principle of solidarity. Because God holds it so dear, he sent his only Son to take on flesh – our flesh – so that he could live in solidarity with us – all of us who are poor and needy in our sins. He shared in all of our joys and sorrows, and reaffirmed that human life was good. Life was made good at creation and remains good to this day. But if God could take on flesh in solidarity with us, then we must take on the burdens of our brothers and sisters and live in solidarity with them.  We must abandon our own accompaniments and sing the song of our brothers and sisters in need.

    In our second reading today, St. Paul tells us to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness. Compete well for the faith. Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called when you made the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses.” We have to be serious about living our faith and proclaiming the Gospel in everything that we do. In solidarity with all of our brothers and sisters, we must sing to God’s own accompaniment and join in the wonderful symphony that is the heavenly worship.

  • Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    One of the most important spiritual tools is that of mindfulness.  You could translate that as a kind of being in the moment; being aware of what is happening, what God is doing here an now.  This is a difficult concept for us modern people to get, because we fly from one thing to another so quickly, we hardly give things a moment to register.  Before we can focus on what’s happening around us, our cell phone rings, or the television takes us to a different place and time, or it’s time to herd the kids into the car and take them to whatever the next thing is.

    Mindfulness requires stillness, quiet and focus, and those things come to us in rather short supply.  As frustrating as this may be for us, we find the first disciples today in pretty much the same boat.  They don’t have the distractions of modern convenience, of course, but they were seeing incredible things from Jesus: miracles, healings, casting out demons, incredible words at war with the Scribes and Pharisees, walking on water, transfiguration on the mountain, all these just to name a few.  Their minds had to be reeling trying to figure out what to make of it all.  They hardly had time to process one thing before the next thing happened.

    To them, and to us, Jesus says in the gospel today: “Pay attention.”  He wants them to know that the cross stands ready for him, that he will have to suffer and die.  We too, have to live in the shadow of the cross: we will have our own suffering, our own pain and sadness.  None of us gets to the resurrection without the cross – Jesus didn’t, the disciples didn’t, and we won’t either.  And so it would serve us well to be mindful, to pay attention, to what is happening in the present moment, to what God is doing now.  If we miss that, the cross will overwhelm us and crush us in despair.  But if we are mindful of God’s presence even in suffering, even in the shadow of the cross, then we will never be crushed under the weight of the cross, because we will be buoyed up by the hope of resurrection.