Caritas Christi Urget Nos

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  • Monday of the First Week of Lent

    Monday of the First Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy.

    People often recoil at the mere suggestion of being called to personal holiness.  Oftentimes, this is wrapped up in what is really a misplaced and false humility, that kind of humility that says that since I’m good for nothing, and so there is no way I can even come close to being like God.  Yet the fact of the matter is that we are made good by our Creator God who designed us to be like himself, perfect in holiness.

    And if that seems too lofty to attain, Moses and Jesus spell out the steps to getting there today.  Clearly, personal holiness is not simply a matter of saying the right prayers, fasting at the right times, going to Church every Sunday and reading one’s Bible.  Those things are a good start and are key activities on the journey to holiness, but using them as a façade betrays a lack of real holiness.  Because for both Moses and Jesus, personal holiness, being holy as God is holy, consists of engaging in justice so that hesed – the Hebrew word meaning right relationship and right order – can be restored in the world.

    Every single command we receive from Moses and Jesus today turns us outward in our pursuit of holiness.  Our neighbor is to be treated justly, and that neighbor is every person in our path.  Robbery, false words, grudges, withholding charity, rendering judgment without justice, not granting forgiveness and bearing grudges are all stumbling blocks to personal holiness.  All of these keep us from being like God who is holy.  And worse yet, all of these things keep us from God, period.

    The law of the Lord is perfect, as the Psalmist says, and the essence of that law consists of love and justice to every person.  If we would strive for holiness this Lent – and we certainly ought to do so! –  we need to look to the one God puts in our path, and restore right relationship with that person.

  • The First Sunday of Lent: Remembering Who We Are

    The First Sunday of Lent: Remembering Who We Are

    Today’s readings

    Perhaps the greatest sin of modern times, maybe of all time, is that we sometimes forget who we are. Politicians forget that they are elected officials, given the trust of the people they serve, and so they become embroiled in scandal or sell themselves to special interest groups. Church leaders forget that they are ordained by God for holiness and so they give in to keeping up appearances, and bring scandal to the Church. But it’s not just these people; all of us fall to this temptation at one time or another – maybe several times – in our lives. Young people forget that they have been raised in good Christian, loving homes, and in their quest to define themselves, turn away from the values they have been taught. Adults forget that they are vocationally called to love their spouse and their children and so get caught up in their careers to the detriment of their family. Think of any problem we have or any scandal that has been endured and deep at the core of it, I think it stems from forgetting who we are.

    Forgetting who we are changes everything for the worse. It makes solving problems or ending scandal seem insurmountable: we constantly have to cook up new solutions to new problems, because we’ve gone in a new direction on a road that never should have been traveled. That was the scandal of Eden, and the scandal of the Tower of Babel, among others. Once we’ve forgotten who we are and acted impetuously, it’s hard to un-ring the bell.

    One of the consequences of forgetting who we are is that we forget who God is too. We no longer look to God to be our Savior, because we instead would like to solve things on our own. Perhaps we are embarrassed to come to God because we are deep in a problem of our own making. We see this all the time in our lives: who of us wants to go to a parent or teacher or boss or authority figure – or anyone, really – and tell them that we thought we had all the answers but now we’ve messed up and we can’t fix it and we desperately need their help? If that’s true then we’re all the more reluctant to go to God, aren’t we?

    This forgetting who we are, and forgetting who God is, is the spiritual problem that our readings are trying to address today. Moses meets the people on the occasion of the harvest sacrifice, and challenges them not to make the sacrifice an empty, rote repetition of a familiar ritual. They are to remember that their ancestors were wandering people who ended up in slavery in Egypt, only to be delivered by God and brought to a land flowing with milk and honey. And it is for that reason that they are to joyfully offer the sacrifice.

    St. Paul exhorts the Romans to remember who Jesus was and to remember his saving sacrifice and glorious resurrection. They are to remember that this faith in Christ gives them hope of eternity and that, calling on the Lord, they can find salvation.

    But it is the familiar story of Christ being tempted in the desert that speaks to us most clearly of the temptation to forget who we are and who God is. The devil would like nothing more than for Jesus to forget who he was and why he was here. He would have Jesus forget that real hunger is not satisfied by mere bread, but must be satisfied by God’s word. He would have Jesus forget that there is only one God and that real glory comes from obedience to God’s command and from living according to God’s call. He would have Jesus forget that life itself is God’s gift and that we must cherish it as much as God does.

    But Jesus won’t forget. He refuses to turn stones into bread, remembering that God will take care of all his real hunger. He refuses to worship Satan and gain every kingdom of the world, remembering that he belongs to God’s kingdom. He refuses to throw away his life in a pathetic attempt to test God, remembering that God is trustworthy and that he doesn’t need to prove it.

    The way that we remember who we are as a Church is through the Sacred Liturgy. In the Liturgy of the Word, we hear the stories of faith handed down from generation to generation. These are the stories of our ancestors, from the Old Testament and the New. In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we engage in anamnesis, a remembering, or re-presentation of Christ’s Passion and death, and as we do that, it becomes new for us once again; it brings us to Calvary and the empty tomb and the Upper Room. There is no better way for us to remember who we are as a people than to faithfully participate in the Sacred Liturgy.

    And so we come to this holy place on this holy day to remember that we are a holy people, made holy by our God. We remember who we are and who God is. We rely on the Spirit’s help to reject the temptations of Satan that would call us to forget who we are and instead become a people of our own making. We have come again to another Lent. Lent is a time of conversion and springtime and re-creation. For the people in our Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults – RCIA – it is a time of conversion from one way of life to another as they approach the Easter Sacraments. For the rest of us, Lent is a time of continued re-conversion and re-commitment to our sacramental life. Our Church teaches us that conversion is a life-long process. In conversion, we see who our God is more clearly and we see ourselves in a new, and truer light – indeed we see who we really are before God.

    That is life in God as it was always meant to be. Remembering our God, remembering who we are, we have promise of being set on high, as the Psalmist proclaims today. This Lent can lead us to new heights in our relationship with God. Praise God for the joy of remembering, praise God for the joy of Lent.

  • Friday after Ash Wednesday

    Friday after Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Sometimes people say they aren’t giving up something for Lent, they’re just going to try to do something positive. I think that can be a little permissively vague, to be honest. I usually tell people it doesn’t just have to be one or the other.  In fact, the Church teaches that it shouldn’t be one or the other.  Today’s Liturgy of the Word makes it clear that it very definitely should be both.

    Fasting is important because it helps us to see how blessed we are. It is important because it helps us to realize that there is nothing that we hunger for that God can’t provide. Fasting teaches us, once again, that God is God and we are not. This is important for all of us independent-minded modern-day Americans. We like to be in charge, in control, and the fact is that whatever control we do have is an illusion. God is in control of all things, even when it seems like we are in chaos. Fasting teaches us that we can do without the things we’ve given up, and that God can provide for us in much richer ways. Fasting is absolutely essential to having an inspiring, life-changing Lent, and I absolutely think that people should give things up for Lent.

    But giving something up for Lent does not excuse us from the obligation to love our neighbor. This falls under the general heading of almsgiving, and along with fasting and prayer, it is one of the traditional ways of preparing our hearts for Easter during Lent. We might be more mindful of the poor, contributing to the food pantry or a homeless shelter or relief organization. We might reach out by serving in some capacity, like volunteering for the mobile pantry, or helping out at the Daybreak shelter. We also might give the people closest to us in our lives a larger portion of the love that has been God’s gift to us, in some tangible way. Today’s first reading reminds us that fasting to put on a big show is a sham. Fasting to bring ourselves closer to God includes the obligation of almsgiving and prayer. Together, these three facets of discipleship make us stronger Christians and give us a greater share of the grace that is promised to the sons and daughters of God.

  • Thursday after Ash Wednesday

    Thursday after Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    When it comes right down to it, we have a choice. We can choose life or death, blessing or curse, the way of the Cross or the way of the world. The choice that we make has huge consequences, eternal consequences. The stakes are big ones, and we must choose wisely.

    The command from Deuteronomy is clear: “Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.”  The way of the Lord is life-giving, the way of the world is death.  The way of the Lord is blessing, the way of the world is curse.  The passing pleasures of the world are nothing compared to the eternal pleasures of God’s way. 

    Jesus asks us today to make a choice to take up our crosses and follow him.  There is great suffering in the cross.  But, as he says, what profit is there for us if we gain the whole world but lose our very selves?  May we all this day renounce the hold the world has on us, and choose life, that we and our descendants might live.

  • Ash Wednesday

    Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Rend your hearts, not your garments,
    and return to the LORD, your God.

    Today we begin something really important.  And I don’t mean just the smudging of our foreheads with the ashes of burnt palms.  That’s just an outward sign.  What I mean is the inward activity those ashes represent, what our collect prayer today calls “this campaign of Christian service.”  This time of Lent is so important to us because it calls us to newness in our relationship with God, that relationship that brings us to the eternal reward for which we were created.  That’s why we call it “Lent.” Lent means “springtime,” a time of rebirth and renewal and new creation.

    We have come here today for all sorts of reasons. But the most important reason we come to Church on this, the first day of Lent, is for what we celebrate on the day after Lent: the resurrection of the Lord on Easter Sunday.  Through the Cross and Resurrection, Jesus has won for us salvation, and we have been blessed to be beneficiaries of that great gift.  All of our Lenten observance, then, is a preparation for the joy of Easter.

    Lent calls us to repent, to break our ties with the sinfulness and the entanglements that are keeping us tethered to the world instead of free to live with our God and receive his gift of salvation.  Traditionally, our Church offers us three ways to do that: fasting, prayer and almsgiving.  Giving things up, spending more time in prayer and devotion, dedicating ourselves to works of charity, all of these help us to deeply experience the love of Christ as we enter into deeper relationship with him.  That is Lent, and the time to begin it, as we are told, is now: Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!

    Today, you can take our Lenten handout with you as you leave Mass.  It has information about all of the spiritual events that are taking place here at Saint Mary’s during Lent, including our parish Mission with Father Ed O’Shea, a program for men on Saturday mornings led by our Fishers of Men group, and online mission allowing us to Encounter Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and a Bible Study called “Witness at the Cross” which will prepare us for Good Friday.  There is also a list of events for our parish Year of the Eucharist.  I invite you to take one, look it over, sign up for what jumps out at you, and save the handout for future reference.  I’m pleased that we have an array of spiritual offerings to help all of us make the most out of Lent.

    The handout also lists our Holy Week, Easter, and Divine Mercy Sunday schedule, and lists times for confessions during Lent.  It’s important to make a good confession some time during Lent, taking that step of repentance which is the first step toward newness, re-creation, and springtime in our lives. 

    Today’s ashes are just the beginning of our “campaign of Christian service.”  Ashes have traditionally been a symbol of an interior disposition.  In scripture, you’ll hear of people sprinkling ashes on their person as they ask pardon for their sins.  Then they fasted and prayed for renewal, and changed their lives.  That’s what the repentance of Lent is all about: literally turning around and going in a new direction.  Getting back on the path and following our Lord who calls us to take up our crosses and follow him.  So ashes can’t be the last time you’re here in church, it can’t be the only discipline of Lent.  It’s the beginning, and certainly a good one.

    Finally, a word about receiving ashes today.  You’ll recall that last year, due to the pandemic, the Vatican directed that instead of etching a cross on foreheads, we return to the more ancient practice of sprinkling ashes on the top of a person’s head.  This is reminiscent of the practice I mentioned a minute ago, in which people sprinkled themselves with ashes as a sign of repentance.  This year, you have both options.  If you come forward with your head bowed, we will sprinkle ashes on your head.  If you don’t, we will trace a cross on your forehead.  Either is fine.

    So here we go.  Our Lenten fasting, almsgiving, and prayer begin today with the sprinkling of ashes.  It’s a wonderful gift to have this opportunity to make our relationships with God and others right.  It’s a great time to get out of our own heads and show our love for others as God has loved us.  And none of this, as the Gospel reminds us today, is to be done begrudgingly or half-heartedly.  None of it is to be done with the express purpose of letting the world see how great we are.  It is always to be done with great humility, but also with great joy.  Our acts of fasting, prayer, and charity should be a celebration of who God is in our lives, and a beautiful effort to strengthen our relationship with him.

    It is my prayer that this Lent can be a forty-day retreat that will bring us all closer to God.  May we all hear the voice of the prophet Joel from today’s first reading: “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart!”

  • Monday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time – Presidents’ Day

    Monday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time – Presidents’ Day

    Today’s readings

    So the disciples are waiting for Jesus to come down the mountain after the Transfiguration.  They have attempted to cure a man’s son from the hold of a demon, but they were apparently unable to do so.  This seems to have led to an argument between them and the scribes.  You can almost feel Jesus’ exasperation.  Both the disciples and the scribes should have been able to do something for the boy, but they couldn’t.  Why?  Because instead of praying, they argued about it.  “This kind can only come out through prayer,” Jesus tells the disciples when they ask why they were ineffective.

    I often wonder, with more than a little fear, how many demons I could have cast out – in myself and in others – if I had a little more faith, if I prayed a little more than I do.  There are, of course, all sorts of demons: demons of illness, demons of cyclical sin, demons of impure attachments, demons of homelessness, poverty, and marginalization, and so many more.  Think of all the demons we could cast out if we just had more faith, if we prayed more fervently and stopped arguing with everyone over everything that isn’t to our liking.

    Today is Presidents’ Day, and we remember those who have served our country as the leader of the most powerful nation in the free world.  It’s a task that should never be undertaken lightly.  Some of these men have been great, and others really terrible.  All have been flawed in some way, because no one is perfect.  None of them has had the luxury of everyone agreeing with everything they said and did.  Perhaps those who have been more successful have been those who thought long and hard before responding to people and situations, taking their gravely important task to prayer before speaking and arguing.  One thing is certain, we need to pray for all of them, living and dead, because their judgment will be a difficult one: from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. 

    Sometimes, when we are trying to overcome some problem, the last thing we think to do is pray, when it should absolutely be the first.  The disciples were guilty of it, the scribes were, and we are too sometimes, if we’re honest.  And all of us should know better.  I know that I myself can think of a number of problems I’ve tried to solve all by myself, when it would have been so much more effective to first turn them over to our Lord.  We can’t just cut God out of the picture and rely on our own strength; that never works – our own strength is so fiercely limited, whether we are the President of the United States, or just a citizen gathered in church for Mass.  We have to turn to the tools we have been given: faith and prayer.  And we can start by saying with the boy’s father: “I do believe, Lord; help my unbelief.”

  • The Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Complete Reversal!

    The Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Complete Reversal!

    Today’s readings

    So what’s wrong with being rich, full and not hungry, laughing, and having people speak well of you?  After all, God told us to go forth and fill the earth and subdue it, so attaining riches is really just the realization of that, right?  And constantly being hungry is unpleasant, and even unhealthy.  Speaking of health, experts speak often about the healing properties of laughter.  And as for having people speak well of you, isn’t that just an acknowledgement that we’re doing what we are supposed to be doing? 

    And while we are on the subject, what’s great about being poor, hungry, weeping and hated?  Doesn’t that just make you a failure, and a hard person to be around?  What possible good can people like that do for the community?  Why would anyone choose to live like that?

    So that’s the premise of today’s Gospel passage.  But, as often the Gospels do for us, we are in for quite a surprise as we roll up our sleeves and delve into the meaning of the scriptures today.  The surprise, actually, comes fairly early in the Gospel passage and you’d definitely miss it with just a quick reading, because we’re more inclined to notice the variation on the Beatitudes instead.  The surprise comes in the first sentence: “Jesus came down with the Twelve and stood on a patch of level ground…” 

    So Jesus has been up a mountain to pray, and has chosen the Twelve apostles, and coming down he sees a big crowd of people from basically all of Israel gathered.  When it says that he stood on a stretch of level ground, this signifies not just where Jesus was standing when he gave the Beatitudes and woes, but more importantly signifies a change, a reversal, of peoples’ perceptions about God and what he wanted to do in the world.  So if our perception of God is One who is beyond us and above us, higher than the heavens, and transcendent in nature, well, yes, we are right about that.  But he’s not beyond, above, and transcendent in a way that separates us from him.  Standing on level ground, Jesus, who is God, is also one who is with us, and among us, and in us, and for us.  And the Beatitudes and woes just serve to underscore that.

    So we have to see God in the poor, the hungry, the grieving, and the outcasts.  Because God is with them and knows they were created with dignity and gifted with grace.  At the same time, we have to realize that if we find ourselves in the reverse, that is rich, with plenty of food on the table, laughing and joking and without a care in the world, and always courting the favor of others, we need to see where that’s coming from.  Are we not using what we have to lighten the load of others?  Are we primarily concerned about our own needs and ignoring the plight of others?  Is our joy at the expense of the sadness of others?  Are we constantly looking for people to build up our egos?  Do we seek what is best for us and accept good fortune and gifts and not use them for the betterment of others and the community?  If so, woe to us.

    Jesus came to point the way to the kingdom of God.  But he didn’t do that by pointing up; instead he did that on level ground, pointing to the ones in need among us.  He wasn’t speaking of a far-off time and place, instead one that was near and now and urgent.  And he makes it very clear that this is not a new message, but one that the prophets proclaimed and people ignored.  Because it was the prophets who were hated and excluded and insulted and denounced, while the false prophets were spoken well of.  The prophets and those who follow their teaching can look for reward in heaven, those false prophets who tell well-off people what they want to hear and court their favor have already received their reward and can hope for nothing more.

    So Jesus preached complete reversal.  It’s not the giddy-happy people without a care in the world that are blessed, rather those who suffer and unite that suffering to Christ that find blessing.  Those who depend on God are blessed, while those who depend on themselves and on those who appear influential find woe.  The kingdom is not to be found far-off and far-away, but rather here in our midst.  God is not removed from us in his transcendence, but rather is Emmanuel, God-with-us, here with us on level ground. We are still in the early part of Luke’s Gospel and the early part of Jesus’ ministry.  But Luke points out at the outset that it’s going to be a bumpy ride!  We need to look for the unexpected, to know that if something in the message makes us feel uncomfortable or uneasy, it may be that God is telling us to pay attention to something important.  When we engage the reversal and enjoy finding God in unexpected places among unexpected people, we can rejoice and be glad, for our reward will be great in heaven.

  • Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time: Right Worship

    Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time: Right Worship

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings are a call to right worship, to righteousness, or right relationship with God and others.  Worship of God, properly understood and properly performed, does not allow singing and praying and invoking God’s name in church and then cursing at someone in the parking lot, or even sending a tersely-written email the moment we get home.  More than that, right worship requires hesed, the Hebrew word that means something like love in action.  Worshipping our God means putting our faith into practice and loving as we are loved by God.

    Solomon, the architect of the Temple, is dedicating the Temple in our first reading this morning.  He stands before the altar in the presence of the entire community and prays that God would watch over the temple and forgive the sins of the community.  Now that they have a place to worship God rightly, the challenge for the community would be to honor that worship in day to day living, which as the scriptures tell us, sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t.

    Which leads to the conflict with the scribes and Pharisees in the Gospel reading.  They take the disciples of Jesus (and Jesus himself) to task for not following every prescribed ritual that is basically a human precept and minor tradition.  Yet they support people creating loopholes in order to violate the fourth commandment of the decalogue and dishonor their parents.  And I’m sure our Lord could have given them many more examples.  The point is that, if they want to honor traditions, they need to worship rightly, putting their faith into action.

    So this is a lesson we need to heed as well.  We can get caught up in the practice of our worship and never practice our faith if we’re not careful.  We must always remember that the true worship of God merely begins here in church; it plays out in the way we live our lives, the interactions we have with family, friends, community members, shopkeepers, coworkers, and so many more.  If we are not making the love of God present everywhere we go, are we really worshipping at all?

  • The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Put Out Into Deep Water

    The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Put Out Into Deep Water

    Today’s readings

    “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

    A command to do something, and a promise – that  is what happens in this early interaction Simon Peter has with Jesus.  And it had to be exasperating for Simon, because, as he says, they’ve been hard at it all night long and their efforts were fruitless.  They’re tired, they’re frustrated, and possibly even a little embarrassed and scared because this was their life’s work and by the accounts we have in the Gospels, they weren’t very good at it.  But something in the command, and in the person of Jesus, convinced him to lower the nets.  And Jesus makes good on the promise that came with the command: they netted a catch, and not just any catch, but a big enough catch to fill two boats beyond capacity.  A command, and a promise fulfilled.

    “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

    If you get the idea that we’re not just talking about fish here, you’re catching on, so to speak.  Putting out into deep water is a command we could all use to take a bit more seriously.  Because I think we all settle for looking around on the shallow end, and honestly, we don’t find much of anything in shallow water.  Here’s the shallow water that I think we spend our time in way too often: binge watching television shows; getting our news off of questionable sources on the internet and television and believing them like they were the holy Gospels; accepting our eighth grade catechesis and faith formation and never engaging it at an adult level; insisting on our own way in personal relationships, loving our sins, and tuning out the world in such a way that we never have to grow in our humanity.  And that’s a short list.  It’s shallow water, and if we are honest, we all look for our food there way too often in our lives.

    Today, Jesus invites not just Simon and the others, but also us: “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

    If Simon could fish in the deep water after a long night of the same old nothing happening, we too can accept our Lord’s invitation to go deep and expect a catch too.  I think this is something worth looking at.  As I mentioned, you can almost hear the exasperation in Peter’s voice: “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing…”  They have given up.  All they wanted to do was go home, clean up, and call it a day.  But I think it’s not just that they have given up on that day’s catch.  They have given up completely.  They have failed to make a catch more than once, and they may have given up hope that there were any fish to be caught. 

    Are we in that place too?  The pandemic seems to be going on and on and on: the things we were doing to protect ourselves and our loved ones no longer seem to be working.  Numbers surge and ebb, and hospitals fill, and people die.  Pandemic-weary people argue over mandates and bicker over what is best.  Experts tell us one thing, and if you don’t like that, you can find an expert to tell you something else.  But that’s really only the surface of the scary things that rage around us.  Crime rages in our cities and nobody has a worthwhile solution.  I keep waiting for someone to write a book called No Suspects Are In Custody, because no one even wants to risk helping anyone or being part of a solution.  Meanwhile one politician points the finger at another for just about every problem we can imagine.  There isn’t respectful dialogue anywhere anymore: not on talk shows, not in Congress, not in communities.  Everything is so disheartening that we just want to give up, go home, and call it a day.

    What difference does it even make if we try to change things?  No one wants to listen, no one wants to change, no one wants to grow.  We’ve given up on ourselves and don’t even see ourselves as worthy of the deep water and the experience of growth. 

    But Jesus does.  “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

    Peter was in that place, but Jesus saw more in Peter than Peter did in himself.  He saw the one who could be zealous and on fire and make mistakes and accept forgiveness and live to grow and walk on water and witness to the Resurrection, and nourish a fledgling Church.  Peter was an extremely unlikely leader: he couldn’t even lead his crew to make a catch of fish when it was his life’s work.  But Jesus sees the miracle in the unlikely.  And so he commands him: “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”  And you know what?  Peter’s nets are full beyond capacity; beyond his wildest dreams.

    Jesus sees so much more in us than we see in ourselves.  But we have to be willing, as Peter was, to try again, to go deep, and to expect a catch.  We have to be willing to learn new things that challenge our preconceived notions.  We have to be willing to expose ourselves to good sources of information and faith formation.  We have to be willing to listen to others, even if we don’t agree, and expect to learn something from the interaction.  We have to be willing to look for what Jesus wants us to catch in every situation, and willing to stay with it, no matter how exasperated we are.

    During our parish’s Year of the Eucharist, we are preparing many spiritual, faith formation, and leadership development opportunities.  We will all have the opportunity to grow in our faith and catch people and bring them to the banquet that is the Kingdom of God.  But we ourselves have to be willing to go deep, to challenge ourselves, and to be part of the movement to live as Eucharistic People. 

    Lent is coming. Lent is a call to conversion, re-conversion, and growth in discipleship. Lent is the quintessential call to put out into deep water.  We would do well to remind ourselves yet again this Lent that it is God who chooses us, that it’s not about what we can do, that it’s always God who gives us the grace to do truly great things, that our unworthiness does not define us in the eyes of God, and that God knows of what we are capable and sees great things in us. Maybe Lent can find us putting aside whatever fears keep us from answering God’s call and instead allow ourselves to be truly changed, truly used by God to do great things.

    “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

  • Friday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the school children.

    The readings for daily Mass usually follow in a series.  So we read from a certain book of the Bible for a while, and then we move on to another one for a while.  So for the last couple of weeks, we have been listening to the story of the rise and fall of good King David, mostly from the books of Samuel.  Today’s is kind of a poetic summary from the book of Sirach, the wisdom writer.  Yesterday, in our first reading, we heard the story of his peaceful death and the transfer of the kingship to his son, Solomon.  Today, tells us about David in more poetic, and somewhat apologetic and glowing terms.  From it, we can see that, when David was at his best, he gave praise to God. 

    In our Gospel today, we hear about the end of Saint John the Baptist’s life.  Herod’s wife, Herodias, held a grudge against John because he opposed their marriage.  So she schemed to end his life.  Saint John the Baptist was one who lived his entire life pointing the way to the Lord.  With every fiber of his being, and until his last breath, he gave praise to God.

    So both King David and Saint John the Baptist did their best to give praise to God until their dying breath.  This is the role of disciples, which includes you and me.  We should always give praise to God and point others to him.  At our best, we should be an Assembly of holy people, helping all the world to find our God.  Whatever we do, and wherever we are, people should see Jesus in us.  In fact, we might be the only Jesus someone sees.  Let’s never get in the way of that.

    In the quiet times of Mass, spend some time thinking about how you might be Jesus to the people around you today, and ask God to give you the grace to do it.