Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: God

  • Fourth Sunday of Lent [C]

    Fourth Sunday of Lent [C]

    Today’s readings

    At the heart of it, Lent is about two things.  First, it’s about baptism.  That’s what the participants in our RCIA program are reflecting on these days, and two of them are preparing to be baptized at our Easter Vigil Mass this year.  And baptism leads us to the second purpose of Lent, which is conversion: forgiveness and reconciliation and grace.  Baptism is the sacrament that initially wipes away our sins and gives us grace to be in relationship with Jesus Christ, who leads us to the Father.

    Jesus paints a picture of a very forgiving Father in today’s Gospel, so this story is of course perfect for Lent, when we ourselves are being called to return to God.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard this story growing up, I was always kind of mad about what was going on.  I guess I’d have to say that I identified myself with the older son, who tried to do the right thing and got what seemed to be the short end of the deal.  But that’s not what the story is about.

    We of ten call this parable the parable of the Prodigal Son, but I don’t think that’s right because I don’t think the story is about the son – either son – at least not primarily about them.  And the word “prodigal” does not mean what we think it means.  I think when we hear that word, we think prodigal means “wayward” or something, because we are relating the word to the younger son’s actions.  In fact, the word “prodigal” means something like “wildly, rashly, incredibly extravagant.”  It’s related to the words “profuse” or “prodigious.”

    So the prodigal one here, I think, is the Father.  First of all, he grants the younger son’s request to receive his inheritance before his father was even dead – which is so presumptuous that it feels hurtful.  Kind of like saying, “Hey dad, I wish you were dead, give me my inheritance now, please.”  But the Father gives him the inheritance without ill-will.  Secondly, the Father reaches out to the younger son on his return, running out to meet him, and before he can even finish his little prepared speech, lavishes gifts on him and throws a party.  So it is the Father who is prodigal here, not the son, not either of the sons.

    There is a tendency, I think, for us to put ourselves into the story, which is not a bad thing to do.  But like I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to identify with the hard feelings of the older son sometimes.  But let’s look at these two sons.  First of all, I’ll just say it, it’s not like one was sinful and the other wasn’t – no – they are both sinful.  The younger son’s sin is easy to see.  But the older son, with his underlying resentment and refusal to take part in the joy of his Father, is sinful too.  It’s worth noting that the Father comes out of the house to see both sons.  That’s significant because a good Jewish father in those days wouldn’t come out to meet anyone – they would come to him.  But the Father meets them where they are and desperately, lovingly, pleads with them to join the feast.

    So, both sons are sinful.  But remember, this is a parable, and so the characters themselves are significant.  They all symbolize somebody.  We know who the Father symbolizes.  But the sons symbolize people – more specifically groups of people – too.  The younger son was for Jesus symbolic of the non-believer sinners – all those tax collectors and prostitutes and other gentile sinners Jesus was accused of hanging around with.  The older son symbolizes the people who should have known better: the religious leaders – the Pharisees and scribes.  In this parable, Jesus is making the point that the sinners are getting in to the banquet of God’s kingdom before the religious leaders, because the sinners are recognizing their sinfulness, and turning back to the Father, who longs to meet them more than half way.  The religious leaders think they are perfect and beyond all that repenting stuff, so they are missing out.

    So again, it’s good to put ourselves in the story.  Which son are we, really?  Have we been like the younger son and messed up so badly that we are unworthy of the love of the Father, and deserve to be treated like a common servant?  Or are we like the older son, and do we miss the love and mercy of God in pursuit of trying to look good in everyone else’s eyes?  Maybe sometimes we are like one of the sons, and other times we are like the other.  But the point is, that we often sin.

    But our response has to be like the younger son’s.  We have to be willing to turn back to the Father and be embraced in his mercy and love and forgiveness.  We can’t be like the older son and refuse to be forgiven, insisting on our own righteousness.  The stakes are too high for us to do that: we would be missing out on the banquet of eternal life to which Jesus Christ came to bring us.

    For us, this Lent, this might mean that we have to go to confession.  Even if we haven’t been in a long time.  We have confessions at 4pm for the next two Saturdays, and on Saturday the 27th, we also have confessions at 6pm.  We also have our parish penance service on Tuesday the 30th at 7:30 … those are all on the front of the bulletin.  Lent is the perfect time to use that wonderful sacrament of forgiveness to turn back to the Father who longs to meet us more than half way with his prodigal love and mercy.  So don’t let anything get in the way of doing it.  If you haven’t been to confession in a very long time, go anyway.  We priests are there to help you make a good confession and we don’t yell at you, don’t embarrass you – we are there to help you experience God’s mercy.

    We are all sinners and the stakes are high.  But the good news is that we have a Prodigal God, who longs to meet us more than half way.  All we have to do is decide to turn back.

  • Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    Today’s readings

    You know, since I’m currently serving in this, my home parish, I’m going to pass on the opportunity to comment on today’s Gospel: I’ve already reflected long and hard on how a prophet is not accepted in his own native place!  I’d like to talk instead about our second reading today.  Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians about the nature of love is one that we’ve heard a million times, especially if we’ve been to any number of weddings.  We may have heard this reading so often that on hearing the opening words of it, we tune out and just let the words flow past us.  But I think Paul’s ruminations about the nature of love are important, so I’d like us to take a little pause in our lives to consider them.

    The other day, I was finishing up at the office after having met with a nice couple who were planning to get married here next year.  The night was crisp, well cold actually, but very clear, and I could see the almost-full moon bright and large in the sky.  Again, this is something that we see enough that maybe we might just be tempted to walk past it and get to someplace warm.  But I didn’t.  It struck me that during the winter, we don’t often get to see such a beautiful sky; too often the beauty around us is masked by gray clouds.  And so that beauty caused me to stop where I was – even though it was cold – and look up at the sights for a minute or so.

    I realized that that beauty brought me joy, even in the dark of winter, and I remembered that joy is, as Teilhard de Chardin wrote, the most infallible sign of the presence of God.  And I got a little choked up, as I stood there, thinking about how God loved me enough to give me a glimpse of beauty that was really nothing compared to what lies in store for us.  As Saint Paul says today, we currently see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then we shall see face-to-face.  And what beauty, what joy there will be on that great day!

    That beauty that we shall see one day is what theologians call the beatific vision.  That is the joy that we hope for in the life to come, and nothing on earth can compare to it.  But sometimes, once in a while, probably more often than we take time to realize, God gives us a little glimpse at that beauty, that joy here on earth.  The Catechism teaches us about this too.  It says, “Faith makes us taste in advance the light of the beatific vision, the goal of our journey here below.  Then we shall see God ‘face to face,’ ‘as he is.’  So faith is already the beginning of eternal life.  When we contemplate the blessings of faith even now, as if gazing at a reflection in a mirror, it is as if we already possessed the wonderful things which our faith assures us we shall one day enjoy.” (CCC, 163)

    One of those little glimpses of the beatific vision, is love.  We know that God is love, that God cannot not love, that anything that is not loving is not God.  I often say that the way that I know that God loves me is by just thinking about the good people God has put in my life.  My family, my friends, my parish family, my brother priests, all of these good people love me in ways that can only come from God.  And experiencing the love that they have for me, and the love I have for them, I get a little glimpse of God’s love for me.  And so it is no wonder that Saint Paul today takes such a good, long look at the nature of love.  He tells us what love is, and also what love is not; he defines love in at least sixteen different ways.

    Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this reading though, is that love is the most important thing of all.  That makes sense if we keep in mind that God is love, doesn’t it?  But we often get bogged down in looking for other things.  And Paul knows this too.  He says that even if we spend all our time working on developing our spiritual gifts – which is not a bad thing to do, of course – but don’t work on loving, then those spiritual gifts are meaningless.  It could never happen, given our imperfect natures, but even if we could speak and understand every human and angelic language, even if we could prophesy perfectly, even if we came to know every possible thing that could be known, even if we could move mountains with our faith, if we don’t also love, then we are nothing at all.  If we don’t get love, we don’t get God, we don’t get anything.  All that other stuff is nice, but love is the still more excellent way.

    For all of us busy twenty-first century people, I think the challenge is making time for love.  We get caught up in our work, our serving, our sports, our kids’ activities, and so on and so on.  But if we don’t take time to love, all that stuff is nothing.  We had a hard week last week, dealing with the tragic death of one of the teacher’s aides in our school.  The day that we told the teachers, I was just drained by the end of the day.  But I went to my mom’s house to celebrate the second birthday of my youngest niece, and she gave me the biggest hug I’d had in a long time.  Katie was God’s love for me in that moment, and I didn’t miss the significance of that at all.

    Love is a lot of things – it’s so complex and yet so simple.  The love that we experience here on earth is just a little glimpse of the love that is our God – but it is absolutely a glimpse of the love that is our God.  Who cares what else we accomplish, what else we can do – if we can’t love, we can’t be part of God’s life, because God is love itself.  That’s why Paul tells us that everything else will pass away – all our spiritual gifts, all our accomplishments on earth, all of our prestige and importance and everything else on earth will pass away one day.  And on that day, it will be just fine to be without all that stuff, because the three things we are left with – faith, hope and love – will never pass away and will lead us to eternal life and a sharing in the life of God.

    And the greatest of these is love.

  • Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    God’s salvation is radical.  Zechariah, in the first reading, is speaking to the broken Israel.  On account of its sins, it was taken into captivity and exiled to Babylon.  The fate they suffered was well deserved.  Generations had rejected the Lord’s covenant, had instead turned to the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the surrounding areas.  They had profaned the temple with the worship of foreign gods and every one of their kings led them to evil upon evil.  So why would the Lord ever care about them again?  Couldn’t he just throw up his hands and say, “I’m done”?

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to restore the people, gathering them from the land of the rising sun and from the land of the setting sun, that is from the east to the west, everywhere over all the earth, and gather them back to himself, restoring Israel and making Jerusalem a holy city once again.

    All of this is a metaphor for our own need for salvation, of course.  How often have we as a culture rejected God’s covenant?  How much have we as individuals sinned?  How much have our leaders led us to the worship of foreign gods, like wealth and power?  We too have found evil upon evil and have rejected our God.  We would well deserve it if he threw up his hands in our midst and said to us, “I’m done.”

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to gather us from wherever we have wandered.  No place is beyond the reach of our God who longs to bring us back to himself.  There is no place that we can go that is beyond God’s love.  Nothing is impossible for our God who made us for himself.

    God’s salvation is radical.

  • The Most Holy Trinity

    The Most Holy Trinity

    Today’s readings

    Today’s feast has us gathered to celebrate one of the greatest mysteries of our faith, the Most Holy Trinity. Today we celebrate our one God in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You have probably heard me tell one of my favorite stories about Saint Augustine with regard to the Trinity. The story goes that he was walking along the beach one day, trying to figure out the nature of the Holy Trinity. As he walked along, he came across a little boy who had dug a hole in the sand right next to the shore. With his little hands he was carrying water from the ocean and was dumping it in the little hole. St. Augustine asked, “What are you doing, my child?” The child replied, “I want to put all of the water of the ocean into this hole.” So St. Augustine asked him, “But is it possible for all of the water of this great ocean to be contained in this little hole?” And the child asked him in return, “If the water of the ocean cannot be contained in this little hole, then how can the Infinite Trinitarian God be contained in your mind?” With that the child disappeared.

    Indeed, the greatest minds of our faith have wrestled with this notion of the Holy Trinity. How can one God contain three Persons, how could they all be present in the world, working among us in different ways, and yet remain but one? Even the great Saint Patrick, who attempted to symbolize the Trinity with a shamrock, could only scratch the surface of this great mystery.

    I think the Trinity isn’t the kind of mystery one solves. And that’s hard for me because I love a good mystery! When I have the chance to just read what I want to read, it’s almost always a mystery novel. I read Agatha Christie all the time growing up, and I’ll often go back to some of her stuff even now. My love for mysteries probably explains why I like to watch “Law & Order” and “CSI.” It’s great to try to figure out the mystery before the end of the book or the end of the show. But, if you like mysteries too, then you know that the mark of a good mystery is when it doesn’t get solved in the first six pages. It’s good to have to think and rethink your theory, right up until the last page.

    The kind of mystery that is the Holy Trinity is a mystery that takes us beyond the last page. This is one we’ll take to heaven with us, intending to ask God to explain it when we get there, but when we get there, we’ll most likely be too much in awe to ask any questions. And so we are left with the question, who is this that is the Holy Trinity? How do we explain our one God in Three Persons? Who is this one who is beyond everything and everyone, higher than the heavens, and yet nearer than our very own hearts?

    One of the best minds of our faith, Saint Thomas Aquinas, has described the Holy Trinity as a relationship. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. And this makes sense to us on some levels, because we all have been taught, and we all accept, that God is love. And not just the kind of paltry love that our pop culture and society calls love, but love in the deepest of all senses, the kind of love that is self-giving and that intimately shares in the life of the other. God is love, but God is better than the best love our feeble human minds can picture. The love that is God is a love so pure that it would wholly consume us if we gave ourselves to it completely. Just as difficult as it is for our minds to describe the Holy Trinity, so that love that is God is impossible for our minds to grasp.

    But this picture of God as a relationship is important to us, I think, because we need to relate to God in different ways at different times. Because sometimes we need a parent. And so relating to God as Father reminds us of the nurturing of our faith, being protected from evil, being encouraged to grow, and being corrected when we stray. If you’ve had difficulty with a parent in your life, particularly a father, then relating to God as Father can also be difficult. But still, I think there is a part of all of us, no matter what our earthly parents have been like, that longs to have a loving parental relationship. God as Father can be that kind of parent in our lives.

    And sometimes we need the Son. Relating to God the Son – Jesus our brother – reminds us that God knows our needs, he knows our temptations, he’s experienced our sorrows and celebrated our joys. God in Christ has walked our walk and died our death and redeemed all of our failures out of love for us. God the Son reminds us that God, having created us in his own image and likeness, loves what he created enough to become one of us. Our bodies are not profane place-holders for our souls, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and that very body was good enough to become the dwelling place of God when he came to earth. Maybe you’ve never had a brother or sister or never were close to yours, but in Christ you have the brother above all others who is present to you in all your joys and sorrows.

    Sometimes, too, we need a Holy Spirit. Because we often have to be reminded that there is something beyond ourselves. That this is not as good as it gets. As wonderful as our world and our bodies can be, we also know they are very flawed. The Holy Spirit reminds us that there is a part of us that always longs for God, no matter how far we have strayed. The Spirit reminds us that our sins are not who we are and that repentance and forgiveness are possible. It is the Holy Spirit that enables us to do the really good things we wouldn’t be capable of all by ourselves, the really good things that are who we really are before God.

    It might seem like this mystery of the Trinity is a purely academic discussion. Does the Trinity affect our daily lives or make a difference in our here and now? Is all this discussion just talk, or does it really make any difference? Obviously, I don’t think it’s just talk. Instead, as our Gospel suggests today, the Most Holy Trinity must be shared with people in every time and place. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit wants to relate to all of us, be present to all of us, and call all of us to discipleship through common baptism, and it’s up to us to point the way to that Trinity of love that longs to be in loving relationship with all people.

    Sometimes the hymnody of our faith can express what prose alone can’t get at. The great old hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy” by Reginald Heber sums up our awe of the Trinity today. Join me in praising God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit by singing that last verse:

    Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
    All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea.
    Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
    God in three persons, blessed Trinity.

  • Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    The third chapter of the book of Daniel is a wonderful piece of Scripture. In it, we see the faithfulness of the three young men: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The threat to them was very real: if they didn’t worship Nebuchadnezzar’s gods, they would be cast into the fiery furnace and would probably die. But, for them, another threat was much greater: they were more concerned about what would happen if they did worship Nebuchadnezzar’s gods. Namely, their entire religious heritage would probably die. And of course, we know the outcome. The God who was their salvation saved them from the white-hot furnace, and they escaped without even the smell of scorching on their clothing.

    But the Israelites soon enough forgot their salvation. Jesus today tussles with an unlikely group – Jews who believed in him. But it seems that their belief was a bit of a hedged bet. Jesus points out that they are still slaves to sin, and that this slavery is an obstacle to real salvation. They claim their salvation from Abraham; and they totally miss the point that Jesus was the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham.

    We too must get our belief in Jesus out of our heads and into our hearts. We need to make sure that our bets are not hedged, that we have not put any obstacles in the way of our true salvation. This means asking ourselves, what is the leap of faith God is wanting us to take today? Where do we need to trust God more? Where do we need to believe not just with our words but also with our actions? God who is capable of saving three young men from a fiery furnace, who is capable of raising his son to new life; this God is capable of our own salvation too, and he is worthy of our trust.

  • Thursday of the Third Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “For he who made the promise is trustworthy.”

    Brothers and sisters in Christ, if these are the only words we take from this holy place today, we’re doing pretty well.  The essence of our faith is based on this rock-solid statement from the writer of Hebrews: “For he who made the promise is trustworthy.”  That’s true, of course, and I think we can all agree with it on the intellectual level.  But people of faith have to go deeper than that; we have to be people whose living is wrapped up in the truth of that statement: “For he who made the promise is trustworthy.”

    If we really believe that, then nothing should ever stop our witness.  We should not be stopped because we think we don’t have the words, or the talents to be a witness for the faith.  That doesn’t stop us because God has promised to give us the words and whatever else we need in those moments, and he is trustworthy.  We should not be stopped because we are afraid of commitment, because God has promised us a life that is better than anything we can imagine if we but take up our cross and follow him.  And he is trustworthy.  None of our objections or insecurities should stop our discipleship, our living for Christ, because God has promised to great things in us.  And he is trustworthy.

    And so we place our lamps on the lampstand, unafraid of the watching world looking to us, because we’re not shining our own light but rather Christ’s.  We encourage each other in faith and good works because we have the promise of our trustworthy God to take us wherever we need to go.

  • Friday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings: 2 John 4-9; John 13:34-35

    [This was Mass for the Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade school children.]

    Today we celebrate a Mass in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  We celebrate Jesus’ Sacred Heard because we always think of love as coming from the heart, and we know that Jesus, our God, is love.

    Last week, I read our Kindergarteners a story about how God loves us.  The Wemmicks were a little village of wooden people, kind of like puppets.  They used to give each other stickers.  The really talented, beautiful, special people used to get pretty star stickers.  The ones who had trouble doing anything good, or who weren’t so nice to look at, they got gray dot stickers.

    Punchinello used to get lots of gray dots because he was really clumsy, and his paint was chipped and scratched.  He would often say silly things or make mistakes, and so he got lots and lots of gray dots.  He was very sad about that until he met a wooden girl who didn’t have any stickers at all.  She didn’t have stickers because the stickers wouldn’t stick to her.  Punchinello asked her about that, and she said she used to get a lot of stickers until she met the puppet maker.

    Punchinello went to meet the puppet maker too.  He explained to Punchinello that the stickers only stick if you let them.  The puppet maker didn’t care what other people thought about Punchinello because he loved him no matter what he looked like, or what he said, or what he did.  When Punchinello started to understand that, one of his dot stickers fell off.

    The Church teaches us that God loves us very much, just like the puppet maker.  He loves us because he made us.  So when he looks at us, he doesn’t see if we’re beautiful or not.  He doesn’t see how high we can jump, or how nicely we dance, or how beautiful our clothes are or how smart we are.  He sees us for what we are: wonderful people who were made by God, and are special just because God made us.

    That kind of love is really wonderful.  It’s the kind of love that lets us know that we can live our lives in happiness because God loves us.  It lets us know that we can do anything God calls us to do.  It lets us know that no matter what other people think of us, we are wonderful in God’s eyes.

    But love like that can’t be kept.  Just like the wooden girl who told Punchinello about the puppet maker, we have to tell other people how much God loves them.  We have to take God’s love and spread it around.  The really wonderful thing is that no matter how much we share God’s love, we’ll never run out of it.

    So today we’re going to ask all of you children to spread that love around.  After Communion, you are all going to come forward to receive a blessing.  We’ll say “God loves you.”  And you’ll say, “Amen.”  Then we will give you the name of someone in your class.  You then have to find a way to spread God’s love to that person.  Maybe you can help that person if they’re having trouble one day.  Maybe you can sit next to them at lunch.  Maybe you can invite them to play with you and your friends at recess.  Maybe you can just tell them they are wonderful and that you love them just like God loves them.

    I know that you will find a way to spread that love around.  We don’t need to be giving people gray dots or shiny stars.  We don’t need to say bad things about people.  We just need to let them know God loves them.  And we can do that, because God loves us first and best.

  • Saturday of the Thirty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Thirty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  “Money can’t buy happiness.”  We have all sorts of proverbs that aim to keep us at right relationship not just with our financial resources, but really with all the many gifts that we have.  Today’s Liturgy of the Word gives us some humble pointers too on this important issue.

    St. Paul, in thanking his friends in Philippi for their generous support of his ministry, tells them: “I know indeed how to live in humble circumstances; I know also how to live with abundance.  In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need.”  His gratitude isn’t so much that their gift to him filled him with plenty, but instead that their gift was a testament to their faith, and their love for the Gospel he preached to them.  He was able to use that gift to further his ministry elsewhere, making Christ known to others who longed to hear of him.

    Jesus today speaks to the Pharisees, who, as the Gospel today tells us, “loved money.”  He tells them that their love of money was not going to lead them to God.  Instead, it leads them to dishonest transactions with dishonest people.  Just as a servant cannot serve two masters, so they could not expect to serve both God and mammon, the so-called god of material wealth and greed.

    We live in times where the love of money has led us to considerable evil.  Greed and the desire for instant gratification has led people to be overspent and overextended.  Major corporations, greedy for more wealth, playing off the misguided desires of so many people, have defaulted, causing the government to have to step in and save them, for fear their downfall would take the entire world economy with it.  In these days, it may be well for us to hear that we cannot serve both God and mammon.  It may be well for us to come to the conclusion that we can live in both abundance and need.  And it’s never a bad time to hear that we need to make God our only God, yet again.

  • Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “You shall love the Lord, your God,
    with all your heart,
    with all your soul,
    and with all your mind.”

    That certainly seems simple enough.  But we miss the mark on it all the time, don’t we?  The idea is to put God first, which of course, is the first of the ten commandments:  “I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me.”  But we have all sorts of strange gods that vie for our attention every day, and way too often, we give in to them, and put something less than god ahead of the God who made us.

    Back in my pre-seminary days, I used to work for a print company.  I had to manage multiple print projects for a few different customers, and so it was my job to schedule the print time in the plant, get proofs to customers, proofread projects, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  It could get very mind-boggling, so I took to writing very detailed to-do lists for myself so that I’d be sure to get everything done in the course of a day.

    You probably do something like that too.  Whether you are managing a consulting firm or simply trying to get the kids to soccer and choir and reading club at the right times, you probably keep lists to make it easier.  I still do it today, and it’s the only way I can keep things going without forgetting something major.  These days, I use a computer version, but the idea is the same.

    But one of the things I used to do when I worked at the print company was to include a one-word task every single day: “pray.”  I found, after I had been working there for a while, that I needed to do that to keep my faith life integrated with my work life.  The Scriptures teach us to pray always, and I found that unless I put that on my to-do list every day, there was precious little chance of my stopping to remember God, the One who created me and sustained me and loved me always.  Taking five minutes to pray was the least I could do.  I kept a Bible and a devotional in one of my desk drawers all the time, and I would take a five-minute break to use them.  That kept me a lot more focused during the day, and kept me from getting so full of myself that I made life intolerable for my coworkers.  Praying had a lot of benefits in the workplace.  And when I got to that one task – “pray” – I would remember to take time to do just that.

    One day, I was very sick and couldn’t come in to work.  So my friend Joyce, who was my backup partner, filled in for me.  The next day, when I came in, I found she had left notes on my to-do list about what she was able to get done, and what happened on some of my projects.  Joyce is a woman of faith, so when she got to that “pray” task, I’m sure she smiled, and probably did just that.  But she left me a note next to that task that said something like: “Done.  But I probably should have made it a novena!”  Apparently it had been a hard day!

    The point of all this is that we have to make a way to put God first in our lives.  Otherwise, if it’s not the busy-ness of the day, then it’s something else that comes first, and it’s almost never God.  It could be our status or ego that comes first, it could be money, it could be the latest gadgets or all the luxury comforts that we crave.  It could be sports, or it could be family activities, or even laziness that becomes a god for us.  And that’s all really sinful.  It’s a violation of the first commandment.  And it’s the first commandment for a very good reason: because it’s the most basic thing.  If we can’t hope to get this one right, we’ll never be very good at all the rest.

    These days in our society, I have been wondering what is really first for us.  I’m thinking we may have made gods of government bailouts.  You’d think that in this time of uncertainty, and on the brink of a pivotal election, people would be coming to Church, reconnecting with their God, and drawing strength from their faith, putting God first even if they haven’t been doing that very well in the recent past.  But you’d be wrong.  Right now, we’re taking the annual “October Count” – a yearly mass-by-mass attendance count.  The attendance counts as compared to registered parishioners this year are running 2-3% lower than last year, and 6-7% lower than this time in 2004.  We are hearing that is true from other churches in our area too.

    Even for those of us who manage to make the time to come to Mass on Saturday evening or Sunday morning, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that we are putting God first all the time.  We have to find ways to put God first, adding time with him to our to-do lists, making prayer and reflection a part of our daily routine.  Because it’s only by doing this that we can nurture a friendship with our God, a friendship that sustains us in bad times and in good, a friendship that ultimately leads us to heaven, that place we were created for by the One who created us.

    Jesus makes it plain enough for us in today’s Gospel.  Love God and love your neighbor; these are the hallmarks of a Christian’s life, the hallmarks of life for all of us who were created by God and are called to return to God one day.  And so it is imperative that we get love of God and love of neighbor right.  To neglect these two commandments, which Jesus says today are the basis of the whole law and the prophets, is seriously sinful.

    But the good news is that we have the chance, having heard the Word of God, to return and to re-prioritize our to-do lists, putting God first, loving God and neighbor, and coming at last into the presence of our God who loves us first and always.  The Psalmist, as always, helps us to make our prayer today: “I love you, LORD, my strength, LORD, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, My God, my rock of refuge, my shield, my saving horn, my stronghold!”  He is the LORD and there is no other!

  • CNS STORY: No ‘Yahweh’ in songs, prayers at Catholic Masses, Vatican rules

    CNS STORY: No ‘Yahweh’ in songs, prayers at Catholic Masses, Vatican rules

    WASHINGTON (CNS) — In the not-too-distant future, songs such as "You Are Near," "I Will Bless Yahweh" and "Rise, O Yahweh" will no longer be part of the Catholic worship experience in the United States.

    At the very least, the songs will be edited to remove the word "Yahweh" — a name of God that the Vatican has ruled must not "be used or pronounced" in songs and prayers during Catholic Masses.

    CNS STORY: No ‘Yahweh’ in songs, prayers at Catholic Masses, Vatican rules.

    I’ll refrain from the “Life of Brian” reference here. I wasn’t too sure what I thought about this issue until this morning. I realize that it’s a good thing, because in these days we have what seems to be a lack of reverence. This is a byproduct, I think, of the whole “Jesus is your friend” movement from the 70s or so. And yes, Jesus is your friend. But he is also God, God both immanent and transcendent.

    We’ve lost a kind of reverence. God is just another guy we know sometimes. We need to recapture the need to kneel, to bow, to refrain from pronouncing God’s proper name. We need to be in awe of God (yes, that’s still one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, you know!). And so not pronouncing the Tetragrammaton is, I think, a good thing. We’ll just have to learn to sing “O Lord, I know you are near…” or something like that.

    Because God is awesome. Let’s never lose sight of that. God is awesome.