Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Truth

  • Memorial of 9-11-01

    Memorial of 9-11-01

    Today’s readings

    I think many of us will never forget where we were eight years ago today.  People say that about the day that President Kennedy died, or the day when the space shuttle Challenger exploded.  But in a particular way, I think we will never forget September 11, 2001, because it was a day that changed our world in some very unpleasant ways and shattered whatever remained of our innocence.  Traveling and doing business has changed so much in these years.  So many of us have known people who have died in the twin towers, or in the war that has raged since.

    I remember the weekend following that horrible day.  I came home from seminary to visit with my parents, and we came here to church to pray.  The church was packed, on a Friday night.  And I know that in every church in America, pews were full every day and every weekend for quite a while.  Look around now, though.  Where is everyone?  Now that the world isn’t going to end as fast as we thought, do we no longer need God?  Or have we grown weary of the war that has been fought since and the changes in our world and just given up on God?

    I think that as the war continues, and the lack of peace seems to continue, and the somewhat subdued, now, but ever-present sense of terror continues, it might just be time for us to do some examination and to discern what has led to that sense of unrest.  Today’s Gospel gives us the examination of conscience that will help us to do that.  What precisely is the plank of wood in our own eyes that needs to be removed before we can concentrate on the splinter in the eye of another?  What is it that is un-peaceful in us that contributes, in some small but nonetheless very real measure to the lack of peace in the world?

    We all have to do that on an individual basis to start with. St. Paul does it in our first reading today when he admits to his friend Timothy, “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man…”  And he acknowledges with deep gratitude and profound humility how God changed his life, had mercy on him, forgave him his sins, and gave him charge over one of the most significant evangelical and missionary ministries in the history of the world.  We, too, are blasphemers, persecutors and arrogant men and women, and it is time for us to humbly acknowledge that and urgently beg from God the grace to turn it around, that all the world might be turned around with us.

    But we also have to do this on a communal basis as well.  We don’t go to salvation alone; that’s why we Catholics don’t get overly excited about having a personal relationship with Jesus.  For us, a personal relationship with Christ, is like that first baby step; once we’re there, we know that we cannot rest and admire our work.  A personal relationship with Christ is certainly a good start for us, but we know that we have to be faithful in community or nothing truly great can ever happen.  So it’s up to all of us together to work for true peace, figuring out what in our society has led to unrest and mercilessly casting it out, opening ourselves to the peacemaking power of God that can transform the whole world.  Together, as the Mass for the Feast of Christ the King will tell us, we must work with Christ to present to God “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

    I get a little worked up when I think about this kind of thing, because I’ve come to realize this is the only way it’s all going to get wrapped up rightly.  Only when all the world has come to know the saving power of our God will we experience the return to grace that we lost in the Garden of Eden.  And that will never happen until all peoples have learned to love and respect one another, and have come to be open to the true peace that only God can give us.

    It didn’t all go wrong on 9-11; if we are honest, that horrifying day was a long time coming.  But that day should have been a loud, blaring wake-up call to all of us that things have to change if we are ever going to experience the peace of Christ’s kingdom.  We are not going to get there without any one person or even any group of people; we need for all of us to repent if any of us will ever see that great day.  Today, brothers and sisters in Christ, absolutely must be a time when we all hear that wakeup call yet anew, and respond to it from the depths of our hearts, both as individuals, and as a society.

    Truly we will never forget where we were on that horrible day of 9-11.  But wouldn’t it be great if we could all one day look back with fondness, remembering with great joy the day when we finally partnered with our God and turned it all around?

  • Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]

    Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]

    Today’s readings

    When I met with Father Jim before I came here to Saint Petronille a few weeks ago, the one concern I expressed was coming back to my home parish.  I thought it might be weird, and I quoted the exact line in today’s Gospel: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.”  I asked him what he thought about that and he said he didn’t know; he’s never had to experience that himself.  But, he also assured me that you’d all be on your best behavior!  So we’ll just have to see how that goes.

    But it is a valid concern, because, as I believe today’s Liturgy of the Word is saying, we are all of us called to be prophets.  When we are baptized, we are anointed with the Sacred Chrism oil, the oil whose name has the same root word as the word “Christ.”  In that anointing, we are called to be other christs to the world, we are anointed as Jesus was, priest, prophet and king.  So the mission is laid out for us on our baptism day.  As priests, we are called to sacrifice for the good of others.  As prophets, we are called to speak the truth and witness to the will of God.  As kings, we are called to reign eternally with Christ our King in the kingdom that knows no end.

    Today, I want to focus, as our readings suggest, on the whole idea of us being anointed as prophets to the world.  This presents two important issues.  First, whether we like it or not, we are called to be prophets.  And second, whether we like it or not, there are prophets among us.

    So first, we are called to be prophets.  And we may in fact not be thrilled about being prophets.  With good reason, I think, because a prophet’s job is not an easy one.  Prophets are called to witness to the truth, and quite often, people just don’t want to hear about the truth.  God says as much to Ezekiel in today’s first reading: “Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you.”  You know, that’s not a scriptural quotation you’ll often see on a vocation poster!  But it’s a warning we all need to hear, because we will always in our witnessing to the truth come up against those who don’t want to hear it.  You might be witnessing to the truth by taking a stand against a business practice you aren’t comfortable with.  You can bet that won’t be popular.  You might be witnessing to the truth by refusing to allow your children to participate in sports when it conflicts with coming to church on Sunday, that won’t be popular either.  Whenever we exercise our ministry as prophets, we are certain to run up against people who are hard of face and obstinate of heart, but our call is the same as Ezekiel’s: witness anyway.

    And second, we need to recognize that there are prophets among us.  And that’s hard too because prophets can be a real pain.  None of us wants to be confronted when we’re straying from the right way.  None of us wants to hear the truth about ourselves or others when we’ve been blocking it out.  None of us wants to be called out of our comfort zone and have to extend ourselves to reach out in new ways or meet the needs of those we’d rather ignore.  But prophets insist that we do all those things.

    It’s harder still when we know those prophets.  They might be our spouses, our parents, our children, our best friends, and because they love us they will witness the truth to us.  But how ready are we to hear and respond to that truth when we are called to it?  Wouldn’t we too want to dismiss the carpenter’s son – or daughter – the one whose parents or sisters or brothers live with us, the one we have watched grow up, the one who shares our life with us?  Who are they to be witnessing to the truth anyway?  That’s the kind of thing Jesus was dealing with in his home town.

    It’s like the Procrustean bed from Greek mythology.  The mythical figure Procrustes was a son of Poseidon and a bandit from Attica, with a stronghold in the hills outside Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length; victims who were too short were stretched on the rack until they were long enough. Nobody ever fit the bed exactly because it was secretly adjustable: Procrustes would stretch or shrink it upon sizing his victims from afar. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, who “fitted” Procrustes to his own bed and cut off his head and feet. And so a Procrustean bed is any kind of arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is enforced.  We might be a lot like Procrustes when we refuse to admit that people among us are prophetic, when we refuse to hear the truth from them.

    And here is a very important truth, the truth that I think we are being asked to take away from today’s readings: the prophetic ministry continues among us.  There are times when we will be called to hear the prophets, and times when we will be called to be the prophets.  Neither task is an easy one: the truth is very often difficult to deal with, no matter what side of it we are on.  But honoring the truth is the only way we are going to get to be with Jesus who himself is the way, the truth and the life.  So it is the vocation of us Christian disciples to constantly seek the truth, proclaiming it when necessary, hearing and responding to it when called upon, but always to be open to it.

    Ezekiel says at the beginning of today’s first reading, “As the LORD spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.”  We might be ready to skip over that detail but I think we need to dwell on it a bit because it’s important.  The truth is a heavy thing, and very often can flatten us.  It might seem to crush the prophet who has to bear it or even knock the wind out of the one who has to hear it.  But it doesn’t go away.  We are given the truth, and the strength of the Spirit who picks us up and puts us on our feet.  So we prophets can depend on the strength of the Spirit to bear the news, and we hearers can depend on the grace of the Spirit to receive the news and heed its call.  The prophetic word is difficult, but our God never leaves us to bear it alone.

    In our second reading, it is Saint Paul who makes the call so plain to us.  He was afflicted with that thorn in the flesh.  Maybe the thorn was the call to witness to the truth as he so often was.  It wouldn’t go away, but God did give him the grace to bear it.  And the words he heard from God are the words we prophets and hearers of the prophets need to know today: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

  • Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist

    Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist

    Today’s readings

    What we are celebrating in today’s feast is the fact that prison bars cannot silence truth. John the Baptist was not asked to renounce his faith; indeed Herod was probably very interested in John’s faith and may have even asked him about it on occasion. Not that he wanted to convert, mind you, but he just seemed to have a kind of morbid fascination with the man Jesus, and anyone who followed him. But the real reason that he kept John locked up was that Herodias didn’t like John, who had a following, publicly telling them what they should and should not do. Herod’s taking his brother’s wife was not permitted in Judaism, but it would all blow over if John would just stop talking about it.

    But that’s not how the truth works. And John’s one purpose in life was to testify to the Truth — Truth with a capital “T” — to point the way to Jesus. So he was not about to soft-pedal the wrong that Herod and Herodias were doing. And that was something Herodias just could not live with. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she eagerly had John beheaded and rid herself of his prophecy. But that didn’t make her any less accountable to the truth.

    This could be a rather sad feast. The end of one who worked hard for the reign of God, and over something seemingly so silly. But, as St. Bede the Venerable says of him: “There is no doubt that blessed John suffered imprisonment and chains as a witness to our Redeemer, whose forerunner he was, and gave his life for him. His persecutor had demanded not that he should deny Christ, but only that he should keep silent about the truth. Nevertheless … does Christ not say: “I am the truth?” Therefore, because John shed his blood for the truth, he surely died for Christ.

    And so, for those of us who are heirs of the Truth, this is indeed a joyful feast. John the Baptist could not keep silent about the truth, whether it was truth with a capital or lower-case “T”. We must not keep silent about the truth either. We are called to offer our own lives as a testimony to the truth.

  • Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today's readings [display_podcast]

     

    There are two kinds of communication that are spoken of in today’s Gospel.  The first is rumor, and the second is truth.  The rumor in the Gospel came about as a result of a misinterpretation of the private conversation that Jesus and John were having.  Jesus tells Peter basically that it’s none of his business what Jesus wanted for John; Peter’s business is to follow Jesus.  But then even that got misinterpreted and a rumor started spreading that John would not die before Jesus returned.  What a tangled web rumor can weave, can’t it?

     

    But the second kind of communication is truth.  And while it often might seem that truth is in short supply, John says that there’s more than enough to go around.  If every bit of truth that Jesus said or gave witness to were written down, the world wouldn’t be able to contain the books to hold it.  So we have to be the people to choose truth over rumor.  There’s plenty of truth to tell, plenty of good news to share, plenty of gospel to which to bear witness.  There’s so much truth out there, that even Paul’s prison couldn’t keep him from proclaiming it.

     

    Blessed are those who proclaim the truth.  As the Psalmist says of them, “The just will gaze on your face, O Lord.”

     

  • Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today's readings [display_podcast]

     

    The two readings we have in today’s Liturgy of the Word are a bit of a coincidence.  We have been reading, these Easter days, sequentially from the Acts of the Apostles in the first reading, and for the Gospel from John.  Today we see both central characters wrapping up their life’s work and taking leave of those they have ministered to and with.

     

    In our first reading, St. Paul takes leave of the Church at Ephesus.  He recalls that he has been diligent in preaching the Truth to them, and clearly feels that he has lived his vocation as best he could.  He takes leave of them, knowing he will not see them again, but confident that his preaching and example, if carefully followed, would lead them to the Lord.  He could not be held responsible for any of them finding they had lost the way.

     

    In the Gospel, Jesus prepares to take leave of his apostles and disciples, and is offering a prayer to his Father.  He prays that his death would glorify the Father – which of course it would! – and prays for those he will leave behind.  He too knows that his preaching and example would lead them where he was soon to go.  He in a sense gives them back to the Father, since their lives had been reclaimed by his ministry.

     

    We all have people for whom we are responsible.  They may be children, spouses, students, coworkers, neighbors.  Some people have been put in our lives for the express purpose of their formation in the Gospel.  We are expected to preach the Truth to them, in word and most especially in example.  When we have done that to the best of our ability, we know that when the day comes to take leave of them, they will have all the tools to live a life of faith and find their way to God.

     

    And so today we pray for those for whom we are responsible.  We cannot live their lives for them; all we can do is to teach them as best we can and provide the best example possible.  We pray for them, knowing that God can bring to fruition whatever it is that we have planted.

     

  • St. Athanasius, bishop and doctor of the Church

    St. Athanasius, bishop and doctor of the Church

    Today's readings | Today's saint [display_podcast]athanasius

    Persecution was something very common in the early Church.  We see the beginnings of the persecution of St. Paul in our first reading.  Some Jews were starting to make trouble for Paul because he was challenging their way of worship and their way of life.  Living the Gospel is intensely challenging, and most people aren’t really looking for any kind of challenge.

    St. Athanasius, whose feast we celebrate today, was himself the victim of persecution.  As the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, he was vocal in his opposition to the heresy of Arianism.  Arianism taught that Christ was not fully devine, in his human nature, and that he was not one with the Father.  It was difficult for Athanasius to combat this belief because Arius was himself from Alexandria and had some vocal and powerful friends.  Athanasius was exiled five times for his defense of the Divinity of Christ and his opposition to Arianism. 

    St. Paul and St. Athanasius embody what Jesus was getting at in the Gospel today.  “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices…” Jesus says.  And both Paul and Athanasius lived that.  But they both knew that their mourning would be much worse if they turned their back on the truth, if they turned their back on Christ.  They are the patrons of all who have to suffer – whether it be a little discomfort or social position, or whether it be at the cost of their lives – for the sake of the Gospel.  All of those glorious martyrs will know the joy that Jesus promises today:  “But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.” 

  • St. John Baptist de la Salle

    St. John Baptist de la Salle

    Today's readings | Today's saint
    [display_podcast]

    Our celebration today leads us to two great saints.  The first is St. Stephen in today’s first reading.  This is really the beginning of the end of his life.  His courageous words and steadfast commitment to the truth are beginning to find disfavor among some trouble makers.  The members of the “so-called Synagogue of Freedmen” are angry that they could not withstand Stephen’s wisdom, so they are starting to stir up trouble that will eventually lead to Stephen’s execution, but through it all, he finds his glory and peace in Christ.

    The second saint is the saint of today’s feast: St. John Baptist de la Salle.  John gave up a promising and rewarding career as a scholar-priest at an influential church, complete with a posh life that would take care of him for the rest of his life.  And he gave it up to work at a ministry he wasn’t all that excited about: educating young people.  Yet, the more he became convinced that this was his life’s calling, the more he dedicated himself to it.  He is the founder of the Christian Brothers, who have a ministry of education all over the world, and is the patron of school teachers. 

    His life resonates with St. Stephen in that he too met up with opposition.  He experienced heartrending disappointment and defections among his disciples, bitter opposition from the secular schoolmasters who resented his new and fruitful methods and persistent opposition from the Jansenists of his time, whose heretical doctrines John resisted vehemently all his life.

    Dedication to the truth can be a difficult thing to live.  There is always opposition to it.  But as St. Stephen and St. John Baptist de la Salle show us today, there is also joy and peace in it.