2021 August: Homilies & Reflections

Homily of Friday, September 3 (Gregory the Great - patronal feast of the monastery)

Today we celebrate our patron Pope St Gregory the Great. He’s our patron, so naturally we think he’s great. He’s the first pope to come from a monastic background. And he sent St Augustine and his companions from his monastery in Rome to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England, thus founding the English Benedictine Congregation of which we are a part. But why do others think he is great? He was a prolific writer, one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church. His writings include The Dialogues (from which we learn most of what we know about Saint Benedict), The Rule for Pastors (a rule for Bishops much as the Rule of Saint Benedict is for monks), many Sermons, letters, commentaries on Job and the 1st book of Kings. He revised the Roman worship of his day, much to the format of the Mass we use today. He is credited with creating Gregorian chant. He re-organized the government of city of Rome, and improved the welfare of the people of Rome, especially poor and refugees from the Lombards, who were ravaging Italy then. After his reign, the peoples of Western Europe looked to Rome and the Popes for order, and no longer to the emperors in Constantinople who had ignored the west. Our religion would not quite be what it is today without his work. And perhaps our world wouldn’t be either. Under Pope St. Gregory the barbarian Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths gave up their heretical Arianism and gave their allegiance to Rome and orthodox Catholicism. He was judged to be great in his own time. So he earned by all his works the honor of Great that follows his name. We too will be judged by our works and actions, so we can follow Pope St. Gregory’s example as best as we can. But perhaps most of all not by trying to directly imitate his greatness but by living up to the title he used for himself: Servant of the Servants of God. May we serve God well by serving our brothers and sisters well. And to do that these days, we might reflect on the meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan to understand who our brothers and sisters are.

Homily of Tuesday , August 31, 2021

This is from Donald Atwater: "Aidan [was born in Ireland (651)]… This Irishman, who played a decisive part in the evangelization of Northern England, is first heard of c. 635, when he was a monk in the monastery of Iona; he was chosen to replace one of his fellows who failed as a missionary in Northumbria because of the roughness of his methods. Aidan was consecrated bishop, and made his headquarters on the island of Lindisfarne. From there he made journeys on foot far and wide, visiting his flock and establishing missionary centres, work which had the wholehearted support of the king, St. Oswald. Hoe organized a monastery on Lindisfarne, where English boys were educated and trained to be missionaries among their countrymen. No wealth was allowed to accumulate; surpluses were applied to the needs of the poor and to the manumission of slaves; Aidan made his teaching acceptable by its practice. The death of King Oswald, friend as well as patron, was a great blow to Aidan, but his successor Oswin was no less dear to him. When Oswin was murdered at Gilling in 651 (he afterwards was venerated as a martyr), Aidan himself died within the fortnight, seemingly of grief. He was buried at Lindisfarne. St. Aidan ‘was a man of remarkable gentleness, goodness, and moderation, zealous for God; but not’, adds Bede, ‘fully according to knowledge…’: that is, he followed and taught the liturgical and disciplinary customs of the Celtic Christians [the Irish], which in certain respects differed from those usual in the Western church. [Which is a reminder that as we have controversies and problems and difficulties and factions in the church today, they’ve had them in the past, and that was one of them] In art, St. Aidan’s emblem was a stag." [May he pray for us and for all bishops].

Homily of the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 29, 2021)

In today’s Gospel, Jesus reacts angrily against a group of Pharisees and scribes who criticized his disciples for not keeping the traditional washing of hands before eating. He accuses them of disregarding God’s commandments while clinging to human traditions and warns them that it is not what comes from outside that defiles, but what comes out from within our hearts, where we rebel against God and enslave ourselves to sin. It seems ironic to have this Gospel read during the Mass. After all, we are in the middle of a ritual whose form largely derives from an inherited tradition, one that even includes the fingers of the Priest being washed, which seems at least reminiscent of the traditional handwashing of the Pharisees and scribes. It seems even more problematic when you consider the Dogmatic teachings of the Church. The Church has regularly emphasized the importance of the tradition, inherited from the Apostles and passed down through the Church, as an important source of our knowledge of God. Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation published by the Second Vatican Council goes so far as to assert that “both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same loyalty and reverence.” So how do we resolve this problem? What makes our traditions sacred, where the traditions of the Pharisees and scribes weren’t? 

We will start with what the Pharisees and scribes did wrong. What it was that made their traditions unfitting. Like our traditions, the traditions of the Pharisees and scribes were handed down, as a body of teaching, ways of life and modes of worship, interpretations of the law given to Moses. However, instead of bringing man to God, they imposed additional burdens. The ritual handwashing spoken of in the Gospel is an example of this. It imposes an additional burden that does not promote holiness of life or increase faith. It is a false cleaning that claims to remove what it is unable to touch: the inner heart of man, where the actual pollution lies. This does not mean we shouldn’t wash our hands, but washing our hands is not a condition required to receive grace. It is an outward cleaning. Unlike our sacraments, it is not an outward sign of an inner grace. This tradition of handwashing is just an outward sign. 

Sometimes the traditions of the scribes and Pharisees were even used to allow them to violate the commandments. In a verse skipped in today’s reading, an example of this is given: the traditions of the Pharisees and scribes allowed them to declare what they would have given to their parents as dedicated to God, absolving them of their responsibility to their parents. That tradition not only did not contribute towards holiness and faith, but actively worked against it, directly violating one of the commandments Moses had given them. The Pharisees and scribes had created something new to alleviate the actual responsibilities they held. 

This contrasts with the example of the Law, highlighted in the first reading. Like the traditions of the Pharisees and scribes, this was handed down in Israel. Moses tells the people to hear and observe these statues, that they “may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land which the Lord, the God of (their) fathers, is giving (them).” Unlike the handwashing, and the other traditions of the Pharisees and scribes, these laws, given by God to His people through Moses, do produce holiness and faith. How are they different from the handwashing described in the Gospel? The most fundamental difference between the two sets of traditions is the lawgiver, the source of the tradition. The traditions of the Pharisees and scribes are human laws, originating with human lawgivers, resting on a human source, they are unable to penetrate the inner life of man. On the other hand the laws of the Torah are laws given by God, through his prophet Moses, that serve to create a People of God. They are ultimately fulfilled in Christ, and form an important part of Salvation History. Their authority and power comes from God, who is able to clean our hearts of what truly defiles us, when we cooperate with his grace. 

Is this true of our traditions? Do they, like the Law given through Moses, rest on the authority and dignity of God Himself? Dei verbum tells us the Apostles, “by their oral preaching, by example, and by observances handed on what they had received from the lips of Christ, from living with Him, and from what He did, or what they had learned through the prompting of the Holy Spirit. … But in order to keep the Gospel forever whole and alive within the Church, the Apostles left bishops as their successors, "handing over" to them "the authority to teach in their own place."” So the Apostles receive from Christ and the Holy Spirit the deposit of faith, which makes up the Church, then hand it on to the bishops who are their successors, to protect and hand on, and it is continually handed over through successive generations coming down to us. In this way, it rests on God. However, the Liturgy as practiced by the Apostles was very different from ours, gradually developing over the centuries. The trinitarian and Christological formulas we use in the Creed had not yet been formulated, and would gradually develop across a series of crises over the centuries. So how do we explain this? Are these all human traditions of the kind the Pharisees had? Has the Church illegitimately added or subtracted from Christ’s message? 

It has not. Instead, what happens over time is the development of the living tradition, as reflection, prayer, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the need to respond to errors give greater insight into the truths contained within the deposit of faith, made up of sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. This cannot change or contradict anything already established, although it can give new modes of expression, as doctrine, liturgy, and modes of life develop across the centuries. These modes of expression for the deposit of faith are authentically interpreted by the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church entrusted to the Bishops under the successor of Peter, the Pope. However, because they come from the deposit of faith handed on from Christ, through Apostolic succession until they reach the present day, they are not merely human traditions.  

So what does this mean for us? What are we supposed to do with the deposit of faith made of sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture, interpreted by the Magisterium? The answer for this is given by St. James in today’s second reading. After pointing out that every perfect gift has at its source the unchanging God, St. James points out that God has implanted within us the word of truth. However, this word is not given to us just to be heard, but also must be turned into concrete action: caring for orphans and widows, and remaining unstained by the world are examples. Another way to describe this word of truth is as the deposit of faith whose authority rests in Christ. This, too, must be acted on and not merely heard. We must cooperate with Christ’s grace, allowing the grace given through the sacraments to penetrate the place inside our hearts from which the sins that defile us arise. Truly cleansed, in a way impossible for the human traditions of the Pharisees and scribes, that gift of grace can produce the fruit of holiness and faith, in us, our communities, and the world. 
 

Homily of Friday, August 27, 2021

This is Donald Atwater on Saint Monica: “…the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, and it is from his writings that she is known. Her husband Petrecius was a man of modest rank at Tagaste in Northern Africa. She had three children, of whom Augustine was the eldest, and when he was eighteen his mother was left a widow. Monica had tried to bring Augustine up as a Christian; she was overambitious for his worldly success, and he regarded her religion with scorn. His earlier vacillations and his liaison with a woman of unknown name caused Monica the deepest distress. It was at this time that a bishop that she consulted gave the famous assurance, ‘It is not possible that the son of so many tears could be lost.’ When in 383 Augustine slipped away to Italy, Monica followed him, first to Rome and then to Milan, where she became an obedient disciple of St. Ambrose. Three years later, her devoted pertinacity was rewarded when St. Augustine decided to receive baptism. She rejoiced triumphantly and retired with him and his friends to a place of study and philosophy. She retired a happy woman. After the baptism they set out to return to Africa. St. Augustine records that at the Port of Ostea on the Tiber, he and his mother were joined in a most moving conversation on the everlasting life of the blessed. Five days later she fell ill and died there.” [Also, it is to be noted that he, in their philosophical discussions that they were having at this place, she would sometimes intervene, and he was amazed and what a fine mind she had; she was a decent thinker, so to speak. Also to be mentioned is that her other conversion was her husband, Petrecius, who remained a pagan most of his life, but at the end was converted by her.] “St. Monica had at times been a trying mother and Augustine had not always been a considerate son, but he had come to recognize her as his true mother, in the spirit as well as in the flesh. His own experience taught him to speak of parenthood as a sort of bishopric.” May she pray for us; may her son pray for us.

Homily of Wednesday, August 25, 2021

As you may know, three of us that are here are monks of St. Louis Abbey in St. Louis, Missouri. So, St. Louis, king of France, is our patron saint. I must admit that St. Louis is not my favorite saint, but given the fact that there are thousands of saints, that’s not surprising. Anybody has their own favorite saint for their own reasons. Probably more people would pick St. Francis of Assisi as their favorite saint, for lots of good reasons. St. Louis was king, and it is a temptation for us in this age to judge people by the mores of our times, rather than by the mores of their own time. As a king, St. Louis had to make some very hard decisions and did things which we might not approve of in the 21st century. But he lived the personal life as a saint, as a devout believer in the way of Jesus Christ and mortified himself. He exerted a lot of effort in raising his son to succeed him as a king to be a pious and just ruler… You may wonder what this contraption in the sanctuary here is: it is a reliquary containing a relic of St. Louis. St. Louis reminds is that whoever we are, we are meant to be saints, and that we can be saints. And that to be a saint does not mean to be perfect. None of us are. There is no saint in heaven who was absolutely perfect, save perhaps the Blessed Mother. So all of us strive in this world against the forces of this world and forces of evil, the forces of our own selfishness, that we work to overcome in order to become saints. And that is absolutely possible thanks to the grace and mercy of God. It is through the grace and mercy of God that St. Louis has become a saint, that he is an example for us, that we too can follow in his footsteps and in the footsteps of all the other saints, that we may all be together, with our differences, in the presence of God, praising Him forever.

Homily of Tuesday, August 24, 2021

The question is, since we are celebrating the feast of Saint Bartholomew, the apostle, what is all this about Nathaniel in the gospel today? And the answer is that they are the same person. Well how can that be? One explanation, probably the explanation generally accepted these days, is one, oddly enough, given by the Nestorian bishop, Ishodad, in the ninth century. He said that Bartholomew is Aramaic, and is patronymic, that is, like Simon bar-Jonah. So Bartholomew is like that bar-Jonah. And so it means “Son of Tolmai” (Tholmai), so you get “bar-Tholmai” (Bartholomew). And the name Nathaniel is the surname of Bartholomew. And it seems there is good reason, in addition to that, to believe that they are the same man, because Bartholomew, in both the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – and Nathaniel in John’s gospel the gospel we heard read this morning, are associated with the apostle Philip. That is, Philip calls Nathaniel, and Philip is in the synoptics, as it were, coupled with Nathaniel, so that is another reason to believe that the two names belong to one man. Bartholomew is said to have preached in India and in Armenia, where he was martyred. He, like all the apostles, one way or the other, gave their whole lives for Christ, clinging to Christ. So it should be for us, that our whole lives should be spent for Him,

Homily of the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 22, 2021)
Joshua 24: 1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Ephesians 5: 21-32; John 6: 60-69

Our gospel readings for the past five weeks have consisted of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. This is the chapter that contains Jesus’ beautiful and moving teachings on himself as the Bread of Life. It began with Jesus feeding well over five thousand people with just five loaves of bread and two fish. After all had eaten their fill he spoke to them of a better food he wanted to offer them, the Bread of Life, which was his own flesh and blood and which would open for them eternal life. We missed a crucial part of the story last Sunday because it was replaced by the gospel for the feast of the Assumption which we celebrated on that day. In that episode Jesus’ followers began to balk at his words. If anyone doubts if Jesus expected to be taken literally when he said “this is my body,” what happened next should remove all doubts. As he heard their objections and watched them prepare to leave, he didn’t call them back saying something like: “But wait! You might have misunderstood me. What I said was only symbolic.” Rather he further challenged them with the statement that “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day”. He knew they heard him clearly and understood him perfectly. Having made their own decision, he let them go their way, freely and without restraint.

In today’s gospel we hear their reservations escalate into desertion. Saying to each other: “This is a hard saying, who can accept it?” they abandon him – in droves. Here already, early in his public ministry, Jesus’ very first announcement of the Eucharist profoundly repelled many of his followers, a tragic and persistent pattern we see repeated for centuries down to our own day. The Eucharist has always been the occasion for division. This is supremely ironic, because the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity, unity with Christ and through him the one bread, with his whole body the Church, the one body. Yet the whole idea offended people from the beginning. Like his Cross, it has never ceased to be a stumbling block for the faithless. Seeing them depart, Jesus turns to those few remaining, his Apostles, and asks: “Will you also go away?” - a question that has echoed through the ages. Peter answers for the group: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” This is the most memorable confession of faith ever made. We do well to make it our own as well. Other people present that day may have been unbelieving, but the Apostles were not scandalized by our Lord’s words. They already had a deep-rooted confidence in him and they didn’t intend to leave him. What St. Peter said is not just a statement of human belief, but an expression of genuine supernatural faith – as yet imperfect – which was the result of the influence of divine grace on his soul.

Let’s look at faith more deeply. Faith includes belief, but it is more than belief. Belief is an act of the mind. Its object is an idea. But faith is an act of the will. The object of faith is a person, in this case a divine Person, Jesus Christ who is God himself. When we believe something we don’t understand or can’t prove, we believe it because we trust its source, usually someone’s word. “We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter says. He and the Apostles didn’t understand Jesus’ words any better than those who decided to forsake him. But Peter made it clear that Jesus, the Holy One of God, was someone they had come to trust so deeply that they were willing to stay near him and move with him into a risky and unknown future. None of us can honestly say, “I want to believe but God just hasn’t given me the gift of faith yet”. That’s blaming God for something that’s not his fault. Such a person misunderstands what faith is, perhaps thinking of it as some irresistible mystical experience, or some sudden undeniable light of certainty. Instead faith is more like pledging our loyalty to a friend or to a spouse. It’s a choice. It’s nothing less than our “Yes” to God’s offer of salvation by becoming conformed to his Divine Nature: spiritual marriage.

Likewise, no one “loses” his faith, the way we might lose our car keys. It depends on a decision. We choose to believe and we choose to stop believing. Faith is never lost by accident or against our will, any more than it’s something we stumble upon or are forced into. God created us with a free will with which he doesn’t mess. In his love for us, God leaves us free to decide for ourselves whether to accept or to refuse his offer, exactly as we saw in today’s gospel. It’s good to remember that the crisis of faith described here didn’t come about among the Jewish people in general. It appeared among those who had become Christ’s followers. Put bluntly, the many people who left and returned to their former ways of life are among the earliest examples we have of those who believed in Christ and then decided to stop, Christians who stopped being Christians. Belief alone is not something to die for. But faith is. Faith is also something to live for; something that is lived every moment. That means an effort that lasts as long as life itself, commitment to hard work, and faithful participation in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. As we know, the Eucharist is at the same time a sacrifice and a meal. It’s the re-enactment of the sacrifice of the Cross and a sacred banquet of the Lord’s body and blood. “If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” It’s a banquet because it’s a sacrifice. Any natural food, whether animal or vegetable, first dies and is then “offered” for food. Its life ends in order to support the life of the one who consumes it.

“My life for yours”: this is a law both of nature and of grace. It’s even the life of glory. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”(Jn 15: 13) As we offer the Father Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist we offer ourselves in faith as well. We receive him in communion, in the hope that he will receive us into himself, making us with himself the bread of life for others, feeding many more than five thousand. This breath-taking prospect is our self-donation, the giving of ourselves in love. It’s the essence of our eternal life in heaven, begun already here on earth as we bring the graces of the Mass into our daily lives. 

Homily of Saturday, August 21, 2021

This is from Donald Atwater: Pope Saint Pius X was a man of humble origins. He was one of ten children of a very poor family. His formal education began at the village school, and he was eventually ordained priest in 1858. After seventeen years as a curate and rector he was made canon of Treviso and in 1884 bishop of Mantua, and in 1893 he was the cardinal archbishop patriarch of Venice. Two outstanding events of his pontificate were the separation of the church and state in France, and the pope’s sweeping decrees against the philosophical and religious movement which was given the unhappily chosen name of Modernism. In the first, Pius sacrificed ecclesiastical property for the sake of the Church’s freedom from civil control. In the second, the methods and exercises of lesser men reacted very unfavorably on public estimates of the pope. (Modernism was a crisis. There was no doubt about that. But the way it was handled was a scandal to many people.) He was criticized too when it was sought to put a brake on what some regarded as extreme manifestations of social and political action, as when the French liberal movement called Salon was condemned in 1910 and the Action Francais (a very conservative movement of the opposite tendency) was condemned in 1914. On the other hand, such important measure of his as the codification of canon law, the organization of Roman ecclesiastical departments in the curia, the founding of an institute for scriptural studies, and the revision of the Latin translation of the bible lay outside public controversy. St. Pius had spent 45 year in parish and diocesan work. He aspired to “Renew all things in Christ” (a quotation from the epistle to the Ephesians). And at the practical, pastoral level, his measures were highly beneficent. For instance, the first steps in the reform of public worship, especially in music. (He was one who said we should be using Gregorian chant); the encouragement of frequent even daily reception of Holy Communion, and of its reception by young children. He was essentially the loving, understanding parish priest, and every Sunday when pope, he gave a simple address on the day’s Gospel passage to all comers in one of the Vatican courtyards. Single-minded goodness and simplicity were his great characteristics, and they are seen in the gift of miracles with which he was credited, even while he lived. Accounts of healing, bodily or spiritual, that command assent by their very naturalness and simplicity. St. Pius wrote in his will: I was born poor, I have lived poor, and I wish to die poor. He was embarrassed by Vatican ceremoniousness and certain papal conventions. Immediately on his death, sixteen days after the outbreak of the First World War, there was an insistent popular outcry for his canonization (which took place 40 years later). St. Pius X, pray for us.

 Homily of Friday, August 20, 2021

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt 22:37)

Our patron saint today, Saint Bernard, wrote a book called On the Love of God, which I don’t think many people really know about. His book On Love is about the gift and the virtue of love. In the book he describes four or five levels of the way we love: our relationship to God, how we love God. Developmental psychology in the twentieth century picked up on these. A developmental psychologist - it might be Eric Erikson – picked up on these.  He saw that where Bernard described stages in the love of God, we could find similar stages in love for others.  These seemed to him the steps of how we learn to love others; how we develop our ability to love, from birth until death. Basically, what was come up with was a four-step process that became something of a classic in the field.

The first level of love is we learn to love ourselves. We learn to love ourselves by being loved by other people. You don’t learn to love by studying about love. You learn to love by being loved. Babies quickly learn that they’re attractive and lovable.  And that’s the first stage of love: I love myself. I love me for me – which is an extremely necessary stage of learning to love. The second level is that I love you for me. I love you for the things you give me. This is a very important developmental stage in learning to love and trust. It’s where we love our parents because they give us things, for instance. We love our friends because they give us friendship. This would be what the Greeks would have called philia, brotherly love. Third level is spousal love. In this case, I love you for you. I love you because you are you and I find you very attractive - period. I expect nothing back; I just love you for you.

The fourth stage takes everybody kind of by surprise. (Bernard’s writings are full of surprises like this.) Remember, in the first stage I love me, second stage I love you for me, the third stage I love you for you. The fourth stage is I love me – for you. I love me again but on what might be called an upward ascending spiral. This is the heroic stage of love. It is when I value myself as the greatest gift I can possibly give. It’s not something I do for you; not something I say for you. But me: this is the level of love where I am willing to give my life for you.

I highly recommend St. Bernard’s book. It’s full of surprises, as is our whole Catholic faith.

Homily of Thursday, August 19, 2021

About the first reading, Jephthah’s oath, all the Fathers of the church, as far as I know, say he made a mistake in carrying it out. He should not have done that, and it was foolish to begin with, to make such an oath in the first place. So, what does that tell us? Well, not to make foolish oaths. Not to promise things we will not be able to keep or should not keep. In the second reading, the Gospel, the question is: what is the wedding garment? What about this man who did not have a wedding garment? What was he lacking that these other people, all we told were good and bad, we all right, accepted into the wedding feast? This is what Saint Augustine says: “Now what precisely is meant by the words, ‘My friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ Listen to the apostle. If I give away all I have to the poor, if I hand over my body to be burned, but have no love, no charity, it will avail me nothing. So this is what the wedding garment is. Examine yourselves to see whether you possess it. If you do, your place at the Lord’s table is secure.”

Homily of Tuesday, August 17, 2021

I think many of us have heard the phrase, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” And that is often true. It is also often untrue. At a personal level, for people, for the great majority of people, if you only seek the good, even that will not be reached. You must seek the perfect, even to achieve the good. If you only aim at the good, you do the ungood, the evil, the wicked, which brings no satisfaction ultimately to anybody. That is certainly true, I think, of what we see in today’s gospel, and which we saw in yesterday’s gospel, which is a continuation or prequel before all of this. Because the rich young man, who has done very good, he has done very well for himself; He’s fulfilled the commandments, etc. – says: what can I do to be perfect? Our Lord tells him, you know, do this, do that, give all you have and follow me. And he walks away saddened, because he has many possessions. He is a rich young man. And we have today’s gospel, which continues this. The danger of possessing reality, of seeking the not-perfect, of seeking the good instead of the perfect. We always ask: what can we get? What can we receive? The rich young man asked that. The apostles today ask it in the gospel. And we ask it. And the early church figures also asked it. If you read the New Testament, the apostles’ letters, of Paul for example, which have been studied by psycho-historians and other people. Who were these early Christians: not the marginalized, not the poor, not the, you know, failures of this world, the misfits, the miscreants, the flotsam and jetsam of life. They are relatively successful people who have achieved quite a bit, but they want more. They want more. So what is the benefit of following Christianity? Spiritual: there are physical blessings to be sure, of all sorts, and Our Lord talks about them in this gospel and in other gospels. There is also persecution, the cross, and particularly spiritual benefits: eternal life, etc., etc., etc. A thousand-fold reward. And for that any sacrifice is acceptable, any sacrifice is doable. And we see that in the early church. These people could have chosen any religion, any religion. They were sufficiently well-to-do to do so, sufficiently mobile to do so. They chose Christianity, as demanding as it was, and it was very demanding, because it offered enormous benefits, of this world and the world to come. Already in this world, one could say, and should say, and must say. So what about us? What do we get? If we truly try to follow Christ; if we aim at the perfect and not the good, we’ll at least reach the good, if nothing else. We’ll probably fall short of the perfect, but we will at least reach the good. And more importantly, we’ll reach all the benefits Our Lord has offered to us, has promised us, if we follow him authentically, truthfully. This, and eternal life also; eternal life now. So though the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good, and I think in the personal life, in the spiritual life, etc., the good is the enemy of the good. If we don’t aim for perfection, we’ll fall far, far short, even into sin. And we will achieve nothing, and reach nothing, and have nothing. So the good can be the enemy of the good.

Homily for the Feast of the Assumption (Sunday, August 15, 2021)

The idea of the Ark of the Covenant and Mary is part of Christian tradition. Not so much in the western church – there is only one place I can think of where it is clearly said, and that is in the Litany of Our Lady. She is called the Ark of the Covenant: we ask the Ark of the Covenant to pray for us; there is that. But there was with the Egyptian Christians, the Coptic Christians, which go back of course to the time of the apostle Peter and his disciple Mark, who wrote the Gospel, who converted the Egyptians to Christianity, where there was a strong tradition of Christian learning and Christian monasticism until Egypt was conquered by the Muslims. She is, among those Christians, the Coptic Egyptian Christians, considered as the Ark of the Covenant of the New Testament, which is foreshadowed by the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament. That is to say, if you went to Mass last night, the first lesson you would have heard was about King David bringing up the Ark of the Covenant for from where it was being kept away from Jerusalem, bringing up the ark made of acacia wood, which is incorruptible, and pure gold, which is also pure and incorruptible. Bringing it up into the holy city of Jerusalem, the royal city of Jerusalem. In the Ark of the Covenant there are the tablets of the Mosaic law, given to Moses on Mount Sinai. There is also another strain of thought which says also in the ark were a jar of manna which fed the people in the desert, Aaron’s rod, the high priest’s rod, which blossomed and proved that Aaron was God’s high priest. The ark that was in Jerusalem in the temple disappeared in the time of the prophet Jeremiah, hundreds of years before our Lord appeared on earth, and nobody knows where it is or where it was put. Some say the prophet Jeremiah hid it himself. 

As you heard, the Book of Revelation says God’s temple in heaven was opened, the ark of his covenant was seen within the temple. And we understand that to mean, whether that is the original ark of the Jewish people temple or our Lady, it is, it means Our Lady was seen in heaven. Then it says, which we heard today, a great portent appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. That image is familiar to many of us, to all of us perhaps, in many paintings of our lady that is how she is presented. The twelve stars are either (or both) the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve apostles. She was with child and, it goes on as we heard, the dragon, the evil serpent, the evil monster wants to destroy the child. And the child is born of the woman and is carried up to heaven – ascension, birth, ascension – and the woman is threatened by the devil and flees into the wilderness where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for 1260 years. Is that an image of Our Lady’s Assumption? And then it goes on to speak, which we don’t hear much of, of the war between Michael and the angels, which ends in the devil and his angels being thrown out of heaven. And then it says, it talks about the persecution of the church and that they have conquered the devil, the martyrs have, by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their own lives, and to death. Then it says: Rejoice, o heaven, and you that dwell therein. When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had born the male child, but the woman was given the wings of a great eagle, that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness to the place where she is to be nourished for time and times and half a time. That can certainly be said of the church, and it can certainly be said of Our Lady. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman to sweep her away with the flood, but the earth came to the help of the woman. And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river which the dragon had poured from his mouth. Then the dragon was angry with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring. On the rest of her offspring: who are these offspring? You and I. If we’re members of the church, Holy Mother Church, the Virgin Church, we are the children of the mother of God, Mary most holy. Then the dragon was angry with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring. Us. And here is what should be the life of us: those who keep the commandments of God, those who keep the commandments of God, and bear testimony to Jesus, bear testimony to Jesus. How do you bear testimony to Jesus? That may be very different for every one of us. But one way is by going to Mass, at least every Sunday, to bear testimony to Jesus. 

Homily of Friday, August 13, 2021

The great G.K. Chesterton once wrote: It is not the Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but that Christianity has been found difficult and left untried. And there is a great deal of truth in that. From the very beginning, and much more so recently, I think, people criticize Christianity as being impossible, even absurd. And that was a constant criticism, a pervasive criticism. And there is a great deal of truth in it, except for one fact: the power of the kingdom, the power of grace, the power that Christ gives by his life, death, and resurrection - makes the impossible and the absurd possible, and real, and true. And that's the difference. We see today how the difficulty of marriage and celibacy are brought up. It is an impossibility left to itself, with original sin, with human frailty, with human incapacity and weakness, etc. But with the power of God all things are possible, if we use the means. And that's the great difficulty: we don't use the means; we don't pray, we don't go to the sacraments. We don't get ourselves transformed by God's grace and power, and can do the stuff, more and more so, that He asks us to do that seem impossible and even absurd, particularly by the lights of modern people. So let us use this opportunity of Holy Mass, go frequently, and utilize each one well. What kind of preparation do we have? What kind of openness do we have? What kind of fidelity do we have? To give ourselves more to prayer and good works, etc., so all these things that seem impossible and difficult, absurd even, become very, very doable, more and more so. Let us ask God for the grace, the grace is always there; He is always sending the grace - and miracles can happen. 

Homily of Tuesday, August 10, 2021 (St. Laurence)

The Collect today says that we should pray for the things that St. Laurence loved. And he loved the poor. And we have that reading from Saint Paul about the cheerful giver because he was noted for his cheerfulness, his sense of humor, it seems. St. Augustine, when speaking of the martyrs, tends often to speak of a text which I think comes from Proverbs, which says: When you eat at the table of a rich man, remember you will have to pay in kind. And St. Augustine says we will have to do that as the martyrs have done. They have given their lives for Christ, as he gave his life and fed us at his table, with his body and blood. So, we have to remember, as we take the body and blood of Christ into us, to transform us, to make us one with Christ, that we, our lives, have to be spent in repaying that meal, that banquet, that gift he has given us. And all the saints, the martyrs obviously, do that in a supreme way. But all the saints, if we look at them, have done that each in his or her own way, giving their lives back to God, as His, and as bearing witness to Him. May Saint Laurence help us to love what he loved and do what he did.

Homily of Monday, August 9, 2021

It is Germany, the summer of 1921. A young German lady, 30 years old, who has just received her PhD a few years earlier, is visiting a friend’s house who has gone out for the evening. She’s bored; she browses through the library of her friend’s house. She finds a book, the autobiography or the life of Teresa of Avila, famous 16th-century Spanish mystic reformer and writer. She begins reading the book. She reads the entire book, spends the entire night reading the book in fact. And the next day she says: this is the truth, this is the truth. And in a few months, she is baptized as a Roman Catholic having been an atheist of Jewish dissent. Eventually, she joins the Carmelite, discalced, order, which is the order of Teresa of Avila. That’s a very austere branch of the Carmelites. And will die in the Nazi concentration camps. Today is her feast day, virgin and martyr. We could say many things about her life that are important and about today’s readings which are also important. But one thing I think we should always remember is the importance of reading the great mystics, like Teresa of Avila. Our Lord spoke with authority because he knew the true and living God. He could speak with authority because he was the true and living God. Teresa of Avila realized that if you know God, you speak with authority. Teresa Benedict of the Cross, Edith Stein, whose feast day we celebrate today, knew that if you read the truth and are transformed by the truth, imitate the truth, you will find holiness, happiness and speak with authority. We too can speak with authority if we read and imitate the gospels, our Lord in the gospels; if we read and imitate the great lives and the great writings of the mystics, like Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein. And what the world needs now, certainly, is someone who speaks with authority, who speaks knowing the true and living God. And that is our duty and that is our destiny. If we do so we will find our personal happiness, and happiness for everybody else.

Homily of the19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 8, 2021)
 
The daily readings the last few weeks have been preparing us for today. In them have heard about the children of Israel escaping from Egypt and being provided for by God in their desert wanderings with manna and quail. In the Gospels we have heard about Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the crowd of thousands with the multiplication of five loaves of bread and two fish. In the first reading today we hear about the prophet Elijah who also is provided for by God with bread from heaven. They are all leading up to that beautiful passage we have today in the Gospel of John that scripture scholars have named the “Bread of Life” discourse. Jesus doesn’t play around with words. He doesn’t use a mysterious parable. He lays all his cards on the table and tells it like it is: I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. And what was the immediate result of Jesus’ blunt truth telling? We’ll hear it told next Sunday in the next episode of the Gospel Then many of his disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. It didn’t matter that Jesus had reminded them how God works, and showed them that he worked the same way  showed them by feeding them personally so that they would have their own experience of being fed by God, so that they would see his power and believe Him when he said I am the bread of life and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. No, it didn’t matter. What he said was hard to believe, so they didn’t believe and they left him.

Some things never change. It is STILL hard to believe. And furthermore, it is hard for us to understand the full meaning of what Jesus said, because bread is not so important to us today as it was to Jesus and his contemporaries. If you go to a restaurant, bread is sort of a free extra, like salt and pepper, and if you’re trying to eat healthy you’ll probably skip the bread or rolls that today don’t have a lot of nutritional value anyway. Bread in Jesus time was what most people ate all the time. It was almost ALL they ate and It was not like our bread at all. It was not bleached; it was whole grained and heavy. It was full of nutrition. It’s that kind of bread that Jesus said he was and is. Now the Eucharist we will receive today, believe it or not, was bread. It doesn’t look like bread or taste like bread. It was made without yeast, somewhat like the bread Jewish people make around the Passover. The bread Jesus used at the Last Supper may have been made without yeast - it’s disputed - but the bread people would have thought of when he said he was the bread of life was good old regular life sustaining bread.

One of the issues dividing the Orthodox Churches of the East and our Roman Catholic Churches is our use of unleavened bread, which the Orthodox sometimes call “dead bread” in contrast to their use of fully leavened bread of life. However, that kind of disagreement misses the point and the import of Jesus words, the Gospel and the sacrament. The Eucharist is the bread of life; it is the real presence of the living God who loves us, saves us, gives meaning to our existence and ensures our existence forever. That tasteless and insubstantial matter is really God. But, we are free to take it or leave it. It may be hard to take, so many do leave it.

The Eucharist was hard for me to take in my 20’s. I had a lot of rules that I thought God should follow, and the Eucharist seemed to go against those rules. I thought that if I received the very real presence of God, I should immediately perceive something awesome, a surge of power, a high or at least a little buzz or something. It was one of the reasons I left the church in my 20’s. I was naïve and simplistic. As much as we would like Him to, God does not follow our rules. One of the perks of being God is that He gets to make the rules. That original sin and our individual tendency to sin or be attracted to sinful things… all of that dulls our ability to perceive and experience God as he really is. The Eucharist is not an instantaneous cure any more than one vitamin, one workout in the gym or 6 laps around the track or one day of eating a wholesome, organic and balanced diet will rectify the effects of years of eating French Fries and Big Macs. The Eucharist, the bread of life, must be a regular, steady diet in order to sustain life, to really change our lives for the better. And we must have faith in the Eucharist just as really as we have faith in the medicines our doctors prescribe for us. Saint Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians today what we should be like once the change starts working in us: all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

When I look at that list I can see just how much further I need to go, just how much longer I need to take this God-like medicine. I don’t shout a lot…though some people think I do… but I do get angry, and now and then I am bitter, and forgiving comes hard sometimes. God knows we are human, and how difficult it can be for us to fully benefit from the Eucharistic bread of life. So, He has given us another form of the Bread of Life. “The bread that came down from heaven" is also the Word of God. In Jesus, God teaches us; Jesus is the life-giving word. God is doing through him what God did for the Jews in the desert, feeding us through the Word of scripture. As we read in Deuteronomy (8:3): "We do not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." Jesus used those very words against his great temptation in the desert. 

In the setting of today’s Gospel, Jesus has just fed the 5000 when he speaks about the Bread of Life that will not just nourish them for one day…. Rather it is a bread that satisfies human hunger for something deeper and gives us life in the new age that Jesus is inaugurating. Jesus doesn't debate with his opponents. If they reason from just a human level, they will never get to see Jesus as he really is. They are closed to what Jesus is saying to them. Logic doesn't work for them in their encounter with Christ, or ours either, as I learned. The way people come to see Jesus is that they are "drawn" by the Father. Seeing with the eyes of faith is a gift from God. We cannot achieve God or see God on our own, we must be drawn by God, the One who gives faith. The invitation is always before us. Today we learn from Elijah and Jesus about God's love for us. We are invited to put our faith into practice …but not as an escape from the sometimes harsh realities of life. Elijah had to return to eventually face his enemies. Jesus did not escape the pain and death that lay ahead for him. Nor can we just shrug our shoulders and leave everything for God to take care of.

Our faith enables us to experience God's presence with us in His word and in the sacraments, both as comfort and encouragement so that we can do what we have to do, even in the difficult and deserted places of our lives. I’ll close with a poem in blank verse you have probably heard, and you might even cringe as I read it but it’s worth hearing again and thinking about the truth of it.

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there were one set of footprints. This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints. So I said to the Lord, "You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there have only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?" The Lord replied, "The times when you have seen only one set of footprints, are the times when I carried you."

The bread of life, word and sacrament. May you consume it in faith, love and trust. May it nourish you on good days and bad days. God will always carry us if we let Him. May He carry you in your sorrows and failures. May you see Him beside you in your joys and successes.

Homily of August 6, 2021

Today’s gospel and feast remind us how glorious & confusing it can be to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. To be a true disciple is to begin living in a new dimension of reality, as Peter, James and John entered into along with Jesus on the top of the mountain. It is to begin living in eternity now, to begin living in the kingdom of God before that kingdom is fully actualized. And that is confusing and difficult. The disciples and apostles had problems with it all along. Uprooted from their families and occupations, they followed Jesus the wandering preacher and healer because of the power of his call to them. Surely it was their hearts that responded, because the pure of heart see God. But their heads took much longer to convert. Jesus was (and is) all things to all people; he lived the broad scope of eternity that defies human minds and logic, while the apostles kept trying to understand him through their own categories of thought and logic. Jesus kept dashing their earth-bound hopes, as in his parables, saying the kingdom was like a mustard seed… not at all like the glorious kingdoms of David & Solomon…. and in his teaching that the first would be last and the last first (after they argued among themselves over who would be first)… that Caesar was entitled to his earthly power and authority, which must be respected. 

It is confusing to be a follower of Jesus. Peter understandably misses the point of the Transfiguration. Having just glimpsed eternity and the unveiled reality of Jesus’ person, Peter, in his enthusiasm, thinks they should stay there. But no. God’s voice said: “Listen to my beloved Son,” which is what they did and accompanied him down the mountain. But when they reached the bottom of the mountain they confronted a very real-world problem, a father who had brought his son to be healed, a son whom the other disciples, who had previously been able to heal and work wonders, were powerless to help. Welcome back to reality. Just as the Jesus & the apostles confronted a real human problem at the bottom of the mountain, we confront those problems too…all the time, every day. The world is brimming with problems needing the word and attention of Jesus Christ through us … who profess our faith in him here and who experience him here. Disease, abortion, addiction, racism poverty, injustice, egotism, consumerism, war, etc. We are sent out from the Mass to do our part in making the kingdom of God more real here and now, and to live our daily lives in the faith, hope and love that God has given us, given us as a foretaste of that kingdom and as tools with which to build it further in this world and focus on what we can do rather than on what we like. 

It is good for us to be here, to worship together in the Eucharist. This is our Transfiguration experience, worshipping God in his real presence: it is a mystical experience, like the apostles experienced at the top of the mountain with Jesus. Notice that the altar here is like the top of a very little mountain. In the Mass and the Eucharist we can experience a real closeness to God that is not possible any other way, and we can experience God with and through our community not just by ourselves in a private experience. But to do this we must pray with our hearts, and not get confused by our heads and not try to make God fit our personal preferences & categories. Each person that receives the Eucharist here is transfigured with Jesus Christ. That is a vision seen more with our hearts than the eyes in our head. God wants his kingdom actualized more in this world. God is here in his beloved son, with whom God is pleased and through whom God saved us. In his word, in his church, in his sacraments, but most of all in our hearts. Let us listen to him. Clean of heart, we too shall see God.