A Few Cents

(32nd Sunday, B)

In the readings today we meet two widows, both poor and yet both very blessed. The widow of Zarephath trusts in the prophet Elijah and comes to be supported miraculously. The widow in the gospel, who donates a few cents to the Temple, is praised by the Lord himself, who says that “she put in more than all the other contributors.”

Marriage

 (27th Sunday, B)

I’m a little hesitant to try to preach on marriage, given especially that I have no experience of it. In fact, I don’t even know very many married people on a personal level, except for my parents—whom I got to know pretty well because I first met them when I was very young.

Nevertheless, I’ve given homilies at plenty of weddings, especially early on in my priesthood, and therefore have reflected some on this great Sacrament. So, I’ll give it a shot, and you, especially you married folks, can feel free to take what I say with as many grains of salt as you see fit.

Thinking As Human Beings Do

 24th Sunday, B

Today we have St. Mark’s account of Peter’s great confession of faith, the definitive answer to the question Jesus puts to all his followers, 

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter, first among the Apostles, answers with the confession that includes within it the whole of our Catholic faith,

“You are the Christ.”

But then, as we heard, something goes wrong. Once Peter makes this glorious statement, Jesus begins to explain to him what being the Christ will mean, and Peter has a hard time accepting it.

Assumption

The dogma of the Assumption of Mary was defined by Pope Venerable Pius XII on November 1, 1950 with the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus. Deus, meaning God, of course, and munificentissimus, meaning most munificent. Generous, bountiful. We don’t use the word munificent much, though thanks to Disney we know maleficent. But this world could use less maleficence and more munificence, am I right?

And as we shall see, this great feast recalls and celebrates God’s bountiful generosity towards us, his human creature.

The dogma of the Assumption teaches “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

Mary’s Assumption at the end of her earthly life goes together with the mystery of its very beginning, that of the Immaculate Conception. Just as in her Immaculate Conception Mary was preserved, from the first moment of her conception, from Original Sin, so at the end of her life it is fitting that she be preserved by the same special privilege from the death and bodily decay which is one of the lingering effects of the same sin. So, at the end of her earthly life, Mary did not die in the same way we will, but was assumed into heaven, body and soul.

This can seem like something very marvelous, and indeed it is, but it is the destiny for which we hope as well; as we say in the Apostle’s Creed, we believe in the ‘resurrection of the body.’ We Christians believe that at the time of the General Judgment our souls will be reunited with our bodies, transformed into what St. Paul calls the ‘glorified body.’

And just as the body of the Risen Lord after his Resurrection is the same body that was Jesus of Nazareth in his earthly life, though glorified and possessing certain new, spiritual characteristics – appearing in locked rooms for example – so our soul will be reunited with our body at the end of time, the same body which is ours in this life but also new and glorified.

Now we admit that we don’t know exactly how all of this will work; it is a matter of our faith, of the faith of the Church.

And so our faith is also our hope. That as the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed into the glory of heaven, body and soul, so one day we will find ourselves in the eternal, happy rest of beholding God in our body, glorified in the Christ who has saved us and through his Resurrection opened for us the path to this most blessed destiny. May our hope for heaven, for the full vision of the bountiful generosity of God, be our strength and our joy as we continue on the pilgrimage of this life.

Seeds of the Kingdom

11th Sunday, B

Today Jesus offers us two parables to help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like. To help us get into them, I thought it might be helpful to review what is meant by the Kingdom of God:

“The Kingdom of God is [Jesus’] presence among human beings calling them to a new way of life as individuals and as a community. This is a kingdom of salvation from sin and a sharing in divine life. It is the Good News that results in love, justice, and mercy for the whole world. The Kingdom is realized partially on earth and permanently in heaven. We enter this kingdom through faith in Christ, baptismal initiation into the Church, and life in communion with all her members.” (United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, 80)

The parables today offer us the image of the seed to help us understand how this Kingdom of God grows and develops. The seed is the presence of Jesus or in other words, grace. The good soil in which the seed is planted is ourselves as human beings, unique and unrepeatable creations of God. The seed of grace is planted in our inner selves—our heart, soul, and mind—beginning at our baptism, and from that point on it grows (if we allow it).

The Answer to Prayer

(17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C; Last Mass at Sacred Heart)

In the gospel today we hear some of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. ‘Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.’ Even more, by sheer persistence, Jesus says, we will receive a favorable answer to our prayer.

To hear this can be a little jarring; it can be an occasion of a ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Often it doesn’t seem like we get what we pray for simply by our trust in God and our faithful persistence in prayer. Look at poor Abraham; after all of his haggling for the city of Sodom, we know what happened to them. In the end only Lot and his two daughters survived that mess, if you don’t count Mrs. Lot who turned into a pillar of salt during the escape. Even more, if you keep reading in Genesis you will observe that Lot’s daughters weren’t exactly the most wholesome and righteous girls that ever lived.

So how are we to take what Jesus says, when he assures us that our prayers are answered, and that we will receive what we want from God, who is even more attentive than human parents who know well how to give good gifts to their children? I think we receive an answer when we read carefully.

Jesus says, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” There it is. The Holy Spirit is the gift we receive from our trust and persistence in prayer, not anything else that we might think we need or want.

The Holy Spirit Whom we receive in prayer is the same Spirit Who stretches the divine life of the Blessed Trinity into the world to conceive Our Lord through the consent of our Blessed Mother. He is the same Spirit who gives birth to the Church when He comes to rest on the apostles gathered in prayer on Pentecost. Both of these mysteries are present when each of us receives the gift of the Holy Spirit through prayer. Just as with Mary, the Spirit desires to conceive the Word of God in us, that we may bear his presence to the world and the Word may become flesh through our words and actions. By our common prayer here in the liturgy, we are transformed anew into the Body of Christ, ready to be sent into the world as God’s own reconciliation, forgiveness, and sacrifice for the life of the world.

This gift of the Holy Spirit, given to all who ask with faith and persistence, is the perfect answer to prayer because it draws us into the infinite creativity, delight, and joy of the Blessed Trinity himself. This is the heart of the Christian mystery; that we might come to share, through the Holy Spirit, the same intimacy of Jesus’ relationship to the Father. In this sense, all of our prayers are answered because we receive the gift that is infinitely satisfying and delightful, God himself.

This is not an easy gift, however. To be conceived as the Body of Christ in the world also means accepting the Cross. To consent to become the Body of Christ here at Mass is also to consent to the Cross that the Body of Christ carries. The Cross is God’s answer to the suffering we have brought upon this world with our sins: not to magically fix the world, but to show us a way through its suffering to new life. Taking up our Cross means refusing to pass evil on, rejecting revenge and refusing to participate in this world’s cycles of violence. Jesus’ life and death assure us that those who accept the Cross in this way participate in God’s work of renovating the world through the divine life poured out into our humanity in Christ. The mystery of this renovation of our humanity is what we call the Resurrection.

Let us surrender today to the gift which God is (literally) dying to give us, the Holy Spirit. By this Gift we are drawn into the divine life of the Blessed Trinity, and are made sharers in the salvation that Jesus Christ has accomplished for the world.

Christian Freedom

(13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

“For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery,” writes St. Paul in the second reading today. The spiritual freedom we have in Christ is worth our reflection from time to time. On the one hand, freedom is one of the great gifts that we have in Christ, and one of the most important ways we recover—in Christ—the image and likeness of God in which we were created, and thus find our happiness and fulfillment. God, after all, is infinitely free, and by being free ourselves we imitate Him and share in His freedom. That’s why human beings always strive for freedom and why it makes us happy, because our hearts and minds are always reaching out for the ultimate, divine Love and Freedom of God. On the other hand, we always have to be on guard against the shallow and erroneous understandings of freedom that come from the world and from that mystery of human selfishness and frustration that Paul calls “the flesh.”

Some people think freedom is just being able to do whatever we please. Thomas Merton has a great line on this: “The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 27) Evil and sin make us unhappy by definition. So when I sin by deliberately choosing the bad, thereby making myself miserable—as well as all those who, by their immense charity, put up with me—I am exercising my unfreedom and my slavery to sin. The metaphor of exercise is pertinent, too, because our choices develop our habits and our habits determine what sort of person we become, whether better or worse each day. This is why it’s hard for the wisdom of this world to accept that real freedom is the ability to choose the good, not the false liberty of being able to do whatever we think we want.

This is also why, as St. Paul points out, spiritual freedom and love of neighbor go together. Forgetting about all of the nonsense fed to us by romantic comedies and the like, love is simply to desire the best for another, and to organize our behavior out of that desire. Love means making our life into a right effort for the good and flourishing of the people and earth around us. So, by loving our neighbor, we are seeking the good, and by learning to seek the good consistently we become free and happy. All of this we do in Christ; in fact, this is the very renovation of our humanity that we know as Christ’s Resurrection.