June 25, 2006

Peace! Be still!

Posted in Homilies at 9:00 am

Twelfth Sunday, Year B, June 25th, 2006

I have a shortened homily today, since we have a guest speaker, Patricia Rogan from Canadian Food for Children for our 2006 Missionary Appeal. I will say a few words about Jesus our peace in the midst of the storm (Gospel Mark 4:35-41) and how the love of Christ urges us on in helping our brothers and sisters in need (Second Reading 2 Cor 5:14-17).

The historical account from the Gospel of Jesus calming the storm is important for us today, because Jesus wants to do the exact same thing for us: in the midst of all the stress of modern life, all our restlessness, distractions, busy-ness, anxieties, Jesus wants to say to our souls, “Peace! Be still!” (And if I’ve said it 10 times I will say it 10 000 times – especially at a Holy Hour the Lord will speak these words to us, “Peace! Be still!”) So that we can have peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our world. It begins with having Jesus not only in the boat with us, but also in our hearts.

There are also privileged places of peace, such as a Church, a beautiful natural setting, or a vacation destination. For me, one such place of peace is Madonna House. As I was returning from Madonna House on Tuesday, I took a different route and drove through some idyllic small towns that I’ve never seen before, such as Palmer Rapids, Quadeville and Cormac.

I was enjoying my surroundings and daydreaming a bit. As I was nearing the end of my trip, I drove into a peaceful little town, a typical small town in Ontario with one intersection, with a store, a bank, a post office, a bridge crossing a meandering river. There were neighbours chatting, someone cutting his grass, people walking down the street eating ice cream, and I thought, “it must be nice to live in such a peaceful place.” And then I realized, “Hey, this is Russell! I do live here!”

What’s the lesson here? We don’t have to escape to Calabogie or Cancun to find peace. What makes a town a peaceful place? Jesus Christ in our hearts and in our homes. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ who, as God, has power to quiet all the storms in our lives, to dismiss all our anxieties, and to say to our hearts, “Peace! Be still!”

The peace of Christ is a gift we must share, not only by shaking hands at Mass, but with all people in our world. We cannot remain in our own little boats, preoccupied only with ourselves and our own families. We must also cast our eyes on distant shores where people are suffering much more than we are.

St. Paul writes in the Second Reading, “the love of Christ urges us on.” Pope Benedict quotes this line is his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, in relation to the Church’s charitable activity. He writes, “‘The love of Christ urges us on.’ The consciousness that, in Christ, God has given himself for us, even unto death, must inspire us to live no longer for ourselves but for him, and with him, for others” (#33).

Let us keep this in mind as we celebrate this Eucharist and listen to our missionary appeal after Communion.

June 18, 2006

Corpus Christi

Posted in Homilies at 9:00 am

Corpus Christi, Year B, June 18, 2006

We celebrate this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ in order to highlight our faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, because it is so easy to fall into routine and take to appreciate Christ’s great love for us in the sacrament of His Body and Blood.

The readings for this year’s feast focus on the covenant sealed by blood. In the Old Testament Covenant that we heard described in the first reading, God promised the people to be their God and to lead them to the Promised Land. The people in turn committed themselves totally to God and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Exodus 24: 3-8). Then Moses sealed the covenant by sprinkling blood on the people.

The blood of the New Covenant is infinitely more precious, because it is the blood shed for us by the God-man Jesus Christ. It is not the blood in itself that saves us, but rather what it signifies – the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ to the Father, and Christ’s love for us even to the point of laying down his life.

When we eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ each Sunday, we also renew the covenant we made with God at baptism. When we eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, we are saying to God, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” “All that the Lord has spoken through the prophets and apostles and through His Church to this day, we will do, and we will be obedient.”

I’d like to share something with you that is deep in the heart of every priest, but I don’t think we talk about it as we should. I can best explain it by drawing an analogy between a priest (who is a father) and parents with skeptical or even rebellious teenagers. It is a painful trial for parents who raise their children with love, in the practice of their faith, and to see their children reach adolescence and seem to turn against them, and act as if they have rejected God and the Church. And sometimes they start hanging out with a bad crowd, and their marks start to slide; perhaps they begin experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex. What do parents do?

Well, unless it’s a very rare and extreme case, parents don’t say to a troubled child, “We’ve decided that we don’t want to be your parents any more because you turned out to be a monster. So get lost!” Instead, wise parents will sit down and try to reason with their child with love and firmness, saying something like, “Honey, we love you very much, but we have to tell you that the way you are living now is wrong, and it will make you unhappy. We want to help you change, if only you will trust in us . . . “ Or something like that.

A priest, as a father, also has to deal with similar issues (believe it or not). A priest, like a good parent, does his best to teach the people and help them to reach maturity in their faith, and to find in God the meaning of life and the source of true happiness. But not everyone listens, or believes or trusts or obeys! Right parents? You could try to be a perfect parent, like St. Joseph or the Blessed Virgin Mary, but that doesn’t mean that all your children are going to listen to you, believe in you, trust or obey you. We all know this rationally, but it doesn’t make it any easier as a parent or a priest.

With this analogy in mind, there is something I would like to talk to you about today. As a priest father, I would like to sit down with you and reason with you with love and firmness. Let me begin by saying something that fathers and men . . . sometimes don’t say enough – to talk about my love for you! Yes! Sometimes I even catch myself saying under my breath, after having a conversation with a parishioner or thinking of one of you . . . “I love them all.” “I love them all . . . “ When I look out at all of you or think of you, in all honesty I can say that there is not a single person in this parish that I do not love. I believe this is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of a priest. And if a poor sinner can say that, imagine how much more God your Father loves you!

All this talk of love must be the prelude to something really big – it is –and it’s related to the theme of today’s feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. Like parents who do their best to pass on the faith to their children, I have tried to communicate to you the Church’s teaching on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and His infinite love for us in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. Yet I feel that some people don’t listen or don’t believe in what I say. And I don’t know what else to do; I’m at my wits end.

Some people receive the Body and Blood of Christ casually, indifferently, or unworthily, or even sacrilegiously. Why? Do they think it’s just a symbol? Do they think that the Church’s teaching on who can and cannot receive Communion, and on the worthy reception of communion is irrelevant, so that they can completely ignore it and justify themselves in their own conscience? What can be done? I don’t know. I even asked the Archbishop about this; he listened and said, “it’s a very difficult situation.”

But, like a parent with a seemingly indifferent or skeptical or even rebellious teenager, I will do my best to persevere in love and continue to patiently preach the Gospel. And I humbly beg you: please, please do not receive Jesus Christ our God indifferently or unworthily or sacrilegiously. If you are unsure, you are welcome to come to confession on any Saturday or Tuesday before Mass. I echo the very last words of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima: “Don’t offend God anymore. He is already too greatly offended.”

And to those of you who have a deep and sincere love of Christ in the Eucharist and in the Blessed Sacrament, I ask for your prayers for the conversion of heart for our brothers and sisters – especially at a Holy Hour. And let us console God with many acts of love for all those who do not love Him. I know of no better prayers than those of the Divine Mercy and those taught by the angel to the children at Fatima.

In the spring of 1916, the Angel of Peace appeared to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, kneeled down and bowed so low that his forehead touched the ground. Then he prayed with great fervour:
“O my God, I believe, I adore, I hope in you and I love you. I ask pardon for all those who do not believe, nor adore, nor hope in you, nor love you.”

The third time he appeared to them, he held a chalice with a host, which he left suspended in mid-air and prostrated himself on the ground, praying:
“Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore you profoundly, and I offer you the most precious Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, really and truly present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the countless outrages, sacrileges, and indifferences, by which He is offended. And by the infinite merits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of you the conversion of poor sinners.”
Then he gave them Communion, saying, “Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful people. Make reparation for their crimes and console your God.”

On this feast of Corpus Christi, let us be mindful of the covenant we renew with God every time we receive Holy Communion. Let us tell Him how much we love Him, and say in our hearts, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”

June 11, 2006

Holy Trinity

Posted in Homilies at 9:00 am

Holy Trinity, Year B, June 11th, 2006

The theme of my homily today is the Holy Trinity as our mirror which reveals to us our true beauty, dignity, value and purpose AND inspires in us modesty of dress. How am I going to link the awesome mystery of the Holy Trinity with something as mundane as clothing? We’ll see!

One could say that there are three mirrors in life: 1) the Holy Trinity 2) the “mirror, mirror on the wall, and 3) the eyes of other people, which all reflect to us in various ways our beauty, dignity, value and purpose.

1) I will begin with the mirror of the Holy Trinity. The Trinity is a mystery of God’s inner life that is unknowable to human reason but it was revealed to us in the coming of Christ and the Holy Spirit, as recorded in the Scriptures. The Gospel contains an explicit reference to the Trinity in Jesus’ command to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:16-20). St. Paul also alludes to the Trinity in the Second Reading, saying that we have received a spirit (Holy Spirit) of adoption, which cries out, ‘Abba, Father’ and makes us joint heirs with Christ, the Son. (Romans 8:14-17).

The mystery of the Trinity matters to us because we are created in the image of the Holy Trinity, one God in Three Persons, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father gives Himself completely to the Son in love, and the Son gives Himself totally to the Father in love; their love is the Person of the Holy Spirit. In this mirror we see who we really are, and the purpose of our lives – to become a person like the Persons of the Holy Trinity by giving ourselves away in love in marriage, family, priesthood or another vocation.
(We come to know our beauty and value as human beings, not through being anxiously preoccupied with ourselves or our appearance, or by putting our bodies on display through immodest dress, but through being centred on God and our loved ones).

2) The second mirror: some people think that they will come to appreciate their beauty and value by looking in a regular mirror. This is false. Mirrors reveal nothing of our true beauty. Remember Snow White! She was so pure, innocent, and the fairest of all, yet she never once looked in the mirror. In the fairy tale, who was it that looked in the mirror? Wasn’t it the wicked witch? I’m not saying it’s wicked to look in the mirror, but it’s not going to make anyone feel more beautiful!

An aside about mirrors. In the Rectory where I live (and I hope to see all of our volunteers there for our volunteer appreciation night on the 24th), there is a walk-in closet with a full-length mirror. Why does a priest need an over-sized mirror, so he can stand there and ask, “does this black shirt match these black pants?” or “Honey, do I look fat in this robe (ie chasuble)?” (Vanity of vanities! All is vanity but to love and serve God alone!)

3) The third mirror: the eyes of other people. In marriage and family, the eyes of other people are essential mirrors that reveal to us much of our beauty, dignity, value and purpose. Babies know they’re beautiful through the admiring eyes of their parents; spouses also are mirrors revealing to each other each one’s beauty. But beyond that, why would Christian people dress immodestly to attract the admiring eyes of the crowd, whether at the mall, a party, or in Church? The eyes of the crowd are a very unreliable mirror not much different from the “mirror, mirror on the wall.” The eyes of the crowd will boost no one’s self esteem and tell us almost nothing about our intrinsic beauty, dignity, value or purpose as people created beautiful in the image of the Persons of the Trinity, people capable of giving and receiving love, and destined for eternal life.

May the mirror of the Holy Trinity inspire us to reflect our interior dignity by our purity and modesty in our dress and appearance, especially in Church.

I’m not going to give specific examples of immodest dress because I don’t want to embarrass anyone. But what many people consider to be normal and modest is not at all. The moral judgements of Catholics and Christians are often formed more by worldly standards rather than Gospel values. Just ask Catherine Doherty, who preached to Catholics in the southern U.S. in the 1930′s on the dignity of black people. She was beaten up, and “black and blue from the blows of the women” (Fragments of My Life, 148). These good Catholic women were formed more by the distorted values of their racist culture than they were by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And today we have our own blind spots when it comes to purity and modesty.

We happen to live in a particular culture and time in history of almost unparalleled immodesty, impurity, sexual licence, the breakdown of the family, and so on. It is no surprise that many Christians and Catholics reflect this historical aberration and fail to realize that what they might consider to be normal, acceptable and modest dress, especially in Church, is not.

My purpose is not to embarrass or judge anyone, but to inspire a collective examination of conscience on modesty of dress and purity. Perhaps each family could have a discussion about this; perhaps individuals could resolve to take that extra step and dress even more modestly than they think they should, especially for the Eucharist.

I’d like to say a few words as a Christian man. So try to forget for a moment that I am a crusty old curmudgeon of a priest, ranting and raving against the modern world, and let me speak to you ladies here as a Christian man on behalf of all Christian men. You ladies here, our sisters in Christ, may have heard that men, more so than women, are “visually stimulated,” for lack of a better word. So Christian men must be brave warriors and learn to fight for custody of the eyes and purity of heart.

We Christian men here want to let our sisters in Christ know that we pledge to strive for that purity of heart that sees God in you, that sees not some body but somebody, a person created beautiful in the image of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. To those women who may be insecure or immature, and who unknowingly dress immodestly, or fail to respect themselves, we want you to know that no matter how you dress, we will respect you. We will look upon you as daughters of God the Father, sisters of Christ, and temples of the Holy Spirit. But if you so choose to help us out by dressing modestly, we would be grateful!

The purpose of our lives is to become a person like the Persons of the Holy Trinity by giving ourselves away in love in marriage, family, priesthood or another vocation. May our practice of the virtues of modesty and purity help us to possess ourselves in Christian maturity, so that we can in turn make a sincere gift of ourselves to others.

June 4, 2006

Pentecost

Posted in Homilies at 9:00 am

Pentecost, Year B, June 4th, 2006
(First Sunday Children’s Homily)

Today, I would like to talk about the role of the Holy Spirit
in our worship of God in the Eucharist.

1) First of all, I would like to ask the children, “What is the Holy Spirit? Is it a thing or a person?”
(Holy Spirit is not a thing like electricity, although some people experience the coming of the Holy Spirit like electricity in their bodies. The Holy Spirt is a Person, one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit).

2) What happened on Pentecost (First Reading)?
(Holy Spirit came upon the apostles in tongues of fire and they spoke in other languages. So on Pentecost we celebrate the beginning of the Church when the apostles miraculously preached the Gospel and thousands of people came to believe in Jesus and were baptized).

3) Can anyone guess where the apostles were or what they were doing when the Holy Spirit came upon them? Were they at the Russell House when the Holy Spirit came upon them? Or in a Church or in the Temple?
(“They were all together in one place” is all we are told in the First Reading. But earlier in the Acts of the Apostles we learned that they gathered in “the upper room” where they were staying in Jerusalem (1:13), and that they devoted themselves to prayer with Mary the mother of Jesus (1:14). So they weren’t in a Church because there were not yet any Church buildings; they were in a house where they were praying together).

4) Another question for you: what would you do if you woke up Sunday morning and found out that our Church had burned down? Would you cry or go back to sleep? (Or go to Walmart or Home Depot?) What would you do?
(I hope that some of you would gather with your families and pray, because the Holy Spirit is with you in your hearts and your homes, and even at home you can do some of the same things we do when we gather in the Church – you can read the Word of God and think about it and talk about it; you can give thanks and praise to God for all the good things in life; you can pray for others and all your personal and family needs).

The apostles had no Church building but the power of their prayer in the Spirit transformed the world. We cannot let this Church building be our substitute for sincere and devoted prayer, nor our bodily presence here be an excuse for interior lukewarmness.

I’m not saying these things to suggest that if we have the Holy Spirit we don’t need the Church or the Sacraments or the priesthood. Far from it! But the Holy Spirit must inspire our worship and rituals or they become almost empty. This is a danger for all religions with rituals – to observe the externals while neglecting the Spirit.

Consider the rituals of the Jewish temple. It was a temptation for worshippers to bring their lamb for sacrifice, and yet in their hearts fail to give God thanks and praise and glory. It’s easy for Catholics to sit in the pew and swallow a Communion host and be ten thousand miles away in their hearts, like a dead body without a soul – that is what worship becomes when the Holy Spirit does not animate our hearts and rituals.

But we still need rituals in our worship. Jesus Christ himself commanded us to use rituals because He not only gave His apostles the Holy Spirit, but He also gave them His Body and Blood and commanded them, “Do this in memory of me.” We need rituals because we are not pure spirits like the angels; we are bodies that need to physical express our worship in external rituals.

Our worship of God is most perfect, effective and transforming of our lives when we combine our rituals with the Spirit in the Eucharist. Jesus speaks of the “Spirit of truth” in the Gospel; this is also the Spirit of true worship; the Spirit that dwells in the inner person, in the conscience and in the heart. The more we bring our true selves to worship, and consciously give thanks and praise to God in the Eucharist, the more we will notice a difference in our daily lives and rejoice in the fruits of the Spirit. Our worship in spirit and in truth in the Mass helps us to experience the fruits of the Spirit in our lives, those fruits mentioned in the Second Reading: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

As Catholics, we know that we need to receive the Body and Blood of Christ into our bodies in order to have eternal life – this is the teaching of Christ Himself (Jn 6). But we also need the Second Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to be interiorly transformed. Catholicism is not an either/or religion but a both/and religion. We don’t say that religions have either rituals and the Body and Blood of Christ OR the Holy Spirit. We have both rituals AND the Holy Spirit.

In this Mass, I invite you all to pray in the Spirit, to listen to the prayers of the priest and make them your own prayers in your heart. And listen especially for any mention of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharistic Prayers. What are we asking of the Holy Spirit in each Mass?

And let us frequently pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives, asking for the gifts and fruits of the Spirit, saying, “Come Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire or your love.” “Come Holy Spirit through the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well-beloved Spouse.”