And With Your Spirit

(Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time-Year A; This homily was given on 22 & 23 September, 2011 at St. Mary's Church in Cranston, R.I. and Holy Cross Church in Providence, R.I.; SeeMatthew 22:34-40)

In just a few short weeks, with the Third Edition of the Roman Missal being introduced on the First Sunday of Advent, we will experience one of the most significant changes in our celebration of Mass since the period following the Second Vatican Council. Certainly the holy sacrifice of the Mass does not change. Our union with Christ in the Eucharist can never change for “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). But many of the words and phrases in the prayers we offer and the responses we share each week will indeed change.

Well before that happens, of course, there will be pew cards available that will identify the words and phrases that are slightly different from what we have grown accustomed to for decades. Change is never easy but I am sure that before long we will become as familiar with the new expressions as we were with the previous ones. Hopefully we will even discover that the changes themselves are instrumental in helping us to draw ever more deeply into the mystery and the majesty of the encounter with the living God that we experience every time we gather together for Mass. We are doing something far greater than refining our language in the liturgy; we are embracing changes that will help us enter more intimately into the life of God.

Today I would like to focus on one of those changes, the very first one that we will encounter on November 27, 2011. On that First Sunday of Advent the priest celebrant will make the sign of the cross at the beginning of Mass and greet the people with the words, “The Lord be with you.”

Instead of the response, “And also with you,” however, the response of the assembled community will now be, “And with your spirit.” I am sure you would agree that it is a very small change. In fact, you might argue that it is such a small change that perhaps it is not even necessary. Yet what is being communicated in that small change, and indeed throughout that brief exchange that we participate in at the beginning of every Mass, speaks volumes.

“The Lord be with you,” the priest proclaims in his greeting.

The Lord, who says to us in Sacred Scripture, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20), this God is with us.

Christ, who abides silently and lovingly in the tabernacle of every Roman Catholic Church is with us.

Christ, whose body and blood are made present on the altar of sacrifice and received by His Church assembled before Him in the presence of the angels, He is with us. He is indeed with us!

“And with your spirit,” the community responds. And with your spirit. There is a spiritual reality taking place here in the Mass that needs to be made known at the beginning. The opening greeting and response set the tone for what we are about to enter into, a spiritual and physical encounter with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We are not just bodies gathered together in His Church. We are bodies and souls and that is something we are in constant need of remembering.

The world in which we live does not always acknowledge the spiritual nature of our existence. Our culture is one preeminently focused on the body and the material world. If you are not convinced of this, turn on your TV or go to the movies. Even when there is an attempt to dabble in things spiritual, they are often explored only in as much as they relate to one’s existence in this world, this present life.

The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis, in a sermon he gave at Oxford University back in 1942 called The Weight of Glory, said that we are in urgent need of being rescued from “the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.” He explains how “almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”

In seventy years not much has changed in that regard. And yet the good we search for, the glory to which God beckons us, the “far-off country” for which we long, none of these have been found on this earth. Sic transit gloria mundi. The glory of this world passes. The good and the glory which we yearn for can only be found beyond this world, in heaven. How remarkably astonishing then, that the God of heaven and the God of glory should choose to come here to this earth and find us! That is what we are celebrating in the liturgy. God is with us, physically, and with our spirit.

In the Gospel for this weekend Christ is asked which of the commandments is the greatest. His response is not simply, “Love God, love neighbor.” That is a truncated and incomplete translation of what He gives in answer to that all-important question. He says not, “Love God, love neighbor,” but:

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

—Matthew 22:37-39

With all your heart…and with all your soul…and with all your mind.

Christ acknowledges the whole person, the entirety of the human person whom He has created and redeemed and sustained by His love. Our response to so great a gift as life and redemption must be more than a mere physical obedience and pious action. We must love God with our bodies and with our souls, with our hearts and minds, our intentions and our wills, with everything we have and are. That is what it means to love God. Such love can only be complete, of course, when we take the same holistic stance in solidarity with and charity towards our neighbor.

At the conclusion of his sermon, C.S. Lewis holds up this love of neighbor as the hallmark of our own call to heavenly glory and union with God. He notes how it is certainly possible to be too concerned or too occupied with one’s own glory (a spiritual myopia, as it were). But, he says, “It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.”

Guided by this focused and passionate desire for our neighbor’s glory, our neighbor’s journey towards that heavenly homeland, Lewis notes how our perspective and our everyday relations regarding those around us can and must be changed. This spiritual nature, which we acknowledge whenever we gather together for the Mass –and with your spirit—this spiritual reality is one that negates any possibility for regarding our neighbor as ordinary. We are destined, body and soul, to endure beyond this world for all eternity. In heaven, or, God forbid, separated from God and heaven, we will exist beyond this place, in a life that never ends. That changes things; it changes everything.

“There are no ordinary people,” writes Lewis:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

How is God challenging us to help our neighbor to that eternal relationship with Him, to share in His glory in that heavenly homeland? How are we called to love God with all of our hearts, all of our souls, and all of our minds in our everyday relationships and experiences this week? May we truly come to experience this love which begins here on this earth and transcends all earthly bounds, and in so doing come to recognize all the more that God is totally and completely with us, and with our spirit.

September 11: A Remembrance

(Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time-Year A; This homily was given on 10 September, 2011 at Blessed Sacrament Church, Providence, R.I. and 11 September at St. Anthony's Church in Providence, R.I.; See Matthew 18:21-35)

There is a museum in Jerusalem called Yad Vashem and it was established to commemorate the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust during World War II. The name of that museum, Yad Vashem, comes from the Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament) and is found in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. In Chapter 56 of Isaiah, the Lord is comforting and consoling the people of Israel who have seen such devastation and loss after years of exile in the land of Babylon. As they return to their native land, God makes this promise to His chosen people, that for those who now keep His covenant and law, “I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:5).

A monument and a name. In Hebrew, a Yad vashem.

In naming the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, the message is clear that for those innocent men and women whose lives were tragically taken away, there will always be a remembrance. In fact, God Himself will remember them always for He knows them each by name.

Today we commemorate the thousands of men and women in our own nation whose lives were tragically cut short ten years ago in the terrorist attacks of September 11. It is not the same experience as the Holocaust; we know that. But for those who have lost family members and loved ones; for those who were personally harmed by the events of that fateful day; even for us as a nation, the sense of injustice, pain and sorrow is the same. The words of the Prophet Isaiah call to mind for us today the reality that these lives too will be given a place of remembrance, a yad vashem. The Lord remembers each of these men and women, created in His image and likeness; He knows them each by name.

The sense of memory and remembrance are central themes for us as Catholics. We celebrate Masses of Remembrance for our beloved deceased; we call to mind our identity as people of faith by remembering the history of salvation whenever the Eucharistic Prayer is offered; we recall Christ’s passion, death and resurrection and unite ourselves to Him in the hope of our own resurrection from the dead. We are people of remembrance.

In our Gospel this weekend St. Matthew reminds us of the importance of the memory when it comes to the commandment to forgive as we ourselves have been forgiven. Christ tells the parable of the king whose servant owed him “a huge amount” (Matthew 18:24). In fact, the debt was so great that in order to settle accounts with the king, the servant and his family would have to be sold off, along with all his property and possessions. He was personally and financially ruined, and he knew it. Falling to his knees before the king he pleaded for patience and the chance to pay it all back.

Suddenly the king, in a moment of extreme compassion and mercy, decides to forgive him the entire debt! It was a remarkable and seemingly unforgettable event. Yet immediately after leaving the presence of the king that servant forgets all about it—or choses to forget. He encounters a fellow servant who owes him a much smaller amount and seizes him, demanding that he pay it back immediately.

The point that Christ is making is that our memories and our hearts should be able to retain the great compassion and mercy of God so abundantly and even extravagantly poured out upon us. From that great resource of Divine Mercy, then, we should be able to act in kind to those who owe us so much less. Christ plays the numbers game with St. Peter in the Gospel: not seven times should we fogive, but seventy-seven times (other translations read seventy times seven, i.e., four-hundred and ninety). Whatever translation we are reading or however we calculate forgiveness, few if any of us can think of one person who has injured us four-hundred and ninety times, or even seventy-seven times. But we have all offended God at least seventy-seven times, perhaps even this week. Remember that! Remember what it is like to be loved that much and to be given so great a gift as God’s unconditional mercy and love.

There is a story about a Christian woman named Corrie Ten Boom who, along with her father and sister, helped to shelter Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War. She would later write a book about her experience called, The Hiding Place. At one point their activity was discovered and they were taken into custody by the Nazis. Corrie’s father died soon thereafter but Corrie and her sister were moved to several places, eventually finding themselves in the concentration camp named Ravensbruk. It was there that Corrie’s sister died shortly before Corrie herself was freed.

Remarkably, Corrie began traveling around the world after the war in order to share the message of God’s merciful love. Her message was that God forgives—even the horrors of the Holocaust—God forgives. As you might imagine, it was a compelling and powerful witness.

She had just finished that talk in a small Church outside of Munich when she saw a man approaching from the back of the room. Her blood ran cold as she recognized him. He had been one of the SS guards at Ravensbruck, and one of the cruelest. He had no idea who she was.

“A fine message,” he said. “How good it is to know that, as you say, our sins are forgiven by God. You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk. I was a guard there. But since that time, I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from you, as well.”

He held out his hand to her, and at that very moment she thought of her sister, who had died in that place. She later recalled, “I stood there—I whose sins had again and again needed to be forgiven—and could not forgive.”

But she knew the power of forgiveness; she had spoken of it so many times. She knew that forgiveness was above all an act of the will, and that she did not need to feel like forgiving someone in order to actually do so. Suddenly she began to pray: Jesus, help me. I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You do the rest.

And as she shook the hand of that former SS guard, she began to feel a love for him that could only come from God. She said later that she had never known God’s love as intensely as she did that day.

We are called to be people of forgiveness in imitation of Christ who forgives each of us for so very much. Often times that is not an easy thing to do. Perhaps sometimes all we can do is struggle lift up our hands to God, to raise our hearts to Him, asking for the grace to forgive. When we do so, whether it be something small or maybe even as overwhelming as the terrorist attacks on our nation ten years ago, we trust that God is with us, helping us and allowing us to participate in His merciful love. May we have the grace necessary to remember all that He has done for us, all that He has forgiven us, so that the mercy flowing from the cross can continue to work in and through us in our daily lives.

Salvation, Hope & Prayer

(Opening Mass for the Formation Year 2011, Seminary of Our Lady of Providence; This homily was given on 7 September, 2011; See Romans 8:22-27)

Why are we here tonight? Why are we here, gathered together before this altar, celebrating a Mass in honor of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of this formation year?

I would suggest this evening that there is only one answer sufficient to answer completely that question. It is a response and answer found on every page of the Gospel; in every ounce of blood that Christ shed for us on the cross; in all of His pain, sorrow and suffering; in all of His joy, triumph and exaltation; it is a response which is also found in the depths of our own hearts, in a longing and yearning too deep for words.

We are here tonight for salvation.

We gather together tonight to be saved by God. Christ gives Himself to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, a foretaste of the eternal life we are called to share with Him. He comes to us to draw us into eternal union with God. It is why He shares with us His body and blood, it is why He instituted the priesthood: for the salvation of souls.

St. Paul, in our first reading this evening, lifts up for us that great mystery of our salvation. He holds it up in all its splendor and beautifully intertwines that mystery with two powerful dimensions of our Catholic faith:

Hope and prayer.

“For in hope we were saved” (Romans 8:24), St. Paul tells us. Our beloved Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI begins his encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, with these very words of St. Paul.

Spe salvi facti sumus. In Hope we were saved.

The Apostle goes on, in his Letter to the Romans, to speak of our human response to this great hope of salvation. He says that we yearn and long for it “with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26) heartfelt prayers in which the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, drawing us ever more deeply into the mystery of our salvation.

These two, then: hope and prayer.

But the sense that our culture has of these two things, hope and prayer, is one that is very different from what the Apostle calls us to in that Letter to the Romans. Often times people see hope as a deep desire or wish for things to simply “work out well in the end.” But this “wishful thinking” is not hope.

Prayer can also become a wish list which is offered up to God for His ratification: this is what I wish for; please grant it to me.

How different, how deep and remarkably beautiful is the hope and prayer that we are called to embrace as men of God being formed for the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Hope as a theological virtue is not a mere wish that the future will "pan out" for us. St. John of the Cross, in fact, in is spiritual writings, does not ground hope in the future at all, but more so in the past. He says that hope is linked to the faculty of the soul commonly understood as the memory (see The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book Three, Ch. 14).

The hope we have for a future with God is rooted in the events of the past and what that means for us today and everyday hereafter. Jesus Christ suffered and died for us on the cross, for love. That happened, and nothing will ever change that. Three days later Christ rose to life again; He made promises to the Church and kept every single one of them. He has promised you and me that if we place our faith in Him, if we put our trust and love in Him, then we will be saved, we will share in eternal life with God. That is the basis for our hope and the rock-solid foundation for everything that we believe. That is what St. Paul means when he writes, “In hope we were saved.” God is faithful. He has always been faithful. We can trust and hold fast to everything He reveals to us through His holy Catholic Church.

But we are not always prepared to respond in faith and trust to so great a hope of salvation; we do not always choose to stand on so solid a foundation. We are in need, every one of us, of holiness and purification. Our hearts need to be prepared to receive so great a gift as God Himself. Pope Benedict XVI speaks of this necessity, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, in terms of hope and prayer. He writes:

Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched.

—Spe Salvi, #33

Borrowing an image from the writings of St. Augustine, Pope Benedict describes how God wishes to fill or souls with honey, but that is not possible when our hearts are already filled with vinegar.

Think of all the bitterness that sin can bring to the human heart and how necessary it is that God drain from us every ounce of this vinegar. He can then stretch these vessels of ours and increase our capacity to receive the sweetness of real honey, His own Divine life poured out deep within the soul. God wants to purify our hearts and fill us with this sweetness, not only for ourselves but for all the souls we will encounter in our daily lives.

“Through this effort by which we are freed from vinegar and the taste of vinegar,” writes Pope Benedict XVI, “not only are we made free for God, but we also become open to others.”

This is at the heart of the purifying power of prayer. Pope Benedict goes on to say that in order for this purifying power to develop, it necessarily involves two things.

§ First and foremost it involves intimacy with God. We come into this chapel, time and time again, day and night, and spend intimate time alone in prayer with God. We come before the one who is so worthy of our love, all the while painfully aware of our own unworthiness. We acknowledge, time and time again, that we do not deserve so great a love, so great a gift, that we could never earn this indescribable love that God has for us, but that He is always present to us whenever we come before Him in humility and in faith. The purifying power of intimacy with God in prayer is essential to our salvation.

§ Secondly, this purifying prayer “must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly” (Spe Salvi, #34). It is not the case that we become expert in the art of prayer and then impose our expertise on the Church and Her liturgy. Rather, we come to the Sacred Liturgy in awe and wonder, we bow before this great Sacrament of our salvation and we learn anew how to pray and offer ourselves to Him. The saints teach us this great act of worship. The Church throughout the centuries has guided the souls of countless men and women in these most sacred mysteries.

As we begin this new formation year, it is my prayer for each one of you that you will grow in the theological virtue of hope, a hope which is rooted on the rock-solid promises of the risen Christ; and through the purifying power of prayer, may God gently and loving allow you to be emptied of all vinegar and stretched out to the capacity to which you can receive so sweet a gift as this honey which is His Divine life within you.

As you continue to be prepared for the day of ordination, may hope and prayer continue to make you more and more like Christ so that, when the people of God approach you as their priest, yearning and longing for salvation with groanings perhaps too deep for words, you will have something beautiful and sweet to offer them.

At The Gates

(Twenty First Sunday in Ordinary Time-Year A; This homily was given on 21 August, 2011 at Blessed Sacrament Church in Providence, R.I.; See Matthew 16:13-20)

There are many treasures and gifts that we share as Catholics in the world today. Whether or not we were baptized into the Church as infants or have been received into the Church as adults there are so many truths of our Catholic faith that are simply priceless. One of our greatest treasures, in fact, is “on display” right now in Spain in the City of Madrid. Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, is a true gift to the Church and to the world.

This very weekend there are 1.5 million young people from all over the world that have travelled great distances to be with Pope Benedict XVI. It is said sometimes that young people are no longer interested in coming to the Church. Tell that to Pope Benedict XVI! Tell that to the 1.5 million people gathered in prayer in Madrid. The Pope truly is a treasure for us as Catholics and a gift to the world we live in.

The Eucharist is another priceless gift we thank God for as Catholics. We gather together each week to receive Jesus Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. The Eucharist is the greatest treasure we could ever possess or, rather, the great Treasure that possesses us, takes hold of us and transforms our lives in ways beyond our ability to fathom.

Nonetheless, and not infrequently, we are called upon to defend these gifts we have been given. Perhaps too often people misunderstand—sometimes even intentionally so—the words and actions of our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI. Perhaps you yourself have had to explain to someone, “No, that is not at all what the Pope said,” or “No, that is not at all what the Pope meant.”

It can also happen that people in our lives will question and challenge the very things that we hold as sacred. Even relatives and friends at times will take issue with those truths of our faith that we value most of all: the personal dignity of every human life from conception until natural death, the sanctity of marriage as a covenant of love between one man and one woman, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Defending our faith can seem, at times, to be a daunting task. Many Catholics may feel like they just do not know as much as they would like to when it comes to responding to these questions and challenges that come sometimes from all directions.

Thankfully Christ has given us such tremendous promises and the blessed assurance that we will never be alone. He says to us at the conclusion of St. Matthew’s Gospel:

Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.

—Matthew 28:20

One of the greatest promises Christ makes to His Church that relates directly to St. Peter and his successor Pope Benedict XVI, as well as to the power of God in the midst of the Church, is the one we hear in the Gospel this weekend. Peter acknowledges that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Jesus immediately recognizes Peter’s insight as a gift:

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.

—Matthew 16:17

This is no ordinary event nor is St. Peter simply more intuitive than the other disciples. He has received the revelation of God and responded to it. Christ continues:

And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.

—Matthew 16:18

This rock-solid promise of the presence, power and permanence of Christ and the primacy of Peter is a tremendous gift and treasure for us as Catholics. Down through the centuries the Church has always held onto these words of our Lord as a reminder of the hope we have in Him. No matter how dark things get or how difficult the battle with evil becomes, the Church will still stand firm. We will continue to proclaim Jesus Christ and His Gospel message until the end of time.

Yet that hope to which we cling, however real it may be, is not precisely what Christ is saying in this passage. Certainly Christ will sustain us through all the trials and tribulations we face. Nonetheless, our Lord’s words to us are not merely defensive; they imply much more than that. It is not simply the case that the Church will be protected by Christ and sustained in the assault of the powers of evil and darkness. No, what Christ is saying is that the gates of the netherworld will not be able to sustain the assault of His Church! He says that “On this rock I will build my church,” and, taking the literal Greek:

πύλαι ἅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς.

The fortified city gates of the netherworld (the powers of death and evil) will not be able to triumph in an encounter with it.

Far from remaining on the defensive, the Church is called upon to go forward in the power of the risen Christ and do no less than lay siege to the gates of the netherworld!

I would suggest this weekend that there are three ways we are called to do that as Christians; three ways of living out our Catholic faith in such as way that we stage an offensive against the powers of darkness and the powers of evil in this world.

The first and perhaps least considered is prayer. There is unthinkable power in that daily converse we have with our God in prayer. Are there people in your life that are isolated from God and from the Church? Are there people that you know and love that feel all alone in this world and live a life separated from God and perhaps have lost their faith?

Hell is eternal separation from God. Many people find themselves in a living hell and long for the communion of life and love that you and I take for granted every day. Pray for them! When we pray for those around us it is not a merely passive plea. We are breaking into the realm of darkness and taking hold of souls created by God; we are lifting them up to God, bringing them into His light, and pleading for their salvation. There is nothing passive about that! It is an all-out, full frontal attack on the gates of the netherworld. And it works. God listens to our prayers.

The second way that we are called to lay siege to the gates of the netherworld is through a full sacramental life in the Church. When a new child of God is brought into the life of the Church, the priest prays in the Rite of Baptism:

The Christian community welcomes you with great joy. In its name I claim you for Christ our Savior by the sign of his cross.

The Sacraments, initiated by Christ and embraced in the life of the faithful, have the power to draw souls from the netherworld into the Kingdom of God.

The same is true for each one of us, already baptized. When we are struggling with sin and even if we have become lost through choices which have separated us from the life of grace and the life of God, we can be brought back into sanctifying grace once more through the Sacrament of Reconciliation. With reconciliation and the power of Sacramental Absolution, the words of the priest announcing the forgiveness of Christ—“I absolve you from your sins…”—have the power to reclaim souls once again for the Kingdom of God.

Finally, and perhaps most challenging for some, the work of evangelization is a powerful offensive weapon against the powers of darkness that oppose us. To simply share our faith and the love we have received from God with those around us who perhaps do not believe in Him can change lives and transform the world we live in. The proclamation of the Gospel message transformed the world in the days following the resurrection of Christ. It transforms the world still.

How is God challenging us to live out our faith this week like never before? With faith and trust in God we ask for the grace to pray for those we love and who are perhaps isolated or separated from God and His Church; to live a full sacramental life in the Church, especially united to Christ in the weekly celebration of the Eucharist; and to proclaim and share our faith in confidence with those around us. When we do so we carry with us the promise of Christ Himself, that not even the gates of the netherworld will be able to stand against us.