Fr. JC Maximilian

[”Doubting Thomas” by Caravaggio] 

This past week I was on retreat with a group of priests involved in the Church Movement called, Communion and Liberation.  Our retreats are somewhat atypical of what one might think a retreat is like.  In the morning we do keep silent, with a conference and Mass.  However, one of the beliefs of Communion and Liberation is the importance of friends, or companions, as we follow Christ, so we also spend time socializing with each other; sharing how we encounter the presence of Christ Jesus in our different ministries.  Another aspect of Communion and Liberation is the full embracing of our humanity through contact with reality.  Since the Word of God became flesh, we too, need to experience the reality of God in the flesh, so we embrace expressions of beauty and culture.  On this retreat we attended a concert of classical music, and went to one of the Catholic Missions established by Blessed Junipero Serra; in fact the Mission where he is buried.

While on retreat I did have my copy of Magnificat, so I was able to pray over this weekend’s readings, but I did not the various commentaries that I look at in preparing my homilies.  Of course today’s Gospel is one that we are all familiar with; the story of “Doubting Thomas.”  As I prayed over this Gospel reading a question came to my mind, was St. Thomas’ doubt, his wanting to “see the mark of the nails in his hands” and put his hand into Jesus’ side before he would believe in the Resurrection really all that outrageous?  I think the answer to that question is by “yes” and “no”.

Let’s look first at the “no,” that it was not outrageous for St. Thomas to want some proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  As I mentioned earlier, one of the themes frequently discussed in Communion and Liberation is the carnal, in the flesh, reality of Jesus.  St. John’s Gospel begins with the beautiful song of how the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.  Throughout His preaching mission Jesus is frequently eating and drinking with people; in fact some of the scribes and Pharisees used that as a critique of Him, saying that Jesus was a glutton and drunkard.  Jesus often physically touched people in healing them.  In several of the post-Resurrection accounts Jesus reveals Himself, and that He was not a ghost, by eating with His disciples.  In today’s Gospel reading, when He first appeared to the Apostles and said, “Peace be with you,” Jesus then showed them His hands and His side, and it was only then that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

St. Thomas was not at that first appearance of the Risen Christ to the Apostles, so it seems quite normal for him to want some tangible proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  And Jesus is not bothered by this doubt of Thomas; when He next appears to the Apostles and says, “Peace be with you,” Jesus right away turns to Thomas and tells him to touch Him for Jesus is eager for Thomas to have believe in Him; “do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  Jesus knows the importance of Faith in order to share the new life He came to bring to all people.  How often during His public ministry did Jesus say, “your faith has healed you,” or “your faith has been your salvation.”

Yet, there is something a bit outrageous in St. Thomas’ doubt, but I think Jesus uses that to help us so that we will “not be unbelieving, but believe.”  St. Thomas’ doubt seems to fit right in with our modern world.  We have seemed to so embrace science and technology, that most people want to only believe what they can see, touch, hear, taste or smell.  They say that they want “proof” and by proof they mean something tangible.  They seem to relegate faith as being just sentimentality and not connected with reality.

However, there are two general methods of knowledge; both direct and indirect.  Science relies on direct knowledge; we know something because we observe it, we experience it ourselves.  This is a powerful method for knowing something, indeed, but it is actually not the most common method for knowing something.  Most of the things that we know, we know indirectly.  Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic work, Democracy in America, made this wonderful observation:

“If man were forced to demonstrate for himself all the truths of which he makes
daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory
demonstrations without ever advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his life,
he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to act in this way,
he is reduced to take on trust a host of facts and opinions which he has not had either the
time or the power to verify for himself, but which men of greater ability have found out,
or which the crowd adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his
own thoughts; he is not led to proceed in this manner by choice, but is constrained by the
inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher in the world so great but that he
believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.”

So most of the truths that we know come through this indirect method.  This indirect method of knowledge is called “Faith,” and we can define Faith as knowledge that we get through the testimony of a witness.  While it is obvious how this applies to religious matters, just think about your own life; how do we know what is in that soda can we are about to open and drink?  By faith in the testimony of a witness, a label, we know that it is soda and not poison.  Of course we need to evaluate the credibility of the witness in order to determine if we should believe what they say, but most of the truths we know in life is through this method.

And this is how St. Thomas’ doubts is a kind of failure, but one that Jesus uses for our benefit.  St. Thomas should have believed the testimony of the other Apostles.  He had lived with them, as they lived with Jesus, for three years.  Theirs was an intimate community of companions.  He should have known that their testimony was credible, and to not accept the testimony of credible witnesses is unreasonable.  However, his failure to believe through the testimony of the other Apostles, and needing direct knowledge, is for our benefit for it demonstrates to us, who did not live with original Apostles the credibility of their testimony.  So when they went out and preached the Good News it was reasonable for their listeners to have faith in their testimony, to come to know Jesus through their testimony.  It has been through this method of knowledge that we have come to know Jesus — by faith, that gives us “a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Something else struck me by this Gospel passage; namely the context of the encounter with the Risen Christ.  Both appearance occurred on Sunday.  The Lord welcomes them by saying, “Peace be with you,” a phrase we hear during Mass.  Jesus speaks to them, as He does to us through the Scriptures, and He shows the Apostles His body, as He shows us His body and blood in the Eucharist.  Our communal celebration of Mass on Sunday is a participation in this experience of the Resurrection of the Lord.  It is a direct experience of Jesus’ presence that requires Faith, and builds up the Faith.

This experience of Jesus places a demand on us.  Pope Benedict XVI recently commented that Faith is both instructive and performative.  By instructive, the Holy Father means that by Faith we learn about Jesus and His teachings so that we may have life to the full, so we even learn more about ourselves.  However, this knowledge must bear fruit in our lives.  This is what he means when he says that Faith is performative; our Christian faith should change the way we live life, for we have been given new life.  We should give what we have received, so as we have received the gift of Faith through the testimony of witnesses, we are called to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection.  The resurrection of Jesus should touch our lives, so that we live differently.  Even when we are tested by suffering through various trials, our Faith in Jesus should cause us to “rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,” as St. Peter says in today’s second reading.  Be witnesses to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

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[Henryk Siemiradzki. “Christ and the Samaritan Woman.” 1890. Oil on canvas. The Lvov Picture Gallery, Lvov, Ukraine.  Found on the web at www.abcgallery.com.]

Have you ever grumbled because you were thirsty?  It was probably on a hot summer day, when you were outside working hard on something — maybe cutting the grass, doing some gardening, maybe painting the house — but you became so thirsty that you grumbled at someone to get you something to drink.  I think that all of us can remember a time when we were so thirsty that we grumbled.

There are a lot of thirsty people in today’s readings.  In today’s first reading, from the Book of Exodus, we are told that the Israelites, soon after being set free from slavery in Egypt, started to grumble against God and Moses because they were thirsty.  They started to ask themselves if the Lord was in their midst.  Then in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus tell the Samaritan woman that He was thirsty.  Our Lord did not grumble at her, but He did ask her for a drink.  So why all this talking about being thirsty?

Through our readings today God is trying to help us understand the difference between two different kinds of thirsts; two different kinds of needs.

The first kind of need is what we can call a finite or horizontal need.  These are the needs that we all have for the good things of this earth:  food, drink, companionship, safety, fun, a good income, medical care, success at work or school, etc.  These needs are all part of our nature as human beings, and there is nothing inherently wrong with desiring them.  These are needs that we can usually fulfill through our own effort.  We are hungry so we get ourselves something to eat, and then we are satisfied; at least for awhile.  We are thirsty so we get something to drink.  As long as to do not go to extremes, and we use proper means for satisfying these needs there is nothing wrong with having them.

However we also have another kind of need; ones that are deeper, infinite or vertical.  These needs are part of our desire for meaning and purpose.  These would include our need for love, truth, beauty, justice, and integrity.  These needs are also built into our nature as human beings, but unlike our finite or horizontal needs, there is nothing that we can do to satisfy these needs by our own effort.  Only God Himself can satisfy these needs, because only God is infinite Love, infinite Beauty, infinite Truth, infinite Justice, and perfectly One.  These are the needs that we can never get too much of; the more we experience them, the more we desire them.  God created us with these infinite, vertical needs in the very core of our being so that we would be constantly drawn toward Him, towards intimate, personal contact with His eternal, transcendent and infinite Love.

It is because of these needs that we are always restless, even when we have satisfied all of our horizontal needs.  It is when we forget this, when we try to satisfy our infinite, vertical needs with horizontal stuff that we put ourselves on the road to disappointment, frustration and even tragedy.

The Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel is an illustration of a person who has made the mistake of confusing these two kinds of needs.  Jesus notes that she has had five husbands and that she was not married to the man she was currently living with.  She was coming to the well in the middle of the day in order to avoid the other women of the village, so she had become isolated from her community.  Jesus, in His thirst — not only for water but for healing wounded souls — saw that this woman was living a life of frustration and alienation.  A life of loneliness and inner turmoil.  She had been trying for years to satisfy her vertical needs, which only God can satisfy, with all kinds of horizontal stuff:  human love, comfort, earthly pleasures.  She had started to learn the hard way that that formula does not work.  She started to have the spiritual awakening to realize that she needed a Savior, a “gift of God.”

Then she had an encounter with a man sitting by the well.  She had an encounter with Jesus, and she came to recognize in Jesus the embodiment of that which could fulfill all the deepest desires of her heart; all of her infinite, vertical needs.  While she did not get all the answers, she recognized Jesus did have all the answers, that He was the Christ, the gift of God.  He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that if she truly wanted to take seriously the deepest desires of her heart then she needed to follow Him.  And she did not keep this treasure, this gift, to herself.  No, she went to all the people that she typically tried to avoid, and shared with them the Good News that she had encountered in Jesus, and she brought them to Him.

What can we learn from the Samaritan woman?  Maybe that we too have been trying to satisfy our vertical needs with horizontal stuff, and that doing so will only leave us feeling disappointed and frustrated.  Maybe we can learn from her to have the spiritual sensitivity to recognize the gift of God, to answer the question the Israelites asked in today’s first reading, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”, with a definitive YES!

As we approach the Altar of the Lord, let us be people who worship what we understand in Spirit and truth.  Let us encounter Jesus, the great Gift of God, who is thirsting to heal our wounded souls.  Then, like the Samaritan woman, let us testify to all those around us — even those we typically avoid — that Jesus Christ is “truly the savior of the would.”

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[The following is a talk that I gave to the Communion & Liberation community in Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 2007.  I thought I would share it since I did not have to preach this weekend since the deacons were]

Advent is a time for preparation and waiting.  It does not seem as if the modern world is very good at waiting.  We seem to want fast food, overnight express delivery, on-demand TV and  movies.  Ours seems to be a culture of instant, or at least near instant, gratification.  Jesus told His Church that we would be a sign of contradiction, and one of the ways that the Church holds up a big red flag to our culture that is just rushing along, is to have this season of Advent — a sacred time of waiting.

But waiting for what?  Rather waiting for whom?  Of course our wait is for the encounter with the Mystery.  The one who speaks with authority.  The one who fills all of our deepest desires.  The one who reveals us to ourselves.  We are waiting for the encounter with Christ.

One of our simple gestures, when we gather as a community of believers, is to pray the Angelus.  Why this prayer, of all the many beautiful prayers in the Church’s treasury?  I believe that Msgr. Giussani had an affinity for the the Angelus because it reminds us of the center of time and being — the Incarnation, when the eternal Logos in love of us became Flesh.  While the Mystery had always made itself known to humanity, in the Incarnation the fullness of Divine love is manifested to humanity.  Of course the Incarnation did not happen at Christmas.  That first encounter of the Logos-made-Flesh was an intimate, personal encounter when the Blessed Virgin Mary said “Yes” to the invitation by God to participate in an absolutely unique way in His almighty will.  For nine months this great event, this wonder of wonders, was experienced only by a few people — most intimately by Mary and Joseph, but recall that even John the Baptist leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when he encountered the Mystery in Mary’s womb.

Yet Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for Christmas, when the great Encounter manifests Himself for all the world to see — from the poor shepherds tending their sheep to the wealthy wise men from the East.  While the waiting for the Messiah was over at the Incarnation, we who are often slow to realize the greatness of God, celebrate the end of the waiting at Christmas.  Our Salvation has Come!

One of the ways that we can best celebrate Advent is to nurture this need for waiting within ourselves.  We need to recognize our desire for Christ, our longing for Him, in order to recognize His Presence among us.  Without anticipation, without waiting, we might miss Christ passing by.  We might miss our opportunity to say, “Master, where do You live?” so that He can say, “Come and see.”  Of course Christ never stops making Himself present to us, He continually invites us to encounter Him, yet we can repeatedly miss Him in our blindness, in our rushing about, in our not being willing to wait.

What can we do to be better wait-ers?  First we can learn to better appreciate beauty.  The theme for this year’s Exercises was “Christ in His Beauty Draws Me to Him.”  That is a powerful statement, and one that we should not rush past too quickly.  It seems to me that our culture has dimmed in its appreciation of beauty.  After all, look at some of the things that pass for art today; a Crucifix in a jar of urine, a mosaic of the Madonna made out of elephant dung, music that seems to glorify using people, or just taking care of “my own.”  We have been lead astray by the saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, which so many people seem to interpret as meaning that there is no universal standard of beauty.  Yet we know that God IS Beauty!  Please note well that I am not saying that God is beautiful, but that God in His Being is the Being of Beauty.  I am not a great philosopher, in fact I nearly drove one of my philosophy professors mad, because I just kept telling him I just did not get it, so I am sure that this is not the most philosophically exact definition of beauty, but beauty is the correspondence between the artistic expression and the mind of God.  It is a response to God’s love that tries as best as it is able to correspond to God’s love.  It is this correspondence, or more properly put, relationship with God that was the theme of the first lesson of this year’s Exercises, and will be the theme of our Advent reflection as we prepare and wait — for Christ, in Christ, with Christ.

In reading a biography of St. John Vianney, I read about an episode in the saint’s life when someone, noticing that the Cure’ of Ars spent many hours of devout prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, asked him what he prayed before the Blessed Sacrament.  St. John Vianney, simple, holy man that he was, replied, “He looks at me and I look at Him.”  What an absolutely wonderful description of contemplation.  First, Christ looks at me.  Then I look at Him.

What does Christ see when He looks at me?  He sees my need.  He sees my longing for infinite happiness, my desire for infinite love.  He looks at me with compassion.  Over and over again in the Gospels we hear that Jesus looked at people with compassion.  Whether it was the Rich Young Man who wanted to know what he needed to do to gain eternal life, or the woman caught in adultery, or the crowd that followed Him like sheep without a shepherd, or looking at Jerusalem soon to be destroyed, Jesus always looked with compassion.  And He still looks at us with compassion.  As you have probably heard, the word compassion means to “suffer with,” but I think we need to broaden that definition for when we use the word “passion” we often mean more than “to suffer”.  We say that we love passionately.  We might say we have a passion for football, or knitting, or hiking, or reading.  Often when we use the word “passion” we mean something like, “to burn with desire,” so when we think of Jesus looking at us with compassion we need to see Him as burning with desire for us.  Jesus loves us.  That really is the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  Jesus REALLY, REALLY loves us.

Now, if you are going to cry when I say that Jesus loves you, please let it be with joy.  Once I was helping at another parish as their children made their first Reconciliation.  Many children come feeling nervous and anxious, and this one child really looked scared and after they told me all their sins, I looked at them with as tender a look as I could, smiled and said, “Jesus loves you.”  With that this child burst into tears.  I have to wonder what people thought as they saw this child crying as they left the confessional.  Maybe that is why they haven’t invited me back to help with first Reconciliation any more.

Seriously, when Jesus gazes on us, He burns with desire for us and with us.  He knows what fulfills our deepest desires.  He lays bare our need to be happy, our need to be loved, together with all the illusions we create around us that we think will make us happy.  Our sins are one type of illusion, a false love, a false happiness that just leaves us empty.  But there are also other illusions in our lives, which often are not sinful per say, but do not satisfy.

Almost 20 years ago I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology.  This was long before I was a priest.  While there I had fallen in love with a woman.  Her name is Juliann.  I know that there was some real love there, because only people who love each other can hurt each other as much as Juliann and I hurt each other.  Looking back in hindsight, we both were looking for the other to be the source of our happiness, and this just put too heavy a burden on the other.  Of course we failed to fulfill each others’ deepest desires, after all we were both fallible and finite human beings.  And when we failed, we got angry with each other.  We broke up, and for a long time afterwards I was in a depression.  I just wondered if anyone would ever really love me.  I was just absolutely sure that if I just found “Miss Right” my life would be happy.

During this time, in addition to going to a counselor — hey, remember, I was studying to be a psychologist, I continued to go to my spiritual director, Fr. Bob, a Dominican priest.  For a very long time I was “in the desert” as they say.  While in my head I could accept the fact that there was a God, I just could not feel His love.  He seemed distant and unconcerned about me.  And I got really tired of hearing people say, “Oh, even Jesus spent 40 days in the desert.”  One day Fr. Bob and I was talking about all the “sand” I was eating.  I remember getting angry and saying, “Jesus was only in the desert for 40 days.  I feel like I have been here for a year.”  Fr. Bob asked me to think about why Jesus was in the desert.  I said to be tempted, and he said, “Yeah, but think about when in His life He was in the desert.”  I said, right before He started His public ministry.  Fr. Bob said, “Yeah.  Did you ever think that God might be calling you to that kind of public ministry?”  I remember staring at him thinking he must be insane.  I mean here I was having what I thought were some serious doubts about God, and he was asking me if I had ever thought about becoming a priest.  He said that he noticed that I seemed to be more at ease, more at peace, when I was helping out there at the university Neumann Center.

I left that session of spiritual direction still thinking that Fr. Bob was nuts, but it broke something in me.  It laid bare some of my illusions about what happiness was.  I eventually came to realize that I had an encounter with Christ that afternoon.  That Jesus had spoken to me through Fr. Bob.  Jesus looked at me.  Of course Jesus was always looking at me, but this time I started to look back.  My needy heart, which was at first “needing” the wrong things, helped me to recognize the Presence of Jesus and my desire to be loved by Him and to love Him.  Now, I have only been a priest 3.5 years, and this encounter was over 15 years ago, it has been a long journey.  It has been a journey of passion — both the suffering kind and the joyful loving kind — but Christ’s compassion for me has kept me going.

One of the things that we need to do as we wait and prepare this Advent season is to recognize Christ gazing at us, and we must gaze back at Him.  We need to allow Christ to lay bare our need to be happy, our desire for love, and our illusions.

Related to this gaze of Christ is the value of the human person.  If we were of little value, why would Christ look at us with compassion?  After all, God does not need us.  God is complete in the Trinity.  Yet for some reason He has not revealed to us, God chose to create the universe.  I almost said, “the universe in general and each of us in particular,” but the truth is that in His perfect love God creates everything “in particular.”  While we can talk, scientifically, of processes of cosmology and evolution, we should never fall for the illusion that God just started these processes and has just allowed them to run without giving things much of His attention since.  That would be a deistic why of thinking:  God the great clock-maker who now just lets the clock run on its own.

No, God loves us as an “I”.  While He loves all of creation, He does so in a particular way, not a general way.  That means that He loves each of us, not just in general, but in particular.  As another priest once told me, “God knew every sin and mistake I was going to make in my life, and even though He could have made the universe any way He wanted, He did not want to make it without me.”  Well, that goes for each of us.

Just as we should never look at cosmology and evolution as processes that God just started and has now step back from, we should not look at our lives in that way.  There is a real tendency to try to explain away our behaviors as due to forces beyond our control.  In the early 70’s the comedian Flip Wilson had the famous saying, “The devil made me do it.”  Now we blame our DNA and/or our environment.  We want to reduce everything that we do to mere reactions.  As a psychologist I see this often, even within the Church.  I work as a psychological expert for the diocesan marriage tribunal, and so often in annulment cases the argument is made that since depression or anxiety or substance abuse or you name the diagnosis from the DSM-IV runs in the family the person was incapable of entering into a valid marriage.  I am not sure what the judges on the tribunal think of me, because I frequently say in my reports that people are not cogs in a machine.  That God has given us this tremendous gift called free will.  While not wanting to completely dismiss the influence of DNA and prior learning, we cannot throw out our freedom.  We cannot be reduced to being just like the animals.  We are made in the image and likeness of God.  We are His children.  He counts the hairs on our heads.  God loves us!!!  Christ desires to enter into an exclusive relationship with us.  Jesus wants every individual to be happy.  Our desires stem not from the senses, like the brute animals, but from that spiritual power we call the human will.

In the famous passage from St. Paul’s Second letter to the Corinthians, in which he talks about the thorn of the flesh that he begged the Lord to remove from him, he writes, “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me” (2 Cor. 12:9).  Here is another example of how the Church stands in contradiction to the spirit of this world.  Weakness, dependency are bad things according to our culture. We are told that we need to become autonomous and independent.  That we are responsible for our own happiness, our own satisfaction.  If this is true, why would we have any relationships at all?

St. Paul had the right idea when he “begged the Lord” three times, for to have an authentic relationship with Christ we must become beggars.  We must recognize our utter dependence on God for EVERYTHING.  I mean every beat of our heart, every breath we take is a gift from God.  We need God.  No amount of money or power or things or human relationships is going to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts.  Only Christ can make me truly happy.

Now, I am not saying that everyone needs to become celibate like me.  Of course marriage is a blessing, a gift from God, yet I am sure that you married couples here can verify that if it all depended on the two of you, your marriage would be over.  I know that if it was just up to me, J.C. Garrett, I could not forgive sins or make present the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.  All vocations must be rooted in God.  That’s just another way of saying, that we need to recognize and live in a unique relationship with Christ Jesus.  We must allow the power of Christ to dwell in us.  This is what Msgr. Giussani called “religiosity” and religiosity is what Jesus insists on as the only condition for being human.  “Man has a choice:  either to conceive of himself as free from the entire universe and dependent solely on God, or else as free from God, and therefore he becomes a slave to every circumstance” (L. Giussani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim [V. Hewitt, trans.]. Montreal, Canada:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998, p. 86).

As a priest I certainly feel close to Christ when I celebrate the Mass, hear confessions, and anoint the sick.  Fr. Stephen Rossetti, in his book The Joy of Priesthood, calls this “reflected grace,” for while the person receiving absolution or anointing or the Eucharist is the principle recipient of the grace of the sacrament, the priest, as the instrument that God uses to bestow the sacramental graces, also receives grace.  Maybe it is the grace of recognizing our dependence on God, because as I said before, I know that on my own I cannot forgive sins.  To be an instrument is humbling, and it is in humility that we draw near to Christ.  God does not want us groveling before Him.  No, He wants us to embrace the our dignity of being children of God, to come to our loving Father with our needs in utter confidence that God will fulfill all our needs.

This dependency on God can be an extremely difficult lesson to learn, and it is one that we often need to learn over and over again.

A few months after I was ordained a priest I was diagnosed with cancer.  I have to say, hearing that you have cancer can be one of the most frightening things you will ever hear.  It really did not matter that the doctor told me that it was one of the most easily treated kinds of cancer.  All I heard was, “I have cancer.”  I had just turned 40 years old.  The details of that night remain fresh in my memory.  About 10 days prior the doctor had removed half of my thyroid, though he told me that the chances that it was cancer was very small.  Mom and Dad, who had stayed with me a few days after the surgery, had gone home.  The other priests in the rectory were all at a neighboring parish to assist at a Penance service.  The doctor said a lot of other things, including that I would need more surgery followed by radiation, but mostly I just heard “you have cancer.”  And I came home to a big, dark, empty rectory.  I tried calling some friends, but no one was home.  I was very scared and panicked, but then a calm came over me and I said quietly, “all for Jesus.”  At first I did not know where that came from, but then I realized in my aloneness that I was not alone.  Christ was there.  He did not tell me that He would take the cancer away.  He did not tell me that I wouldn’t die.  He was just present with me, and I knew that He would always be present with me.  The fear and anxiety did not magically go away, but they were transformed.  I had a new appreciation for what Jesus means when He says, “See, I make all things new.”

When we are humble and embrace our dependence on God, Christ fills our lives in a superabundant way.  God who is Love fills us with love.  But if we are all filled with ourselves, striving to be so autonomous, we leave no room for Christ.  He knocks at the door of our heart, but He will not kick it in.  We must open the doors of our hearts, invite Him in, and He will sup with us.

Christ, who reveals us to ourselves, comes as a little baby, born in a manger.  The King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Babe of Bethlehem, showing us that it is in dependency and weakness that the power of God dwells in us.

This religiosity, which Christ insists on, this unique relationship in which Christ looks with compassion on us as we depend on Him, is ever new.  Christ is present to us through His Church, which is nothing but His Mystical Body enlivened by His life, by His Holy Spirit.  As members of the Church we invite each other into this unique relationship with Christ that we have been discussing.  Msgr. Giussani says that a friend is someone who opens up this religiosity in us.  Fr. Bob, my old spiritual director, was a friend because in his challenge, he opened me up to the gaze of Christ.  The reason we gather for School of Community is not simply to participate in some kind of Adult Faith Formation or study group.  We are called to be friends to each other.  We are called to help each other be open to the relationship that Christ desires to have with us.  We help lay bare each others’ need for love, for happiness, and our illusions that keep us from Christ.

Our religiosity, our relationship with Christ that embraces our dependence on Him who looks on us with compassion, expresses itself in prayer.  I am sure that most of us remember being taught, probably sometime in our childhood, that there are four kinds of prayer:  Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication (ACTS).  At times it seemed to me as if the prayer of supplication or intercession or asking was treated as the least good kind of prayer, because it could be seen as selfish.  In reading the lessons of this year’s Exercises, and reflecting on them, I have come to realize how wrong that way of thinking is.  While we certainly should be mindful of all of our brothers and sisters around us, and not be selfish, but all prayer really is asking.  When we ask God our Loving Father for something — whether for ourselves, or our families and friends, or for the world — we are recognizing our dependence on Christ.  We are inviting Him, who is constantly knocking at the doors of our hearts, to enter into relationship with us.  It is always an asking to be aware of the Divine Presence.  We should always pray, that is ask, in the words of that Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

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Beginning Day

I have mentioned on this blog that for about the past year and a half I have become involved with one of the new ecclesial movements in the Church called Communion & Liberation. Now, you may be wondering “What is Communion & Liberation, or simply, CL?” I’ll allow the National Office to provide a good description:

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement whose purpose is the education to Christian maturity of its adherents and collaboration in the mission of the Church in all the spheres of contemporary life.

Communion and Liberation began in Italy in 1954 when Msgr. Luigi Giussani established a Christian presence in Berchet high school in Milan with a group called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), GS for short.

The current name of the movement, Communion and Liberation (CL), appeared for the first time in 1969. It synthesizes the conviction that the Christian event, lived in communion, is the foundation of the authentic liberation of man. Communion and Liberation is present today in about seventy countries throughout the world. There is no type of membership card, but only the free participation of persons. The basic instrument for the formation of adherents is weekly catechesis, called “School of Community.” The official magazine of the Movement is the international monthly, Traces – Litterae Communionis

While the weekly School of Community, which usually involves reading from one of Msgr. Giussani’s books may lead one to think of it as a theology study group, it really isn’t. The purpose of reading from the book, a very short section each week, is to provide a provocation so that we can look at our own experience to see if what was said “fits” with my life experience. It causes the members to reflect on their own life as a Christian so that we can both support, and when needed, challenge/encourage each other to live a more dynamic, authentic Christian life. To be honest, there have been weeks when my School of Community is what has gotten me through, and has helped me “stir up the flames” of my priesthood. School of Community is to help foster a community of companions on the road with and to Christ.

The first link in this post should take you to a PDF of the flyer for this year’s “Beginning Day” in NYC. This is one of the gestures of the movement for starting the new School of Community year. It is a great opportunity to learn more about CL and just meet some terrific Christian friends. The NYC Beginning Day is October 27 from 2-5 p.m. at Holy Family Church, 15 E. 47th St., NYC. Everyone is welcome.

If you are close to Philadelphia, the CL community there will have its Beginning Day on October 20 starting at 2 p.m. at the Lemon Hill picnic ground in Fairmount Park (near Boathouse Row off Kelly Drive). In addition to spiritual witnesses there will be food and games.

Unfortunately I cannot attend either Beginning Day, since I have Altar Server Training. I do, however, encourage folks to check them out.

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[Fresco of the “Last Judgment” painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel]

How many of us have a safety deposit box?  What treasures do you put in it?  I am sure that all of us have made some careful preparations for our retirement; setting up 401b’s and IRAs.  What is your most prized possession?  What special care to you take to protect that prized possession?

“For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”  In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that we need to ask ourselves, “What is my treasure?  What do I value most in my life?”  The famed Russian writer Anton Chekhov once wrote, “When I wanted to understand someone or myself, I considered not actions but desires.  Tell me what you want and I will tell you who your are” (A. Chekhov, “Storia noiosa,” in Racconti, vol. 1.  Milan, Italy:  Oscar Mondadori, 1996, p. 351).

We who call ourselves Christians should desire Christ Jesus above all other things.  Faith is what we should desire above all else.  By faith Abraham sojourned in a foreign land, and in the Letter to the Hebrews, from which we heard in today’s second reading, we hear that Christians are to continue that journey of faith that Abraham started, “as strangers and aliens on earth…seeking a homeland.”  The better homeland that Abraham, and all of us who call ourselves Christians, desire is a heavenly one.

Faith is what we should treasure more than anything else.  But what is faith?  God gives us His own definition of faith in the Letter to the Hebrews, “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”  Faith is a supernatural knowledge; we know with complete certainty that all the things that God has revealed to us are true.  Faith is not just belief in a set of dogmas.  Rather faith is belief in a person, namely Jesus Christ.  The essence of faith is accepting something as true, not because our own senses assure us of it, but because the person who tells it to us is trustworthy.

Many of today’s intellectuals and cultural elites consider faith to be childish.  They say that mature people do not depend on faith, rather they depend on science and reason.  For them the only way of knowing is through empirical, scientific knowledge.  Because they are so boastful of their opinion, many of us who still value faith are sometimes embarrassed about it.  We cover up our faith in conversations around the water cooler because we do not want people looking down at us.  But we should not be embarrassed by our faith, for faith is a necessary part of any fully human life.  In fact everyone lives by faith, even the intellectuals and cultural elites, to some extent.

What is this?   It is a can of Campbell’s soup right?  Are you sure?  How do you know that it is not a can of poison, or paint, or ink, or manure?  Because it says that it is a can of Campbell’s soup, and most of us have come to trust in this label.  But did any of us see what was put into this can?  We believe that it is tomato soup because we have faith in the label.

Msgr. Luigi Giussani defines faith as a type of knowledge about reality that comes to us through the testimony of a witness.  Just stop and think about how often we believe something because someone has told us it is so.  I read that a friend of mine mother has died and the obituary tells me when and where the wake is going to be, so I go and offer my prayers and support to my friend.  But why do I believe the obituary?  I wasn’t there when my friend’s mother died, nor was I there when my friend made the arrangements with the funeral director.  I have faith that the newspaper is telling me the correct information.  How do we know that any of the history that we learned about in school ever happened?  Without faith there would be no civilization, for each and everyone of us would need to re-invent fire, the wheel, everything on our own because we would not be able to take as true what was handed down to us.  Most of our knowledge comes through faith.  Human society is built on faith.  We could never eliminate faith, but even if we could, it would not make us more mature.  Rather it would make us less human.

The most important criterion of knowledge through faith is the witness.  The witness needs to be someone who knows what they are saying, and has no desire to deceive us.  It is here that we have good reasons to support our faith in God.  We were not eye witnesses to the creation of the universe, but the order and beauty of the cosmos makes it quite reasonable to believe that there was indeed an intelligent creator.  We were not eye witnesses to Christ’s resurrection, but there were eye witnesses who saw the risen Christ, and those eye witnesses founded the Church, which has endured longer than any merely human organization.

Abraham walked by faith, because “he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy.”  Do we find God trustworthy?  To we trust in Jesus?  This cannot be a mere expression of our lips.  It must be a commitment of our heart; we must put our whole mind, our whole heart, and our whole soul into our faith in Jesus.  Even when things do not go the way we would like them to go, we must live by faith, trusting in the one who made us the promise.

This means that we must have an encounter with Jesus Christ.  It is not enough to know things about Jesus, and to fulfill the external obligations of the Church.  We must encounter the risen presence of Jesus in all the moments and situations of our lives.  We must desire Him.  This year, the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, which I and some others in the parish are involved in, will be reflecting on this simple phrase, “Christ in His Beauty draws me to Him.”  It is a call to notice the beauty around us and see in it Christ’s presence speaking to us.  It is a call to develop a true poverty of heart, which is an irrepressible desire for the ultimate and definitive truth that constitutes the human heart.  That truth is Christ.

Does the beauty of Christ Jesus draw you to Him?  Do you trust in Jesus?  Do you desire His kingdom more than anything else?  “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

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[A mural in the basilica at Conception Abbey in Conception, MO; sorry, I do not know who the artist is]

HAPPY PENTECOST!

OK, a little survey.  At how many of your parishes did you have one (or more) of Mass readings in a foreign language, that is in a language other than the dominant language of most of the parishioners?  What languages did you hear?

I had all four of the Masses at the Our Lady of Sorrows campus, and the second reading was done in Polish, Phillipino, Spanish and Hungarian.  Of course the vast majority of the parishioners speak English.  The Gloria was sung in a mixture of English, Spanish, and we signed (American Sign Language) part of it.  Also this was done to “re-create the experience of the first Pentecost.”

What’s wrong with this?  Well, first it fails to recognize that the celebration of Pentecost (fifty days after Passover) started over a thousand years before Jesus Christ.  Pentecost was, and is, one of the top three holiest days for the Jewish people, and time for given thanks for the first fruits of the land.  It was a pilgrimage feast, meaning that all the men of Israel were suppose to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice in the Temple.  That is why there were Jews from all over the Meditterean there.

The reason why the Apostles were given the gift of speaking in foreign tongues was so that the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus the Savior, could be understood by all those gathered around them.  This is what we mean by a charism of the Holy Spirit; they are not give necessarily for the recipient’s  benefit, but rather for the building up of the Church.  The focus really should not be on the speaking in tongues, but on the universality of Christ’s message of salvation.  I wonder how many people really understood that when they sat there (hopefully reading the second reading in the missalette) as they heard the Word of God proclaimed in a language they did not understand.  I fear that instead of “re-creating” the experience of Pentecost, that we were actually “re-creating” the experience from the book of Genesis, namely the Tower of Babel.  Of course the lesson we are suppose to get from the story of the Tower of Babel is the effect of human pride and arrogance, thinking that we can reach God all on our own effort.  Instead of promoting universality it created division.

The funny thing is that as Catholics of the Roman Rite we do have a language that is meant to be used to promote our unity and the universality of the Gospel — Latin.  How many of you heard any of the readings, any of the Mass for that matter, proclaimed in Latin?  Probably not many, yet every Pope since the Second Vatican Council has reaffirmed the teaching of that Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, see #36 and 54).  In fact, Pope Benedict XVI, in his recent Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, again encouraged the use of Latin in the Mass, particularly at international gatherings.

What is Pentecost for the Christian?  It is the birth of the Church, and what is the Church?  The Church is a life.  The Church is nothing more and nothing less than the Life of Jesus Christ, remaining incarnate throughout history in all places.  Msgr. Luigi Guissani, in his book, Why the Church? (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), says this about the Church, “What the Church is for all men is Jesus Christ’s self-communication to the world” (p. 86).  Giussani then goes on to quote from another important theologian of the 20th century, Romano Guardini, “What does the event of Pentecost mean for the Christian life?  Before it happened, Christ presented himself — in person — ‘to the eyes’ of men; there was an abyss between them and Him.  They did not understand Him; He did not come to be something of ‘theirs.’ … Pentecost makes Christ, his Person, his Life and his redeeming action part of ‘their’ reality . … Pentecost is the hour the Christian faith was born, the moment of being in Christ; not because of a mere ‘religious experience,’ but by the hand of the Holy Spirit” (Romano Guardini, Vom Wesen des Christentums, Wurzburg:  Werkbund Verlag, 1938, pp. 41-42).

As we celebrant the third holiest day for us Christians, let us make that Life become the most vibrant part of us.  Let it enliven every aspect of us, so that like St. Paul we can cry out, that it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.  We must avoid the heresy of dualism, where we put our Catholic Faith in one box and the rest of our life in another box.  Our Catholic Faith must BE our life; in our parish church and community, in our family and homes, at our work-place, in the marketplace, and in the public square.  Vivo Christus!

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“Even after sharing their lives with Jesus for such a long time, after the disaster of Calvary and the mystery of Easter, after all that, the apostles understood little of Him.  Only a few hours before His ascent into Heaven, they still asked Him when he would establish the Kingdom of Israel, such as everyone conceived it at that time:  a kingdom of earthly and political power” (Luigi Giussani, The Journey to Truth is an Experience, Montreal & Kingston:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, p. 53).

Clearly the Apostles did not understand Jesus, so why did they follow Him?  St. Luke apparently wanted to make sure that people understood that Jesus really ascended into Heaven, because he records that event twice; first at the end of his Gospel, which was just proclaimed, and at the beginning of his second work, the Acts of the Apostles, which we heard in our first reading.  Do we get it any better than the Apostles?  So, why do we follow Jesus?

Hopefully we follow Jesus, even in our lack of understanding, for the same reason that the Apostles did, because Jesus has become the focus of our affections.  Hopefully, in the midst of the darkness and confusion around us, as it proclaimed during the Easter Vigil, “Christ is our Life!  Thanks be to God!”  For the Apostles Christ Jesus enlightened them; He “was the only one in whose words they felt their whole human experience understood and their needs taken seriously, clarified” (Luigi Giussani, The Journey to Truth is an Experience, Montreal & Kingston:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, p. 53).

So why did Jesus Ascend into Heaven?  Jesus wanted to come even closer to us, to be even more intimate with us.  If He had stayed on earth He would have remained limited in time and space.  Now that He has ascended into Heaven, by the sending of the Holy Spirit, Jesus dwells within our hearts.

More importantly, the Ascension is the establishment of Jesus’ Kingdom on absolutely unshakable ground.  Earthly kings and emperors, which the Apostles were still looking for, always remain vulnerable because even if their enemies do not usurp their power, death surely will.  However Christ’s reign will never come to an end; He is no longer vulnerable.  Because He has ascended into Heaven, God made Christ the everlasting King, and His kingdom is firm; His Church will never be destroyed.  If we stay faithful to Christ the King, our victory over sin, evil, and injustice is assured, and this will bring us everlasting happiness.  Christ’s ascension should fill us with joy, as it did His Apostles, because now we know for certain that the Christian cause is unassailable, and that Jesus’ lordship is unconquerable.

The fact – that Jesus Christ, true God and true man – by His Ascension has become the everlasting bridge between Heaven and earth posses a challenge to what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “tyranny of relativism” which threatens to enslave the world today.  Too often we are afraid of offending people who do not share our beliefs.  We are so very concerned about being tolerant.  There is a goodness in that tolerance because every human being does deserve our respect because everyone is made in the image and likeness of God, and Jesus came to save everyone.  However such respect and tolerance should never turn into indifference.  Indifference is easy and often more comfortable than actually defending and spreading the Truth.  Yes, I said Truth – a singular – and not “truths” a plural.  There is only one Truth, and Jesus tells us that He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).  Only Jesus Christ ascended to the throne of heaven, and He alone is the Savior.  True, God is gracious and His mercy is not limited in any way, but He has made His mercy known by sending His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.  Finally, God desires to extend His mercy to every person through the spreading of the Good News of Jesus Christ.  This is why it is our mission, as His Church, to preach “repentance for the forgiveness of sins in his name to all the nations.”

As we receive the Eucharist today, the food that nourishes us, let us ask that we have the strength never to be ashamed of the truth of Jesus Christ, the only Truth that will truly set us free.

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Sts. Paul and Barnabas sure do cover a lot of ground.  In our first reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, eight different cities are mentioned where they “proclaimed the good news,” and that is not counting the unnamed city from which they started the leg of their missionary journey that we heard today.  So a total of nine cities where they not only “proclaimed the good news” but also “made a considerable number of disciples.”

The Acts of the Apostles gives us a type of snapshot of the early Church, and it is marked with a lot of dynamism.  It is active and growing.  In fact, the Church has the very life of Christ Jesus, Himself.  Yet something else is needed, in addition to dynamism, and we start to see that something else in the early Church in today’s reading.

Dynamism without structure is like a firecracker – a lot of noise, but no lasting results.  However, if you add some structure to that dynamism then the energy can be channeled and directed.  The combination of structure and dynamism assures stability, growth, and fruitfulness.  Since the Church was founded to endure, grow, and bear fruit until the end of time, it needed a structure, and we call that structure the hierarchy.

The Church’s hierarchy has been part of God’s plan right from the beginning.  It is not a later human invention.  In fact we can see this hierarchy having its roots in the words of Jesus to St. Peter, after he made his profession of faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God.  Jesus calls Simon, Peter which is a play on the Greek word “petros” which means “rock.”  Jesus goes on to say that upon this “Rock” He will build His Church.

We should recall that originally the Hebrews were nomadic desert-dwellers.  As such, they “were particularly sensitive to the point of reference provided by great rock formations, fixed as they are, compared with sand and dust which can be blown away and scattered by the wind” (Luigi Giussani, Why the Church?, Montreal & Kingston:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001, p. 78).  The word “rock” or “crag” is one of the most frequently used metaphors for truth and safety in the Bible.  In Psalms we hear, “Though my flesh and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart, my portion forever” (Ps 73: 26), and “God alone is my rock and salvation, my secure height; I shall never fall” (Ps 62: 3), and one last example, “Let the words of my mouth meet with your favor, keep the thoughts of my heart before you, LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (Ps 19: 15).  In saying that He was going to build His Church on the Rock that is St. Peter, Jesus was saying that the papacy would be the visible sign of unity, stability and truth for His Church.

Of course this foundation was added to.  In today’s passage from the Acts of the Apostles we hear that Paul and Barnabas “appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, commended them to the Lord.”  Sts. Paul and Barnabas were not starting their own churches, for they knew that there is only one Church, the one started by Christ Jesus and entrusted by Him to the Apostles, with St. Peter as their head.  Those ordained by Paul and Barnabas were local church leaders who were entrusted to care for the local Christian communities, and to continue the mission of spreading the Good News.  Right from the start we see the hierarchy of the Church being established  — a Pope, bishops, and priests.

For us Americans the idea of the Church’s hierarchy can be difficult to accept.  We have a democratic mindset:  we vote for everything, from the President and Members of Congress, to laws, to local school boards.  We even vote for the captains of our teams.  While the democratic mindset can be very effective for organizations that are of strictly human origin, the Church is NOT of strictly human origin.  The Church is divine in its origin; it is a LIFE!  It is the Life of Jesus Christ.  The Church is the prolongation of the Incarnation, the Word Made Flesh, through time and space.

The Church is also like a family.  Children do not have the right to vote on what they will eat or when their bed-time will be.  They need their parents to teach and guide them into mature, responsible, generous, and virtuous adults.  Likewise, by our baptism we became the children of God.  Only God’s grace and revelation can enable us to grow into the saints we are meant to be.  We do not have the right to vote on how God should send us His grace, or about what path should lead to moral and spiritual maturity.  God is the one who has to nourish, guide, and teach us.  That is why we call Him FATHER!  He does this through His ministers in the Church, with whom He shares His authority.  As Jesus says in St. John’s Gospel, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20: 21).

We may not always like God’s choice of human ministers, because since they are human they have flaws.  To make up for these human foibles and flaws, God has guaranteed that through the bishops in union with the Pope we will always have access to His grace, which strengthens us, and to the dependable truth about what we should believe (Faith) and how we should act (Morals) in order to grow up in the faith and reach the lasting happiness of Heaven.

Ponder these words from Msgr. Luigi Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation, “The authority of the Pope and bishops, therefore, is the ultimate guide on the pilgrimage towards a genuine sharing of our lives, towards a true civilization….  Where that authority is not vital and vigilant, or where it is under attack, the human pathway becomes complicated, ambiguous, and unstable; it veers towards disaster, even when on the exterior it seems powerful, flourishing, and astute, as is the case today.  Where that authority is active and respected, the historic pilgrimage is confidently renewed with serenity; it is deep, genuinely human, even when the expressive methods and dynamics of sharing lives are roughshod and difficult” (The Journey to Truth is an Experience, Montreal & Kingston:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, p. 74).

As Catholics we are called to “pray and obey.”  At each Mass we pray for the hierarchy of the Church, and in our private prayers we should also pray for the Pope, and all the bishops and priests.  We need to pray that these ministers of God can overcome their flaws and foibles, so that everyone that they meet can encounter the loving presence of Christ Jesus.  Likewise we are all called to practice that most difficult yet most important of virtues – obedience.  God has guaranteed that despite all their imperfections, His ministers will not be able to obstruct the flow of His truth and grace through the Church’s ministry.  In its official teaching about faith (what we should believe) and morals (how we should live), God has promised that His Church will not lead us astray.  Obedience to Christ’s Church – whether in basic things like the Ten Commandments and coming to Mass on Sundays, or in more difficult and counter-cultural things like divorce, contraception, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research – shows that we trust Chris, the one who established and guides His Church.  As Christ renews His commitment to us by giving us His Body and Blood at this Mass, let us renew our trust in Him, and ask Him to increase our desire to follow Him through the practice of the virtue of obedience.

[Much of this homily was inspired, and parts were taken from, “Homily Packs:  Fifth Sunday of Easter (C)” found at www.epriests.com, a service of Regnum Christi, 2007].

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I know it has been nearly three weeks since I last posted to this blog.  I am sorry, but things can just get so busy in the parish.  Of course the first week, Easter Week, I was on retreat.

The retreat was held at the Seton Retreat Center, which is at the motherhouse for the Daughters of Charity in Emmitsburg, MD.  If you have not been to Emmitsburg it makes a nice trip.  Gettysburg is only about 10 miles away, so there is some nice history to see, and the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is attached to the motherhouse.  There are some beautiful hills, especially where the Grotto above Mount St. Mary’s University and Seminary is, just down the road.

This retreat was for priests involved with Communion and Liberation.  It was my first time on this retreat, and a first time to meet other priests involved with CL (well, I meet with 3 of them in Brooklyn monthly).  Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete gave the conferences.  He is a very fine theologian, and very funny.  He is also kind of incharge of CL in the US.  The retreat was just what I needed.  It was so uplifting.  The major theme was seeing the evidence of the Resurrection in our lives.  I think he made a good point, that for too many Catholics the Resurrection is treated as merely an historical event that happened a long time ago.  While this is true, it is also an event that has completely changed the world.  We have been set free from the Law of Corruption, Sin and Death, and live now a new life.  We need to be aware of that, and see the world as different because of the Resurrection.  It is in remembering the Lord that we make the Lord present in our lives, and see Him, encounter Him, everyday in the events and people in our daily lives.  That is what it means to be a follower of Christ.

When I first encountered CL I was in a place where I was looking for “something.”  I was feeling as if my joy and zeal for the priesthood had been robbed from me.  The first 18 months as a priest was very challenging, personally.  First a few months after being ordained, I was diagnosed with cancer, and while it was easy to treat, it really wiped me out for a long time.  Then just as I was getting back to “normal” my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I moved to a new parish to be closer to him.  He then died 11 days after I arrived.  The new parish was going through a lot of growing pains.  It had just been merged, two parishes were combined, 6 months before I arrived.  Understandably many of the people did not like the idea of being merged, and it has taken time to adjust to the new reality.  Spiritually I was feeling very down, and a priest friend of mine mentioned this group called Communion and Liberation.  I did not know anything about it, so I Googled it (actually I Pro-Life Searched it) and what I read attracted me.  I then contacted the local person, and we met for coffee.  Something about him, really the joy in him, was what I wanted.  So a small group of us, four, started to do “School of Community,” using the book, Why the Church? by Msgr. Luigi Giussani the founder of CL.  The book spoke to my experience, of the struggle and frustration I was feeling, my discouragement, and it showed me another way.  Of course it is the WAY, Jesus!  I still feel like I do not fully understand CL’s way and method, but I am getting there.  The key is to encounter the Lord, to recognize Him as the deepest longing of my heart.

Since coming back from the retreat I have noticed that I am more joyful and more zealous for the Lord.  Others have noticed it too, and that is the key.  While preaching is important, what really draws people is their noticing your joy.  Their hearts will say “I want that too,” and they will then want to know what the “something” is that you have.  That is when they are ready to have Christ proposed to them.

Well, I have two committals to do, and it is pouring rain, so I should get ready to get wet.

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I will be away this week.  I am attending the Communion and Liberation Retreat for Priests, in Emmitsburg, MD.  The first conference is tonight, and I will be back sometime Friday night.  Please keep all of us priests in your prayers, that this will be a time to draw closer to our Risen Lord, to develop some holy companionships for on the Road, and just some time to relax and recharge the spiritual batteries.

THE LORD IS RISEN!  INDEED HE IS ALIVE!

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