Month: November 2016

Sadducees, Cynicism, and Voting

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Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead. (Luke 20:35) To attain to the coming age: the age of immortal happiness and peace.

Jesus conquered death and mounted on high, to the Kingdom of heaven.  He made eternal life our destiny, also.  By ‘the coming age,’ the Lord means that a life without suffering and death awaits us.  It’s right around the corner.  It could begin anytime.  We pray with childlike hope that we will indeed attain ‘the coming age;’ we pray that the Lord, in His mercy, will deem us worthy.

Temple aromaAs we read at Sunday’s Holy Mass, the Sadducees practiced a cynicism that we might find familiar—a 21st-century-type cynicism.

The Son of God came to Jerusalem to reveal the beautiful meaning of life, and the Sadducees carped and criticized Him for it. Christ spoke the truth about the heavenly Father, and the Sadducees played word games with Him.  They basically said, “Whatever.  Go rant about your dreamings somewhere else, visionary!  Around here, we only pay attention when you show us the money.”

The Sadducees’ cynicism darkened the holy city profoundly.  After all, they were the priests.  They had the duty of standing at the altar and offering sacrifice to the powerful God Who had liberated the nation from slavery.  The sweet smell of the lambs they burnt filled the air of Jerusalem.

So if any particular group of men in the city should have had room in their hearts for Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God; if any professional association should have had the imagination to envision an age to come, free of death and sorrow… you figure that would be the priests, whose business was God.  If a street vendor grows cynical, that’s one thing.  A cynical lawyer we can understand.  But cynical priests?  Yuck.

Not that priests should fall into facile naiveté, either.  All of us have to approach life practically, realistically—at least with one eye.  We have to have one eye that is purely practical.  Then we focus the other eye on the glorious age to come.  The world as we know it will pass away.  But we do need to keep the lights on and pay our bills in the meantime.

At St. Andrew’s in Roanoke, we have been discussing “Taking the Next Step” in financial commitment to the parish.  We all tried to figure out what percentage of income we regularly put into the offertory basket, and then find a way to take it up a notch. The big moment comes when you write in your offertory pledge.  Speaking of priests—it is a priestly act to sacrifice a specific amount, on a regular basis, as a gift to the Lord.  It’s a sweet-smelling offering. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

voting-boothOne last thing:  I’ve been in the sacred ministry now through four presidential elections.  Never before have so many people come to me and asked me, “Father, would you please, please, please tell me how to vote!  Just tell me who to vote for!”

Now, we can’t do that.  Not because we fear the IRS.  But because the act of voting inherently proceeds from the individual citizen’s conscience.  Voting means exercising my love for my neighbor, by making a good choice on my ballot.  It’s not for the priest to tell people how to vote in an election.

I think we all know what we stand for as Catholics.  We insist on the God-given dignity of every human person.  We recognize that we human beings need each other to survive, and that we truly thrive only when we work together, and love each other as brothers and sisters. The Catholic Church is a pro-life, pro-immigrant, pro-family Church.

The Lord does not ask us to cast the perfect vote on Tuesday.  Jesus Himself will not appear on that ballot.  After all, His kingdom is not of this world.  What He asks of us is merely this: to give it our best shot—basing our choice on His teachings.

Merciful Steward + Thanks, Borromeo!

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At Holy Mass today, we read the parable of the dishonest steward.  It has many complicated and difficult aspects.  The steward’s own dubious moral character.  His desperate honesty with himself vs. his dishonesty with his master.  Then his master’s apparent approval of his dishonesty…  Who can understand all this complexity?

st-charles-borromeoBut at the heart of the parable lies one simple detail:  The steward reduced the debtors’ burden.  They owed 100.  To one, the steward said:  Make if 50.  To another: Make it 80.

The debtors experienced sudden, unexpected relief.  Instant reduction of anxiety and strife.  Like a jubilee.

It’s like the day during my senior year of college when my Spanish Literature professor walked into the classroom a couple weeks before the end of the semester.  He announced that he had been offered, and had accepted, a new job at a different university.  He intended to report to the registrar our grades as they stood at that moment, because he was leaving town the next day.

He had assigned us a crushing 30-40 page research paper, to be turned in at the end of the semester.  Few of us had had the time or the courage even to start working on it.  He said:  “If you have a paper to give me today, I’ll read it tonight and include it in your grade.  If not, Don’t worry about it!”

A miracle of mercy.

St. Charles Borromeo died 432 years ago today.  Everyone knows the relationship between St. Charles Borromeo and the greatest book of all time?  The greatest book of all time is, of course… Okay, after the Bible. …the Baltimore Catechism!  Thanks to Cardinal Charles Borromeo, we had the Roman Catechism. Baltimore Catechism is based on the Roman Catechism.  So:  Thank you, St. Charles Borromeo!

We make things complicated.  But they’re not.  They’re actually simple.  We are not God. God is God.  And He is, above all, merciful.

Jubilee-Year Lesson?

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This man welcomes sinners and eats with them. (Luke 15:2)

The man who welcomed sinners and ate with them was?  …Jesus.  His eating with sinners especially displeased the Pharisees because?  …The Pharisees justified themselves based on their observance of purification customs.  They had transformed the ancient Temple purification rituals into little routines observed in the home.

Logo for Holy Year of MercyThis did not come out of nowhere.  The ancient nomadic forefathers of Israel had indeed distinguished themselves by the cleanliness of their camp.  So the Pharisees turned this into the distinguishing characteristic of their religion.  They measured their fidelity to God by their scrupulosity in proper household purification.

We can hardly condemn them.  It comes naturally to us, tribal creatures that we are, to suspect the hygiene practiced by people different from ourselves.  And we also know perfectly well that sharing a table with strangers, with whom we share little in common, poses big challenges.   Making conversation with people from a different clan makes for a lot of work. In human social interaction, like naturally congregates with like.

But a Christian simply cannot be satisfied with this.  When our Lord and Master walked the earth, He dealt with others at a deeper level.  Christ interacts with the innermost heart, where the one, true God and Father of all speaks.  He speaks the truth of His love.

We all possess that interior depth, regardless of color or language or hygiene customs.  We have that human depth in common.  And that interior depth is the place where we can meet a brother or sister in real friendship–as opposed to the shallow relations we can have based on the externals trappings of tribal affinity.

The jubilee Year of Mercy will soon draw to a close.  What lesson can we take from this year of special graces?  Maybe this:  cherishing in our hearts the image of Christ meeting His brethren in their innermost hearts, where we all stand together before God, as His beloved handiwork.

All-Souls Day Homily

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lascaux_painting

—

What is the Mass, fundamentally?  It is the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Christ, the God-man.

How does the celebration of Holy Mass affect our minds?  Hopefully, it focuses them on this essential fact:  The God-man died, and He rose.  This is the fact.  This is the central fact of them all, the fact according to which we understand and interpret all other facts.

In Adam all died.  In Christ all rise.

The niggling little critics might ask us questions like:  You believe all people descend from Adam and Eve?  Then where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from?  Or:  Did Original Sin occur before or after the dinosaurs?

We just say:  Look, critics, niggle all you want.  We start with the new Adam.  The divine Christ, Jesus.  The poor wanderer Who is the High Priest of all creation.  He died on the Cross and rose on the third day.

That’s the central fact.  We cannot understand anything, really; we can’t study dinosaur bones, or the night sky, or the cave paintings of Lascaux—and understand any of it—without first considering the fact at the heart of the Mass.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, dear carping critics, then let’s chat some more about things like the Big Bang theory.

This is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have eternal life.

So:  When we Christians pray for our dead, and talk to them, and look forward to our reunion with them; when we Christians greet every day as an opportunity to gather up moments of divine love for eternal life; when we try to live as mystics of the Mass, we engage in no maudlin sentimentality.  We engage in no fancy mythopoesis.  No.  We deal in pure facts.

Where does reality begin?  The only reasonable answer is:  God.  And God became a man, and died, and rose again.  Reality begins with the inner mystery of Holy Mass.  Reality as a whole makes sense, when we take the immortal Mass as Fact #1.

The Silence of the Saints

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All Saints Fra Angelico

St. John received a vision of heaven.  As we hear in our first reading at Holy Mass today, one of the elders in the vision asked St. John to speak about the heavenly scene.  But he wouldn’t.  Instead, John confessed that he did not know.

As St. John had written in one of his letters, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed” (emphasis added).  As we sing in our psalm for today’s Solemnity, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord?”

The Catechism puts it like this (1026-27):

Heaven is the blessed community of all who are perfectly incorporated into Christ.  This mystery of blessed communion with God and with all the saints is beyond all understanding and description.  [emphasis added] ‘No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has the heart of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.’ (I Corinthians 2:9)

The qualities outlined in the Beatitudes—poor in spirit, mournful about the sin of the world, meek, merciful, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, peaceful, and clean of heart… If we try to synthesize our idea of these qualities in a human personality, I think we could add one more:  Quiet.  Not loud.

We can safely say: when we try to put the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount into practice, we wind up speaking less.  We speak a great deal less than we would if we had never heard of Jesus Christ.

As we cultivate this quieter life, we can listen for the great, secret silence of heaven.  Yes, we know from reading Scripture that hymns of transcendent harmony resound up there, like rushing rivers.  But, from here, the music of heaven sounds like…silence.

That silence of the saints contains the great secret.  This unutterable secret lies at the very center of Christianity.  Anything and everything that we know—pumpkin pies, autumn-leaf-covered mountainsides, warm fireplaces, kisses from your honey—all these things, good and sweet as they are, are less good than heaven.  Heavenly goodness shines in the distance, the secret that defies all description and utterly exceeds the conception of man.

May we hold that secret in our Christian hearts by faith.  The secret of the saints is the goodness we strive for.  That secret makes life worth living.