Purity of heart

Audio: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1r8CMMH17Y0cExKTm5QUDVUQmYtNXZjVl90d1I0VFpJMmpF

In the U.S. We have a funny relationship to law.  It would seem to be a love-hate relationship with law.  We praise the justice of our laws (or the vast majority of them) and yet we cling so passionately to "liberty" which so often is described as a total absence of any kind of restriction, even laws.  This is one example of the complex relationship between law and freedom. 

Jesus confronts a kind of Legalism in today's Gospel. In fact, every reading we heard points to the tension between the letter of the law and the true goal of the law, which is ultimately our sanctification.  The law is meant to make us holy, and that means our bodies and our souls, and as we mentioned in the penitential act today, includes our thoughts, our words, our actions and omissions ("what I have done and what I have failed to do").  However, laws can only really govern our actions, the very important first step in achieving sanctity but certainly not the complete fulfillment. So if our life revolves around the law, then we will miss the mark. God wants more. We will be forgetting the heart, where holiness is completed.

For example, if we are playing a sport, we don't want to focus on all the rules. It ends up being tedious and frustrating when the game is supposed to be enjoyable and at times exciting.  The laws can get in the way if they are treated as the focus of it all. But if they are not mistaken for what it's all about, the laws/rules are the true path to enjoyment.

Jesus says it clearly: the law has to be in our heart. The heart must be pure. 

Jessica Hayes – Consecrated Virgin.

Homily for Sunday Aug. 23

Audio only:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1r8CMMH17Y0X05DMU1xdGRQbVdBU0NFVXBzX1NTUjdIMTRr

Acquired taste

Audio: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1r8CMMH17Y0dmt3eUxwOGZrVjlmRXotZUw2TXZ0NlZXbC1Z

Last week I discussed "eating right" spiritually. I think today we can look at this a little bit more by talking about my acquired taste and eventually love for tomatoes. As a kid, tomatoes were good for only two things: spaghetti sauce and pizza. The sight of my dad slicing them up and eating them in front of me was just disgusting.  My parents never tried to force me to eat one, but if they did, it might have started World War III: there's no way I would have gotten anywhere near one! Well, I find it pretty amazing that now one of my favorite foods this time of year is slicing up a fresh tomato and basil from the garden over some toasted bread with olive oil, a simple homemade bruschetta. Oh, it just doesn't get better than that. How does a switch like that happen? Well, I slowly over time acquired a taste for better things. It's took a long time, but I eventually wised-up to the fact that vegetables can be absolutely delicious, and that food is so much greater than just candy, salt, and fat -although a strip of bacon is still really good!

In today's first reading, we hear Wisdom inviting us to a banquet. That character of Wisdom personified is really just an aspect of God Himself. But wisdom is also something that we ourselves can have, we can sort of possess it even if we can't control it or dominate it. So Wisdom, who is both God as well as part of our highest self, is then really Jesus Christ, the logos of God or the Word of God, which Saint John Paul II calls "the human face of God and the divine face of man."

And wisdom (Jesus) makes an invitation to us to join in the banquet. It's important to remember that as this image again proves, God isn't out to get us, to hurt us, to make life difficult. A banquet is a great thing. Now, granted, life is difficult, we do get hurt, and there are other forces house to get us and hold us down – but God, my friends, is all about loving invitation to nourish the deepest desires of our souls.

So, our souls actually want to be fed good wholesome stuff: we don't long for junk food. The spiritual food we want is ultimately Jesus. We went life. We want happiness. We want to know that I life is meaningful, and that we are playing a part in the building up of the kingdom of God.  The only way we are going to get that kind of nourishment is with God, so our hearts must be open.

The invitation that Jesus for the offers us requires us to choose. God doesn't force us. But another important aspect of Jesus's invitation is that it requires us to say no to certain things. If we are going to accept the banquet that Jesus wants to offer us, we have to reject the spiritual junk food that's out there. One concrete way that we can embrace the invitation of wisdom from God, is to read regularly from sacred Scripture (Lectio Divina). Another option is to pray the rosary (Which always includes meditating on the mysteries of Jesus is life). Or we could take a book off of the shelf of our Paris library in the back of church for our own spiritual reading. These are ways that we try to cultivate wisdom we try to acquire a taste for the higher things. We also then have to make time for that by rejecting the junk food that's out there: television, movies, Netflix, video games, and really a lot of the books out there that are just as bad if not worse.

Jesus says to us that we have to feed on him, and then every single Sunday he invites us to the banquet of the Mass to feed us, both in the Eucharist and in the wisdom of sacred Scripture and of the teachings of the church. Do we accept that invitation?  Do we share that invitation to others?

Eating Right

Audio: https://drive.google.com/a/stpius.net/file/d/0B1r8CMMH17Y0RlRwc1V2YVpiWGZ3NWRsa01jdDN3Wm1EWUdB/view?usp=docslist_api

Jesus again stresses the point of how He is the food that we need: I am the Bread of Life!  It doesn't get clearer than that for us.  We must rely on Christ, particularly in how we plan out our Sundays.  What does your Sunday routine look like?  Are you overbooked?  Do you let Sunday get filled up with all kinds of things that don't really give you rest or help you to pray?

At my old parish we had a good routine for Sundays: after Masses (and whatever else) we would have lunch then if possible do some exercise.  Finally around 4pm we would finally sit down to relax.  Fr. Bill would bring to the living/TV room his stack of newspapers: SB Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and NY Times (which he would get the only on Sundays).  He would sit in his lazy-boy trying to read, but his exhaustion would get the best of him.  He'd jokingly pretend he was reading even though his drooping head and snoring would always tell the real truth.  In the paper he really liked looking at the Travel section and seeing the beautiful places out in the world, particularly Europe, a few of which he was fortunate enough to visit.  I would often go to the book review and see what new books were being touted by the book "gurus" of today and then the best-sellers list where I could see what people themselves found important.  Week after week there were always on the list a collection of self-help books and diet books.  Not long ago I heard somewhere that the fact that there are so many of these books and always new ones is proof that they don't really work, at least by themselves.  There's not perfect solution, and we can't change by following a program unless we ourselves are transformed: we have to fix our desires and our passions and our goals in order to change our behaviors.  If losing weight is the goal, then it's important to get to the root of the problem: how we treat our bodies, including our lifestyle and eating right.

This concept of eating right plays into our spiritual life as well.  We are bodies and souls, and we feed our minds and our hearts all the time, and the really scary part is that we don't even know we're doing it: all the TV we watch, books we read, songs we listen to, they all have messages that feed our souls.  Are we feeding our souls just a bunch of junk food?  perhaps even toxic stuff?  The truth is that if we are going to get through the world with an intact faith, there is no way we can do it without eating right spiritually.  The journey is too long and too hard, and there are some real forces against us.  

We see this clearly in the background of our first reading today.  The prophet Elijah is on a journey across a desert because he is running for his life.  King Ahab of Israel married a pagan queen Jezebel, who had hundreds of prophets to worship Baal in Israel.  Elijah was the only prophet of the Lord at the time, and he called for a big show-down between the two sides on Mount Carmel.  After the Lord proved himself as the only true God, Elijah had the prophets wiped out on the spot, and when Jezebel hears of this, she sends her entire army after him.  So he has to run for his life.  We have forces chasing after us as well, and the journey is not easy, except that the Lord is on our side.  Elijah needed to eat and drink to sustain his body on the journey, and we must do the same for our souls.

The Eucharist is the most important way we can feed our souls.  It's the ultimate high-point of how God strengthens us for the journey of faith.  And that is why it is such a tragedy that many Catholics do not come to Mass regularly.  They aren't feeding their souls (at least in this most important way), and are thus letting them waste away.  It shouldn't be a surprise that if you don't go to Mass, you are very likely to lose your faith.  Even if you have a life of prayer and avoid many of the obvious evils in our culture, you are still like an athlete who isn't eating breakfast or lunch, only snacking here and there.  It isn't going to be enough to keep you going.  We need Jesus, brothers and sisters, and we should find it amazing how God, as Saint Francis says, was humble enough to become this small for us.

But receiving communion must be done with the right spiritual state.  If we take communion when we really need to go to confession or do not truly believe the Catholic faith, it will not help us.  Like Saint Paul says today, we can actually frustrate the work of God in our souls if we carry evil in our hearts: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.  All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice.  And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.  One obvious remedy for this is Confession.  Go and confess your sins.  Another is forgiving others, as Paul mentions.  Remember, in the Our Father Jesus made it clear that we must forgive if we want to be forgiven.  Then the Eucharist can really have good effect on our spiritual lives.

As we feed our bodies, we need to feed our souls.  There are many in our world who don't do a good job of this, and probably every single one of us has room to improve it for ourselves.  As Jesus strengthens our souls, may we not be afraid to share that good news with others, particularly inviting them back to Mass if they have been away.  The Lord is merciful.

Food for the journey

Audio: https://drive.google.com/a/stpius.net/file/d/0B1r8CMMH17Y0cFVlWl9oUkszQlNyWDNpV19HVVd1WTVWUWJj/view?usp=docslist_api

LOTR - why it's awesome.  It's very Catholic.  If you think the C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia is a great series (which by the way is much more than just children's literature), then I can assure you that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece is even better.  Searching for lists online, I found it to be the second best-selling novel in the English language in the 20th century.  I truly can't say enough good about this book because I love the author.  And frankly, in some ways, I think some of his other writings are better than Lord of the Rings in many ways, and I'm not talking about the Hobbit.

J.R.R. Tolkien went to weekday Mass regularly, as well as Eucharistic Adoration, which we have at 7pm this week.  It was in Adoration, in fact, that he was inspired with the central idea of his novel.  So don't let anyone say Adoration is a waste of time, because he earned a lot for his fidelity to this form of prayer, and ultimately, it brought a lot of hearts closer to God, mine included, because without this man's prayer life, we wouldn't have Lord of the Rings today.

Two friends on a long journey. This journey will end up becoming an important mission, and in fact the most difficult thing they will ever do, with their lives on the line again and again. From day one, they are slowly stripped of every comfort. Slowly they step further and further from their own country into a world much bigger than the little one they lived in.  One bit at a time they grow stronger and stronger interiorly so that they no longer complain about their hunger or soreness.  Slowly they learn to rely more and more on the essentials, most importantly on their trust in each other, and the life necessities of water and bread. Special bread called "lembas" or "waybread" - literally food for the road, the journey.

That bread would fortify a grown man for a full day's work, or in this case, for the two companion's journey across mountains and into enemy territory.  We see the exact same thing in the readings today: food for the journey.  If the story of Israel can be seen to symbolize the story of every Christian soul, then just as they needed food on their journey to the promised land, so too do we need the Eucharist to make our journey to heaven.
One of the interesting things about the lembas bread was that its power would increase when not eaten with other foods.  This reminds me of what Jesus said today: Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  The more we rely only on Jesus alone to satisfy our souls, the stronger the Eucharist will effect us.

But unfortunately we live in a society focused on consumerism.  We buy one product and consider it obsolete after a few weeks.  We enjoy one experience, throw it away, and look for the next.  Sometimes we do this with God and our spiritual life as well.  We go to Mass and then we are done and move on to the next thing.  We consume God in the Eucharist instead of letting God consume us in the Eucharist.

Saint Paul's "new man" in Ephesians.  Transformation.
you must no longer live as the Gentiles do... you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.

We are supposed to be transformed by the Eucharist.  Change the way our consumerist culture makes you think about coming to Mass.  It's not about entertainment.  It's not about a neat experience or punching a time-card.  It's about letting Jesus transform you into who you were meant to be, so that you can make it through the journey ahead.  Open your hearts to Him today and let Him consume you.