Holy Family

 GKC “Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”
– Brave New Family

Even though it was written 25 years ago, many Catholics in family life ministries believe that the Church is only beginning to see the fruits of John Paul II’s message to families.
Although he was a celibate priest like me, Wojtyla became very close to a circle of young people whom he pastored while serving as chaplain to university students in Krakow. As they married and had children, Fr. Wojtyla offered spiritual and pastoral guidance to their families that would inform his work well into his years as Pope John Paul II.
“He was able to support these young families, to help them live the faith at a time when Communist society was really trying to undermine the family, ordering work and school schedules in a way that systematically minimized their time with each other. The state, and not the family, was, according to the government, the ultimate good and end of society.
JPII was working in his own small way to fight this head on as a priest, then in a bigger way as a bishop, and finally, after being elected Pope, much of his wisdom about the sanctity and importance of marriage and family life can be found in his 1994 “Letter to Families.”
In his letter, John Paul II wrote that men and women, particularly in their roles as fathers and mothers in the family, are key to building up a “civilization of love,” in which families are able to give and receive love at individual and societal levels.
The history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family.
we're not investing for the future of society or for the Church. We're just living for the present moment, and for our own selfish desires.
Who can deny that our age is one marked by a great crisis, which appears above all as a profound ‘crisis of truth?’” John Paul II wrote. “A crisis of truth means, in the first place, a crisis of concepts. Do the words ‘love’, ‘freedom’, ‘sincere gift’, and even ‘person’ and ‘rights of the person’, really convey their essential meaning?

It is in our hearts and in our homes that the Lord ultimately desires to reside as well - not just in this church. This is why Pope St. John Paul II called the home “the domestic church” – for children it is the first community of faith, and for all of us it is the first step in bringing God’s kingdom into the world.
The family needs the parish for support, and the parish needs the family for support. So our community is trying to build up the parish family by building up the domestic church. Prayer must become the dominant element of the Year of the Family in the Church: prayer by the family, prayer for the family, and prayer with the family,” John Paul II wrote. “Prayer increases the strength and spiritual unity of the family, helping the family to partake of God's own ‘strength.’    
Resources, workshops, and other avenues will be utilized throughout the year. Please refer to other parts of this bulletin for more information.
Goals: 1 - invest into our parish families of all types.  2 - We are in God’s family, adopted sons and daughters in Christ Jesus 3 - Christ must be at the center of our families 4 - support network for families in smaller communities within the parish called “households," starting officially in the fall.
If you are… this is for you.   recently married. married for years. empty nesters. widowed. divorced or in other difficult situations. unmarried, you still have a family! (I know I do!)
We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation. [...] If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world. GKC

Christmas Homily

All your plans are stripped away. You can't do what you want. You are stuck in a room staring at a wall. You are separated from your friends. You barely get to go outside.

Fr. Alfred Delp: 1944 Munich Germany - Tegel prison
It is going to be a beautiful Christmas, despite everything, or perhaps because of everything. With the state setting on these days, it's real, without obstruction, and a person can stand in face ultimate reality.…I think that from all of this we're going to have a watchful and blessed time with the child. The contradiction of everything we take for granted, the setting aside of all our important matters. Powerlessness on the tight-rope is an education in understanding the child.
… I'd like to light some candles for you. You've been with me in my night, and you still have your own darkness to live through. We are all in this together, for sure. Together will pull through. And in the midst of the night, the light will shine. You'll see. Let's help one another, not we really, but singing and praying the old Carol's and prayers, more earnestly and soberly than before, but in a way that is closer to reality.

But [I am] always trying to transform these whimpers into the only two realities that make this place worthwhile: adoration and love. Everything else is false. Believe me, these weeks have been a kind of bitter and unrelenting judgment on my past life. It's standing right here as a big question demanding its final answer, its seal. … during these weeks I've learned and re-learned enough for years.

Pope Benedict XVI:  On every child shines something of the splendor of that “today,” of that closeness of God which we ought to love and to which we must yield.

With eyes of wonder. The eyes of a newborn child.

Wonder and awe at this great mystery: God in the flesh.

Eternity comes into time.

It’s like a full grown man trying to wear the clothes of a kindergartner. Growing up in my house, our favorite pajamas were to simply wear my dad's T-shirts that were in his closet from 5Ks and other races that he had participated in. Everyone loved dad’s “running shirts” because we could curl our legs up into the shirt and fit our whole self inside. But not once did my dad ever wear one of my T-shirts. If he did I wouldn't have worn it ever again because it would have been destroyed.

Here’s another part of this great mystery: Omnipotence is weak. The all-powerful who created the stars with a “big bang” as easily as saying “let there be light” cannot hold up his head. The one who knit you together in your mother’s womb before you were born nine months (or so) later, He cannot move his arms in His swaddling clothes - he’s stuck, and he can get cold and hungry and sleepy. WHA?!


Pope Benedict XVI: In Jesus Christ, the son of God, God himself, God from God, became man. God's everlasting "today" has come down into the fleeting today of the world and lifted our momentary today into God's eternal today. God is so great that he can become small. God is so powerful that he can make himself vulnerable, and come to us as a defenseless child, so that we can love him. God is so good that he can give up his divine splendor and come down to a stable, so that we might find him, so that his goodness might touch us, give itself to us and continue to work through us. God has become one of us, so that we can be with him and become like him.

This is a great love story. What do lovers do? They talk, a lot. They hold hands. They spend all kinds of time together. They do all this to get close to each other, trying to share everything they can with the one they love.
That’s why God does this. We needed salvation, but God could have done it another way. He chose this way for a greater purpose.
And that is what God wants. He wants you to get close to him, to share everything you can. How can we do this? Here’s a couple ideas for this Christmas.

SING CHRISTMAS CAROLS: Make the home a place of worship. This year has especially taught us how important and how challenging that is for living and passing on the faith. I encourage you to go and sing your favorite Christmas carols at home together, since we cannot do so here. Look up lyrics online for these songs. You may also like to read from the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Talk to Jesus about your hopes for peace, your dreams for unity, reconciliation, and forgiveness, your longings for truth and justice and holiness.

END OF MASS?? The search of the shepherds. Sometimes it is hard to find God in our lives but that doesn’t mean He isn’t there.

homily - Advent 3rd (Gaudete Sunday)

This Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday because "gaudete" (the command to "rejoice!") is the first word of this week's Mass. The entrance antiphon begins the Mass with the words "Rejoice"!

This is echoed in our first reading today from Isaiah 61 v. 10: I rejoice heartily in the Lord. The Hebrew language uses repetition for emphasis, and thus the word rejoice is used twice in a row, as it is also picked up in the Latin translation St. Jerome gave us 14 centuries ago: "I rejoice rejoicing in the Lord."

In today's 2nd reading, it becomes clear what true joy is: holiness. And St. Paul makes it clear that holiness doesn't come from us.

May the God of peace make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will also accomplish it.

However, this does not mean we do not cooperate, as I stressed last week from the message of repentance we hear from John the Baptist. (Gregory of Nyssa) He who climbs never stops going from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end. He never stops desiring what he already knows.

In fact, St. Paul also gives us a recipe for joy. We can all probably think of a type of Christmas cookie or other special food that we really cherish around this time of year, and each one of these has a special recipe. If we don't follow that recipe, we won't end up with the same cookies or whatever it is that we remember so fondly. If we try to abandon that and do it our own way, we end up missing our goal, it's not right.

If you want to be joyful at all times, simply follow the recipe of St. Paul, the advice he gives us today. Try it for the next two weeks. See if it works. If you do nothing that goes against this, you will have joy. Rejoice always, he tells us, and then gives us the program: Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good. Refrain from every kind of evil.

 

CCC 736 By this power of the Spirit, God's children can bear much fruit. He who has grafted us onto the true vine will make us bear "the fruit of the Spirit: . . . love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." "We live by the Spirit"; the more we renounce ourselves, the more we "walk by the Spirit."
(Basil the Great) Through the Holy Spirit we are restored to paradise, led back to the Kingdom of heaven, and adopted as children, given confidence to call God "Father" and to share in Christ's grace, called children of light and given a share in eternal glory.

Homily - Advent 2

 The Jordan River was the “gate” so to speak by which the people of Israel entered the promised land, as told in the book of Joshua. Just like they went through the waters of the Red Sea to be set free from slavery 40 yrs earlier, the Hebrew people go through the Jordan River. When the Messiah is finally among them, hiding and waiting, John the Baptist begins his work of preparing the way at the same Jordan River. He message is clear: he is calling us to conversion from sin through a baptism of repentance.
The Church brings us these readings today to remind us that Advent is not a time to slouch around. That petitionary prayer: “Come, Lord and save us!” is not permission for us to be lazy because God is going to fix everything.

Think of a child sitting on a couch watching television and calling to a parent to go get them some food or drink. They don’t want to get up and do the work. Just bring me this please.

That’s not Advent, friends. “Couch Christianity” is fake Christianity. We need to cooperate with God’s grace, as a bride dancing with her husband must be attentive and responsive to the movements of his lead.

For the next two and a half weeks of this season, and truly for the entire Christian life, that means always hearing again and again the call of Jesus (and first also the call of John the baptist): The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,  repent and believe in the Gospel.

Jesus, the long awaited Messiah, came to free us and save us, but from what? From our sins and the slavery it brings us. The only way to do this is to heal our hearts so that they can actually love. Every sin destroys a bit of the love and justice that the Lord’s kingdom is meant to embody and shine forth. We sometimes confuse sin with self-disgust, a sense of not measuring up to this idea of what we want to be. Sin is not the same as our human poverty - that we are creatures who need God every moment of every day. Jesus isn’t going to take away that need for Him, He only wishes to satisfy it for those who truly open themselves to it - precisely by turning away from sin and turning towards God. That is true conversion.

with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day… he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. the day of the Lord will come like a thief. This is the second week in a row the readings mention the image of a thief, last week Jesus said it in the Gospel. This is a scary image. We won’t be ready. We will be surprised terribly if we aren’t trying to pay attention now. The urgency is clear.

In order that we don't become lazy in the spiritual life, it is helpful to make a daily practice of the examination of conscience or of some other technique for reviewing our lives. A different method, called the daily examen of St. Ignatius, is particularly powerful for finding God's hand at work in your life. I highly recommend this practice for "staying awake" and not turning into a "couch christian."

1. Become aware of God’s presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward tomorrow.

links to more info on the EXAMEN PRAYER: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen/

A DAILY EXAMINATION based on 7 capital sins: http://www.standrewsemporia.org/uploads/1/0/9/8/10980758/selfexamination.pdf

Homily - Advent 1

 

Advent – Starts with Christ’s coming at the end of time, then transitions towards Christmas as we get closer.

Prophet Isaiah – crying out to God and to His people. Here is a prayer that can really be on all of our hearts. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for, such as they had not heard of from of old. No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Isaiah would never have expected his prayer to be fulfilled in the great mystery we remember in under four weeks, that God would rend the heavens and come down in human flesh. It is certainly unheard of, and for the Jews absolutely unimagined, undreamt. But this is how much God loves His people. Love does whatever it can to unite with the beloved.

Saint Paul himself experienced this in a profound way, when Christ Jesus revealed himself specifically to “Saul” on the road to Damascus, literally tearing the heavens open and crashing into his world. He made him blind temporarily so that Saul could finally see the entire universe from the right perspective: it was all centered around the Gospel of Christ Jesus. That’s why today in the 2^nd reading, Paul is repeating the name of Jesus Christ again and again. In fact ten times in the first ten verses of 1^st Corinthians. He knows who we must build our lives around, and he gives his entire life and his death to this message. A good question as we begin Advent is “How centered is my life on Jesus?”

Isaiah continues: Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways! We know in humility that we are not “ready” for God to come, either at the end of time, or to come tearing through the shell of our lives now, unless we “stay awake” like Jesus asks us in the Gospel today. We “stay awake” by practicing what is right, or as we said in the opening prayer, by “running forth to meet Christ with righteous deeds at his coming.” The righteous deeds are outlined last week, from the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The sheep and the goats are all surprised in fact, by the king who says to them: “I was hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger, and in prison, and you treated me well or poorly.” May we not let these four weeks of Advent rush by without us truly getting ready for Christmas by deeds of righteousness and a deeper life of prayer that centers around Jesus.

Homily - Christ the King

Audio:  https://soundcloud.com/stthereselittleflowersb/nov-22nd-solemnity-of-our-lord-christ-jesus-king-of-the-universe 

 

The full title of today's feast is Our Lord, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Man that's a rather powerful title. Some of us act like they are king of the world, and many of us think we are king of our own lives, at least part of the time, but Jesus is King of the Universe - of literally every created thing. He is God and man, and the Father "will place all things beneath his feet," even death. We ourselves will also be placed  beneath Jesus' feet. We have no choice. Well, we do have a choice, but it's not what we would expect, the freedom-hungry and self-directing people that we are. Our choice is this: do we receive Jesus as our King now, or is it imposed on us later.

When our lives end, they will be wrapped up with one ultimate defining line in the sand. Everything we do: every action we take, every conversation with another person, every check that we write, every opportunity we take and every one that we turn down, every step toward chasing a goal, every decision for our careers and for our families, every friend we support in good or help steer away from evil, all the most important things in our stories and all the little moments of our lives that no one in the world notices - - all of it will come down to two simple choices: God, or myself. "I will serve" or "I will not serve" are the only two things our lives can say in the end.

St. Augustine outlines this in his masterpiece, the City of God: Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly [city] by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly [city] by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its own head in its own glory; the other says to its God, "Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength." 

So which one do we want to be part of?

Although our lips and voices are important, our lives are the real answer we give to to this question. "I will serve the Lord, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe" or "I will not serve this king" is seen in how we follow Jesus' commands. As St. Augustine describes it, do we love God so much that we even despise our own selves (that is, forget ourselves entirely) when He demands it? (This is what Jesus means when He tells us to "deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow after Him") Or do we cling to ourselves so much that we end up despising God for "attacking" us.

Our lives show the answer to this question in a million different ways. But I want you to think about two this week: time, and service.

1. Time: How do I spend my time? Do I ever "waste" time for God? (It's never waste, but the worldly view sees it as useless, so we can say this not to agree, but to remind ourselves of the lie we need to reject). How much time to I "waste" for God? When looking at life from the perspective of our death, we may look back and say we "wasted" a whole lot of time on things that seemed important to us.

2. Service: Is my life mostly about building up "my life" in some way? (career, legacy, family, hobbies). When I say, "that was a good day / great day today," was it great because I spent it on others? because my life was saying "I will serve the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe"? or for some other reason?

This is hard for me too. I just spend five days on retreat and I feel more than ever that I have a lot of room to grow in this. I have a lot more to give to Jesus. More of my heart, more of my time, more of my life.

As we face this task, Psalm 23 should strengthen us. The Good Shepherd will not abandon us. God will do everything He can to help us if we only ask Him, day after day, to do so. We cannot fail unless we rely on ourselves to do this. Ask Jesus for His help. He wants to hear your voice crying out to him. He loves you so much. He is only waiting for you to turn toward His face so that you can feel the warmth of His love.

Last Sunday (Oct. 11) homily

 audio - click here

You may remember I talked about parables giving us glimpses of heaven, because Jesus wants to transform our minds to see life from the true perspective, and not from the lies that the enemy sows down here in the darkness. Today’s parable speaks to us about heaven, but it also works on another level, giving a sort of outline for how Christianity will spread throughout the world. You may recall Jesus telling his disciples to “shake the dust” off their feet and take the Good News to other towns whenever they are rejected – this is exactly what happens in the life of the early church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and beyond, where after proclaiming in the synagogues, Paul and others eventually bring the Gospel to the Gentiles.

This works also for us too: God is constantly inviting us to something great. But like the invited guests, we often do not listen to the invitation. Sometimes this is really our fault. Other times, it is because the enemy has flown in like a bird to snatch the seed away from us, having made our ears deaf to the word of proclamation.

Our society constantly, and often implicitly, promotes values that make us spiritual zombies, numb to the things that matter. In order to hear God’s invitation, what we need is a transformed vision of our world.

When someone asks you “How’s life?” “How are you doing?” “Are you happy with the way things are going?” what do you use to measure that? Surely such a complicated question has many ways to look at it. 1. Career. 2. Health. 3. Family. 4. Friendships. 5. Faith. 6. Legacy. 7. Fame/popularity/honor. 8. Wealth. 9. Pleasure (do what I want to do).

The way you measure it tells you what you value, and helps you to understand the story you are a part of.

Our vision needs to be transformed. We live in a society that makes us numb to the invisible by constantly throwing our face into the visible.

 

CS LEWIS’ Weight of Glory is like reading two or three chapters of the the Gospels. It is not long. But it is worth it. (Just like the Gospels are totally worth it!) And like the Gospels, this will help to change your vision of the world. Here are some highlights:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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We have within us a desire for our own faroff country. I feel a certain shyness speaking about it. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Another solution is to try to identify it with certain moments in one’s own past. But all this is a cheat. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but are ultimately dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.

... A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a [world without romance].

 

Paradise exists, and in the Gospel today it is described as a great wedding feast (imagine an endless Thanksgiving that is all joy and no awkward!) That feast is available to us in a foretaste on this earth. It reaches out and gently touches us in prayer. We catch a glimpse of it in the sacraments. We hear it whispering in the Mass.

Listen to the ache within you, the hunger, the desire for heaven. It is God’s invitation to the wedding feast.