Lin Wilder's Blog, page 4
March 9, 2025
A Joyous Lent: Recovering the Great Fast
Fasting, Lent. Plate and cross on wooden backgroud.A joyous Lent?It isn’t something that can be understand easily.
This past Wednesday, the liturgical churches left ordinary time to enter forty penitential days in the desert with Christ. Today’s Gospel reading returns to the Baptism of the Lord and the beginning of Jesus’ three-year journey to the Cross.
The Gospel of Mark starkly declares “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert.” (I’m using last year’s Gospel passage for the first Sunday in lent.) The Gospel reading invites us to follow him into the desert of fasting, alms and prayer.
Saint Mark’s verb jolts. And forces us to think about that first sin of Adam and Eve.
It was eating!
Adam and Eve broke the only fast established by the Lord in Eden. That forbidden eating of the fruit caused their own death and that of all Creation. The ensuing devestation and corruption is so vast that only Jesus can restore life. Unless we meditate on him and his passion its impossible to understand what was happening, what he was doing:
I have to redo man in everything. Sin has removed the crown from him,and has crowned him with opprobrium and with confusion; so he cannot stand before my Majesty. Sin has dishonored him, making him lose any right to honors and to glory.
This is why I want to be crowned with thorns – to place the crown on man’s forehead, and to return to him all rights to every honor and glory. Before my Father, my thorns will be reparations and voices of defense for many sins of thought, especially pride; and for each created mind they will be voices of light and supplication, that they may not offend Me.
The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
How then there be joy in the midst of such immensely unjust persecution, torture and suffering?
Gibran’s On Joy and Sorrowis one of the most poignant and disturbing poems I have ever read. Years ago, when I first discovered it, I memorized one line:
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
On Joy and Sorrow
There’s an intrinsic metric suggested here, isn’t there? But more than a rhythm, we recognize the truth of this line with a startled gasp, “Of course this is true!”
The annual season of Lent is here. Forty days that has felt like an endurance test stretching ahead of me, filled as they are with the ‘three pillars’ of prayer, fasting, and alms giving. That is until receiving an email from the Prior at St. Michael’s Abbey and several days later, hearing Father Chris Munoz” homily at the 6:30 AM Mass. First the homily: “Of all the holy seasons in the church, Lent is the only one where we’re told to work,” Father Chris declared.
Thank you for the reminder, Father Chris. I like, no I need, work!
The Pastor’s homily brought me back to a phrase used several years ago by another priest at the end of his Ash Wednesday homily,.
“Have a joyous Lent!”
We’ve begun a forty-day grace-filled season where new habits can be learned. If, that is, we do the work. That’s the goal, discarding the sin-filled habits and learning new ones, right?
How, exactly, do we learn new habits?Carefully. Reasonably and truthfully examine our sinful habits and attitudes about others and our world that we’re willing to change. If it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken our sins out loud, if Catholic, consider braving rhe confessional for guidance and absolution from a priest.
Convinced your sins are unforgivable? Father Jacques Phillipe replies, “Our sins are a very poor pretext for distancing ourselves from Him, because the more we sin, the more we have a right precisely to approach Him who says: The healthy are not in need of a doctor — the sick are.… Indeed I came not to call the righteous, but sinners (Matthew 9:12-13). If we wait until we are saints to have a regular life of prayer, we could wait a long time.”
There’s a caveat here however. While doing our reflections and examination of conscoince,we must understand that the desire to correct ourselves emanates from grace. Therefore, it’s always gentle, never forceful. In fact, we’re advised to ignore certain feelings of guilt that seem to arise from our conscience.
To preserve our hearts in perfect tranquility, it is still necessary to ignore some interior feelings of remorse which seem to come from God, because they are reproaches that our conscience makes to us regarding true faults, but which come, in effect, from the evil spirit as can be judged by what ensues. If the twinges of conscience serve to make us more humble, if they render us more fervent in the practice of good works, if they do not diminish the trust that one must have in divine mercy, we must accept them with thanksgiving, as favors from heaven. But if they trouble us, if they dishearten us, if they render us lazy, timid, slow to perform our duties, we must believe that these are the suggestions of the enemy and do things in a normal way, not deigning to listen to them.
All of which inspires joy at this holy season, does it not?
Fasting can be onerous.Aa a Benedictine Oblate, I know and follow Saint Benedict’s command to pray to love fasting.. In the last couple of weeks however, I’ve dreaded upcoming fast days. Or just haven’t the gumption to do anither day of bread and water. But then that email showed up. It contained a most intriguing conversation between the Prior and T.K. Coleman of the weekly podcast, The Minimalists.
Coleman’s remarks served as a wakeup call to the immensely vast array of the physical and spritual benefits of fasting. And include some I’d never before considered. After listening to their conversation, I’ve recommited to The Great Fast.
The Great Fast Morning OfferingStir up in me O savior the desire by the merits of your fast in the wilderness, the earnest desire and the effective will to choose to fast, and to so repair my many falls, order my bodily appeatites and purify my mind.
Unite me in the present struggle with all the Christian penitents who will pass this day in self-denial. By this holy observence, increase my hunger for the Banquet of the Lamb-below under the sacramental signs and finally above in the vision of your Blessed Face. Amen..
Have mercy on me, God, in accord with your merciful love;
in your abundant compassion blot out my transgressions.
Thoroughly wash away my guilt;
and from my sin cleanse me.
5For I know my transgressions;
my sin is always before me.b
6Against you, you alone have I sinned;
I have done what is evil in your eyes
So that you are just in your word,
and without reproach in your judgment.c
Behold, I was born in guilt,
in sin my mother conceived me.*d
8Behold, you desire true sincerity;
and secretly you teach me wisdom.
….Psalm 51
It’s only day four and I’m astounded at the tangible fruits of this fast I’d dreaded so. I’ve written before about the well-known health benefits, but the strange emptiness is best expressed through the lens of poet..
There’s a hidden sweetness
in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less.
If the sound box is stuffed
full of anything, no music.
If the brain and the belly
are burning clean with fasting,
every moment a new song
comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and a new
energy makes you run up the
steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like
reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with
the reed pen.
When you’re full of food and drink,
Satan sits where your
spirit should, an ugly metal
statue in place of the Kaaba.
When you fast, good habits gather
like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon’s ring.
Don’t give it to some illusion
and lose your power.
But even if you’ve lost all
will and control, they come
back when you fast,
like soldiers appearing out
of the ground, pennants
flying above them.
A table descends to your
tent, Jesus’s table.
Expect to see it, when you
fast, this table spread with
other food better than the
broth of cabbages.
The post A Joyous Lent: Recovering the Great Fast appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.
March 1, 2025
Mitigating the Tyranny of Time
Mitigating the Tyranny of Time“When were you the happiest?”
“High school.”
My husband, a therapist, declares his patients invariably answered his question , “What’s the happiest time in your life?” with those two words. For over twenty years, he counseled former combat veterans. That’s a lot of people whose happiest years were decades earler. Yet when he told me this I was unsurprised, because I thought of my two older sisters. I was certain that’s exactly how they’d answer John’s question.
So am I proposing some kind of psychological time machine back to high school in mitigating the tyranny of time?
Nope, my years in high school were nothing like that of my popular cheerleader older sisters–I was anonymous. But watching their preoccupation with boys, clothes, dating, followed closely by early and miserable marriages, readied me for learning the key to happiness from John Bradshaw. Bradshaw had left Catholicism right before he was to be ordained to the priesthood. The future “founder of the self-help movement” taught at a private Dominican college in Houston where he used us to recover his life and sobriety.
Over and over, pacing the classroom floor, Bradshaw shouted, “If you want to be happy, then act as if you are, take time to …LOOK at that tree!”
Over time, the feeling will follow, the knowledge that “Yes!, I am happy!”
Exactly like faith and love: The actions precede the feelings.
Is it really tyranny?Time is certainly tyranny for those lost in long ago illusions of high school perfection. And those who live in the future: “When I finish this degree…” “All will be perfect when I get that new house…” It’s tyranny too for those who spend their lives racing against the clock.
My recently learned tricks aren’t really steps in mitigating the tryanny of time but more like a conscious decision to stop fighting it. My recent accident happened because my mind devolved to my early training in crisis. Those years were indeed filled with crisis, other lives were on the line and instilled powerful reactions in me. That the panic reaction is completely unwarranted doesn’t matter. Because I was very late, my mind focused only on that clock.
The catalyst for my “Aha!” is Meister Eckhart and his trenchant remarks on time.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart lived in the thirteenth century. The mechanical clock had just been created. Our notions of hours, minutes and seconds didn’t exist. Hence precise meeting times lacked any semblance to our preoccupation the construct of time. And yet, one of the great philosophers of that age declared “the very taint and smell of time” keeps the light from reaching us.
So exactly what is it I’m suggesting?
Don’t look.
Huh?
Now, when I get in my car to attend Mass, a meeting, appointment, gathering or the like, once driving, I refuse to look at the time. Confident I’ve done my part in reaching my destination, read, left early enough.
I force my attention solely on prayer aand what’s happening around me, other cars, drivers, and the like. Only when reaching my destination do I look at the time. The habit bleeds over to other tasks druing my days causing sharper writing, cooking and deeper meditation. Obviously, there’s nothing new about this practice, all traditions preach and teach: live in the now, the present. And so mitigating the tyranny of time.
Just so,My plan for Lent is to not overthink Lent. When I said that during confession last Thursday morning, I surprised myself. Suddenly unsure of what I meant, I stopped talking and regarded my confessor uncertainly..Thankfully, Father Charlie Banks nodded his understanding and said, “We keep trying to earn his love, his forgiveness.”
Precisely!
So what does “not overthinking Lent” mean, specifically?
Of course I’ll fast and study spiritual texts that await my attention. But I want to be less rigid about it. For example, if, on a usual fast day, it feels right to make us a meal, I’ll do it..aware these penances emanate from grace, not me. But far more than that, I want to make better use of my imagination.
If, like me, you believe–are certain, that Eden is real, I mean imagining Adam and Eve’s days. How they were with their Lord when they “walked with him at the breezy time of day.” They knew what they were: his beloved creatures. Therefore, they understood their absolute dependence on their Creator but also comprehended their glorious partnership with him in caring for his creation. So it didn’t feel like dependence but love.
Adam and Eve’s senses were uncorrupted. They viewed and heard the trees and the animals just like he did: with pure love. They’d no thought of the utility of a tree or animal, for all was one. Our first parents experienced sheer joy at their being along with that of all creation. They were children, Peguy’s magnificent epic poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope explains:
Children are not like adults.
For children playing, working, resting, stopping, running, it’s all one.
Together.
It’s the same.
They don’t make the distinction.
They’re happy.
They have fun all the time.
As much when they work as when they play.
They don’t notice it.
They’re very happy.
And their commandment is the same commandment of Jesus.
Of the child Jesus.
Hope, too, is she who is always playing.
They saw “with the inexpressible bliss of supreme life, which is supreme wakefulness, supreme activity,and supreme intensity, and at the same time deepest calm, deepest peace, and deepest security….”
Hanns Georg von Heintschell-Heinegg
Imagine!
Look at that tree!The post Mitigating the Tyranny of Time appeared first on Lin Weeks Wilder.
February 15, 2025
The Immorality of Stupidity
The immorality of stupidityStupidity’s immoral?
Run that by me again?
Ever since my week-ago car accident that occured from my own stupidity, I’ve been pondering it. What it truly is, how and why it takes us over, individually and collectively.
First, a brief background about the accident. Engrossed in Bishop Barron’s wonderful phrase, egodrama:
“I’m late!”
“I’m not going to get there in time!”
“Me!” “Me!” “Me!”
WHAM! A truck I never saw plowed into me.
I knew better than to take the risk of blindly turning onto the road, but I did it anyway.
“Sin makes us supid,” so says my friend, Father Dan Crahen.
Precisely.
Stupid acts like mine, connote carelessness, thoughtlessness and lack of focus. But it becomes somethng else when it becomes the noun, stupidity. It describes a state of being. One that recalls experience with incompetent–aka stupid– bosses, physicians. and others immersed in a cloud of unreason.
Until now, I’d not considered stupidity-consistently stupid people, as immoral. Consider the folks who get a job or promotion because of their connections not competence: the Peter Principle. Or the person who never should have graduated. Most of us have likely experienced the damage one of these individuals can cause. Simply because they don’t know, don’t care or both. And yet they get rewarded.
In the searingly heart-wrenching and brilliant book, Killer Angels, union calvary officer Major-General John Buford, already badly wounded from a previous battle, awaits the arrival of the “Rebs” he knows will come to Gettsburg.
Alexandra Hudson’s piece,
He had held good ground before and sent off appeals, and help never came. He was very low on faith. It was a kind of gray sickness; it weakened the hands. He stood up and walked to the stone fence. It wasn’t the dying. he has seen good men die all his life, and death was the luck of the chance, the price you eventually paid. What was worse was the stupidity. The appalling sick stupidity that was so bad you thought sometimes you would go suddenly, violently, completely insane just having to watch it. It was a deadly thing to be thinking on. Job to be done here. And all of it turns on faith.
Killer Angels
When Does an Intellectual Failing Become a Moral One? appeared in my inbox the way Killer Angels jumped into my hands. Hudson’s title derives from, Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity. Although I’ve read more than a little about the man whom I consider a saint, Dietrich Bonheffer, I’d not realized his Letters from Prison. existed. That they do is something of a miracle. The letters were secretly spirited out of Tengel Prison thus making Bonhoeffer’s ruminations about Germany’s embrace of Hitler’s evil accessible.
Dietrich BonhoeffferStupidity as vice.Bonheffer contends that it wasn’t malice that caused the the leader and members of the German Lutheran Church to submit to Hitler’s demonic plans for Germany and the world, it was stupidity. And stupidity, declares Bonhoeffer, far more dangerous than mere malice.
“Reasoning is of no use, Bonhoeffer writes. “Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
The German martyr’s eighty-five-year-old description of 1940’s Germany evokes shudders of recognition from 21st century readers.
“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
We Have Far More to Fear From Stupidity Than Evil
Worse, stupidity’s contagious. Why?
In the effort to fit in, or be liked, we allow fools to influence us. Stupidity seems to sweep through masses of people gobbling them up as it goes. As if there were a magnetic force drawing people in. We see it in mobs, any huge collection of people gathered together for a singular purpose. Today those gatherings occur virtually and privately on personal devices thus even more darkly troubling.
It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.
The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up an autonomous position.
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Stupidity isn’t new. Is it?
This past week, the liturgical church has been filled with the readings from Genesis. All the gifts given humanity by God. And then:
What can we do?
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals
that the LORD God had made.
The serpent asked the woman,
“Did God really tell you not to eat
from any of the trees in the garden?”
…..
Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they realized that they were naked;
so they sewed fig leaves together
and made loincloths for themselves
the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God
among the trees of the garden.
In a remarkable interview with Rene Girard, Girard replied to that question with brilliance: increase our personal sanctity. Because on our own, all we can do is sin.
At an invitation from my online friend, Janet Klasson, I signed up to pray an assigned hour of the Passion Clock. I’d read Luisa Piccarreta’s Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ before. But the wisdom of organizing a method where we pray one hour daily for seven days before moving on the next is inspired. Because after a couple of times praying that hour, we become familiar with it enough to recall it throughout our day. As is, of course, the point.
The twelfth hour is 4-5 AM. And the soldiers are mocking, insulting and torturing him. Luisa describes his beautiful eyes filled with spit, soldiers even forcing open Our Lord’s mouth to fill it with their spit. And Jesus’ “supernatural love and sweetness” that shines throughout.
Following the explicit and graphic narrative of each hour we pray-ers are asked how we handle situations in which we’re criticized unjustly. Or ridiculed. Or betrayed. Do we exhibit the constancy that Jesus did while enduring people spitting, stomping and brutalizing him?
Firmness is that virtue which makes us know whether God really reigns in us. If ours is true virtue,
we will be firm in trial, with a firmness which is not inconstant, but always equal to itself. The more
we become firm in good, in suffering, in working, the more we enlarge the field around us, in which
Jesus will expand His graces. Therefore, if we are inconstant, our field will be small, and Jesus will
have little or no space. But if we are firm and constant, as Jesus finds a very extensive field, He will
find in us His shelf and support, and the place in which to extend His graces.
The Twenty -Four Hours of the Passion
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February 8, 2025
Good Afternoon, Fellow Missionaries!!
Good afternoon, fellow missionaries!It’s been exactly ten years since my husband John and I met the founder of the Haitian organization, Hands Together. Quite honestly, I have an agenda. I’m sharing those first impressions today in hopes that you’ll consider supporting Fr. Tom and his extraordinary mission. But perhaps more importantly, follow his advice: “resolve to create a little bit of heaven now, today.” Continue reading to make sense of this nonsequitor.
“His voice boomed out into the church,. Awakening me from the torpor resulting from a seven-hour drive from that had begun at three AM.
“Good Afternoon, Fellow Missionaries!”
We were at the vigil Mass at St. Gall’s Church in Gardnerville, Nevada, where a priest we had never seen before was celebrating Mass. Fr. Tom Hagan, OFSC strode to the front of the church to celebrate Mass, joyfully, loudly and forcefully. After explaing that then Saint Gall pastor, Father Paul McCollum had invited him for a mission weekend, Father Tom began to speak.
His homily was long, maybe thirty minutes or more. But I was mesmerized. Despite my fatigue, Fr. Hagan woke me up. Today, I cannot get him or his organization out of my mind, out of my heart. He is still waking me up. Father Hagan reminds all of us that we are each called to a mission uniquely our own. If we ignore that quiet voice that challenges us, urges us to take that risk, follow that path which looks impossible, there will be no one to walk it.
Good afternoon, fellow missionaries!
How it happenedFather Tom Hagan was the Chaplain for Princeton University, Chaplain for Life. He explains that he lived comfortably among some of the wealthiest and best educated of the world. Until he took a group of Lafayette college students to Haiti. That comfortable world blew up when he listened to that quiet voice and decided to do something. Hands Together was founded when Fr. Hagan left his post at Princeton and moved to Port-Au-Prince in 1997.
He comes to churches like St. Gall’s in Gardnerville, Nevada, for several reasons. Primarily, to beg, the word he uses, for help for a three mile ‘city’ in Haiti where he lives along with more than half a million Haitians. The United Nations has called Cite Solei the most dangerous place on earth where anarchy and savage poverty rules and is home to Father Tom Hagan. During his appeal, Fr. Tom’s words are stark and graphic.
We shift uncomfortably in our pews, our well-fed bodies ill at ease with the fact that fifty-percent of all children born in Father Tom’s ‘parish’ of 500, 000 will die of starvation before the age of five.
Or at hearing about the orange hair and distended bellies that signify severe malnutrition.
And at his flat statements about prying the dead bodies of infants from the hands of despairing, unbelieving mothers.
The main-surprising- themes of his talkboiled down to these six points:
Yes! We need your help desperately and if you can, send moneyBut more than that, please do this for me, for yourselves and for the world,Resolve today to create a ‘little bit of heaven’ right where you are byBeing a better more loving wife, husband, mother,And pray as hard as you possibly can asking Jesus, ‘what is it you are asking of me, today?’Understand that we are all called to be missionaries in the place where each of is, now.It is astonishing and humbling to consider men like this one. So obviously called for something huge, impossible and massively dangerous. Last night, on the way home from Mass, I was filled with the image of Fr. Tom’s face when I shook his hand and he took it with a plea: “Please pray for me,” exhaustion, sorrow and pain written all over his face. What a privilege it is to know there are men like him in this sad and broken world; what a privilege it is to want to help.”
Reading Father Hagan’s ten-year-old words matter. I am reminded me that if I choose, I can make my not huge tasks- doing dishes, cleaning the house, holy. But I must collect myself, keep myself in His Presence, only then can I sanctify the mess.
Message From Fr. Tom Hagan – Founder
Many years have passed since my first trip to Haiti in 1985. It’s with warm fondness and lasting satisfaction that I remember the handful of enthusiastic young students who organized efforts to help two dozen people suffering from leprosy in Gonaives, Haiti. I thank God for the wonderful, caring people that joined me in doing something for this great world of ours – joining “hands together” and discovering the joy that comes from helping others.
Much has been accomplished since our incorporation in 1989 and I am extremely proud of all the dedicated people who have participated in Hands Together’s efforts to build a more compassionate and human world. There seems to be an urgency now more than ever to offer challenges and give meaning to our young people’s lives. We must be willing to teach that we are all linked together; our only lasting bond is the bond of love. We must be willing to join hands with the poorest of the poor and work together to overcome all kinds of bigotry and hatred. Our spirit should be one of continual joy and optimism – knowing that we are indeed loved by God and through grace and prayer we are drawing closer to him as time passes. In the words of the prophet Micah we are required “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
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February 1, 2025
EWTN, Mother Angelica and Miracles
EWTN, Mother Angelica and MiraclesBecause I had what my friend Jack Capparro vividly termed “the grunge,” I isolated mself last week and didn’t leave the house…at all. For a daily Communicant like me, missing daily Mass feels like sin. And then I remembered EWTN’s daily eight am Masses with the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word. Hence, it was like seeing good friends when I ‘attended’ Fathers Joseph, Mitch Pacwa and John Paul daily Mass. But it’s Father John Paul Mary’s homily on the feast of Saint Aquinas, that sticks, days later. Father John Paul declared that day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mother Angelica’s miraculous healing.
Before continuing with the homilist’s remarks, a bit of background.
Until those awful days when churches were closed all over the world, I knew nothing of EWTN, Mother Angelica. or televised church services. But EWTN’s daily Mass was a lifesaver. Neither my husband John nor I ever doubted the spiritual efficacy of those five-AM Masses (we were living on the west coast back then.) We were exceedingly grateful for the solace of EWTN television Mass. In fact, in April of 2020, during that pandemic of fear, I wrote of an extraordinary homily given by Father John Paul. Extraordinary for many reasons but primarily his phrase, making a gift of our wounds that burned into my psyche.
This last Tuesday, Father John Paul spoke of Mother Angelica and miracles. The priest’s loving tribute to the founder of EWTN begins with the Italian mystic Paola Albertini‘s many attempts to meet with Mother Angelica. It was 1998, the priest explained, and there were many pseudo-mystics attempting to meet. Paola’s persistence finally persuaded the nun to see her. During their first meeting, praying the rosary together, the mystic declared that “Our Lady is here! She has a message for you!” Father John Mary relates that the portrait of Saint Francis kept over her desk shone as Paola said,
“What joy you give to the Heart of Jesus your beloved Spouse!….Defend the holy Eucharist even with your own life. Yes, Jesus still today is being made a fool of and sneered at….. I bless this location; I bless you, my daughter, and with so much love I tell you: Don’t stop! Go forword for the love of Jesus, unperturbed along the way that Jesus traced for you since you were in your maternal womb…”
I’ve embedded Father John Paul’s beautiful homily here below, it begins on minute 19
Mother Angelica’s healingsLater, in another rosary, Mother Angelica praying in Latin and Paola in Italian, “Mother Angelica had a sudden “feeling” that God wished to heal her. She then said to herself interiorly:
“Lord, all of these years You have used me as a comfort and an example for all of the handicapped and crippled. If You want to change this it is okay with me”.
Moments later, Paola asked if she could pray for Mother. When Mother Angelica consented, Paola fell to her knees and recited a prayer in Italian. After several minutes, Paola then requested that Mother remove both of her leg braces.
Her legs became more and more stable as she walked across the room, her feet and legs straightening into the proper position, the weakened muscles regenerating and strengthening with every moment. When Mother Angelica paused for a moment, Paola placed a crucifix on her back and her legs.“Lets walk” she then ordered. Mothers wobbliness and unbalance was now gone and she walked almost normal, unlike she had done in 42 years. She then opened the door and peered out at the security guards down the hall and stated:
“Look no braces and no crutches!”
Rita Rizzo, (Mother Angelica) was no stranger to miracles. Born with a debilitating malady of “dropped stomach,” Rita was miraculusly healed at nineteen.
A “classic entrepreneur,”
…the young Rita Rizzo [Mother Angelica] was at her wits end because of the severe pain that she was experiencing in her stomach. Thankfully, a sympathetic friend brought her to a Ohio mystic and stigmatic named Rhoda Wise on January 8, 1943. (Those interested in reading more about Rhoda Wise can read the article I wrote about her here). At this providential meeting, Rhoda told young Rita Rizzo to make a Novena (9 days of prayer) seeking the holy intercession of St Therese of Lisieux, and she gave her a Novena prayer pamphlet to St Therese to recite, asking the intercession of St. Therese for a cure for her stomach illness. On the last day of the Novena to St Therese, that is precisely on Sunday, January 17, 1943 Rita Rizzo woke up in the middle of the night with a strong, sharp pains in her stomach –
“It seemed like something was pulling my stomach out”, she later stated.
When she arose later that Sunday morning, she immediately thought of putting on the corset around her waist as she was often obliged to do to avert the pain, but she “heard” and inner voice telling her to get up, and then suddenly she realized that the usual pain was gone, and that she was miraculously cured. She looked into the mirror and indeed the bluish color around her waist and also the bulging lump on her lower abdomen was completely gone. And time has shown this cure to be permanent because over the many passing decades the stomach pain and swelling has never returned.
Concerning this first miraculous healing she stated:
“When the Lord came in and healed me I had a whole different attitude. I knew that God knew me and loved me and was interested in me. I didn’t know that before. All I wanted to do after my healing was give myself to Jesus.”
say author Raymond Arroyo and Lee Iacocca about the fifty-eight-year-old nun, the only Roman Catholic figure, who launched a broadcasting network heard all over the world. I’m quoting from Ramond Arroyo’s biography of Mother Angelica. Hers is yet another impossible success story. This one though, isn’t about becoming a billionaire or supermodel. It’s the strory of a woman determined to follow God. And one I plan to read as soon as it arrives.
Angelica told author Arroyo that :
“If you’re following God, He never shows you the end. It’s always a walk of faith. Franciscan virtue is to follow the Providence of God. And God’s providence goes as far as you go. Now that’s the scary thing about it. If you don’t go, He won’t go.
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January 25, 2025
Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Willpower
Rediscovering the greatest human strength: willpowerIn their book, Willpower: Redisovering the Greatest Human Strength, authors Roy Baumeister and John Tierney claim that success, however defined, materially, financially or psychologically, relates to self-control. They confess their original belief that the religious teachings about character, morality and will, were restrictive and punitive. But when their own studies demonstrated the observable link between willpower and self- control, they changed. The authors state, in fact, that “willpower is like a muscle. Self-control demonstrably diminishes as willpower fatigues. Improving willpower is the surest way to a better life…” redicovering the greatest human strength: willpower.
Furthermore, Baumeister and Tierney declare, most major problems, ranging from underachievement in school to obesity to divorce, anxiety, depression, impulsive violence and many more of the most common social illnesses result from a lack of self-control.
Willpower and self-control are essential predictors for a happy life. Lack of both incur massive troubles for the human person.
Gasp!
Sarcasm aside, understanding social science’s love/hate relationship with the reality of the human will and our need to train it, recalls my study of Catholic Christianity at Saint Benedict’s Abbey under the tutelage of Brother Andrew Koch. Like most Americans, including many Christians and Catholics, I lacked appreciation and understanding of virtue, will, soul., intellect…: The extensive vocabulary of faith was utterly foreign. However, once I began to study, I got hungry, remembering the yearning for wisdom I’d had in my youth. As I learned and assimilated authentic wisdom provided by a seemingly bottomless trove of scholars, I changed. Hence everything changed. And continues to do so because there’s no limit to wisdom and light.
There is nothing on earth more desirable than truth, is there?
How did we get here?During the last several days, many are asking, what happened?
How did we become a culture requiring a president to declare there are just two genders?
Or a country whose president must enforce achievement and merit as basis for hires, advancement and salary?
Or an American state declaring it illegal to request proof of citizenship to vote?
The easy answer is to blame all this on the sixties, my coming of age era. It’s surely reasonable to hearken back to those days of protesting everything, but it isn’t sufficient. The answers, apart from our first sin, lie in the words of a rabbi and a priest.
First, the rabbi. Edwin H. Friedman’s Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix nails it. Friedman’s aptly named “cultural camouflage” leads directly to what I’ve called the Institutionalization of Denial. Family therapist and ordained Rabbi, Edwin Friedman, died suddenly in 1996 prior to the completion of this book. It was his family and friends who finished then published this remarkably insightful work.
It was in fact my consistent inablity to predict the future course of relationships on families and institutions over the course of several decades that first led me to question the adequacy of the social science construction of reality and eventually led me to wonder if an intended source of enlightenment had, in fact, become a force for denial…
In this book on leadership, I will describe a similar failure of nerve (to the Socratic Greeks) affecting American civilization today. But I will add, when anxiety reaches certain thresholds, reasonableness and honesty no longer defend against illusion, and then even the most learned ideas can begin to function as superstitions.
Friedman’s theory of leadership, begins with a person, one with integrity-integrity in the sense of willing to stand apart, take command. A leader with nerve because he-or she- has a “differentiated self”. Someone with the “presence” to take a stand, apart from the consensus, relying not on data or consultants but on her abillity to act. Make a decision while accepting that there will be hundreds or thousands who may hate him or her. Accepting that there will be sabatoge, an inevitable result of leadership. There will be resistance.
The priestis Fulton J Sheen who peels back Friedman’s theories to explain the morass oppressing much of humanity: the extinction of guilt by psychiatry. Feudian psychiatry’s insistence that the ills affecting man were external forces applied to him or her done without any fault of the person. With a sweep of psychiatry’s therapeutic touch, sin, conscience and responsibilty were relegated to the medieval past. What suffering people required was understanding and kindness not punishment. A culture of tolerance that developed and transformed society into….this.
In his book, Peace of Soul, the archbishop relates the Lord’s preference for “nasty people.” In a real sense, Sheen writes here about the cultural camouflage of ‘niceness’ that imbues our societies.
Nice people must see themselves as nasty people before they can find peace. When they exchange their proud and diabolical belief that they never did anything wrong to a hope for a Divine remedy for their mistakes, they will have attained to the condition of normality, peace, and happiness. In contrast to the pride of those who deny their guilt to escape self-criticism is the humility of God, Who made a world which added not to His glory and then made man to criticize Him. The nasty people are the convertible people; aware of their own imperfections, they sense within themselves an emptiness…This sense of sin in them does not beget a forlorn despair, but a creative despair, when once they know that they can look beyond themselves for loving relief.
Our Blessed Lord was very fond of nasty people. He told so many stories about them. One of the charges the enemies made against Him was that He ate with nasty people and with sinners. One of the greatest of all the Apostles came to Our Blessed Lord through hate.
“I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.”
The greatest of the apostles came though hateYesterday was the Feast of the conversion of Saint Paul-the apostle who Archbishop Sheen writes “came to Our Blessed Lord through hate.” Saint Paul surely wasn’t an individual I expected to get to know…until I felt impelled to write a novel about his early life, In the Afterword, I wrote this:
Throughout the writing of this book, my decision to imagine the early life of St. Paul has seemed alternatively foolish and wise, arrogant and humbling … and a panoply of other feelings as paradoxical as Paul himself. Of one thing I am sure, however. After a year of immersing myself in the life of the young man called Saul, I am convinced that he is a man for our times. I undertook this book for many reasons, but primarily because I came to see Saul as a man who had no interest in sidestepping the meaning of things, or in appeasing hurt feelings or bruised consciences. Saul was interested in just one thing: truth…
As he told it, he became the most feared persecutor of the followers of the Way— the Christians— until he was quite literally toppled from his throne of certitude. At that point, he became … drum roll here … the Apostle to the Gentiles, trading his Jewish Saul, for the Roman Paul.
Certainties are so seductive, are they not? Whether about religion, the Bible, the hypocrisy of Christians, or the broader concerns of politics, many of our certainties loom so large that they eclipse everything else— including the truth standing right in front of us.
Caravaggio: The Conversion of Saint Paul
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January 18, 2025
Be Made Clean!
hands washing.Be made clean!
A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him and said,
“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
touched the leper, and said to him,
“I do will it. Be made clean.”
The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
Covid provided our modern world with a quasi-understanding of what lepers experienced in ancient Israel., especially in those first fear-filled months. But unlike Covid, leprosy was a known entity in the ancient world. The horrors of the untreatable disease were visible: supparating sores, deformed digits and facial features advertised its presence. Can we imagine the shocked horror at Jesus’ touching the leper? Or the amazement at hearing, “I do will it. Be made clean.?”
Similarly, because the tales of Jesus’ healing miracles have spread througout the land, four men “break through the roof of the house” where Jesus is teaching. This was the only way the intrepid friends could get the paralytic close to Jesus.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to him,
“Child, your sins are forgiven.”
During Jesus’ teaching at the Capernaum synogogue, the people were amazed at his words, wondering who was this Jesus? The demons don’t wonder, they know.
“In their synagogue was a man with an unclean spirit; he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are–the Holy One of God.”
It’s the first week ofordinary time. Altough the word ordinary conveys the commonplace and routine, that’s not the meaning of the church’s ordinary time. It’s root is the Latin word, ordinalis: numbered or ruled…a seasonal rhythm of order. The vestments used by the priests and on the altar during ordinary time are green because the color signifies growth. In this case, our growth: in the daily routines of living our lives, caring for the creatures and the creation we’ve been given to conserve and protect.
Just so, last Sunday, Fr. Chris Munoz , celebrating the Baptism of Our Lord, invited each one of us to follow Jesus as we began this first week of ‘ordinary time.’ It’s been a liturgical week packed with healing, blatant displays of human desperation, exorcism and the call to follow Jesus.
What does that mean, to follow Christ?
These three simple words can grow in heft until they flatten me. True for many reasons but primarily because I’ve finished my third and most thorough read of Diedrich Bonhoefer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Although Bonhoefer is addressing his fellow German Lutherans, we 21st-century-Christian are pierced and exposed by the densely packed truths in these 297 pages. After my second read, I wrote of Bonhoefer’s explanation for faithlessness: disobedience. “The response of the disciples is an act of obedience, not a confession of faith in Jesus.” Without obedience, faith is a sham.
The profound paradox of faith
The path of discipleship is narrow, and it is fatally easy to miss one’s way and stray from the path, even after years of discipleship. And it is hard to find. On either side of the narrow path deep chasms yawn. To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way.
To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenceless, preferring to incur injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way. To see the weakness and wrong in others, and at the same time refrain from judging them; to deliver the gospel message without casting pearls before swine, is indeed a narrow way.
The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger of straying from it…
This brilliant, founder of the Confessing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, actively participated in the plot kill Hitler. It’s a decision that seems to contradict the entire message of his message of discipleship. And there is the rub, isn’t it? We cannot know what impels another. Inevitably, when we try to do so, we sin. Regardless of the evil another man or woman says or does, we must think, look and speak of them with love. No one is excluded.
Unutterably hard, indeed. This week has been one where my inability to do this led to seek confession twice within five days. “If you wish, you can make me clean…I do will it, be made clean!“
Saturday and Sunday’s Liturgical readings provide counsel and consolation:
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”Sunday’s Gospel reading affirms Bonhoefer’s insistence on the fact that obedience must precede faith. It’s at the Cana wedding miracle that disciples gain faith. “Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.”“Do whatever he tells you.”The graces of My mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is — trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to Me, because I pour all the treasures of My graces into them (Diary, 1578).
Saint Faustina Diary
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January 11, 2025
The Object of a New Year: A New Soul and New Eyes
White daisy flower in the crack of an old stone slab – the concept of rebirth, faith, hope, new life, eternal soulThe object of a New Year
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
I’m not unique when, at times, my heart feels like the pavement pictured above: stone-dry, cracked and devoid of life. And then a prayer or a person says or does something that infuses beauty, life...hope. Chesterton’s words dissolve the stony debris hardening our hearts to reveal the incarnated Christmas miracle given freely to each of us 8.2 billion souls on the planet: Everlasting life in Jesus, our savior. The object of a new year: a new soul and new eyes.
What does that mean, a new soul? Father Benedict Kiely explains, in his lovely nugget, “Make Dogma Great Again.” A new soul isn’t just about repentance and resolution to stop commiting the sins of the past, but “a sense of hope and trust in God and a willingness to cooperate with him– to listen to him. And yes, a new soul means a conversion. Let us in a profound way be more commited to our faith in public and private than we were in 2024. That sense of hope has solid grounds even if they are the size of a mustard seed…”
This year-2025-is exceptional. That’s true, I think, for many reasons but primarily two: First, this is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. And secondly, the world has ensconced on the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Why should the anniversary of words promulgated in 325 be material to us 1700 years later?
Make dogma great againI’ve learned over the years that we converts have some things to teach those of you who never walked away from God. Our hard-earned knowledge is implicit in Father Benedict Kiely’s phrase, “make dogma great again.” Following my conversion from atheism to Catholic Christianity, I addressed a variety of groups about what it was like to live without faith. Almost always, about halfway through my talk I stomped the floor, hard, with my foot. The action served both to wake people up as well as to make my point: without faith, there is no ground, no floor, no limit…. Hence when I saw Fr. Kiely’s phrase, I recalled my absolute soul-bursting joy at the blessed, sacred dogma of our Christian and Catholic Chistian faith.
Yes!
The Lord of the Universe emptied himself of all divinity to take on our ruined humanity!
“If you wish, you can make me clean,” the leper prostrates himself before Jesus.
Jesus reaches out his hand, touches him and says,
“I do will it, be made clean.”
Bishop Robert Barron addressed the United States Congress last month. His subject? The Call of Justice. This hour-long-talk is riveting. It’s packed with a trove of material to ponder. For example: “The three trancendentals-properties -of being: Whatever is, to the measure that it is, is true, good and beautiful…thus appealing to the mind, will and heart of man…Culture is predicated on the three transcendentals of the true, the beautiful and the good…Your part of it is a passion for the good, the just…”
The camera pans the faces as they listen. “Truth, Justice, Beauty are other names for God…I think everyone in this room has been summoned….The measure of your life now is how do you respond to this call from uncondtional justice?”
The Jubilee year of hopeAlthough I’ve written before about this Jubilee Year of Hope, it feels that there aren’t enough words to describe my elation at the Holy Father’s opening of five Holy Doors. Pope Francis stated that he wanted the second Holy Door to be at a prison. And so, the Holy Door was opened at Rebibbia Complex. To underscore the wondrous meaning of such a thing, Pope Francis declared that he wanted everyone to “have the opportunity to fling open the doors to their hearts and to understand that hope never disappoints.”
We must remember precisely what a Jubilee means: the extraordinary graces offered to each soul if we prayerfully determine the object of a new year. A time of great joy, universal pardon, recovery of lost family members, freedom from slavery, lands returned to former owners…
The Old Testament readings in Leviticus make clear that each of us is a stranger and a sojourner. Therefore, claims of ownership of land and persons are groundless.
Someone cries from the left: ‘This land is mine!’ Somebody else cries from the right, ‘No way! It is mine!’ This is the sort of situation the Biblical text addresses. It does so by short-circuiting the discourse of rights and entitlement. ‘The land’, says the Lord, ‘shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants’ (Leviticus 25.23).
One of the many gifts of Christmas is contacting those we no longer see. Chris Garza at Saint Paul the Apostle Church Pismo Beach, and I had the chance to ‘talk’ online. Chris spoke of the specialness of this year. Because of Hope: the word that keeps glowing in my heart and mind for 2025! Chris’s comment that he was finishing French Catholic poet Charles Peguy’s epic poem, The Portal to the Mystery of Hope, intrigued me simply because of its title. Published the year of Peguy’s death in 1914, we sense Peguy’s timeless brilliance in his splendid words.
Hope is a little girl, nothing at all….
“And yet it is this little girl who will endure worlds.
This little girl, nothing at all.
She alone, carrying the others, who will cross worlds past.
As the star guided the three kings from the deepest Orient.
Toward the cradle of my Son.
Like a trembling flame.
She alone will guide the Virtues and Worlds.
One flame will pierce the eternal shadows….
The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
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January 4, 2025
New Year’s Resolve: Increase in Humility
Business Leader Attributes Traits Characteristics and Features New Year’s resolve: increase in humility.Huh?
“New Year’s resolve: increase in humility.” What does that even mean?
Indeed.
It was just that suggestion during an Episcopalian priest’s homily that made me walk away from God at the tender age of seventeen. I can recall clearly my thoughts as I left the church for the last time. The language of the sixties:
“I don’t want to be humble!
“I want to be famous……not waste my life like my mother did.”
Webster’s defintion of humility states that “not being arrogant, assertive but submissive” is “chiefly southern.” It’s an Interesting caveat since for the third and I hope the last, time, I’m back in Texas.
All that ambition coalesced into achievements I’d not dreamed of. But instead of pride at the accomplishments and a measure of satisfaction, I felt hollowed out. Rather than enjoying the introductory kudos before my talks, I felt like an imposter–expert? What a joke!
My shock at my serious consideration of the Catholic religion resulted in a conversation with a man who was a spiritual director. It was a term I had never before encountered, but this wise man graciously listened to my story. And seemed to understand my fear that this impulse to become Catholic wasn’t real. After so many years of searching, how could I trust this?
When he told me that the journey was always a masculine inclination, and that the decision to stop and call a place home, always feminine. I wanted to feel baffled by his observation, I needed to resist and discard it.
But I knew what he said was true. The lure of the journey
All of which takes me to another teen, one living in similarly disruptive times. Unwilling to settle for knowledge, this young man refused to waste his time in academic pursuits. Somehow he knew that the “cultivation of reason must be tempered,” for wisdom could be found only in God. And the journey there, lay inward.
The fifteen-hundred-year-old Rule.We Benedictine Oblates read the brief but dense Rule of Benedict three times a year. On January first, we began anew with the Prologue which contains some of the most lushly beautiful prose ever written.
L I S T E N carefully, my child,
to your master’s precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him
from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.
To you, therefore, my words are now addressed,
whoever you may be,
who are renouncing your own will
to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King,
and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience.
And first of all,
whatever good work you begin to do,
beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect it,
that He who has now deigned to count us among His children
may not at any time be grieved by our evil deeds.
For we must always so serve Him
with the good things He has given us,
that He will never as an angry Father disinherit His children,
nor ever as a dread Lord, provoked by our evil actions,
deliver us to everlasting punishment
as wicked servants who would not follow Him to glory.
Prologue-The Rule of Benedict
Father J. Augustine Wetta‘s eminently readable book on Saint Benedict and his Rule is so readable that I just finished a second read. Wetta writes with a rare combination of twenty-first century sarcastic wit coupled with a testament to the profound wisdom embedded in Saint Benedict’s Rule.
He begins by explaining just who Benedict was:
Saint Benedict “was training for a life in politics, the world seemed to be going down the tubes. There were gangs of kids armed to the teeth in the street; there were endless, bloody wars being fought all over the world; and there was a sudden influx of terrible diseases for which there were no cures.
There were scandals in politics and scandals in the Church. In short, the world was a mess. So he ran away. But he didn’t join the circus or find his fortune in The Big City. Instead, he went to live in a cave on the side of a mountain. There, without all the distractions of family and schoolwork and social life, he figured he could focus exclusively on holiness. He was thinking specifically of Christ’s words: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and . . . follow me” (Mt 19:21). He wanted to take those words literally.
Saint Benedict spent the next three years just praying. Ironically, all this praying made him famous.”
Benedict’s ladder.
Now it happens that there is a little-known but highly effective twelve-step self-help program that folks all over the world have been using for more than fifteen hundred years. You won’t hear about it on late-night infomercials or read about it in Vogue or Men’s Health because it’s not about beating the competition, getting rich quick, making friends, enhancing your sex appeal, or influencing people. And it doesn’t have many boisterous proponents, because those who have mastered this program tend to be content just as they are. Nonetheless, those people are happy to share what they know if you ask. The program is called “The Ladder of Humility” and it comes from a short book by Saint Benedict called simply The Rule.
Humility Rules: Saint Benedict’s Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem
That humility’s a lifelong battle is conveyed clearly by the young Roman who walked away from the world to become holy. After twenty-plus years of living the school of Benedict, some old and noxious habits of mine are dead, praise the Lord! Others, unfortunately, are excellent at feinting death but awake with the slightest provocation.
L I S T E N carefully, my child,
to your master’s precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him
from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.
To you, therefore, my words are now addressed,
whoever you may be,
who are renouncing your own will
to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King,
and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience…
Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom. Amen
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December 28, 2024
Time Belongs to God
Surrealism. Spiral of time and human’s hand behind sky’s curtain. Time belongs to GodTime. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world.
Until suddenly, we don’t.
Probably because of serious illness as a small child, I think about my death frequently. Hence my ‘alive time’ has always felt like something that needed to be spent thoughtfully and never wasted. Even before my conversion to Catholic Christianity, I worried whether I’d used– not squandered– the gifts I’d received. To me then, Pope John Paul’s title phrase, “Time Belongs to God,” aptly characterizes the length of human life. Lives that aren’t extinguished by abortion or suicide, that is.
The ancient Stoics practically counseled their followers, “Momento Mori.”
And we Benectine Oblates, like the monks, are advised “day by day, remind yourself that you are going to die.”
If these ruminations seem uncomfortably dark and desolate for these joyous high holidays of Jesus’ birth, let’s consider a few truths of our faith. And review the liturgy for Christmas week:
Unlike every human baby ever born, Jesus was not born to live but to die. Is it likely or even possible that the Lord of the Universe left the details, the manner, people and place of His birth up to chance?That Emperor Augustus just happened to declare the need for a census requiring Joseph and Mary to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem?Or that the too-small inns were happenstance?Could St. Joseph have genuinely believed that Mary had lain with another man?Feast of Saint Stephen
The twofold generation of Christ is admirable; the first, His birth of a Father without a mother, is eternal; the second, His birth of a Mother without a father, happened in time. Eternal Himself, He was born of His eternal Father.
Why do you wonder? He is God. Consider His divinity, and all cause for wonder will cease. Let amazement pass away; let praise ascend; let faith be present; believe what has happened.
Has not God humiliated Himself enough for you? He who was God became Man. The inn was too small; wrapped in swaddling clothes, He was placed in a manger. Who does not marvel? He who fills the world found no room in an inn. Placed in a manger, He became our food.
The very day after Christmas, the liturgical churches celebrate the feast of the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen. We hear in the Book of Acts that,
Stephen, filled with grace and power,
was working great wonders and signs among the people.
Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen,
Cyrenians, and Alexandrians,
and people from Cilicia and Asia,
came forward and debated with Stephen,
but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke.
When they heard this, they were infuriated,
and they ground their teeth at him But he, filled with the Holy Spirit,
looked up intently to heaven
and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God,
and he said,
“Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man
standing at the right hand of God.”
But they cried out in a loud voice, covered their ears,
and rushed upon him together.
They threw him out of the city, and began to stone him.
The witnesses laid down their cloaks
at the feet of a young man named Saul.
As they were stoning Stephen, he called out
“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
“…at the feet of a young man named Saul.” The prophet of the Gentiles was bathed in the blood of Stephen, remarks the EWTN homilist. “What must Saul have seen?” asks Franciscan friar, Father John Paul, in his excellent homily for the feast of Saint Stephen.
The feast of the holy martyrsIs it possible on Saturday’s memorial of the holy martyrs not to think of the holy innocents being dismembered by chemicals or instruments while in the womb? The horrific daily slaughter of 70,000 souls? And not to beg forgiveness for their mothers and abortionists?
On the fourth day after celebrating Christmas, we ponder precisely what Saul saw: Truth in all its explosive and bloody power.
“When truth is proclaimed,” declares Father John Paul, “there are only two choices, submission or denial.” King Herod, like Stephen’s executioners chose denial. “…Could not withstand the wisdom and spirit…covering their ears.”
The homilist reminds us that the process of believing begins with the ears. The hearing of the message of salvation, once heard, descends into our hearts. Then, if we submit, into our intellect and will.
But we’re weak, fearful and incapable of anything worthwhile!
Indeed we are. Father Peter Cameron invites us to embrace our helplessness and flaws and pray before the creche:
“May I never fear my weakness, my inadequacy, or my imperfection. Rather, as I gaze with faith, hope, and love upon your incarnate littleness, may I love my own littleness, for God is with us. Endow my life with a holy wonder that leads me ever more deeply into the Mystery of Redemption and the meaning of my vocation and destiny.”
Sisters and brothers, this is the Jubilee. This is the season of hope in which we are invited to rediscover the joy of meeting the Lord. The Jubilee calls us to spiritual renewal and commits us to the transformation of our world, so that this year may truly become a time of jubilation. A jubilee for our mother Earth, disfigured by profiteering; a time of jubilee for the poorer countries burdened beneath unfair debts; a time of jubilee for all those who are in bondage to forms of slavery old and new…
As we contemplate the manger, as we gaze upon it and see God’s tender love in the face of the Child Jesus, let us ask ourselves: “Are our hearts full of expectation? Does this hope find a place there? … As we contemplate the loving kindness of God who overcomes our doubts and fears, let us also contemplate the grandeur of the hope that awaits us. … May this vision of hope illumine our path each day” (c. m. martini, Christmas Homily, 1980).
Dear sister, dear brother, on this night the “holy door” of God’s heart lies open before you. Jesus, God-with-us, is born for you, for me, for us, for every man and woman. And remember that with him, joy flourishes; with him, life changes; with him, hope does not disappoint.
Homily of the Holy Father
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