On Shepherding...

 It’s dark, and the sheep are vulnerable. They’re huddled together inside the sheep pen, sleeping soundly. I’m not sure what sheep count when they are falling sleep, but they are, in any case, fast asleep, trundled like little bundles of white wool.

They sleep so soundly because of the ingenuity of the shepherd boy, who, in an attempt to keep the sheep together, has constructed an enclosure by rolling big rocks in a circle, with a four foot opening at one end. He learned this trick from his big brother, who used to be the shepherd boy and he learned it from his father. Shepherds have been passing down this trick for keeping sheep together since the time of Jesus.

Which is why Jesus talks about it so much: the rocks which make up the walls and the opening, which he calls the sheep-gate.

Of course it is not, properly speaking, a gate at all. It’s just a bunch of rocks, and the shepherd boy himself serves as the sheep-gate. Once all the sheep are inside, he lays down across the opening his head on one rock and his feet on the other. That way, if a sheep tries to escape, he would have to walk over the shepherd boy and wake him up. And if a wolf tries to get in, it is over the body of the shepherd.

And that’s why, just a few weeks before Bishop McManus will ordain four of our brothers as priests, the Church gives us this passage to reflect on. For that shepherd boy is providing an example for every priest of what he’s being ordained for. Like Jesus, the Good Shepherd, he is called to, quite literally, lay down his life for the sheep. 

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the great High Priest who is the model for every Shepherd’s heart, quite literally, laid down his life upon the Altar of the Cross for love of the Flock.

And when we go to or watch the stream of the ordinations in just a few weeks, we will hear these men promise to do just that.

First, they promise obedience and respect. Like the young shepherd who lays down to become a sheep-gate, those to be ordained will kneel before the Bishop and place their hands in his. He will look them right in the eye and ask each one whether he is willing to promise obedience and respect, not just to him, but to his unknown successors as well. 

Will you go, not where you choose, but where the Church will send you? Will you preach not yourself or your own bright ideas, but Christ Jesus, in season and out, whether they acclaim or deride you.

Will you celebrate the sacraments faithfully, not even praying in your own words, but with the ancient words and rites the Church has passed down to you? Will you forgive sins and anoint the sick (often at two o’Clock in the morning), not in your own name, but in the name of Christ, the High Priest, showing his gentleness and compassion?

Will you pray for the flock God places in your care, in the middle of the night and in the noonday sun, in public and in the quiet of your room? Will you, in the words of the Ordination rite “beg God’s mercy upon the people entrusted to your care by observing the command to pray without ceasing?” 

Will you offer the perfect sacrifice of Christ upon the altar, and join to it your life and the lives of those you shepherd? Will you be the good shepherd, laying down your life lest the sheep stray or the wolf get in the door?

And through the many years, the man, the very human man who raises a Chalice in perfect sacrifice for all the days to come, will imperfectly answer each of those questions. Some days he will lay down his life with the fervor of a young martyr, and on others he may seek his own advantage. Some days he will be the very compassion of Christ and on others irascible and narcissistic. For the shepherds God chooses for you are not saints or demigods, but, as Saint Paul reminds us, “men chosen from among men,” each given the inestimable joy of serving as the fragile vessel through which Christ continues to act in his Church.

For while the priest may pour the water, it is Christ who baptizes. And while the priest may give the penance, it is Christ who forgives sins. While the priest may make the sign of the cross, it is Christ who blesses, the priest holding the host in his hands, but Christ who gives us his flesh as food for the journey

I love this time of year, beginning with the Renewal of Priestly Promises at the Chrism Mass and soon to include Ordinations to the Diaconate and Priesthood. For in between, God gives each Priest the chance to reflect on what he’s called to be, and what he may have become.

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Just yesterday I received a box from Tally’s Church Supply. It’s my gift to one of the ordinands in the form of an old chalice, re-plated in gold for his First Mass. The chalice was first raised at an Altar back in the 1950’s by a newly ordained priest, the Chrism still fresh on his hands. But through the years, as the aging Priest moved from assignment to assignment, the patina discolored and the chalice picked up its share of nicks and scratches.

Now the chalice is fresh and new, ready to be raised again by young and newly anointed hands in offering the great Sacrifice of Praise which is the center of our lives, as we pray that God give to this good new Priest the spirit of the parson of whom Chaucer wrote so many years ago:

“Christe’s lore and his apostles twelve he taught,

but first he followed it himself.”

Seeing God Face to Face

You remember what it was like last year at this time? For weeks and months on end you were unable to see your mother, your brother or your best friend.

Oh, sure, you could chat with them on Zoom, but that just wasn’t the same. Face to screen is not the same thing as face to face.

I can remember in late summer, waiting outside a sandwich shop in West Stockbridge waiting to see my oldest and best friend for the first time in six months. I remember just sitting there and wondering what it would be like, after six months, to see his face again, or at least his eyes above the blue surgical mask. And it was so good to see him.

We long to see the face of the those whom we love…face to face.

That’s how we long to see the face of God. The Hebrew word for face is pānîm, and it’s used in reference to seeing the face of God over a hundred times in the Old Testament. For how much we long to see God’s face.

And it’s not a vain hope, for we can call God “you” —- he has a face and we can enter into a relationship with him. As our beloved Pope emeritus reminds us, 

God is certainly above all things, but still he talks to us, he listens to us, he sees us, he speaks to us, he makes a covenant, he is capable of love.¹

In 1979, archaeologists excavating a tomb near Jerusalem discovered two small silver scrolls that recorded a priestly blessing from the sixth book of Numbers. The scrolls were dated to the 7th century B.C., making them the oldest written Scriptures we have ever found. 

These ancient silver scrolls preserved an even more ancient blessing, which since Aaron has been prayed by priests over their people:

May the Lord Bless you and keep you. 

May the Lord make his face to shine on you, 

and be gracious to you. 

May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace.²

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you…may he uncover his face to you and bring you peace!  It’s an answer to the Responsorial refrain we sang just this morning: “Lord, let your face shine on us.”

That’s why we read in the Book of Exodus, “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.”³ For this was a foreshadowing of what we would experience in Jesus, in whom the search for the face of God is at an end…in him we see and touch and even consume all there is to know and experience about God, “the sum total of Revelation.”⁴

Again, to our beloved emeritus:

Jesus shows us God’s face and makes God’s name known to us. In the Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he says to the Father: “I have manifested your name to them...I made known to them your name”⁵…For “whoever sees him, sees the Father,”⁶ as he said to Philip.⁷ 

So….we long to see God’s face. We long to see, Jesus, who introduces us to the Father when he teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, and (as I will say in a few minutes) “we dare to call him Father.” The word for Father in Hebrew, which Jesus would have used, is Abba.  Just like daddy, or pappa. Abba!

Which brings me to a story I may have told you already, but, no matter, it gets better each time I tell it.

It goes back more than forty years, when I was with two of my brother seminarians on an old Arab bus bumping along a dusty backroad from Tiberius to Jerusalem. 

At the heart of the story is a five year old boy who climbed onto the bus, holding the hand of his father.  Father and son were Hasidim (good orthodox Jews, who only spoke Hebrew) and they each dressed identically, with dark pants, white buttoned shirts, black hats with their ultra-orthodox curls on either side and the little tassels from their prayer shawls hanging below their waists.  The father spoke to the boy softly in Hebrew while they moved to stand in the back of the bus, all the seats having now been taken.

As we continued to bump along in the old school bus, half the Israeli countryside crammed into that little aisle, including young soldiers with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders and finally an old man with a goat.  Yes, a goat, which stood just to my right in the aisle.

When the little Hasidim boy at the back of the bus spotted the goat, his eyes grew big as saucers, and overcome with curiosity he pulled his hand from his father’s and fought his way down the aisle as only a five-year-old can do.  When he got to the goat he stared, then smiled (I half expected the goat to smile back) and cautiously began to play with the goats beard, then pet him on the head and then conduct an extended conversation with him in their native Hebrew.

But, as five-year-olds do, he soon grew bored with his new adventure, so he turned to go back to him father, who had been smiling at him during the whole course of this wild adventure.  But the boy couldn’t see his father from way down there near the goat.  All he could see were the big Israeli soldiers with their guns, and the funny looking blind man with his lunchbox and the young Americans all staring at him and he panicked, yelling at the top of his lungs “Abba!  Abba!  Abba!”

He was desperate to see the face of his Father, who pushed through the crowd and swept him up in his arms. And when the little boy saw Abba’s face through his years, he began to giggle.

As we will, on that blessed last day, when we shall see the Lord, bask in the light of his glory, and see him face to face.

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1 - Benedict XVI, 16 January 2013.

2 - Num 6:24-26.

3 - Exodus 33:11.

4 - Dei Verbum, no. 2.

5 - cf. Jn 17:6; 6, 26.

6- cf. Jn 14:9.

7 - Benedict XVI, 16 January 2013.

Faith: Where the Feeble Senses Fail

On the day I made my First Communion, Saturday, June 4, 1960 my Godparents, Nora and George, gave me this little prayer book. It still looks pretty good for a a sixty-one year old book.

And this book taught me a very important lesson. On page 55, there’s a picture of the Priest holding up the host, entitled “The Changing of the Bread.”  Here is what it says: “This is the holiest part of the Mass. The priest first changes the bread into the living body of Jesus. He uses the same words Jesus used. He then raises the Sacred Host over his head for you to see. It is really Jesus. Look at it and say: “My Lord and my God.”

And I learned, a few years later, where those words came from. You heard them too, just a few minutes ago. They are the words spoken by Thomas when he touched the wounds of Jesus and realized that it is not a ghost he is seeing, but “My Lord and my God.”

Thomas had a hard time believing it was the Lord without being able to see and touch him. “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe,” he stubbornly insisted.

But then, eight days later, Jesus again appears to his disciples in the upper room, including even Thomas.  And Jesus says to him: "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it into my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”   

And then Thomas says it: the same words little Jimmy learned to say on the day of his First Communion: “My Lord and my God!”

And then Jesus, thinking of little Jimmy, says the last words to Thomas in today’s Gospel ‘You have believed, Thomas because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’

Saint Thomas Aquinas was addressing the same reality when he wrote the famous Catholic hymn we call the Pange Lingua, or the Tantum ergo. You probably know the most famous stanza by heart, even in Latin:

Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Hence so greatly the Sacrament

Veneremur cernui:

Let us venerate with heads bowed

Et antiquum documentum

And let the old practice

Novo cedat ritui:

Give way to a new rite;

Præstet fides supplementum

Let faith supply or supplement or make up for

Sensuum defectui.

How the senses fail.

Or, as the old English translation puts it:

Faith for all defects supplying,

Where the feeble senses fail.

Senses fail. Usually our senses do a good job. Saint Thomas (the one from Aquino) understood this. In his famous Summa Theologica, he describes both exterior and interior “sensitive faculties.” There are five exterior senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). But then he describes four interior senses: consciousness (or common sense), imagination, instinct and memory.

Now in a few minutes we will recite the Creed, the summary of what we believe has been revealed to us by God. We will say that we believe in God, although we have not seen him. And we will profess that we believe that he made heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible. Even though, by definition, we have not see the invisible things (namely angels and demons). We have not seen, but we still believe! We have not touched, but we still believe!

And so we go back to Jesus’ last words to Thomas: ‘You have believed, Thomas because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ And we believe because we have Faith. This same faith which Saint Paul today calls our victory over the world.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we read the definition of Faith: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”

Such Faith is a gratuitous gift of God’s grace, and the origin and essence of that Faith is in knowing the Lord Jesus way down deep inside.  

- the same Jesus who walked into the room where the doors were locked and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

- the same Jesus who walks through all the doors we have locked with our fears, our terrors and our sins….who walks into our hearts and says, “Peace be with you.”

 and our the terrors 

- The same Jesus you first knew as a little child, kneeling beside the bed, trying to remember which shoulder to touch with the sign of the cross.

- The same Jesus who delivered you from all the real and imagined fears of adolescent selfishness and who taught you to love and to laugh and to forgive.

- The same Jesus who showed you a path he had laid out just for you and introduced you to all those people he wanted to you to love.

- The same Jesus who gives you meaning and satisfaction and purpose and direction.

- The same Jesus who rescues you, again and again, from your selfishness, foolishness and sin.

- The same Jesus who died for you on that Cross and rose triumphant from the tomb that you might never really fear death again.

-The same Jesus who will return in glory to judge the living and the dead and who will raise up your mortal body from the tomb.

- The same Jesus whom we see with our hearts and touch with our souls when the priest raises up a little piece of bread, consecrated and transformed into his Body.

- The same Jesus whom we approach, trembling with Thomas and with all the Church, whom we look upon and touch and say: “My Lord and my God.”

Easter Homily

A great silence lay heavy upon the earth, as in the darkness of a tomb, thick with death, with ancient sin and crippling despair, It seemed that all was lost, that Satan’s empty show and fear and pain and loss has won the day.

A great silence lay upon the earth, as they walked in the darkness to his tomb with vials of oil to anoint a dead body on that awful, awful night.

It’s not unlike the dark silence of so many days in the dark pandemic year just past. A year so like the darkness of the tomb, whose shadows fill us with dread and make us tremble.

But the great good news of this Easter morn is that the tomb was empty!  And therein lies the mystery and meaning of our lives.

In the emptiness of that tomb, every question is answered, for those whose ears will hear.

In the emptiness of that tomb, every doubt is washed away, for those whose hearts will believe. 

In the emptiness of that tomb, every fear and sin is buried, for those who are willing to rise with Christ.

For from the darkness of our selfishness.  

From the pitch blackness of war and violence,

From the blindness of sin and rebellion,

a light rose from that tomb,

that will never be extinguished,

that will never die!

That light is the Son of the Living God,

through whom this world and time itself were made,

in whom we live and move and have our being.

He was made flesh for us,

a weak and little baby in the arms of his Virgin mother,

he let go of his power as God,

and put on our human flesh,

to be God and man, and to teach us how to love.

And then he taught us,

to always take the last place,

to seek out and care for the poor,

to pick up our crosses,

to seek only holiness and love.

And when, finally,

his time had come,

he suffered and died for us,

he was nailed to a cross,

opening his arms in an everlasting sign

of his eternal love.

And when they buried him in the tomb,

that cold and scary Friday night,

most of them thought the story was over.

That he was dead, and would stay that way.

But on the Easter morning,

the light pierced the darkness,

and nothing else would ever really matter again.

Only the mystery of this Easter morning:

To die to myself,

and to be born to him alone.

To love unto death,

and to rise to eternal glory.