Giving Thanks...

One of the most overwhelming privileges of being a priest is the number of times you are there at the moment of a person‘s death. The whole family is gathered around, listening for their loved one’s breathing to slow. It can takes minutes or hours or sometimes even days. It is a sacred and extraordinary time, standing there beside the bed, a privileged moment.

For me, one of the most remarkable experiences of the moment of death was with Martha and Peter more than 30 years ago. I had walked with Peter through an extraordinarily agonizing few years as Martha slowly succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s. I remember visiting the house the first day she no longer recognized who he was, threatening to call the police, because this strange man was now making lunch for her in the kitchen. I remember when she was finally no longer able to speak, and would just sit and stare out the window and mumble at the Lake for hours on end. And I remember when poor Peter was no longer able to take care of Martha, and had to put her into a facility where they could provide 24 hour care. It broke his heart.

Most of all, I remember that night when Martha died. Peter had insistently called me and said he was sure she was about to die and could I come by and pray the prayers of commendation of the dying. I arrived late that night, pulled into the driveway, and the whole family was standing around the bed. Martha was slowly dying, her breaths more shallow and irregular by the minute. And in between each halting breath, she would mutter something unintelligible, much as she had been doing for the past six months. We didn’t pay much attention.

Until all of a sudden, with Peter standing over her, putting ice to her lips, and then slowly running his fingers through her hair, she grabbed his wrist Looked him right in the eye and said with unimaginable clarity, Peter, thank you. Then she closed her eyes and died.

It was the first time she had spoken something intelligible in years, and yet somehow, in that last moment, her love, and her gratitude pierced the fog of her disease, and touched the heart of the man who had stood by her for all those years.

Gratitude is, perhaps the deepest expression of love. The gratitude of the leper who came back to give thanks that he was cured, the gratitude of creatures, who, get on their knees and thank God that they were born.

But sadly, gratitude can seem so rare these days, even among good people like me and you. 

On the day I received my last postgraduate degree I practically sprained my wrist patting myself on the back. But did I think of Miss Lucasak who first taught me cursive in third grade, or Miss Morin who encouraged me to write those one page essays with the pictures two years later. Did I think of the Priest who first inspired me with a love for the Liturgy, or my parents who put me through College, or the inspiring professors I had come to know along the way. Did I think of the scholars who had constructed that world of knowledge in which I had gained some small degree of proficiency, or those who built the institutions which had led me through those mysteries. 

No, I thought of none of them, I never gave them a thought or a prayer. I never said thank-you. But like an ungrateful leper, I just got on with my life and I never looked back.

I was always struck by something which Fred Rogers (you remember Mr. Rogers?) would frequently do when giving a talk. H would stop and ask people to be quiet for a moment and think of someone who had made a big difference in their lives. Maybe the person was dead, maybe they had never even known what a big impact they had on your life. And maybe you never had a chance to say that to them.

Do that now. Stop just for a minute and, in the silence, think of someone who meant a lot to your life and thank God for them.

PAUSE.

Didn’t that feel good?

That’s why, in just a few minutes, I will say to you: Lift up your hearts. And you will respond: We lift them up to the Lord. 

And I will say: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

And you will reply: It is right and just.

Violence and the Presence of God

It’s been quite a year.

Sixty thousand dead in Gaza, and 20,000 of them were children. That’s 2% of the children who lives in Gaza City killed by guns and bombs in a single year.

And then there’s Ukraine. The number killed there is the last four years runs into the millions. Not to mention the accusations of war crimes and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people by mass genocide in Nigeria and the Sudan.

But those numbers don’t mean a lot after awhile, for the horror of violence gets strangely diluted by statistics. A million her, a 100,000 there. What does it mean?

Somehow it really comes home, though, when you hear of a person pulling the trigger of a hand gun at Whitney field two weeks ago, shooting a teenage kid. Then it really comes home.

“Violence,” Habbakuk cries out. “Violence!" and you, O Lord, why don’t you stop it!?

 Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?  Destruction and violence are before me;  there is strife, and clamorous discord.

There is evil in this world. We see it in headlines. We see it in other people. And sometimes, we see it in ourselves.

But why does God allow it?

A Simplanswer. He allow us because he loves us. :oves us enough to give us a choice. A choice to lie or to hate.

For real love requires freedom. No one can force me to love. Love is the choice to let go the way of my own self interests or to lay down my life, to sacrifice my life for the other.

Loving is always a choice. And so is violence. 

The devil and his minions whisper incessantly into ears, just like they did for Eve and her husband. “God can’t save you. You’ll a sap if you think about other people. They’ll just take advantage of you. They’re a threat to you and to your happiness and even to your life. You need to take action!  Protect yourself!  Kill them before they can kill you!

It happens in the school yard in fifth grade, and in High School when the rival gets the girl, or at the office when she gets the job I should have gotten or at Thanksgiving, when that embodiment of selfishness needs to be cut off and made to suffer!

“Violence,” Habbakuk says, Violence on every side! Sounds like a great idea, the devil whispers into my heart…and yours…

And that’s the way it is. People can choose to love, or they can choose to hate. And God will not stop them. They can choose to go to heaven, or choose to go to hell.

And old and very wise friend of mine used to say that, when he was younger, he found it very hard to believe that anyone could be in hell. But since he grew older, he said, he now has a list!

There is evil in this world. And people will sin against you. Jesus told us as much. They will revile us and talk about us and say every vile thing against you. 

That’s what Jesus meant when from the wood of the Cross when he prayed the first lines of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why ave you forsaken me!” For at that moment Jesus was taking upon himself all the violence and all the sufferings of every man or woman who ever lived. He takes them upon himself, like an innocent sheep led to the slaughter, and he invites us to join our sufferings to his.

So, when they treat you so badly, join your sufferings to his.

When they spread life about you behind your back, join your sufferings to his.

When they seek to kill your reputation or make everyone hate you, join your sufferings to his.

When that same relative does that same thing again at Thanksgiving, join your sufferings to his.

When even your spouse or your kids or your best friend turn against you, join your sufferings to his.

For he hangs there, nailed to a tree for love of you. Which is why that Cross is our only salvation.

So what we are we to do, in the face of Violence. The same thing he did. We are to join our sufferings to his, and just like Jesus, open our arms and pray, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Saint Piero Frassati

Pope Leo is canonizing two young people as saints today. One of them is Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old boy who devoted himself to promoting devotion to the Holy Eucharist. The other is Piero Giorgio Frassati, who died at the age of 24, but spent his life loving Christ in the poor.

I first came across Piero Frassati about ten years ago, when a young seminarian gave me a copy of his biography and told me how much he inspired him. Indeed, Piero’s brief life was a homily far better than I could ever preach on Jesus’ demand that we ‘pick up our crosses and follow him.’

This was because Piero did not see the cross as something to be feared, but as the way to find Jesus in the poor and in everyone who suffers. And by offering to carry their cross with them, even for a little while, he was able to walk with Jesus himself.

As a little boy, Piero Giorgio once overheard one of the sisters say that Jesus was not only present in the consecrated host received at Communion, but also in the poor. So when his relatives gave him gifts of money for his First Communion, he told his mother he wanted to give it away to people who had nothing to eat.

Another time, walking home from school, he met a boy with no shoes. Piero gave him his own shoes and walked home barefoot. His father was furious, but little Piero was simply puzzled. The boy didn’t have shoes. He gave him his shoes. What could be wrong with that?

When Piero began attending daily Mass, his care for the poor became even more consistent. As he later wrote to a friend: “Jesus comes to me every morning in Holy Communion, and I repay Him in my small way by visiting His poor.”

His father was a good man but never trusted the Church. He was a journalist who helped found one of Italy’s largest newspapers. They say he once lost his temper one winter when 13-year-old Piero was riding the streetcar home from school. He noticed a woman shivering outside by a snowbank and gave her his streetcar fare to buy food and then walked the last three miles home in the snow!

He would never tell these stories himself, however, and lived the life of a normal teenager. He enjoyed hiking and skiing, and perhaps the most famous picture of him is on top of a mountain smoking a pipe with his friends. He played soccer, told jokes, pulled pranks, and loved spirited debates. But quietly and simply, his friends recalled, he just naturally sought to help others by picking up their crosses and carrying them with them.

Every day after high school he would stop in poor neighborhoods on his way home—often facing his father’s wrath for being late to supper. He regularly spent his small allowance on bread, food, and medicine, which he quietly delivered to families in need. When a friend once asked him why he did this, he explained that the cross is not some distant object but what we are called to carry every day in prayer, sacrifice, and love. “Our life,” he wrote, “must be a continual preparation for heaven; the cross is the ladder that leads us there.”

I could also tell you about his joining the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, or how he decided to study engineering so he could be near the miners who suffered so much, or how near the end of his life he devoted himself to visiting the sick—especially those whom everyone else avoided for fear of catching polio.

Indeed, he did contract polio himself, but would not stay in bed, since his grandmother was dying at the same time and he wanted to care for her needs. Eventually, however, the disease overcame him—or perhaps not. For just before he died, barely able to move, he scrawled a shaky note asking a friend to deliver medicine to one of the poor he regularly visited. That note—almost illegible because of his paralysis—was the last thing he wrote. It summed up his whole life: even in his final agony, he was thinking of the poor.

He died 100 years ago this summer, after which thousands of poor people came to his funeral. In the few years God gave him on this earth, he taught us what it truly means to pick up your cross and follow the Lord.

 

Introduction to the Sacred Liturgy at PSJXXII

 It was a delight to meet the first year seminarians at Pope Saint John XXIII National Seminary today for our first class in INTRODUCTION TO THE SACRED LITURGY!

Click here to download a link to the slides for our first class!

Greed and the Rich Fool

This morning we hear about the greed of the man who wants to die with all the toys and builds a great big barn to keep them in. And then he dies.

He’s a lot like Harry Potter! No, not that Harry Potter! Harry F. Potter. He was the president of the Savings and Loan who treated George Bailey so poorly back in Bedford Falls. Harry F. Potter was the definition of greed.

Or Gekko? No, not that Gekko. Gordon Gekko, the king of Wall Street, who once whispered so ominously that “greed is good.”

Or me, right after each new IPhone had been announced, so convinced that this one purchase is all that stands between me and true happiness?

It’s like the old song says, “I want it all…and I want it now!”

That’s how it is with greed, the only sin which merits three sentences in the ten commandments:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Maybe that’s why almost half of us spend more each month than we make, accumulating mountains of stuff, after which we go to the Container Store to get stuff to put all our stuff in. We live in a society which constantly celebrates that bigger is better and more is best, where acquisition is the goal of life and where having a lot makes me happy.

All of which exacerbates the distances between us. Did you know, for example, that the three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the poorest 48 nations combined? And that the top 1% of wage earners in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts earn the yearly salary of the other 99% in just three weeks?

So, what is the antidote to greed? One thing only: the Lord Jesus Christ, hanging upon the cross, clinging to nothing of this world, and letting go of everything for love of us. Total self-emptying kenosis, the very opposite of grasping green-eyed greed.

For it is only by giving our hearts and our lives over to Christ and inviting him to live within us, that we can begin to find the courage to give and not to grab.

The Little Flower understood it best when she called us to a life of gratitude rather than greed.

“I feel, [she once wrote] that when I am charitable it is Jesus acting in me; the more I am united to Him the more do I love all my Sisters….True Charity consists in bearing with all the defects of our neighbor, in not being surprised at his failings, and in being edified by his least virtues.”

So we who seek to follow Jesus are called, she continues, not only to give to whoever asks, but to let what we think belongs to us to be taken. “I know it seems hard; [she writes] but the yoke of the Lord is sweet and light: and when we accept it we feel its sweetness immediately…For only love can enlarge my heart...

That’s why each time I am greedy, the Lord smiles patiently and shows me the wounds he suffered for my salvation, still bleeding from his hands, his feet and his side…he smiles at me and says, “You have earned nothing. All is gift…even the air you breathe. And it is only by the gratuitous love of God that you live and move and seek my face.”

For greed, dear friends, is but a lie whispered by the devil into innocent hearts, tempting them to seek their own glory, and not the glory of God.

Hesed and the Love of God

You have heard it said that God is love. He is love. Where love abides, there is God. Where there is no love, there is only darkness and sin.

 

There are two words for love in Hebrew. Ahavah is the word for the love between a mother and child, a husband and wife, a brother and sister or friends. But there’s another word for the

love of God…Hesed. Hesed is that steadfast, loyal, and merciful love which God shows to his people. It is more than human love, because it wants to forgive.

We hear how unreasonable such love can be as Abraham tests God’s love. Will you still destroy Sodom if there are fifty innocent souls within its’ walls? No. What about 45? No. What about 30? No. What about 20? No. What about 10? No. For God’s love is the love that is aching to forgive. Have no doubt about it, God is the God of justice, but he is the judge with

a merciful heart.

Like the father of the prodigal who gives him his half of the estate and who then sits outside waiting for him to come home after he has squandered it on dissolute living. Like the shepherd

who goes in search of the one sheep he has lost, or the woman who spends all day searching for the lost coin. God loves us so much that he desires more than anything else that we repent and

live.

And he loves us so much that he wants us to have the same merciful love for one another. That’s what we pray at least three times everyday. Forgive us our sins Lord, just as much as we forgive those who sin against us!

So, is there someone you have not forgiven. Someone who hurt you very deeply? Remember what the Lord said about that? If you remember someone who has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go be reconciled with your brother. Then return and offer your gift. 

You can always come back for the 9:45!

For if I have not love, I am nothing.

Sede Vacante and the Death and Election of a Pope

Here is a link to the slides for a workshop on Sede Vacante and the Death and Election of a Pope which I presented to the Young Adult Study Group this week. I hope you find them to be informative.

Sede Vacante and the Death and Election of a Pope