Our Lady of Cisne

On Saturday morning we were honored to welcome the Ecuadoran community for a celebration of Our Lady of Cisne.  Here are the words of welcome I offered before the Mass was celebrated by Father Porras.

Bienvenido a su casa de la Catedral de San Pablo para esta fiesta de la Virgen del Cisne.  Agradezco a Padre Porras su disposición de celebrar esta misa. Sé que con la devoción de la Antigua estatua Franciscana de la Virgen María comienza  la gran peregrinación desde el santuario de El Cisne hasta la Catedral de Loja.  Durante cuatrocientos años los fieles de Ecuador y Perú han honrado a la Santísima Virgen y han pedido su ayuda. ¿Puedo pedirles un favor?  Por favor, únanse a mí para pedir a la Virgen del Cisne que interceda por nosotros aquí en la Catedral de Worcester, para que bajo su protección podamos recibir todas las gracias que necesitamos para seguir la voluntad de Dios.

Gracias a todos!  Gracias por ser tu presencia!

Seeking the Narrow Gate

Today we hear the Lord urge us to seek to “strive to enter through the narrow gate.” It’s the little space which is hard to squeeze through…it’s uncomfortable, maybe even painful, but it is the way that leads to him. It is the way of the cross and of the crib.  It is the way of vulnerability.

Like the crib which holds the baby in a manger. Is there anything more vulnerable than a baby in a manger? He can’t feed himself, like the little lambs who eat the straw. He can’t run away, like sheep dogs barking in the night. He can’t even make himself heard, like the bellowing calf. He is dumb as an ox and weak as a baby rabbit. He can do nothing but be.  

But was there ever a more beautiful being, a more wondrous birth, a more glorious incarnation than Christ, the incarnate, the only-begotten Son of God? For he chose to empty himself, taking the form of a weak, puking babe in a feed box, son of a Virgin, wrapped in baby cloths and reigning from a throne of stinky straw.

Catherine of Siena understood it when she wrote that Christ came:

“…so that I, then, with my littleness, would be able to see your greatness, God, you made yourself a little one, wrapping up the greatness of your Godhead in the littleness of our humanity.” 

And that is what God asks us to become in turn: weak, vulnerable and willing to accept the crosses he may send our way, collapsing into his arms in total surrender to his will.  And there are few things harder, for me or for you.

For when I look in the mirror, I know what I want to see.  I want to see youthful perfection. I want to see the me I want folks to see, perfect in every way. I want to see the me I want my friends to see, warm, loving and ever so patient and giving. I want to see the me I want God to see.  I want him to say, “What a good job I did with that one!  He is truly the Son in whom I am well pleased.

But while you can fool some of the folks most of the time, and many of your friends some of the time, there is no fooling God.  For “nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”  We are naked before God, whether we want to be or not.

Which makes it strange that we spend our entire lives running away from who we are, always afraid that it’s not enough.  That’s because vulnerability is hard work and requires nightly examinations of conscience and constant vigilance and good and honest friends, and really smart and strong spiritual directors and shrinks to stay honest.  Because we run from vulnerability like it’s the plague.

But what is more vulnerable than the baby in a manger or the man on the cross.

Though he was in the form of God he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into the likeness of man and accepting even death, death on a cross.

And as he did it, he opened his arms and looked us right in the eye, and said, love one another as I have loved you.  Take up your vulnerability and follow me. Vulnerability.  It is the key to unlock what God wants of us… But it is never easy.

A case in point…

I was, I suppose, a typical late seventies seminarian.  Each night of my senior year at Holy Cross, everyone would gather in my room and we would sit in a circle, burn incense before an icon and sing Compline.  Each morning, I would pray Morning Prayer and there was always a Gelineau Psalter jostling around in my book bag.  I came to the Seminary entirely devoted to the Psalms and the essential role of the Liturgy of the Hours as a sanctifier of time and a participation in the very prayer of Christ.

And so the preservation of the LOH, to exclusion of almost all other versions of Christian Prayer, became something of a crusade for me.  Novenas and devotions were nice, but they were so yesterday.  I belonged to the enlightened ones who did not pray to get something but to join our hearts and souls to the cosmic praise which transcended more primitive forms.  I would graciously tolerate the imperfect usages of others, but I knew God liked my prayers best of all.

So when my spiritual director, suggested I might benefit from an introduction to the Jesus Prayer, I smiled at him indulgently, but never really took it seriously.

For, you see, this prayer had no drama. It lacked dramatic rubrics.  There were no prescribed postures or incense or bells or intellectually challenging prayers.  You just sit there, he said, and say over and over again: Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.  “Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner”?  Yes, he said.  But more slowly and with your eyes cast on the cross or closed.

So, skeptically, I tried it.  Over and over and over again.  And by the fourteenth time, I was getting bored…longing to go do something useful, like matching my socks.  But I stubbornly kept on.  And by the twenty-eighth time I was angry: “this is not doing any good.  I could have gotten through mid-day prayer by now.  I’m not accomplishing a darn thing.  I didn’t say darn.  

But at least I had enough sense to keep pushing on…until I pushed through, and started to listen to what I was saying, with more than my head.  Slowly, very slowly, my heart came out to play.  And I began to pray: to see the face of Jesus, and to see it as something more than a reflection of me.  And then my voice began to blend with the voice of the Leper by the side of the road:  Jesus!  Son of the Living God!  Have mercy on me, a sinner!  And by the sixtieth time, I didn’t want to stop, for I felt embraced by the mercy of God, overwhelmed, washed over and transformed.  Only when I had unmasked my vulnerability, was I able to begin to learn how to pray…

So, you wanna be a better person than I was?  You wanna be what God wants you to be?

Seek out the narrow gate.  Be vulnerable. 

For conformity to the vulnerability of Christ as we open our arms on all the crosses God gives to us is the way he makes us the kind of people that he wants us to be.

Mary our Queen...

When Pope Pius XII established this feast (a year after I was born), he told us that she who was the most blessed of all women was also more worthy of the title Queen than any other creature. We celebrate Mary’s queenship just eight days after her Assumption because, in the words of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, she “was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory... and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son.”¹

But what do we mean when we say that Mary is a queen?  That she was wealthy?  That she was powerful? No. Mary is Queen in the same way that Jesus is King of the Universe. 

It is a royalty “interwoven with humility, service and love. It is above all serving, helping and loving. 

Do you remember how Jesus was acclaimed as a King?  It was with the inscription which Pilate nailed above his head on the cross, which read “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”²  This is the King who suffers with and for us, the king who governs us by laying down his life for us.  

And the same is true of Mary our Queen, who is the humble servant of God and the servant of all mankind.  She is the Queen of love “who lives the gift of herself to God”³ and who, “by loving us, by helping us in our every need…is our sister, a humble handmaid.”⁴

1 - Lumen Gentium, n. 59.

2 - cf. Mark 15:26.

3 - Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience (22 August 2012).

4 - Ibid.

Naomi and Ruth...

Today we hear one of the greatest stories of friendships between two women in the whole Bible. 

It begins as a famine breaks our in Bethlehem and Elimelech and his wife Naomi and their two sons (Mahlon and Chilion) emigrate to Moab, where Elimelech dies, leaving Naomi as a widow with the two boys.

When the two kids grow up, they marry Orpah (not Oprah, but Orpah) and Ruth.

Ten years later Naomi’s two sons die and she is left with no husband or son to take care of her in her old age. So she decides to go back home to Bethlehem and says goodbye to her daughters in law.

Now Orpah behaves normally.  She kisses Naomi goodbye and that’s that.  

But Ruth begins to follow Naomi as she begins to walk out of town on her way back home.  Naomi protests, but then Ruth provides one of the most beautiful speaches in the whole Bible, when she says: "Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you! For wherever you go, I will go, wherever you live I will live, your people shall be my people, and your God my God."

The young widow Ruth is so devoted to her old mother-in-law not because she is rich or powerful. No.  She is so utterly and completely devoted to her, just because she loves her.

Just like God loves us.

Thar' be whales!

Whale watching is a great way to celebrate the summer, as our young people and some of their families took to the Ocean to encounter these wonders of God's creation!

Fear of the Lord

Here's my homily for tomorrow on the fear of the Lord.

You just heard Moses say it: “what does the LORD, your God, ask of you but to fear the LORD, your God, and follow his ways exactly.”

Fear of the Lord is an uncomfortable concept for us to come to grips with. But if we do not begin with fear of the Lord, we can never come to know and love and trust in him. 

We hear it over and over again in the Old Testament: “fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). “Fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). “Fear of the LORD is the beginning of…understanding” (Proverbs 9:10).

For the basic reality of God and me is that he is big and I am little. He is the creator and I am the created. It is his will and his will alone that matters. And my part is to obey him or choose turn away.

Without him there is nothing. Apart from him there is formless, empty darkness and lifeless cold. A void. Nothing at all.

But with him is all meaning, truth and endless love. Gazing upon his glory is perfect love and apart from him there is nothing.

Which is why we speak of two kinds of repentance in the Act of Contrition. The first is based on my dread of the “the loss of heaven and the pains of hell,” my fear and abject dread of embracing the dark, cold nothingness of evil and spending an eternity separated from the ground of all being. This is fear of the Lord. A fear based upon the reality that God is very big and I am very little.

But we also speak of another motivation for our contrition, as “most of all” I turn away from my sins because they offend thee my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.

All good, and deserving of all my love. That is what God is. All powerful? All knowing? sure! But all loving and all good, as well. Worthy of my fear. But even more worthy of my love.

Fostering Vocations on the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time...

"The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few.” How many times have you heard those words of Jesus repeated, usually at the beginning of a vocation talk. And usually, the preacher will tell you what a shortage of priests we face.

But is that true? Do we face a shortage of priests?

Well, the number of Priests in the United States has dropped by a third, while the number of Catholics has actually increased by close to twenty million, or nearly twenty-five percent. So, twenty-five percent more Catholics and thirty percent fewer priests accounts for the fact that the roughy seventy million Catholics in the United States don’t see a priest quite as often as they used to. Sounds like a shortage.

A good comparative measure to use is the ratio of priests to people. In other words, how many people are there for one priest in a given place. 

When I was ten years old (in 1963) there were just under nine hundred people for each priest. Today, there are over 4,000 Catholics for each priest. That’s more than a 300% increase in the number of Catholics a single priest must take care of. Sounds like a shortage.

Why are there fewer priests? One of the biggest factors is age. The baby-boomers produced more babies, and hence more vocations, than this country has ever seen before, and probably more than we will ever see again. That’s why 1950 was the year we had more priests per people in the United States than ever before and more than we have had ever since.

But those of us born in the 50’s are reaching our sell-by date. The average age of a priest in the United States was 35 in 1970. Forty years later it was 63. Today it is approaching 70. So, in most of our dioceses, almost half of our priests are at retirement age. It doesn’t take a sociology major to figure out that as the large number of priests in my generation head off to the nursing home and our final reward, the number of people to be served by each priest will only continue to increase precipitously.

But does this decrease really represent a shortage of priests? It certainly feels like a shortage when the parish I grew up in (Saint Brigid’s in Millbury) had a pastor and three curates when I was a kid. It now has a singe priest who covers two parishes. It feels like a shortage.

But it's also a complex reality. For example, when you compare the ratio of priests to people today to the ratio of priests to people in the 1920’s, it’s just about the same. It was that baby-boomer bubble that raised our expectations.

And when you compare the ratio of priests to people in the rest of the world, well we’re looking pretty good. Remember the number of people for a single priest in the United States is about 4,000. In South America the number of people for a single priest is over 7,000. And the same is true of the Caribbean and Central America. It doesn't get much better even in Africa, where the Church is growing by leaps and bounds. Even there we find almost 6,000 people for a single priest.

So, whether we live in Worcester or West Africa, in Providence, Puerto Rico or Ecuador…we need more priests. 

Priests to continue Christ’s work of Redemption until the end of time. Priests to proclaim the Gospel, by what they say and by what they do. Priests to consecrate and sacrifice. Priests to shepherd after the model of Christ the Good Shepherd. Priests to celebrate the sacred mysteries, consecrating and sanctifying, anointing, forgiving and blessing.

Priests to offer the the Sacrifice of the Mass, in which he who offered Himself on the Altar of the Cross now offers himself through the hands of his priest. Priests who pray and teach and bind up wounds. Priests who “never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

We need more priests. And how do we get them?

We get them from families. Good and loving families who are consecrated to Christ and to his Church. 

One such family was John and Harriet. They brought up their family in Dorchester in the opening years of the last century. It was a working class neighborhood where life centered around the Church and the oldest of their six children, John, went on to be ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Boston and later the founding Bishop of this Diocese, and enthroned in that cathedra.  Cardinal Wright died forty years ago yesterday, which is why this Mass is offered for the repose of his immortal soul.

There have been four such families since then in this Cathedral Church, whose example and prayers resulted in the ordination of Father O’Shea, Father Carey, Monsignor Kelly and the good Jesuit priest, Father Kiley.  Those families formed priests, as, God willing, families continue to do today.

And while we should pray each day for the men God calls to be priests, we should pray for their families as well.

Pray for those mothers and fathers who teach men what it means to be called “father,” by their example, their encouragement and their prayer.

For remember, every priest who raises a chalice from the Altar in participation with the perfect sacrifice offered by Christ upon the altar of the cross, first learned how to hold a sippy cup at the table, taught not to spill the milk by the ones who fed him and clothed him and protected him as a child.

Every priest who preaches the word of salvation from a pulpit like this one, a word which will rouse them, console them, and give them hope, once learned how to talk and gained the courage to speak the truth from parents who will faithful and true.

Each priest who blesses on behalf of Christ and his Church with the blessing that only a Priest can give, first learned how to make the sign of the cross from forehead to breast and from left shoulder to right by a faithful man whom he first called father.

Each priest who offers prayers for untold thousands, first learned how to kneel and to pray from a family of faith, a domestic Church, mothers and fathers who had given their lives over to God.

Pray for these families of present and future priests, who by their example and their prayers will foster the vocations which Christ has planted in the hearts of their children.

Vocations which will bring forth priests to minister to your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren for generations to come, as Christ has ordained for our good and the good of all his Holy Church.

On Greed...A Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time...

Remember Harry Potter? No, not that Potter! Harry F. Potter. He was the president of the Savings and Loan who treated George Bailey so poorly back in Bedford Falls. It's a wonderful life, while Potter is stereotypical greed personified. 

Or Mr. 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.”

But that does not keep me from being greedy or from being jealous of all that neat stuff my neighbor has. Those of you of a certain age will remember Big Brother, Bob Emory, who used to sing to us at noontime about how “the grass is always greener in the other fellow's yard.”

That’s because, so often when we see that enviable lawn, we are made green with seething envy. It’s unfair! I thought I was supposed to have the best lawn! It’s almost funny the way we stand there stomping our feet, green-eyed with jealousy and greed.

And this rot in our souls erodes our social fabric as well. As Americans, who last year decreased our giving to charity for the first time in over a decade by 3.4 percent. Americans, so caught up in a consumeristic fervor that almost half of us spend more each month than we make, accumulating mountains of stuff, which we then go to the Container Store to get things to put all our stuff in. (By the way, one of my favorite stores is the Container Store).

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 city of Worcester earn the yearly salary of the other 99% in just three weeks?

Now, admittedly some of these are political realities way above my pay grade. But they also unmask gross inequities in what Pope Francis has called the “economy of exclusion.”

Which is what the ever pessimistic Quoeleth is talking about when he laments that “all things are vanity,” and what Jesus is describing in the sad story of the rich man who built a great big barn to put all his stuff in and then promptly died. 

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, by 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…and smiling he says, “You have earned nothing. All is gift…even the air you breathe. It is but 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 ways of God.

"lie down with the lamb"

Passover (paesach), Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Rosh HsShanah (Trumpets) the Day of Atonement Yom Kippur), Tabernacles (Sukkot), and Hannkkah. These are what the Book of Leviticus calls ‘the festivals of the LORD on which you shall proclaim a sacred assembly and offer sacrifices as prescribed for each day.’ (Lev 23: 1ff)

These seven feasts of Israel foreshadow the feasts of the new Covenant which mark the days of our liturgical year: Lent and Easter, Pentecost, Advent, Christmas and Epiphany and the time of the Year in which we find ourselves now. 

For, as it is written, “Holy Church celebrates the saving work of Christ on particular days in the course of the year with sacred remembrance…In fact, throughout the course of the year the Church unfolds the entire mystery of Christ…” (Roman Missal, General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, no. 1)

So like our Jewish brothers and sisters, let us remember the mysteries of the Lord on each day of every year of our lives, for “his love is everlasting”