On Hospitality

Christ in the Home of Martha and Mary by Valázquez

Hospitality, love for the stranger and the alien, the poor wretch and the one whom everyone else forgets is the only correct answer to the question: “How do I get into Heaven?” 

That's what Abraham and Sarah teach us when the three strangers go walking by their tent on a stinking hot day.  They could have ignored this trinity of strangers, but they did not.  They invited them in, bathed their feet, gave them something cool to drink and cared for them.  Why?  Because they knew they were divine messengers?  No.  They invited them in because God would have wanted them to. And because they did, God fulfilled his covenant with the elderly and childless couple, promising them a son, Isaac, the son of laughter in their old age.

 

The first path to heaven, then, is hospitality, for hospitality's sake.

 

And then remember the other Lazarus, Jesus's dear friend.  Lazarus is there along with his sisters Martha and Mary.  

 

Martha understands hospitality.  She's cooking the meal, running around the kitchen, setting the table, seating the guests and breathlessly exhausting herself in order that everyone might be at home.  

 

But then she looks over at Mary, who, we are told, is sitting at the Lord's feet, listening to him, deep in conversation with Jesus.  The sweaty and exhausted Martha is enraged....so enraged that she goes right up to Jesus, and in words that could only have come from a friend says to him: tell that sister of mine to help me rather than sitting on her....chair chatting with you all day.

 

And then Jesus tells us something extraordinary.  He tells us that there is an even more excellent way, a better part than hospitality.  The better part which Mary has chosen, is to spend time alone with the Lord, and that better part shall not be taken from her.

 

So, hospitality, feeding the poor, forgiving and embracing the stranger, welcoming those rejected by everyone else...are indispensable to those who seek to walk the path to holiness. But something more is required, to pray, to listen and to dwell with the Lord.

 

I have a lot of friends who are great social workers, selfless advocates for the poor and the downtrodden.  

Indeed, for many years, I used to do spiritual direction with a lot of Catholic Workers and Jesuit volunteers and the like.  And you know what one thing they struggle with more than anything else. 

Its not the getting up in the middle of the night to drive someone to detox, or having the patience to put up with all the stresses of working with the poor...it's shutting up long enough to pray, and stopping “doing stuff” long enough to sit at the feet of the Lord and listen to him.  The Martha in them would keep them going, twenty-four hours a day, like the energizer bunny, running in circles.  But what they need is contemplation, and quiet and peace with the Lord, if it's all ever going to make sense.

 

I also have friends in monasteries, like the Trappists in Gethsemane Abbey in Tennessee, where I preached their retreat a number of years back.  They are wonderful monks, who pray five times a day with an intensity and a joy which is a marvel to behold.  But you know what their struggles are?  Forgiving that monk who gave them a dirty look, or putting up with that guy who entered with them thirty years ago who still drives them crazy, or seeking out and caring for the monk who is struggling and alone.

 

For the road to holiness is paved over two paths: hospitality and prayer, Martha and Mary; for they are not really two paths at all, but the one path which leads to the cross of Jesus, to the perfect sacrifice of love and devotion, which is our hope, our salvation and the only way to get to heaven.

 

For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

The Assumption, the Acadians and Louis XIII

The first National Acadian Day in 1909 in Shediac, New Brunswick

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, immigrants from southern France began to settle in the Maritime Provinces under the auspices of King Louis XIII. They would come to be known as the Acadians, but from the first their story would be intertwined with the this dates, August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And it was their attachment to France, the eldest daughter of the Church and it’s thirteenth King names Louis that is at the heart of the matter.

Louis’ mother and father, you see, were childless and without an heir. So they asked all the Churches in France to intercede with the Blessed Virgin, on the feast of her Assumption into heaven, to intercede for them.

In response to their prayers, Louis XIII was born, and so, the feast of the Assumption was declared a National Holiday, as it still is, all throughout France. There are 11 national holidays in France, and four of them are feast days: Christmas, All Saints, the Ascension of the Lord and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Which is why the Acadian ancestors of those who built this Church declared the Blessed Virgin Mary on the feast of her Assumption to be their patron. As we do too, trusting that the great Mother of God, who interceded for all those who have gone before us, will intercede for us too, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

On Suffering

This was my homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Edith Stein was born Jewish. Her family was not overly religious, but inculcated in her a love for those who suffer. Which is why, at the outset of the first World War, she volunteered to care for the soldiers of the Austrian Army who were suffering from typhus, dysentery and cholera.

It was there that she first began to struggle with the question of how to explain the horrors of war. How can a living and merciful God permit such suffering?

It’s a struggle we can all relate to. Did you read, by the way, the account of eight year-old Iegor Kravtsov? He and his family were forced to hide for months in the basement of their home in Ukraine, not far from the steel plant in Mariupol which was decimated by Russian missles.

His grandfather was killed when a shell hit their house. And then it got worse. The second grader wrote in his journal: "I have a wound on my back. The skin is ripped off. My sister's head is broken. My mom tore her hand muscles, and has a hole in her leg.” 

And suffering is not just found in war. There is the suffering of everyday life, which each of us knows. The teenager whose first love just rejected him, the child, whose mother’s addiction subjects him to a life of violence and abuse, you and me, when our dreams are shattered or when blind fear wakes us up in the middle of the night, or when we walk away from the grave having buried the person who loved us better than anyone else.

But back to Edith. Her struggles with the question of suffering led her to the Gospels and she eventually became a Carmelite nun and took the name of Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, a name which reflects her lifelong struggle with suffering in everyday life. 

For, in the words of Viktor Frankl sufferin is “an ineradicable part of life.” And if we are to find meaning in life, we must also find meaning in suffering.

St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross looked for the answer to that question in the writings of the great Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross, who prayed from a cell where he had been imprisoned for ten years:

“Where are you hiding, my beloved Lord. You have left me. You ran away like a deer, having struck me down. I ran after you, calling, but you were gone!”

He also wrote this:

…I saw the river over which every soul must pass

to reach the kingdom of heaven

and the name of that river was suffering:

and I saw a boat which carries souls across the river

and the name of that boat was love.

So suffering is the river that flows through each of our lives, and love is what gives it meaning.

For love is not a warm feeling or an insipid poem on a flowery Hallmark card. Love is the willingness to suffer for the good of the other and the salvation of souls, including our own.

This is what we mean when we say that Jesus saved us by dying on the Cross, for from that Cross he taught us the meaning of love: to so love God as to open my arms and accept whatever he asks of me, and to accept it as perfect joy.

When we can’t understand the suffering, when we can’t figure it out the Cross he has sent us, when there is no possible reason why we would choose it: to open our arms on the Cross with him, in perfect obedience to God’s inscrutible will.

In the words of Saint John, to “cast off all things and use only the cross as [my] cane…[to be] truly resolved to suffer willingly for the love of God in all things.”

So, the next time the Lord send you a Cross, accept it as his gift to you. Accept it as the Divine Teacher instructing you how to love.

It is why we gather here, around this Altar and beneath that Cross, joining all the sacrifices and struggles of our lives to his perfect sacrifice, offered on the altar of the Cross for our salvation.