Message of Love

We live in a time of institutionalized sin. We accept all types of deceptions, falsifications, and temptations. Our secular cultures abuses us with all types of scandals and rumors which encourage and nourish all types of vices and sins to fester and grow within our hearts with greed, selfishness, and other undesirable, unloving traits promoted as beneficial and natural.

As Christians we accept that we are sinners and try to avoid sinning. The Church reminds us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to worship only God.

Still the sinning and temptation continue, but we have the lessons from the Gospels leading us to the power and glory of God.

Sinfulness causes our hearts and souls to feel fatigued, confuses us. The glamor of evil is a serpentine road which crosses itself several times; it is a harsh course full of discontent, anxiety, selfishness of heartlessness, of fear, of destructive inquisitiveness to the poor decaying clamor of indecision and deception. Our secular culture deliberately challenges and ridicules all that was good, decent, and noble within our lives, and now we constantly have to assert what is sacred, what is essential.

How beautiful is the kingdom of God, which encourages goodness in the world, where all that which is divine waits, all love, all mercy, all forgiveness, all hope—a kingdom of charity, humility, obedience. How wonderful to live in peace, to live with God’s love for eternity!

We all have been tempted by the secular culture; we all have learned ways to resist it.

Our secular culture does not want our sincerity or our respect; it provides enough stimulation to make each of us a conversational diletante, with only trivial information and its derivatives to guide us away from seeking God’s forgiveness and mercy.

We must learn to pray to God in humble, honest, loving words. We must praise God for each breath we take, each mountain we see. We must thank God for the entirety of our lives, the good, the bad, the misspelled, the ungrammatical, the typographical errors, the beauty, his goodness and kindness to us. We must always thank God for all the priests, the clergy. For it is in our Church that Christ’s lessons of love continue to be shared, to be taught, to be lived every day.

The mission of the Church remains one of love, education, and preparation. The message of the Church is love.

“The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.” Archbishop Oscar Romero

Prayer

We are always in need of prayer. And so we must allow ourselves a minute or two of silence; we must also respect others when they are praying.

Life is filled with all types of distractions and temptations. A healthy prayer life will provide a calm respite. We will behold the majesty and magnificence of God. We will learn patience and confidence. We can breathe without anxiety, without angst, without worry. Contemplation leads us toward God.

A rigorous prayer life prepares us to follow Christ, to live with Christ’s fairness and social justice lessons in our hearts. A rigorous prayer life makes us aware of our own individual situation. We can see our strengths, our weaknesses. We can ask God for assistance. A rigorous prayer life will help us become closer to God.

Goodness requires diligence and perseverance.

Lent provided us with forty days of a journey into the desert for purification and provided a picturesque of hope through the various liturgies read during Mass. Lent does not have to provide us with discomfort. It only requested that we attempt to move closer to God, that we attempt to be better Christians. The great problem we face is sin, and the solution is not always easy to accept and follow. When sin appears before us, we must remember to pray to God for strength to avoid sin, for guidance away from sin.

Lent provided us with many reasons to pray to God, to remember that we are refugees searching for forgiveness, mercy, and love. We are not the rulers. We are wounded by our various sins, seen and unseen.

Lent provided us with an education, very private and personal; we were asked to examine our consciences. When we went to Confession, we were told to “sin no more” and we returned to our lives of road rage, crazy bosses, and secular supported and encouraged vices.

We can always trust in God. We do not have to be a member of the distraught population bouncing between each sin and deception displayed on magazine covers and television screens. There is another solution.

Silence. Contemplation. Prayer.

Splendid Prayer.

Chrism Mass March 29, 2010 Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle

The Chrism Mass on Monday evening at the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle was a wonderful liturgy and opportunity to see the various priests of the Archdiocese of Washington. It is an evening of respect and reverence for the Gospel, the Eucharist, and priests.

Archbishop Donald Wuerl was the celebrant; every priest in attendance was concelebrant.

The Chrism Mass was simply a Mass for priests. Seminarians were recognized. Priests who have died recently were recognized.

This Mass more than any other celebrated the extraordinary daily lives of priests as they live and work in their various ministries. One important part of this Mass was the blessing of the holy oils which will be used within the sacraments during the next twelve months. Each parish in the archdiocese received the oils which were blessed by the Archbishop.

Seeing all priests together in white vestments was impressive. How solemn yet moving the procession of priests into the Cathedral was! Both enthusiasm and hope were present. Love, universal and unconditional, was present also. This was a celebration. This was an evening when priestly vows were renewed with a youthful vigor.

A priest’s life is not easy. Their work never ends. Weddings, baptisms, confessions, hospital visits, parish meetings, and balancing the parish budget keep all priests busy in addition to their individual prayer times and Mass schedules. Being a priest is more than just saying Mass on Sunday.

A priest encourages us to love, to follow in the footsteps in Christ. Each priest in his own unique way illuminates God’s perfection, God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s forgiveness. Each priest in his own unique way illuminates our imperfection, our secular culture’s imperfection and destructiveness. Each priest in his own way provides light, hope, love, understanding leading those willing to listen, willing to follow away from the darkness. Priests are here to serve us, to direct us to salvation. They encourage us to examine our consciences, to live our lives filled with charity, humility, and obedience to the commandments of God. By their example we are presented with goodness and a view of a holy life of prayer and good works. A priest is a human being who needs our love, our assistance, and our prayers. And because many parishioners only see them during the rituals of the Mass, celebrating the Eucharist there is a tendency to elevate them, forget that they are all human and need our compassion, our empathy, and our friendship.

Evangelization must exist beyond the Mass. By example, each priest provides ways for us to incorporate the gospel into our lives and helps us develop the courage to spread it. We must always remember that the teachings of Jesus Christ centered on the notions of fairness, social justice, and love. Our priests do this each and every day.

The priesthood is an important, vital institution which provides sacramental assistance, directions, and prayers to and for believers and assistance, directions and prayers for nonbelievers. Priests are often very important in both their parishes and neighborhoods. The strength and beauty of the priesthood is dependent upon the love, support, and prayers of the faithful. We must pray for the health and well being of the current priests and of the future priests.

The Chrism Mass splendidly looks toward the future and asks us to always remember our priests in our prayers.

Challenge Ourselves

We must always challenge ourselves and our views of our world. Being Christian is difficult. There is a tension between what Christ taught and how our secular society encourages us to live. The greatest danger that a Christian can face is complacency, accepting everything, questioning nothing. This in essence can render your faith moot, meaningless. If we allow ourselves to love our neighbors, we must hope and pray for fairness in their lives; we must also act to achieve this fairness in their lives. It will not occur without our effort, our support, our patience. Prayer is essential. When we allow ourselves to love our neighbors, we become involved in their lives and struggles, we allow ourselves to suffer with them, we allow ourselves to share compassion with them. As Christians we can never accept the status quo. We must look at our society, at our world and see how the poor and marginalized are treated. We must work for true equality which will foster freedom, peace, human dignity for all mankind.

“The Church is obliged by its evangelical mission to demand structural changes that favor the reign of God and a more just and comradely way of life. Unjust social structures are the roots of all violence and disturbances.” Archbishop Oscar Romero

Reflection - Logical Parishioners

The logical parishioner, modern, involved, busy has infinitely more to do with Love and Prayer than the Young and the inexperienced, whether student or observer, ever imagines. Social Justice promotes a special type of love and hope unencumbered with any desire for reciprocal behavior or any desire for possession.How lucky for us that sin creates an ancient form of amnesia (inability to love God and neighbor) and a modern form of jealousy (inability to remember and to share all the goodness that I have received); you might expect that I would have enough common sense to remain quiet and to mind my own business. What makes the “new” love based upon fairness and the Social Justice teachings of Christ so appealing is its insistence to recognize that love requires a foundation of both spiritual and intellectual, prose and poetry, sound and silence, motion and stillness, ignorance and intelligence. Within all love reside many unasked questions. Love itself is often an ethereal mystery which appears and disappears within our hearts when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be open, to look upon the world with an universal hope and concern for our neighbors which matches or exceeds our hope and concern for ourselves at a specific moment.The modern thought and acceptance of sin within some secular thinking reduces the evil within sin, reduces our responsibility for our actions. We must accept that sin is often unavoidable. We must believe that prayer and penance are always necessary.

We can allow ourselves to be part of God’s procession, surrounded by all the Saints, surrounded by angels, resplendent in love and hope, glittering with humility, charity, and obedience the most precious jewels of faith and love.

Let us reverse things. Instead of asking how we can teach social justice, suppose we ask how social justice can teach us. What might we learn from Christ’s lessons on fairness, for example, about service to the poor to which he was devoted? Some of Christ's lessons are so advanced that only the youngest and poorest will recognize them. But his ideas of love, fairness, and social justice can also teach us something personal yet perhaps revelatory: that thinking and doing matter crucially as we follow him, increase goodness and love in our lives. Again and again, he emphasizes prayer, and the need to serve others; through prayer we can find both the confidence and patience to become God’s humble, loving servants.

True, the desire to pray and to find goodness becomes an insatiable desire and you must pray. Nevertheless, you must also think . . . Contemplation, when it it true, honest, selfless leads us to Christ, opens up the beauty and majesty of his Passion which will grow stronger within each of us as our knowledge and understanding of the humiliation, suffering, and sacrifice grows. For each of us there is something of particular interest, particular meaning within Christ’s Passion which binds it to our hearts, links us to the universal Church. Allow yourself to spend fifteen minutes or more every day thinking about what the Passion means to you; allow your thoughts to be childishly chaotic, undisciplined, unfocused when you begin. This is natural; our lives are often simply a collection of episodic confusion and desperation. Contemplation and prayer can lead us to God, when we allow ourselves to be believe, when we allow ourselves to live as Jesus instructed us to live, when we allow ourselves to love.

The logical parishioner understands and accepts the illogical; love is rarely logical. The logical parishioner understands and accepts Prayer; petitioning God is a natural part of the existence of all men.We are all young and inexperienced. Each day we grow in goodness, hope, and love. And true love often remains something more beautiful, more bountiful, more mysterious than that which we allow ourselves to imagine.

Contemplation and silence.

We, you and I, with contemplation, silence, prayer, more thinking, some action can become the logical parishioners.

Unity

We live in an age where everything is complicated. We live in an age of technology. We live in an age of avoidance and loneliness.

Christ encourages us to develop and to share unity and simplicity. The more we are able to do this the more we are able to understand the world. We must learn how to interpret intense, impassioned discussions about life, politics, relationships, religion, and the world. The true test for Christians is the requirement to apply Christ’s teachings to these discussions to determine their fairness and validity. We must always be open to learning new things, hearing new things. But, we not automatically accept these new things. Newness is often seductive, flattering to our ears; as Christians we need to contemplate, to pray before accepting the many wonders of this modern electronic world. The light of Truth appears after we labor, after we are silent and allow ourselves to think, after we pray for understanding. Remember men like to change their minds. Everything which is new and revolutionary today will be revised tomorrow. The one constant in this world is God. We must strive to live with hearts, souls, and minds filled with purity and love, filled with sincerity in thought, action, and word, completely steadfast with the entirety of our being. We are human beings yes, but as Christians our lives are meant to praise and honor God. We live in a time of institutional violence, institutional sinfulness. All that we belief is sacred is constantly, continually under attack. Our Faith is a threat to the goals and ambitions of commercialism, secularism. Undisciplined hearts are easier to control and manipulate; selfishness leads to weakness and fear. As Christians we must always remember Christ, allow our existence to progress one footstep at a time in a path chosen by Christ. Allow yourself time to become good and devout. Allow yourself time to learn how to do good works in your community. Allow Christ to direct your heart in the right way to avoid the clamor and glamor of evil. Move beyond tolerance. Seek an understanding of yourself and your neighbor. Seek social justice for all; be not afraid of social justice. You will not lose anything because of it. You will gain many things as fairness grows within your heart, soul, and mind. Allow social justice to lead you toward God and goodness.

Daily pray to God, remember everyone in your prayers, both known and unknown, seen and unseen; remember the widows and orphans, the lame, the sick, the afflicted. Remember them all. Love them all.

A Change of Pace

As a joke a friend asked me what I liked about Lent. At first I gave very serious answers which went above his very intellectual secular mind. Then, I revised it.

1. I like fasting. How wonderful it is to go to a dinner party and be able to refuse having a second helping. Especially when you do not want the second helping.
2. I like penance. How wonderful it is walking into a confessional and telling a complete stranger all those things that your Mother told you never to talk about.
3. I like abstinence. I like how the word sounds. Visually it reminds me of an aircraft carrier. I like how it looks too. Beef, pork, chicken, buffalo, venison, turkey, pheasant, how the list seems to grow. It does take thought and effort to avoid them. How much of our diet is based upon consuming beef and chicken and pork! Those poor animals! Yes, abstinence is good. One day without meat isn’t so bad. I can have iceberg lettuce instead. Now, iceberg lettuce is a real sacrifice.
4. I like examining my conscience. I somehow went through life more concerned with being conscious than expanding my conscience. Homonyms are always a recipe for disaster. “My conscious has no conscience.” “My conscience is too conscious.” “My conscious mind refuses to tolerate my conscience.” “Between my conscience desires and my conscious reality is a gulf of quips, wisecracks, and puns.” “So how do you spell conscience?”
5. I like thinking about being good. Especially when someone annoys me and I wish that I had some magical power to deflate their tires or to turn them into a camel or a mule.
6. I like remembering people to include in my prayers. There are always the usual collection of relatives and friends. But, then one day you turn on the television and hear a story about a soapbox derby and remember someone from my childhood who won the soapbox derby of your youth and you wonder what happened to this person are they still racing in the soapbox derby circuit, are they still racing, are they still alive and using soap, and you add them to your prayers for that day.
7. I like almsgiving but the word reminds me of almonds. I am not sure if I really like almonds. I wouldn’t buy almonds by themselves. I wouldn’t add almonds to a salad unless it was made with iceberg lettuce and served at a soapbox derby.
8. I like thinking about going to Mass. Then, my mind creates a list of such wonderful diversions and distractions like experimenting with fonts to create artwork while typing, uses for iceberg lettuce, how to obtain super powers, how to encourage dinner party invitations from single serving hostesses, sponsoring a soapbox derby.

For Lent to be successful for us, we need to encourage and to allow ourselves to enjoy the journey, to the things that we are learning about ourselves and our relationship with God. Lent is a journey of enlightenment and purification. Do not be afraid of being alone in the desert.

Remember iceberg lettuce and a soapbox derby.

And then simply pray.