A Face like the Sun
​Our Lord climbs Mount Tabor to pray with Peter, James, and John, and while he is praying, is transfigured: the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary. Two weeks ago I too climbed Mt. Tabor, with 45 others from our parish,  during our Holy Land pilgrimage. How wonderful to have been where Our Lord stood. We could see the fertile Valley of Jezreel, the limestone cliffs of Nazareth to the northwest, the Golan Heights to the east. What a grace to make that pilgrimage—you see the Scriptures as you hear them! So on Mount Tabor, Christ reveals his glory to Peter, James and John to strengthen their faith for the trauma of his Crucifixion. “This is my beloved Son,” a voice thunders from within the cloud. This is my Son, blazing with the radiance of the sun, with the glory of a billion stars. He will be humiliated on Good Friday, but he will be raised up, for the Creator of the Stars of Night cannot be conquered by darkness.
 
A Boy’s Telescope
When I was a kid I bought a telescope. With that treasure, I explored the heavens, gazing at galaxies and moons and planets, the rings of Saturn, the polar caps of Mars, the dusty lanes of stellar nebulae. As the apostles beheld Christ’s heavenly glory, let us also turn our telescopes to the heavens for a moment. On a clear night from a high mountain—Mt. Tam for instance—you can see hundreds of stars, a few planets, and the smoky edges of our own galaxy. That dull smudge is the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years distant (that’s 10,000 million trillion miles—the Lord owns a lot of real estate), which contains over a trillion stars. Both galaxies belong to the Local Group of about 50 galaxies, which belongs to a cluster, which clusters make up filament patterns of superclusters. My new favorite telescope, the Hubble, took a picture of the night sky the size of your thumb held at arm’s length and found 10,000 galaxies in that small dark spot. If every star (with its dozens of planets) were a grain of sand, the box to contain all the observable stars in the universe would have to be two miles high and two miles wide and stretch from New York to Atlanta. The universe is vast beyond our imagining, but God made man as the central jewel of creation: a creature to be loved for his own sake, and made capable of loving his Creator. But we are only capable of that love if we keep ourselves pure.
 
Your Sanctification
In the Epistle, St. Paul pleads with his beloved Christians at Thessalonica to imitate this immaculate whiteness of Christ.  He earnestly urges them, in the Lord Jesus, “to refrain from immorality and lust…. God has not called us to impurity but to holiness.” As a mother would speak with her daughter, or a father his son, he addresses the delicate and burning issue of purity. “Conduct yourselves in a way pleasing to God… this is the will of God—your sanctification.” Paul defines “sanctification,” in this passage, as sexual purity. Holiness is more than chastity, of course, but bodily impurity severely limits our capacity to love God. “Every other sin,” St. Paul will say, “is outside the body,” but the impure man compromises the very temple of the Holy Spirit, which is his own body.
 
While He was at Prayer…
The world in which we live smears its filth on us at every turn, from television, movies and social media. You can hardly do a simple google search without getting contaminated by someone’s impurity. How can we maintain the purity in which God created us? How can we keep our place among the radiance of his sun and stars? We all know that only God can keep us pure, that we are powerless in the grip of our own lusts to either sexual impurity or base uncharity. It is for us to pray, from the heart, every day, to dispose ourselves. Notice that the glory of Our Lord’s immaculate purity was revealed while he was in prayer. That’s why, at Star of the Sea, we are putting all our time, money, and energy into Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist. We must make our parish another Mount Tabor, a hilltop from which the radiance of Christ’s light beams over the City. Every parish must be so, and I believe the surest way is to develop a culture of Eucharistic prayer in every parish. May Our Lady, the Immaculata, Star of the Sea, shine her brilliant purity upon us, leading us to the glory of Christ himself.

I’ve often remarked how many women say that they are certainly planning to go straight to heaven when they die, while most men will say something like “just get me to the last rung of Purgatory.” No doubt this reflects certain differences between the sexes, such as a man’s desire for adventure, of finding his way out of any difficult situation. By contrast, a woman desires the security and comfort of a permanent dwelling, a home where she can raise her young. But it goes deeper, I think, to a spiritual difference between men and women. Women understand mercy better than men; in their physical and emotional delicacy relative to men (O, I can hear the outrage against my “sexism”!), women learn to trust God’s providence earlier and better than men. Until old age weakens them, men labor under the illusion that they can provide for themselves and need not depend on others. Thus men are less relational than women, generally.
 
Purgatory is a lonely place, where individuals work through their sufferings alone, at least compared to the communal banquet of heaven. C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce (a delightful little novel about a bus trip from purgatory to heaven), portrays it as a vast and lonely plain where people move farther and farther away from each other, until they are completely isolated, which by then is hell.
 
St. Therese does not plan to go to hell, but neither does she expect purgatory. “Listen,”, she writes, “this is how great your confidence should be! It should make you believe that purgatory is not made for you, but only for the souls what failed to recognize God’s merciful love or who doubted its power to purify…yes, despite your little infidelities, you can hope to go straight to heaven, because the good Lord desires it even more than you do…” Yes, St. Therese, we should want to go straight to heaven, and to expect it—to work for it with all our strength here below, and believe it is possible to go straight to perfect happiness after death. We should not be afraid to ask for it, and to recognize that God wants this for us more than we do.
 
So St. Therese speaks. She speaks directly to us. I invite you to Leonardo de Filippis’ one-woman play next week in my parish here in San Francisco. Actress Audrey Ahern will play our little Saint, and believe me, she brings Therese to life. No tickets needed, just an open heart, next Wednesday, February 24 in our parish auditorium, at 7pm. See you there!

Desert Warfare
We entered into the great and holy season of Lent with Ash Wednesday last week. The fact that just about everyone loves Ash Wednesday confirms what Cardinal Sarah says in his book God or Nothing: to be atheist is quite impossible. Everyone confesses at some point the futility of these few years on earth and senses that only God can save us from returning to mere dust.
 
The collect for Ash Wednesday expresses the season with particular precision: “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.” Lent is armed conflict. We enter into a campaign of military service; we prepare for battle armed with weapons of self-restraint. It is just this kind of desert warfare that Christ enters into on the First Sunday of Lent. The Spirit drives him into the desert to meet the enemy at close quarters. He takes with him only the weapons of self-restraint; He talks to no one, he sleeps on the ground, and most importantly, he refuses food and drink. On the fortieth day the Bible tells us, with typical Semitic understatement, Jesus was “hungry.” At his weakest, Jesus confronts Satan.
 
The Mount of Temptation
I want to share with you an extraordinary experience I had on Ash Wednesday. 45 of us were making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and our last day happened to be Ash Wednesday. We were scheduled to visit Jericho, where Jesus had been baptized and then driven by the Holy Spirit into the desert. Notice that Our Lord begins his public ministry by retreating into the desert, and then confronting Satan: first things first, right? We had come to the same place on the first day of Lent, and I convinced the tour director to let us make a side trip past Jericho to the “Mount of Temptation.” It is a desert cliff above Jericho, a few miles from the Jordan River, the site of Christ’s temptation after his 40-day fast. Built into those cliffs halfway up is a Greek Orthodox monastery, the extreme south end of which is found a chapel with a rock in the far wall. This is the rock on which Lucifer placed our Lord to show him all the kingdoms of the world, which he would give him, if only Jesus would submit himself to Satan.
 
Members of His Body
We spent some time in that little chapel, overlooking the vast fertile plain of Jericho, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea. I’ve asked many of our pilgrims which place of our pilgrimage struck them the most—Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem? They all, to my surprise, said it was the Mount of Temptation. Christ was tempted in every way that we are, writes St. Paul. We found Christ’s testing cathartic for our own temptations.  “If in Christ we have been tempted,” writes St. Augustine, “in him we overcome the devil…. He could have kept the devil from himself; but if he were not tempted he could not teach you how to triumph over temptation.” I know that when I am tired, hungry, abandoned, or at the end of my rope, Satan will appear with “solutions.” Just get something to eat if you are depressed, he will say, or level some power over someone, or jump off a cliff and see what happens. The world, the flesh, and the devil offer us all sorts of solutions to our problems, but Jesus did not swerve one inch from God’s will.  Perched on the Mount of Temptation, we sensed that we too could keep faithful to God’s will by clinging to Christ. If He could do it, I can do it, because I am after all a member of his own body.
 
Lent is a time for war, desert warfare, not only with the devil but with our own flesh and the world. War requires discipline and self-denial to reach our objective. Let us ask our Holy Mother, who trained her will from the moment she made her Fiat to the angel Gabriel, to enter this campaign of Christian service joyfully, armed with the weapons of self-restraint.

On Thursday night, 45 of us arrived rather late at a pilgrim’s hostel on Mt. Carmel, in the city of Haifa, in Northern Israel. We are from Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco, and fittingly for us the Carmelite pilgrim’s hostel is called Stella Maris, perched as it is on the northernmost tip of Mt. Carmel above the Bay of Haifa.
 
It was too late to scout around that first night, so we offered a brief Mass, had some soup, and went to bed. The next morning, rather early, I wandered the halls until I came to a steep flight of steps leading to a chapel topped by a small dome. At the base of this chapel was a small cave, on a lintel above which were inscribed these words: Hanc Aliquando Speluncam Incolvit Magna Ille Prophetarum Dux et Patrem Elias Thesbites (“at one time this cave held that great leader and father of all the prophets, Elijah the Thesbite”).
 
We had stumbled upon Elijah’s Cave, by some accounts the beginning of western monasticism, the birthplace of the Carmelite Order, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Certainly finding the Prophet’s Cave down the hall from my room was surprising, but even more so was the crowd I found praying quietly in front of that cave. It was six in the morning, and most of my fellow pilgrims were sitting in silence before the cave, before the tabernacle, before the precious tiarared statue of Jesus and Mary above the altar.
 
Our pilgrimage is typical. An aggregate from various walks of life battling jet lag, missing baggage, and stomach upset. We are thrilled to discover famous places dear to us. We are worried about getting robbed and sick and misunderstood in a foreign land. Our own landscape suffers irreparable change by what we see and hear, and we are not sure we want all that a pilgrimage imposes. And yet: each morning most of our number make their way to Elijah’s Cave to find silence. We can no longer see the sweeping horizon that he saw (as the medieval church blocks the raw elements without), but we know our need for silence. In that chapel, as in most any Catholic chapel, there is the fullness of silence. We do not find it on the bus, or at meals, or in the airport or on the plane (Lufthansa offered 1200 different pieces of entertainment from each of our seats). But we find it near that cave, and we long for it.
 
God still offers us silence in the noisiest the world has ever been. He offers it and we long for it. Thank God we are on a pilgrimage in which we can satisfy that longing.