From Whom every family is named

St. Paul kneels before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. God defines the family because he created us. We did not create ourselves. The secularism in which the United States is awash rejects this fundamental truth; namely, that I am not God. It is by His authority that I even exist, and by His authority that the human family exists. Paul “kneels before the Father,” he bows to that authority, so that he might know the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge. Catholic schools and universities, in a better time, valued love more than knowledge; in a better time Catholic priests taught their parishioners and Catholic parents taught their children, that God created us for one purpose: to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, so as be eternally happy with him in the next.

But our faith has diminished as we have become wealthier and more educated. Oh that we could be wealthy, educated, and faithful to God! Why is it that economic prosperity almost always leads to loss of faith? As western culture loses its faith in God, the family, in particular, becomes incomprehensible. If we do not “kneel before the Father” with St. Paul, we will not be capable of “comprehending” the breadth and length of Christ’s love. We will become progressively stupid and loveless, that is, less civilized. For all the rhetoric about going green and being natural, our relations with each other have become unnatural, because we have rejected the laws of nature and nature’s God (as the Declaration of Independence states in the first paragraph).

Charity

San Francisco was once a city of strong Christian families. Its hundreds of churches bear witness to a more faithful era. How can we speak truth to a culture gone secular? I tell you, we can only do so with heartfelt charity. No one will listen to a Christian who does not speak with charity. In his letter to Nancy Pelosi and others who attacked him for defending marriage, Archbiship Cordileone wrote these words last June: “Please do not make judgments based on stereotypes, media images and comments taken out of context. Rather, get to know us first as fellow human beings. I myself am willing to meet personally with any of you not only to dialogue, but simply so that we can get to know each other. It is the personal encounter that … softens the heart.  In the end, love is the answer, and this can happen even between people with such deep disagreements. That may sound fanciful and far-fetched, but it … is possible. … I know this from personal experience.”

Legalism v. Charity

In the Gospel Jesus is attacked, like our good Archbishop, for an act of charity. At a Sabbath dinner party he sits opposite a man suffering from dropsy. “May I heal this man, even though it is the Sabbath?” he asks the Pharisees. They remain obtusely silent because they are legalists: they love the law more than the man. Jesus heals the man and then asks the sullen Pharisees if any one of them would rescue his own son or even his work animal ox on a Sabbath. They cannot answer him without surrendering their proud self-sufficiency. They would have to say, with St. Paul, that the law cannot save us. Only God can save us, and it is He who makes the laws. His supreme law of charity trumps all other laws, and this is something all of us find hard to live with.

Those of us who love the Latin Mass are particularly prone to legalism. The many rubrical laws of the Mass, however, are at the service of charity. If we follow every liturgical law of the Mass but are not moved to greater charity, meaning patience, heartfelt affection, and thoughtfulness to our brothers, the law is pointless. It becomes an obstacle to God, as it did in today’s Gospel.

The good news is that we can keep the disciplinary laws of the Church and the supreme law of charity. God does not command mutually exclusive laws. We can be faithful to the high standards of Christian morality without violating the highest law of charity. It’s all about how we say things: either with the loving heart of a mother or father, or the harsh demands of a Pharisee. We must turn, above all, to Our Lady for inspiration and intercession in achieving this delicate balance. She was supremely delicate among all women. She knew the right words, and will teach us how to speak, even to our enemies.

From the Pastor’s Laptop: Bare Ruined Choirs

An author recently asked me to write a priest’s story of “celibate love” for his book on marriage. But who would be interested in a non-physical “love story”? Don’t we unconsciously assume that a priests’ or nuns’ love is somewhat sterile, even love-less?

Rather than describing a priest’s love as “celibate,” I would describe it as “virginal.” Doesn’t everyone want to love a virgin? Don’t we all want to give our beloved a pure, virginal love? Here’s what I wrote, and let’s hope priests can at least aspire to the virginal love their celibacy signifies.

At age 22 I found myself studying literature in Oxford and singing in the local parish choir, where I met a young lady. She sang well, and invited me to her apartment for coffee and poetry reading. It was all very chaste, but not perfectly virginal, because I was thinking about her a lot more than about God. Of course, I couldn’t help but notice she was a woman, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s body.

One bitterly cold and foggy night, I was riding back from class on my bicycle. I came to a juncture in the Woodstock Road. Turning right, I would arrive at a cheery apartment where a lovely young lady would offer me hot coffee and pastries beside a bright fire, at which we would read beautiful poetry together. Turning left, I would arrive at the remains of Godstow Abbey. I liked to pray alone at this abandoned monastery beside the Thames, in whose bare ruined choirs the stars served for a roof and the grassy earth for a floor. It had been dissolved under the Elizabethan persecutions and stood on a broad moor in silent witness to the consecrated women who prayed and lived there from its establishment in 1133.

I turned right, and that has made all the difference. I spent an hour looking up to heaven from that roofless chapel, and then went home to read in my room. On that night, God showed me my heart’s longing. I desire to look through a chapel’s stone latticework into the stars more than through a hearth fire into the black eyes of a woman. The solitude of Godstow’s ruins on a windswept English moor are my love story, because this is where God drew me one foggy chill night.

Everyone that hears this parable thinks how unfair life is. Jesus defends himself for giving equal pay for unequal work, and we listen with quiet resignation. Yes, God has been unfair to me many times in my life. I’ve been misunderstood by my best friends; I’ve been punished for doing good things; I’ve been cheated out of what should have been mine. I should be happier, I should be living a better life, I should be more respected in my community, I deserve a higher standing of living. Life just isn’t fair, and God’s responsible for life’s injustice.

Jesus does not disagree. In fact, he seems to bait us in this parable: “You think I’ve been unfair with you?” I won’t deny it, He says, and I’ll even chastise you for pointing it out. “Friend, take what is yours and go,” the Landowner says to the complaining worker. “What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?” Go, and do not question me.

God doesn't owe us anything, but He gives us everything anyway

I’d like to point out two things about this Scripture.

The first point is that God is God, and really, we have no right to question him. Does a gnat question the man who brushes him off? We are really nothing before God, and can stand on no authority of our own to challenge his judgments. We delude ourselves if we think we can demand anything of God. God is God, and we are not God.

There is a second point, however, and it is even more important than the first. God loves us. He loves us poor, trembling, insecure, complaining and whining gnats. I might think he is unfair with me, and that he loves that guy more than me, and that he has forgotten me. But this parable actually says quite the opposite. Everyone gets equal pay. Jesus is telling us that he gives each of us the same amount of his providence. He goes out five times during the day—at daybreak, at nine, at noon, at three, and at five o’clock—looking for unemployed people. He wanted to give honest work, and honest pay, to men that were without work or pay. Is it the fault of those hired at 5 o’clock that they did not get hired sooner? “No one has hired us,” they say. No one valued their work enough to hire them until the Landowner finds them. The worst experience is to be unwanted, and not valued, by others. Personally, I would much rather be the man hired at daybreak, working for someone who appreciates me, than that lonely guy kicking stones all day, hoping someone would hire him.

In the end, all get the same daily age. And in Scripture, that wage is eternal life. All the workers make it to heaven, because all responded to the Landowner. All came to the land of everlasting rest, owned by God, which we call heaven.

Getting to Heaven

The next time you feel that life is unfair, remind yourself that God gives each of us all that we need to be eternally happy. The next time your stomach gets sour over the fact that you’ve tried to honor God all your life but don’t feel the rewards—the next time you feel cheated—ask yourself: would I want anyone to be shut out of heaven forever? I think all of us would say that what we really want is bad men to become good men, and for everyone to go to heaven. This life is so brief, nothing really compares to the life of the world to come. So what if I have a little more grief than the next guy? The main thing is for us all to get safely to heaven.

Let us count on the prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary to keep us steady in our resolve to work in just the way God wants us to, and to work for the salvation of all souls, that we may all be in heaven one day with her, and the Blessed Trinity, and all the angels and saints forever.

Archbishop Cordileone had planned an ambitious weekend for our parish: meetings and meals with parish staff, school faculty, and finance council; solemn Masses followed by receptions; individual meetings with priests and other parish leadership; careful review of parish financials and sacramental records. But more important than any of this, in my opinion, was his visits to the sick of our parish. Even though Archbishop Cordileone was running a bit late, he asked me to lead him to the forgotten people. It is on these sickbeds that we found the core of blessing, a hidden furnace of grace that animates all our parish’s apostolic activity.

We walked a block and a half up Eighth Avenue and rang the bell. A Burmese family, who had been Buddhist but now Catholic for some years, graciously received us into their main room. They had set up a cloth, candles, and crucifix. I was surprised to see that they had placed Grandmother’s bed, not in a back room, but in their main room. She was bedridden, but she was still integral to the family’s bustling life, and a source of grace for her children and grandchildren. Our spiritual father, Archbishop Cordileone, opened the ritual and began the prayers. They were simple prayers, not spoken with any particular emphasis, but full of health and grace when spoken by a priest, especially by a successor of the Apostles. He bent down to anoint her forehead, and she smiled. He placed the Body of Christ on her tongue, and she closed her eyes.

Nothing in an episcopal visit compares with leading your spiritual father to the sick of your parish. I will always love my Archbishop for these moments with the sick, these saints of our parish. 

On this day, September 14, in the year 335, the Emperor Constantine dedicated a basilica over the site on which was discovered a Cross. Constantine’s mother, the Empress Helena, had made a pilgrimage to Rome nine years earlier. With imperial resources, she was able to locate the long-lost hill of Calvary, upon which a second-century temple to Aphrodite had been built. Deep below its foundations she found three crosses, one of which was discovered to have healing powers.

St. Helena got back to Constantinople and convinced her son to erect a basilica over the spot on which Christ died and was buried. In 335 the basilica was finally ready, and the priests lifted high the Cross of Christ with this chant: “Ave Crux, spes unica!” Hail O Cross, our only hope! Behold this cross, an instrument of the vilest pagan torture, now become the jeweled sign of our salvation. No tragedy, no suffering, no evil can overcome redeeming health this Cross affords to those who believe. In the presence of this Cross, hope shines into the darkest despair.

Once I came upon a terrible accident on I-580. A woman had lost control and rolled her little Mazda into the median. Both her girls were dead, and the paramedics brought me to her just after they had told her this. I held out a 3-inch wooden cross from my emergency kit. She wordlessly pressed that cross to her lips as EMTs lifted her into the mediflight.

In September 2001, a fireman found steel beams twisted into a perfect cross in the wreckage of World Trade Tower #2. It became an icon of hope in the midst of the most senseless tragedy of our time.

Today your priests, and your Archbishop, will clothe themselves in red vestments. It is on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross that Archbishop Cordileone has chosen to visit our parish, and to offer the sacrifice of the Mass here in our sanctuary. We welcome him, and we adore the Holy Cross with him. May we cling to the Cross of Christ, like that unfortunate mother on the freeway. May we Hail the Cross of Christ, our only hope!z

Fr. Driscoll and I (and any other priests who happen to be staying with us) try to have dinner together after “Oratory” (evening prayers) every night. After washing up, we often pray a rosary while walking up and down bustling Clement Street. We generally wear cassocks when we pray, and the first time I entered that very public street with cassock and rosary I felt a modicum of trepidation. We certainly did not want to make a show of our prayer, and yet neither did we want to hide it under a bushel basket. But my mild anxiety was groundless, as the public seems to welcome public prayer with gusto. Some do not notice or acknowledge two blackrobes with rosaries on a busy street, but about half do, and to date not one has frowned or disparaged us. Most who look at us smile, one (elderly) lady blew a kiss, and a few have thanked us with obvious sincerity. I’m sure that the big cities, as tough and secular as they posture themselves, are longing for the presence of God. The public really does want the joy that only a world beyond this world affords. Two priests in soutanes has brought smiles and gratitude to many here in San Francisco, and that is, after all, what a priest is called to do.

Many thanked me for mentioning the homeless man, Myron, in my homily a few weeks ago. Fr. Driscoll and I were just beginning our third decade the other day when he waved toward a figure bedding down by some bushes. It was Myron himself, and he saluted us with great glee. “Keep praying, fathers!” he called out. We will keep praying.