I went for a hike in Bavaria today with an old friend, a German Benedictine priest. We studied together in Rome in the 80s and every ten years or so we visit each other, either in California or in Germany. Yesterday we spent an hour in the house in which Pope Benedict was born, and in the church in which he was baptized, at the tiny village of Marktl-am-Inn. Like Pope John Paul II, his home was just across the street from the parish. Today we hiked through the splendid forests of lower Germany, stopping at every village to say a prayer in their tiny churches. Each of these villages also has its Maibaum or "May Tree," what we call a "May Pole," around which festooned girls dance on May 1st. Some will point out that German tribes danced around sacred trees as pagans, and that there is little difference between pagan and Christian customs. That is to say, as my friend observed pithily, "we are still worshipping trees." He pointed out that the Green Party in Germany is now close to 20% of the Bundestag. 
 
Well, I replied, nothing wrong with worshipping trees. In fact, today of all days we do just that as good Catholics. It is September 14, the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross."  We don't worship the Cross, of course, but we exult it with the highest affection and esteem, such that most law-abiding pagans would see no difference between our awe before the wood of the Cross and their awe before the wood of a maypole. Consider how we address the Cross as if it were a person, from today's Liturgy: "O Cross, more splendid than all the stars, towering above all cedars, on whom hung the life of the world."
 
The wood of the Cross is different than that of any tree, however. Bavarians erect Maypoles in their town squares to point to the Cross, not to compete with it. The Cross was just a piece of wood before Christ joyfully ascended onto it. In fact, the Cross was just another form of imperial torture, which is why the enemy of life never suspected that the author of life would use it to destroy him. Christ beat Satan with his own weapon, taking violence and death upon himself. 
 
And so, violence was undone by violence, and God trampled death by His own death. When we take up a cross ourselves, we will take the enemy by surprise every time. He will never come to believe that a human being can willingly, even lovingly, take violence upon himself for love of another. And so, each of us has seen how easily a little person can disarm a strong person with simple charity. One of my favorite Mother Teresa stories is her interview with Daniel Ortega. She had asked for a building in Managua to serve the poor. She was escorted into a dark room to find Mr. Ortega seated between four large soldiers brandishing impressive machine guns. He harangued her for 30 minutes about the great Satan Capitalism and how he was saving the country through Marxism. Mother simply replied "works of love are works of peace" and asked him how many children he had. President Ortega was flummoxed but replied "seven." Mother reached up to give him seven miraculous medals, and one for his wife, and ... one for him, even showing him how to wear it. The strongman was disarmed, and smiled, and gave the little nun a few buildings downtown to begin their work. 
 
I am aware that Daniel Ortega has rearmed and is causing great suffering in Nicaragua today. But anyone who takes the cross upon herself can disarm him again, for truly, Ave Crux Spes Unica (see the motto on my webpage). 

Faith and Reason

Almost every high school student, and every college student, are taught that faith and science are incompatible. Religion, they are told, is nothing more than primitive superstition. No intelligent and sophisticated person takes the bible seriously. What about you? Do you believe that every word of the bible is inspired by God and without error? Have you studied the bible so as to understand what “inspired” and “inerrant” mean? “Inerrant” means that the Bible reveals truths deeper and more essential than historical or scientific facts. Some of those deeper questions include, for example, whether there is a God, an intelligent order to the universe. Is human life greater than physical existence? Are we nothing more than meat machines, or do we have immortal souls? Most high school and college students know the atomic table and basic calculus but cannot fathom these fundamental questions of human existence.
 
How and Why

​Our first reading is from the book of wisdom: “The deliberations of mortals are timid, and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind.” Our “earthen shelters”—our bodies—clamor for food and entertainment, which distract our minds from penetrating the deeper mysteries of life. We rarely get below a surface understanding of life, which, in any case, a market economy and an atheist culture reduce to animal compulsions: food, sex, and violence. “Scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty.” Mathematics, astronomy, physics, and all the natural sciences, which are relatively simple, measurable, sensible—but even these we must toil at. “But when things are in heaven,” the Holy Scripture continues, “who can search them out … except you had given wisdom?” The deepest intellectual knowledge, an integrated understanding of all reality—what we call wisdom—comes only with God’s help. The empirical sciences like math and physics can explain how things work, but only God can reveal why we are here in the first place. The how we are here is much less vital to us than the why we are here. Only God open our minds to first principles and final ends.
 
Pope Francis in his first encyclical, Lumen fidei, says faith is an act of the intellect superior to that of unaided human reason, because it is illuminated not merely by empirical observation, but by love. Mother Teresa, for example, aided by her faith in the Love of God, understood reality on a grander scale than those who analyze things only in terms of politics and economics. She could see the broader connections, the “mega-stories,” the deepest relationships between things and peoples. Without faith, our intellects are hamstrung. If you think our current leaders seem less intelligent than the founders of our nation, you are probably right. 250 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote that a free democracy orders itself according to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, we are trying to order our lives together without reference to God. Without the higher science of faith, we cannot understand the fundamental laws of nature and the social order. Social disorder, chaotic politics, and public violence will increase as we reject divine Wisdom.  
 
God Alone

​We know how we exist (at least on a physical, molecular level), but how is not enough for the human soul. “Deaths by despair” (drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, suicide, overeating, and clinical depression) have increased dramatically in the last 20 years, especially among millennials. Time magazine reported in June that drug-related deaths among 18-34 year olds has risen 108% between 2007 and 2017 (36000 millennials died of despair in 2017). There does exist a fundamental reason which orders all existence, an ultimate purpose toward which everything moves, Jesus says, and I am He. We have all come from God, and we are returning to God. Your focus on God must be absolute if you are to make it through this life to heaven. And so “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Should my own mother mean more to me than God, I must “hate” her, that is, crucify my attachment to her. It is not my mother I hate, but my own disordered attachment to her that I hate. God alone must be my all in all. Nothing and nobody can take His place.
 
Today, September 8, is also the feast of the Birth of Mary, nine months after December 8, the Immaculate Conception. Her Immaculate Heart understood what the human mind, crippled by original Sin, can never understand. Her wisdom is God’s wisdom; her love is his love. Let our minds be single-hearted like hers, the Immaculate Heart, letting nothing and no one come between us and God.

Yesterday was the feast of St. Pius X in the older calendar, and St. Gregory I in the newer calendar. Pius X was born Giuseppe Sarto (that’s Joe Taylor in English) in 1835, grew up in a poor family near Venice, and became Pope in 1903, dying just as the Guns of August unleashed the Great War in 1914. Europe has never recovered the unity that Christianity had woven of the many tribes and languages from Moscow to Greece. Pius X pleaded with his fellow Europeans to see liberal relativism (what he called “modernism”) as the mother of all errors. Modernism’s will to power splinters not only social cohesion but even the individual’s sense of personal integrity. People feel “disintegrated” today: confused about their personal identity, isolated from others, and without a place in society. In Pascendi, Pius X predicted the personal and social disorder that would follow Europe’s denial of an intelligent unifying principle, her defiance of God. To restore social unity, he pointed us to the Sacred Liturgy, to the communal confession of a Power greater than ourselves. Pius X promoted early and frequent reception of Holy Communion, as well as initiating the “liturgical movement” through sacred music and greater use of scripture.
 
Our other saint had done the same in the sixth century. Gregory I was born around 540, during the decline of the Roman Empire. Son of a Roman senator and Prefect of Rome, he became Prefect of the Eternal City at only 30 years old. Upon his father’s death, Gregory turned the family villa into a monastic community, and to this day San Gregorio monastery sits on that spot of the Caelian Hill. (Interestingly, somehow Mother Teresa managed to situate her European Motherhouse on the spot as well. Ten years ago I did a funeral Mass for a homeless man in San Gregorio church while the sisters and the poor of Rome sang laments, mostly off key.) Gregory was persuaded to become bishop of Rome in 590, and like Pius X he shored up what was left of the temporal order by focusing on the eternal. He strengthened his people's faith in and devotion to the Holy Mass. “Gregorian Chant,” for example, was one of Gregory’s contributions to the Sacred Liturgy.
 
The Catholic Church has contributed much to the arts and sciences, from systems of integrated healthcare, to the rule of law, to the scientific method, to music, painting, and architecture. In America, along with Catholic hospitals, the Church is best known for its Catholic schools and universities. Few Catholics in San Francisco attend Mass anymore, but many are proud to say they received a “Catholic education.” What good is a Catholic education, however, if almost every Catholic school graduate abandons the Mass? We are educating our children for Harvard, perhaps, but not for Heaven. And if we are not educating them for Heaven, even their lives on earth will be disordered.

In my own experience at Star of the Sea, worship had become secondary to education. The parish was dying, but the school was thriving, brimming with energy and money. Energy and money for what, though? The school had lost its defining purpose, and anyone who pointed this out was demonized. Parents enrolling their children in the school were told, apparently, that they never had to attend the church, and that the parish and school had long ago gone in different directions. Thus, the one thing that distinguishes authentic Catholic education (faith in the Eucharist) was missing. 75% of Catholics in America today don’t believe in the Eucharist, and I would bet most of them attended Catholic schools.
 
If parishes cease being “schools of prayer” (in the words of Pope John Paul), they will die, and their schools will eventually die with them. If the Church is not focused on the one thing necessary, which is prayer and especially the Holy Mass, her parishes will decay. Her hospitals, her universities, her music and art, her schools will decay with them. Popes Gregory and Pius did not focus on Catholic education, or Catholic health care, or Catholic social programs. They focused on the Holy Mass, on the Sacred Eucharist. All the Church's good works will follow if we are faithful to the Mass. Without the Eucharist, however, we will have only corruption and decline.
 
Who will be our Gregory the Great, and who our Pius X? Who will restore the Holy Mass to its first place in Catholic parishes, schools, universities, and hospitals? 

Love God, love neighbor

Our Lord tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in response to a lawyer’s question: “what must I do to have eternal life?” Christ replies with a question: what does God command? The lawyer answers “Love God. Love your neighbor.” Our Lord nods in approval. Do this, and you will live. But as lawyers are wont to do, he has another question: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which dramatically shows who is my neighbor, and how to love him. Answer: Everyone is my neighbor, and I love him by meeting his basic needs with my time and money. As Mother Teresa said, “you must touch the poor; you must give until it hurts” (until you feel it). The lawyer got it right: love God and love neighbor. But it is in the doing that we often fail. Twice Our Lord tells the lawyer to “do”: “do this and you will live;” “go and do likewise.”
 
Loving God first, and then our neighbor for the love of God, is more than just a feeling. Is anyone not moved to compassion by images of a wounded and dying person? The news media, and the entertainment industry (which are hardly distinguishable these days), monetize our compassion. We want to know if people are suffering in Syria, or in Eritrea, or in Odessa, Texas. We want to see the suffering and feel the compassion, because compassion is a naturally good feeling. But do we do anything about it? “Which of the three was neighbor to him?” Jesus asks the Pharisee, who replies, “the one who showed him mercy”—the one who gets dirty, bloody, and sweaty to help a poor man who is dirty, bloody, and sweaty. St. Augustine says that the Samaritan represents Our Lord, and the dying traveler represents Adam. God felt compassion, as we all do, but further, he acted on that compassion. He came down from heaven and bled for us on the cross.

Myron of the stinking rags and beatific smile

Some of you may remember a homeless man who would come to our parish named Myron. He lived in a tent on 12th Avenue, and Jean and Arnold Low brought him breakfast every day for 22 years. That’s compassion! On the morning of October 27th, 2016, they brought Myron’s breakfast, but no sound came from the tent. They went to Mass and came back to find the food untouched, and his stiff body inside the tent. Myron used to attend our Masses covered in filthy dreadlocks and stinking rags. He kept to the back of the church and no one wanted to be near him for very long because of his smell. But Myron beamed the most radiant smile, and people would put up with his odor just to receive that smile. His name in Greek, Myron, means sweet oil, as in “myrrh.” “That’s what my mother named me,” he would say with a smile.
 
The Hebrew word for Myron is Mashiach, which was translated Christus in Greek. The Messiah Jesus Christ is the Anointed One, bearing the fragrance of healing oil to the world. Our Myron was definitely not sweet smelling, and yet his sweet smile healed us all. 700 people came to his funeral. He was certainly an outcast, one of the city’s many street people, psychologically imbalanced, thrown away and forgotten. Among the many truths contained in the parable of the Good Samaritan is that the poor anoint us. God saves us from self-absorption through his beloved poor, if we take the time to see them, to talk with them, to “touch” them. St. Vincent de Paul said that “those who love the poor in life not be sad in this life and will have nothing to fear in death.”

The poor enrich us

​Of course, serving God in the poor is work. The Good Samaritan had to change his travel plans to help the beaten man. He got blood and sweat smeared on him, and perhaps even other bodily execrations, by hauling the helpless broken body of this man onto his own donkey. But there is a kind of blessing, a grace and a joy, that comes only by surrendering to a poor man’s need. God gives us the poor to slow us down, to smell the sweet scent of His presence along the road. We can’t help every broken person, but if we never stop to help another man, we remain the poorest of men.
 
The poor closest to us, however, are those we live and work with. There is a person in your house, or with whom you work, who annoys you. You avoid him or her, which is in many cases not unreasonable. But there are times when you should not avoid an annoying person. God wants to bless you through that person, but you need to surrender a bit of your time and attention. Smile at annoying people every time, and give them your patient attention from time to time. Mother of Jesus, help us to be patient and attentive to those who need a smile and perhaps a helping hand.