Santa’s Prayer
We have entered the Season of Advent, but of course the Christmas lights have been up for weeks now. Last week I celebrated Black Friday by taking some out-of-town friends to Macy’s tree lighting ceremony at Union Square. The streets around the Square was packed with happy people radiating an air of anticipation. Something good was going to happen. And lo, Santa himself showed up at 6:30 to lead us in a countdown… 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …zzztt! The giant green tree lit up with flashing white lights, and everyone cheered.
 
But it was really something, to see so many people emanating a certain Christmas joy. It struck me that in fact this tree lighting ceremony was a sort of liturgy, complete with vestments (the fire chief in his dress uniform, the master of ceremonies in a shining red gown, Santa in his red suit and furry hat). There was music, most partook of some food, and Santa even offered a prayer that this Christmas would bring peace and joy to our city. He knew that in the back of everyone’s mind, as dozens of city police stood tensely on the perimeter, were recent terrorist attacks in just such gatherings as this. But we came nonetheless, because everyone needs “liturgy,” special ceremonies that lift us out of ourselves and give hope for a better future.

Advent looks forward, not backward
The Scriptures and prayers of this first Sunday of Advent look to that better future, because they speak not of Christ’s first coming 2000 years ago but his Second Coming. St. Paul urges us to “to be blameless in holiness … at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.” He wrote these words fifty years after the first Christmas, expecting his return. Notice also that Jeremiah in the first reading describes a future that has not yet come to pass: “In those days Judah shall be safe and Jerusalem shall dwell secure…” Jerusalem has never known security (the “security fence” fifteen years ago has only led to more violence), and most of the world’s terrorism comes from the interminable dispute between Jew and Arab.

Running to Jesus
The opening prayers, or collects, for Advent are among the most beautiful. Consider today’s prayer, the first for the New Year: “Grant your faithful, we pray, Almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ…” We don’t just waiting around, but we run to Christ. Don’t we all prepare for Christmas by running about, displaying the most spectacular energy of the year—decking the halls, trimming the trees, singing the carols, stirring the eggnog, planning social after social. Since we were children, we have run toward Christmas, as we should. The prayer continues: “run to meet your Christ with righteous deeds, so that gathered at his right hand, [we] may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.” Decking halls is delightful, but “good deeds” are the essential Christmas decorations. No good can come from us that doesn’t come from our interior life, and so above all Advent is a time for deeper prayer: daily Mass, daily Scripture, a good confession, and attending your parish mission.

Prepare Ye
At His First Coming, God came as a darling baby on the lap of his virgin mother Mary. At His Second Coming, Christ will come on the clouds with power and great glory. “Beware,” Jesus warns us, that “that day catch you by surprise like a trap. [It] will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth.” Jesus describes his Second Coming as an “assault” and a “trap”— sobering words. We cannot simply wait for the Second Coming; we need to prepare for it and even run toward it.
 
Advent prepares us for our own death, for Jesus will return to us on the day we die, if we don’t live long enough to see the end of the world. We long for the Advent of a bright, new world, when justice, and the fruit of that justice, which is enduring peace. But first the old order must pass away. No one can better take us through that death, and prepare us for the rebirth, better than the Mother of God. Even as we fight our way through the malls and stage our parties and write our cards, let’s make every Christmas preparation an act of prayer. Buy gifts that will help people become more human, bring Christ into your Christmas parties with a reading of Scripture or praying the rosary, and send cards with Jesus and Mary on them rather than a tawdry rendition of Santa and Rudolf. Let’s not just walk, but run to meet Jesus this Advent.

An Authentic Thanksgiving
A Happy Thanksgiving to you all, and many thanks for beginning your holiday with Mass this morning. You are among the faithful who celebrate a genuine Thanksgiving as did America’s founding pilgrims. We must never forget that America was founded by religious pilgrims, motivated more to worship God freely than material prosperity. Prosperity followed, but worship came first. They, and Presidents Washington and Lincoln after them, established Thanksgiving as a day of worship and sacred gratitude to God. I’ve been told that America’s very first Thanksgiving meal was at St. Augustine in Florida, following a Mass offered in thanksgiving by Spanish colonists, fifty years before the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. The first act of thanksgiving on our soil was, therefore, the Catholic Mass, the same Mass that we are offering on this Thanksgiving Day.

A cardiac Event
Last week a friend of mine went through a “cardiac event,” which means her heart almost gave out. She is fairly young but saw her life failing her, and all that she held dear being taken from her. I was amazed to hear her cheerful and even thankful voice on the phone. “In this trauma, I thank God for all he has given me, and I know He has allowed my heart to falter at this time for a good reason.” She witnessed to me that a time of pain and confusion is the precise moment to give thankful praise to God, who never ceases to care for us.

Stand Erect
Our two readings are from the 34th and last week of the Liturgical Year, and speak of the end times. The prophet Daniel is thrown into the Lion’s Den, and Jesus predicts the unimagined stress at the end of the world. In the first reading, Daniel, an exceptionally gifted youth who had enjoyed the king’s favor, is destroyed by envious people. The King, reluctantly, is forced by political necessity to execute him. One of the more gruesome means of capital punishment at the time was stripping a man naked and throwing him into a cage with several lions. Daniel refuses to express bitterness at this turn of fortune; he doesn’t miss a beat, but joyfully—even with gratitude—climbs into the cage. The next day, untouched by harm, he sings out to the king, “O King, live forever! God has sent his angel to close the lions’ mouths,” for he is the living God. Daniel’s unshakeable faith motivates his unshakable thanksgiving.  So it will be at the end of the world. “You will see Jerusalem surrounded by armies,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel. Some “people will die of fright… but when these signs begin, stand erect and raise your heads, because your redemption is at hand.”
 
When things go very south for you, when your enemies attack and your friends reject you, when your money fails, when your health fails, when your mind fails, stand erect, raise your head, and know that your redemption is at hand. It is precisely in distress that we must thank God, if we are to survive the great distress. People of faith, in fact, grow stronger in times of distress if they consistently thank God. They are immune from discouragement.

A. Lincoln
Let us return to President Lincoln, who uttered the following words precisely at the time of greatest national distress, in the midst of our Civil War.

The End
We have come to the end, the 24th Sunday after Pentecost and the Last of the liturgical year. Next Sunday we begin again with the first Sunday of Advent—thus the seemingly endless cycles of life and death. But these cycles will not continue forever. Only God is forever, and one day we will reach our “end”—the essential purpose for which we were created. “You were made for a greater purpose,” said Mother Teresa. “To love and be loved.”
 
Endurance
To attain this perfect love, which we call heaven, requires God’s Grace. But it also requires endurance on our part (longanimitas in Latin—long-suffering, literally “to a great length”). In the Epistle, St. Paul assures us that he is praying for us, his readers, even those of us at Star of the Sea in 2015. He is praying for our perseverance, because as Jesus says in the Gospel, “The one who perseveres to the end will be saved.” His words (permanserit usque ad finem in Latin) mean “remaining steady through to the end.”
 
Terror
The Lord describes this End as one of terror, for who can see the face of God and live? Many have portrayed the Second Coming in bright and pleasant images—Jesus floating down in clouds, surrounded by rosy-cheeked baby angels, with happy souls floating up to meet him in the sky. No one knows the time or the manner in which he will return to earth, but here is how He describes that day: “when you see a desolating abomination in the holy place, you must flee to the mountains…pray that your flight not be in winter…woe to nursing women on that day…” This last warning became terrifyingly real to my mother in October 1962. It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Union had their nuclear warheads pointed at New York City, where our growing family was living in a small house in the Bronx. She was still nursing me, her fourth child as the world came the closest it has ever come to global nuclear war and the end of life as we knew it. The End will come, and it will be exceedingly hard: had those days not been shortened, Jesus says, no one would be saved. The powers of the heavens will be shaken, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn.
 
Every eye shall behold him, even those who pierced him, and no one will be able to deny either God’s existence or Christ’s Lordship on that day. “When you see these things, know that he is near, at the gates.” How do we persevere in our faith until he arrives; how do we keep our wits in a time when titanic forces will rip away our faith away?
 
Your Word O Lord
We have this consolation: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” One thing will remain. We will always be able to find him in the Sacred Mass. The Mass, given us through his Holy Church, not only brings us his Word, but gives us the capacity to see and hear his Word in the chaotic world. When so many of our loved ones, especially our own children, have given up on the Mass, it is tempting to lose faith in it ourselves. But today we renew our commitment to the Mass, the still center of our lives, the source of God’s Word. Even though heaven and earth collapse around us, may God find us holding tightly to that Word, to the Mass. Our Lady and all the Saints are here with us. Let us hope and pray that those closest to us will also find their way back to this fellowship—imperfect on earth, but soon to be perfected in heaven.

Earlier this year a controversy ensued over the question of phasing out altar girls at my parish. Many good and thoughtful Catholics could not understand why a pastor would think that sexual differences indicate different roles in the Mass. The heat generated over this question took me aback. How much of it, I wonder, is generated by our unconscious acceptance of liberalism’s mantra that personal autonomy is the supreme good? If that is so, then indeed we should be at liberty to choose our sexual identity, despite our natural bodies.
 
Last week five girls submitted applications to become Boy Scouts in Santa Rosa. I don’t think this was prompted by the girls themselves, because children generally appreciate the natural differences between boys and girls. Rather, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in an article by Steve Rubenstein: “One by one, under the watchful eyes of parents, they trooped to the head table and plopped their applications in front of Council President John Carriger. ‘I’d like to be a Boy Scout,’ each girl said” (emphasis mine).
 
From my experience with youth programs over the years, I’m fairly certain that these gender questions are of little interest to children, but of pressing concern to adults. When I checked this story on Google, I found that every news site listed by that estimable search engine was reporting in lockstep with the prevailing gender-neutral dogma, and many of them were homosexual advocacy sites. I was surprised, on Halloween this year, to see how many adults dressed up in costumes. Halloween in my neighborhood was less about children than about adults. Children need us adults to consider their needs before our own, at least some of the time.
 
Girl Altar Boys? Some of my best altar servers were girls over the years.  If redefining gender roles is of little interest to children, then who is really behind such things, and whose agenda are they advancing? So many of us have unthinkingly accepted liberalism’s mantra of “choice” but there are some things one simply cannot choose and simply cannot change no matter how loudly one says them or how hard one tries to choose them because they just are: boys can’t be girls; girls can’t be boys; marriage can’t be redefined; killing a human being is never not murder – all of these things just are because that’s how God defined them. 

Libralism's creed of personal autonomy has been the air we breathe in the West at least since Francis Bacon wrote his treatises on man’s domination of nature. Liberalism’s creed is not going to go away any time soon, but at least we can bring a measure of reason to the controversy. We can calmly insist that our natures are greater than our wills, that Mother Nature is not mocked, and that she always wins in the end.  (For a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts of America, consider the Catholic Troops of St. George or the interdenominational Trail Life USA.)

If you are near San Francisco on Sunday evening, I invite you to my parish for a 7pm presentation by Dr. Maria Elena Monzani, an astrophysicist from Stanford University. She is one of our few high-level scientists who believe in something greater than what we can see through our advanced telescopes. With images from the Hubble Telescope, she will show how the wonders of deep space show the fingerprints of God Almighty. This is sponsored by Star of the Sea’s Speaker’s Series, is free and open to the public, and will include some nicely-appointed Italian antipasto eats after the talk (eg, prosciutto, salami, cheeses, etc). Come on by if you are near--7pm this Sunday, November 15, in the parish auditorium. 

Today is the Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran in Rome, the Cathedral of that city and the ecclesia omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput (as it is written on the bases of the mighty columns flanking the central portal). Translated: “of all the churches in the City [Rome] and the world—mother and head.” She (the Lateran Basilica) is the Mother and Head of my little parish here in San Francisco, and the Mother and Head of your dear parish, wherever in the world you may worship the Good God. We celebrate the dedication of this particular parish, established in the year 324, because in solemnizing her dedication we render thanks for every one of our own little parishes.
 
Have you ever been to St. John Lateran? It is a magnificent church, immense but usually quite empty except on special occasions. Most parishes in Rome are empty these days, with only a few isolated people scattered among the rows of empty pews for Sunday Mass. I suppose today’s successful organizations (consider Facebook, Google and Uber here in the Bay Area, which employ thousands of the brightest and best) would consider the Catholic Church a dying entity. Considering her client base and revenue, we would have to agree.
 
And yet the pastors of St. John Lateran’s Parish in Rome have never given up. They have remained open through the barbarian invasions, Europe’s various civil wars, the current secularization. These men have given up expecting full churches, but they have not given up offering the Holy Sacrifice. They have had to redefine what “success” means in a post-Christian age. A successful pastor is a faithful pastor. He may or may not have lots of people at Mass, but he will continue to offer the Mass prayerfully and consistently, even if he is the only one at the altar. He will become a soul before God, and he will return every morning to the conviction that God Alone Suffices.
 
Those of you who have children know how discouraging it can be to see them casually toss Jesus away. Almost every faithful Catholic family I know has seen their children or grandchildren cave into practical atheism. Know this: the Domestic Church will suffer the same failures as the Parish Church. And the Parish Church suffers the same disappointments as the Mother Church in Rome. Most of our children will sell their birthrights for a bowl of porridge; they will suffer the bitter disappointments of life without God. We must do what we can to deliver Jesus, and then become a soul alone with God, heedless of success or failure. Our children are not our own; we are stewards, not owners, even of those we love the most.
 
The Lateran Basilica, a big empty Church in Rome, is our Mother and Head. We hope it will one day again ring with the joy of a thousand voices every Sunday. But in our time she is a Sorrowful Mother who has been abandoned by her children. She does not love them any less for it, nor love God any less.