Rose Colored Vestments  

“Gaudete Sunday” takes its name from the first word of its opening scripture verse, the introit from Philippians 4, which is also the Epistle for this Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete. Dominus prope est. “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near.” From the perspective of a sinner facing judgement, the nearness of the Lord is fearful, as in the Dies irae sequence. But from the perspective of the sinner facing final redemption, his imminent arrival is joyful. We want to get on with the necessary judgement so we can get through Purgatory and on to Heaven. We want the Lord to come quickly, because the arrival of the Lord is always our supreme good. Thus the priest and the altar clothe themselves in rose vesture to indicate the joy of the Lord’s imminent arrival.

Joy is More than a Feeling

​St. Paul does not ask but commands us to be joyful, in the imperative. He does not suggest; he requires that we radiate joy. Remember that birthday party when you were pouting and your mother said “You will be happy!” St. Paul can command joy because joy is not just a feeling. As they say in Retrouvaille, a program for troubled marriages, love is not a feeling; it is a decision. I will love you, even when I don’t feel love for you! I will radiate joy, especially when I don’t feel joyful. Sound “inauthentic” or “fake?” It’s not. It’s called fidelity. Contemporary culture, following the dictates of the sexual revolution, commands us to follow our feelings. Jesus commands us to overcome our feelings and to practice goodness even and especially when we don’t feel good. The good news is that we can choose to exercise joy even when things around us make us feel sad.
 
Joy is a virtue: it’s a habit we form by repeatedly choosing a good behavior.
Joy is a duty: God calls his disciples to radiate confident joy in his divine providence, the unshakable conviction that “all things work for the good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28). Joy is a net by which we catch souls, beginning with our own. A sad Christian is a bad Christian. We can lose our own soul by grumbling, by complaining, by falling into a pervasive negativity. When we grumble we throw God’s gifts back in his face. Complaining is a kind of blasphemy. And finally, joy is possible. God does not command the impossible, and we all know people who have suffered terribly but remain serenely joyful.

Prayer Guarantees joy

How can I retain that joyful peace when so much is wrong within and without? St. Paul’s answer is clear: prayer. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he says. “Have no anxiety at all, but by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.” Like everyone else, I struggle with sadness, frustration and discouragement. Being a priest in a culture that marginalizes priests because it ignores God is not easy. Being a priest in a Church whose leaders are confused is confusing. Being a practicing Catholic in a Church whose leaders have been living criminally double lives is discouraging. The betrayal of our leaders drains our courage to be Catholic. We all struggle to put on a joyful face every day with our co-workers, our children, our spouses, and with that most difficult of person, the one we see in the mirror every morning. Personally, what saves me is getting my old carcass out of bed and into the chapel every morning. What can we do when everything else fails but come before God?

The Star of the New Evangelization

​The great image of Our Lady of Guadalupe to my left is still with us from her feast last Wednesday. She brought joy to an entire continent at the lowest point in American history. The most highly developed civilization on the American continent, the Aztec empire, was in its death throes. When she appeared to Juan Diego Cuat-loat-at-zin in 1531, his civilization and the sacred beliefs of his ancestors were being destroyed by the Spaniards. She said to him, “Escucha, ponlo en tu corazón, Hijo mío el menor, que no es nada lo que te espantó, … no se perturbe tu rostro, tu corazón; … ¿No estoy aquí yo, que soy tu Madre?” God gave us His mother, so that we would believe in his tender love for us. By coming to Him through her, we will never flag in Christian joy. Our Lady of Guadalupe, cause of our joy, pray for us!

Mother of the Americas

Yesterday the entire archdiocese came together, it seemed, to honor the Mother of God. 40,000 pilgrims made their way through the city to the cathedral in the 25th annual Guadalupe Procession, walking, singing, and praying for 12 miles into the City of St. Francis. Horsemen in brilliant Guadalupano colors led the way onto the central plaza, pausing at the church door to let in a young woman dressed in the bright mantle Our Lady of Guadalupe, accompanied by a bearded indigenous man dressed as Juan Diego. Thirty Aztec concero dancers in plumage and shells followed them, all keeping their eyes fixed on the 20-foot cathedral mosaic of la Guadalupana. They made their way to her, offering gratitude and prayers to God for sending his holy mother to the Americas in 1531. After the singing, they backed away toward their places for Mass, never turning their faces from hers. And it seemed to me that she was with us yesterday; more than a mere image, the Mother of God who left her image on Juan Diego’s tilma 487 years ago has never left the Americas. God sent his Mother to Mesoamerica during Advent, a Christmas gift, a birth of the Christian faith in the new world. In that year, ten years after Hernan Cortez landed in Veracruz, both Spaniard and Aztec were locked in a war of attrition, grinding toward mutual destruction. Only a mother, and only the Mother of God, could reconcile God’s children. Today they are one race, La Raza, and all of us from Canada to Chile, are Guadalupanos.
 
In my catechism class yesterday, I asked four children to draw a picture of “Christmas” on the board. Each of them drew a Christmas tree. I asked them: What does a fir tree have to do with the birth of the Messiah? And a little girl said it was because Jesus would carry a big piece of wood one day through the streets of Jerusalem. Yes, Christmas is the birth of the Messiah who would save his people by the wood of the cross. Advent is a time of greater prayer and penance to knock down the mountains and fill in the valleys in our lives: to dismantle sinful or simply exaggerated behaviors, and to fill in good habits that may be lacking, especially consistent prayer. Most of us don’t pray enough, and because we don’t give significant time to focused conversation with God, we become easily stressed, irritated, discouraged, depressed, angry, and abusive. The answer to every confusion in our life, the strength for every weakness, is to come before the altar of God, like the Aztec warriors themselves did 500 years ago in Tepeyac, and as they did yesterday in the cathedral. I want to thank all the people from our parish who attended this Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the patronal feast of the United States. Thank you for coming before the altar of God today as well.

Make Straight the Path

Luke begins his Gospel with a list of important historical figures, establishing his credentials as an historian: In the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, in the governorship of Pontius Pilate, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…” But the word of God, and the judgement of God, did not come through these great leaders. It came through John the Baptist, a simple preacher who lived in the desert. He wore animal skins and ate insects. He said very simply: Prepare the way for God to enter your soul. Make a straight path for him into your life. Straighten yourself out. We have work to do in these last three weeks Christmas, and I don’t mean only shopping. We must send out the cards and buy the gifts and stage the parties, which are good things. But please do not neglect the real meaning of this season, which is to prepare our souls to receive Him.

The Immaculate Conception

​On Saturday we celebrated our national patroness, the Immaculate Conception. It was on this day, Dec 9, that Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego, a poor little Indian man who could not even speak Spanish. He was on his way to the Mass of the Immaculate Conception when she drew him in by flor y canto, by roses blooming among cactus and songs of delightful birds. In exquisite sweetness she called out: “Juanito, Juan Diegito, el mas pequeño de mis hijos.” He asked who she was, and she told him: “Know for certain, my son, my littlest one, that I am the perfect and ever virgin holy Mary, mother of the true God, through whom all things live, the creator of mankind, the sovereign of all that is near and far, the maker of heaven and earth.” We are all children of this woman, and children of God. Our lives can be ordered and peaceful, preparing for heaven even while on earth, so that nothing here can disturb us. We only need to pray to the good God through Our Lady, and that prayer is how we make straight the path for God into our hearts this Christmas. We celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe this Wednesday, December 12, at 6 in the morning. Can I count on you to join Juan Diego and me on that day, at that hour, to meet her in our church here on Geary Boulevard?

Let no man separate

Three years ago on the feast of St. Francis, Pope Francis opened the Synod (meeting) of Bishops in Rome on marriage and family. Pundits speculated that the Church would change her teaching on divorce. Providentially, the Mass readings that day delivered Christ’s clearest teaching about marriage and divorce: “What God has joined let no man separate.” Marriage is certainly a human relationship, but the Sacrament of matrimony takes us far beyond our human capacities. Bishop Barron describes the human aspects of marriage as “two people deciding, for mutual benefit, to live together in a form of intense friendship.” Children, physical pleasure, recreation, emotional fulfilment, professional achievement, etc. are all fruits of this relationship. But marriage is not only a human relationship. It is primarily a relationship, through your spouse and children, with God. Marriage, and all forms of love, are God’s, and so Jesus declares that what God has joined no man can separate; therefore whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. The Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, simply because divorce does not exist. A man who separates himself from a woman he has validly and sacramentally married is still married to her. No divorce certificate from city hall can change that. Neither can any priest, bishop, or pope break the bond that God has forged.

Youth, faith, and vocations

It’s been three years since the Synod on marriage, and last Wednesday Pope Francis opened a second Synod, this one on “youth, faith, and vocations.” Again the Synod begins its monthlong deliberations with Christ’s words from Chapter Ten of St. Mark’s Gospel affirming God’s gift of lifelong marriage, and warning against the grave harm impurity does to our relationships. Again, however, the world is wondering if the Church will relax her biblical rules on sexuality. How can the Catholic Church, pundits ask, possibly expect young people to be chaste? But this Synod again opens with Christ’s clearest teaching on God’s plan for human love: “God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” A person’s sex, or what we call today “gender,” is not personal choice. Our sex is a gift from God. We either use our sexual gifts according to God’s laws (and flourish) or we ignore the owner’s manual (and suffer chaos). We do not break the law of God. We break against the law of God. Someone suggested that if you are confused about your sexuality simply go into the bathroom, disrobe, and if you have any questions call him. Biology and the natural law matters. I know that many young people have been thrown into confusion by our confused culture, and many bear wounds from the pervasive social dysfunction of our time. Young people, especially, have had the rug pulled out from under them in the sexual sphere. But the solution is not to pretend that we can create our own reality. The solution is to come back to the natural laws. Our Heavenly Father does not want us to break against these laws, which are beautiful, true, and good. He wants us to flourish by joyfully receiving the beautiful ways of nature.

Love Wins

​I noticed a large sign in the store the other day: Love Wins. That is certainly true. While everyone seems to have their own definition of “love,” there is a God and He is love. One who loves another brings the beloved to God who is love. When it comes to male and female, love by its nature is fruitful, as in all the animal and plant kingdoms. Love blossoms effusively. “Let the children come to me” Jesus says in the Gospel about marriage. Love wins because it transcends its own time and place in begetting new lives who carry that love far beyond the short lives of their mother and father. It is this vocation to which God calls young people— to offer ourselves as He offered himself for another. Let us pray that the Church, in this synod, calls young people to no less than Jesus Christ in this Gospel.
 
God our Father, through Holy Mother church, has opened both these Synods of Bishops with the Scriptures we hear today: “it is not good for man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.” God is the author of love and the intensely relational form of love we call sexual. Adam wakes up to find Eve and cries out: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” And that is why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh.” We are not owners, but stewards, of our bodies and souls. Let us pray to the Blessed Mother in this month of the rosary to show us how to love, and how to live, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus her Son. Let us pray for the leaders of our Church, now gathered in Synod, to proclaim God’s truth about truth and beauty and love, ever ancient, ever new.

A Wedding Feast Gone Sour
“Gospel” in Old English means “good news” (evangelium in Latin, meaning “glad tidings”), but what is the good news from today’s Gospel? A King invites guests to a wedding feast for his Son, but they ignore him. He invites them again, and some ignore him again, while others actually kill his messengers. The king responds in a reciprocally outrageously manner by sending troops to kill the killers and “burn their city.”  Does our Heavenly Father really kill those who oppose him and incinerate entire towns in his rage? On Friday an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia killed at least 1200 and left 17,000 homeless. Why does God punish even the innocent in this way?
 
I cannot say why God permits losses such as these, or even smaller run-of-the mill adversities. No man can judge or even understand God’s ways; we are the creatures and He the Creator. But some human beings do manage to trust God even in acutely difficult circumstances. They believe that He knows what He is doing. Earthly tragedies at least serve to remind us that here below we have no lasting city. God allows us to suffer not because he feels “hurt” when we ignore Him but in order to correct our disordered intellects. We lapse unconsciously into thinking that we can live just fine without Him. But in reality our only hope is to live eternally with Him, because anything less than the infinite will never satisfy the human heart. Everything in this earthly life must be bent toward finding that Infinite One.
 
God allows natural disasters for this supreme good. He takes things away from us—he lets our property burn, he lets our health decline, he takes way friends and relatives—so that we will focus our hopes on nothing less than His perfect will, which we call heaven. People complain about getting older—losing our eyesight, our sense of taste, our cardio-vascular strength. At 56 I’ve begun to dry up in some places and leak in other places but the weakness of aging helps me to let go of the natural and prepare for the supernatural. The older we get the younger we get, because we are approaching our birth into a perfect life. The weaker we get the stronger we get, because weakness forces us to transfer our hopes from our limited human strength to God’s infinite strength. 
 
The good news of this Gospel parable is that, though we lose everything in this world, we never lose God’s invitation. But we have to respond to the invitation. A Christian responds by attending the Holy Mass, God’s nuptials for His Son. Jesus uses the forceful image of a king burning a city to drive home his point: we will burn if we do not receive the Bread of Life. Without the Eucharist we are defenseless against real evil in the world. But having received the Holy Eucharist, nothing can touch us; we are invincible because God almighty lives within us.
 
The man not properly dressed
So the king fills his banquet hall with guests. But then he comes across a man without proper vesture. The king becomes enraged again (on a purely literal reading we would say this king needs anger management therapy). The king casts the poorly-dressed man out—outside of heaven—where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Lesson: we must be clothed properly for the Mass. I’m wearing my “Sunday Shoes” at Mass right now—I bought them specifically for Sundays and wear them nowhere else. What we wear at Mass matters much. But even more important is to clothe our souls with grace, which we receive in prayer and sacrament. So many are lined up at the confessionals right now for that very purpose.
 
Bring them in!
Finally, notice that the king orders his servants to bring in the people, from the highways and byways. “I want my wedding hall filled with guests” he cries out. Not long ago I mentioned to a nice lady at Mass how much I miss seeing her husband at church. She spoke to him, gently, and he came back to Mass after many years. Sometimes it just takes a simple invitation. In other cases, we simply need to pray and offer sacrifices for those who are trying to live their lives without God. This is what Our Lady of Fatima asked of the three children: make everything you do a sacrifice for those who do not know God. Do not complain that your children, your spouse or siblings, your grandchildren do not go to Mass. Do something about it: make of everything a sacrifice for those entrusted to you, and the good Lord will do the rest. 

The last time I preached in this chapel was April of 1997, and Mother Teresa was sitting in her wheelchair right beside where Sr. Prema is sitting now. The sound system kept cutting out, with the street noise as outrageous as it is today. After Mass I offered Mother a new sound system for the chapel. She replied “but, father, we already have a sound system.” Yes, Mother, I pointed out, but it hardly works. “I think it’s fine for simple sisters like us.” She said, and moved on to another topic. I am happy to see someone eventually installed a functional sound system, but be careful not to overdo your simplicity!
 
72 years ago today Jesus spoke to Mother in what we now call “Inspiration Day.” On a train climbing the grade up to Darjeeling, Jesus’ thirst for love and souls took hold of her heart. From that day, I think, she began to see Jesus more clearly in every person. And what did Mother see in priests, whom she loved so much? She saw in us what we rarely see in ourselves. She saw in the priest “the love of the heart of Jesus,” in the words she loved to quote from the patron saint of parish priests, St. John Vianney. From her childhood at Sacred Heart parish in Albania, Mother had a particularly vivid devotion to the Heart of Jesus, and in every priest, she saw not only Jesus but the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “How pure the priest must be, how holy…” she would tell us.

In the Gospel, Our Lord sees a poor man in the synagogue, one with a withered hand. Like Mother Teresa, he sees what the Pharisees don’t see. Jesus sees the marginalized man because he thirsts for him. That thirst for souls is the heart of the priesthood. Even should a priest have to condemn a man in the flesh, he does so in his burning thirst to save that man from eternal damnation. How courageous a priest must be at times, to speak sternly to the rich and powerful in his own parish who put their souls in jeopardy. It was Cardinal McCarrick that would not refuse Holy Communion to the pro-abortion politicians of his diocese, even after the Pope clearly directed bishops to do this. I think of the famous Catholic Senator Ted Kennedy, who promoted abortion for most of his life. Senator Kennedy died in his sin, and his own bishop, Theodore McCarrick, did little to save him. May now ex-Cardinal McCarrick pray for the soul of this grievously-confused member of his own flock, who has gone to the judgement of God.
 
Today is “Inspiration Day” for the Missionaries of Charity family. It is the day Jesus impressed on a 38-year-old sister in a train to her annual retreat, that he thirsts for every human soul. Please continue to ask Our Lady to awaken that same thirst in the souls of her dear priests.
 
​

Dear Sisters,
 
Thank you for inviting us to offer the Holy Mass in your home today. I am from San Francisco, and with me are Fr. Jose Antonio, Fr. Alberto, and Fr. Manuel from Spain. We are in Calcutta for a meeting of the Corpus Christi Movement for Diocesan Priests, which as you know was founded by Mother Teresa in 1979.
 
The Pharisees are annoyed that Our Lord's disciples are not fasting. Jesus replies: "the wedding guests do not fast while the bridegroom is with them. But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken from them, and then they will fast."
 
The Bridegroom was with us for 33 years, and then we sent him away. On this day (Friday) we sent him to hell. But just before we crucified him, He left us a memorial of his Passion, the Sacrament of his abiding presence. Every day in every MC house the priest prays these words at Benediction: "O God, who in this Sacrament has left us a memorial of your passion, grant us we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience the effects of our redemption." That is the collect prayer for the Mass of Corpus Christi, used also for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. 
 
Today is Friday, and we fast, because on this day we killed the Lord. We give up meat, we eat less, we don't eat dessert and we drink only water, or some other form of penance. But even today, Friday, we have Jesus in the Mass. God never, ever deprives his people of the Corpus Christi, the flesh of His Son. 
 
Mother Teresa founded the Corpus Christi Movement for priests so that we would be better custodians of this saving mystery. "Consider us," writes St. Paul in the first reading, "as stewards of the mysteries of God. Now it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy." We priests find it difficult to be trustworthy, I think. From Judas to Peter to ex-Cardinal McCarrick, priests have failed in some pretty serious ways to be trustworthy stewards of the Eucharist. Mother saw this problem in 1948, when she founded her Order on the Holy Eucharist. She saw how priests need help keeping their sacred trust when, in 1979, she founded the Corpus Christi Movement for secular priests. She sees the challenge now, from heaven, and through you, helps us priests to be faithful stewards of the mysteries. 
 
Be holy or go home, she would tell seminarians and priests. One of my seminarian friends was having a sexual relationship with a girl when Mother told him that in 1989. So, he did go home. He left the seminary, did the honorable thing and married the girl, and I hope they have a beautiful family today, with many children. "My dear priests," Mother told us, “be what you are. You are the receivers of an infinite gift. Now give that gift, unstained, back to the Church.” 
 
Please continue to pray for us, that we do penance with you on Fridays, when the bridegroom is taken from us, and every day, offer joyful surrender to God's holy will. We bring you the Holy Presence of Christ in the morning Mass, and you bring the poor the Holy Presence throughout the day. May God be with us all, in the Immaculate Heart of our Mother Mary.

​A Bitter Pill

​On July 25, 1968 a respected world leader published a document predicting grave social consequences if a certain new drug were to be approved. His document set off international outrage, but all of what he said has come to pass. I was seven years old, the fourth of six children in a happy home. The American family was strong, with few divorces and many healthy children. Pornography was considered despicable and children played in the streets without fear. Fifty years before the #MeToo movement, this world leader predicted the exploitation of women, widespread divorce, and a general lowering of morality, if we chose to use the drug that had recently been developed.
 
The drug was the hormonal contraceptive pill, and Pope Paul VI was the world leader. The widespread use of contraception, he said in his encyclical Humanae vitae, will “open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards…. A man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to a mere instrument … of his desires.…” The pope’s prescience is certainly remarkable, a clarity inspired by God. At a time when cultural trendsetters were convinced that the contraceptive pill would strengthen marriage and liberate women, Paul VI foresaw the weakening of family life and disrespect for women from which we now suffer. Actually, he had only to consider the Soviet Union, which had legalized contraception forty years before. Today, Russia’s divorce rate is still an unbelievable 90%. The average Russian woman has had eight abortions, and most Russian children do not know who their father is. The Soviet Union was certain to collapse, because as goes the family, so goes society.

Everyone Condemned Contraception until 1930

The Bible condemns contraception; St. Augustine condemned contraception in the fourth century; Thomas Aquinas condemned contraception in the thirteenth century; Martin Luther in the sixteenth century as did every Christian theologian until 1930, when the Anglicans became the first in history to approve its limited use. The divorce rate in America that year was 15%. By 1968, when virtually all religions but Catholicism had accepted contraception, the divorce rate had doubled to 30%. Today, almost everyone contracepts, and the divorce rate is 50%, but in fact less than half of Americans are even getting married. “Modern contraception is not only a fact of our time; it may even be the central fact; it is hard to think of any other [innovation] whose demographic, social, behavioral, and personal fallout has been as profound” writes author Mary Eberstadt.
 
Has the sexual revolution delivered on its promises to liberate women, to bring love and peace to the world, and to strengthen society? On this, the 50th anniversary of his prophetic encyclical, we should listen carefully to the vicar of Christ; he teaches that the mystery of human love is revealed only within the natural laws of God. To begin with, contraception is unnatural: what other creature in the natural world contracepts the reproductive act? But beyond nature, contraception denies the supernatural meaning of the marital act. It tosses God’s gift of co-creation back in His face. The fullness of human love is meant to transcend the present; it is meant to express itself into the future in new life—even into eternity, when an immortal soul is created at conception. Contra-ception steals love’s tomorrow. I think of my mother and father, enfeebled by old age, dependent on the love now of their six children. How terrible to have contracepted or aborted the children God meant to give you in life! What a lonely death a woman would face had she no children to help her through the last part of her life!
 
In response to the errors of the Anglican church in 1930, Pope Pius IX published Casti Connubii that same year: “Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature.” We frustrate our love when we sterilize it. One woman or one man cannot meet my need to love and be loved. It takes a family, a big family, because I need lots of love. Contraception is designed to limit our families. It limits the family’s potential to provide that love we all need.

The Good News

​The good news is that every marriage has to potential to provide the enduring love we all crave. Statistically, spouses that do not contracept almost never divorce. Most of us do not know about these marriages, because the sexual revolution has shouted down the Gospel for the 50 years. But there are signs that people are fed up with the false promises of the “summer of love.” Some young people are turning back to the perennial teachings of Jesus, transmitted through the Catholic Church. I know of many families that have never contracepted. Happiness has not been easy for them, but it has been possible. Fifty years after their wedding day, most of them will be more deeply in love than ever. Their adult children will be able to say to their own children that the man sitting next to my mother is my father. There is no reason more families cannot be like these families. Your homework is to read Pope Paul’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae. I first read it at age 21, when I had been dating a lovely young lady for two years. It speaks not primarily about birth control but about human life and human love. It gave me great hope and joy upon that first reading, and I would like you to have that same joy in knowing that God has created us for greater things—to love and to be loved. We can find authentic love in this life, if we learn to trust God and follow His precepts for the great gift of Christian marriage.

Jesus sends his apostles out two by two in today’s Gospel. Religious orders would never send their sisters out alone. St. Francis sent his friars out with a companion, and to this day you can see Mother Teresa’s sisters walking the streets of San Francisco two by two, praying the rosary as they go to the homes of the poor. The Church is essentially a community, not a solitary experience. 

I have two questions for you: does God send us out—I mean you, the laypeople—to evangelize the culture? And if so, what does that look like day to day? The answer to the first question is yes, God sends everyone out from their comfortable homes on Christian mission. Many ignore this call, but in fact no Catholic is exempt from the task of evangelization. In the first reading Amos complains about this. “I was no prophet,” he tells the court prophet Amaziah, who resents Amos’ interference. “I was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores” (a tree surgeon). It was the Lord who said to me ‘go, prophesy to the people of Israel.” Why? Because the professional prophets, like Amaziah, were not doing their job. Israel had run off the rails, and if the professional clergy would not fix the problem God would send tree surgeons if necessary.

Our Leaders are Confused

Today, if I may say so, many of our leaders, in both church and state, are confused. In both the federal government and in the churches, leaders are bickering and taking opposite positions on our founding documents—the Bible and the US Constitution. One Catholic bishop says divorce is permitted and another says marriage is for life. One supreme court justice says our constitution gives doctors a right to kill an unborn child, or an emotionally fragile patient (what we call “assisted suicide”) and another supreme court justice says the opposite. The confusion is most painful when it comes from Rome itself, the center of Church unity, or from Washington itself, the center of national unity.
 
God has given us a natural law, written on the human heart. To end our painful confusion, we need prophets, both priests and laypeople, to point out this natural law. Who will say “marriage is a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman made for babies”? Who will say “it is wrong to kill an unborn child”? Who will say “right religion is good for America”? Who will say, to the bishops of Germany and to the Pope if necessary, that they should not bless same sex unions, but rather give real Christian support to those who are confused about their sexuality?

The Christian Family

​We are all afraid and unsure what to say when we hear falsehoods in politics, the media, and among our own friends. We need the support of a community to speak the truth, and to find a way to convert hearts rather than just angrily condemn error. How does God send the laity out, two by two, as prophets? By means of marriage. Marriage is your two by two mission. Marriage is not private but a public institution at the service of the common good. Marriage – the lifelong bonding of a man and a woman, open to the transmission of new life—is the most fundamental community of both church and state. When you mess with marriage and family life, you jeopardize the entire human community.
 
It is impossible to do the work of God alone. Priests—even secular priests—need to live in community, not only working together, but living, praying, and recreating together. For most of us, marriage is how we evangelize. It is our great mission of building community, of training ourselves and our children in patience, thoughtfulness, and sacrifice. The future of humanity passes by way of the family, as St. John Paul famously wrote in his great document on the family, Familiaris consortio of 1981. I just came back from three days at the Napa Conference, an annual gathering of church leaders from around the country. The theme this year was marriage as the most basic tool of evangelization. There is great hope for marriage, and for the Gospel. The church is not dead yet. Of the 700 inspired and inspiring participants at that gathering, less than 60 were clergy. The vast majority were laypeople, married people. I wish you could have heard Dr. Scott Hahn’s powerful testimony, both from Scripture and his own life. “Imagine if one generation of Catholics in this country lived their vocation to marriage faithfully, how this nation would be transformed!” Scott and Kimberly Hahn, with their eight children and 15 grandchildren, will celebrate 39 years of marriage next month. God has blessed them in their struggles to learn selflessness themselves, and to witness to the joy of surrendering to Jesus for others. May we all believe in the Way of the Lord Jesus through families like theirs. 

The Great Feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady

We have returned to the simple green of “ordinary time,” having just come off the liturgical highway of feasts which began last December. We traveled through Advent and Christmastide, then back into Lent and Eastertide with its grand finale of Pentecost followed by Trinity Sunday. The feasts of Corpus Christi (last Sunday) and the Sacred Heart (last Friday) followed by the Immaculate Heart (yesterday) cap this great liturgical sweep. We live the core mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection through the Two Hearts of Jesus and Mary, communicated to us at every Mass within the Body of Christ. Truly our own hearts are restless until they rest within the hearts of Jesus and Mary. The Church of the Eucharist is our earthly home while on pilgrimage to our eternal Home, the House of the Father.
 
The Day we became Homeless

The first reading today, from Genesis 3, tells the sad tale of the day humanity became homeless. Adam and Eve decided to leave their Father’s House by a fundamental act of distrust. “After the man had eaten of the tree”—that is, after he had lost his trust in God’s perfect will (we call this the Original Sin), God asks Adam … why? Why did you not trust me? Adam blames someone else: “She gave it to me—the woman you gave me.” It’s her fault, and really, it’s your fault! God then asks the woman: why did you give death to your husband? Eve blames someone else—“The serpent tricked me” and now implies, with Adam, that God himself is at fault: why did God put a snake in Paradise in the first place? With Adam and Eve, we say that God cannot lay all sorts of traps in our lives and expect us not to get hurt.
 
Isn’t it true that I’m messed up because someone else—probably in my childhood—messed me up. And they keep messing me up. My husband or my wife, my employer or my coworkers—someone right now is messing me up. I’ll always be messed up, so I’ll just have to self-medicate with food, or alcohol, or marijuana, or porn, or anger, or the internet. The temptation, when we mess up, is to think that we are helpless victims of this messed up world.
 
A New Adam and a New Eve

But God sent a rescue mission, a New Adam, born of a New Eve. The First Eve gave death to Adam. The Second Eve gives life to the entire human race by giving birth to a Savior, who trusts that God really is looking after him. In the Gospel this New Eve asks for Jesus from the edge of the crowd. Maybe she had a basket of food for him (she had heard, perhaps, that the crowds kept her Son so busy he had not even enough time to eat). Maybe she just wanted a word with him (she had heard, perhaps, that the leaders had decided to kill Him). The mother just wants to see her son for a moment. But Jesus says: “Anyone who does the will of my Father is my mother, and my brother, and my sister.” He directs our eyes to his own Mother, the perfect disciple, perfectly committed to the will of God. But Jesus also says that we all have a place in God’s house, if we do the will of the Father. Mary broke the chain reaction of rebellion begun by Eve, and now no one has to sin. Everyone can be a saint, and no one is excluded from the House of the Father.
 
Come Home

​The journey begins and continues with prayer. Only within prayer could Mary have responded to God’s Word through the Angel Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your will.” She trusted where Eve did not trust. Prayer is essentially silence, a stillness that can learn to trust the quiet voice of God. “In the Silence of the Heart God speaks” Mother Teresa would say. Today, in this parish, we begin the Forty Hours Devotion: 40 uninterrupted hours of silent adoration before the Eucharistic Face of Christ. It is only in this grace-filled emptiness that God can fill us with his perfect will. You are not OK, and I am not OK, but that’s OK because we have a heavenly Father who welcomes us into His home, the place where His Son awaits us in the most Blessed Sacrament. Give yourself an hour with Him over these next two days.

Last Year: The Annunciation

Normally we celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation today, but this year March 25 falls on Palm Sunday. The Annunciation has been moved to April 9, but it was one year ago today that Archbishop Cordileone blessed our Perpetual Adoration Chapel. In the past 12 months we have tripled the hours of Eucharistic adoration, with hundreds of people from all over the city praying before the exposed Heart of Jesus day and night. God has chosen our parish to provide the Sacred Eucharist of His Divine Son, our only hope and unfailing consolation. Every week I see saints being formed before the Presence of the Eucharistic Heart of the World. Thanks be to God.

This Year: Palm Sunday of the Passion of Our Lord

Palm Sunday, the only Mass of the year with two gospels, two colors, two themes, and two names: Palm and Passion Sunday. The Mass begins in green (life) and ends in red (death). It begins with joyous song and ends in empty silence as we move toward Good Friday.
It begins with an altar decorated with bright palms and ends with a barren and stripped altar after the Holy Thursday Mass later this week.

Blood

The altar is clothed in red today, red for the blood of Christ as we hear the entire Passion read in three parts. In horror movies blood means death, but in the Bible blood means life. The Jews revered blood as the principle of all life. A man was forbidden to approach his wife during her menses, out of reverence for the sacred blood which transmits human life. To this day, orthodox Jews do not consume an animal until its sacred blood has been drained from it. One does not consume blood, but Jesus would give his blood for us, and command us to drink it. Blood taken is death, but blood given gives life. A man's blood given for his family day by day provides for the life his wife brings into the world through her blood. Christ’s blood is life for us.​

Silence

This week ends in silence on Good Friday, the only day of the year that has no Mass, a liturgy that begins and ends in silence. As God’s blood is life rather than death, so God’s silence is joy rather than sorrow. “In the silence of the heart God speaks.” We must silence our own clamoring self-will, we must die to ourselves, in order to hear the still soft voice of God. He does not shout, like we do. Only in silencing ourselves can we hear a baby's breath, an old woman's sigh, a gentle breeze.

Emptiness

This week ends in the emptiness of an altar stripped after the Holy Thursday Mass. The barren altar speaks to us, inspiring us to strip our wills so that God may fill us. Even God cannot fill a soul that is full of expectations and demands, of angers and resentments. God will not force himself upon us, as we do upon ourselves and others. The altars of first Christian centuries were built to resemble empty tombs. Mass was held upon this empty tomb of Christ, an emptiness that would be filled with God’s glory because He emptied himself on the Cross.


an ancient Christian burial box built to resemble the empty tomb of Christ.


Sacrifice

Every human story is an echo of this empty tomb, the story of one who sacrifices himself for another. I flew to Washington last week to visit my mother. On the plane I watched one movie going east and two movies going west. All three of them told the same story: sacrifice. It’s the only story that really holds our attention. In Bridge of Spies a lawyer risks life and career to defend a Russian spy; in Born in China (a wonderful nature film), a snow leopard dies trying to feed her cubs; in … ahem … Wonder Woman [I fast forwarded through the bad scenes to get to the story’s conclusion], the heroine offers her life to protect others from violence (after showing the viewer dozens of scenes of intense violence, of course). Every story worth telling is the story of one person’s sacrifice for another, and that’s why we listen to the entire story of the Passion every year. It’s the only story worth listening to.
 
Mom

Last week I spent a few days with my mother. She needs 24-hour nursing care because she is dying. Death is gaining the upper hand with my mother’s tortured body and failing mind, although God may permit her to wrestle with death some months more. I sat for hours in her room, which became my chapel. I prayed my breviary out loud at her request, and quietly when she slept. We her children must prepare ourselves for the silence and emptiness, the absurdity of death. My sister in law, who lost her mother last year, recently told us to prepare to lose her bit by bit. She hardly eats and her big boned body is down to 88lbs. Her twisted and bent frame is hardly recognizable. Who can make sense of this, and what can prepare us? Only Jesus. The Son of Man let his body become twisted and bent, and let death and silence and emptiness swallow him. But he entered into that emptiness with brave faith, and in so doing made a way for my mother. He made a way for each of us. And so:
 
Crown him with many crowns                         
The Lord upon his throne …
Awake my soul and sing                                  
of him who died for thee
and hail him as thy matchless king                          
for all eternity.
​