Homily for the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time 2015
 
“Who” is the question of the day. “Who,” not “what.”

“Who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb?” asks the Lord of Job in the first reading. “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” ask the apostles of the Lord in the Gospel.

The principle that tames the restless sea is a Who not a What; the Big Bang at creation’s beginning was the utterance of Someone, not something. And so St. Paul says in the second reading, “the love of Christ impels us….” Not the love of the sea or the air or the trees, as strikingly beautiful as they are, impels him to sacrifice his life. Not even the love of a human person, as deeply endearing as he or she may be, impels him to sanctity. It is the love of Christ that moves the planets and moves men to reverence the planets.

Pope Francis’ long-awaited encyclical on the environment came out on Wednesday, and it is a beautiful document. But it is less about the environment than about the One who made the environment. When it comes to hard decisions between human prosperity and environmental concerns, only the love of God will lead us to fully respect the planet He has given us. “The destiny of all creation,” he writes, “is bound up with the mystery of Christ.” We cannot understand or effectively respect the planet without respecting the planet’s owner, who alone completely understands his own creation.

The fundamental problem motivating environmental exploitation, the Pope writes, is “anthropocentrism” and the “technocratic paradigm.” In other words, ignoring God’s existence in order to exalt man and man’s technological powers reduces the environment to man’s control, and we don’t have a very good track record of managing things we attempt to control. History will show that the strongest man, in any society that denies God, eventually takes what he wants. Is it coincidental that the great atheistic societies of our time (Russia and China) have committed the greatest environmental degradation? If God does not exist, why respect his creation? And that includes other human beings…. We must ask the “What” questions: What causes global warming? What drives the economy and what makes environmental solutions financially viable? What can we do to reduce emissions? What political and sociological remedies can we apply? But those questions are subordinate to the primary question of Who. Who made all this? Who will help us respect what He has given?

Ora et Labora

“Prayer and work” are the rhythm of the Christian life. Mother Teresa expressed this beautifully on the little “business cards” she would give out: “Prayer is the fruit of silence; faith is the fruit of prayer; love is the fruit of faith; service is the fruit of love.” It’s a kind of chain reaction—silence leads to prayer, which leads to faith, then to love, and finally to serving others. Authentic prayer will inevitably lead to service. A Christian who prays but does not serve is kind of a dud, a “failure to launch.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus is weary of the crowds and just wants to get away by himself. The previous day the “whole town” had been gathered at his door for a free cure, and he must’ve been exhausted. We’ve all had days when everyone needs something from us. So the next day Jesus gets up very early and goes alone to a deserted place to pray. But before long Peter and the others find him and order him back to work: “everyone is looking for you!” Jesus simply says, “let us go…for this purpose I have come.” God came to earth to serve, and during our time on earth we must serve with him. There’s certainly plenty of work to be done.

Only a Shadow

The Catholic Church in San Francisco is but a shadow of what she once was, and I suppose that is true in most of our big cities. I realized this most forcefully last week with the storm of protest against our altar boy policy, but it became much more apparent when I saw Archbishop Cordileone attacked for requiring Catholic school teachers to teach Catholic doctrine. These protests are generated by the secular media, of course, but what surprised me was how quickly and cruelly our own parishioners joined in. For CBS to belittle Catholic belief and practice is understandable; for a Catholic to do so is dysfunctional and disobedient. If Catholics side with the media against their own archbishop, then we must say that the Church in our city has somehow failed. In 1939 France and Germany were still “accommodating” the National Socialists in Germany even as the Reich’s armies overran Poland; our Church has also been complicit to some degree in the rise of the increasingly militant “dictatorship of relativism” in this country.

My People are Dying

“The people are dying for lack of knowledge,” cried out the prophet Hosea (4:6). “They don’t know me, and so they don’t want me” Jesus said to Mother Teresa in 1946. People are dying because they have not found a credible witness to Christ. Last year 38 people jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge, down from 46 the previous year. Jesus spent from morning to night healing these people, principally by witnessing to the love God has for them. He commands us to work with him.

“But father, I’ve tried to bring my children back to Mass!” many lament. True enough: it’s downright difficult to serve people who don’t want our services. The 50 Catholic parishes in San Francisco offer hundreds of “services” every Sunday, and most are mostly empty. So let us begin with silence and prayer, as Mother Teresa counsels on her “business card.” His bishop assigned St. John Vianney a dying parish in 1818 with these words: “there is little love of God in that parish.” Fr. Vianney sat in the confessional and no one came. He offered Mass and no one assisted. So he gave himself over to prayer, spending long hours in his silent church. Eventually people started coming, because they knew they needed what he had to offer.

Prayer through Our Lady

As always, we turn to Our Lady. She knew she could not save even one soul, so she gave herself over to prayer. Her prayer was: “Let it be done to me as you say.” We who have faith will avoid the terrible discouragement of seeing our society lose its faith by repeating those words, and turning to Our Lady for consolation and strength. 

I wish you a blessed and merry “Little Christmas,” as the Irish call January 6. In the south of Ireland, so Wikipedia tells us, the men all take on the household duties on this day while the women go to parties or shop for those after-Christmas bargains with their sisters, mothers, aunts, and daughters.

Herod wants to be a star

The Wise Men followed the Christmas Star and, on this day, find Jesus all brightly shining under the Star’s beam. King Herod also saw that star, but what did it mean to him? Absolutely nothing. Poor Herod (first, his name is positively frightful) considered himself a rising star in the Roman Empire. He became governor of Galilee at age 25, and to consolidate his position banished his first wife and their son, sent hundreds of priests to their deaths, and finally murdered his second wife and their children. And of course he killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem in a fanatical attempt to maintain control. He spent his life seeking to be a star rather than to follow a star, leaving a trail of blood, destruction, and anguish behind him.

Wise Men look up not down

No one can see the arresting beauty of the Star, or the Babe, or his Mother, unless he looks up, beyond himself. The Wise Men looked up, studying the heavens. They prayed to God rather to themselves. “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart, a simple look turned toward heaven; it is a cry of recognition and of love…” wrote St. Therese. They recognized God, while Herod recognized nothing familiar in this world, a stranger to himself and a monster to others.

There’s only two ways to go in this life: up or down. I can be a Herod, or I can be a Wise Man. I can choose to complain, to rant, and to despair, or I can choose to thank God, to edify, and to rejoice in the life God has given me. This joy is not just the power of positive thinking; it is “a cry of recognition and of love.” We recognize that God loves us, and that nothing is beyond Him.

No one wants to be a Herod, not even Herod. No one wants to kill babies, or their own wife and sons. But unless we study the heavens like the Magi, we will sink with him into that chaos. Prayer enlarges the heart and makes it capable of receiving the infinite God. Take the trouble to pray, to look up instead of down, to seek and expect joy. Take the trouble to stop in the church, or stop at an open window, and to look up instead of down. 

As I write this the rain is pouring down on the skylight outside my office window: a very good sound. We have been praying for rain, and God has answered our prayers. The news, however, has unleashed a barrage of dire warnings about the “worst storm in five years….”

This morning before sunrise, I drove through the plashing rain for Mass at Mother Teresa’s sisters. I was delighted to hear the Alleluia verse sung by 40 angelic sisters’ voices: “Let the clouds rain down the Just One, and the earth bring forth a Savior.” Rather than spreading “dire fear,” let the news media spread joy and thanksgiving to an all-provident Father who provides rain and wind and sun for his beloved children.

Reflecting a culture empty of God, however, the media usually spreads anxiety. It trembles with panic at every change in the weather, or the economy, or the human condition. It fears change, because it does not fear God.

The first reading today (Dec 11) reassures us, if we have ears to hear: “Fear not, O worm Jacob, o maggot Israel: I will help you, says the Lord”—not very flattering to us poor maggots, but an accurate description of our trembling helplessness. “They seek water in vain…but I will open up fountains … I will turn dry ground into springs, that all may know that the hand of the Lord has done this.”

If we think we can control the climate, or even manage our own fears, we live in fear, because life is bigger than us. We are only worms, slithering on a rainy sidewalk. But our Father loves these little worms, and provides rain and sun for them. A Christian should know this, and fear not.

You know that disturbing voice a little child uses to say “no” to his mother? The Asian couple next to me in this plane have the cutest little china-doll baby. The plane begins to shudder with turbulence, the seat belt light pops on, and Mamma pulls her darling onto her lap. The little girl protests with charming decisiveness—charming because she is absolutely helpless but pronounces her “no” with such queenly finality. She has barely begun to speak but this word “no” she knows. Listening to this litany of “no’s” to a loving mother who only wants to keep her from banging her pretty little head, I hear the disturbing story of the human race. Who has taught us to say such an assertive no?  It is Satan’s voice I am hearing from this pretty little baby.

It is my voice. All my life I’ve been saying no to God. Granted, I’ve said yes a few times, but usually only after a bloody fight. My first impulse is distrust. Prove to me it will be better your way. Why do I imagine I know better than Him who brings order to earth and skies? It is the height of illogic to refuse God, and yet my default response to Him is something like what will you give me if I do it your way?

We’ve just finished a priests’ retreat on Our Lady in Fatima, inspired by the spirituality of Mother Teresa. Most of us have been disciples of Mother for decades, although some have only recently discovered her particular spiritual perceptions. She made an extraordinary vow in 1942, four years before Jesus would ask her to leave the Loretto Sisters for the open streets of Calcutta: “I will refuse you nothing, under pain of mortal sin.” She trusted Him that much, to surrender even the smallest details of her life. And the next 55 years were not easy. She fought sometimes tooth and nail to hold onto the joy of loving Jesus, but by God’s grace she prevailed. Certainly we all have fears, attractions and impulses that conflict with God’s will. A bit of food, a sharp voice, the memory of a pretty girl, an ache or pain—every bit of the world is at war with God. Every single thing He has created—all of it good—has been compromised by a fundamental disorder. It was not easy for Mother Teresa to deny Him nothing, and to accept everything, but she did it, by His grace. “If you only knew how He thirsts for you,” she wrote her sisters in 1993.

If only that baby would stop saying no for just a minute and consider: my mother loves me more than herself. Why won’t I let her hold me close to her heart? Yes, the plane is shuddering all around me, but do I know of a better place to be than in her arms? If only I would let Him hold me close to His heart.

Early Sunday morning I knelt before the tabernacle in a large empty church in a big city. The church is my church, Star of the Sea in San Francisco. My prayer is distracted by thinking of all the work that must be done to keep this parish alive. In New York, Archbishop Dolan is closing 31 parishes and merging another 81. One of them is the church in which I was baptized, Star of the Sea in the Bronx. When the Archbishop of San Francisco asked me to take Star of the Sea here, I told him confidently that I could certainly bring more life into the parish. But kneeling in this vast empty church, my confidence is waning. Confidence in myself, that is.

Over the past 20 years of parish work in the Central Valley, I worked hard and expected people to respond. People did respond—our Mass attendance, lay apostolates, and income doubled in a few years. That made me feel good, and naturally led to the pride common in successful pastors. Now, however, kneeling in this vast empty church, I get the feeling that it is humility time. I begin to see that nothing I do will double the number of Catholics coming to this parish. There’s too much competition for their time and money in this city; secularism has devastated family life in San Francisco. I can’t drive success here like I did in Modesto.

I’m 53 years old and it’s time to surrender to God. In the first 25 years of the priesthood, I worked at a frenzied pace, depending a lot on myself. As I get older, God is giving me the gift of weakness, so that He may be strong. As my aging father said recently, “I’m getting too old to keep denying reality.” The reality is, it is God who grants the increase.  Even if He is pleased to accept our help, He certainly doesn’t depend on it.

So I stay in this empty church, and it is God I find in it, not myself. He has largely erased my own powers, and the affirmation that comes to a priest when his church bursts with people. In a greater measure, then, I have found the only beauty and love that never wanes, but only grows brighter with time. God has brought me to this vast empty church to find Him, in whom my heart is glad.

I am pleased to see two seminarians at Mass this morning—Cameron Polette entered the archdiocesan seminary from our parish in August and is home for the long weekend, and Ivan Ruiz, our new Oratorian seminarian, is serving the Mass. I also see a U.S. Naval lieutenant in uniform, presumably here for Fleet Week. Thank you for your service to our Country. We are all looking forward to the air show this afternoon with the Navy’s Blue Angels.

 A Paralytic

In today’s Gospel, just as Jesus is getting out of a boat on the Sea of Galilee, some men lay down their paralyzed friend on the dock, right in front of Jesus. And Our Lord goes to the root of the problem: he cures the man’s sins. Only after healing his sins does he heal his paralysis. We take two lessons from today’s Gospel.

Paralyzed by sin

Our First Lesson: the paralyzed man’s friends make a bold move by plopping him down right in front of Our Lord. They don’t give Jesus any choice but to face their friend, and they don’t give their friend any choice but to face Jesus. St. Thomas Aquinas writes: “the paralytic symbolizes the sinner lying in his sin; just as the paralytic can’t move, so the sinner cannot help himself.” Many of our friends trapped in sin—addictions, anger, compulsions—simply cannot get beyond their demons. We’ve all had periods ourselves when we need someone to help us out of a situation—a divorce, a depression, an addiction. But the first thing we must do for a sick friend is to pray for him, because all sickness comes ultimately from sin. Sometimes more direct action is necessary, such as taking a buddy to an AA meeting, or insisting that he got to confession, or talking to him quietly about how he is treating his wife and children. I mentioned to a nice lady yesterday how much I miss seeing her husband at Mass. “It makes me so sad that his business keeps him so busy on Sunday’s, but I don’t want to pressure him,” she said sadly. “Well,” I suggested, “after 30 years maybe it’s time for a bit of well-placed pressure.” I don’t know what she said to him last night, but this morning he was at Mass. It made my heart leap with joy, and I’m sure she was all smiles too. We must never give up on helping others regain holiness.

All Healing goes through the Soul

And this brings us to our Second Lesson: the Sacrament of Penance. This sacrament heals paralyzed limbs and hearts. Imagine paralysis in the ancient world, before motorized wheelchairs, handicapped ramps, and automatic doors. A paralyzed man had to lie on his back for the rest of his life, staring helplessly up at the sky. Does Jesus cure this helpless man’s paralysis? Yes, but only after he forgives his sins. He points out that mortal sin is worse than paralysis. Indeed, it is sin that paralyzes. The first thing in any distress—physical, emotional, or spiritual—is to go to confession, and to pray before the tabernacle. Jesus heals the man’s paralysis with a word, not only indicating his divinity, but showing how external paralysis only manifests the root problem: the internal paralysis of mortal sin. The first thing in any sickness is to get to confession, because the soul is infinitely more important than anything else. If our souls are all right, the rest of us will be perfectly all right.

Kolbe: A Pure Heart, a strong body and spirit

St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who died in Auschwitz in 1941, got tuberculosis at age 17, and lived with only 25% lung capacity for the rest of his life.  But this infirm man founded and oversaw the largest friary in the world (Neopokolanow, near Warsaw, with 700 men). At the time of his arrest in 1941, he was managing the largest printing concern in Poland. He survived three months in Auschwitz at hard labor and almost no food, and in the end saved the life of another man by taking his place in the starvation bunker. Where did he get his extraordinary strength? Not from his weak body, but from a pure soul, a heart cleansed of sin.

The way to all health is through our souls. Before we go to a physician or psychologist, we must go first to God. If our country is sick, and she is, let her look above all to her soul. Yesterday 3000 people followed the Archbishop in a Eucharistic procession to United Nations Plaza, where we prayed the rosary. President Obama had left the City just hours before along that same route. I was hoping he could’ve joined us for the rosary. Imagine President Obama praying the rosary with Archbishop Cordileone. Imagine what that would mean to the health of this country. Our Lord wishes to cleanse, heal, and strengthen us, but we must first confess our personal sins, and repent of our national sins.

Let us pray to the Blessed Mother, that she bring our sick and suffering souls to her Divine Son. Let her lead us to share her purity, and the glory God has bestowed upon her, and all the saints, among whom are we, in the making.

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.

Yesterday was the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day before was St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Day. At the top of our rectory staircase I have hung a poster-sized prison photograph of Fr. Kolbe, who died in Auschwitz in 1941. No one took his life from him—Fr. Kolbe freely gave his life for another prisoner. This man, Francis Gajowniczek, actually survived Auschwitz and made it home to his wife and children. Thirty years later attended Fr. Kolbe’s beatification and lived to see Kolbe canonized by a fellow Pole, St. John Paul II.

As we say in the third Eucharistic prayer, he “entered willingly into his passion,” and in the fourth Eucharistic prayer, “having loved his own, he loved them to the end.” I put Kolbe’s prison photograph at the top of the stairs so that as I can remember always that to which I aspire: to fear nothing and so love without limits. On the walls of many of the barracks in Auschwitz are hundreds of these mug shots with the names of the prisoners, the date of entry, and the date of death. In many cases the interval between entry and death is only a week or two, and almost every photograph shows a terribly frightened man or woman. A few do not show this despair, and Fr. Kolbe’s is one of them. He looks into the camera with intense focus, the concentration of love. He was not afraid.

Fear drives much of human behavior. The Nazi’s feared the Jews. The Jews fear Hamas. Hamas fears the Israelis. Of course, we have good cause to fear those who fear us, and seek to harm us. Most of the time your neighbor’s unreasonableness is driven by fear. But letting fear drive our behavior is always a failure of our freedom. When we act out of fear, then we allow the irrational fears of others to drive us, and everyone ends up in a ditch.

The saints are simply those men and women who refused to let fear control them. They made the heroic effort to believe in God’s providence, to trust Him in the face of even the ferociously irrational behavior of others. I want to live in that kind of freedom; I want to posses that capacity to love. Only an abiding conviction that God loves me can bring me to the place where I can “sing because He loves me, and because I’m free.”

Kolbe loved our Lady very much and longed to go back to God on her feast day. He died on Aug 14, the vigil of the Assumption, and I always figured that he missed it by one day. But this year I offered Mass in the extraordinary form on that day and discovered that Aug 14 is indeed a Marian feast day, with the vesture and prayers for Our Lady—solemnities in the older calendar are spread over two days. So Fr. Maximilian would have offered the Mass of Our Lady that day, at least in his heart, because he was dying naked without bread or wine.

His death on a Solemnity of the Immaculata was one more sign that God had not forgotten him, even in that starvation cell in Auschwitz. As I climb the stairs every day I see his prison photograph and remember that God is with us, and there is nothing to fear. We are free to love without limits.