Dead Man Walking

It might surprise you, but I’ve found that most priests would rather do a funeral than a wedding. In a funeral, you know the soul is safely with God, but in a wedding, you don’t know where he or she might end up. What to do? Well, as St. Paul says in our Epistle today, “a dead person has been absolved of sin,” so I think it’s best for us mortals to consider ourselves already dead. “You must think of yourselves as dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus,” St. Paul continues.

I once heard a Vietnam veteran describing what it’s like to be in fire fight—deafening blasts surround you, machine gun rounds whistle past, searing flashes blind the eyes. “The sheer volume of noise paralyzes you with fear,” he said. “The only way to overcome your terror is to enter the field a dead man. In your mind you must know that you have nothing to lose, and only in this way can you advance.” “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,” St. Paul writes, “that we might live.” Normally we think of baptism as new life, but here Paul describes it as death leading to life. It was much clearer in the early Church, where baptisms were done by total immersion—drowning, as the Greek word baptizein means “immersion”—and when baptism meant death if discovered by the empire. We must not forget, even when the Church is in relative peace, that to live in Christ we must first die. Do parents realize that their children’s baptism is largely dependent on their own dying to sin? Half the baptisms I did in the parish were for children of parents living in sin, and I had to tell them that their children will greatly suffer for the sins of their fathers. Baptism, and the daily conversion to Christ it requires, is death before it can be life.

The Eucharist, our death and our life

In the Gospel Jesus multiplies bread for 4000 men. Without food many would have collapsed. Bread is life, the “staff of life.” Jesus says in John 6 that unless we eat the bread that he will give, we "will not have life within us.” But the Blessed Sacrament, along with baptism, is a death before it is life. Unless we die with Christ at every Sunday Mass, we will not rise with him. At every Mass, Christ sacrifices himself in an unbloody manner, making present his redemptive death on Calvary. Every Mass, in a sacramental sense, is a funeral for the Son of God, and every funeral Mass is a resurrection for the believing soul. Christian funerals have happy endings, but first we must die: we must crucify our wills, we must mortify our desires, we must enter into the field of this world’s combat as dead men walking. Dead to sin, and alive in Christ Jesus.

So we must not be afraid to die. God will keep us safe; he will feed us with the bread of life. We must hope in Him, without whom there is no hope. The prize of heaven awaits the soldier who cares not for his life on the battle field.

Good weddings

There are some weddings that I enjoy more than funerals. Sometimes bride and groom have made an honest effort to die to themselves before the wedding day. You can see it in how they comport themselves during their wedding: their marriage is not some sort of show, and it is not all about them. They know the authentic joy of having already died to this old world so as to live for God in Christ Jesus. These are the kinds of weddings you see at Thomas Aquinas College, and in any Christian community worthy of the name. Our marriages, and our lives, are not ours. They have been bought and paid for. Let’s make a resolution to die today, to die for Christ, so that we might have the courage to live.

As always, we look to Our Lady, who commended her life to God’s will when she said to the angel Gabriel, “Be it done unto me according to Thy will.” In saying that she anticipated her Son’s last words from the cross, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Christ and his Holy Mother reign in heaven as King and Queen Mother because they surrendered their lives to God. Let us pray to Holy Mary, and surrender ourselves to the will of her Son, and so come to the fullness of life in our heavenly homeland.

Do you know the style of Catholic statuary popular in the 1970s? It portrays rather abstract saints in long thin bodies with expressionless faces. They certainly don’t seem human, and I could never identify with them. I prefer more realistic statues, but the chapel in which I am praying has these elongated passionless statues and so I must pray with them.

I’ve posted the statue of Our Lady in this chapel, and I must say I’ve warmed up to it quite nicely. It depicts the loving trust the baby Jesus had placed in his mother; it calls to mind the trust God has placed in man: “this is my body; do this in remembrance of me.” Because the statue is so elongated, the distance between Mary’s arms, in which she tenderly cradles her baby, and her tiny feet is exaggerated. It’s a long way down for the baby if she drops him. She seems to suspend him over the abyss, and he rests in her loving arms without a care.

Just so, God wants us to rest in his arms without a care. A saint is someone who actually trusts God with his life, who allows God’s will to direct him completely, dispensing with the usual safety nets we string about our lives. Think of Mother Teresa leaving her convent for the streets of Calcutta just because Jesus told her to do it, or Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldees for an unknown land “which I will show you when you get there.” God begs us to trust Him as he carries us over the abyss, and to show that we will not get hurt if we do so, He first trusted us. He makes himself helpless, and crawls into the arms of a human being, and lets her suspend Him over the abyss. What if Mary would have dropped him?

“You want to be happy?” God asks us. Let me show you how to do it: watch me surrender to my Father and my Mother. She holds me over the chasm, and I am not afraid. Do not be afraid to trust your Mother, and your Father. So we too can put ourselves into the arms of our Father in heaven and we can put ourselves into the tender arms our Mother Mary, that is, Mother Church. It’s a long way down if she drops us, but if God Himself could trust her, so can we. She will not drop us; God will not drop us, unless we panic and struggle in His arms, and throw ourselves down.

On Saturday a local priest pointed to a large green area on the other side of the highway. “Lots of monkeys in that park,” he said. “They come across the road looking for food in our house.” Yesterday I rode to that park, Nairobi’s City Park, in search of monkeys. There were lots of them, hanging from branches, crashing through bushes, perched thoughtfully on fenceposts, and hauling cute monkey babies upside down under their bellies. I stopped to inspect one at close range, and of course a man with a camera appeared to ask if I wanted my photo taken with the little beast. “Maybe,” I demurred. “But what is the name of these monkeys?” “They are monkeys,” he drawled. “They don’t have names.” “No, I mean the name of their species,” I persisted. He seemed unenlightened. “They’re just monkeys.”

It made me think: thousands of monkeys in the middle of Nairobi, and no one knows their names. But certainly God knows them. “Not a sparrow falls without your Father knowing it.” In this park, in addition to the monkeys, were hundreds of Kenyans and at least one American. Each of us has a mother, and each one’s mother knows us.

I gave a talk to the sisters last night on Our Lady and the Eucharist (the retreat is on Our Lady, roughly following the 20 mysteries of the rosary). I have to make the sisters laugh a bit, so I told them about the monkeys. If God loves the monkeys, He loves us too, and that’s why He gave us His Holy Mother, to feed us the Bread of Life. Here is a bit of what the sisters heard last night.

Our Lady was not at the Last Supper. One reason was that Christ held this Supper for his Apostles, to ordain them for the Eucharist. She was not called to be a priest; her role, like that of Mother Teresa, was not to bring the Eucharist to the people, but to bring the people to the Eucharist. Mother Teresa brought the love of Jesus into the dark holes of the poor, where the priests could not go. When the poor had received the love of Jesus in their hearts, then she would bring the priest to give them the love of Jesus in their bodies. Then she would call the priest, who would hear their confessions and give them the Eucharist.

Another reason Mary was not at the Last Supper was that she had already received her First Holy Communion, which the Apostles were to receive that night. She had already received Jesus when she had said her “Fiat” (or in Hebrew “Amen”) to the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Also, while Jesus gave Himself to the apostles veiled under sacramental signs, Our Lady had received Him in the fullness of his physical reality. Hers was the world’s first First Holy Communion, and the only reception of the Eucharist “unveiled,” not as bread but as a baby in her womb. She knew the Eucharist “face to face;” she nursed Him, and spoke with Him, and loved Him as her child.

But to receive that First Eucharist, Jesus’ Mother first had to say an unconditional “yes” to God’s will. We call it her Fiat, from the Latin “let it be done [according to your will],” but this simple village girl didn’t speak Latin. She probably said the Hebrew word Amen. That means something like “so be it” or “yes, of course!” or “be it done!” That was Our Lady’s vow of consecration to God; she said it once, and she renewed her total surrender every day. You too, dear sisters, say “Amen” every day, before receiving Jesus Christ, and when you say it, you are renewing your vows. Mary made one vow, but you have made six baptismal vows and four religious vows. All our vows, however, come down to one word: “Amen.” We say it before receiving Holy Communion, and we say it with Our Lady. Every time you say Amen to the Eucharist you renew your vows, and you strengthen the joy of living those vows. Your vows are enclosed within the one vow of our Lady: “be it done to me as you have said.” So do not be afraid of keeping those vows, and knowing the love of Jesus in your hearts. God receives your Amen as He received our Lady’s Fiat. He knows you as he knows her, and he stays in your heart, as long as you keep saying Amen to the Holy Eucharist. 

Our Lady’s Month

This is the second Sunday in the lovely month of May, when life is blooming and brimming. A bunch of us prayed the rosary yesterday walking near the blossoming mustard flowers—they are five feet tall! TAC in the spring is the time to turn to Our Lady, the New Eve, truly the mother of all the living. Tuesday is the feast of Our Lady of Fatima; 33 years ago on Tuesday St. John Paul was shot in St. Peter’s Square. “One hand fired the gun and another hand guided the bullet,” he said. He went to Fatima a year later to lay that bullet in the crown of Our Lady’s statue, his mother in heaven who saved his life on earth.

A mother’s voice

A few years ago I was giving a retreat to the Missionaries of charity in Brazil and decided to disobey the superior. She had said not to go near the favela, the slum, at the bottom of a certain steep hill. But I so wanted to climb that hill and get a good look over the city, so I did it anyway. On the way down, a young man started yelling and then fired a pistol at me. The bullet didn’t hit me, and I ran. Back at the convent, I told Sr. Vera Maria. “Our Lady saved you,” she exclaimed. “Many people disappear into the favelas, but Our Lady saved you.” I felt abashed, and promised not to disobey her again.

My mother’s voice was the first thing I ever heard. She would sing to me while I was in her womb, she told me. As a boy I would hear her singing in the kitchen below my room, and I would recognize that voice from some deep well within me. There were six kids in my family, and Mom would read to us every night (sometime Dad read too). We would drift off to sleep hearing our mother’s voice telling the story of some saint or a chapter from the Bible.

Good Shepherd Sunday

We call this Sunday, the Fourth after Easter, “Good Shepherd Sunday” because the Gospel is always taken from John 10. Today Jesus describes the voice of the good shepherd. “The sheep hear his voice,” he says. “They follow him, because they recognize his voice,” and he brings them “abundant life”—like the abundance of springtime mustard blossoms above our College.

The Church speaks with the voice of Christ, which is the voice of a mother who loves her children. We all recognize it. Even those who say they hate the Church know that the voice with which she speaks is from God and is true. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, describes how to give a homily on Sunday mornings: “The Church is a mother, and she preaches [as] a mother speaks to her child…. This setting, both maternal and ecclesial, in which the dialogue between the Lord and his people takes place, should be encouraged by the closeness of the preacher, the warmth of his tone of voice, the unpretentiousness of his manner of speaking, the joy of his gestures.” It is the way Christ spoke to the rich young man in Matthew 19: “Jesus looked at him with love and told him: if you wish to be perfect, give all your possessions to the poor and then follow me.” Jesus knew it would be hard for his young friend to hear what he had to say, so he first looked at him with great love. Holy Mother Church speaks as her Master speaks: not avoiding truths that must be said, but speaking them with understanding love, suffering for and with those to whom she speaks.

World Day of Prayer for Vocations

Fifty-one years ago, the Holy See designated Good shepherd Sunday as World Day of Prayer for Vocations. The voice of the shepherd calls young men and women through our Mother, the Church. Pope Pius X wrote that “every vocation to the priesthood comes from the heart of God, but it passes through the heart of a mother.”  In my last parish, women would sometimes complain that we had too few priests. “Have more babies,” I would tell them. Priests don’t come from celibate men; they come from mothers. We won’t get many vocations from the 1.2 children the average American woman is giving to the Church.

At age 19, young Jorge Bergoglio wanted to study medicine. His mother prepared a special room for him by cleaning out a cluttered room on the family’s terrace. One day, the future Pope’s mother entered the room to clean it. She found not medical books but theology books. “Jorge,” she said: “come here. You told me that you were going to study medicine.” “Si, Mamà,” he replied. “Why did you lie to me?” She said. “Mamà, I did not lie to you; I am going to study the medicine of the soul.” His mother wept when she realized that he would become a priest. She knew he would have to leave their village, and perhaps she even knew that he would have to go very far away, to Rome, someday. Do you read to your children at night? Do you pray the rosary with them? Nothing but a mother’s love will make their vocation real to them.

Thank you, dear mothers, for having children. We know that it is the noblest human activity, and often the hardest, to bear and educate new lives. Thank you, dear mothers, for speaking the truth in love to your children, that they will grow up to know God, love him, and serve him in the Church in the vocation God has chosen for them. Where are future priests and nuns going to come from? Where is the priest who will be standing in my place twenty years from now? I will tell you where that priest is. He is having dinner with you this evening. You will a read saint’s story to him tonight, and pray a decade of the rosary with him and his brothers, and tuck him in tonight. God wishes them to be saints, by hearing the  voice of the Good Shepherd through you. We love you for giving us life, and for giving us the Author of Life through his own mother, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

With this Mass, we have entered into Holy Week. No time compares with these eight days that have forever changed human history, and continue to change it.

Palm Sunday is the only Mass with two colors, and two Gospels. The liturgy begins with jubilant green palm branches as Christ triumphantly enters His City; it ends in red as he is executed five days later, with his blood soaking the ground beneath the cross. He took the city like no commander or emperor has ever taken a city. He took it without shedding the enemy’s blood, seated on an ass, the foal of a colt, in perfect humility. The city would demand blood, but it would be only his own. No one took it from him; He freely gave it to save the city, as he does at each Mass.

Christ begins the great labor of redemption this day, and will accomplish it in seven days. As God accomplished the great labor of creating the world in “seven days,” so will He accomplish the great work of recreating it in seven days. He fixed his eyes on the will of God to accomplish this work: “I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” Christ sets himself to the task, and we must do the same.

God has appointed to each of us some great task, a “city” that we each must take as Christ took Jerusalem. It will be our vocation to enter this city and make it our own: a marriage, a career, some great sacrifice for another, some titanic suffering we must undergo. The time comes for every man to “set his face like flint,” heedless of either praise or mockery, in order to accomplish the work God has set before him.

In this Holy Week, we accompany Jesus Christ in defeat and triumph, in order to prepare for our own. To win, we must first lose, but our initial loss will not defeat us if we keep our eyes fixed on Christ. “Let us go,” as Philip said in last Sunday’s Gospel, “to die with him.”

Mother Teresa and Soviet Atheism

Today the Church celebrates Laetare Sunday, named for the first word in the introit or entrance antiphon: Laetare Ierusalem. Rejoice, O City of men, for God is within you! Our Gospel story is of a man born blind (born in Original Sin) who washes in the pool of Siloam (the pool of “the One Sent”). Only baptism in Christ Jesus heals the man who gropes in the darkness of a world without God. Let’s go to Soviet Russia to see what a city without God would look like. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his poor blind Bolsheviks attempted to annihilate any trace of God in their grand social experiment. In 1931, for example, Stalin dynamited the largest Orthodox church ever built, Moscow’s cathedral of Christ the Savior. He began work on a colossal statue of Lenin that would stand in its place. Every single Catholic parish in Russia was destroyed, or converted into warehouses or sports clubs. A great darkness closed in. The Soviet Union, they said, was impenetrable to the Gospel.

Somehow, though, decades before religion was legal again in Russia, Mother Teresa and her sisters slipped into Moscow. She tells this story from those days before 1989: “One doctor in charge of a very big hospital accepted us, and we came there and he gave us three rooms. And we began the work in that place by cleaning the toilets—that was our first apostolic work. …We had a little tabernacle, we had Holy Mass, and the priest gave us Jesus and he changed the whole attitude—the whole place looked quite different after. …After one week, the doctor came to me and said, “Mother Teresa, what’s happening in my hospital?” I said, “I don’t know, doctor, what, what is happening?” He said, “I don’t know, something is happening. I see the nurses and the doctors much more kind, much more loving with the patients. I see the patients are not screaming with pain as before. What’s happening? What are the sisters doing?” And I looked at him and I said, “Doctor, you know what is happening? Jesus is in this house now. There in that little chapel. He is living, He is loving, He is there, He’s the cause, He’s the giver of this joy, of this peace, of this love.” And he just shook his head, “Thank you.” And it was wonderful to feel that Presence of Jesus in that hospital after seventy years.”

American Atheism

Our government has not waged a frontal war on God like the Soviets. American atheism is a personal choice, and all of us have chosen it to some degree. Our lives are growing darker as we go about our daily lives ignoring God’s laws. Take the odd phenomena of Road Rage, for example. It is barbaric, but what causes it? Well, consider what most folks listen to in their cars, some for hours on end. It’s usually rap or rock music, or news, or talk shows, that only stir up anger, fear, and discouragement because it ignores even the idea of God, and often ridicules those who believe in God. People used to have bumper stickers: “God is my co-pilot.” But rarely now do we imagine God co-piloting our cars, or our lives. Our freeways have become darker, less-friendly, more dangerous places. So have our schools, our neighborhoods, and our politics.

In 1863, President Lincoln spoke to a nation that was, in his words, “faced with a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity.”  Are we not engaged today in a cultural civil war of “unequaled magnitude?” Lincoln begged the American people to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes.”  The President of the United States urged Americans to return to God’s will. All the newspapers affirmed his prophetic utterance. Can you imagine any news media, liberal or conservative, urging us to trust in God’s will and His laws today?

Hope

And yet: there is good reason for hope. We know how bright life can be when we order our lives for God through regular prayer and the exercise of charity. We can throw Jesus out of our cities, but we can also welcome Him back. We can bathe in the waters of His grace, as he instructed the Blind Man: “Go, wash in the waters of Siloam.” We Catholics have three treasures that keep God’s light brightly burning in our cities: Mass, confession, and the rosary. At TAC we get good marks on Mass and confessions, but there is the third treasure, the rosary. Do not underestimate the practice of the rosary. “The rosary,” wrote Blessed John Paul II in 2002, "is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and its depth.” All of us can pray the rosary daily, or at least a decade daily. Our country needs what only we Catholics can give: The Eucharist, sacramental Penance, and daily consecration to the Mother of God.

Joy

The good people of Russia have rebuilt the cathedral Stalin dynamited in 1931. The colossal statue of Lenin was never erected. Jesus Christ has won the war, even though the battle for individual souls, and the souls of nations, rages on. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asked the blind man. “Yes, Lord, I do believe,” and he worshipped Him. For each of us, light and joy flood our lives when we echo that blind man’s faith, when we come back to right worship, ortho-doxy. Yes, Lord, I do believe. I worship, not myself or any other, but You alone.

A Love Story

The third Sunday of Lent brings us the wondrous fourth chapter of St. John, the so-called “woman at the well.” It is a love story, a story where false, empty, bitterly-failed love meets true, deep, and joyously perfect love. The story has a happy ending, and it is the story of humanity.

A Well

1600 years ago St. Augustine began his homily on this Gospel with these words: “A woman came. She is a symbol of the Church not yet made righteous but about to be made righteous. Righteousness follows from the conversation.” Jesus draws a sinful person into a friendly conversation by sitting down at Jacob’s well in the heat of the day. In the Old Testament, men found their spouses at wells—Moses meets Zipporah, Isaac meets Rebecca, and Jacob meets the beautiful Rachel at watering holes. And so, again at Jacob’s well, a woman comes up, alone, and Jesus is thirsty. Mother Teresa described the thirst of Jesus: “I Thirst is something much deeper than Jesus just saying ‘I love you.’ Even more—he longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come close.” The Samaritan woman approaches, and Jesus draws her close to him. How does He do it?

Give and Receive

He begins with a simple, direct request. “Give me a drink.” I am the needy one, he says to the woman. I need something you can give. The woman is irritated—all she wants is to get her water and be off. “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” Jesus responds in a kindly tone (we see how she begins to soften) and offers her his own gift of “living water.” She is beginning to be touched that this Jew would accept anything from a dirty Samaritan, and want to give something in return.  “Sir, give me this water,” she says. She begins to thirst for him.

Uncovering her Sin

And now Jesus is in a position to gently uncover the bleeding wound of her sin. He has come to address the real problem—her failed attempts at love. She has had five husbands, and is sleeping with a sixth. What was she looking for in those six men? At Jesus’ gentle but playful prompting, she admits this bravely, as if making a good confession after 20 years. She says “I can see you are a prophet” and goes to the question of faith: on what mountain should we worship? How can I truly love God? “I know that Messiah is coming, and he will tell us everything.”

And Jesus simply says, I am He. I am the God, I am the Man, I am the love you have been looking for. Notice this detail: she drops her bucket by the well and runs back to town. She no longer needs that dirty little bucket; she no longer needs fetid water from stagnant wells. And in her joy, she runs back to town to share her joy—the “joy of the Gospel”—with her townsfolk.

I Thirst

The woman at the well tells us two things about ourselves. First, that we all have dirty little wells into which we dip, hoping for some kind of satisfaction. What is your watering hole? Is it a bar or a dirty little pit where you drink alcohol? Is it pornography, America’s dirty little secret? Pornography and fornication are the mockery of love, as the Samaritan woman learned from bitter experience. She urges you to abandon that well. Throw your cracked, dirty little bucket down and run back to town, engage the culture in witness that Jesus Christ is the only love that satisfies the thirsting human heart.

And second, the Samaritan woman tells us that Jesus is the first to ask: “Give me a drink.” We say, but God, what can I give to you? And Jesus, the beggar by that well, the poor one hanging from the cross, replies: “You can give me your heart.” I am dying of thirst for your heart. Once we have given that, we are capable of receiving his infinite gift. God wants to espouse us to Himself. He sits by our dirty little wells—our addictions, our sins—and looks up at us. “I’m thirsty. Please give me a drink.”

“Jesus thirsts for you … always, even when you don’t feel worthy,” wrote Mother Teresa. “Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you—you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him.” Our Lady first heard those words from the Cross—I thirst. She knows. She knows who Jesus wants to be for you, and who He wants you to be for Him. Go with her to the Cross, and give our crucified Lord something to drink, from you own heart.

A Face like the Sun

The second Sunday of Lent describes the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary. Jesus climbs Mount Tabor to pray, and while he is praying, is transfigured before Peter, James, and John. I think this detail in the Gospel is most important. Prayer transfigures Jesus, at least in the eyes of his friends, and his immaculate nature is thus revealed. “This is my beloved Son,” a voice booms from within the cloud. This is my Son, the all-pure, whose face shines like the sun at midday, and whose vesture gleams white as light. There is no shadow or hint of darkness in Him. Listen to Him; imitate Him, become Him.

Your Sanctification

In the Epistle, St. Paul pleads with his beloved Christians at Thessalonica to imitate this immaculate whiteness of Christ.  As a father, as a mother, he earnestly urges them, in the Lord Jesus, “to refrain from immorality and lust…. God has not called us to impurity but to holiness.” He does so as a mother would speak with her daughter, or a father his son, about the delicate and burning issue of purity. “Conduct yourselves in a way pleasing to God… this is the will of God—your sanctification.” Paul defines “sanctification,” in this passage, as sexual purity. Of course there is much more to holiness than chastity, but sanctification is not possible when one degrades himself in the flesh. We get pretty good marks on purity here at TAC in comparison with Paul’s “gentiles.”  “Conduct yourselves,” he says, “so as to please God, as you are already doing,” but I exhort you to do so even more. We too could be more Christ-like, more god-like in our purity. We could imitate the blazing and mighty purity of the Son of God.

My Beloved Son

How do we imitate the purity of Christ Jesus? It is in prayer that we perceive God’s love, and so are strengthened against loveless lust. While in prayer, Christ’s face blazed like the sun and his clothes shone white as light. He spoke with the glorified figures of Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets. Jesus reveals himself in complete majesty, a majesty of immaculate purity. His brightness manifests a quality of glorified bodies, “who will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt 13:43). But faith comes more through hearing than through seeing. And so the Father’s voice commands them to “Listen” to his beloved Son. But how many are listening?

Is anyone listening?

It certainly seems like most people are not listening, and so they fall into gross impurity, an impurity that incapacitates authentic love. Last week I bought a smoothie at a little shop, and the girl at the counter seemed so empty, so debilitated. She didn’t smile, didn’t look at me, spoke in a monotone, and made my smoothie with zombielike movements. I went outside to drink my smoothie and a car dropped off a young woman in a uniform who sat at the next table to await her shift. She too was a zombie: glassy eyes, wooden movements. Behold the casualties of the so-called “sexual revolution.” When I see that kind of emptiness in a young person’s face, I know the cause. They do not know love, they do not know themselves, because they are living a lie in their bodies. They do not see the image of God in the human person, and they will eventually destroy that image—even babies—without a thought, because they have not listened to God’s voice. 

We too, even in our vigorous Catholicism, violate holy purity at times in what we watch at the movie theatre, on TV and computers and cell phones. We promote poisonous impurity in how we dress, in the music we listen to, and in how we look at others. The Father’s voice begs us, commands us: Listen to my beloved Son. Do not listen to the world! It is aggressive, demanding, and intolerant. It shouts at you, demands your submission, and soaks you in impurity. If we want to be capable of love, we must listen carefully to God by praying early and often. In the silence of the heart God speaks; only in silence can love speak to us.

May Our Lady, the Immaculata, show us how to see Christ in others, and love Him in others in all purity and sanctity.

Basic Training

We have entered into the great and holy season of Lent. The collect for Ash Wednesday portrays Lent as armed conflict: “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.” Christian service is military service, and we have entered a military campaign armed with weapons of “self-restraint” against spiritual enemies. The enemy opposing us is, in fact, the enemy we face every morning in the mirror: our own disordered passions and insecurities. Only self-restraint, discipline at times harshly administered, can gain victory in these contests.

Before we enter this conflict, the first reading from Genesis lays out our situation. First, we hear that God created us from “the clay of the earth,” as Ash Wednesday reminds us: “Remember O man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” We are body-soul composites: not angels, and not brutes, but a little of both. Next we hear that God planted us in his garden of delights, right among the blossoming fruit trees and a variety of animals. He gave us free will and commanded us to exercise careful stewardship of this garden. Then God drove a stake in the ground, called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and said: I am God. You are not God. I alone have full knowledge and I set the moral law. Dominion is yours in many things, but you must obey the natural law. Finally, we hear how our first parents challenged God’s authority and violated the natural law, committing the Original Sin. This is our situation as we enter the war of Lent. Obedience to God is our freedom; we have lost it, but we are freedom-fighters working to regain it.

Desert Warfare

The Gospel then puts us into the desert with Jesus, because Lent is desert warfare. The Spirit drives him into the wastes to meet the enemy at close quarters. Jesus takes with him only the weapons of self-restraint—the very weapons Adam and Eve surrendered in the Garden on that fateful day. He talks to no one, sleeps on the ground, and refuses food and drink. On the fortieth day the Bible tells us, with typical Semitic understatement, Jesus was “hungry.” The serpent had left Adam in the garden, and now he returns to the new Adam in the desert. Satan tests Christ three times.

Hunger

Test Number One: Satan suggests that Jesus turn a heap of stones into savory loaves. The Son of God replies with perfect self-restraint that his food is to do the will of his Father. Christ’s fast reveals how much we idolize food. There is hardly a moment when we are not thinking about our next meal. And not only food—we idolize every gift God bestows upon us, and then we pretend the Giver doesn’t exist. Fasting is house-to-house warfare designed to take out these idols. Meal by meal, we gain ground, breaking our dependence on earthly gifts. “Man lives not on bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Trust

Test Number Two: Satan commands Jesus to test God by throwing himself off the temple parapet. Jesus responds simply that man does not test God. It is God who tests man. He trusts his Father enough not to test him. Jesus’ simple trust reveals humanity’s fundamental doubt. Skeptics all, we do not trust what we do not see. Only with misgivings and much bellyaching do we manage to trust God when he tests us. We would rather test him first, to see that he is real. When bad things happen to good people, how many of us pass the test? And so Christ’s second victory reverses Adam’s Original failure. Jesus shows us that we can trust God to be God, and that perfect happiness consists in perfect obedience to the author of all that is good.

Humility

Test number three: Satan takes Jesus to the top of the US Bank Tower in downtown LA—the tallest building west of the Mississippi—and offers him unlimited control over the Great City. Jesus replies with perfect humility that he will not attempt to rival God’s authority. The devil lost heaven by planting his feet before God and declaring Non Serviam. Jesus bows his head and declares Serviam. I will serve. Jesus’ refusal of worldly dominion reveals our own dependency on human recognition. We obsess over politicians, sports stars, economic magnates, and entertainment celebrities. We must use severe means to break our worldly fixations.  “You shall worship God and him alone shall you serve.”

Lent is a time for war, desert warfare, not so much with the devil as with ourselves. Saints battle the devil; sinners battle themselves. War requires discipline and self-denial to reach our objective. Let us ask our Holy Mother, who trained her will from the moment she made her Fiat to the angel Gabriel, to enter this campaign of Christian service joyfully, armed with the weapons of self-restraint.

Don’t just keep the faith

Jesus insists today: “Your light must shine before men….” I’m sure most of us have heard that little Christian ditty at summer camps, This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…” Actually, I hate that song, sung at so many youth camps by goofy youth ministers. But, in fact, those goofy youth ministers had it right: we must let Christ’s light and truth shine before men, or we are unfaithful to Christ and refusing to be really Catholic. It is because Catholics in our country do not shine the beam of Christian truth upon politics, entertainment, and education that corruption and indecency are engulfing us. As they say, don’t just keep the faith—spread it.

Jesus not only compares us, but identifies us with salt and light in today’s Gospel. He doesn’t say a Christian is like salt and like light; he says “you are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.” The human body cannot survive without salt and light, and the social order cannot survive without the salt and light of Christian witness. Our culture becomes less than human, and we ourselves become dehumanized, without the savor and brightness of Christ and his Christians.

Privatized Faith

As Fr. Barron points out in his Sunday homily this week, salt and light are no good by themselves, but only in service to something else. No one eats spoonfuls of raw salt—we use it to flavor something else. No one stares into a naked light bulb; it only serves to illuminate something else. Just so, Christians serve no purpose if they keep their faith to themselves. We are to salt and illumine our culture, giving it savor and brilliance. By definition, then, Christians are missionaries; we must take our faith beyond private belief into the public square. Incidentally, restricting Christianity within private belief and isolating it from the public square is precisely what our government is trying to do. Soviet Russia and Communist China attempted to do this, with some measure of success. In order maintain complete power, governments since the Roman Empire have ferociously attempted to keep Christianity out of public life. That’s the underlying purpose of the HHS Mandate, which redefines religion as a strictly private activity.  We must not let that happen here in America.

Preparing to launch

I am privileged to work in a College that was founded to prepare Catholics to bring the light of Christ’s truth into the secular world. Here at Thomas Aquinas College we dedicate four years to the epic task of assimilating the greatest thought of western culture. We must be aware of the danger, however, that after these four years we will fail to launch out after graduation. TAC is the beginning of our evangelical mission, not the end. We educate ourselves in order to bring those eternal truths beyond the College, beyond our families and friends, into the public square.

The world’s salvation depends upon the witness of Christians like us. Notice also that salt not only flavors food but preserves it from rotting. Light not only reveals what is beautiful but also exposes what is ugly. A good conservative preserves what is healthy in society and a good liberal exposes what is rotten in order to change it. Christian witnesses must both conserve the good and freely reform what is bad. Only the light of Christ’s Magisterium can show us when to conserve and when to change. Our College has provided the world with hundreds of Catholic witnesses who preserve the good and change the bad in the realms of business, politics, education, and the arts. Emulate them! Prepare for your own launching by studying the truth diligently now, so that you can liberally shine Christ’s truth into your own spheres of influence after graduation.

The Health of our culture depends on Christian witness

A flavorless, dim Christianity is not only unfaithful to Christ, but disastrous for the world. Weak Christian witnesses, for example, permitted the Nazi holocaust in Christian Europe. Weak Christian witnesses are permitting the abortion holocaust in Christian America today. Christians and churches that fail to salt and illuminate public life are permitting the pornography epidemic in our country, as we saw in the dark music of the Grammys and the super Bowl half-time show (I didn’t and wouldn’t see it, but was told about it). True enough, some Christians have pushed back, saying, “no, it is not acceptable to vomit out this kind of filth on national television,” but they are evidently still too few to change the culture.

Charity above all

Finally, let us consider how best to give witness to Christ in a darkening world. In our first reading, Isaiah says that if you “share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless; clothe the naked when you see them, and do not turn your back on your own, your light shall break forth like the dawn.” The most compelling witness is not what we say but what we do. Only if people see that we care about them will they care about what we say. No one will listen to even the most shining truths spoken by a mean and angry person. Some well-intentioned pro-life folks and pro-marriage folks fall into the trap of anger, negativity, and condemnation. In doing so, we fail to believe in God and his work. He converts hearts, not us; it is for us to love those he has put with us on earth, and then to teach the truth to those whom we love.

So let us make quite sure that what we learn at this splendid Catholic College is not kept only to ourselves after graduation. I cannot say how you must witness to the Gospel in your private and public life after graduation, but I do say we must all give witness, as the Holy Spirit gives us utterance, to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the only Savior of men. May the Blessed Mother guide us in faithfully witnessing to her Divine Son, through her spouse the Holy Spirit, in obedience to her Eternal Father.