Gaudete: joy

Today, the Third Sunday of Advent, is “Gaudete Sunday,” so named from the first word of the entrance verse for the Mass: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say it, Rejoice!... the Lord is near” (Phil 4:4). The priest and the altar clad themselves in rose colored vestments to express the Church’s joyful expectation of the Lord’s imminent arrival. We anticipate the Lord not with fear and trembling but with steadfast joy. The Prophet Isaiah’s joy flows from his heart and soul: “I rejoice heartily in the Lord, in my God is the joy of my soul.” His joy is that of one sent to bear glad tidings to a people in darkness; an exultant energy, as Our Lady went in haste to bring Jesus to her cousin Elizabeth.

This Present Darkness

Next Sunday will be the darkest day of the year, the day before the Winter Solstice. There is no longer and colder night than December 21st. Christmas brightens the long winter of our earthly exile. In this month of December the Church celebrates feasts of light. On Monday we celebrated the Immaculate Conception, the “white dawn announcing the Son’s rising.” Yesterday it was St. Lucy, a child martyr of the 3rd century whose names means light (Lucy from “lux”), and whose radiant joy overcame the hatred of her executioners. In ten days we celebrate the greatest of all Festivals of Light, the star of Bethlehem, the radiance of angels over nighttime flocks, the Solemnity of Christmas. “O that birth forever blessed,” writes Aurelius Prudentius in his 4th century hymn. “When the Virgin, full of grace, Overshadowed by the Spirit, Bore the Savior of our Race.” It is by virtue of His birth that St. Paul can command us in the Epistle to “rejoice always.”

Anyone can rejoice in every circumstance if he knows that God is with him, because joy is a virtue, not merely a feeling. Joy is an act of the will, sometimes difficult, but always possible to men of faith. We do not have to be sad, we do not have to be negative; we can choose to smile into the darkness, to sing while we work at even disagreeable tasks. “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks.” ‘Always’ because God is with us in every circumstance. Joy is a virtue that becomes less difficult and more perfect with practice.

“Make Straight the Path”

In the Gospel, John is baptizing at the River Jordan, and some priests ask him: who are you? He tells them that he is not the Messiah, but a voice in the desert crying out “make straight the way of the Lord.” The sad and lonely desert, the dangerous and frightening wilderness, is spreading. Senselessness, perhaps guided by calculated demonic fury, is undermining the once solid foundations of an earlier Christian era. Two years ago today a young man drove up to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 20 children. Two days ago a 22-year-old man opened fire at Rosemary Anderson School in Oregon. School shootings are relatively common now, but unknown just a generation ago. What has changed? Well, we can hardly expect people not to kill children when our government subsidizes child murder under another name. Not 20 children but 20,000 children die every day in this world through government-subsidized abortion.

It is always darkest before dawn. We cannot lift the darkness—only God can save our world—but we can make straight the path. It is the joyful penances of Advent, our spiritual preparation, that make Christmas the most joyful season of the year. Take those spiritual practices away, and Christmas loses its joy. It becomes just another commercial event, driven by blind market forces.

“Joy is prayer - Joy is strength - Joy is love - Joy is a net of love by which you catch souls,” wrote Mother Teresa. If you pray, you will be joyful, because you will see light in even the deepest darkness. Go to Mass every week, every day if possible, and bring your friends. Make a good confession, schedule in a weekly holy hour, pray the rosary, and you will radiate the light of a joyful Christian. “Pow’rs, dominions bow before him, the babe, the world’s redeemer,” wrote Aurelius Prudentius 1600 years ago. “Now he shines, the long expected. Let creation praise its Lord.”

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.

It is a Sunday morning in Washington, and I am waiting to fly to Rio de Janeiro to give a retreat to the Missionaries of Charity. My family had our best reunion in years yesterday, with heartfelt love expressed across four generations and many branches of the family tree. My brothers and I had many good bike rides in our hometown, in particular one lovely cruise as a golden-orange sun set behind Blue Mountain, the mother-guardian of my youth, against which all my childhood was framed and protected. We laughed and joked as we pedaled through the town that God gave us to grow up in, rejoicing to be together. As our family grows older, it grows also in love. Astrophysicists tell us the universe is continually expanding, galaxies and stellar systems relentlessly distancing themselves from each other. Unconsciously, we think that this is the way of friendship and family as well, that we all get busy, and become less connected as time and circumstances relentlessly pull us apart. But that is not what is happening to my family, although it has in the past. Now we are drawing closer, with deeper love and understanding as we grow older—as we approach the jumping-off point for the Eternal Banquet Feast of the Lamb (God willing).

Tomorrow, May 26th, is the Feast Day of St. Philip Neri, who was born into eternal life 419 years ago. Happy Birthday, St. Philip! You might know that your scribe will be moving to Star of the Sea Parish in San Francisco August 1, hoping to establish an Oratory of St. Philip. We hope to form a community of priests and brothers who live as St. Philip did in his Roman parish of Santa Maria in Vallicella (St. Mary’s of the Little Valley) during the Renaissance.

How did St. Philip live? Well, he was a mystic, an extraordinary saint given wondrous gifts. He was given, above all, an almost unbelievably burning love for Jesus, such that upon his death his heart was found to have grown to three times its normal size, breaking several ribs. During the Mass, his heart beat rapidly as he went into ecstasy, and he sometimes floated a few inches above the marble floor. It was enough, for someone suffering from a burden on his heart, for Father Philip to press that man’s head to his own heart, to relieve his sorrow and grant great joy.

It is this supernatural joy that we hope to live among our small band of brothers in San Francisco. It is the joy of knowing Jesus, of knowing that God the Father sees us and loves us and provides for us. It is the joy of knowing the Holy Spirit of God within ourselves and each other. In today’s first reading, from Acts 8, another Philip (the Apostle), goes to Samaria to “proclaim the Christ to them.” With one accord, we read, the people paid attention, and “there was great joy in that city.” If only we, too, following Philip the Apostle and Philip Neri the “Apostle of Rome,” could become apostles of San Francisco! If only, through their intercession and by the grace of God, we too, secular priests that we are, could radiate that joy to an often sad and dysfunctional but beautiful city! San Francisco is not so different from the Rome of Philip’s time or the Samaria of Philip’s time. I believe everyone can radiate the joy of knowing that we are loved, and loved infinitely. It depends on prayer, really. If you are having difficulty in your marriage, pray, and you will find the joy again. If you have sickness in your body, or distress at work, or in your family, or find your state in life empty, pray to God, and you will recover that joy. It is for joy that God made us.

I thank God for my family here in Pennsylvania (how much love and joy we had these past few days!), and I thank him for my future family in San Francisco. Happy St. Philip’s Day!

The other day I gave a talk on the Pope’s recent document on evangelization, Evangelii gaudium. Pope Francis has come up with quite a few memorable phrases, such as his most famous, priests “smelling like the sheep.” I noticed another one in this document: “Some Christians’ lives seem like Lent without Easter.” That’s me, I thought. I’m not happy until everyone is behaving as they ought. And a few lines later, Pope Francis described me again: “Sometimes we are tempted to find excuses and complain, acting as if we could only be happy if a thousand conditions were met.” But I can’t afford to refuse joy until things are perfect. I must rejoice now, and show it.

After the talk, I went to Vons. I was in line with an armload of groceries with two people in front of me. Disclaimer: whoever is in front of you in the check-out line is your enemy. But even if these two were not in front of me, I would be tempted to think sour thoughts about them. An Anglo lady with cropped hair and lots of makeup was talking with a younger Mexican lady. They were pointing to a Cosmopolitan magazine, which showed a woman with some outfit whose neckline went to her belly button. “Celebrities can wear that kind of thing, but I couldn’t,” one giggled thoughtlessly. Next to this picture on the cover was a headline: “bed-breaking sex.”

I despised these ladies for smiling at Cosmo’s pornography. They were joking about it! They were admiring “celebrities” who get paid lots of money to smash and trash the soul of our country. Why are Americans so stupid? Why do we stupidly smile as the cultural elites brashly destroy our marriages, our families, and our children? I wanted to get out of that store, or take those women to task, or throw out those racks of soft porn at the check-out counter.

The “Joy of the Gospel” came back into my mind. I didn’t feel very joyful at that moment, but rather guilty and sad. I was scowling, or looking away, simply unable to manifest the joy of knowing Jesus. Dressed in my clerical clothing, I was failing miserably to be even the simplest Christian, let alone an “other Christ.”

It was my turn at the checkout. I had a $20 bill, but the total was $20.78. I began to push one item to the side when the cropped lady ran up and put her card number into the touchpad. “Here you go father,” she smiled at me. “That should save you two or three dollars.” I was not kind to her, but she was kind to me. Yes, her hair and her conversation blithely aped the idiocy of our declining culture, but she had a heart, and she shared that heart with a priest.

Despite the pervasive inanity of our time, people still have hearts. It takes a lot to completely destroy a human heart. We can smile, and we can manifest joy, because each person in that grocery store radiates the image of God, even if from under a “distressing disguise.” One who commits himself to the Joy of the Gospel makes the effort to see beyond the disguise. He sees the heart, and responds to that heart. Blessed John Henry Newman, an Oratorian priest model for me, took as his motto “Cor ad cor loquitor”—heart speaks to heart. The heart of God to the heart of man, certainly, and the heart of man to the heart of God. But it is our joy also when our hearts speak to each other, even in the check-out line at Vons.