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.

Homily: Paralysis 
Extraordinary Form Homily September 30, 2012
18th Sunday after Pentecost

The Paralytic

Jesus crossed the lake to his home town of Capernaum. Just as he is getting out of the boat, some men hurry up to the dock to lay down their paralyzed friend, 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.

A Bold Move

Our First Lesson: the paralyzed man’s friends make a bold move by plopping him down right in front 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 writes: “the paralytic symbolizes the sinner lying in his sin; just as the paralytic can’t move, so the sinner cannot help himself.” Those who bring the paralytic to Jesus lead the sinner to God. Most of the time we bring a friend to God by praying to God for his soul. Sometimes more direct action is indicated. A good friend will take a buddy to an AA meeting if circumstances warrant an intervention. A good friend will insist that his brother get to confession if he needs it.

Healing Sin

And this brings us to our Second Lesson: the Sacrament of Penance. This sacrament releases paralyzed limbs and hearts. Imagine paralysis in the ancient world, before motorized wheelchairs, handicapped ramps, and automatic doors. A paralyzed man had to lay on his back for the rest of his life, staring blankly up at the sky. So this paralytic lies in front of Jesus, helpless. Does Jesus cure his paralysis? Yes, but only after he forgives his sins. Our Lord points out that mortal sin is worse than paralysis. Indeed, it is sin that paralyzes. It puts us flat on our backs. The first thing in any distress—physical, emotional, or spiritual—is to go to confession. 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. Even it pleases God to permit a persistent bodily infirmity, we will be all right.

A Pure Heart, a Strong Spirit

St. Maximilian Kolbe was sick from the age of 17. Tuberculosis struck him while in the seminary and left him with only 25% lung capacity the rest of his life. But see how 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 managed the largest printing business in Poland. He survived three months in Auschwitz while giving his food to others, and in the end freely offered his life for another man in the starvation bunker. Where did he get his extraordinary strength? Not from his weak body, which God never cured in his life. Fr. Kolbe’s remarkable strength came from a pure soul, a heart cleansed of sin.

If we are sick in spirit, and even sick in body, let us look first to our souls. If our nation is sick, let it look above all to its soul. Our Lord wishes to cleanse, heal, and strengthen us, but we must get on our knees before him. We must confess our personal sins, and repent of our national sins. Nothing else matters if the soul is diseased. Our souls must be our first concern.

Let us pray to the Blessed Mother, that she also bring our sick and suffering souls to her Divine Son, that we may share her purity, and the glory God has bestowed upon her, and all the saints. 

Homily: Purity
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time; Sept 2, 2012, Fr. Joseph Illo

A Pure Heart

In 1948, Mother Teresa picked up a man dying in a gutter, covered with worms. She did not want to do it; the very shape and smell of this man repulsed her. But once she overcame her initial repulsion, she recognized Jesus Christ in the man she was holding. He was the first of 47,000 people she and her sisters picked from gutters over the next 40 years. One of them, looking up into Mother’s face, asked “why are you doing this?” She replied, “Because I love you.”

It was not easy for Mother Teresa to practice this degree of charity. Daily, as she went into the streets, she climbed Golgotha to lift the dying body of Jesus from the Cross. To climb that hill, and to recognize the Body of Christ, she needed a pure heart.  “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God,” Jesus says in the 6th Beatitude. The impure can’t even see God, let alone feel his love.

Hand Washing and Heart Washing

In the Gospel today, the question is one of purity. Christ’s disciples scandalize the Pharisees by launching into a meal without washing their hands. As St. Mark explains for his non-Jewish readers (that’s you and I), by the time of Jesus all Jews had adopted the ritual initially practiced only by priests: that of washing one’s hands before receiving God’s gifts. Catholic priests maintain this tradition—before Mass many priests wash their hands before clothing themselves with the sacred vestments, and during the Mass servers pour water over the priest’s fingers just before he enters into the Sacrificial Liturgy.

We must all purify ourselves before offering the sacrifice. So we begin every Mass with an act of penance, and again we purify our hearts just before receiving communion: “Domine, non sum dignus…. Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof….” We cannot receive his gifts efficaciously, we cannot receive the gift of himself, with impure hearts. But how do we purify our hearts? Certainly not with mere soap and water.

Purity is always an issue. We may purify ourselves in the confessional, and Christ may purify us in the Holy Mass, but it isn’t long until we manage to defile ourselves again. We defile ourselves in slight ways in almost every conversation with peers. We defile ourselves by how we regard or disregard others. We defile ourselves slightly and sometimes grievously on the internet. We defile ourselves with food and drink, and in how we behave off campus. It is almost impossible to make our way through this world without getting dirty. Thus the need for constant purification.

Charity purifies

The Pharisees insisted on hand washing, but how best to purify our hearts? St. Paul writes in our second reading: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Charity covers a multitude of sins, as St. Peter writes (1 Pet 4:8). Of course, we need to keep clear of worldly stain—the basic defilements, such as drugs, pornography, intemperance in food and drink, dirty speech, etc. But purity consists in seeking good, not just avoiding evil. Charity is the greatest good, and a pure faith cares for “widows and orphans.” Today that means befriending the friendless, helping someone with homework, listening patiently, from the heart, to people, calling Mom and Dad at least once a week, and putting up with annoying folks with a smile. Love is patient; love is kind.

The Immaculate One

Mother Teresa became a saint by the heroic exercise of charity. She founded a congregation known as the Missionaries of Charity. A few years after she picked up that first dying destitute from the gutter, she established her first Home for the Dying in a section of Calcutta called Kalighat. She named this home Nirmal Hriday, Bengali for the “Home of the Pure Heart.” The first day I went to that place, I felt weak and naseus. But the brothers took me first to a little statue of the Our Lady that Mother Teresa had set into a wall niche. And so everyone begins the day’s work at Kalighat with a prayer to the Immaculate Heart, asking for the purity necessary to attend to the dying Christ at Calvary.

Among all the wondrous virtues of Our Lady, her purity sets her apart preeminently. Don’t we long to share in that purity? Don’t we forget that such purity, such joy, is even within our grasp? Mother Teresa ended every prayer with this invocation: “Immaculate Heart of Mary, Cause of our Joy, pray for us.” We too can imitate Our Lady’s purity, and so share in her joy, by practicing the charity of her Son. Go to her, go to Him, to share in their purity.