Homilies from St. Anthony, Allston, MA

Sorry, Charlie

The most disturbing conversation I ever had as a priest was with a man who went to Mass every day.  I thought of him when I read this parable again.

Notice what the pharisee says: How blessed he is that God did not make him like the others. He describes others as greedy, adulterous and dishonest.

When I spoke to this man about the need for him to consider confession, he would say how he did not need to go to confession: “I don't need confession, everyone else does because they are all pigs.”

Look how similar he is to the pharisee in today’s Gospel. "I thank you," he says, "for I am not like the others."

He then, of course, boasts of his devotion and their sins.

 

But the important part to notice is that he is worshiping God on his own terms, not on God’s.

He is doing many things to prove to God how holy he is.

He reminds me so much of the old icon for Star-Kist Tuna, Charlie, trying to prove that he had good taste only to learn that Star-Kist did not want tuna with good taste, but tuna that tastes good.

Here he is working to prove that he was worthy of being blessed by God, but Jesus is showing that he is far from deserving such recognition.

Now look at what the publican offers. All he offers is his sinfulness and a sense his repentance. Actually, he does not even offer this, he just comes before the Lord humbly as a sinful man and Jesus says that he received his blessing from God.

So often I read that people think we need to be proving our devotion, but Jesus calls us to be like the publican fully aware of God’s great mercy and holiness and aware of our humanness in great need of both. Jesus always said that it is the greatest sinner who is most appreciative of God’s mercy. That is why He taught that the tax collectors and the prostitutes were getting to Heaven before the pharisees.

We are on our way to eternal life by recognizing whom we truly are and we approach God out of our truth invite him into our truth and do not run from him when our weaknesses confront us with the truth we do not want to acknowledge. We are far from the Kingdom of God when we put up a false front that is actually a lie.

That is why it is so important to understand how the pharisee, who is a character we find in every parish, in every community, in every culture throughout time is a false understanding of what it means to be Catholic. The reason is the focus is exclusively on him. Notice how many times he uses the "I" word.

Jesus uses 44 words to quote him and he uses the I word four times. Almost ten percent of everything he says is the first personal pronoun. Notice something else, Jesus describes him as praying the words to himself.

He describes the publican as simply praying. That man says eight words and does not use the first person pronoun. He only uses one direct object pronoun to refer to himself. He is totally, humbly focused on the love and mercy of God and the pharisee is, as Jesus says, focused exclusively on himself.

So, according to Jesus, who gets to Heaven? The poor sinner, the poor publican. The pharisee is lost.

This highlights something that is essential within us. The pharisee is lost because he is self-deceived. Everything he does is on his own terms and the problem is that he does it all well. So he does not see that he is doing many things, none of them are actually serving God.

This remind me of a story my father used to tell, I think it was true. The baseball game was tied, there was one out, the bases were loaded and it was the ninth inning.

The star of the team was coming up to bat and the manager told him to make a sacrifice fly out. This would have driven in the winning run and the team would win the game.

The star hits a home run on the first pitch, it is a grand slam bringing in four runs. The whole crowd goes wild and cheers, the game ends in spectacular style.

The manager greets the home run hitter at the plate and fines him.

He won the game by not doing what the manager asked. He played not as a teammate but to glorify himself.

The pharisee is trying to win salvation by glorifying himself.

The publican is realizing Heaven cannot be won on his own power. Only by acknowledging his own humanity in the face of God’s glory can he understand the power of God’s love and mercy.

That same message is for us.

The most dangerous sin we can ever commit is the sin of pride. No other sin is so dangerous, none. It is the mother of all sins, literally. It is the sin that makes us think of ourselves greater than we actually are and leads us to replace God in our lives with ourselves.

The greatest virtue is humility, the polar opposite of pride. It leads us to see ourselves as we truly are: human, creatures of God and unable to know, love and serve God without recognizing our deep need of His grace leading us to be in union with Christ in order to be his disciples.

This is why true prayer is so important.  We may do many things to serve God, but the most important thing we must do is just experience his true friendship and we can only do that by praying to him as we would speak to any intimate friend and that is about everything.

The most important piece of advice I ever learned as a priest actually came to me as a seminarian. It was the words of Fulton Sheen who demanded that a priest spend one hour before the Blessed Sacrament. The same goes for everyone. Daily prayer of just in the presence of Christ and if it cannot be in front of the Blessed Sacrament then a special place where we can sit and build our friendship with Christ speaking to him mentally and if necessary physically and humbly as intimately and truthfully as we want. There we will find the true power of His grace in our lives and be able to share it with others through our lives.

Finally, we can take this message for ourselves, but never forget, that there are many publicans outside our doors, who feel they have to be like the pharisee to enter. They have no idea that they are closer to Christ than so many others, all they have to do is enter that door and pray. 

Prayer: The Sine Qua Non

I am going to cite for you a Church teaching that I am guessing you may never have heard. From paragraph 2098 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.

Everything you have heard about how much we live our faith; our morality and the commandments means nothing if we do not first understand that simple sentence. Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.

As you know that often I say that whole concept of good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell is wrong and that is why. It is through prayer that God transforms us and makes us whom he calls us to be for it is in prayer that we encounter God personally.

If we remove prayer from Catholic morality then it becomes just a moral standard that anyone can try follow, whether they believe in God or not, or whether their god is one of a pantheon of gods or is the atoms and molecules that they believe define all of reality. There is no mercy in that moral standard and those who fall short of it discover its tyranny. Just because someone does not believe does not mean he or she does not love or rejects the morality of the Commandments.

It is prayer that transforms us to encounter God on a personal level and leads us to seek him totally over time. It is the person who prays who learns that God is ever present in his or her life.

It is the person who prays who understands the work of Christ and His spirit in leading us all to the Father.

It is the person who prays who comes to understand what it means to encounter Christ as the embodiment of the truth.

Prayer is essential for each of us.

 

Many people who do not normally pray will find themselves praying when things go wrong. They feel bad that they only call on God in tragedy, but many of the saints would say not to dismiss this desperate effort, because even this sporadic prayer is important.

Our call is to pray more.

I often quote St. Alphonsus Liguori who taught to converse with God as one would a good friend. This is what prayer is. It can be the formal prayer we learn in religious education. It can be the public liturgical prayer we do here but it also can be the private informal prayer we all have a calling to do daily. Prayer is all of that and we have an invitation to participate in it.

However, prayer is even more for it is a dialogue.

Questions for discussion:

How do you pray? 

What do you say when you pray?

What does Jesus talk about today? The persistent woman who does not give up and demands an answer.

Prayer demands an answer for prayer expects an answer.

Many people will say as they pray that they wonder if God hears them. Of course, He does. His response will be as Father so that answer will be what is best for you but He will answer.

I always like to tell the story which I read I think in the Reader’s Digest which I understand is a true story. It is of the woman who prayed that her number would come out in the lottery. When they did the drawing on television that night she checked her ticket and it came out exact, except it was exactly backwards.

Obviously, the ticket was useless but she learned not to trust in the lottery but to trust in God.

When we pray, we must expect answers. Billy Graham used to teach to pray and give thanks to God for his response in that prayer, for that is how confident we should be that he will answer. He may not give us what we want the way we want it, but He will respond.

My mother was handicapped from the neck down with the exception of her right hand. It was a slow process that began when she and my father were hit by drunk driver one night in 1967 in our hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts. Slowly the process began that she was more and more unable to walk until she became unable to move all below the neck but her right hand.

Many times, she prayed to be healed and obviously that did not happen. However, she was healed in so many other ways. I can still remember her smile at times and her unique humor and more. Her spiritual healing was more powerful than her physical healing and that is how God brought more to her and through her than a healing would have accomplished.

I think today that God is speaking to His Church about all its failures and those who pray will persevere but will listen to what He is saying.

Cardinal Sarah in his latest book writes what it appears others are learning and getting as a message in their prayers as well that our Church has been busy teaching justice and issues but has not been teaching prayer and the quest for holiness. The reason her bishops have not been doing this, according to Cardinal Sarah is that they have been lost in issues. The end result is the same: teaching a moral standard without prayer and a relationship to Christ makes that standard a tyranny to those who fall short of it. Christ came to give us freedom and we find that freedom in Christ.

So you have many demanding morality but not prayer. As I began this homily in the same way I end it.

If we do not pray, then we cannot live the quest for holiness for according to section 2098 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.

The Sacrament of Healing

You know that I do writing and occasionally I am contacted to do some volunteer writing usually for Catholic events. I was asked to interview a Fr. Kaz from the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, MA about Love and Mercy Faustina: a new movie that will be shown nationally for one night on October 28^th. It is about St. Faustina Kowalska and the origins of the Divine Mercy devotion. It is excellent and I highly recommend it to you. I can give you more details if you request them after Mass.

The first thing I said to him was that I know little about this devotion. They never taught it to us in the seminary and so I knew nothing about it until I ended up in my first parish in Dorchester and the Sisters of Divine Mercy rented the convent. That was the first I learned anything about it.

There is an interesting dimension to this teaching. If you have never seen the image, you will notice that it is of Jesus standing in front of black background with two rays of light coming from his heart. They represent the blood and water of his mercy extended to all who seek it.

I went to the National Shrine on Thursday and spent some time in prayer in front of the image and one thing struck me: It was not the image but the blackness that was behind it. If you look carefully at the image, you will see that this is Jesus, being exactly what he says He is, the light shining in the darkness. Purposely, there is nothing else in the painting besides the image, but the background is not not painted, it is instead a deep black.

So, if you were to encounter Jesus and just pridefully ignore him, where would you go? Deep into where there is no light and no presence of God. We know that through Jesus, we are forgiven of our sins, that there is no sin that he will not forgive, save the sin of refusing to be forgiven of our sins.

So then what sin is represented by the blackness? The sin of pride. The sin of refusing to humble ourselves before Christ and receive His mercy and forgiveness. The sin of saying, we are in no need of what He offers us.

Today’s Gospel features the lepers who humble themselves before Christ and receive his healing. They were lepers, they were ostracized from the community and had only themselves for companionship and support. One was a Samaritan, so among the lepers he was also an outsider because he was not a Jew.

They are all healed, but he alone comes back indicating just how appreciative he was at being healed. There was no other recourse. He had only Christ and humbling himself before Christ he was healed. The others did nothing wrong by not going back, but he demonstrates a full understanding of what he received.

The saints often related this to the sacrament of reconciliation also known as Confession. Never forget that this is a sacrament of healing. I think too often our teachings are made to be lifeless sets of rules. When that happens, they lose their meaning and their power. The Sacrament of Reconciliation does two things to us that we can also see in the story of the lepers.

 

Through the mercy of Christ, it gives us the freedom from the darkness behind his image in the painting. It is not only that we recognize that Jesus is the source of this healing but that when we humble ourselves before him, we become free from getting lost in the darkness—no matter how many times we need to approach him

But we need to look at something else. It is this great humor that is in the Gospels. What happens next to the lepers? They are healed. They go show themselves to the priests and now they are free to return to society. That is something that they cannot keep a secret. Now people will see that they are healed and they will spread the word and this is now Jesus’ notoriety happens.

The same can be said for us. What does Jesus save us from, that deep eternal mysterious darkness that you can see behind the image of the Divine Mercy. Every time we go to confession, regardless of the sins, this is the darkness from which we are saved. However, there are so many others that need to know that experience is real.

There are many people out there who believe they are beyond the mercy and love of Christ. Some people, like those who ostracized the lepers are telling them that they are evil sinners beyond the mercy of God, believe it or not. I have little hope for them going to Heaven compared to those they condemn.

I have dealt with people over time who believe that they are so bad that Jesus cannot forgive them, or they did some awful sin that makes them unable to be forgiven. It is a terrible thing to see someone who has been lost in that pain and it is a better joy when they learn they are wrong.

People can get lost in thinking that they are worse than they are. Every so often someone will come to me desiring to go to confession and tell me that it will be a long confession for they broke all the commandments. My first response to them is always: “Who did you kill?” They say no one. Then I respond, “then you did not break all the commandments.” They realize they are not as bad as they thought they were.

This is the power of Confession for what it does is opens us up to God’s mercy through His son, Jesus Christ and saves us from that mysterious darkness behind the image of the Divine Mercy. It the darkness of pride and may even be self-imposed because we thought we were something good or bad that we were not.

 

Be the Loving Face of Christ

Cardinal Robert Sarah in his new book: The Day Is Now Far Spent, addresses the issues of the current problems in the Church. He puts it squarely in failing to seek holiness, the theme of our second reading. Further, he says that what caused all this is that we stopped praying. He is especially addressing the priests and the bishops, but also the Church as a whole as well.

We have a mission to evangelize the world, but no one talks about how to do it, but he does. He says we do it by our living a holy life. It is an essential part of what it means to be Catholic and he suggests that this must be our focus now.

How do we do that? we simply fall in love with Jesus. We make him a part of our life and let his vision transform our vision as we grow closer to Him. We do that by being people of prayer above all else.

Our Church really does not speak much to the world if we are not focused on our own holiness. He explains we must people of prayer, real prayer, what Thomas Merton called contemplative prayer.

Prayer is what makes us different than others for prayer leads to holiness.

The problem, according to Cardinal Sarah, is that we have become lost in causes and social justice. That was never the mission of the Church. This does not mean that social justice is not important but being focused on causes and not on Christ is disastrous, especially among the priests and bishops.

 

Further, we can lose a sense of how to do social justice if we are not first in pursuit of holiness.

Let us take one example: There is a lot of talk in the church about being a welcoming church. So many Christians are focused on that ‘all are welcome’ message but there is no place in the Catholic Church for not being loving people to anybody. That is what is different. The question should not be whether one is welcomed in the church, but whether one experiences love, regardless of whom he or she is.

There is a horrible story out of Tennessee, you may have heard about it. A young teen about 16 years old apparently wrote some messages to a friend who was male. The content of the letters was not revealed but they indicated that they were in some form of a sexual relationship. You know we consider that sinful, but do not forget that God’s grace and mercy is bigger than all our sins combined. That was his reality. Apparently, a former girlfriend somehow got those messages and used them to cyberbully him by outing his as gay. She did this publicly on the internet. He was so devastated that this happened that he committed suicide using a gun by the way. His whole family is devastated. So now everyone is focused on him understandably and the stigma that caused him to feel so desperate that he committed this devastating act.

We Catholics seek to live our faith in holiness and love. As Cardinal Sarah says, we must be the
 face of Christ. Maybe if we were more focused there we might be able to see this picture with better lenses.

What would the saints do in this case? Well, let us take one saint, a parish priest: St John Vianney. Now, let’s imagine that the suicide did not happen and the parishioners gathered the teen up with his letter and they brought him to St. John Vianney. They may have realized quickly that was a mistake. St John Vianney saw more hope for salvation in people like him than those who lived an ersatz form of Catholicism. He probably would have told them he did not have time for such nonsense, and then spoke to the teen about holiness, sin and Christ. He would probably have scolded those who brought him. He would have told them that the cyberbully was the one who committed the far more serious sin.

Cyberbullying is a technological form of a sin he called detraction which is saying something bad about another person even if it is true. It is so severe that it is close to the worst sin one can commit, according to beloved saint.

Just because it is using technology and it has a 21^st century name does not mean it is not the sin of detraction. That was the same sin Queen Jezebel, the most evil woman in the Bible, used against Naboth in the time of Elijah the prophet so that she could steal his vineyard. Same sin.

No one mentions that maybe if people were actually seeking holiness and were teaching the truth about mercy and God’s love, and not just his judgement, when they spoke of sin, things like this might not happen.

A good, holy person as St John Vianney would recognize the need to balance awareness of sin with love. He sought to bring Christ to a sinful but human world that needed to know the face of  Christ.

The late Fr Rufus Pereira used to explain that the worst of all pain is the feeling of abandonment. Remember, Jesus says from the cross: “My God, My God why have you abandoned me.” Those feelings of being abandoned by the rest of the world can kill, especially at that age, and detraction is one of the causes of it.

Her actions led him to feel that pain. Whether he was accurate in his assessment, it does not matter. Her actions led to his suicide because he went down that dark hole of feeling isolated and abandoned. Now you understand the real tragedy of what happened in Tennessee.

We must be accurate on sin but through holiness we learn how to reflect, accurately, Christ’s love and not what passes for Christianity today,. Cardinal Sarah says it is bourgeois.

Holiness gives us a whole different vision and more accurately displays the true face of Christ not the bourgeois that many people think of today. We cannot be holy if we are not people deeply in love with Christ and people of prayer.

1. How much do we love Christ?

 

2. How do you pray?