THE LITURGICAL YEAR

Sermons, hymns, meditations and other musings to guide our annual pilgrim's progress through the liturgical year.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

ART THOU A KING?

A SERMON FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING


Today we proclaim our Lord Jesus Christ as King.  In the words of the Te Deum, “we acknowledge thee to be the Lord… heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory.”  Today’s feast is fairly recent, less than a hundred years old.  It was Pope Pius XI, who instituted the Feast of Christ the King in the Holy Year of 1925.  He did so in order to combat the rising tide of secularism.  Today, this tide has become a veritable tsunami, sweeping aside all vestiges of allegiance to any King, let alone a King who claims to hold rule over the whole world.

There are so very few today who claim Christ as their King.  So few who are ready to acknowledge their own role as servants of the King, that they must serve God, as well as just knowing and loving him.  Most folks these days prefer to remain masters of their own destiny, indulging every desire that pops into their mind, with no reference to the commandments or the will of their King.  “We have no king but Caesar,” they still cry out today, and the only difference between them and the Jewish mob on Good Friday is that the Caesar they have today is none other than themselves.  They have been deluded into believing that there is no higher power than the will of the individual, and woe betide the man who would prevent them from doing what they want. 

This is exactly what the devil wants.  After all, doesn’t Satan also claim to be the prince of this world?  And what laws does this prince impose upon his subjects? Only one law: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”  It’s a law which is very willingly obeyed by many people.  After all, what’s better than doing what you want all the time? It sure beats having to obey the laws of God, which stop you from doing what you want, right?  And yet, it is the laws of God that separate us from the dumb beasts who act by instinct to satisfy their every desire.  Satan’s law makes us descend to the level of animals, and fall away from our noble inheritance as children of God and servants of the King. Satan’s law makes everybody his own king.  They might not openly worship Satan as King.  But they do worship themselves, and ultimately that’s the same thing. 

So here we are in this world, acknowledging Christ as King today, but divided from the vast multitudes who just do what they want, “free” from interference from any higher power.  We may ask ourselves if Christ truly is King, when so many rebel against him?  Isn’t it more accurate to admit that it is Satan who is really the Lord of this World? Let’s answer that by thinking of it in worldly terms.  Do you remember the story of Robin Hood?  When good King Richard appoints someone to be the Sherriff of Nottingham, and then this man turns out to be a wicked traitor who rebels against the king, who is actually the ruler of Nottingham?  Well, in a sense, it’s the rebellious Sherriff who’s in charge; but in reality, the king is still the ruler.  And eventually, at the end of the story, good King Richard comes back from the crusades, and destroys the wicked Sherriff of Nottingham, and reclaims his rightful kingdom.  Likewise, although Satan is ruler of the earth in a sense, it is only a matter of time before the King of Kings comes and destroys him, reclaiming his rightful territory.
Christ did not become the King of Israel to exact tribute, or to create a well-armed military, or to conquer visible foes; but rather that he might rule souls, and counsel them regarding eternity; and that he might lead to the kingdom of heaven all such as believe in him, hope in him, and love him.  

As men and women of faith, who do believe that Christ is our loving King, our role is plain and simple, and that role is to serve God by loving him in return. And how do we love God?  By obeying him, by keeping his commandments. That includes the commandment to love our neighbor “as ourselves”, and this is a good opportunity to remember that yes, we must love ourselves.  Not as the devil wants us to love ourselves, by gratifying our every whim, but by acting in such a way as to provide for what we most need, namely our ultimate salvation.  We don’t truly love ourselves if we sin at will, if we reject God and put ourselves on the path to hell.  The only right way to love ourselves is by following Christ our King.  Do that and we can be sure we’re heading in the right direction.  

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have a hard time figuring out why we’re all so short-sighted.  It seems like we’re prepared to renounce eternal life for a few simple passing pleasures here and now.  It makes no sense, and yet, it’s what we all do every time we commit a sin.  Obviously, we can’t be trusted to rule ourselves. Sheep need a shepherd to stop them straying from the fold, and men need a King, to keep them from ending up in hell. 

So let’s be crystal clear today, and make this a short sermon!  We will pledge our allegiance to Christ the King today, or else we will silently resolve to continue doing what we want whenever we want to do it.  It’s time to choose now to follow either the law of Christ or the law of Satan.  Let’s make our minds up once and for all!

ETERNAL MONARCH, KING MOST HIGH

A HYMN FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING

Translator: John Mason Neale (1818-66)

1 Eternal Monarch, King most high,
Whose blood hath brought redemption nigh,
By whom the death of Death was wrought
And conquering grace’s battle fought.
2 Ascending to the throne of might,
And seated at the Father’s right,
All power in heaven is Jesu’s own,
That here his manhood had not known.
3 Yea, angels tremble when they see
How changed is our humanity;
That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained,
And God, the flesh of God, hath reigned.
4 Be thou our joy and strong defence,
Who art our future recompense:
So shall the light that springs from thee
Be ours through all eternity.
5 O risen Christ, ascended Lord,
All praise to thee let earth accord,
Who art, while endless ages run,
With Father and with Spirit One.  Amen.

FUNERAL SERMON FOR BISHOP PAUL PETKO

GIVEN AT OUR LADY OF GOOD REMEDY CHAPEL, LIZTON, INDIANA

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2018

Many years ago, I used to work on Fifth Avenue in New York.  It’s true that Manhattan is the city that never sleeps, but then, there are times that it’s more wide awake than others.  One such time is around five o’clock in the afternoon when thousands of offices turn off their computers and send their teeming flocks of employees down the elevator to pour out onto the street below.  This mass of humanity heads for the nearest subway station, and off they go, to Grand Central or Penn Station, to take their commuter trains out into the distant suburbs.

I call it a mass of humanity, and yet it resembles nothing of humanity.  As the traffic light turns red, this single-minded mob comes to a stop, only to move forward again in perfect unison when the light turns back to green.   It looks more like a coordinated stampede of well-dressed animals, all following each other with blank expressions like a mindless flock of sheep.  But let’s face it, isn’t this what we all do at some time or other? We act like sheep.  How many times have we just followed along blindly after others.  It would be okay if the ones we’re following are heading to a good place and know how to get there.  But be careful!  If the sheep we’re so blindly following get lost, then so do we. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” says the prophet Isaiah; “we have turned every one to his own way.”

In other words, there are dangers in being a sheep.  If we blindly follow someone who is equally ignorant, someone who is just another sheep, then we are in peril, perhaps of our lives, or even of our very souls.  And that, my friends, is why God gave us shepherds.

His Excellency Bishop Paul Petko was one such shepherd.  He was our spiritual leader and protector, and we were the sheep of his pasture.  Like good sheep, we followed him to this place among the thriving fields of corn in the middle of Indiana, and here he provided us with a spiritual home, a place where we could bring our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows and our sins, and lay them all on his shoulder in the confessional.  He gave us a place of peace here in this Chapel of Our Lady of Good Remedy, a quiet harbor from the roaring waters of life.  He restored our souls with the sacraments of Absolution and Communion, he confirmed us in the truth and taught us the ways of righteousness. And when the storms came and we were in danger of falling away from the faith or losing our moral compass, or perhaps just straying away from Mass, we could always count on his steady hand to hold us up and guide us back to the right path.  Here was a quiet man, quiet yet unwavering in his commitment to his flock as he led us towards God.

All those tens of thousands of sheep out there in the world, milling around without direction, without any sense of where they are going or why they’re going there, what a sad waste of humanity that they were not acquainted with our bishop here. What a terrible shame that they never had the opportunity to experience his compassionate guiding hand, bringing them the knowledge of their final end, and providing them with the means to get there. While we enjoyed all the benefits his kind heart could give us, those poor souls still do not know the reasons why they should lead a godly life by knowing, loving and serving their Creator. Sadly for them, they blindly follow the sheep around them, and they “know not whither they go.”  Take a long careful look at them, those people of the world who know not what they do, and as our blessed Lord did on the road to the end of his own life, let us ask the Father’s forgiveness for them.

And then, let us turn to ourselves.  We have followed our shepherd here, some of us for many years.  But today, we can follow him no longer.  We are sheep without a shepherd, and as we bid him farewell, we find ourselves asking him the same question that St. Peter asked our blessed Lord,: Quo vadis?  “Whither goest thou?”  And Bishop Petko’s silent reply is the same as our Lord gave to Peter: “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.”  And indeed we will.  As the good abbot Saint Sylvester said, “I am what he was, and what he is I shall be.”

Meanwhile, what must we do?  It is said that as the shepherd is struck, so the sheep are scattered.  We suddenly find ourselves without our shepherd. He has indeed been struck down in the prime of life, and taken from us.  What are we to do?  Are we indeed to scatter, to go astray, every one to his own way?  Have we learned nothing?

The Requiem Mass we attend today is the same Requiem Mass Bishop Petko said so many times for the repose of the faithful departed. The words of this Mass remind us that the departed run out not into nothingness but into God.  There is a greater reality and a greater finality than death and that is the love and the compassion of God. We may not be immortal but God is.  As the great English poet John Donne put it: “whom God loves, he loves to the end and not to their end and their death, but to His end, and His end is that He might love them more”.

If we learn nothing else from Bishop Petko, let it be the inevitability of our own death and judgment, which he continues, silently, to teach us today.  That, like sheep, we are mortal, and we shall all one day meet death.  We are dust, and unto dust we shall return.  In the midst of life we are in death.  This is his lesson today, and yes, he is still teaching us.  We have before us his life of service to God, to the true Church of Christ, and to us his flock.  It is a wonderful example for us to follow, and if we continue to follow it, we shall not go astray.  

There are plenty of questions that are still unanswered, and about which we may legitimately wonder.  Will Mass continue in this chapel?  Who will say it?  And so forth. We must remember that the times in which we live are not normal times.  The diocese will not just send another pastor along to replace the one we have lost. Priests are not a dime a dozen any more, and the ones that are out there must be carefully vetted for validity, education and moral character.  It’s up to us now, the sheep, to find our own shepherds, and nothing is certain, nothing can be taken for granted any more.  Our complacency is shattered like a broken mirror, into smithereens.

However, this is a time not for panic or even anxiety, but for the tranquil reliance on the Providence of God.  As soul by soul and silently the heavenly bounds increase, we bid farewell to our shepherd, but not to our faith.  Those truths have been passed down through the the Church that Christ founded, through the apostles and his successors, through Bishop Petko, and to us.  If we stay true to that Church and remain within her sheepfold, we will always have a shepherd, the Good Shepherd himself in fact.  For “the Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” 


Sunday, October 21, 2018

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

A SERMON FOR THE 22nd SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST


On February 15th, 1971, something rather remarkable happened over in England.  That day was known as D-Day, not the D-Day of World War 2 when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, but D for “Decimal”.  It was the day when the United Kingdom changed its currency based on pounds, shillings and pence to a new decimal currency with a hundred pence in a pound instead of the 240 as before.  This newly contrived D-Day occurred just a couple of years after the introduction of the new Mass, and added to the general feeling of uneasiness and instability that was a result of all the changes being forced upon us by the progressives of the time, both in Church and State.  The old money had been in use since Roman times, when money was made of real silver, and a pound of silver was known in Latin simply as a librum, a “pound”.  This was divided into 20 shillings, each of which was made up of 12 pennies.  The penny was called a denariumin Latin, and if you were listening carefully to the Latin reading of today’s Gospel, you will have heard that when our Lord asked the Pharisees to show him the tribute money, they brought him just such a denarium

I was sixteen years old when this annoying modernization of the traditional currency was introduced.   Before the big change, the Bank of England never seemed to get rid of old coinage, and I had spent my childhood collecting pennies that dated back to the early reign of Queen Victoria, which you’d find in your pocket change every so often.  I had coins of every king and queen of England since then, even rare ones of Edward VIII, the king who abdicated after marrying the American divorcee.  It was fascinating to me that the system we still had in England back then was exactly the same system as the one in use when the Blessed Mother took the Christ Child shopping —pounds, shillings, and pence, with the image of the ruler of the land stamped on one side.  Whether it was Caesar Augustus or Queen Elizabeth II, the custom of minting coinage with the face of the ruler of the day on one side had been practiced from time immemorial, and continues even to the present day.

Every time we look at our coins and see the face of our ruler staring back at us, it is a stark reminder of the words of our Lord, that while we are busy buying and selling and giving unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, we nevertheless have another allegiance to one who also claims his own dues.  We owe to God the things that are God’s.

Church and State.  As separate institutions, neither one represents the complete picture. We are, after all, human beings made up of body and soul, and require both institutions to govern our whole being. The laws of the state govern and protect our physical rights, not to be stolen from, not to be murdered, not to be endangered by people who drive too fast, and so on.  Meanwhile, and in complete unity with the State, the laws of the Church, our so-called canon laws, govern and protect our spiritual rights. Our right to believe and practice the faith God revealed, our right to worship God as Christ himself taught us at the Last Supper, our right to receive valid sacraments, all these are under the purview of the Church.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.  Again, in England, we had it right, at least for a time—the senior bishops of the Church had seats in the House of Lords, and participated in the running of the government, bringing their ecclesiastical expertise and oversight over the laws of the land.  This was the way it was done not only in England but in all the Catholic countries of Europe.  Church and State in harmony (at least most of the time), running the country and protecting its citizens from physical and spiritual harm.

The enemies of God made sure they brought all this to an end, in one way or another.  In England, it was the Church they attacked and overthrew at the Reformation. In France, they took thee opposite approach and overthrew the monarchy at the Revolution.  Meanwhile, in the newly formed United States of America, our founding fathers saw to it that Church and State would never work hand in glove for the good of the citizens.  Instead there was erected an artificial wall between the two, and the Separation of Church and State became an article of faith of the new nation, enshrined in its very Constitution.  This was the divorce of Church from State, and the nation we have today is the sad, unnatural child victim of this divorce.

This unnatural separation of Church and State is bound to favor the State, and we see a growing number of examples today of the Church’s rights being trampled.  The State started by claiming jurisdiction over the laws of marriage, first by recognizing divorce, then going after the very core of the sacrament, permitting marriage between people of the same gender.  The rights of Christians to display crosses or say “God bless you” when someone sneezes has somehow become offensive to a tiny minority, which now seeks to use the law separating Church and State to make Christian symbols and customs illegal.  Gradually, our rights as Christians in general, and as Catholics in particular, are being eroded.  This does not bode well, and history tells us where such assaults logically lead.  We should expect that as things spiral faster out of control, that the words of Holy Scripture will eventually be labeled as hate speech, that Bibles will be banned, that the true Mass and Divine Office will be outlawed, and that we will be physically hunted down and persecuted.

Our Lord didn’t say very much about it, but with his few words about giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, he did make it extremely clear we should pledge our allegiance to both Church and State, and that their role should be to work together in complete harmony, a harmony created by God for the good of our body and soul.  Primarily, we should determine to be good sons and daughters of the Church, good children of God.  And then, if we are American, then by all means let us be good Americans, loyal, patriotic Americans, who want our nation to be safe and secure, based on the rule of law.  

But our first loyalty must always be to God. If laws are passed by Congress that defy the laws of God, then we should be ready to defy those laws, or at least to make sacrifices to defend God’s laws which can never be superseded by the laws of man.  We must be ready to use whatever lawful means we have at our disposal to change those laws. Our most effective means, I don’t need to tell you, is with our vote, and for that reason, Catholic citizens must be aware as Election Day approaches of this most cherished of privileges.  Like all privileges, it is also a duty, and those who are eligible to vote should do so.  It is imperative for the continued existence of our civilization, perhaps even of our ability to worship God freely, that good people with good sense do not abandon our nation to the godless mob of left-wing extremists.

While we vote only once a year, we should meanwhile pray daily.  Pray for the restoration of sanity to our Church and to our nation, that wisdom and peace may prevail, and that the laws of God and man, Church and State, may once again coincide for the benefit of all.

GOD OF OUR FATHERS

A HYMN FOR THE 22nd SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST


By Daniel C. Roberts, 1892

1. God of our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band.
Of shining worlds in splendor through the skies
Our grateful songs, before thy throne arise.

2.Thy Love divine hath led us in the past.
In this free land by thee our lot is cast.
Be thou our ruler, guardian, guide, and stay.
Thy Word Our Law, thy Paths our chosen ways.

3. From wars alarms, from deadly pestilence,
Be thy strong arm our ever sure defense;
Thy true religion in our hearts increase,
Thy bounteous goodness, nourish us in peace.

4. Refresh thy people on their toilsome way;
Lead us from night, to never ending day;
Fill all our lives, with love and grace divine,
And glory, laud, and praise be ever thine.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

A MESSAGE FOR MISSION SUNDAY


The story of the Church since its inception on the first Pentecost Sunday has been a story of expansion.  Our Lord gave the Apostles a mission, to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  All the Apostles were therefore, by definition, “missionaries,’ and their successors would continue their mission to the ends of the globe.  In the early days, the great churches were founded—Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and so on.  From there, bishops were created to convert the surrounding lands throughout the known world.  We are familiar with many of these men, St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Boniface, Apostle of Germany, St. Patrick, and so on.

After the civilized world had been brought within the folds of Rome, the Church turned its attention farther afield.  Great explorers like Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus opened up whole new worlds to east and west, and the work of Catholic missionaries was renewed and expanded. Finally, the darkest corners of the world, from Africa to the Amazon, were discovered, explored, civilized and converted, and the Church thrived in its mission of bringing new souls to God.

By the 1960s there didn’t seem to be any more undiscovered civilizations to be converted.  While missionary work continued in the colonized nations, its nature became more humanitarian in its nature, and the Church was rightly renowned for its schools and hospitals, and of course for the devoted work of the priests and nuns who ran them.  Was it Mission Accomplished, perhaps?  But there was a change in the air, and things would never be quite the same again.  

The Second Vatican Council made sure that the Church’s Mission would not only remain unfinished, but would actually be destroyed almost entirely.  Two thousand years of missionary work have been undone in the past seventy years, as Catholic schools closed, hospitals were secularized, and churches turned over to the new Mass and whatever happened to be the heresy of the day.  Vocations dried up, as God was presumably unwilling to call good men and women to a life wasted with such spiritual humbug, and the missions disintegrated into “liberation theology” and war against capitalism, colonialism, and, let’s face it, Catholicism.   

Papa Francis is a typical disciple of the Church’s new vision.  His hostility towards missionary activity is openly expressed, and this “Vicar of Christ” has actually prohibited the clergy from attempting to convert souls to the Church.  He has even refused to accept converts who wished to be baptized, telling them they should remain in their false religions.  And yet the whole Catholic world, with very few exceptions, swallows his open defiance of Christ’s instructions to go, teach, and baptize all nations.

Conscious of this incredible situation, we must realize the consequences.  We must pray for the missions. The world has reverted to its primal state, and we must seek new apostles to restore it.  Where are they?  Are you perhaps chosen to be one of them?

Sunday, October 14, 2018

LETTING GO OF THE PAST

A SERMON FOR THE 21st SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST


Today, we stand on the threshold of the future.  That’s nothing new of course, and we do the same thing every day. Today’s no different from yesterday or last week, or New Year’s Eve.  The future will begin in a moment, but for now we live in the present.  And what is the present?  In one sense, it is a fleeting second, which snatches us out of the past and just as quickly launches us forward into the future, and into which we nonetheless manage to cram every single thought, word and deed of our entire lives, one after another.  In another sense, it’s a never-ending stream of movement that is motionless.  It’s like looking at a river from a distance.  We see the river, and it doesn’t change. And yet, if we look closely, we observe that it is made up of millions of tiny drops of water, each of which rushes past us on its way to the ocean.  Our lives are like that river, and the present moment is just one such drop of water.

These drops of water are precious.  They are gifts from God, sent by him for us to use wisely.  Each little drop, as it passes through our fingers, is an opportunity. We cannot hang on to these moments of opportunity any more than we can hold drops of water in our fingers.  They fall through, and are gone.  Once they have passed through our fingers, each moment joins what we call the Past.  And there’s literally nothing we can do to change the past.  It’s done, finished, gone.  We either used our moment well, or we squandered it.  Each moment, an opportunity to use for good or evil, or to squander by doing nothing at all.

No matter how many years old we are, our life so far has been years and years of acquired experience, followed by this present moment, now!  Surely, all that past experience should give us a good idea how we should treat the present?  Surely, we must have learned from our successes and mistakes which of those millions of drops of water that have passed through our fingers we should now cherish, and which we would rather forget. This is as it should be.  The good deeds of our past comfort and encourage us to enter the future. The mistakes and misdemeanors of our past fill us with regret, remorse, and repentance, and give us the resolution necessary to do better in the future.

All except one, that is.  There is one particular drop of liquid that is poisonous above all others.  We should be filled with horror when we see its dark polluting sludge in our hands, staining our fingers, and working its way into the bitter recesses of our heart. We should drop it as though it were scalding hot. And yet it sticks to our skin and we can’t shake it off…. But that’s okay, because we don’t really want to let it go.  In fact, we hang on to this toxic waste as though our very life depended on it.  We can’t seem to let it go, we won’t let it go, and if ever it does fall from our fingers we consciously reach out into the pool of hatred that it came from, and with all deliberation fill our fingers anew, time and again replenishing these lethal drops and never, ever letting go.

The name of this filthy liquid is not sludge, but “grudge.” It’s one of the curses of our fallen human nature to want to bear grudges.  We don’t forgive others easily.  It seems as though we can never let go of the resentment we feel towards someone who has done something we don’t like.  Perhaps an act of unkindness, or condescension, or betrayal.  Sometimes it’s something really serious that they did, something that mortally hurt us or those we love.  So we bare our teeth like an angry dog, and vow that we will never forgive them, we wish evil upon them, we rejoice in their misfortunes, and there is nothing, ever, that will appease our wrath.  What lovely people we are.  In passing, I would point to a man we all love, who was betrayed, flogged and spat upon, and who was in the process of dragging a heavy wooden cross up the steep hill of Calvary to be crrucified, when he cried out these incredible words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”  But “we have none of this man’s weaknesses, we are stronger than him.  We won’t forgive them their trespasses no matter if they were to grovel in the dirt and beg for absolution”.  Is this how we think?  Then I tell you now, we are on our way to the fires of hell.

“But no,” I can hear you say.  “I’m not that bad!”  So how bad are we?  If something bad happens to someone we don’t like, how does it make us feel?  We’re too polite, of course, to chuckle openly. In moments of anger we might say we would dance on someone’s grave, but of course, when the time comes, we never do. But what does go through our head? Alas, it’s usually a confused mix of feelings, brought about by a clash between our intellect and our emotions. We know with our intellect we should forgive, and so we try outwardly to appear sympathetic.  Meanwhile, a whole avalanche of emotions crash down over our outward displays of fake compassion, covering them with the heavy slush of harbored resentment.  And so what do we do?  Rather than rejoice outwardly in their suffering, we criticize them for things unconnectedto their present difficulties.  We bring up all kinds of ideas why such and such a thing has happened to them—their daily imperfections, their flaws of character, their negligence, even the wrath of God that they so “rightfully deserve”. We behave, in other words, like Job’s comforters, eagerly laying the blame for people’s problems on their own shoulders.  And then, to make things even worse, we manage to congratulate ourselves at how compassionate we’ve been.

We’re quite different, of course, when bad things happen to us.  Then we feel sorry for ourselves, and expect the sympathy of all those around us, as though we were entitled to it.  Even people  we’ve hurt in the past, now that we’ve had a heart attack, or lost our mother to cancer, or whatever, surely now they’ll come weeping and consoling...?  And if they don’t, our feelings of being offended are now twice as bad as before, and their lack of compassion, which we believe is rightfully ours, is now added to the pile of resentment that we have nurtured over the years.

This is some of the ugliest stuff that goes on in our little world.  Resentment is the only sin that never goes away, to which we remain totally and deliberately attached, which we insist on committing on a continual basis.  It’s the drop of dirty water that never leaves our fingertips.

Our Lord tells us that love covers a multitude of sins.  Today though, he warns us that resentment covers a multitude of prayers and good deeds.  Look at the Gospel:  a servant owes the king ten thousand talents.  He’s on the verge of being sold, with his wife and children, so that the king may recoup some of his money.  And yet the servant begs pardon of the King and is forgiven.  Likewise, we, who have committed many sins, and owe God so much, manage to escape hell by going to Confession and being forgiven.  

But when someone sins against us, when we take umbrage at some trivial wrong committed against us by our neighbor, do we forgive them as God forgave us?  Or do we follow the example of the wicked servant, who ignores the entreaties of the man who owes him money, and grabs him by the throat and demands to be paid.  And when we don’t receive an abject apology from our own naughty neighbor, what happens then?  That’s when it begins, and we start collecting those drops of deadly water in our fingers, the waters of resentment forming into noxious pools at our feet, pools that will eventually swallow us up.

God’s message is crystal clear.  Forgive them that trespass against us.  If we don’t forgive them, we cannot and must not expect the eternal Judge to forgive us our trespasses when we kneel before him on Judgment Day.  No matter how complacently we might be expecting that forgiveness, we will instead be shocked to hear those words, “Depart from me, ye accursed, into the everlasting fire.”  These aren’t the words we want to hear.  So to avoid them, let’s do what we have to do now!  Let’s let go of that bitterness in our hearts against our neighbor, so that we may truly be forgiven, as freely as we have forgiven others.

Don’t harbor resentment towards the evildoers in our life.  Every single moment of bitterness and rancor is another tiny drop of that river of life, flowing inexorably towards a vast ocean of eternal despair.  The past is over and done with.  Let’s stop dwelling on it, let’s shake off those bitter drops from our fingers once and for all.  Let’s make that firm resolution, here and now in the present, that our future may be free of all that resentment and animosity, thereby assuring us of our eternal future in that beautiful land in which offences have no place.

FORGIVE OUR SINS AS WE FORGIVE

A HYMN FOR THE 21st SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST


By Rosamond E. Herklots (1905-1987)

1. 'Forgive our sins as we forgive,'
You taught us, Lord, to pray,
But you alone can grant us grace
To live the words we say.

2. How can your pardon reach and bless
The unforgiving heart,
That broods on wrongs and will not let
Old bitterness depart?

3. In blazing light your cross reveals
The truth we dimly knew:
What trivial debts are owed to us,
How great our debt to you!

4. Lord, cleanse the depths within our souls,
And bid resentment cease;
Then, bound to all in bonds of love,
Our lives will spread your peace.

WITHSTAND IN THE EVIL DAY

A MESSAGE FOR THE 21st SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST


Words of encouragement, today, from St. Paul, which come at a very propitious time and are very welcome. First the stark reminder that we are at war with Satan and his powers of darkness, and that by ourselves, we are incapable of withstanding his attacks.  Then the exhortation that we are not alone in this battle, and that if we put on the whole armor of God we shall be able to “withstand in the evil day.”

Surely, we are all in a state of shock as to how fast the world is spiraling into hatred and violence.  Perhaps we should not be so surprised—after all there are many prophecies that, in the end days, right will be wrong and wrong will be right.  And yet the speed at which the unraveling of our civilization is taking place takes our breath away, and we gasp, dreading what might come next.

Let’s not waste our time dwelling on the Whys and Wherefores.  If you hear someone  breaking into your house, it’s not the time to consider which piece of furniture he’s come to steal, or check whether your insurance is up to date.  It’s time to grab your Glock and defend yourself.  So let’s take a brief look at the list of defences St. Paul prescribes for our battle against the devil.  They are truth, righteousness, peace, and above all, faith.

Truth is our answer to the lies we hear in so much abundance today.  Truth is a positive thing, lies are negative, the absence of truth. There is only one ultimate truth which is God himself, and for this reason, our devotion to the truth is a most powerful weapon against the Father of Lies.  You may have heard it said that there’s no defence against a liar, and yet it is also said that “Great is Truth, and It shall prevail!”  So let’s stick to the truth amid all the fake news and falsehoods being spread by our enemies.

Righteousness is the way we should lead our own lives.  No matter what evil is perpetrated by others, our own actions should be based on God’s nature, which is Love, and therefore on loving God and our neighbor.  This means keeping the commandments of God, and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.  It means forgiving them their trespasses, because only be doing that can we ever hope that our own trespasses against God will be forgiven.  So we must fight evil with good.

The Peace that will follow our reliance on the Truth and our observance of a Righteous lifestyle is essential to winning our inner battle.  The opposite of peace is agitation, anger, fear, panic, hatred—all things that will eventually destroy us rather than leading us to victory over our enemies.  Let us fight with the words of Nathan Hale paraphrased on our lips, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for God.”

Above all, Faith. When the angry mobs of anarchists, feminists, Satanists and Democrats come pounding on our doors, it is our Faith which is our final shield against their fiery darts.  By it, we are strengthened against our fears.  By it, we know that Love conquers all, and that no matter what happens to our mortal body, our soul shall find its salvation and be the ultimate victor.

Sunday, October 7, 2018

A TRIPLE MYSTERY

A MESSAGE FOR ROSARY SUNDAY


When God formed Adam out of the dust of the earth, he made him with a certain form and with certain characteristics.  He could have made us to look more like monkeys if he’d wanted. Or he could have made us to be sea creatures, building our cities beneath the depths of the great oceans, which, after all, cover more area than the seven continents combined.  But he didn’t.  He knew what would be best for us, and created us in his own image and likeness.

What exactly does that mean?  That we look like God?  What does God look like?  The likeness, though, as we read in the catechism, is chiefly in the soul.  We have such things as intellect and will, aspects of our nature which we have in common with God.  There’s something else too, which in my humble opinion, occupies way too much of our attention, and that is “emotions.”  “Feelings.”  We base too many decisions on our feelings, rather than what we know to be true.  Our will often follows those feelings, instead of what we know is the will of God, until we end up like so many in the world today, slaves to our every whim.  Slaves to our feelings, slaves to sin.

That being said, our emotions should occupy some place in our life. They are the fuel which drives the engine of our psyche.  But we must come to term with those emotions, so that the higher powers of our intellect and will may control them and keep them in their proper place.

Emotions are multiple and extremely complex.   Fear and desire, love and hate, nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, and so on. But if we boil them down to their basic simplicity, we find that we are driven by two overriding feelings, one pleasant and the other unpleasant.  We call them “joy” and “sorrow.”  In a sense, we’re all bi-polar, not in the medical meaning of that term, but in the sense that there are two extremes in our make-up.  We do not experience those absolute extremes very often: neither the utter elation that some wonderful event may inspire in us, nor the pit of despair that drives people mad with grief.  But potentially at least, the full range is there, and we plod our way through life, experiencing some moments of happiness here and there, and bits and pieces of misery now and again.  

Again, let’s remember, we are formed in the image and likeness of God. It’s difficult to apply our own frivolous emotions to the Almighty Creator of all.  He does not experience emotion as such, and yet the Bible is full of examples that allude to God being angry or saddened by the evil deeds of man, or rejoicing at their virtuous acts.  There’s no point trying to delve too deeply into the mind of God because we can never understand what is infinite.  Let’s rather keep just bear in mind that everything God does is founded on his intellect and will, while our own experience of life is based, for better or worse, on the joys and sorrows we feel, often in spite of our intellect and will.

Our Creator knows this and has given us an instrument by which we might, as I said, come to terms with these emotions of joy and sorrow.  He gave us the Rosary.  And what’s more, he gave the Rosary to man not directly, but through the hands of a Woman.  Not that man doesn’t have emotions, but it is the nature of the beast not to show them. Man is the hunter, the provider, the protector.  He must show strength of character.  It is in his nature not to show his feelings, he is accustomed to hiding the weakness of emotion.  Woman, on the other hand, is the nurturer, the caregiver, she who devotes herself to raising a child with tenderness and love, who wears her heart on her sleeve.  It is Woman that reminds us men of the value and importance emotion has in our character and our lives.  How fitting is it then, that God should give us the Rosary through the hands of his Mother.

This Rosary is the means, par excellence, of controlling the upheavals of our life.  We think, traditionally, that the first ten decades of the Rosary are divided unequivocally into first, joyful mysteries, and then sorrowful mysteries.  First the one, then the other.  But that’s not life, is it?  In the same day, the same few minutes even, we experience both joy and sorrow in different degrees.  And it’s the same in the Rosary.  If you think about it, joys and sorrows are all intermingled in the first ten mysteries of the Rosary.  Each of the joyful mysteries contains some form of sorrow.  And I hope you do think of it.  It’s what we’re supposed to do when we say the Rosary—think about each mystery.  This is the task of each of us, a task which will not only bring us closer to God through our prayer, but will also help us psychologically to understand our own ups and downs.  We can never experience complete joy in this life: there’s always the fear of losing whatever or whoever is the reason for our happiness.  Nor do we allow ourselves to wallow too deeply in our sorrow—we think “positive thoughts”, we create “opportunities out of crisis”, we “move on with our lives”, we do whatever we can do to avoid total despair.  

The Rosary shows us the way, separating the joyful from the sorrowful mysteries, and yet reminding us of the intimate connection between the two.  You can figure these out for yourselves.  Just one example: in the fifth joyful mystery, when our Lady and St. Joseph experience the joy of finding Jesus in the temple, that joy came only after an agonizing three days spent searching for him in vain. As for the sorrowful mysteries, they are terrible indeed, but you and I know how the story comes out in the end—with the gates of heaven joyfully opened for us, and our souls redeemed. Each drop of Christ’s Blood spilled is for us, and we rightfully rejoice, as well as mourn his sacrifice.

And then finally, of course, after this comingling of joys and sorrows that make up the first ten mysteries, and forming a cocoon of sense around all of them, the glorious mysteries show us what it was all for, the ultimate reason for the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion and so on.  And equally, the glorious mysteries show us that life’s emotion roller coaster is worth its while. After all, all these ups and downs of life will end up with a permanent up, or a permanent down.  It’s our job here to use the vicissitudes of life as our path towards, and not away from, eternal life.  The joys of our life are a pale reflection of the eternal joys of heaven which can never be lost.  The sorrows of our life are likewise a pale reflection of the anguish of hell, where we can never console ourselves with positive thoughts, or hope for the future. The glorious mysteries are our destiny, but it’s a destiny we have to work for.  We have to acknowledge our transitory joys for what they are, and we have to accept and endure our sufferings as the price we must pay to attain eternal happiness.

Three kinds of mysteries:  joyful, sorrowful and glorious.  A Trinity of mysteries, reminding us that the joys and sorrows of our nature reflect the Most Holy Trinity, the Creator who made us in his image and likeness.  And why did he make us?  Not only for the joys and sorrows we experience in this life as we know and serve God, but the glory which will follow when we are with him forever in the next.

The enemies of God, of course, hate the Rosary.  They hate the beauty of its symmetry.  It was only a question of time before these enemies who had already abolished the beauty of the Mass got their teeth into the Rosary.  They would have had a hard time trying to abolish joy or sorrow from our lives, and certainly they can’t pretend to do away with the glory of the life to come.  Instead, they destroyed the symmetry of the Rosary by adding to it. “Luminous” mysteries were tacked on by John Paul II, supposedly to illuminate our medieval human understanding of life.  But luminosity is not an emotion like joy or sorrow.  It has not part in the lesson that our Lady gave us when she handed the Rosary to St. Dominic.  The Illuminati must be proud of these luminous mysteries, and the work of John Paul II in the supposed “improvements” he made on God’s own Rosary.

You all have a Rosary.  It’s not meant to be a decoration on your mantelpiece.  It’s not meant to be hidden away in a dusty drawer.  It’s meant to be prayed.  Meditated on.  Absorbed into your own life experiences to make sense of them, reminding you of what’s really important, the events of our Redemption.  It is truly the work of God.  So wherever you keep it, go find it, and from now on, keep it in your hands.  You’ll not only please Almighty God by praying it, you’ll find your own lives a lot easier to bear.

SING WE OF THE BLESSED MOTHER

A HYMN FOR ROSARY SUNDAY


Sing we of the blessed Mother who received the angel’s word,
and obedient to the summons bore in love the infant Lord;
sing we of the joys of Mary at whose breast that child was fed
who is Son of God eternal and the everlasting Bread.
Sing we, too, of Mary’s sorrows, of the sword that pierced her through,
when beneath the cross of Jesus she his weight of suff’ring knew,
looked upon her Son and Savior reigning from the awful tree,
saw the price of our redemption paid to set the sinner free. 
Sing again the joys of Mary when she saw the risen Lord,
and in prayer with Christ’s apostles, waited on his promised word:
from on high the blazing glory of the Spirit’s presence came,
heav’nly breath of God’s own being tokened in the wind and flame.

Sing the greatest joy of Mary, when on earth her work was done,
and the Lord of all creation brought her to his heav’nly home:
Virgin Mother, Mary blessed, raised on high and crowned with grace,
may your Son, the world’s redeemer, grant us all to see his face.
By George B. Timms, 1910-97

SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE LUMINOUS MYSTERIES

A MESSAGE FOR ROSARY SUNDAY


It seemed in 1972 that the Rosary was to escape the fate of the Holy Apostolic Mass and remain in its traditional form unscathed by the modernists.  Even Paul VI, a confirmed modernist himself, referred to the wise distribution of the Rosary into three cycles, representing “the joy of the messianic times, the salvific suffering of Christ, and the glory of the risen Lord.”  He confirmed the correspondence between the 150 Hail Marys of the Rosary and the 150 psalms of the scriptural Psalter, and flatly refused to upset the symmetry and significance of the Rosary’s format.

And then came John Paul II.  To be fair to him, the changes he introduced to the Rosary were not as sweeping as those envisaged by Annibale Bugnini.  The destroyer of the Mass had planned to reduce the Our Fathers to only one at the very beginning of the Rosary, to chop the Hail Mary in two so that only the first half would be recited on each bead, and then have the second half said only after the tenth Hail Mary of each Mystery.  At least we were spared that desecration of our Lady’s gift.  However, the entire symmetry of the Rosary was essentially annihilated by John Paul’s introduction of his “luminous mysteries.” No longer could a Rosary made up of two hundred Hail Marys claim to be the Psalter of Our Lady, and even worse, the Rosary would lose its triune element of joys, sorrows, and glory, a feature which represents a perfect reflection of the Redemption Story as well as our own life experiences.

God is a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  Our very life is a trinity of joys, sorrows and eventual glory.  Where does the notion of “illumination” come into play to destroy this triple symmetry and give the Story of Redemption a separate fourth element? The Freemasons like to place an all-seeing eye into their triangular symbol of God, thereby introducing a fourth element into the Holy Trinity.  Could these deceptively innocent “luminous mysteries” be the equivalent of that all-seeing eye of the Illuminati, an attempt to enlighten the Catholic Church so long “enslaved in the darkness of superstition” (faith)?

It does not require a conspiracy theory, however, to know that the “luminous mysteries” have no place in our contemplation of the story of our Redemption.  While the Church always encouraged individuals to meditate on the many other events of our Lord’s life, and even use the Rosary to do so, the introduction of an institutionalized change to the structure of the Rosary was never envisaged.  It was our Lady’s Rosary, transmitted to us from heaven and through the ages as an instrument for our sanctification and confirmation in grace.  All its mysteries are “luminous” in that sense, and bring to us the message of light and darkness, joy and sorrow, contained in the story of our Lord’s life and death.  They enlighten us with the faith, hope and love to live in the peaceful acceptance of these joys and sorrows that God permits, all for the sake of the eternal glory that will be ours if we do so.  Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries together present to us the single source of God’s Light, who is Christ, and who illuminates our darkness and saves us from the fires of hell.  There is no place for any other kind of mystery to interject itself into this perfect plan.