BECAUSE THE DAYS ARE EVIL

 A SERMON FOR THE 20TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

“Brethren, see that ye walk, not as fools, but as wise, because the days are evil.”

These are the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, which we read in today’s Epistle.  If the days were evil back in St. Paul’s time, believe me, the devil has been taking advantage of the two thousand years since then to improve his methods and make things a heck of a lot worse.  We’re all quite grimly aware of all the evils besetting our world, our nation, our church, our families, at this time, so it would not just be depressing but actually pointless to list them here.  Instead, let’s take a look at what St. Paul advises should be our reaction as Christians to the evil days we live in.  St. Paul does not give us a long laundry list of things we should and should not do.  He sums everything up in one thing not to do, and then gives us just the one correct way in which we should act.

Let’s start with the one and only thing he advises us not to do in our depression, fear or anger or whatever else we might be feeling in these evil days; the single vice he picks on is this: “Be not drunk with wine.”  Be not drunk with wine…?  That might strike us as a tad over-simplified perhaps, but if we analyze what he means, I think we’ll understand what he’s getting at.  First of all, there’s no harm in taking a drink now and again.  It has many social benefits, and it’s often a good way to relax at the end of one of these ‘evil days’ we live in, and forget, for a little while, the many heavy burdens that beset us.  St. Paul doesn’t tell us “Don’t drink wine.”  He says “Be not drunk with wine.”  In other words, don’t drink to excess.  Don’t drink so much in order to forget all your troubles that you’re no longer capable of dealing with them—you’re no longer able to function with Christian charity, loving God and your neighbor as you should.  Living in the dull, alcohol-induced haze of drunkenness is merely to bury our head in the sand like ostriches, and effectively do nothing about the evils that surround us.  Thus, we allow that evil to continue and thrive, fulfilling the old adage that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

When our blessed Lord was crucified, they offered him wine mixed with myrrh to deaden the pain.  Wine mixed with myrrh was a widely used painkiller in those days.  He would not drink it.  The pain of the crucifixion was meant to be embraced in all its agonizing anguish by our Saviour who wanted to show us the extent of his love for us.  Today, his love is still as strong as it ever was, despite the sad punishments he permits to the world in retribution for its many sins.  Those of us who remain his loyal children must suffer along with the rest, but our response must not be one of refusal, or even reluctance to accept the cross we have been given.  We have been asked to show our love by suffering, not by deadening the pain with alcohol, or indeed with any other form of narcotic, whether it be pharmaceutical in nature, or any form of distraction.  When St. Paul said “Be not drunk with wine,” he was also saying many other things: “Be not obsessed with the results of football games,” “Be not overly consumed with political controversies beyond your control,”—in short, don’t let yourself be distracted from the evil of our days by resorting to things which merely serve to deaden the pain but make no contribution to the common good.  Sure, we might lessen our own suffering a little, but how is that helping the world at large, how is it helping our neighbors to handle their burden.  “Bear ye one another's burdens,” St. Paul said, “and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

So if St. Paul today picks on getting drunk as the thing to avoid, he obviously means this on a deeper level.  But how does he want us to act instead?  What should we do if it’s not to deaden our own pain with distracting pastimes and excessive pleasure-seeking?  The answer again might surprise you: “Be filled with the Spirit,” he says, “speaking to yourself in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”  What does he mean?  Singing?  Is the answer to all life’s problems to simply follow the advice of Rodgers and Hammerstein and just “whistle a happy tune”?  Again, let’s take a quick look at what St. Paul is really saying…

First of all, we must be filled with the Spirit.  In other words, we must be Temples of the Holy Spirit, we must remain constantly in the state of grace and avoid all sin.  And in that state of grace we must sing to God, not necessarily out loud or with an actual tune, but “in our heart to the Lord.. speaking to yourself”.  We must sing, whether aloud or silently, psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.  Where else are these psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (known as canticles) to be found but in the Divine Office of the Catholic Church.  Every week the priests and clergy pray this Divine Office from a book known as the Breviary.  This book contains the Church’s official prayer, in which we pray our psalms, our hymns and our spiritual songs.  We recite all 150 psalms every week, we pray the main canticles of the Church, the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, the Te Deum, every single day, and we offer up our hymns at every hour of the Office, from Matins during the night hours to Compline before we go to bed again.  This official worship of God is second only to the Mass itself in its worthiness and efficacy.  Thanks to the Internet, the Breviary has been made available online to all Catholics in these modern but evil times, in English as well as in Latin.  Now, any of us, if we’re able and willing, can join the clergy in their daily prayer, offering this Divine Worship to God.  Just go to breviary.net if you’re interested. 

However, God understands that those who live in the world usually don’t have time to devote much time to long daily prayers.  Instead, he has given us, through the hands of his blessed Mother, what has always been known as the “poor man’s Breviary”—the Rosary.

With its 150 Hail Marys mirroring the 150 psalms of the Breviary, the Rosary is something you can pray at any time, and even without a book.  It doesn’t change from day to day, which means it can be memorized easily, and it can be said all at once or in short sessions; for example during those “down-times” when we’re doing some of those routine things that won’t distract us from our prayer, like when we’re driving to work for instance.  The Rosary contains all the chief mysteries of our faith, arranged not only chronologically, but in such a way that we might come to a true understanding of the chronology of our own life—a series of joyful and sorrowful events, all interspersed, which come together to make sense only in the glorious things that await us after our death.  Praying the Rosary makes sense of the life we live in the midst of so many trials and tribulations.  When we meditate on what the Son of God and Son of Mary enjoyed and endured, it inspires us to enjoy and endure our own ups and downs, and grants us that peace in our hearts that can come only from the promise of eternity with God. 

Here, then, is the answer contained in St. Paul’s words.  This should be our reaction to the evil days in which we live.  The Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose feastday we celebrated this past Thursday, provides us with all the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs we need to sing to God in our hearts, and thereby stave off the evil of our times.  It is our melody par excellence, the most perfect expression of the prayer we offer from our heart.  Pray the Rosary, pray for the world, not just for ourselves and our own little troubles, but for all of “us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”  Instead of drinking ourselves silly or burying our head in other frivolous pastimes to take the pain away, instead, pray the Rosary.  It’s the instrument of salvation given to us from the hands of the blessed Mother herself, a gift meant to enlighten us and do good in this world, good that will dispel the darkness of evil.  Time and again, she has appeared to her children, each time exhorting them to pray the Rosary and pray it well.  She didn’t give us the Rosary so we could hang it from our bookshelf as a decoration—we’re meant to pray it, and to pray it hard for the world we live in.  So let’s not waste our time on frivolities any longer; it’s time to pick up our beads and commit ourselves from this time forth to pray the Rosary in the spirit of today’s Epistle, “giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and submitting ourselves one to another in the fear of God.”

SING OF MARY, MEEK AND LOWLY

 A HYMN FOR THE 20TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

By Roland F. Palmer, 1938

 

1 Sing of Mary meek and lowly,

Virgin-mother pure and mild,

Sing of God's own Son most holy,

Who became her little child.

Fairest child of fairest mother,

God the Lord who came to earth,

Word made flesh, our very brother,

Takes our nature by his birth.

 

2 Sing of Jesus, son of Mary,

In the home at Nazareth.

Toil and labor cannot weary

Love enduring unto death.

Constant was the love he gave her,

Though he went forth from her side,

Forth to preach, and heal, and suffer,

Till on Calvary he died.

 

3 Glory be to God the Father;

Glory be to God the Son;

Glory be to God the Spirit;

Glory to the Three in One.

From the heart of blessed Mary,

From all saints the song ascends,

And the Church the strain reechoes

Unto earth's remotest ends.

NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

 A REFLECTION FOR THE FEAST OF ST. FRANCIS BORGIA

An interesting phenomenon occurs about this time every year.  It is the slow and almost imperceptible approach of darkness and death into our daily lives.  We don’t need to explain the perfectly natural and astronomical reasons why this happens: suffice it to point out that the very nature God created is our annual reminder that we too shall one day die.  As the sun sets a little earlier every evening, as the dark hours of the night lengthen, we realize the same thing is happening to the days of our life.  Slowly, yet inexorably, we approach the eternal night.  As if to reinforce the feeling of dread we inevitably face during the month of October, the trees begin the yearly process of dying for the winter.  The autumn leaves start to fall, and one by one they fade and die, only to be swept away and forgotten.

On this tenth day of October, in the midst of our increasing trepidation, we celebrate the feast of St. Francis Borgia.  How appropriate it is to dwell for a moment on the intense horror he suffered as he was suddenly subjected to the sight of one particular death, and how he reacted to this experience in the manner of a true saint.

Francis was born in Spain the son of John Borgia, Duke of Gandia and Joan of Aragon, granddaughter of the King of Aragon, Ferdinand V.  His childhood was one of great innocence and godliness, and he was renowned for his Christian graces and the hardness of his living.  He eventually was appointed to the Court of the Emperor Charles V, and was made Viceroy of Catalonia.  The Empress Isabella died, and Francis, as master of her horse, was commanded to accompany her body to Granada, where it was to be buried.  When they reached Granada, the coffin of the Empress Isabella was opened, in order that Francis might swear to the magistrates of the city that it was indeed the body of the late Empress.  The body was so disfigured that no one knew it, and he could only swear to its identity because, from the care he had taken, he was sure no one could have changed it on the road. The sight of the awful change which death had made in her countenance so thrilled him with the thought of our mortality and corruption, that he bound himself by vow, as soon as he lawfully might, to give up all things, and to serve only the King of Kings from then on.  He so advanced in Christian graces, that his life reached an image of perfection usually attained only in a cloister.

The Borgia family is not well renowned for its holiness, to say the least, and yet, Francis Borgia was able to reach sanctity despite his circumstances.  By the sudden realization that “in the midst of life we are in death” he was made to understand the importance of living that life in such a way as to prepare for what lies beyond death’s portal.  He was able to see for himself how the bodies we so tragically pamper and indulge, even the bodies of kings and empresses, will eventually decompose in the grave, and that it is only in caring for our souls and preserving in them the grace of God that we will arise from death to a far more glorious destiny.  Let this be in our thoughts this October as the leaves fall around us and the darkness comes to swallow up the unprepared.

PUTTING ON THE NEW MAN

 A SERMON FOR THE 19TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Both Epistle and Gospel today touch on the same idea, that of making sure we’re dressed right.  We need to be dressed appropriately for whatever we’re doing.  Our Lord gives us the parable of the man who wasn’t dressed properly.  He’s a guest at a wedding feast, not just any old wedding feast, but a royal wedding nonetheless, to which he has been invited by the King himself.  Even an ordinary person’s wedding is a solemn occasion, an important milestone in a person’s life.  In accordance with this solemnity, the bride wears a beautiful white gown, with silk, lace, often with a veil and even a long train.  The groom and his best man are dressed in formal attire too, dress uniform if they’re in the military, or black tuxedoes and bow ties.  In more civilized times, any other kind of dress would have been unthinkable, although sadly, in these modern “enlightened” days, people have become accustomed to pushing the limits of modesty, or even experimenting with other silly ideas, with irreligious music and even fancy-dress based on their favorite movies.

A wedding, though, is a formal occasion, and the clothing of the guests is meant to reflect this.  For us to show up in jeans and a t-shirt would not only detract from the formality of the occasion, but would in fact be an insult to the newly-weds.  This goes for any wedding, let alone a royal wedding such as our blessed Lord describes in his parable today.  The King’s son is getting married.  In England, it’s a big deal when the heir to the throne gets married, and the whole nation unites to celebrate the great event, decorating their villages and organizing special tea parties and dances.  A royal wedding is a hugely solemn affair.  But in today’s Gospel, the King looks around at the guests and finds one man there who just didn’t bother to get dressed up for the occasion.  The King is so furious he can barely speak.  He just manages to sputter out the question to the guest, “What the heck do you think you’re doing, showing up dressed like that?”  Then he turns to the servants, and orders them to drag him out in chains, out into the outer darkness where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

Ouch!  That seems like a rather severe punishment for not making sure your socks match.  But of course, it goes deeper than that.  It’s a parable, so isn’t meant to be taken literally.  What’s our Lord really getting at here?  Does it perhaps mean he’ll punish us if we don’t dress appropriately for church on Sunday morning?  If the men aren’t wearing a jacket and tie, or if the ladies show up in a pant suit?  To be sure, we should dress for Sunday Mass as befits the solemnity of the occasion.  And even though we don’t have a beautiful old gothic cathedral here, with dozens of altar boys and a choir to rival that of the Mormon Tabernacle, the Mass is still the Mass, and we should be in our Sunday best for it.  Certainly, we should not insult the King of kings by coming to his wedding feast dressed in our everyday clothes.  But as I said, it goes deeper than that.

St. Paul explains it more fully.  “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” he says, “and that ye put on the new man.”  It’s not the clothes that matter so much, not what covers the body.  What is important is the soul inside that body of ours, and how we clothe that soul.  St. Paul reminds us that we need to dress our soul in the image of God, “a new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”  When we show up for Mass on Sunday, and even more importantly, when we show up for Holy Communion at the communion rail here, we must ask ourselves, is our soul dressed appropriately, in righteousness and true holiness?  If we’ve arrived at the wedding feast in the spiritual equivalent of jeans and t-shirt, we need to go to the men’s room and change into our tuxedo there.  We need to go to the confessional and put on the new man, to dress our soul in the fresh, clean, and crisply pressed suit of righteousness and true holiness.  Because if we were to go to Communion, God forbid, in the state of mortal sin, then we would call down upon us the condemnation of the King of kings, and would be worthy indeed, by our act of sacrilege, of being cast into the outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Now we know how to dress properly for Mass, how can we enforce this spiritual dress code of holiness on others?  The truth is, we can’t.  Parents can certainly enforce frequent Confession, daily prayers, Mass attendance, and catechism lessons on their children.  But when they become adults, it’s up to each individual to take care of his own soul.  In this sense, we are truly not our brother’s keeper.  We traditional Catholics sometimes find it frustrating that we can’t make other people see where they’re going wrong, and we tend to over-compensate for this frustration by being overly zealous about their outward appearance.  I’ve been in churches where the ushers stand at the door before Mass, armed with tape measures and long shawls, imposing the letter of a long-obsolete law on the innocent victims of today’s modern culture.  I’ve known elderly gentlemen to be forbidden Holy Communion because they’re not wearing a tie.  Is this truly what we’re all about?  Is the value of a man to be based on a tie? 

It’s a dangerous approach to the faith, and on so many levels.  So many have been scandalized by such behavior, so many souls, I fear, lost forever by the display of pharisaical and judgmental hypocrisy that goes on in some traditional churches.  Just as we should not judge a book by its cover, nor should we judge a man’s worthiness to enter a church by the clothes he wears.  Just as on the deeper level, we should not deny entry into our churches to sinners.  Because aren’t we all sinners, after all? 

And yet, the King in today’s Gospel most certainly did judge the wedding guest by his clothes, so what’s our Lord telling us here?  Is it the opposite of what I’m saying?  That we really should judge a man by what he’s wearing?  No, obviously not.  Don’t forget, we’ve already determined that his clothes were chosen out of deliberate disrespect for the King and his newly-wed son, or at least out of inexcusable negligence.  The sin lies not in the actual clothes so much as in the attitude we have in wearing them.  And sinners may come to church and attend Mass, but if their intention is to receive Holy Communion sacrilegiously, as, for example certain pro-abortion Catholic politicians do, then the sin is so great as to merit God’s eternal wrath.

So let’s dress for the occasion!  And let’s not judge others on how they’re dressed.  Sure, we might notice that a fellow-churchgoer he hasn’t bothered to comb his hair, or polish his shoes or wear a nicely pressed shirt.  We might even think to ourselves that he’s a slob!  And maybe he is.  But slobs can go to heaven.  Meanwhile, the impeccably clothed Pharisee, dressed to the nines, might not.  It’s not the clothes that merit eternal life, but, as we noted, the honorable and righteous state of holiness that clothes the man inside, the soul.  The external details can never give the full picture of a man’s worth.  And as we know, no one except God himself is capable of judging the internal state of another man’s soul. 

Likewise, we shouldn’t dress for church to impress our fellow parishioners.  And certainly, we shouldn’t wear our “holiness” on our sleeves either.  Holiness means loving God constantly, at all times, and with our whole heart and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we should always be showing off our love to anyone watching.  Love is something that is shown by our willingness to sacrifice, not by our eagerness to impress.

The ultimate moral of the story is that we must use our prudence, to know not just what clothes to dress in, but also how to act in all things.  Always with righteousness and holiness, but once we’ve got that figured out, the means by which we act with that righteousness and holiness.  If we’re not offending God, there’s a time and place for everything.

SING WE OF THE BLESSED MOTHER

A HYMN FOR THE MONTH OF THE HOLY ROSARY

By G.B. Timms (1910-1997)

 

1 Sing we of the blessed Mother

who received the angels word,

And obedient to his 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.

 

2 Sing we, too, of Mary’s sorrows,

of the sword that pierced her through,

When beneath the cross of Jesus

she his weight of suffering knew,

Looked upon her Son and Saviour

reigning from the awful tree,

Saw the price of man’s redemption

paid to set the sinner free.

 

3 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,

Heavenly breath of God’s own being,

Tokened in the wind and flame.

 

4 Sing the chiefest joy of Mary

when on earth her work was done,

And the Lord of all creation

brought her to his heavenly home:

Virgin Mother, Mary blessed,

Raised on high and crowned with grace,

May thy Son, the world’s redeemer,

Grant us all to see his face.

JOYS, SORROWS, AND GLORY

 A REFLECTION FOR THE MONTH OF THE HOLY ROSARY

The mysteries of the Rosary deal not only with the life of our blessed Lord and his Mother.  Our own life is one long mystery itself, and we are often left to wonder on its purpose and its ultimate end.  Such reflection, however, is productive only if we submit these contemplations to our faith in God, pausing to consider his role in our existence, and our corresponding role in his plan for the world.  By this faith we inject hope into what could otherwise be considered an empty and worthless, and yes, often miserable succession of events pulling us from cradle to grave.

When we consider on the other hand that God sent his only-begotten Son to die for us so that we might enjoy everlasting bliss with him after this vale of tears, we are thereby illuminated with the realization that our poor life must be worth something, and that the joys and sufferings in it have a purpose.

Reflecting more deeply on this simple fact, we are faced with the awesome truth that God must truly love us.  Why else would an all-knowing God, who foresaw the rebellion of Lucifer and the disobedience of Adam and Eve, have created the whole universe for us?  Why else would he knowingly have made a world in which he would be called upon to abandon his only-begotten Son to such suffering, just to save us from the eternal fires of hell?

No amount of meditation on these things will ever suffice to bring us to a true appreciation of this love that God showed in his creation and for us, his poor creatures.  The beatific vision will one day give us a more perfect understanding of what we owe our divine Creator.  Meanwhile, as we go through life—our test here on earth—we seek out our happiness and endure our sorrows, hopefully placing both in the hands of that divine Providence who knows at every passing moment what is best for us and for our salvation.

The never-ending mix of joys and sorrows in our life is perfectly reflected in the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Every time we pray our beads, we are reminded that it is only in the Glorious Mysteries that follow after our own lives that we will find true peace and solace.  This lesson is further driven home when our loved ones pass on to eternity.  We understand by our faith that they have gone to their eternal reward, and while we might fear sometimes for their ultimate fate, we at least have the opportunity of praying for their souls and for that “eternal rest” and “perpetual light” that is promised to those who love God.  That rest and light is our own consolation too as we draw ever nearer to our own death and judgment, or if not consolation, then perhaps our inspiration to do better while we still have the chance.