THE SAD STATE OF HUMAN NATURE

A SERMON FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

Last week we spoke about the temptation of Eve, and the series of mistakes she made in listening to the devil, then conversing with him, then believing him, and finally yielding to his suggestions.  She made these mistakes, and like us when we make mistakes, she also had to face the consequences of those mistakes.  She and Adam were banished from the Garden of Eden, they lost their innocence and their holiness, and were doomed to suffer and eventually die.  This is justice, and God, as we know, is infinitely just.  So it should come as no surprise that God punished Adam and Eve for their sin.  What we might perhaps not understand, is why today, we have to suffer because of the sin of our first parents; after all, we didn’t bite the apple, they did!  Why should we share in their punishment?

That, my friends, is just the way of things.  If the father of a family, let’s call him Fred, inherits lots of money and a beautiful house from a rich uncle, all is lovely for a while and the family enjoys the benefits of their inheritance.  Just as Adam and Eve enjoyed the beautiful Garden of Eve bestowed upon them by their loving Father in heaven.  But then Fred starts spending his money on sinful pastimes, he falls into temptation (like Adam and Eve did) and starts drinking to excess and gambles away all his good fortune.  This wasn’t the rich uncle’s fault for giving him this fortune in the first place, it was Fred’s fault for abusing the fortune.  Just as Adam and Eve lost their earthly paradise and many of the other gifts God had given them, the unfortunate Fred loses his home and all his money, and is reduced to poverty.  And here’s the unfortunate point, so do Fred’s children.  Yes, the sins of the father have consequences for his children, and this was no different for Adam and his descendants.

What exactly have we lost by Adam’s sin?  More perhaps than we think.  It’s interesting that God did not take away Adam’s free will, even though it was by his free will that Adam had made the choice to disobey God.  If God had removed his free will, man would have been reduced to the same level as the other animals, mere brutes, shuffling around and following our basic instincts.  Infinitely just, God may be, but he is also infinitely merciful, and spared us this indignity.  He had created man for a destiny in heaven, and he did not want to remove that possibility altogether.  Let’s not neglect to make our thanks to God for this great blessing.  Nevertheless, our free will was weakened.  Our tendencies to sin are far greater than they otherwise would have been.  Likewise our understanding—Adam’s understanding before his fall was far greater than even the most intelligent men of history.  He knew more without study than Plato or Aristotle managed to figure out even after years of constant education and thinking.  But after the fall, man’s intelligence was darkened, it became obscured.  “For now we see through a glass darkly.” Now we have to learn how to do everything all over again.  We buy a piece of furniture and we have to try to figure out those crazy diagrams how to put it together, or if we go on vacation to Turkey we have to learn at least a few words of Turkish even if it’s just so we can ask for a cup of coffee in the morning.  It doesn’t matter what we do or where we go, there’s always that learning curve we have to master before we can be comfortable.  We have Adam to thank for that, and again it’s just the sins of the father being visited on us, his children.

Our first parents were free from all suffering, and even from death.  Theologians have concluded that although they would not have lived in this world forever, they would simply have been taken up into heaven, body and soul, when God so willed.  It is believed by many that for this reason, the Blessed Virgin Mary did not die either.  She who was preserved from the stain of Adam’s sin at her conception should not be subject to the bodily corruption which resulted from that sin.  And of course, we know by our faith, that she was assumed body and soul into heaven.  The rest of us, however, are not so fortunate.  Are we tired this morning, not feeling well?  Or maybe we have a headache or our arthritis is bothering us?  Worse yet, are we worrying about what ill health may eventually befall us as we get older?  Again, this was not something we would have had to be anxious about if we hadn’t inherited the sin of Adam.

On no account must we blame God for these consequences, any more than Fred’s children should have blamed their rich uncle for leaving his riches to their father in the first place.  It was actually all Fred’s fault, just as the actual guilt of original sin rests entirely on the shoulders of Adam and Eve.  We must simply accept what is and deal with it accordingly.  We must suffer and die, we must learn how to put that cabinet together, or look up what the Turkish word for coffee is. 

Above all, we must fight temptation.  Whether Adam and Eve are in heaven today is something we’ll not find out until we get there ourselves.  But first we have to get there!  And that means, not making the same mistakes.  After the fall, Adam and Eve were like us, subject to all the dark tendencies of our fallen human nature.  And we, like them, must fight those same tendencies, even though it’s not our own fault we’re stuck with them.  Whether we’re to blame for our own temptations just isn’t the point, it’s how we deal with them that counts.  We have to remember they’re not just temptations from the devil.  More important yet, they’re tests permitted by God.  Tests we have to pass and not fail.  These tests are the very purpose of our existence and are permitted by God for that reason.  Adam and Eve had only one test, which they failed.  We on the other hand are given multiple tests, we’re tempted every day—we hear those diabolic words in our ear all the time, “Do this, or do that, and you’ll become as gods…”  Don’t listen to the devil, just remind yourself that God is giving you another test, one that you had better pass.  Say the powerful prayer, even as you mouth the words, “Get thee behind me Satan!” and thank God for the test.  For it’s only by passing our tests that we’ll merit happiness in the life everlasting.

THIS SEASON CALLS US TO RETURN

 A HYMN FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

By Harry Hagan, 1999

 

 

1.      This season calls us to return
That by repentance we may learn,
To seek but Christ and Christ alone
Who by his cross makes us his own.

 

2.       O may the joy of holy Lent
Bring us the patience to repent;
To lose our lives for Christ this day
And run by faith the Gospel way.

3.      Come make our yoke, O Christ, so sweet,
Our burden light, our joy complete,
That we may praise the Trinity
This day and all eternity.  Amen.

IN SIN HATH MY MOTHER CONCEIVED ME

 A MESSAGE FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

In the 50^th psalm, its author King David conveys to us the revealed truth from God that we are conceived in sin, that even at the moment of conception, when an infant must surely be at its most innocent state, there lurks within that child’s soul nonetheless the stain of original sin.  So we are conceived, so we are born, and upon entering into this world the first duty of the parent is to arrange for that original sin to be removed by the sacrament of Baptism, thereby giving their beloved newborn the greatest gift of all, the ability to enter heaven.

Unfortunately, another danger surrounds our children.  For when they attain the use of understanding and reason, when their free will becomes truly free, they develop the ability to abuse that free will and stain their souls all over again.  Like Adam and Eve when they bit the apple, our children discover the knowledge of good and evil, and they start to commit sin.  We were also children once, so we know it happens to us all.  It’s an awakening to a power to choose heaven or hell, and our parents hopefully prepared us for this gradual awakening by teaching us to love God and his commandments as soon as we were able to understand.

We’ve all been given this solemn duty, to love God by keeping those commandments, but it’s important to have a clear picture of what this duty entails.  Imagine you’re the manager of a small business.  You hire a part-time worker to come in and install a computer network in your office.  He shows up on time and you give him everything he needs to complete his work.  At the end of the day you return to make sure it’s all working properly and what do you find?  Instead of installing the computers and hooking them up to the wi-fi and the internet, he’s decided instead to spend the day painting the office a beautiful shade of green.  Obviously, you would not be pleased.  And despite his demands to be paid for his day’s work, you wouldn’t give him a penny because he didn’t do what you hired him to do.  “But I didn’t do any harm,” he might say.  But that’s beside the point.  He was given a specific job and he didn’t do it.

So when God places us on this earth, it is with the understanding that we’ll do the job he puts us here to do.  Those duties can be summed up in what our Lord described as the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our heart and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  All the commandments depend upon this one, and it is by obeying them that we fulfill the role for which we were created.  It doesn’t matter how “nice” we are, how “polite” or “tolerant” we are.  It doesn’t matter if we go through life merely “doing no harm” and being what we think is a “good person.” If we don’t perform the task for which we were created, we’re not going to deserve to get paid at the end of the day.  We must take care of those Catholic duties God gave us, to be a member of the Church he established, to obey the commandments, and to worship him in the manner he prescribed at the Last Supper.  If we decide to neglect any of these three things we should resign ourselves at the same time to the fact that we’ll never be paid for anything else we might do in this world, no matter how hard we work on it, how well we do it, or how nice a shade of green it turns out to be.  Know, love and serve God, that’s all, and you’ll get your paycheck.

FIVE BAD MISTAKES

 A SERMON FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

One of the unfortunate consequences of Adam and Eve’s original sin is that our fallen human nature has some very unpleasant tendencies to prefer to do what’s wrong rather than what’s right.  We do those things which we ought not to do, and we leave undone those things which we ought to do.  And then we lose our soul.  So why on earth do we do these things in the first place? 

The reason is clear.  What did the serpent tempt Eve to do?  There was only one thing that the devil wanted Eve to do.  After all, God had given them only one single law, that out of the hundreds of different fruits he had given them in their Garden of Eden, there was one, just one, that they must not eat.  If they did eat of this fruit, they would die.  God gave them this one prohibition, and he told them ahead of time what the punishment would be if they broke this one commandment.  They had been warned.

But the serpent, it says in the Book of Genesis, “was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.”  Note, he doesn’t push Eve right away to eat the fruit—he was too subtle for that.  Instead, he simply plants a thought in her head.  We see now why her first mistake was to listen to the devil in the first place: because when she thinks about what he had so subtly pointed out to her, she now, not surprisingly, asks herself “How come I can’t do this one thing?  Why not?  Eve probably let this question simmer in her mind for days, maybe even weeks, as the temptation to question God kept recurring.  Eventually, it became an obsession and she felt she had to take it a step further. 

So she now makes her second great mistake by responding to the devil.  She explains to the Father of Lies, with the best answer she could come up with, that “If we eat this fruit, God told us we shall surely die.”  And the serpent’s answer was swift and decisive as he planted his venomous fangs into Eve with his come-back to her objection.  “No you won’t,” he says, “You won’t die.  And not only will you not die, but “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  And Eve, who had made the first mistake of listening to what the devil had to say, who had made her second mistake by talking back to him, now makes her third and most grievous error.  She believes him.

You can see from this response by the serpent to Eve why he was known as the most subtle of all the beasts of the field that God had planted in the Garden of Eden.  He mixes in just enough truth in his lies that we’re tempted to believe what he says.  He tells Eve, “Ye shall surely not die.”  True or false?  Did Eve die?  Physically, she did not die.  Her body lived on long after she ate of the forbidden fruit.  But what about her soul?  That first sin, original sin, was an extremely serious sin, what we now call a “mortal” sin.  Mortal, because it kills the soul.  And Eve’s soul, once she took that first bite, was quite, quite dead! 

“Ye shall not surely not die,” was only part of the serpent’s lie.  He goes on: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened.”  Eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and yes, you will know the difference between good and evil.”  Again, true.  From that time on, man has known this difference between good and evil.  But although the devil had inserted this truth into his response, he failed to mention that this knowledge was not going to be to their benefit but to their downfall.  And instead of telling Eve that inconvenient truth, instead he tells her a blatant lie: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  And any resistance Eve was maintaining to the temptations of the devil fell apart.  The idea that she and Adam would benefit from disobeying God, the idea that she and Adam would be raised to the same level as the God who created them, was just too good to be true.  She would soon learn that it was neither good nor true.  But by then it was too late.

Her fourth mistake was the worst so far.  She committed that original sin and yielded to the serpent’s temptation.  She took her bite of the forbidden fruit, she suddenly knew right from wrong, and immediately she knew she had done wrong.  She no longer possessed that beautiful innocence and sanctifying grace that God had bestowed on her as she was created out of Adam’s rib.  From now on, she would be constantly tempted to abuse the free will God had given her, using it to offend God even more.  And she wasted no time in doing precisely that.  No longer innocent, but now crafty like the serpent who had tempted her, she gathers her little basket of the forbidden fruit and proceeds to tempt Adam to commit the same sin she had been tempted by the serpent to commit.  Her fifth mistake was to corrupt others.  But it was not her last mistake.  From that moment on, she and her descendants have been making one “mistake” after another.  We’ve never stopped, not even after the incarnation of the Son of God and his work of Redemption to save our miserable souls.  Adam and Eve were given everything, everything they needed to live a beautiful life in their earthly paradise, everything they, and we, their descendants, could have wished for was granted to them.  Just one simple little rule—don’t do this one thing.  Don’t eat this one fruit.  And that’s where the devil inserted his cloven hoof and forced the door open.  Subtly, very subtly with a great deal of very pleasant-sounding truth, but with the lie hidden in that truth, the malicious lie that completely subverted all the good he promised.

Should we expect anything else from the devil today?  Of course not—what worked for him then has been working ever since.  When we’re tempted, it’s because there’s a “perceived good” in what we’re being tempted to do.  We think there will be benefits to be had from committing our sins.  We steal so that we can have something we otherwise would have to pay for.  We miss Mass on Sunday so that we can do something else we’d rather do—sleeping, visiting our family, watching football, whatever.  We sin because we’re attracted to the perceived benefit we think we’ll get from sinning.  Whether it’s riches or pleasure there’s always something “good” that hides the enormity of the offence against God we’re being tempted to commit.

So don’t make the same mistakes that Eve made.  First of all, never, ever listen to the devil, don’t entertain those evil thoughts and desires that pop up now again—that’s just playing around with the devil by thinking about all the “nice things” to be gained by sinning.  If you take this first step of not playing with the devil, you don’t need to worry about making the second and the third mistakes and so on.  But if you do get that far, stop yourself there before you make Eve’s second mistake.  Before you start weighing up in your mind whether to commit the sin or not.  This is simply telling the devil that, yes, you’re aware of the benefits, but you’re not supposed to do this thing, whatever it is.  The devil has plenty of additional reasons to pile on as to why you should, and this is where he mixes in the lie amidst all the truths.  Even then, it’s not too late.  But it’s imperative that you don’t then make the third mistake of believing him.  If you do, it’s all over because then there would be nothing left to hold you back from the fourth mistake of yielding completely to the temptation.

Regrettably, there are many people who have even taken things so far as to make the fifth mistake.  In other words, they fall so deeply into sin that they justify it in their own heads and want nothing more than to tempt other people to commit the same sin so they’re no longer alone in their defiance of God and his law.  We see this in such institutions as the so-called Gay Pride movement and the pro-abortion lobby.  We even find it in the conciliar Church of Vatican II.  How else can we explain its leader’s frenzied attempts to abolish the Holy Mass.  He has made all the mistakes of Eve and then some.  Now he wants to spread his errors, to teach and even force people to abandon the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the other sacrosanct beliefs and practices of the Mystical Body of Christ.

To avoid following in the footsteps of our first parents, we have to stop the devil in his tracks, before the temptation becomes so big great that we’re unable to fight it off anymore.  The simplest way we can stay spiritually healthy and save your soul is by not making Eve’s first mistake.  Don’t entertain any thought which you know the devil wants you to be thinking about.  Believe me, he’s ready to jump in and take advantage of our wandering mind at a moment’s notice.  Don’t give him the chance!

THE MAKER OF THE SUN AND MOON

 A HYMN FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

By Lawrence Housman, 1906

 

 

1. The Maker of the sun and moon,

The Maker of our earth,

Lo! late in time, a fairer boon,

Himself is brought to birth!

 

2. How blest was all creation then,

When God so gave increase;

And Christ, to heal the hearts of men,

Brought righteousness and peace!

 

3. No star in all the heights of heaven

But burned to see Him go;

Yet unto earth alone was given

His human form to know.

 

4. His human form, by man denied,

Took death for human sin:

His endless love, through faith descried,

Still lives the world to win.

 

5. O perfect love, outpassing sight,

O light beyond our ken,

Come down through all the world tonight,

And heal the hearts of men!

IT'S A MYSTERY

A REFLECTION FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

How many times do we ask a Catholic teacher, even a nun or a priest, ‘how can that be?’  We don’t understand a particular article of our faith, and so we “ask the experts,” hoping, expecting even, to get an answer that makes sense of our questioning.  “How is it possible for God to be three Persons and yet only one God?”  “Why does God allow this or that evil to exist?”  “What does it mean that our souls will go to heaven or hell for all eternity.”  We don’t get it, we want to see the answers, but no matter how hard we work our brains, we still just don’t understand.  So we ask.  And then we get the worn-out old phrase that we’ve learned to shrug off, “It’s a mystery.”

 Sure!  We’ve heard that before.  It means that Father is busy and doesn’t have time to explain, or that he doesn’t know either and can’t be bothered to look it up in his books.  Either way, he’s not going to tell us, so we might as well just forget about it.  Of course, when we get older and wiser, we do understand what’s behind that seemingly brash response, “It’s a mystery.”  We come to recognize that there are things in this world that simply can not be explained.  Take UFOs for example.  There are so many accounts of people seeing them, even being abducted by them, that we wonder what they are.  But “it’s a mystery” and we can only guess what those lights in the sky really are.  “Who shot President Kennedy?”  “Do ghosts exist and if so, what are they?”  “How on earth did Joe Biden ever get into the White House?”  There are so many mysteries in life, and no one knows the answer to them.  Nevertheless, they are all mysteries which perhaps one day will be solved. Maybe some long lost footage will appear of men in black shooting Kennedy from the grassy knoll.  Or incontrovertible proof will finally come out showing the plotting and execution of the rigged election of 2020.  They won't be mysteries any more.

There are, on the other hand, those supernatural mysteries mentioned above, to which we will never know the answer, which we will forever fail to fully understand. Our limited, finite minds can never fully comprehend infinity, eternity and true perfection.  We may have words for them, but finite brains cannot grasp the infinite.

Like a wretched schoolboy who refuses to believe his teacher when she explains that the earth revolves on its axis, simply because he looks around and doesn’t experience the sensation of movement, people sometimes refuse to believe God for the same reason that some of the things he has revealed are not apparent to our senses.  We have no other confirmation than our blind faith that, for example, our souls will live forever, whatever “forever” means.  But it is this very faith that will save those souls of ours.  We are pleasing to God when we trust that he can neither deceive nor be deceived.  We become ever closer to him by assenting with our faith even to those truths that we don’t and never will understand.

LIKE UNTO GOD

 A SERMON FOR SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY

Today is Septuagesima Sunday.  Yuletide is now officially over, and our attention turns to the less joyful aspects of our Redemption as we start our preparations for Lent.  It is another new beginning, the time when we start to contemplate the price of that Redemption.  We are reminded by the violet vestments that another season of penance is upon us, and that our thoughts must return once more to focus in on the sins we’ve committed, repenting and making reparation for them.  Soon it will be Ash Wednesday, with its somber reminder of our creation out of the dust and ashes of the world.  This morning, we started reading in the Office of Matins that story of creation when God made the world for man, and then created man himself to know and love and serve him.

It is a story at once joyful and sorrowful.  The beauty of an organized universe, the wonders of nature, the  creation of man and woman in their earthly paradise of Eden—we read with awe and thanksgiving that God would deign to make all these good things out of nothing, and for no other reason than to extend his infinite love to us mere mortals.  Everything that God created was for us men and for our salvation.  So who exactly are we, that God would do so much for us?

The catechism asks us this very question, “What is man?”  And we all learned when we were children that “Man is a creature composed of a body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.”  This is what makes us different from all other creatures.  Everything else is either entirely made up of matter, or entirely spirit.  An angel, for example, is entirely spirit.  A rock, on the other hand, is entirely matter.  But man is a combination of both matter and spirit.  While both aspects of our nature are made in the likeness of God, it is our soul that most closely resembles him.  When we receive our ashes on Ash Wednesday, the priest reminds us that insofar as we are made up of matter, our bodies are nothing but dust, and “unto dust thou shalt return.”   But our soul?  That’s a whole different story, because our likeness to God is chiefly in our soul.  This soul of ours is in the image and likeness of God in four distinct ways: our soul is a spirit like God; it will never die, but continue forever like God; it has understanding; and it has free will.  Four ways in which we are truly like unto God!

The first two require little explanation: God is a spirit and our soul is a spirit.  It is not made up of matter but of spirit, and cannot be perceived by any of the five senses.  And because it is a spirit, it can never die.  Sure, there was a time in the past, before God created our soul at the moment of conception, when our soul did not exist.  But there shall be no time ever in the future when our soul shall cease to exist.  It will live forever, it will exist unto eternity, like God himself. 

The third way in which our soul is like unto God is that it has understanding.  It has the gift of reason.  This places us on a level higher than the animals.  We are able to reflect on our actions and the reason why we should do certain things and why we should not do them.  We are able to judge the consequences of our actions.  Man is not just an animal.  A human being is defined as “a rational animal.”  Other animals do not have reason, they only have instinct.  They follow certain impulses or feelings that God gave them at creation, with different laws for each class or kind of animals.  They follow that law without thinking about it, acting solely on instinct.  We sometimes think they know why they’re doing something, but they actually don’t.  It is we who understand why they do them, but they are simply following their instincts.  When the dog chews up your slipper, he might slink into the corner with his tail between his legs, as if he understands that he has been a bad boy and is sorry.  Actually though, he is instinctively aware from prior experience that he’s going to get whopped with that slipper when you see what he’s done.

If animals could reason, they ought to improve in their condition, inventing better ways of doing things, improving gradually throughout the generations to the point where they could learn, for example, how to create commerce, how to organize the food chain, build supermarkets where they could buy bigger and better bones… you get the picture.  But they don’t.  We humans did.  We constantly improved on what was before, until now, all we have to do is shout out to Alexa and she will somehow turn the heat down, lock the front door, play Beethoven’s Ninth, and predict tomorrow’s weather.  We have the use of reason and we used it to invent Alexa, and everything else that makes life easier.  Animals don’t.  We are higher than the animals, and thus closer to God.

We have reason, then, but how do we use this reason?  That’s where the fourth aspect of our soul’s likeness to God comes in.  For we have free will.  I have the freedom to do or not do a thing, just as I please.  I can even choose to commit sin and refuse to obey God.  God, you see, has voluntarily imposed upon himself this limit to his power, that he cannot force us to do anything unless we first wish to do it ourselves.  And neither can the devil, by the way.  What we do, how we act, is all up to us. This great gift of free will can be used either to benefit myself or to injure myself, but either way, God will neither make us do good things, or stop us from doing bad things.

Why did God give us free will?  Because if we had no free will, we would not deserve reward or punishment for our actions.  No one should be punished for doing what we cannot help.  God wouldn’t punish us for sin if weren’t free to either commit that sin or avoid it.  It is we ourselves who turn our freedom to our benefit if we do what God wishes when we could equally do the opposite.  Because we aren’t physically obliged to do God’s will, but do so voluntarily, God is all the more pleased with us and will reward us accordingly.  Animals don’t do that.  If you dangle a frog in front of a hungry snake, the snake will eat the frog.  But if someone puts a 16 oz. T-bone steak on your plate on a Friday, you are free to choose whether to follow the Church’s law on abstinence and thus please God, or do what you really want to do and wolf it down.  We are not animals, and so we are free to ignore our instincts and obey the laws of fasting and abstinence, and indeed all the other commandments of God and precepts of the Church.  It’s all up to us whether we do or whether we don’t.

From this first day of Shrovetide and for the next two and a half weeks until Ash Wednesday, our job is to prepare for Lent.  If we focus in on this idea that we’re made in the image and likeness of God, if we use our reason and our free will to avoid the things that are wrong, to do the things that are right, we will surely arrive on Ash Wednesday in the right frame of mind to spend the Lenten season fittingly, by repenting for our past faults, by making reparation for them through prayer and penance, and by resolving to avoid all future offences against God.   A very blessed Shrovetide to you all!

COME LABOR ON!

 A HYMN FOR SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY

By Jane L. Borthwick (1859)

 

 

Come, labor on.
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
while all around us waves the golden grain?
And to each servant does the Master say,
"Go work today."

Come, labor on.
The enemy is watching night and day,
to sow the tares, to snatch the seed away;
while we in sleep our duty have forgot,
he slumbered not.

Come, labor on.
Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear!
No arm so weak but may do service here:
by feeblest agents may our God fulfill
his righteous will.

Come, labor on.
Claim the high calling angels cannot share--
to young and old the Gospel gladness bear;
redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly.
The night draws nigh.

Come, labor on.
No time for rest, till glows the western sky,
till the long shadows o'er our pathway lie,
and a glad sound comes with the setting sun.
"Servants, well done."

Come, labor on.
The toil is pleasant, the reward is sure,
blessed are those who to the end endure;
how full their joy, how deep their rest shall be,
O Lord, with thee.

THE PROBLEM WITH PRAYER

 A MESSAGE FOR SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY

There comes a time in everyone’s life when we realize that we simply can’t cope with all our problems by ourselves.  We need to be able to rely on the help of others.  This humbling experience may not be a pleasant one, but self-reliance only goes so far, and sooner rather than later we have to face the reality that we are not an island unto ourselves, quite capable, thank you very much, of handling every crisis that crosses our path.  Eventually, because of old age, or unexpected poverty, marital problems, health issues, catastrophic events, or whatever, we find ourselves obliged to turn to others and plead for help.

At times like this, we find out who are friends really are.  Those who seemed so sociable and close to us all of a sudden stop answering their phone, the text messages become increasingly sparse, and gradually they disappear altogether.  They no longer find us to be a source of joy and fulfillment in their lives, but merely a burden and responsibility they do not wish to take on.  If we’re lucky to have a close family environment or real friends, then we are indeed blessed and will find some of the help we seek.  But sometimes, even that is not enough.

And then, of course, we turn to God.  He whom we had kept on the shelf like a dusty old book is finally taken down and noticed again.  We pray in our distress for a happy outcome, knowing that God is all-powerful and can work miracles if we pray hard enough.  We finish our prayers and then sit back and wait for what we think must be the inevitable answer to our prayers.

Sometimes, our confidence is rewarded and we’re delivered from our plight.  We’re reassured and strengthened in our faith, confirmed in our belief that God answers all prayer.  Other times, though, nothing happens…  Oh dear, has God stopped answering his text messages, is he going to cut us off like all those other false friends we thought we had?  This is where our faith is truly tested.

In point of fact, we’re looking at it the wrong way.  Just because God has chosen to answer our prayer in a way different from what we had hoped for, it doesn’t mean he isn’t answering it in his own way and for our greater good.  But now it is we, perhaps, who stop praying, who lose confidence in God—in short, we're in danger of becoming one of those false friends ourselves, turning away from the God who actually loves us and takes care of us in the way only he knows best.  We must look on it as a test, placing even more trust in divine Providence at such times when we don’t understand it.  Pass the test by praying harder, adoring the all-merciful God in your ignorance of his divine plan for us.  Increase your faith and hope in him, love him all the more in your child-like abandonment to his fatherly care.  You’ll understand later why he chose to handle things this way.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

 A SERMON FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

Among the feelings of anger, depression and frustration we’ve been experiencing these past few months, we must include also a certain sense of incredulous amazement.  As we watch the nation and the world seemingly going into self-destruct mode, we are forced to wonder how on earth the authors and perpetrators of this national suicide can possibly think that what they are doing is a good thing.  If you’re like me, you probably end up just shrugging your shoulders and dismissing them all as “bad people,” what Archbishop Vigano calls “children of darkness.”  While this may be true, to call Democrats and Progressives evil is a bit of an over-simplification.  Not because their lust for power and destruction in defiance of the spirit of the Constitution and the laws of God isn’t an evil thing in itself.  Rather because they appear so firmly oblivious to the evil of their agenda.

This is an odd thing.  Normally, when we go after something evil, it’s because there is some kind of perceived good to be achieved.  This perceived good is usually the satisfaction of some evil inclination, true, but at least there is that satisfaction, which to our corrupted human nature, provides us with some similarly corrupted sense of fulfillment.  But what good can be perceived by their hatred for a President whose policies resulted in benefits for all our fellow citizens, especially those whom they claim to hold in special esteem, the minorities, the poor and oppressed?  What good do they see in creating policies that jeopardize our safety by releasing hardened criminals from jail and letting in an unlimited number of unvetted illegal immigrants?  That create more poverty by enabling homelessness, by raising taxes and increasing regulations that put employers out of business?  That create an explosion of immorality by promoting every imaginable vice as the highest pinnacle of self-achievement?  Let’s not forget their unflinching promotion of abortion, particular in the minority communities they claim to protect.  Where do they see good in any of these things.  It’s national suicide where the only good they can claim to be going after is the destruction of their own nation and its identity.  They seem to take pleasure in slitting the wrists of the country and watching its lifeblood drain away into the dust.

There is a man in today’s Gospel who begs our blessed Lord, who is passing by, for mercy.  He is blind and desires to see.  So he cries out that Jesus, the Son of David, may have mercy on him.  For this he is rebuked, but not dissuaded from crying out all the more.  He perseveres in his cries for mercy, and our divine Lord rewards his persistence by restoring his sight.  Those enemies of God, children of darkness, or whatever you want to call them, are similarly blind.  The difference between them and the blind man of our Gospel is that they don’t seem to know it.  For if they did, then surely they too would want to see.  But as children of darkness, they know nothing but the darkness in which they live, a dark world in which they cannot see anything, because it is a world that has no light.  They see, as St. Paul describes, “through a glass, darkly.  This glass is the prism through which they see their darkened, evil view of the world.  They have only to ask God for mercy, and he would give them the grace to see otherwise.  But they do not ask.  And so God does not grant them to see.

How hardened are we to our own desires for self-indulgence that we do not ask God for the grace to change our ways?  What are the attachments in our own life that we’ve resigned ourselves to accepting?  What bad habits, vices, habitual mortal sins even, have we come to accept as inevitable?  What temptations persist in attacking us, for which we’ve stopped asking God for the graces to fight?  Before the start of this Lenten season of penance, we absolutely must examine our conscience in this matter.  For if we are to do penance, we must know what we are doing penance for.  It’s not enough to enter into Lent with some vague notion of “making reparation for sin” or “feeling sorry” for the bad stuff we’ve done.  We must approach Lent with the firm purpose of amendment.  We must seek to amend our lives and rid ourselves of any complacent attachment to the specific sins into which we keep on falling.  It’s no good to attribute them to our “personality”, to “the way we are.”  Our task this Lent is to improve that personality and become better than the way we are, to become the best we can be.  For this we need the grace of God.  So let’s not let Christ pass by this Lent without crying out to him with all the persistence of the blind man in today’s Gospel, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me!”  “Ask, and ye shall receive.  Seek, and ye shall find.  Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”  But if we’re so hardened to our sins, so familiar with them that they are no longer repulsive to us, then it’s time to wake up.  Time to turn on the light in our darkness, time to stop seeing through a glass, darkly.

Sooner or later, we will see God, not through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.  We will know him no longer in part, but even as also we are known by him.  For the enemies of God, that will be a terrible moment.  A light will switch on in their dark minds, illuminating for them the horror of all they’ve done to hurt God and destroy souls.  And in particular their own souls.  This light will provide them forever with a deep loathing of themselves, an infinite and eternal self-hatred of what they are which will burn into their souls forever.  May God protect us from such a fate.  Let’s do what we must to avoid it.

And on this Quinquagesima Sunday, when St. Paul speaks to us of “faith, hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity,” then let’s start on our quest to put away our thoughts of anger, depression and frustration at all the things that are happening to us and our country.  Let’s replace them with thoughts of compassion for our enemies.  Let’s keep in mind their ultimate and horrendous fate if they fail to seek the light of truth, if they neglect till too late to beg God for the mercy he would surely show them.  It’s a terrible, awful fate, and one that we can so easily avoid by simply realizing our own blindness.  May God have mercy upon us all.

JESU, LOVER OF MY SOUL

 A HYMN FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

By Charles Wesley, 1740

 

Jesu, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high:
Hide me, O my Savior, hide,
Till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide;
O receive my soul at last.

Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, oh, leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.

Thou, O Christ, art all I want; More than all in Thee I find; Raise the fallen, cheer the faint, Heal the sick and lead the blind. Just and holy is Thy name, I am all unrighteousness; Vile and full of sin I am, Thou art full of truth and grace. Plenteous grace with Thee is found, Grace to cover all my sin; Let the healing streams abound; Make and keep me pure within. Thou of life the fountain art, Freely let me take of Thee; Spring Thou up within my heart, Rise to all eternity.

ST. VALENTINE, PATRON SAINT OF LOVERS

 A REFLECTION FOR ST. VALENTINE'S DAY

St. Valentine was a Roman priest who was imprisoned for secretly marrying Christian couples so husbands wouldn’t have to go to war, something that was considered a serious crime. Eventually, Valentine even attempted to convince the Emperor Claudius to become a Christian. This did not go down well with the Emperor, who became enraged and sentenced Valentine to death, commanding him to renounce his faith or be beaten with clubs and beheaded.  St. Valentine refused to renounce his faith and was executed on February 14, A.D. 269. Other variations of his biography say that he refused to sacrifice to pagan gods, was imprisoned and while imprisoned he healed the jailer's blind daughter. On the day of his execution, he left the girl a note signed, "Your Valentine."

 

Today happens to be St. Valentine’s Day, and is the feastday on which we ask the help of this saint to watch over the lives of lovers everywhere.  For those who need help in finding a life partner, or want to confirm God’s blessing on their marriage; for those seeking protection and guidance for a husband or wife, the conversion perhaps of a boyfriend or girlfriend, St. Valentine is always ready to intercede with his prayers and patronage.  We should send him our prayers today for whatever our own needs may be, as well as other members of our family, friends and neighbors, anyone we know who could use his special help in matters of love.

 

This year, St. Valentine’s feastday falls in carnival time, just a couple of days before Mardi Gras.  Like so many of the Church’s liturgical celebrations, both Carnival and St. Valentine’s Day have been turned into an excuse for indulging our sinful pleasures.  To do so is a mockery of the solemn occasion each represents.  Our blessed “farewell to feasting” which precedes the gravity of the penitential season of Lent, must not be seen as the pretext for drunkenness and gluttony.  Neither should we pervert St. Valentine’s Day, with its emphasis on the sacred love between a man and a woman, into a day of lustful debauchery.  For Catholics, these are obvious statements, but in this world of sin, our temptations to self-indulgence are sometimes hard to withstand.  Pray to St. Valentine for his help, as well as to the “Mother of Fair Love” our Blessed Lady.

 

St. Valentine’s spiritual responsibilities are extensive.  As well as taking care of lovers, engaged couples and happy marriages, St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers and epileptics, and is also kept busy by those who invoke him for protection in their travels, and by those suffering from the plague (think Covid for example), and from fainting spells.  But let’s pray today especially to him to protect our families and keep them united in the faith in these difficult times.

SEED FALLING BY THE WAY SIDE

 A SERMON FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY

There’s a lot of seed being planted in today’s parable, and most of it is ending up where it doesn’t belong: on rocky ground, among the thorns, and by the way side.  This seed doesn’t produce any fruit.  The parable is interpreted for us by our Lord himself, and he tells us that the seed represents the word of God.  So it’s not a question that any of this seed is bad seed.  Like the word of God, it must all be good, very good, so the blame for why it fails to produce fruit rests not on the quality of the seed but on the ground on which it falls—and even more so, on the aim of the sower who sows the seed.  In other words, it’s up to us to make sure that this seed falls on good ground so that it isn’t wasted.

The word of God comes to us in many ways.  When we pray and meditate on the sacred mysteries, when we read holy Scripture and other spiritual books, as we get closer to God and understand better what he wants of us, we come to realize what a tremendous treasure is available to us in this word of God.  Indeed there are so many ways that we can avail ourselves of this infinite treasury that we can’t possibly ever hope to benefit from all of them.  But there are some that would be a great pity to waste, and I’d like to concentrate on just one of them today.

Like so many of these graces, this one was first thrown out on to the rocky ground by the Protestants, just one more example of how Martin Luther and the sheep he led astray reject the gifts God gave them through the Church.  Sacraments tossed by the wayside, the intercession of our Lady and the saints, the very presence of God in the Holy Eucharist, and so the list goes on.  But today I’d like to focus on just one of these beautiful gifts from God—Indulgences. 

We’ve been made to feel guilty about Indulgences.  The propaganda that is constantly being hurled against the Catholic Church, her practices and her history, has succeeded in putting Catholics on the defensive.  Some Catholics even start believing the propaganda themselves, and start feeling guilty about issues like Galileo, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and yes, Indulgences.  But before we hang our heads in shame at the abuses which drove Martin Luther and his followers to quit the Catholic Church and reject the whole notion of Indulgences, we should examine their true history and nature.  A short Sunday sermon is never going to be adequate in doing this, so I would encourage you, especially those of you who have your doubts about Indulgences, to look up Indulgences online in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Very briefly, an Indulgence is the remission of the temporal punishment due to sin, the guilt of which has already been forgiven.  We know that through the Sacrament of Penance our sins are forgiven.  We walk out of the confessional in the state of grace, with a clean soul free from the stain of sin.  It’s a good feeling, and obviously so much more.  But what about making satisfaction for those sins that were just absolved.  There still remains a debt to pay.  Our neighbor might forgive us for breaking the lawn mower he lent us, but we still owe him a new lawn mower.  We still owe God something for the manifold offences we’ve committed against him.  The penance given to us by the priest who absolves us is part of that satisfaction, and must have been fulfilled in order to gain an indulgence, and then it is these indulgences that help us complete that satisfaction in this life instead of in Purgatory.  That’s why it’s so important to go to confession frequently.  We can’t work on gaining any indulgences unless our sins have been forgiven and sacramental satisfaction has been made for them.  Confessing our sins opens up to us the Church’s treasury that flow from the infinite merits of Christ and the abundant merits of his saints.  Indulgences are a very important part of that treasury, seeds of grace that deserve to be sowed on the fertile ground of souls free from mortal sin.

The authority of the Church in this matter is clear.  She derives this authority to bestow indulgences, in other words, to commute the penalty still attached to a sin that has been forgiven, from Christ himself.  When our blessed Lord established the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, he gave to St. Peter and his successors what we call the “power of the keys.”  “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” he declared; “and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  In so declaring, Christ is bestowing power on the Church, which will be observed and ratified by God himself.  We know from Scripture that our Lord gave the apostles the power to forgive sin.  With the power of the keys, it follows that the Church has the power not only to forgive the guilt of sin but also to remit the penalties due to that sin.  I’ll leave it to you to think about that later, and to thank God for providing such a tremendous gift to us.  But now, it’s up to us to use this gift and use it wisely, making sure this good seed does not fall by the way side and get wasted.

As you know, an indulgence can be either plenary or partial.  The plenary indulgence remits all temporal punishment due to sin, so that no further expiation will be required in Purgatory.  A partial indulgence commutes only a certain portion of the penalty. For example, there’s a 500-day indulgence for kissing your scapular when you put it on or take it off.  Contrary to popular belief, this does not mean you get out of Purgatory 500 days earlier every time you kiss your scapular.  No, a certain effort is demanded of the faithful.  But indulgences make that effort a lot easier!  To say that an indulgence of so many days or years is granted means that it cancels an amount of punishment in Purgatory equivalent to that which would have been remitted, in the sight of God, by the performance of so many days or years of the ancient canonical penance. More simply put, when you kiss your scapular and fulfill the other conditions, it is as though you were doing 500 days of very strict penance.  Lent is only 40 days, so do the math.  500 days—that’s a lot of penance, and the type of penance which was done in the Middle Ages was much stricter than our little Lenten sacrifices, that’s for sure.  To perform 500 days of such penance would be extremely meritorious if done properly, but in her mercy the Church has allowed us to fulfill these obligations by a simple act like kissing our scapular.  How can we possibly waste such opportunities?

Indulgences may be applied to oneself or to the souls in Purgatory.  While we cannot apply Indulgences to the living, the poor souls in Purgatory have no way to make satisfaction for their sins except through their terrible sufferings—or with our help.  They cannot help themselves, but we have the great privilege of being able to help them.  Our prayers and penances, particularly our indulgenced prayers and penances, are the most efficient way we have, outside of having Masses said, of aiding our departed loved ones and the other forgotten souls in Purgatory.  This is charity, the love of neighbor commanded by Christ himself.  It follows that we have a duty to gain as many Indulgences as we can.  And yet, how much time do we spend on making sure that our actions are geared to have this effect?  How much effort do we put into gaining Indulgences for the Poor Souls?

So today, as we approach the penitential season of Lent (it begins one week from Wednesday), let’s prepare ourselves so that we’re able to receive as many Indulgences as we can.  There are certain conditions that must be observed.

The first of these conditions is to be in the state of grace.  So let’s start by making our Shrovetide Confession and Communion.  Only by being in the state of grace can we avail ourselves of an Indulgence.  We must, therefore, have been absolved from all mortal sin.  To receive a Plenary Indulgence, not only Confession but also Holy Communion is necessary, either in the day or two before performing the indulgenced act, or within the eight days following.  For a Partial Indulgence, we must at least have a contrite heart. 

Secondly, to receive any Indulgence we must have the intention to receive it—it’s not enough to perform the act or say the prayer, not knowing that there’s an indulgence attached, or not thinking about it.  Naturally, we must also follow any instructions specific to the action or prayer in question, for example, the times and places required for the November 2^nd Toties Quoties Indulgence.

Thirdly, and don’t be put off by this one, we must include “prayers for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff.”  While you might wonder what happens if there is no Sovereign Pontiff, or worse yet, what “Pope Francis’s” avowed “Intention of the Month might be (an end of global warming, the overthrow of capitalism, the abolition of the traditional Latin Mass, or who knows what), there’s no need to worry.  We can still pray for the four intentions of the Holy See that never change.  They are: 1) the progress of the Faith and triumph of the Church; 2) peace and union among Christian Princes and Rulers; 3) the conversion of sinners; and 4) the uprooting of heresy.  Nothing wrong with those intentions, so make sure you pray for them.  A simple Our Father and a Hail Mary will suffice.

Once we’ve prepared our souls by being in the state of grace, and our minds by familiarizing ourselves with the other conditions, our Lenten preparation should continue with a little research to find out which prayers and actions have Indulgences attached to them.  The best way is to have in your home a copy of The Raccolta, the official manual of indulgences authorized by the Holy See.  It contains all the prayers and devotions enriched by these indulgences.  The 1957 pre-Vatican II edition is still in print and available online.

We’re almost halfway through Shrovetide, so there isn’t much time left to prepare.  Pick up your Raccolta and make your resolutions.  It’s a thick book and there are plenty of ways to help our dear departed this Lent, so let’s make sure we don’t miss out on any of those seeds being sprinkled from the Church’s treasury.  Make it your hobby to gather up as many Indulgences as you can, so they don’t fall by the way side.  Be the good ground on which these seeds of grace may bear fruit, and come to the aid of our brethren, members of the Church Suffering.  Let’s try to apply for as many Indulgences as we can possibly devise, and fill this Lent with as many acts of charity as we possibly devise.