Jan 30 - 4th Sunday in Ordinal Time

+ If you recall, this is a continuation of last Sunday’s gospel passage:  Jesus has just selected a very cogent passage from Isaiah as his first scriptural proclamation, a passage about the One sent by God, to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives: now this is meant to be very glad tidings to the very spiritually poor, and liberty to the hopelessly enslaved!

 

And then he looks around and says: right here, right now, by my very reading of this passage, it is fulfilled by me in your hearing it! And then everything reverberates! First some praise! Ah! He speaks well! Some were amazed at what they heard; but then most get to the bottom line: hey, isn’t this [just] the son of Joe Jacobson, who lives not far from here?? Hey, Jesus, do here what we hear you have been doing all around the countryside – all those signs and apparent wonders! You are not going to make fools of us! Prove yourself for us now!

 

But then Jesus rather calmly makes what has become the classic statement: no prophet is accepted in his own native place, even if great signs and wonders are done or left undone! Then, the formerly adoring crowd rose up, drove him out of town and led him to the top of a cliff from which they intended to hurl him: for being an outrageously controversial figure! But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away. It was not his time to lay all his cards out on the table, so he simply walked away unnoticed! 

 

When something entirely new begins to happen, even if it has been foretold, it’s just not the same as the foretelling – and people, in their fear and their insecurity, react in defensive, irrational and illogical ways! And so it happened at Jesus’ “home parish!” No wonder the call to ministry ought to be rightly billed as a sometimes dangerous and hazardous profession!

 

Young Jeremiah of the first reading today knows about such a call and such accompanying danger. He stands as a prophet in his own right telling the people of God to repent, repent or they will be destroyed (again). They do not repent, and Jerusalem is destroyed. But Jeremiah is true to his vocation, true to his mission and he is rewarded by God who praises his stick-to-it-iv-ness!

 

Jeremiah also stands as a figure for Jesus – who would warn God’s people once again to repent – but would himself do something about their rejection, their disobedience, their sin, by dying in order to reconcile it! And he stands for us too, each in our own states of life – who are called to be instruments of grace in the lives of others, so that they hear the warning before it is too late! The warning is simply this: LOVE while you still can; love because you have been loved by God; love because God’s love has saved you; love because it is the only key to heaven! And you will be victorious, just as Jesus himself was victorious, just as Jeremiah was victorious, and just as the very last Apostle on earth will be victorious in announcing the GOOD NEWS of salvation that is simply there for the belief in it!

 

O God, you are our hope from our mother’s womb – you are our strength – you are our joy!

Jan 28 - St Thomas Aquinas

+ Today we celebrate the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, “The Angelic Doctor,” one of the most influential theologians in all of Church history. He was born, son of the Count of Aquino, near Naples, Italy. He was educated by Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. He secretly joined the mendicant Dominican friars in 1244. His family kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year to keep him out of sight, and to deprogram him, but he escaped imprisonment and rejoined his order in 1245. He then studied in Paris under St. Albert the Great, who sang the praises of his bright, young student: the lowing of this dumb ox would be heard all over the world.

 

Thomas was ordained a priest in 1250, and then returned to Paris to teach theology at the University of Paris. He wrote defenses of the mendicant orders, commentaries on Aristotle and some bible-related works, usually by dictating to secretaries. He won his doctorate and taught in several Italian cities. He was always in demand for his intellectual prowess, and spiritual insight which he combined in his most classic and famous work: The Synthesis of Theology, or as we know it: The Summa Theologica. In all of his research, writing and teaching, however, Thomas was one of the first to show how faith and reason could be complementary to one another, and how anyone at all – Christian, Jewish, or pagan – could contribute in the final analysis of a given topic so long as they were authentically searching for and in touch with truth in its objective state. 

 

On the 6^th of December 1273, Thomas experienced a divine revelation which so enraptured him that he abandoned the Summa (before finishing it), saying that it and his other writing were so much straw in the wind compared to the reality of the divine glory. He died four months later while en route to the Council of Lyons, overweight and with his health broken by overwork.

 

Because of his penchant to include all sources – sacred and profane – in the search for truth – several bishops condemned some of Thomas’s works shortly after his death, but Pope John XXII, who must have had a deep appreciation for them, canonized Thomas less than fifty years after his death in 1274. Pope Leo VIII commanded that his teaching be studied by all theology students from then on. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1567.

 

St. Thomas Aquinas understood the readings for Mass today: wisdom is an enormously valuable treasure that must be prayed for and then protected and guarded at all costs: the secrets of God lie in wisdom; the gospel passage reflects, no doubt, Thomas’s humility in knowing that even though he was regarded as a teacher extraordinaire, he paled in comparison with the glory of Christ the Teacher and Master of which his light was but a flicker!

 

May we never tire of praying for wisdom, and then working to preserve its fruit once it arrives. May study of the things of God be part of our daily routine, our daily bread.

 

Lord, teach me your statutes for I am open of mind and generous of heart, and ready to be taught.

Jan 24 - St Francis de Sales

St Francis de Sales was a very important post Reformation Bishop and Doctor of the Church. He was born in 1567 and died in 1622 of natural causes. Francis was the eldest of twelve children born to a well-placed Savoyard family. His parents intended that he become a lawyer, enter politics, and carry on the family line and power. He studied at La Roche and Annecy in France, taught by the Jesuits. He entered the College de Clermont in Paris at age 12. In his early teens, Francis began to have an overly fearful belief in pre-destination, and was so afraid that he had been already condemned to Hell that he became ill and eventually confined to bed. However, in January 1587 at the Church of St. Stephen, he overcame the crisis, decided that whatever God had in store for him was for the best, and dedicated his life to God.

 

Francis then studied law and theology at the University of Padua, Italy, and earned a doctorate in both fields. He returned home, and found a position as Senate advocate. It was at this point that he received a message telling him to “Leave all and follow Me.” He took this as a call to the priesthood, a move his family fiercely opposed. However, he pursued a devoted prayer life, and his gentle ways won over the family.

 

Francis became a priest in 1593 and was appointed provost of the diocese of Geneva, Switzerland, a stronghold of Calvinists. He fought hard to win them back to the Church, becoming a preacher and a writer. He even used sign language to communicate with the deaf – thus explaining his patronage of the deaf. His gentle ways brought many people back to the Church. In 1602 he was named Bishop of Geneva. With St. Jane de Chantal he helped to found the Order of the Visitation, as well as many other religious congregations.

He was noted for writing The Introduction to the Devout Life – which emphasized the fact that holiness is not just for the elite, but for everyone; this was not a popular sentiment at the time. But the value of his writing led to his being declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Blessed Pius IX in 1877, and patron of writers and journalists by Pope Pius XI in 1923. He is buried at the basilica of the Visitation at Annecy, France. Pope Francis today in his homily in Rome called Francis de Sales the “doctor of gentleness” as he used a gentle approach (that he had to work for many years to develop and fine tune) to deal with the problems he faced in ministry. He was always about building bridges of understanding, and tearing down the walls of bitterness and resentment.

 

As it relates in the gospel passage today, St. Francis de Sales found the joy that comes from being friends with Jesus and doing his Father’s will; this is an immense joy that leads to many self-sacrificial works for the greater honor and glory of God.

 

May we love others today simply, honestly and self-sacrificially as did St. Francis de Sales.

 

The mouth of the just murmurs wisdom.

Jan 23 - 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

+ Our first reading today encourages us to listen to the Law of the Lord not in a negative sense – not as a series of restrictions and binding regulations – but rather as a generous boundary given by the God who orders all things for our welfare, for our benefit and for our good: he knows how everything is supposed to work and interact, he is after all Creator and Designer!

 

All of the men, women and children who thus heard the Book of the Law were invited then to have a great feast of rich foods and sweet drinks – for “that day was holy to the Lord” – and it was from that time onward to be a day of rejoicing which would be the strength of the people.

 

In our own day, we come on the Lord’s Day, in a sense, to hear the words of God at Mass in the readings and the homily – which could be also described as his law, his dictates and mandates – but we must take them for what they are – inspired words of encouragement, guidance and love. Only God knows the way to where he is, and so it would behoove us to listen to and follow the words and ways of the One sent to us to show us that way: especially as he is God’s-own-words-now-in-human-flesh

 

In the gospel passage then we see Jesus announcing quite matter-of-factly that he was indeed the Anointed One of God sent to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. TODAY THIS SCRIPTURE PASSAGE IS FULFILLED IN YOUR HEARING! This was an astounding statement for Jesus to make: no one would ever have dared (in a million years) to say such a thing: but Jesus quite frankly reported: IT’S ME!

 

How fortunate they were to hear this, how fortunate for us too! For we are incorporated into his very Body the Church by the Holy Spirit who vitalizes every part of the Church so that our salvation can be made available to us as we need it! And so: “It’s him, for us too!”

 

As Jesus has been anointed to proclaim the Gospel and work great deeds, so have others been appointed and anointed in the same way: the bishops and priests carry on his work and the poor have glad tidings brought to them through parish ministries and programs, captives of all kinds of forces both internal and external are freed because of the spiritual power of bishops and priests, the spiritually and intellectually blind are able to see things as God intends by an awakening of faith, and many of the physically and psychologically oppressed are set free, again by programs set in place that have the power of the Holy Spirit flowing through them.

 

Jesus came to save the world: it is the least that any of us can do to let ourselves be saved, let us cooperate in our own redemption and help in the renewal and resurrection of all those around us!

 

Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life; let us, as your emissaries, Lord, speak those words to all we meet today!

Jan 18 - 2nd Week in OT - Tuesday

+ Today we consider the true meaning of “Sabbath.” Saturday, for the Jewish nation, is a symbol of a love Alliance between God and mankind. Creation, and all its manifest glory, is conceived as a space, an arena, for the Alliance, as a meeting place between God and man, as a place to worship.

 

And so our gospel today is about true worship.

 

True worship, the true offering to God cannot be the destruction of something (to sacrifice an animal for example), but it is rather the union of man and creation with God.

 

Belonging to God has nothing to do with destruction or “non-being”, but rather a way of being (“to be with God”).                       

 

Sabbath means to return to the origins, to clean up the pollution that our works have produced, but when man refuses the “leisure of God” – worshipping – then he becomes “a business slave”.

 

Sabbath more importantly has to do with God’s way of seeing it, rather than us. He sees it as the Table of the Last Supper ultimately – and so should we.

 

Lord, may nothing come before being fed by you, and service to you.

Jan 9 - The Baptism of the Lord

+ The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord tells us two really astounding facts: that Jesus is the Beloved Son of the Father (and that we had better listen to him); and that after we listen, we are invited to respond to what we have heard by becoming incorporated into his very life, by our own baptism into the Church that he set up for that very purpose. This makes us astoundingly enough, not only members of his very own Body, but also adopted children of the same Father, with Jesus as our elder brother, and each other as brothers and sisters. Yes, we are God’s children – for real and for sure! There is enough there to meditate on for the rest of our lives!

 

Our readings today tell us how Jesus’ baptism was not for the repentance of his sin because Jesus never had any sin; Jesus was baptized for us, demonstrating himself the way in which we are to be incorporated into himself. But God the Father used the occasion for a great show light and power when he thundered: THIS IS MY BELOVED SON! LISTEN TO HIM! This is my beloved Son, listen to him! Listen to him and respond to what you hear and you will have everything you need for life here and hereafter: you will be able to have your sins forgiven – when you ask for them to be; and you will be welcomed into eternal life in the Father’s house at the end of your days on earth!

 

All this: for listening and responding: listening to the Scriptures, listening to the homilies, listening to the teachings of the Church which are there for our guidance and our growth and then responding in love – listening to the inner stirrings of our own minds and hearts!

 

And it is not to his own people alone that Jesus offers such salvation; but to the whole world – all the nations, everywhere. This is very good news!

 

May we recall also that the baptized one, whom we recall today, is also the Suffering Servant, the kind, gentle, loving, shepherd of the sheep: who would change everything forever – but at the cost of his own life! Is it even possible for God to die?

 

Thank you God, for being an amazing elder brother – come to save us; may we be true, authentic, genuine and real adopted sons and daughters of the Father, and brothers and sisters of you to whom we look for help, mercy and forgiveness but most of all: lasting and permanent friendship and peace in your Kingdom!

 

The Lord will bless his people with peace!

 

Jan 6 - St Andre Bessette

+ Today the Church on the North American continent rejoices in the feast day celebration of Brother Andre Bessette – the Miracle Man of Montreal – as a saint! Canonized on October 17, 2010, St. Andre Bessette is an outstanding example of a poor, humble, servant of the Church as doorkeeper of Notre Dame College, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, as a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross- for forty years. Not even expected to live at birth, always sickly in life, only 4’2” tall – this giant of a compassionate soul touched millions of lives, without even himself trying.

 

To Brother Andre it was all the work of St. Joseph to whom he had a fierce devotion and loyalty. He found early on that St. Joseph was curing people of all kinds of ailments and diseases simply by his encouraging them to pray to him and rubbing oil from the St. Joseph Altar lamp in the college chapel, or a medal of St. Joseph. When the thousands of “miracles” were attributed to Brother Andre he was very quick to disclaim any credit: it is all St. Joseph: it is not me at all: I am only his little “puppy dog!”

 

It was Andre’s dream to build a worthy shrine to St. Joseph nearby – but with the interference first of his own community, and then World War I, the completion of what is now known as St. Joseph’s Oratory on Mount Royal was a long time in coming, and the result of many temporary stages of development.

 

At the age of 92, Andre died on January 6, 1937 before seeing the completion of his dream. But he knew it would be completed and he continued to give St. Joseph all the credit to his very last breath! Over a million people came to the oratory to pay their last respects. It almost seems like there is now a fourth member of the Holy Family, for it is almost impossible to even say the words St. Joseph, without now thinking immediately of St. Andre Bessette – his devoted friend in life and his dear companion in death!

 

And it seems equally impossible to say: St. Andre Bessette without also calling to mind St. Joseph! With such a duo praying on our behalf – we cannot go wrong!  St. Andre / St. Joseph – pray for us! And by the way – we may even go so far as saying that we have a trio to pray on our behalf – our own Brother Paul Andre (named after this saint), our own co-founder had fierce and undying devotion to both St. Joseph and Brother Andre Bessette, and being a nurse, I know that Brother Paul Andre is ever ready and willing to pray for us and our needs: physical, mental and spiritual!