Solemnity of Pentecost

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Dominica Pentecostes
19 May 2024

 The Church concludes the Holy Season of Easter today with this great solemnity of Pentecost.  Pentecost is the celebration of that day when, after having prayed for Christ’s promised gift, the Holy Spirit descended upon the early Church, with His gifts and power being poured out upon the Apostles and disciples.  Pentecost being the birth of the Church, the Church being vivified by the Holy Spirit, is such a beautiful feast that it was a natural choice when I was choosing the date to observe with you my 25th anniversary of ordination to the priesthood.

The Church sort of “hangs out” at John’s Gospel chapter 20 at both the beginning and the end of the Easter Season.  The earlier part of John 20 is the Gospel for Easter Sunday.  One week later, on the Second Sunday of Easter, we hear from later verses of John 20.  And today for the Mass of Pentecost Sunday, we hear almost the same Gospel as from the Second Sunday of Easter, John 20.  So, what might John chapter 20 do for us in communicating what the power of the gifts of the Holy Spirit does for the disciple?  From the Easter Sunday Gospel (John 20), we heard, “On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark”.  Upon noticing that the stone was rolled back from the tomb, and noting that the Lord’s body was missing, she ran.  We might reasonably conclude there was at least some fear in her reaction and her pace to get away from the empty tomb in the darkness of early morning and back to the apostles with the news.  In the later section of John 20, which we hear today, it is later on the day of the Resurrection, and we hear, “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews.”  Again, John chapter 20 notes darkness, for it is evening, and it clearly mentions this time the fear that captivated the apostles and disciples.

I think the prominence of John 20 as Easter starts and again today at Pentecost, the conclusion of the Easter Season, makes us consider the prominence of darkness and fear in the lives of disciples.  Taking note of this darkness and fear on Pentecost, then, we have a cause for gratitude to God in that the gift of the Holy Spirit helps us confront how darkness and fear limit our vocation as disciples.  Perhaps we can admit that much of our lives can be marked by darkness and fear of various kinds and to various degrees.  Darkness is not only the literal dark of early morning or night, it can refer to a lack of illumination, a lack of inspiration that can overtake us in the life of faith.  Fear is not only that which might be a cause of serious risk to us, it can refer to a lack of hope, to being locked in our own “upper rooms” whereby we fail in trust of the power of the Lord, we are lacking in trust in his peace, lacking trust that he does commission us, and that he brings about life in us through the Holy Spirit, giving us the gifts we need to do what he asks.

But the Holy Spirit, promised and given to the Church, and to individual disciples is not a spirit of darkness and fear.  It is a spirit of glorification.  John chapter 7 is a passage where the Lord mentioned living water flowing from within believers.  John 7 clarifies that the Lord was speaking with that image of the Holy Spirit, and John 7 goes on to add, “There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (Jn. 7:39).  The Holy Spirit then is a spirit of glory, because It follows after the glorification of the Lord and brings the presence of the glorified Lord.  Time and time again in the life of discipleship we have to acknowledge that we are engaged in a battle as we seek to leave sin behind, to proclaim the joy of God’s Kingdom, and to advance by holiness toward that Kingdom in eternity.  Time and time again, we must learn and train ourselves to act contrary to the tendency to stay in darkness and fear.  For a disciple who seeks to live in accordance with the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit, received by us, we must reject the attitude of defeat that would keep us from fulfilling our mission as witnesses in this world.  We must reject the messages that come from darkness and fear that tell us to keep our gifts hidden under a bushel basket, locked in our upper room.  In contrast to darkness and fear, we are given light and peace by the risen Lord, gifts we are to share freely, for we are called to be the light of the world and the city set on a hill that cannot be hidden (cf. Mt. 5:14).  The spirit of the world will not welcome this from us, these gifts of light and peace and faith, as we see almost every time a prominent and serious Christian opens his mouth in public, but, like it or not, it is the gift we are charged by the Lord to give to the world.

I can think of so many times in my 25 years of priestly ministry where darkness and fear had their way.  At this point in life, I think I have enough evidence to suggest that disciples should probably expect to never be done learning the lesson of battling darkness and fear.  When I was first ordained, I had no idea how many things over these 25 years the Lord and his Holy Spirit would make possible, things I could not imagine due to darkness and fear.  When confronted with new challenges or new opportunities requiring much effort, I can think of many times when my first reaction was like the frightened apostles.  The message I might hear is that I can’t do it or I don’t have enough of what it takes to accomplish some work of the Lord.  I could never have known 25 years ago the many ways I would be pulled out of darkness or out of my own locked upper room, often kicking and screaming, to do what I did not think possible.  It’s a lesson I must still learn and put into practice.  The truth is, for us disciples, we can tend to focus on the work we think we are doing for the Lord, such that we lose sight that it is the Lord of the work who has primacy.  The error we make is to first think of our own strength, our own ideas, our own abilities.  But beyond our own strength, we have been given the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit is not in the game of limiting what God desires!

The Holy Spirit is given to us to confront the darkness and fear in our age of history.  I want to conclude by highlighting only three things the world needs from us disciples to confront the darkness and fear of our age.  We are given  after all the Spirit of glory.  First, to counter the spirit of darkness that is corrupting marriage and family life, the world needs disciples like you to show a consistent sacrificial love, the stability of commitment even and especially when things are tough, and the blessing of human life, made in God’s image and likeness, which echoes the goodness of God’s choice to take on our flesh in the Incarnation.  Second, to counter the spirit of darkness that is corrupting fatherhood and leadership, the world needs disciples in the priesthood who will teach the truth without cowardice and who will be sources of stability for the flock by standing resolute against the storms of secularity, and who will remind us of the primacy of God, by leading us in worship that places all of our focus on God and what He is owed.  Thirdly, to counter the spirit of darkness that is seen by so many divisions and polarity in society, the world needs the Church to be an authentic community fostering charity and unity in community life that mirrors the life of the Blessed Trinity. By doing these things and doing them together and according to our own proper vocations we honor the order of the world God has made and we present to the world the health of the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.  An attractive healthiness that draws others into the community.  We have been given a spirit of glory.  May we seek to promote the health and the mission of the Church by letting the Holy Spirit lead us out of darkness and fear.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

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Dominica in Pasqua VI
5 May 2024

 My Kindergarten teacher, Sister Mary Samuel, taught my class the Rosary.  When we small kids naturally started putting the rosary over our heads, Sister told us gently: “Now children, we don’t treat it like jewelry, or something just to wear.  We treat it respectfully as something we use for prayer.”  After Sister’s example and lesson, it was a man whose dedication to Mary and the Rosary most stands out to me and has impacted me greatly.  That man was my maternal grandfather, Jack Ryan.  At the end of his life, in and out of consciousness, he would become agitated when he could no longer keep a grip on his Rosary.  My family discovered that if they taped the Rosary to his hand he would remain more calm.  Not discounting the great example of so many faithful women, for me the Rosary has always been a masculine form of prayer and a manly thing to do, thanks to my grandpa.

The month of May is typically devoted to Mary, to motherhood, and to Marian devotions.  As we are in May and have the May Crowing today, I want to promote the Rosary as a prayer for each of you to foster in your personal spiritual practice, to promote it as a prayer that should have a place in your home life (and which I especially encourage you men to lead), and I want to encourage you to join in praying the Rosary before Masses and to also get involved by helping to lead it.

The Holy Rosary gradually took form in the second millennium of Christianity.  It has nourished countless saints and has been encouraged by the Church’s teaching authority.  While we consider it a Marian prayer, it is really focused on Christ and should be understood as a summary of the Gospels.  I can’t do justice to the Rosary’s development in a homily, but a few highlights stand out.  The practice of keeping count of prayers, which also has a place in Eastern religions, can be seen in the very disciplined life of desert monasticism in the 2nd-4th centuries, where little rocks or sticks would be used to keep track of one’s completed prayers throughout the day.  In the 6th century and beyond, as Western monasticism in the style of St. Benedict grew, monks would pray all 150 psalms from the Bible over the course of a week.  But some monks had to be involved in the realities of manual labor to keep a monastery running, chores, building, farming, livestock, harvest, and repairs.  Monks who couldn’t be in the church praying with the other monks would replace a psalm by praying an Our Father.  The monks doing labor, and eventually lay faithful too, wanted to participate in the prayer of monks at the church, and so this practice of replacing the psalms with other prayers came to develop more and more.  In the 12th century and beyond an incarnational spirituality was on the rise, with greater meditation on the wonder of God’s taking on human flesh.  Devotions to Jesus (God incarnate) and Mary (who gave God His flesh) were increasing, as an expression of this incarnational focus.  This is the same time that sees the development of one familiar example of incarnational spirituality: the invention of Nativity Scene by St. Francis of Assisi.  And at this same time, St. Dominic enters the history.  The traditional customary story is that Mary appeared to St. Dominic and gave him the Rosary, asking him to use it and to promote it.  We can’t certify that story, but we do know that St. Dominic preached about the use of the Rosary, and it continued to develop and to take shape as we know it today.  The Rosary is both vocal prayer (meaning, the repeated scripted prayers) and mental prayer (meaning, meditation on the mysteries).  You aren’t really praying the Rosary if you aren’t contemplating the mysteries.

St. Dominic used the Rosary as a spiritual weapon against one of the most distorting and pernicious heresies of all time, called the Albigensian heresy.  That heresy rejected the notion that God could have become human because it viewed humanity as evil, as a corrupted thing of this world, the domain of an evil god who controls the world and this life.  At that time, the world was latching onto the heretical notion that material things and flesh are only evil, that we are only spiritual beings trapped in a body, and our real salvation is escaping this body, discarding it and being free of it.  Meanwhile, the Church was holding onto the goodness of creation, made in God’s image and likeness – fallen and marked by sin, yes – but destined for resurrection in a glorified flesh and made for eternal union with God in Heaven.  No wonder an incarnational spirituality was on the rise as a response to such a heresy on the rise.

Heresies that hold distorted notions of the material world and the dignity of human flesh are the final point I want to make in my promotion of the Rosary today.  We sometimes uncritically think about history and we think that we live in such a developed time, and the ancient and medieval peoples were kind of quaint little figures with their bands of heretics running about and misleading peasant souls; so uninformed were they back then, not like us.  That is a grave mistake for us to think.  The Albigensian heresy, that the Rosary was such an effective weapon against, was itself a reworked version of an earlier heresy that took its own stab at denouncing the material world as ruled by an evil god and that claimed that matter and flesh are evil.  That same root heresy hasn’t gone away, even if individual proponents of it (like the Albigensians) have been eradicated.  Viewing human dignity, human flesh, and the material world as not worthy of God, as evil things that God would not associate with, as depraved and therefore only worth tossing away is a heresy that still exists.  This should sound suspiciously familiar to our ears.  Yes, the same heresy exists in our time, just taking on a different form, but promoting the same pernicious and distorted lie that leads people down a path of impoverished living, lack of authentic human fulfillment, and ultimately sin that runs the risk of eternal damnation.

In short, our time too suffers under movements and ideas that have a very low view of human dignity.  Moderns might not call human flesh “evil” or claim that it is the domain of an evil god.  That all sounds far too religious and antiquated.  We’ve gotten rid of all that.  Moderns are more sophisticated than all that.  The truth is, moderns just do the same things under a different guise.  In place of calling flesh “evil”, the modern version of the heresy views it as “meaningless”.  It does not see human flesh as having its innate dignity created by God and thereby being a privileged expression of spiritual reality.  But the authentic faith holds that the soul is not just something trapped in an evil body with the only solution being escape and leaving the body behind.  Rather, the human soul properly dwells united to human flesh, whereby the body expresses the spiritual reality of the soul.  For moderns who often uncritically adopt the same reworked heresy in the various ideologies of our time, human flesh does not have its own innate dignity and meaning.  It is rather, meaningless and therefore it is subject to whatever an individual possessing it may wish to do with it and to it.  Sure, we don’t have odd sounding words like Albigensians, but our version of the heresy goes by lingo that sounds so reasonable, words like “choice” (as in: My body, my choice).  Our version of the heresy goes by words like “trans” and “non-binary”, meaning that there is no stable meaning to the body.  It’s whatever the person wants it to be.  Or our version of the heresy, focuses on only one aspect of flesh, like the meaning of sexual love.  It makes that meaningless in and of itself, by promoting a self-fulfillment in whatever sexual expression the individual desires.  Alleged sexual “freedom” in promiscuity, in forms of entertainment and media, and in an ever-expanding LGBTQ trajectory is this heresy’s “gospel”.  “Love is love”, after all, right?  The lie of this heresy is that there is no defined meaning or purpose for sexual love.  It’s up to the individual and it’s all equal and of equal value for society.  In other words, this heresy would say there is nothing uniquely meaningful about God’s design of the complementarity of the sexes, about heterosexual love, nor its contribution to the stability and good of society.  That’s heresy.  It needs an authentic response from us who are believers.  In needs a response in our words, but also in our actions, the way we live in the flesh.  We need a weapon to carry with us into the battle where we in our time, like St. Dominic in his, are supposed to be witnesses to the truth, to the goodness of God, and to His love that calls us – body and soul – into resurrected life.  The Rosary is our weapon too.  And we need to use it.  Pray it daily.  Teach it to your children.  Do it as a family.  If you have 20 minutes in the car then you have time for a Rosary.  That could be daily since we all spend so much time in the car, right?  But pray it in more serene settings too.  Come early to pray it in public before Mass.  Praying it in families or in groups in the church carries an indulgence with it.  We celebrate in faith the Resurrection of Jesus in the flesh and the hope that gives us to have a restored body united to our soul in Heaven.  May the intercession of Mary and our devotion to the Rosary help us to hold the true faith: namely, that God has chosen to grant us contact with his divinity precisely through His incarnate bodily reality, thus making the physicality of our world not evil or meaningless, but a sacramental reality that helps us touch the divine even here and now in our daily living.