Day One: Lent: A Gift, Not A Burden

Here we are.  A new beginning.  A fresh start.  “Return to the Lord” the prophet Joel tells us in the first reading of today’s Mass.  What a gift we have in the Lenten season!  An opportunity to make things right with our God.  An opportunity to rediscover how much he loves us and truly how much he forgives.  Last Sunday, I spoke about friendships, and I must admit that there are friendships that have fallen by the wayside or grown stale that I wish I could jump-start or refresh much like pressing the refresh button on a computer.  The beauty of Lent is that we can refresh our relationship with God.  The ashes on our forehead serve as a reminder not only of our sinfulness, but of the love that God has for us in sending his only Son to rescue us from sin.  Think back to that best friend in high school that you wish you were still in touch with and just imagine if you could start anew with that person on this day.  This is the beauty of Lent.  We get to start anew with God.  We are called to return to the Lord because he will restore the joy that has been lost in our lives.  So don’t look upon the season of Lent as a burden because of all the fasting and sacrifices.  It truly is as a gift!

A Little Help From My Friends

"They came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men."  (Mark 2:3)

I have been blessed throughout my life with incredible friends.  These are the people that love me, keep me grounded, point out my flaws, lift me up, and go through great lengths to demonstrate the depths of their love.  I could begin talking about my best friend who has walked with me for all but the first six months of my life, but I would need an entire chapter of a book to attempt to describe our friendship.  I have one group of friends that I get together with once or twice a year (not nearly enough) and whenever we gather, we lift up our wine glasses and say the following toast:  “I have learned that being with those you love is enough.”  Isn’t that the truth?  Being with friends, family, or even with God himself should be enough for us.  Friendship is a gift that comes from on high to bring us closer to the Source of all love.  I have no doubt that these friends would go through great lengths to do anything for me as I would for them.  Providence brought us together, and time and distance has not been able to keep us apart.

Among the many subplots going on in today’s gospel reading, friendship is one that is key to what transpires.  Four men go through great lengths to place a paralytic man at the feet of the Lord.  They would not be deterred by a crowded house or a blocked entrance.  Rather they enter through the roof to make sure that their friend would be healed.  This should prompt us to ask the question:  do I have friends like that?  Do I have friends that would overcome any obstacle to make sure that I am well?  Or better yet:  do I have friends that would do anything to bring my closer to Jesus and/or do I bring my friends closer to the Lord?  All very good questions and worth examining because we tend to categorize our friends.  We have our work friends, our school friends, our neighborhood friends, our social/party friends, and of course, our church friends.  Do we only speak about Christ with our “church friends?”  Why are we ashamed to bring others to the feet of the Lord?  So many around us are paralyzed by sin, and the Lord is counting on us to bring them to him.  Friendship in Christ is what makes those relationships last because they are firmly rooted in Love Himself.  Friends do come and go, but I have found that those that have been with me the longest are the ones that I met in church where Christ brought us together and continues to strengthen out love.

We begin the season of Lent on Wednesday, and we will no doubt begin our Lenten practices.  Allow me to add one more:  do I bring my friends closer to Christ?  This is key because as members of his Body we called to strengthen our Church by bringing others to him as the four men did in the gospel.  As the first reading said, God wants to make something new, and he wants to start with each of us as we enter this blessed season that calls us to conversion.  Shouldn’t we invite others to come before the Lord to be freed from whatever sin paralyzes them?  So this Lent, bring a friend to Church, invite them to pray with you, and let us strengthen the bonds of friendship that unite us with those we love.  This Lent, may we be the good friends that bring paralyzed souls to the feet of the Master.

Holding Her Hand

“Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him,  "I do will it. Be made clean."  (Mark 1:41)

How do we treat those who are ill?  In the first reading, we learn that under the Mosaic law, lepers would have to present themselves to the priests, and if they were declared lepers they would be condemned to a sub-human existence on the periphery of society.  They couldn’t be near people and would have to yell, “Unclean, unclean” if someone came near them.  This is how it was during Jesus’ time which is what makes this healing so remarkable.  Jesus touches this leper in order to cure him when his word would simply suffice as we say before receiving communion.  Jesus treated the sick with love and compassion.

There are so many who are sick among us including ourselves.  We may not have a physical illness, but we suffer from the ills of this world that cause emotional, mental, and spiritual pain.  Yesterday, we had a healing Mass here at the parish for the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.  Many came looking for healing just as the leper does in today’s gospel.  Many came just seeking to have the Lord touch them in a special way.

A little over a week ago, I visited a woman named Martha who was very, very ill with cancer.  She was at home, in her bed, and being taken care of by her husband who is a physician.  I spent some time at her bedside and gave her the anointing of the sick.  At the time, I didn’t know how grave her condition was.  On Friday night, after a long day, one of her friends asked if I could visit her again because she felt that death was near.  I went again and found the house filled with people including the Martha’s mother who had travelled to be with her daughter.  They led me to the bedroom, and I found a much different scene from a week earlier.  She was now in hospice bed, she was sleeping but laboring for every breath, and her husband sat at her side clutching her hand.  I took a seat on the other side of the bed and sat her mother next to me.  The entire family came into the room as I prayed the prayers of commendation of the dying.  Every now and then, I would look up from my book and see her husband caressing her arm and looking at her with probably the same eyes that he looked upon her when she approached him at the altar on their wedding day.  He was a physician.  He knew very well that death was near, and he was cherishing every second that he had left with his wife holding her hand and brushing back her hair with tender care.  When I was done with the prayers and gave her the final blessing, we all sat there in silence.  I looked around and saw her children and the rest of her family staring at her.  Martha’s mother, with great faith, kept repeating in Spanish, “my little daughter, my little daughter, I give her back to you Lord.”  There was so much peace and so much love in that room.  Her husband kept whispering in her ear that the priest had come to visit in some hope that she would open her eyes, but she was starting to slip away.  One by one, everyone started leaving the room, and when I got up to leave, her husband got up to thank me and shake my hand, and as he did so, he never let go of his wife’s hand.

I left a little before 10pm and the next morning before I walked out the door for morning Mass, I saw an envelope on the floor that someone had dropped through the mail slot.  The envelope had my name on it, and I opened it to find a thank you note that read. “Father, eternally grateful for your visit last night.  My friend Marta died shortly before Midnight.”  My heart sank with sadness, but as I walked over to church, all I kept thinking about was how this husband never let go of his wife’s hand during her last breaths.  This is love!  So it is with our Lord and each and every one of us.  When we are sick, when we are broken, when we are ravaged by sin, depression, or despair, and when we are lonely, we look to the Lord for comfort and healing because just like this loving husband, Jesus never lets go of our hand.

Women of God

“Jesus approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.”  (Mark 1:31)

This past week, the Church lost two great women who dedicated their lives to serving the Church.  On a personal level, I lost two remarkable women who I looked up to as examples of unflappable faith.  One of these ladies I have known since I entered seminary, for she has prayed for me and for all seminarians and priests every day for the last 36 years.  The other was the heart of my last parish who lived for serving her parish and for taking care of her priests.  Both ladies loved the priesthood and devoted their lives to praying for us and our ministry.  Now they enjoy the just rewards of true servants of God.

I met Delia Berta González in 1993 when I was in my first year of seminary.  She was a small woman with a loud, loud voice—not unlike my own grandmother. In 1976, Bishop Roman and Bishop Estevez, when they were still parish priests, were doing a radio show with her to promote vocations and asked her on the air if she would start up a prayer league of people to pray every day for more vocations and for our seminarians and priests.  She didn’t hesitate and immediately gave her phone number on the air.  From that moment, ladies were calling her up because they wanted to be part of this prayer league.  Thus, the Liga Orante was born, and Delia Berta set up a very simple ministry.  She would assign one person to call ten people to pray for vocations during the week.  It grew exponentially to the point where we once had thousands of people praying for vocations every single day.  The highlight of the Liga Orante’s year was their annual Mass with the Archbishop and the seminarians at St. John Vianney Seminary every January.  Two hours before Mass started, little old ladies would be carefully parking their cars and filling up the seminary chapel.  Delia Berta would always be seated proudly in the first pew.  This was her day with her boys. She hugged and kissed each seminarian as if each was her grandson.  At the end of the Mass, she would present the Archbishop with a check that was scraped together with the coins and dollar bills of her ladies.  The check was usually anywhere between $12,000 and $19,000 for the seminary.  She would then grab the microphone from the Archbishop and would proceed to tell her army of ladies to give more to the seminary and to keep praying.  We would laugh because not even the Archbishop could take that microphone away from her once she got started.  Years later when I became Vocations Director, I also became the chaplain to the Liga Orante.  Delia Berta was thrilled, but her health was beginning to decline.  She would call me up this time of year to remind me of their annual Lenten Retreat, but she was having trouble remembering how many times she called me.  I didn’t mind.  During my last year as Vocations Director, she recognized very few people, but she still kept her seat in the first pew at their annual Mass.  She may not have remembered everything, but when she say her seminarians, her priests, and her bishops walk in, the great smile of pride would return and she was full of life again.  I preached at her husband’s funeral and helped her bury a daughter in a span of a few months.  Her mind may have been failing her but the work of the Liga Orante had to continue.  Her closest friends carried her torch these past few years even as many of these ladies from Delia Berta’s army of prayer began to go home to the Father.  On Saturday, Jesus approached Delia Berta, grasped her hand, and helped her up.

Right before Christmas 2008, as I was saying goodbye to Delia Berta and my work with Vocations, I called my soon to be new parish, Mary Help of Christians, and a booming voice answered, “Good morning, this is Marge!”  I asked to speak to the pastor, but that voice stayed with me.  I would meet Marge Hickey three weeks later.  She was our sacristan, our receptionist, our go-to volunteer, the only one our pastor would allow to cook for the priests and spoil us.  She did all of this as she was about to turn 80 years old.  Every morning, she would open the church at 6:30 a.m. and prepared the altar for Mass before the priest arrived. Everything had to be just right for God and his priests.  I would walk in around 6:50 a.m. and find her sitting at the edge of the fourth row praying from her book of novenas and I’d whisper good morning to her.  Marge didn’t know how to whisper.  She would always break the silence of the morning with a hearty “Good morning, Father!”  Many a day I would sit with Marge at the reception desk, and she would tell me stories about her family growing up in Long Island during the Depression.  Marge was always independent.  Her father died at a young age, and she took care of her mother and sister when they were dying.  During Lent, she fondly recalled the times her mother went to Long Island Sound on Fridays to fish for small halibut that she would prepare for dinner.  Marge always said that she never tasted a better piece of fish.  Marge was also an excellent cook in her own right.  She would spoil the priests with incredible rib dinners and big fried gulf shrimp.  She never made a bad meal, but she was never satisfied with what she made. Nothing was too good for her priests.  Every Sunday morning she had to bring us our bagels: a honey bagel for Father Jerry, an oatmeal raisin bagel for me, and a plain bagel for Father Tom.  And many a parishioner almost had their hands cut off if they even attempted to go near our food.  Her health started failing during my last months at Mary Help, yet she continued to show up at the office even if she couldn’t show up to daily Mass anymore.  She continued to cook for us and answer the phones and supervise the decorating of the church during Christmas and Easter.  Even as her incredibly generous heart began to fail, she continued to worry about letting our pastor down.  On Wednesday, Jesus approached Marge, grasped her hand, and helped her up.

If you read the Greek translation of St. Mark’s gospel, the word “help” in Greek literally means “raise up.”  St. Mark uses this word in today’s Gospel to “raise up” Simon’s mother in law and again when Jesus “raised up” the little girl who had died and finally to describe Jesus’ own resurrection.  What did Simon’s mother in law do to thank Jesus after being “raised up”?  She began to serve them.  How else could she thank the Lord.?  These two extraordinary women were pillars of the Church.  Even through great pain and physical hardship, they would constantly rise up to serve the Lord each day.  Like St. Paul in today’s second reading, they both believed that the preaching and the spreading of the Gospel was an obligation that had been imposed on them, and woe to them if they didn’t accomplish their mission.  But they did accomplish it, and they leave behind a legacy of service and fidelity to the Church that should serve as an example for all of us as Jesus calls us to rise up as a Church during these trying times.  God called two good and holy women home to himself this week.  It is up to us to continue their work.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant…come, share your master’s joy.” (Matthew 25:23)

How To Offend a Catholic

Offending Catholics is very easy.  All you have to do is preach the truth on a topic that the secular world considers “hot button issues” and half of them are probably offended.  Catholics like to be left alone, and they like to take the easy path when it comes to "practicing their faith":  come to Mass, put their dollar bill in the collection, listen to a homily that makes them feel good, and then go home because they have fulfilled their Sunday obligation.  But don’t you dare challenge them or ask them to go above and beyond that hour on Sunday!  This is the story of a homily that I delivered three times today about a fundamental truth that managed to offend some of my people (some even walked out of church), and in full disclosure, as a priest/homilist I wanted to offend them.  Here goes:

“The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority…” (Mark 1:22)

When I was in the seminary, I had professors who would command a room when they taught.  As someone aspiring to be a priest and a teacher of the faith, I would be in awe at how they taught with such passion and authority.  This is no doubt a gift.  We all had teachers and professors who overwhelmed us with their knowledge and, of course, we had some teachers that underwhelmed us with the way they imparted knowledge.  To their students they sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons.  The latter is where we find the Jewish people in today’s gospel.  For too long they had been underwhelmed by the scribes who were very knowledgeable but did not get their message across because they did not teach “with authority.”  Enter Jesus who probably commanded that room simply by his presence.  He teaches them with divine authority and expels unclean spirits with the same authority.

Believe it or not, Jesus passes on this same authority to each and every one of us through the Holy Spirit.  We have been baptized and confirmed in this Spirit to teach and spread our faith, this Good News, with the same authority that Jesus had.  We must be bold like our Lord and proclaim our beliefs with conviction. But unfortunately we have been so timid in using this authority that the Lord has passed on to us, that our Catholic faith is being threatened and we aren’t standing up as a people to protest.

On Friday, the Archbishop sent each of his priests a letter that he wanted to be read this Sunday from all pulpits.  I want to share this letter with you now.

(At this point in the homily, I read the Archbishop’s letter on the HHS mandate that all health insurers, including Catholic ones, had one year to comply with a mandate and start offering contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs as part of our health plans even if it violated our beliefs.  If you have not read the letter, you can read it here: http://www.miamiarch.org/ip.asp?op=Article_1212794952367.  As I read the letter I could tell the people, for the most part, were bored out of their minds.  So when I finished, I continued with one simple question:)

How many of you were aware of the mandate that the Archbishop mentions in the letter? (At all three Masses, only about a dozen or so people raised their hands and I preached to well over 1500 people today.)  You see that’s the problem!  As Catholics, we don’t take the time to notice that our faith quite literally is under attack.  Even the Pope who lives thousands of miles away has noticed this from afar.  On January 19^th, when speaking to bishops from our country he said:  “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness...”  The Pope is in Rome and he sees what is happening to our country:  our religious liberties are being trampled upon, as Catholics we are being pushed around:  and we’re letting people do this to us.  Catholics make up a quarter of this nation’s population.  Don’t you think that if we rose up as one Church, with one voice, we can defeat this mandate?  Of course we can.  But no.  This is not what Catholics do.  Most Catholics live the shadows and don’t raise their voices when they confront someone who may disagree with our beliefs because quite simply, we don’t want to offend someone.  Well my friends, I’m here to tell you today, that that kind of Catholicism just won’t cut it anymore, so I have two words for you:  OFFEND SOMEBODY!  If we cannot uphold the faith of our Church and the truth passed on to us by our Lord then we don’t deserve to be called Christians.  Everywhere I look in the media, I hear about Evangelicals doing this and the Evangelical vote swaying elections and the Evangelical movement making noise.  Why aren’t Catholics making noise?  Why aren’t we allowing our voices to be heard?  Why are we so ashamed of this beautiful, rich, and living faith that we claim to profess every Sunday at Mass? 

Let’s put it in very simple terms:  our Catholic faith and what we do for others as a Catholic people is under attack.  If this mandate were to be enacted, we would not be able to provide insurance to our teachers in our Catholic schools, our doctors and nurses in our Catholic hospitals would go uninsured as well along with all the employees of Catholic Charities.  Catholic hospitals comprise of 1/5 of all the hospital in the U.S., and the biggest charitable organization in this country is Catholic Charities.  The only, tiny exception that the government gave us to prevent us from having to comply with this mandate is if we only hired Catholic workers and only ministered to Catholic people.  My friends, not even Jesus Christ would be able to comply with this because he ministered to all.  When someone hungry shows up to a Catholic Charities soup kitchen, we don’t ask for a Catholic ID.  We give them food.  No questions asked.

So as you can see, how we serve the people around us, not just Catholics, is being threatened.   We must use the authority that Jesus gave us through baptism and confirmation to let our voices be heard.  Let me put it another way that may be simpler to understand:  WE HAVE TO STOP BEING SUCH WIMPS WHEN IT COMES TO OUR FAITH!!!!!!!  It’s time for a new generation of Catholics to rise up and turn the tide in this country towards a culture of life.  I’m tired of 1-hour a week Catholics.  I’m tired of feeling like the only person shouting the truth from the mountaintop without anyone behind me.  We have reached a critical crossroads when it comes to Catholicism in America, and we must rise up!  Doing what you are currently doing now is not good enough.  Our Lord deserves better.  Our holy Church deserves better.  And if I offended anybody during the preaching of this homily….GOOD!  At least it struck a nerve.  At least I made you think.  Jesus did not spend his public life preaching wondering who he was pleasing and who he was offending.  He preached the Good News of the Kingdom of God with divine authority, and he ended up on a cross.  It’s time for a new breed of Catholics.  The Holy Father also emphasized this to the U.S. bishops:  “Here once more we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed…with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society.”  There you have it.  If you don’t like the way I presented it, here it is straight from the mouth of the Successor of Saint Peter.  We need to pray for unity among us.  We need to pray for this assault on our religious liberty to subside.  We need to pray for a conversion of hearts in our nation so that all people of all faiths and creeds may be respected.  But more importantly, we need to pray that we as a Catholic people may finally grow a backbone and become a force to be reckoned with in America!

Why I Love Jesus AND Love the Church

“They said to him, "Rabbi where are you staying?"  He said to them, "Come, and you will see." (John 1:38-39)

This past week a young man posted a video on the Internet that has gotten over 11.5 million hits in just 6 days.  The video was titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”  (If you want, you can check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY.)  At first I didn’t pay attention to this viral sensation, but then former students of mine began to post it on Facebook with positive comments as if they just had some major epiphany.   This got me curious, and I saw the 4-minute video.  The young man is well intentioned as he professes his love for Jesus and how entering into a personal relationship with the Lord totally transformed his life.  Great witness, seems genuinely authentic, and I agree with a lot of the points he makes, but he veers terribly off course when he drops the word “hate” on us which he does in the title of the video.  His premise is that Jesus came to abolish religion.  Slight problem though, Jesus himself said in the Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”  Ok, then.  Jesus, as the young man correctly points out, did have a problem with the religious establishment of the time who did not practice what they preached which is why Jesus comes to establish a new covenant based on God’s mercy and love and ratified by the blood of his cross.

The thing with the video is that this very gifted young man could have used this platform to win over a host of followers to Christ, but unfortunately he has to go and use the word hate when it comes to religion.  Without religion, would he or any of us know who this Jesus is?  Just saying .  But when he really starts to lose me is around the 1:16 mark of the video when he excuses himself and says: “Now I ain’t judging.”  Pretty tough statement to back up when you’re only a quarter of the way through and you’ve already judged Republicans, big churches, people who condemn divorced single moms, and the church’s lack of compassion for the hungry:  “Why does [religion] build huge churches but fail to feed the poor?”  If he did his research he would probably be shocked to know that the Catholic Church feeds millions around the world and according to a list of 200 charitable organizations that Forbes compiled in 2005, if you add up the Catholic charities on the list, these Catholic organizations raised $5.5 billion (yes that’s billion with a “b”) for their charitable endeavors.  The “big churches” have been built, and yes the way they were built in centuries past were dubious to say the least, but another blogger’s reaction to this part of the video said it best:  “Go to a man in poverty who attends a beautiful church and offer to tear down the beauty that surrounds him, to melt down the gold so he can buy more food. You will never see a man more insulted.”

Halfway through, the young man professes that he loves the church to which I said “Whoa! You just contradicted your entire video!”  He unfortunately reduces religion to a set of rules that Jesus hated and came to abolish, but the reality is that Jesus told his disciples “If you love me, keep my commandment. (John 14:15).”  Religion shouldn’t be reduced to a list of rules of “thou shall not’s.”  What this young man proposes is like going to the doctor and not following his prescriptions to make us well.   The truth of the matter is that Jesus did found a Church.  He entrusted it to Peter:  “Upon this rock I will build my church (Matthew 16:18-19).”  And he told his disciples at the Last Supper:  “Do this in memory of me.”  So wherever two or more are gathered in his name, that is where Jesus will be.  That sounds a lot like Church to me and diffuses the notion that religion is a man made invention as this young man claims.  We are a holy Church, the bride of Christ, made up of sinful people.  The young man correctly points out that the Church shouldn’t be “a museum for good people but a hospital for the broken.”  This causes him to wonder that if Jesus walked into Church, would we even let him in?  Well……..um……..we kind of already did.  In fact, he’s already here.  He was here before you arrived and will be here when you leave because when Jesus said “do this in memory of me” he left us the gift of his presence that comes from the hands of a priest:  the Eucharist.  But let’s not stop there.  Do you want to see Christ?  Look at your brother and your sister sitting next to you.  Do you want to take a picture of Christ?  I’ll be consecrating the bread and the wine in a few minutes that will become the Real Presence of Christ in his body and blood. It’s easy to judge the Church, and believe me as a loyal son and priest of Holy Mother Church, I’ll be the first to admit that we have made mistakes and even grave mistakes especially in the last 10 years, but her beauty, her majesty does not lie in the beauty of this building or in her glorious basilicas and cathedrals, her beauty lies in the hearts of her holy people.

So why did this video catch fire?  Why did so many young people press “like” on YouTube and Facebook?  Well, simply put, the premise implies that you can love Jesus without any of the responsibilities that go with it (i.e. religion).  It’s an old oxymoron:  “I’m a spiritual person, but not a religious person.”  Where else do you get your spiritual groove on if it isn’t in a church?  Where else do you go to come to a deeper understanding of who Jesus is if it isn’t within a community of believers?  Many young people want an out, an excuse, a justification for their personal faith or lack there of.   Yes Jesus loves us despite our sins, but eventually we have to realize that just because we say we’re Christian, it doesn’t give us free license to follow Jesus “our way.”  He showed us THE WAY.  He left us the gift of the Church, and yes, as the young man concludes, Jesus did say on the cross “It is finished,” but contrary to what this young preacher says, the work of the kingdom isn’t done.  Jesus did perfectly finish His work here on our earth, but he established the Church to continue his mission, to continue his works, and to ultimately get it done and bring it to perfection:  “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel (Mark 16:15).”  His work is finished.  Ours was just getting started.  This video appeals to young people because as I said last week in my homily, we’re always searching for answers and this applies in a very unique way to our youth.  Many of them are searching for love, peace, and the truth.  This is why Jesus tells John’s disciples in today’s gospel to “come and see.”  If you want answers, come to Jesus.  If many young people saw past their pre-conceived notions of the Church, and saw what I see, or saw what the Holy Father saw last summer when he gazed out across an airfield and saw a million young people praising Jesus, these young people would fall in love with the Church as I have because it is here that we experience the power of the living body of Christ.

Saying we love Jesus but hating religion goes against what our Lord taught us and will ultimately lead us to moral relativism because we will have no moral compass to guide us in our journey.  Jesus left us the apostles, he founded the priesthood, he blessed many saints along our 2000 year journey for us to see how beautiful this Church can be.  I love Jesus, and I love the gift that he left us in his bride, the Church.  I laid down my life for Him as I laid down my life for Her.  I love them both so much that I will not cease preaching the gospel and preaching the truth and doing the good work of our Church until our mission it is actually DONE!  Jesus said he was finished, but we’re just getting warmed up.

Gazing Up At the Stars

"We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage." (Matthew 2:2)

 

When I was a child, our family would spend our summer weekends in the Florida Keys.  The night sky is a lot clearer down south than it is here in the city.  At night, I would go over by the water and just gaze up at the numerous stars up in the sky.  I was always fascinated by outer space.  I was a Star Trek and Star Wars fan.  I had a small telescope.  I still remember when Haley's Comet made its pass by our small planet.  I was captivated by the possibilities of what laid beyond "the surly bonds of Earth."  Since I was a child, I would always look for the brightest star in the sky and assume that was the star the Jesus was born under--the same star the Magi saw at its rising and followed the Bethlehem.  What must have gone through these wise mens' minds when they saw this star appear?

 

The Feast of the Epiphany used to be a pretty big deal.  It still is in the Church, but not so much in the world.  Today we celebrate, as the preface of the Mass says, the revelation of "the mystery of our salvation in Christ as a light for the nations."  Jesus did not come to just save the Jews, but to save the entire world.  You see all of Judea should have been at Mary and Joseph's front door waiting to do this child homage.  The innkeeper that turned them away should have offered them his own home.  This was the child that all of Israel had been waiting for, yet, apart from the shepherds, the only ones that came to do him homage were three Gentile strangers from the East.  Pope Benedict pointed out in his Epiphany homily that with the Magi's journey from the East towards Christ, humanity also begins its pilgrimage towards its Redeemer.  While the response may have been slow at first, many nations would soon come to recognize Christ as their Messiah and King as we do today.  Like the Magi, our hearts are constantly searching.  Searching for answers to great mysteries.  This is why we have constantly gazed up at the stars because we long to know the great unknown.  What lies beyond that which is around us?  Only God could properly satisfy the curiousity he himself placed in our hearts.  The Magi had the restless hearts that St. Augustine spoke about that could only be satisfied by the presence of God.  That is why they prostrated themselves before the Child.  They were in the presence of the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  In concluding his homily on Friday, the Holy Father in a stroke of genius turns the tables a bit on this restless heart analogy:  "But not only are we restless for God: God’s heart is restless for us. God is waiting for us. He is looking for us. He knows no rest either, until he finds us. God’s heart is restless, and that is why he set out on the path towards us – to Bethlehem, to Calvary, from Jerusalem to Galilee and on to the very ends of the earth."  And this unrest that lies in the heart of God is passed on to us so that we may bring the light of his presence to all the world.

 

Today, like the Magi, we are searching for something that will bring us fulfillment, contentment, joy and peace.  Our search sometimes leads us down wrong paths, but we ultimately come back here, to this manger, to this altar, to this church in order to find that which our hearts truly long for.  A world filled with darkness has been flooded by God's radiant light.  Stargazing is fun, but like those first astronaut pioneers that ventured past our orbit 50 years ago, there comes a time when we must stop gazing and start exploring what lies beyond.  We have spent two weeks gazing upon this glorious scene of the manger.  Now it is time for us to stop gazing and to start exploring what lies in the heart of God.