Day 37: Begging for God's Mercy

Imagine a beggar sitting on a sidewalk with his hand held out and his head held low begging for money to eat.  He is ashamed to look up because of his appearance.  He only has his hand extended hoping that someone will be generous enough to place a coin in his worn and dirty hand.

Now imagine if we were that beggar coming before God to beg for his mercy.  Dirtied by sin, heads bowed because we are ashamed by our transgressions, but coming before our Father nonetheless to beg for mercy.  The thing is that we see ourselves as beggars.  God sees us as his children.  Once we discover that we are and always will be the children of God, then our lives take on new meaning and new purpose.  Sin becomes something foreign because we do not want to damage this relationship with the Father.  Yet, sin invariably creeps into our lives and we find ourselves once again as beggars with our hands outstretched to God.  He does not reject us.  He does not ignore us.  He lifts us up, cleans us off, and forgives us...no questions asks. 

Holy Week is upon us.  Have you come before your God and begged for his mercy?   

Day 36: Christ Our Refuge

All of us have days that we wish we never would've gotten out of bed.  Perhaps you get to work or school and as soon as you walk through the door, all the problems of the world come tumbling down on your head.  Perhaps, you dragged those problems from home.  Here it is, mid morning and you're already wanting to get away from everything.  These are the moments in which you must find the time, however brief, to center your day on Christ.  We must realize that He is our only refuge.  He is our strength.  He is our deliverer.  He will shepherd us through the day and bring us safely to its conclusion.  So if it's mid-morning and you've reached your wit's end already, just close your eyes, center yourself on the Lord, and pray, "Jesus Christ, my refuge and my strength, deliver me and keep me safe.  Amen."

Day 35: Christ Our Light

"I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

There are so many who woke up this morning feeling defeated even before they got out of bed.  There are so many who see no light at the end of the tunnel because they are overwhelmed by a myriad of problems.  There are so many who fear what lies ahead because of what has happened to them in the past.

But Jesus offers us words of hope when he tells us tells us that he is the light of the world.  If we want to escape the darkness, all we have to do is follow him.  He stretches out his hand to each of us this day to deliver us from whatever darkness may be surrounding us into the warmth of his radiant light.  Come and rescue us, Lord Jesus, and be our light!

Day 34: The Importance of Confession

When I logged on this morning to the Archdiocesan website, I discovered that our Communications Department had published one of my recent messages to my parishioners.  The message is the same one that I have emphasized over and over again during this Lenten season which is that the Lord is inviting you (yes, you!) to return to Him in the beautiful Sacrament of Confession.  This weekend the Archdiocese is having its annual Reconciliation Weekend on Friday evening and Saturday morning and afternoon.  So as we get ready for Holy Week:

1. Read the message that I wrote to my parishioners on confession by clicking here:  The Importance of Confession 
2. Find a parish near you in the schedule attached to the message.
3. Make a good examination of conscience.  Here's a very good and detailed one: (Examination of Conscience from The Fatima Center)
4. Go to confession.
5. Rejoice in the beauty of God's forgiveness.

That sounds like a good to do list for this week. 

So, I'm going to confession this week.  Are you?

Day 33: The Tomb of the Confessional (Redux)

This morning I delivered a homily that's tough to translate to the written page.  It had a beautiful story of witness and a resurrection of sorts that happened to me on Friday that I am still trying to process and may write about it for Easter.  I drew heavily as well on themes that I touched on three years ago, so what I wrote then still very much applies today and worth reading:

“Untie him and let him go.” (John 11:44)

 

When was the last time you went to confession?  When was the last time you put pride aside, got down on your knees, and asked a priest to absolve you of your sins?  For the last month, we have been talking about emptying ourselves and giving our whole self to the Lord, putting him in charge, and slowly allowing our will to become one and the same with His.  Why is this a good a time as any to finally kneel down and go to confession?  Because Lent is a journey from the confessional to the table of the Lord where we commune with Christ.   It is in the desert of Lent that we realize that sin has been destroying us ever so slowly to the point that our souls become dead.  I look out at my congregation on Sunday mornings and wonder what burdens my people might be carrying.  How many are out there just going through the motions because sin has corroded their soul?  How many are so dead inside because of sin that when they come to church they experience as much as a dead man in a tomb? 

 

Jesus does not want us to live this way.  Today he not only wishes to raise his beloved friend Lazarus from the dead, he wants to raise you and me as well.  He is calling you to the tomb of the confessional.  Why do I compare the confessional to a tomb when it is hardly a ringing endorsement for the sacrament?  Put simply, it is in the confessional that we die to our sins.  It is in the confessional that our sins go to die, and like Lazarus we emerge from the tomb of the confessional with a new life.  We come out totally freed from bondage, and we hear the same words that Lazarus heard from Jesus when he emerged from the tomb:  “Untie him and let him go.”  We are not bound by burial cloths instead we are bound by the very sins that have kept us from hearing the voice of the Master that tells us when we are surrounded by the darkness of sin:  “Come out!”

 

Take it from a frequent penitent:  it takes courage and great humility to kneel down before a priest, who himself is a sinner, and ask for forgiveness.  That is what makes this sacrament so unique.  It is the simplest of sacraments yet the hardest to do.  We quiver when we have to look inside our hearts and see all the times we have failed the Lord.  We sometimes may go to confession and try to hide the things that are really tying us down as if we can hide from our God who sees everything.  This past fall I heard a Domincan priest, who are generally great confessors, tell a group of priests that I was on retreat with: “If there is something so dark that you cannot possibly utter, then my friends, that is what you need to confess.”  Our lack of owning up to our sins and not confessing them just makes their hold over us that much stronger.  When we hear ourselves say our sins aloud, as painful as it may be, followed by the priest uttering the liberating words of absolution, there is a freedom that we experience that we cannot possibly imagine.  Let me witness as someone who is both a penitent and a priest.  It truly is liberating to hear someone tell me “I absolve you of your sins.”  And as a priest, there is nothing that gives me greater joy aside from celebrating the Mass than to tell a broken soul, “My child, I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” 

 

As priests, we live for this time of year.  We spend hours in the tomb of the confessional quite joyfully because we know that we are reuniting our spiritual children with our loving and merciful God.  A couple of weeks ago at our Men’s Conference, I heard the great speaker Curtis Martin tell the men:  “Don’t be ashamed of what you tell the priest in confession even if it’s the darkest of sins because you actually make a priest’s day when you allow him to help you be reconciled with God.”  So forgive me as I get all Clint Eastwood on all of you today, but “go ahead…make my day!”  We wait for you in the tomb of the confessional ready to help you watch your sins die, ready to free you from their bondage, and ready to send you forth totally free to love God and each other.  And the beauty of spending so many hours in that tomb is that we priests become tombs ourselves because the sins that we hear uttered are never spoken of again.  So what are you afraid of?  What are you waiting for?  What awaits us in the tomb of the confessional is a joy-filled new life that is ours for the taking.  Embrace it, cherish it, and don’t fear confession, for when we are finally cured of the blindness of sin, we are able to finally see the loving face of a God who loves us to no end.

Day 32: How Deep is Your Faith?

Do we really believe or are we just going through the motions?  How deep is our faith?  Notice I say we because even priests can at times start flying on autopilot and lose their connection to the Divine.  All of us can recite prayers, go to Mass, and basically do the things that our faith requires us to do.  But does it move us?  Are we listening to God?  Do we see his hand in our lives?

One can never grow accustomed to the work of God in our daily lives.  It is miraculous and beyond comprehension.  But it also challenges us to go deeper into our relationship with him and to increase our faith.  It is very easy to switch on the faith autopilot and go through routine, but I remember the words of an old confessor: "beware routine."  Our faith has to be renewed every day.  It has to be fresh.  It has to excite us and wow us. We are after all dealing with a God who sent his Son into the world to die for our sins and rise to new life.  We are dealing with a LIVING God who is constantly at work in our lives.  Our faith must be like that of our Blessed Mother Mary who believed what the angel had told her.  It has to be unquestionable like the faith of Abraham.  It has to be like St. John's who upon seeing the empty tomb just simply believed.  On this day, reflect on how deep your faith is, and let yourself be amazed by your God.

Day 31: Sleeping With a Smile ("SEND IN MOSES!")

I have written one fan letter in my entire life.  I’ll get to that in a second.  First, a confession.  During my senior year of seminary in the fall of 1996, the Yankees were playing in the World Series.  Because I had to be in my dorm room at 11:00pm, I could not see the games, so I went to the K-Mart down the street and with $99 that I got out of who knows where because I was penniless, I brought a 1.5 inch Sony Watchman to watch the late games in my room which as you’ve probably figured out by now was against the rules.  I watched in horror as my Yankees lost the first two games at home, then screamed with delight when Jim Leyritz tied up Game 4, and eventually saw them beat the Atlanta Braves in Game 6 on regular TV in the kitchen of my home parish during a party.  (I forget names easily, but I remember some really inane details sometimes.)   That next Monday night, I started watching The Late Show with David Letterman.  The priest in charge of discipline had a “nod nod, wink wink” understanding with me because we used to trade jokes from Letterman from the night before, and as I went on to Major Seminary where things got harder and we were allowed to have TV’s in our room, going to bed laughing with delight after prayer was that was like a soothing balm to soul that was being put through the rigors of seminary.  All my classmates watched Dave every night.  I would rehash the jokes or the gags, and even at the end of the year roast of the soon-to-be priests, I once hosted the entire evening impersonating, you guessed it, David Letterman.

Which brings me to the only fan letter I have every written.  In the year 2000, Dave had quintuple bypass surgery.  This prompted me to click on a link on AOL (remember that?) that allowed me to send him a get-well card.  I wrote a heartfelt message wishing him a speedy recovery, God’s blessings and that I was praying for him.  After long seminary days of study and formation, I could always count on him sending me off to sleep with a smile.  At that time there was genuine concern that he would not return, but he did with great fanfare so he could continue to read top ten lists, dump watermelons and other items off buildings, and continue to make people laugh. Over the last several years, Dave started to get a bit too political and I started praying a bit more at night and watching ESPN as I went off to sleep, but his announcement yesterday of his retirement still jolted me.  I watched last night for the first time in a while and how he relayed the story of how he came to this decision was both hilarious and poignant.  Despite his marital indiscretions, political leanings, and contempt for authority, what came through the screen was an imperfect human being just like me trying to connect with his audience (His return to TV after 9/11 is still one of the most moving, raw, and honest moments of television that I have ever seen). 

Every year on St. Patrick’s Day, on this Lenten Blog, I post a clip of the Muppets singing a hilarious rendition of “O Danny Boy” and I caption it with “Jesus wants you to laugh.” Prayer and a lot of laughter got me through seminary, and most of that laughter came from David Letterman.  As I was writing this last night, I pondered that part of living a good Christian life is making time for laughter.   Not only is it the best medicine but it moves us to a genuine joy that God wants us to experience.  Imperfect as he was, Dave brought me such joy every seminary night.  So thank you David, and thank you for answering a question that has always baffled me: How many guys in Spiderman suits can you get into a New York City Jamba Juice?

 

To this day, this is still one of my favorite bits.  I saw it this morning for the first time in years and still laughed as hard as I did back then.  Enjoy!

 

Day 30: Arguing with God

In today's first reading, we see Moses interceding to God on behalf of the Israelites because they had turned away from the Lord and started to adore a golden calf that they had fashioned.  Pope Francis ran with this theme this morning in his homily when he talked about Moses' conversation with God as genuine prayer:  "The Bible says that Moses spoke to God face to face, as a friend.  This is how our prayer must be: free, insisted, with arguments."  Now to the devout this may seem a little disrespectful, but the Pope is trying to draw us deeper into the life of prayer.  Sometimes we pray "words" and don't enter into a profound conversation with our Lord.  So yes, at times we do need to argue with God.  Why hasn't he resolved an issue we have been praying for?  Why does it seem like he is not listening to us?  This is how we talk to a friend, the Pope says.  This also brings us to deeper into the mystery of God's will for us, it invigorates us, and opens us up to all the grace that God is prepared to bestow on us.  It also opens us up more to the Holy Spirit who will guide us in our prayer life and deepen it.  So, take a moment today to genuinely converse with God.  Argue with him if you have to.  You will only come out of that prayer more invigorated because you have had a genuine encounter with the Divine.

Day 29: Feeling Lonely?

So many come to the Church seeking the presence of God because of the lack of presence in their life.  They feel lonely.  So many elderly tell me that they listen to Catholic radio all day because they feel like they have a companion throughout the day.  Early this morning, I read a tweet from Bishop Burbidge of Raleigh that read:  "We pray for those who feel alone and share with them the truth of today's Gospel: God never forgets us and is always there to comfort us!"

The gospel starts off by Jesus telling us that the Father is working for us (Jn 5:17).  Think of that if you are feeling lonely, abandoned, or depressed.  Your God is working for you!  He has not forgotten you.  He has not abandoned you.  At this very second as you read this, he is at work for you.  You may not see the tangible results right now, but he has a plan that is unfolding for you.  It's our job to go along with that plan.  So I echo Bishop Burbidge's call to pray for those who feel alone.  May they feel this day the warm embrace of their Father in heaven.

Day 28: Short Fuse

Raise your hand if you've gotten to the point in Lent where everything is beginning to bug you. (My hand is firmly raised like Horshack's in "Welcome Back Kotter.).

This is perfectly normal. The desert is getting to us. We long for the refreshing waters of Easter. But this is also a sign and Lenten lesson that we need to center ourselves more on God. Don't you think Jesus must have felt frustrated at times with the motley crew he surrounded himself with?  And with the Pharisees constantly needling him?  Yet he took those incidents as teachable moments and opportunities to dispense his Divine Mercy.

So if you find yourself having a short fuse these days, it's to center ourselves more on Jesus and one more valuable piece of advice: let things go and let it slide off of you (as they say in Spanish: "que te resbale").