In 258, when Bishop Cyprian was arrested and tried for being a Christian, his sentencing in the marketplace of the great city of Carthage was witnessed by many thousands of citizens, including no doubt many hundreds of his flock. (We have the court stenographer's record of the trial.) As the soldiers led him away in chains to be executed, dozens and dozens of Christians started chasing them down the road, shouting, "I'm a Christian, kill me too!!" In fear of what might happen if they killed so many, the soldiers beat them and chased them off before martyring the great bishop.
This is not only exemplary faith, of course, but also the fruit of how that faith was lived out. Christians at that time knew they faced the possibility of martyrdom, both literal and figurative. The world was overtly, violently hostile to Christ, far more so than today's anti-Christian sentiment. They were therefore taught in their catechesis and in sermons to prepare for it. They were taught that love for God, Christian virtue, meant being so attached already to what is promised for the next life, that persecution and struggle in this life cannot injure it. They took literally what St. Paul says, "What can separate us from the love of God?" Nothing, certainly, in this life!
The technical name for that attitude was detachment - Greek, "apotasso," Latin, "renuntiatio."
What do we renounce today? What part of the world are we sacrificing, knowingly, in order to belong to Christ?
My own participation in this year's 40 Days for Life campaign and kickoff has brought this question forcefully to mind this week. What is the depth of my love for these poor? Would I be there for those innocent little ones, if the police were ready to drag me off to a severe beating, imprisonment, exile, or even death? Would I still run after them and their mothers -- so often lied to, scared, and compelled by others into such a "choice" -- crying with more perfect charity, "I'm a Christian, kill me too!!" Can I have such love in my heart, even when our pro-life speech and witness is protected, not persecuted?
Few of us will ever have to answer that question in fact. But all of us should be preparing for it.
Information, resources, and community building for all the members of the Deacon Community of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sioux City. Thoughts, Catholic commentary, and occasional homilies from Deacon David.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Homily - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and Catechetical Sunday
I found this homily difficult to write, because the theme of Catechetical Sunday (marriage) doesn't really fit the readings. Still, it certainly wasn't as bad as this...
The prophet Amos rebukes those who lie and cheat in the marketplace. But, more than their lying and cheating, his real target is their attitude about God. They say, “When will the new moon be over…, that we may sell our grain, and the Sabbath, that we may display the wheat?” For these people, God’s law is important, but less important than their money and their greed. They’re going through the motions of obeying God’s law, but they don’t love God. This is why they are impatient for the Sabbath to end, so they can get back to doing their important business!
This attitude, this kind of sin, is all too familiar. Our society approves and rewards such sinners as being “more tolerant.” They show up at the Temple, but they do not let their faith affect how they act in the “real world.” The way such people behave in the marketplace, is also how they conduct their politics, and their family life -- and even their worship. This is not tolerance, but idolatry: they treat God as only one good among many, and God’s law as only one rule among many.
Too many people still think such an attitude is acceptable and practical, since it’s merely what everyone else is doing. But for God, and for faith, it is not nearly good enough. The prophet Amos cries out with God’s righteous anger against being treated so lightly.
Jesus tells us that we “cannot serve two masters.” God is not one good among many. He is the only good. If we want or need other goods than God, it is only so that these created goods can bring us closer to Him. And God’s law is not one rule among many. It is our only rule. If we follow other laws, it is only because these too have their source in God’s law. We cannot love both God and the world.
Jesus tells us that, if we are not trustworthy in small things, we cannot expect to be trusted with great things. The sacrament of marriage is one of those “great things” for which we hope to be trusted. And because this vocation is so important, the devil works very hard to keep husbands and wives from being trustworthy with the small, daily aspects of married life.
How do those who are called to married life prove trustworthy in little things, each and every day? How do we let our faith affect our family, so as to be worthy of God’s trust with the great thing, our sanctification through married life?
The Church clearly teaches the minimum, the letter of God’s law for marriage. Adultery, fornication, contraception, pornography -- these are all grave moral evils. At a minimum, don’t do them. Let me say that again: chastity is the least we can do for God. The devil tries to convince us that chastity is too hard for us. He whispers that we have a right to be unchaste, at least in our thoughts and desires, if not with our actual bodies. But God says that chastity, even in our thoughts and desires, is not too hard for us to live up to. And He gives us the grace to do so.
But this “least,” Amos has said, is not enough. We must do more than just the minimum.
Our shared spiritual life in the home is a critical part of that “more.” The devil wants your marriage to fail, because its success is part of what gets you to Heaven. Therefore prayer is crucial to a healthy marriage. Husbands and wives strengthen their marriage when they pray together. Parents both teach and testify to their faith when they teach their children to pray. Meals together, without distractions like television or computers, form us humanly and socially; and they become spiritually intimate with family prayer. Even perfectly ordinary and common moments, like getting into or out of your car, can be simple and effective times to pray, and can build in us the habit of praying constantly.
Sharing prayer in these ways is not hard, but it does take commitment. There are always going to be interruptions of our prayer time, and temptations not to pray. Don’t give up. Keep praying. No matter what we may be doing physically, like mowing the grass or folding laundry, we can always recite an Our Father or a Hail Mary mentally.
Another major portion of doing more than the minimum is healing our attitude. Our mutual obedience to each other and to God should be willing, and prompt, and cheerful. A husband’s gratitude to his wife, for example, might be expressed by not complaining about her to his buddies. Likewise, a wife’s humility might mean not nagging her husband.
Our prompt and cheerful mutual obedience also entails a prompt and cheerful readiness to forgive. No matter how good our marriage or family life might be, all of us will sometimes need both to ask for and to offer forgiveness. A healthy attitude and an active prayer life will make both the asking, and the giving, easier.
How we live in the home is how we will live in the world. If our faith permeates every part of our family life, it will also shape our conduct in worship of God, and in the marketplace, and in politics. Only the healthy and active faith nourished in the home will survive the trials of the world and the hatred of the devil.
Finally, today we mark Catechetical Sunday. Every parent is a catechist, and we pray that all parents will have the courage and grace to pass on their living faith to their children. But also, volunteering to be a catechist in the Church requires very deep faith, and can even represent heroic courage. It is a further gift of time, patience, and faith. Every Church catechist makes sacrifices to help other families pass on the flame of our faith. You also show us how to serve God alone, with faith and love. As we mark Catechetical Sunday today, I offer special thanks and prayers to all the members of our parish who live out their faith in this way.
The prophet Amos rebukes those who lie and cheat in the marketplace. But, more than their lying and cheating, his real target is their attitude about God. They say, “When will the new moon be over…, that we may sell our grain, and the Sabbath, that we may display the wheat?” For these people, God’s law is important, but less important than their money and their greed. They’re going through the motions of obeying God’s law, but they don’t love God. This is why they are impatient for the Sabbath to end, so they can get back to doing their important business!
This attitude, this kind of sin, is all too familiar. Our society approves and rewards such sinners as being “more tolerant.” They show up at the Temple, but they do not let their faith affect how they act in the “real world.” The way such people behave in the marketplace, is also how they conduct their politics, and their family life -- and even their worship. This is not tolerance, but idolatry: they treat God as only one good among many, and God’s law as only one rule among many.
Too many people still think such an attitude is acceptable and practical, since it’s merely what everyone else is doing. But for God, and for faith, it is not nearly good enough. The prophet Amos cries out with God’s righteous anger against being treated so lightly.
Jesus tells us that we “cannot serve two masters.” God is not one good among many. He is the only good. If we want or need other goods than God, it is only so that these created goods can bring us closer to Him. And God’s law is not one rule among many. It is our only rule. If we follow other laws, it is only because these too have their source in God’s law. We cannot love both God and the world.
Jesus tells us that, if we are not trustworthy in small things, we cannot expect to be trusted with great things. The sacrament of marriage is one of those “great things” for which we hope to be trusted. And because this vocation is so important, the devil works very hard to keep husbands and wives from being trustworthy with the small, daily aspects of married life.
How do those who are called to married life prove trustworthy in little things, each and every day? How do we let our faith affect our family, so as to be worthy of God’s trust with the great thing, our sanctification through married life?
The Church clearly teaches the minimum, the letter of God’s law for marriage. Adultery, fornication, contraception, pornography -- these are all grave moral evils. At a minimum, don’t do them. Let me say that again: chastity is the least we can do for God. The devil tries to convince us that chastity is too hard for us. He whispers that we have a right to be unchaste, at least in our thoughts and desires, if not with our actual bodies. But God says that chastity, even in our thoughts and desires, is not too hard for us to live up to. And He gives us the grace to do so.
But this “least,” Amos has said, is not enough. We must do more than just the minimum.
Our shared spiritual life in the home is a critical part of that “more.” The devil wants your marriage to fail, because its success is part of what gets you to Heaven. Therefore prayer is crucial to a healthy marriage. Husbands and wives strengthen their marriage when they pray together. Parents both teach and testify to their faith when they teach their children to pray. Meals together, without distractions like television or computers, form us humanly and socially; and they become spiritually intimate with family prayer. Even perfectly ordinary and common moments, like getting into or out of your car, can be simple and effective times to pray, and can build in us the habit of praying constantly.
Sharing prayer in these ways is not hard, but it does take commitment. There are always going to be interruptions of our prayer time, and temptations not to pray. Don’t give up. Keep praying. No matter what we may be doing physically, like mowing the grass or folding laundry, we can always recite an Our Father or a Hail Mary mentally.
Another major portion of doing more than the minimum is healing our attitude. Our mutual obedience to each other and to God should be willing, and prompt, and cheerful. A husband’s gratitude to his wife, for example, might be expressed by not complaining about her to his buddies. Likewise, a wife’s humility might mean not nagging her husband.
Our prompt and cheerful mutual obedience also entails a prompt and cheerful readiness to forgive. No matter how good our marriage or family life might be, all of us will sometimes need both to ask for and to offer forgiveness. A healthy attitude and an active prayer life will make both the asking, and the giving, easier.
How we live in the home is how we will live in the world. If our faith permeates every part of our family life, it will also shape our conduct in worship of God, and in the marketplace, and in politics. Only the healthy and active faith nourished in the home will survive the trials of the world and the hatred of the devil.
Finally, today we mark Catechetical Sunday. Every parent is a catechist, and we pray that all parents will have the courage and grace to pass on their living faith to their children. But also, volunteering to be a catechist in the Church requires very deep faith, and can even represent heroic courage. It is a further gift of time, patience, and faith. Every Church catechist makes sacrifices to help other families pass on the flame of our faith. You also show us how to serve God alone, with faith and love. As we mark Catechetical Sunday today, I offer special thanks and prayers to all the members of our parish who live out their faith in this way.
Friday, September 3, 2010
3 September - Pope Saint Gregory the Great
On loving God in the active life – wisdom from Pope Saint Gregory the Great
Before he was chosen as Pope, Saint Gregory was a monk (under the Rule of Saint Benedict), and a deacon (yea, go deacons!!). He had a monastic contemplative life, based around his monastic schedule – Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina, meditative prayer, and silence of tongue, mind, and opinion. When he became Pope, he complained bitterly about the loss of this schedule and this spiritual routine. He feared greatly the damage this lack of contemplation could do to him, and through him to the souls in his care.
But in the course of his pontificate, Saint Gregory came to understand another path of contemplative prayer, suitable for those in the active life. Here in very schematic form are the six steps he sketches out on this path.
1. The pursuit of natural virtue in one’s duties in the world. The four cardinal virtues – prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance – are part of the natural law, and we know about them, and what makes them good, from our ordinary experience in this world. No one in the active life can deny that to pursue these virtues is a good thing in itself. Those who strive for these virtues are “better” people, and they are more admired and respected, in general. The more systematic and self-disciplined the pursuit of these virtues, the more admirable the person.
2. Humility. Saint Benedict says that humility is the root of all virtue, and the self-disciplined pursuit of even natural virtues tends to humility. But humility creates in us the capacity to love the other more than one loves oneself. Humility perfects natural virtue, and, if we’re looking in that direction, leads us to Christ.
3. Obedience. Obedience is another fruit of growing in natural virtue. “Obedience” here doesn’t mean taking orders from someone else; it means choosing to put the good of someone else reasonably high in our priorities. For example, husbands and wives practice this obedience to each other daily, when they choose to do household chores out of love. Employees practice this obedience when they choose honesty rather than lying or stealing from their employer. And so forth. In a larger sense, what we’re doing when we obey in this way is choosing the good more effectively. We’re submitting ourselves more wholeheartedly to the demands of that vision of the good, through the practice of natural virtue perfected in humility. Already at this level there is a degree of joy which draws us further along this active path. As the saying goes, "Virtue is its own reward."
4. Unity and peace, then, are the practical fruit of natural virtue, humility, and obedience in one’s state in life. It is the lack or the imperfection of virtue that separates us from each other, and that breaks our peace with each other, for example in anger. But, looked at from the other direction, unity and peace are also the means of encountering the true unity and true peace of the Mystical Body of Christ. That is, natural unity and peace are the historical expression of supernatural unity and peace in Christ. So again, natural virtue leads us to Christ. The more our growth in virtue orients us to the good of others, the harder it is to maintain a vision of the good separate from the good which is Christ.
5. In the Church, the submission of one’s judgment to the reign of Christ is purified. The fruit of unity and peace in the Church, the mystical Body, is an encounter with Christ the Head. We therefore begin to apply the humility and obedience to the Church, also. We come to love God’s providential will in the Church. We submit ourselves more and more to her wisdom in doctrine; we look more and more to her moral guidance in daily matters; we find increasing happiness in fulfilling her precepts. The joy of loving Christ, and of loving like Christ, begins to make our attraction to merely created goods less compelling.
6. Loving the Church, we can finally envision love for God Himself as perfect Love. We find, in the depths of our most basic motive for meeting our duties in the active life, the eye of our heart gazing upon God’s divinity. To put it simply, we live the divine praises.
The attractive object of contemplation for those in the active life -- what draws our attention and our attraction out of the created order and toward God -- is, then, the providential will of God. By learning to love the will of God, starting at the most general level of natural virtue and working “up” to the most personal level of my vocation and what God wills me to do, right now, today, in order to serve in that vocation, we come to love God Himself – which is, of course, what we are created and baptized for.
I stress that following this path doesn’t happen automatically. We still sin. Even without sinning, we choose contradictory and retrograde goods every day. God doesn’t deprive us of the good of our will. We must choose to love him, at every moment. But what this path showed to Saint Gregory was that he need not regret leaving the monastery. It is possible to be a perfect imitator of the perfect love of Christ, even in the midst of active life in the world – in the world, that is, but not of the world. This path, finally, is one of interior conversion -- a different path of interior conversion than the monastic vocation, but that’s precisely why we who aren’t monks need it.
Before he was chosen as Pope, Saint Gregory was a monk (under the Rule of Saint Benedict), and a deacon (yea, go deacons!!). He had a monastic contemplative life, based around his monastic schedule – Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina, meditative prayer, and silence of tongue, mind, and opinion. When he became Pope, he complained bitterly about the loss of this schedule and this spiritual routine. He feared greatly the damage this lack of contemplation could do to him, and through him to the souls in his care.
But in the course of his pontificate, Saint Gregory came to understand another path of contemplative prayer, suitable for those in the active life. Here in very schematic form are the six steps he sketches out on this path.
1. The pursuit of natural virtue in one’s duties in the world. The four cardinal virtues – prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance – are part of the natural law, and we know about them, and what makes them good, from our ordinary experience in this world. No one in the active life can deny that to pursue these virtues is a good thing in itself. Those who strive for these virtues are “better” people, and they are more admired and respected, in general. The more systematic and self-disciplined the pursuit of these virtues, the more admirable the person.
2. Humility. Saint Benedict says that humility is the root of all virtue, and the self-disciplined pursuit of even natural virtues tends to humility. But humility creates in us the capacity to love the other more than one loves oneself. Humility perfects natural virtue, and, if we’re looking in that direction, leads us to Christ.
3. Obedience. Obedience is another fruit of growing in natural virtue. “Obedience” here doesn’t mean taking orders from someone else; it means choosing to put the good of someone else reasonably high in our priorities. For example, husbands and wives practice this obedience to each other daily, when they choose to do household chores out of love. Employees practice this obedience when they choose honesty rather than lying or stealing from their employer. And so forth. In a larger sense, what we’re doing when we obey in this way is choosing the good more effectively. We’re submitting ourselves more wholeheartedly to the demands of that vision of the good, through the practice of natural virtue perfected in humility. Already at this level there is a degree of joy which draws us further along this active path. As the saying goes, "Virtue is its own reward."
4. Unity and peace, then, are the practical fruit of natural virtue, humility, and obedience in one’s state in life. It is the lack or the imperfection of virtue that separates us from each other, and that breaks our peace with each other, for example in anger. But, looked at from the other direction, unity and peace are also the means of encountering the true unity and true peace of the Mystical Body of Christ. That is, natural unity and peace are the historical expression of supernatural unity and peace in Christ. So again, natural virtue leads us to Christ. The more our growth in virtue orients us to the good of others, the harder it is to maintain a vision of the good separate from the good which is Christ.
5. In the Church, the submission of one’s judgment to the reign of Christ is purified. The fruit of unity and peace in the Church, the mystical Body, is an encounter with Christ the Head. We therefore begin to apply the humility and obedience to the Church, also. We come to love God’s providential will in the Church. We submit ourselves more and more to her wisdom in doctrine; we look more and more to her moral guidance in daily matters; we find increasing happiness in fulfilling her precepts. The joy of loving Christ, and of loving like Christ, begins to make our attraction to merely created goods less compelling.
6. Loving the Church, we can finally envision love for God Himself as perfect Love. We find, in the depths of our most basic motive for meeting our duties in the active life, the eye of our heart gazing upon God’s divinity. To put it simply, we live the divine praises.
The attractive object of contemplation for those in the active life -- what draws our attention and our attraction out of the created order and toward God -- is, then, the providential will of God. By learning to love the will of God, starting at the most general level of natural virtue and working “up” to the most personal level of my vocation and what God wills me to do, right now, today, in order to serve in that vocation, we come to love God Himself – which is, of course, what we are created and baptized for.
I stress that following this path doesn’t happen automatically. We still sin. Even without sinning, we choose contradictory and retrograde goods every day. God doesn’t deprive us of the good of our will. We must choose to love him, at every moment. But what this path showed to Saint Gregory was that he need not regret leaving the monastery. It is possible to be a perfect imitator of the perfect love of Christ, even in the midst of active life in the world – in the world, that is, but not of the world. This path, finally, is one of interior conversion -- a different path of interior conversion than the monastic vocation, but that’s precisely why we who aren’t monks need it.
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