Epiphany 2025: are we attentive to the little daily epiphanies?

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

This past Wednesday night, I was looking for a video to describe the history of Medjugorje. In case you don’t know, it’s the sight of an alleged ongoing appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary since 1981. There’s some controversy surrounding the truth of the appearances, though. In general, the Vatican says that it is a good place for pilgrimage but it takes no official opinion on the truth or falsity of the visions. It cannot deny that there appear to have been miraculous healings for visitors going to the shrine but it is more cautious of the visions from the people who started having visions when they were children but who are now in their fifties. 

I would guess most of the people going there, including a local group who recently went, have no interest in entering into the controversy surrounding the visions. In that way, they are like the Magi from today’s Gospel. These astrologers, probably from modern day Iraq, could have had no idea that they were fulfilling Old Testament prophecy when they walked into Jerusalem in search of the newborn King of the Jews. They were just interpreting the movements of a star and it led them there. They couldn’t have known that the star was simply light being drawn to the child who would one day identify himself as the light of the world. They didn’t have the Old Testament, after all, so they couldn’t include it among what they considered their holy writings. Instead, they had to rely completely on the instinct built into human beings to search for things larger than themselves and the Holy Spirit guiding and directing them along the way. Thankfully, their instincts told them something wasn’t right with Herod, though, and they trusted the Holy Spirit when he told them not to go back and tell the false king where the true king had been born. They went home, like the shepherds on the day of Jesus’ birth, a little wiser and a little more faithful. 

I want to admit something that I’m not proud of at this point. It’s only been recently that I’ve prioritized spending a Holy Hour each day. You’d think, as a priest, I would have done it every day from the time of my ordination. Unfortunately, when I was ordained, it wasn’t stressed how important that was. I did spend time in prayer each day reading and reflecting on what’s called the Liturgy of the Hours. But, spending time reading Sacred Scripture and then being quiet and listening is really something I’ve only been doing since last June, when I decided to start classes to officially be a spiritual director. I struggled for a good six months not to fill the time reading something or looking up prayers on my phone. In fact, I’ve only recently got to a point where I put a moratorium on my phone in the chapel because it is only a distraction for me. That hour is singularly my time with my friend, just being with Jesus and expecting nothing. One question that I keep bringing to Jesus is what He wants from St. Patrick’s. As I shared in this week’s bulletin, Jesus shares with me that something great is going to happen here. However, when I ask for greater clarity what that means, I hear “wait and see”. I ask if it will be a celebration or an opportunity for growth and he tells me that I should wait and see. Now, I’ll admit, I’m not claiming to be the recipient of special revelations, anything more than what anyone else would hear. And, even though I use the example of the flood in the gospel, I’m not saying that it’s going to have the same emotional impact that the flood did. I’m just saying that, regardless of what happens, some will think it is a positive and some will think it’s a negative. God could make us the premiere ice cream dealer in the world and some would think that’s great while others would be depressed because they’re lactose intolerant or because the ice cream is just too cold. 

In the meantime, I’ve appreciated waiting and seeing because it has opened my eyes to all the small revelations Jesus puts into my daily life. I noticed the white purity of the snow on Thursday. I gave thanks for the questions of a person struggling with their faith. God’s making epiphanies dailys in our lives. Do we notice them?

Mary, Mother of God: Making sure we ponder the authentic words Mary pondered.

Friends

Peace be with you.

I hate the phrase toxic masculinity. It’s become very popular among academics to demonize anything that’s stereotypically masculine. However, having said that, I was listening to a podcast yesterday morning called The Counsel of Trent by a Catholic Answers presenter named Trent Horn. He was talking about how there is this toxic group of apologists who are male and claim they can be crass or crude. They even claim a permission in scripture to be able to do this. They’ll take a passage from St. Paul where harsh words seem to be said to justify this, even though Trent Horn was quick to point out that what they’re interpreting as a harsh word is better translated as refuse or manure or fertilizer rather than a harsher equivalent, if you catch my drift. He says these men will say that this passage gives them the right to speak bluntly as men ought to do. For instance, when talking to a former “adult” movie star who has reformed her life and is trying to work within that community to get others out of the slavery they’re stuck in, one of these men, in a debate, referred to her using a toxic word to describe her current, post confession, post conversion life as though it were stuck in her past life. Trent took exception to these men asking, saying that they’ve doubled the scandal they caused by not only refusing to accept the veracity of her repentance but by using harshly offensive language in doing so.

That type of toxic masculinity is rooted in an inability to fully grasp the Gospel. I set that in stark contrast to what happened in the Gospel today. If you haven’t heard the full explanation of the Birth of the Lord from the Gospel of Luke this year, I’d suggest watching A Charlie Brown Christmas in which the character Linus finally drops his blanket to relate the story of how the shepherds have this tremendous encounter with angelic forces in a field. Contrary to some depictions you may get from some Christian art, shepherds are not a group of philosophical guys sitting around a field hoping angels would come to enlighten them about the workings of the world. They were the toughest, dirtiest, most hardscrabble guys alive at the time. They had to defend their sheep from wolves and thieves. They had to know where the best fields were to get their sheep food and water and how to deal with other shepherds who knew where those fields were to get there ahead of them. The last thing they were going to do was take a break to go see someone else’s baby. These guys aren’t like me. When I see a baby coming into church, I say “Oh a baby, I want to hold her”. These guys see sheep born all the time, what do they care about a baby? The fact that these guys go running to Bethlehem goes to show how untoxic their masculinity is. They have had an encounter that just has to be explored. This fact alone should tell those who believe Jesus was just a great man and not fully God and fully human that they got it wrong. The fact that shepherds were the ones who ran off to see this baby points to the fact that something special has happened here and that’s the fact that God himself has come among us as a baby. As they arrive in Bethlehem to where the Holy Family is staying, they tell the story of what happened in the field and, as they go back to their flocks, the Bible says that these hardscrabble guys continue glorifying and praising God. It goes to show the quality of the encounter these men had. They had to have an encounter with the one true God. 

       There’s a movie out there, which I’m not going to say where you can find it because I don’t want to give it any undue publicity, but it purports to be about the life of Mary. I think that, because of the success of a series like The Chosen, mainstream Hollywood thought there may be money in trying to get into telling the story of Mary. However, as they tend to do, this movie really misses the mark. One of the most glaring examples happens when Mary is asked by the Angel Gabriel to be the mother of God and her response is “Let it be me”. NO! Mary’s response was “May it be done to me according to your word” It’s the difference between someone saying “I trust you God so I will do it the way your way” versus “I’ll do it my way”. Over and over again in this movie, they get Mary wrong because it is not rooted in Sacred Scripture interpreted through the lens of Sacred Tradition but rooted in false notions of ecumenism and female empowerment. 

We are called to be like Mary, meditating in our hearts on the experiences she had with Jesus and having the joy of the shepherds, praising and glorifying God. One of our challenges is to make sure we are following the right message when we do so. We have to make sure we are, like Mary, meditating on what the Bible actually says and what our faith professes and not simply what someone with a toxic agenda wants us to believe. If, in the end, in our prayer we must echo Mary’s fiat, “May it be done to be according to your word.”

Holy Family - C: We keep Mary’s memories in our hearts

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

Did you get a glimpse into other people’s family life that made you feel a little uncomfortable at Christmas? It often happens that, when we get together with people outside our nuclear family, we see parents struggling to discipline children and children testing their parents' patience. Maybe your parents or aunts or uncles are getting to an age where they are struggling to hear or are having memory issues and they aren’t quite the person you remember from your childhood which can cause some uncomfortable family dynamics and frustrations. Maybe it was your own family that had a mini explosion while family members were around. 

Regardless, doesn’t it feel good to know you’re not alone? Even the Holy Family struggled to understand family dynamics when they went up to the Temple for the Feast of Passover. Now, it’s important to point out a few details. First, Luke is using this experience of going to the Temple, which would have been a common one for the Holy Family, as a framing device. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus would have gone to Jerusalem at least three times a year for the Feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Luke highlights this visit on the feast of Passover because that will also be the celebration taking place at the end of his gospel when Jesus is crucified. Notice, also, that it was a total of three days of separation from Jesus that Mary and Joseph endured. Three days without Jesus parallels with three days Mary will endure without Jesus at the crucifixion. Some people suggest that the source of the tension has to do with the fact that Jesus is Bar Mitzvah, he is now responsible for his own choices. Bar Mitzvah, however, is a status bestowed on a boy at his 13th birthday, not his 12th, and it tends to be sometime more modern than something that happened at the time of Jesus. The idea of children not having adult responsibilities is a very modern one, after all. 

       The tension definitely has to do with whom Jesus is going to consider his Father. Mary asks “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus responds “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” The tension is obvious, who Jesus considers his real Father. It should be pointed out that, by all accounts, Joseph was a good Dad. He worked hard as a laborer and provided a meager home for his wife and child. Jesus isn’t rebelling from an abusive relationship here. It’s just that he’s in his heavenly father’s house and that is a place he wants to stay in order to be close to one he loves.

      It may feel like there’s a lack of resolution to this tension because all it says in the Gospel of St. Luke is that Jesus went home with Mary and Joseph and was obedient to them. That may sound like he just put up with the situation until he could go off to college but remember the root of the word obedient is to listen, just as he listened to his heavenly Father in the temple so he listens to his Mother and Foster Father in Nazareth. Further, it says that Mary kept these things in her heart. This is one of those passages that makes people wonder if St. Luke knew Mary personally and heard it from her. But, more importantly, there will come a time when Jesus is back in this same temple, as I alluded to, and his fidelity to the will of his heavenly Father will be tested. We’ll hear about that in a few weeks at the end of our Lenten journey. But, for now, we are invited to be like Mary and ponder the experiences she had of Jesus in our hearts. That’s something we can do as a family. We can find a time in the week and start with prayer, then read the gospel for the upcoming week, and spend time together talking about it, asking questions and sharing similar experiences. In the process, we may find we are developing a Holy Family of our own. 

Christmas 2025: Come You Unfaithful

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who was visiting from out of town told me about a new song by a singer named Michael Boggs called Come You Unfaithful. I was immediately turned off by the title but I trust this friend so I decided to give it a chance. It starts to the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful but goes in a very different direction than the original. Actually, it pointed out what I would consider to be some flaws with the original song. In this version, the unfaithful, the unworthy, those with nothing to offer him, the unrighteous, and the undeserving are invited to Christ the Lord because He came for them. I started to tear up a little thinking about all the people who have left the church because they felt that they simply weren’t holy enough, weren’t worthy, to come here. I thought of my relatives who feel unrighteous and undeserving of God’s love. I thought of my friends who struggle to know and be loved by God, who feel unfaithful and, thus, unwelcome in God’s house. And I prayed for them and wished I could invite them here right then and there.  

But it was the second verse that really got me emotionally. In that verse, he invites the anxious, the waiting and wanting, those whose burdens are all they can bring, those weary from silence and questions without answers to rejoice because Christ came for them. I started thinking about people who really needed to hear this message and never will because they’re not here with us any longer. I started thinking about the people struggling with brain health in our streets walking past the church at all hours of the night in search of some safe place they may not find or some drug that will numb it all. I thought about families missing a child who died in a school shooting or from some disease struggling to celebrate the birth of the Christ child without a child of their own.

There’s simply too much suffering happening around here this Christmas, maybe not for you or your family but for a lot of people there is. For some people who came to this country illegally, they’re worried about being deported and being separated from a spouse and children or, worse, having a legal spouse and children be forced to be deported with them. For some people, they’re worried they won’t be able to afford their house or their car because their salary dropped when they lost their job and had to take one with less pay. For some people, they’re wondering how they’re going to keep their business open when everyone is buying everything online. And, for a lot of people they’ve come to church hoping God would send an angel like the movie It’s a Wonderful Life only to go back home and have nothing get better. 

For our Christmas Masses, there are four separate sets of readings with four different gospels. There’s Jesus’ genealogy from the gospel of Matthew, the traditional story of no room at the inn from the Gospel of Luke, there’s the visit of the shepherds from the Gospel of Luke, and there’s what’s referred to as the prologue of the St. John. What’s striking about these sets of readings, however, is the promise of the messiah in the first reading versus what actually happens in the gospel. If you read the first readings, you may get a sense that, when Jesus came, it should have been like a superhero movie or like a scene from the Lord of the Rings. The bad guys should be just about ready to destroy all the faithful followers of the Lord when, out of the East, Jesus appears riding a white horse with a sword wiping out all the bad guys and saving the day. But, instead, we hear about a baby lying in an animal’s food trough being visited by a bunch of dirty shepherds who should be looking after their flocks. We hear all about his relatives, some of whom are not particularly great by the way. And St. John, in all his philosophical nuance, puts Jesus as the incarnation of the words used to create the universe at the beginning of time. That’s hardly going to drive off a warring army, let alone deal with all the problems we have. 

The hardest part of today is that Jesus didn’t come to make our life prosperous or even to make it easy. If, for the most part, your life is going okay, that’s great. Even Michael Boggs, in the third verse of Come You Unfaithful, says Jesus came for the prideful, the self-sufficient, and you with all the answers, which is true. He loves you too and walks with you. But for those of us who are maybe struggling to find the Christmas spirit, It’s okay. Jesus may not have come to take away our suffering, but he came to walk with us in our misery. It may not always feel like he’s there, but he’s closest to us in our suffering, not just in an impassive voyeuristic way, but in a way in which He suffers with us. He doesn’t take away our pain but he shares it with us. He took on our sins and redeemed us all on his own on the cross but he doesn’t leave us here to suffer on our own. Do you feel lonely, abandoned, or isolated? Do you feel like no one can help or no one cares? I hope not. But, if so, please know that you’re not alone. Christmas reminds us that Jesus came in a real human way to walk with us in our suffering and he sends us, the members of his church, to walk with each other. You’re welcome here to experience Him, and us, walking with you. 

3 A C - Being On Fire

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

In my mind, there’s nothing better than sitting next to a fire on a cold winter’s day like yesterday. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we’d go camping as a family. We’d always have a campfire at night and share stories and eat campfire food right before bedtime. Nowadays, I have a small electric fireplace that safely mimics a campfire with less of a chance of starting my house on fire. One of the few things I can look forward to in winter is one of those snowy days where I can’t go anywhere or do anything so I sit next to that fireplace and read between naps. 

For some reason, the theme of fire has regularly appeared in my spiritual life this Fall. It started when I showed a video from the priest-physicist Fr. Robert Spitzer about the Shroud of Turin for one of my Thursday morning Koffee Klatsches. In the video, he said two things of which I was unaware. First, to make the shroud, it would “require billions of watts of light energy, far exceeding the capabilities of any known UV source today”. He attributed this to the kind of energy it took to provide the resurrection. I thought about the descriptions the four evangelists use to describe Jesus at the Transfiguration. St. Matthew and St. Luke both say, “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white..” St. Mark says “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” Fr. Spitzer also reported about something called  "’zinc sparks,’ where a fertilized egg releases a burst of zinc ions, creating a tiny, visible flash of light when a sperm meets an egg, essentially marking the moment of conception…” So, there’s a kind of fire in creation and recreation. Shortly thereafter as part of my daily prayer, I re-read the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three men from the Book of Daniel who refused to worship the King of Babylon as though he were God. Their punishment, you may remember, was to be burned alive. However, despite heating the furnace warmer than usual, not only did they survive but the text says that the King and his advisors saw “one like a son of man” protecting them in the fire, a reality Christians have attributed to Jesus’ presence. Lastly, on this past Friday, the church celebrated the memorial of the martyrdom of St. Lucy. She was betrothed to be married to a man but had secretly consecrated herself to remain a life-long virgin, sort of an early church Nun. When she refused to break her vows of virginity they decided to put her to death by fire. However, like those three young men in the Old Testament, she was protected from the flames by her savior. 

All of this has made me pause and think about the two ways St. John the Baptist talks about fire in today’s gospel. First, he says that Jesus will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire. Then, toward the end of the passage, he says that the chaff will burn in unquenchable fire. It seems like St. John isn’t sure if fire is a good thing or a bad thing. If we’re being baptized into it, it seems like the warm comfort of a fireplace, whereas when he says that the wheat will go into the barn but he will burn up the chaff in fire, that appears that the fire is divine punishment, thus not something we’d want to mess with. However, I think that’s the advantage of using fire. It’s something we can sit around to keep warm but it’s also something that can start a field on fire. If you let wheat drop upwind from a hot fire, the wheat itself will fall unharmed on the ground or into a basket because it is heavy enough to do so but the garbage or chaff, which is much lighter, will be caught by the wind and blow into the flames to be burnt up. 

That’s the image St. Luke wants us to have today. It’s what we do to our sins when we go to confession, we keep the good deeds we have done but allow the fire of God’s love to burn up our sins. That’s also what happens, in the Mass, when we offer our less serious sins to God. We have that fire inside of us from baptism and can burn up our sins before they burn us up. Is our faith life on fire burning up our sins and drawing into a life of resurrected faith or do we need to ask God to take out his winnowing fan to fan it back into flame?

2 A C: God uses the lowly to humble the proud

 Friends

Peace be with you.

Tomorrow/today is a very important day for the church in Mexico and all of Latin America really. It is the feast day of St. Juan Diego who was a simple peasant under Spanish rule and who, in 1531 while walking to Mass, found himself visited by a woman dressed like an Aztec princess who identified herself as “ever-perfect holy Mary, who has the honor to be the mother of the true God." When St. Juan Diego recounted this story to his local bishop, the prelate was understandably skeptical. He told St. Juan Diego he needed to ponder over what he was telling him to decide if he thought it was legitimate or not. The next day, Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego again and sent him back to the Bishop with a gift that knocked the cleric to his knees: fresh roses that wouldn’t have grown this time of year in their climate and her image fixed on Juan’s cactus-based coat in such that way that does not seem to have been painted and has lasted five hundred years despite being made with materials that typically last 10-15. Why would Mary appear to Juan Diego? Why appear in Mexico? Why not come slightly farther north to a country that would eventually be a world superpower and convert the colonies from the beginning? Imagine how much different things would be if she had just waited a little while longer, say 1774 or 1777, and been Our Lady of Philadelphia or New York or even our Lady of Cedar Rapids. Yet, that is often not the way God works. 

It is within this context that we hear of Jesus’ cousin, St. John the Baptist. St. Luke, situates the beginning of John’s ministry both in time and in contrast. In other words, he lists the names of a group of leaders so that the hearer will know in what year it takes place and will have a reminder of the corruption of those leaders as well. Luke is using these names to remind people of the murder and corruption these men did. He does this so he can contrast St. John the Baptist, a man of unparalleled holiness who spoke truth to power. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that St. John the Baptist was a political revolutionary or a competitor with Caesar and Pilate and all those folks. I’m saying the exact opposite of that. The truth he spoke was about the fulfillment of the Old Testament Prophecy spoken in our first reading about God leveling mountains and filling valleys to prepare for his coming. St. John the Baptist called on people to be prepared for the coming of the Lord

At the time of St. Juan Diego, Spanish Franciscan missionaries had been working to convert the people of Mexico for 20 years with very little success. Because of this revelation of our Lady, approximately 90 million Latin American people would be converted in the next 10 years, a feat only possible through the action of God. And that happened, not through the most powerful of subjects or to the most powerful country in the world but to a peasant, considered less in dignity by most of the Europeans trying to colonize Mexico. And, as I said before, Mexico itself is a country that has always struggled to provide adequate resources for its citizenry. Why would God there to this man, this peasant saint?

To remind us that human power pales in comparison to the power of God, that human wisdom seems like foolishness compared to the wisdom of God, and the good things we prize on earth seem pathetic compared to the great things God wants for us. In this world where powerful people seem to constantly want all of our attention in order to have a greater control of our lives, we remind ourselves that God’s plan is always better than human plans. We just need to be humbly open to the way God appears in our lives.

CTK B: the son of man is coming testify to the truth.

Friends

Peace be with you. 

In a few weeks, a friend of mine is taking me to see the musical Dear Evan Hansen down at Hancher. I’m excited but I know it will be an emotional time. I’ve seen the play a few times and each time it has been. It’s not for everyone so please don’t read this homily reference as an endorsement. There’s no references to faith in it and it is a very postmodern morality play. Still, I appreciate it because, like many people who have seen this play, I can sympathize with the main character. Without giving away too much, the main character is named Evan and he is an awkward high school kid who doesn’t have any friends. Early in the show, he interacts with another kid who also has no friends because he a is very angry teenager. Evan is just really shy and awkward. When the angry kid ends his own life, the boy's parents find a note that seems to indicate he and Evan were friends, This leads Evan down a road of lies that seems to spiral out of control. 

I think we need to talk about lying. I think it’s not something that priests talk about much anymore, or at least we don’t talk about it as the focus of our homilies. We may bring it up at the end as a kind of morality example but it’s something we should probably talk about more because it affects our integrity. Oftentimes people will distinguish between lies of commission and lies of omission but I was thinking of a couple of other distinctions  as well. Lies of commission are when we actively tell someone a false statement. Most of the time we do this because we are embarrassed by our actions and we want to protect our reputation or we do it to get out of being punished. An example of a lie of commission would be telling your spouse that the kids returned the car empty instead of admitting to her that you forgot to stop at the gas station on the way home. A lie of omission, on the other hand, happens when we leave out important details or pretend we don’t know what happened when we do. An example of a lie of omission would be when you overhear an annoyed coworker talking about how someone left the door to the office unlocked last night and someone stole her computer and you realize you were the one who forgot to lock it but you don’t say anything because you don’t want to get in trouble. I was also thinking about lies of presumption, when we make up an allegation against someone or a motivation why someone did something when we don’t know the facts. For example, we may think that our spouse deliberately left their socks on the bathroom floor instead of in the hamper because you got in a fight the night and they did it spite you. I was also thinking about lies of convenience, which we do when we don’t want to admit to someone that we disagree with them or are not going to follow their advice. I find myself doing this when someone gives me driving directions to their house, I generally let them talk without paying any attention instead of thanking them but letting them know I’d prefer to follow my GPS. Lastly, how about lies to the self. A lie to the self is when we have an impression of ourselves that doesn’t match the choices we make to live our lives. For example, we may think we are a good person even though we tell a lot of lies or are racist or sexist or just a mean person in general. We may also have a deflated sense of self, though, where we believe we are worthless when, in fact, we are using our gifts and talents to the best of our ability but someone else just has more gifts and talents than we do. 

As I said before, the challenge with all these lies is that they destroy our integrity. We are meant to be holy as God is holy and the word holy is related to the word whole or integral. Lies split us into a truthful side versus an untruthful side, a trustworthy side versus an untrustworthy side. 

Jesus had a hard truth to pass on to Pilate today; that he came into the world to testify to the truth. It would have been easy to justify remaining silent in the presence of someone who had no way of understanding who he was but, instead, he speaks the truth knowing that it will be used against him by the man who will pronounce his death sentence. Can we have that same integrity and be people of truth?