The Humanity of Jesus

I started writing down this homily and ran out of time. The last part is more of a bullet point summary of what happened. I think you'll still be able to understand despite the lack of completion

My Dear brothers and sister in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God our Father and the divine Lord Jesus Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity through the power of the Holy Spirit. What does it mean when we say that Jesus was fully human? Each week we profess in the creed, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who…For us men and for our salvation…came down from heaven by the power of the Holy Spirit … was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” This is an articulation of the Christian belief that Jesus was fully God and fully human. What does that mean?

There are some people who like to treat non-human things as though they are human. For instance, I think there are some people who treat their pets as though they are human. I know of people who will pick up their dog or cat, turn them over, and rock them like a mother rocks a baby. In some ways, I think it says more about who we are as human beings than about the animal being like us.

So, what does it mean to be human? In answering this question, I thought about some sci-fi programs with robots mimicking what it means to be human. Whether it’s Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man or Lt. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, I find it interesting that feelings seem to be an important part of what it means to be truly human in these depictions.

· Feelings point them toward sex but that is the definition of carnality.

· Same is true of Jesus – Dan Brown thinks Jesus couldn’t have been a real man, a real human if he didn’t have sex.

· Scriptures see it different
o Second reading: God became fully human by suffering
o First reading: Suffering is meaningful because it shows a person’s willingness to be obedient to God
o Gospel: whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served
but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

· To be truly human as Jesus was fully human doesn’t mean being a masochist. But it does mean being willing to recognize a divine motive in all things, even suffering. Only a real human could suffer the way Jesus did.

· During Preparation of gifts “May the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Gives us hope that Jesus who willingly entered into this human condition of suffering will someday take away suffering when we share in his divinity.

What are you holding onto?

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ
Grace and peace in God, our Father, through our humble Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit be with you all. As I read over this Sunday’s readings this past week, I couldn’t help but think, jeesh! These are pretty hard readings to live out. Pretty hard to preach about too. If only I had looked far enough ahead of time to notice just how hard they were. I could have made the pastor preach on these readings! But, considering the fact that he didn’t make me preach on divorce and remarriage last week, I should probably suck it up and preach this week.
Each time that this set of readings comes around, it reminds me of a story that I heard in a homily preparation service that I used to receive. It said, “African hunters have a clever way of trapping monkeys. They slice a coconut in two, hollow it out, and in one half of the shell cut a hole just big enough for a monkey's hand to pass through. Then they place an orange in the other coconut half before fastening together the two halves of the coconut shell. Finally, they secure the coconut to a tree with a rope, retreat into the bushes, and wait. Sooner or later, an unsuspecting monkey swings by, smells the delicious orange, and discovers its location inside the coconut. The monkey then slips its hand through the small hole, grasps the orange, and tries to pull it through the hole. Of course, the orange won't come out; it's too big for the hole. To no avail the persistent monkey continues to pull and pull, never realizing the danger it is in. While the monkey struggles with the orange, the hunters approach and capture the monkey by throwing a net over it. As long as the monkey keeps its fist wrapped around the orange, the monkey is trapped. The only way the monkey could save its life is to let go of the orange and flee.” How many of us, myself included, would be just as trapped in that tree if there was a roll of hundred dollar bills in the coconut? Or perhaps the key to a luxury automobile? Or maybe a huge diamond wedding ring from that certain man or woman we’ve been dating for a long time?
In today’s gospel, we hear the story of a man who is trapped by the need for success. He asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. He asks the very man who will win eternal life for him by suffering and dying on the cross what he can do to be saved. For some reason, whenever I hear this story, I can’t help but imagine Jesus as a very kind-hearted but somewhat gruff old rabbi instructing a precocious student a hard life lesson. Jesus’ response is to obey the law. But the boy isn’t satisfied. He thinks to himself that that can’t be all there is to do. There has to be more. He seems to say in a very frustrated tone, "Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth." as though he finds fulfillment of the law so easy that it has lost its challenge.
I can just imagine Jesus smiling with love at this young man. And I love the fact that St. Mark includes a detail about how Jesus felt about this faithful-to-a-fault young man. It says that he loved him so he challenged him. He challenged him to give up the coconut so that he could inherit eternal life. “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."
The boy’s response is one of obstinace. How could he give up all that he had and follow Jesus? It’s too much to ask. And, yet, it’s not as though Jesus doesn’t turn to each of us and ask something similar. It’s a terrible economy. I might not have my job next week. How can I donate money to the poor? I work forty hours a week or more and that’s not even counting all the preparation I have to do at home. How can I make it to my child’s school event to show them support? I’m too busy! I have always imagined that I would get married and have three or four children with a beautiful wife. I can’t be called to give up all that great stuff for something else that’s great, something like priesthood. We all have excuses that seem perfectly legitimate. What good is it for the boy to sell all he has and give it to the poor without first investigating if the poor will actually use it wisely and not waste it on booze, drugs, and prostitutes? Jesus doesn’t care. The point that he’s trying to drive home is that wealth forces us to pay attention to it, attention that could be paid to God and the family of God. What is stuck between those coconut halves for you? And how can you let it go and be free?

All are welcome but there are expectations to be part

This past week, I had a rather thought provoking question from one of the parishioners here at St. Thomas. The person asked what it means to sing the Song “All are Welcome” while simultaneously saying that non-Catholics are not allowed to receive Holy Eucharist. How are we building a house where love is found and all are safely led. A place where saints and children dwell and hearts learn to forgive…” if we say to newcomers that they aren’t allowed to share in the seminal experience of catholic liturgy, the Eucharist.

Our readings guide us along the path toward an answer to this ecumenically sensitive question. Both the first reading and gospel deal with situations in which people are doing Godly things in seemingly ungodly circumstances. The first reading tells of a time when Moses’ flock has grown to a point that it was difficult for him to minister to them. So, God takes some of the Spirit that he put on Moses and distributes it to 72 other men. The problem is that, for some reason, only 70 came to the meeting tent where the Spirit was distributed. The other two, Eldad and Medad, were on the list of people invited but they never showed up. It’s not clear whose fault it is that they are absent, whether they weren’t invited or if they were and declined the invitation. Regardless they soon find themselves doing the work of prophesy.

What happens next is very interesting. Joshua, Moses assistant, demands that Moses stop them. Why, you may ask, would he demand this of his superior? It’s important to keep two things in mind about this. The first is that Joshua was a priest, the leader of the group of priests, in fact, who would have been in charge of the meeting tent that held the Ark of the Covenant. So, in Joshua’s mind, it simply doesn’t make sense that something holy could happen anywhere else, let alone in the most secular of all places, in camp. Secondly, since Joshua is sort of a High Priest before the temple High Priests were set-up, Joshua probably thought it was his responsibility to be present for holy things to take place. How could Eldad and Medad have had something holy happen to them if he wasn’t there to witness it. It boggles the mind! Moses’ response to the Joshua’s complaints is profoundly empowering: “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets! Would that the Lord might bestow his Spirit on them all!”

Similarly, in the gospel, the apostle John hears about someone driving out demons in Jesus’ name who does not follow them. Jesus tells John and the other apostles that, “There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can, at the same time, speak ill of me… Whoever is not against us is for us.” It seems that Jesus is basically informing John and the other apostles that there is an openness to faith present in this person that should be encouraged and not snuffed out.
If we were to stop there, we may conclude from both of these passages that we, Catholics, have no right to restrict someone from receiving Holy Eucharist. All are Welcome to come to the table of the Lord and receive. Yet, there’s more to the message than just those two quotes. Jesus continues by saying that there are expectations of life for being part of the kingdom of God. One cannot sin and be considered part of the kingdom of God. In rather graphic terms, Jesus tells his listeners that they need to get rid of whatever causes them to sin, whether it be a hand, a foot, an eye, or something else, it’s better to enter the kingdom of God without these things than to be eternally punished with them.

So, All are Welcome in this place but we must be aware of what we are being welcomed to. We are being invited to live a life of conversion. A life that seeks to get rid of anything that gets in the way of our relationship to God. And, while this is not the only place where holy things happen, we know that something uniquely holy happens here. This is where we are reminded of our need to live life simply, both financially and morally. We need to be open to getting rid of what causes us to sin and know that our willingness to do so is what determines if we are in communion or out-of-communion with this community. All are Welcome in this place, true. But, all of us, catholic and non-catholic alike, must know that there are demands put upon us if we intend to become or remain a part of this body of Christ.

The difficulty we feel in living out a faithful life

My Dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God our Father through our Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Recently I was visiting with a professor who was frustrated by a group of students she took on a service trip during her college’s January term. Being a sociologist, she was trying to expose them to the frustration of being impoverished through the eyes of the people living in New Orleans. So, she first spent two weeks teaching them a bit about the history of the city and all that took place surrounding hurricane Katrina and all the utter incompetence that surrounded that event for the people living in that area. Then she took the students down to actually see the devastation and help in a few service projects. On the way back to Iowa, the group encountered some rough weather-related travel meaning that forced them to spend an extra night in a hotel two hours from home. The students immediately started complaining about not getting home when they expected and having to sleep in a hotel and having to spend more money on food than their $5 food voucher would cover. The professor was frustrated because she felt like the students had missed the entire point of the exercise. They had just visited a place where an entire town was uprooted from homes and livelihoods for months if not years. And, unlike the people of New Orleans, the students knew that their residence hall would still be sitting there fully in tact when they got back the next day.

Our readings are filled with this kind of frustration this week. The first reading talked about a group of people who know that what they believe is evil. They know that they are proposing to defy God’s law and they even know that there is someone trying to get them to do what is right, the so-called “just man.” And yet, rather than listen to the just man, they seem to go out of their way to discount him, even trying to use his own words to discredit him. They say, “Let us put him to a shameful death; for according to his own words ‘God will take care of him.’” Ultimately, they are claiming to seek proof all the while knowing that they are really trying to make the just seem unjust.

Similarly in the second reading, the Apostle James is focusing us on wisdom. Just like St. Paul has lists of virtues and vices to describe if Christians live by the spirit or by the law, so St. James has a beautiful list of virtues for those who live in wisdom. And yet, St. James knows that there are some who don’t live in wisdom. He says, “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” It seems to me that James is rooting all conflict in an unwillingness to have sympathy for another person. We create conflict because we are unwilling to ask someone for something. We are unwilling because we fear that the other person might not give us what we want. Or, if we do ask, we are only concerned with what will benefit us and not concerned with what will benefit the other person.

Lastly there is the gospel where Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to die a humbling death and that, because of his humility, he will be exalted through resurrection. The apostles almost immediately start to fight about who is going to be the greatest. And Jesus’ response is that the apostles must learn to be servants to the least powerful among us, children.

All three readings deal with the difficulty we feel when our lives don’t match up with our professed belief. Weather it be a politician who claims to hate high taxes while attaching all kinds of spending amendments to bills, the priest that pounds the pulpit calling married people to greater fidelity while himself having a girlfriend on the side, or the teacher who gets angry at students for not studying while they themselves haven’t updated tests or quizzes in years, we all struggle to live our lives in conformity to our values. We all make mistakes on occasion. Our readings warn us that, when it happens, when someone points out to us our own hypocrisy, there are ways we shouldn’t react. We shouldn’t simply discount the other person by ignoring our hypocrisy and focusing on the mistakes of that person, as the author of the book of wisdom warned us. And, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help and, instead, create a war as James warned us. Instead, we should seek out the, “wisdom from above…(that) is….pure…peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity” and we should work to be of humble service to one another.

Who are the poor and what does it matter?

My Dear Brothers and Sister in Christ

Grace and peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you in the power of the Holy Spirit. I think if there’s one thing we need to pray for in this country right now, it’s that we find both grace and peace in the health care debate. I keep watching this debate with a mix of fascination and disgust each time that a news story comes on TV about it. The level of vitriol from liberals and conservatives alike at the Town Hall meetings is really kind of disgusting. From the people who brought guns to a town hall meeting to the senator who asked one of his constituents on what planet she spent most of her time to the man who bit off another person’ finger, there has been a complete lack of respect and a flourishing level of misinformation flowing from all sides of this argument. What I truly found disturbing, however, was what happened in Red Bank, New Jersey when a wheelchair bound woman was shouted down at one of these town hall meetings. When one man was asked why he heckled and jeered at her, his response was, “I don’t know how a handicapped woman in chair has more rights than I do.” While it’s not entirely surprising considering the fact that, whenever I see one of these town hall meetings, rude and obnoxious behavior seems to be the standard modus operandi it is still disappointing considering the American notion of equality we prize.

If only we had Jesus around to cure everybody for free. Then we wouldn’t even need a health care industry. And yet, would you believe that’s not entirely true. At the time of Jesus, there was a kind of system involving a bunch of people called healers. They would do a lot of things that Jesus did in this gospel. They would mix up strange concoctions and put it on whatever ailed the person. They would make noises and shout commandments at the person. And, most importantly, they would build up a reputation for themselves as a healer so that others would come to them and pay them to be healed. What is surprising about Jesus in this story is not that he does the healing or even the way he heals the man. It’s that he does everything that a professional faith healer does but then asks that the person healed not make his reputation known. And, even though it had the exact opposite effect, I don’t think that was his intent. In other words, I don’t think he was telling those he healed not to tell others they had been healed knowing full well that they would tell other infirmed individuals and he would get the credit. Jesus isn’t displaying a kind of false modesty that typifies the politician among us. I think Jesus was doing it for a different purpose entirely that he knew they wouldn’t get. I think Jesus dared to look beyond the sickness and see the suffering person underneath and, in that person, he saw the image and likeness of himself.

Fr. Jon, last week, talked about the letter of James and how we get to hear about that letter for the next several weeks. This week, we heard James offering a challenge to us to live out the teaching Jesus is giving to us. “Show no partiality…” says James. We here at St. Thomas often take up a collection for the poor that we put in baskets around this very pulpit. And yet, how do we act when the poor come into our church? Do we intentionally sit at the edge of the pew so they cannot possibly sit next to us? Do we pretend to be occupied at the greeting at the beginning of mass and at the sign of peace so that we don’t have to shake their hand? Or, have we become a church that bureaucratically bullies the poor out of our doors by setting up unfriendly policies that allow them into the building while simultaneously telling them that’s as far as they’re going to get? Do we want poor people and persons with disabilities on our commissions and committees to lend advice and suggestions? Have we, as Catholics, become so whitewashed, so modern, so professional, so middle class that the disabled and the poor are just an inconvenience that we put up with, if we have to, on Sunday?

The name Catholic means “universal”, not in the sense of anything goes/believe what you want to believe/I don’t have the right to insist that there is absolute right or wrong. In the sense that, as James asked in the second reading today, “…have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs?” We might not be screaming ad hominem ignorant clichés at each other like they are at town hall meetings, thank goodness. But, when people come to St. Thomas, do you think they see a church that is going to be open to them and make them feel part of the body of Christ regardless who they look like or do you think they leave feeling like they have go to the mall buy a pair of khaki pants and a polo?

IRB

I have been asked by Iowa State University to be on a board that reviews research involving human subjects. To me, it's a honor to be able to serve a University for which I have great respect and to be able to bring God into a conversation on this campus without every mentioning his name.

For the last two days, I've been staring at my computer trying to National Institutes of Health training related to being on this board. It was strangely exhilarating to finish looking over 20-30 pages of material and then take a four, five, or six question quiz and pass. I was so worried that I wouldn't pass at each of them and the instant affirmation was good. I'm glad it's over but it's nice to be invited onto campus to be part of this committee.

Why liturgical dance is evil...

At some point in the last year, I was at a catholic convention and saw a bumper sticker that said, "Don't blame me. I voted for the black guy!" with a picture of the Pope on it. The implication was the person was displeased with the current pope. I wonder how they would feel knowing these are the views of the "black guy."

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=97109

Sisters...Sisters...there were never such devoted sisters...

I was reading our local paper, an act I tend to avoid, and found this article. My first reaction was to ask why the Associated Press always makes the hierarchy of the catholic church seem so tyrannical. I generally don't buy the conservative argument that there is a liberal bias in the media that slants all stories in that direction. And yet, when a woman religious criticizes a review for "misogyny in the church and especially distrust of women who are not directly and submissively under male, ecclesiastical control" while the "inquiry is being directed by Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior general of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus" makes me angry.

So, the implication is that the church should encourage and foster congregations of women religious who make every effort to dissent from church teaching. We should tell the screaming child in the restaurant that free expression is a good thing and encourage them to keep screaming. Why? And, isn't the fact that these congregations can't attract young people to join them at least some indication that there is a privation of fecundity? I can't pay my college students to consider joining these congregations. They're all graying and, to be honest, will probably all be gone by the time I'm ready to retire. The ones that are attracting new members are the ones that have maintained fidelity to the church. Why would anyone want to be around a group of people that hate the organization they profess to be a part of? To me, it's like the wife that constantly expects the husband to change. Either you love him as he is or you'll eventually get a divorce. The church is just trying to avoid a divorce. The Ap, on the other hand, seems like the annoying best friend spreading rumors and sowing the seeds of doubt.

Weddings

I've grown to appreciate weddings in the past year. It started when I had a series of people that I really respect and love get married. The easiest example of this is my good friend and coworker Misty and her husband and my new friend Jacob. They were just so much in love that they made it easy for me to do the wedding. Recently, I had two awesome weddings in one weekend, my good friends James and Jennifer and the next day my friends Jeff and Amy. I used to HATE doing weddings. I got cynical.

So, I started to get cocky. I'm going to be the guy that does like 40 weddings a year and have people want to get married by him.

Now a new issue has reared it's head. It's not the wedding planner. I was worried about that phenomenon before and have only had one person have a wedding planner in eight years of priesthood. I tend to be a jerk to these people because they are totally unnecessary and will only serve to have another leader barking orders and creating chaos.

But, I just know that, after this dancing procession thing that appeared in the youtube machine...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

...it's just a question of time until I have students that want to do this and I'm going to have to say, "no." I know it was cute. It would have been PERFECT for the reception. But it doesn't belong in the wedding liturgy. I'm hoping it will be five years before I get my first request. I'll let you know if I'm right or not.

The supernatural faith inculcated by a miracle

If you are a student of History and, in particular, a student of American History, you may already know that Thomas Jefferson wrote his own Bible. Well, he didn’t exactly write it inasmuch as take the Bible as we know it, take out a few things, and make it a Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. He described the principles that guided him in this endeavor in a letter to friend and fellow American founder John Adams, as a need to “strip off the artificial vestments in which (the true words) have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves.” He only trusted the gospels and, even then, only the teachings of Jesus and none of the miracles, believing if you just find the words of Jesus, “There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
I imagine most of us can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson in some ways. He was really saying that the supernatural elements of the gospels are kind of embarrassing. I mean who would take mud nowadays, splatter it on someone’s eyes, and expect that the person would be able to see afterward? And aren’t we all a little skeptical of the healings Jesus performed? Couldn’t you just as easily explain them as the power of positive thought instead of the miraculous intervention by God?
Most of the time I hear someone preach about this particular gospel, that fear of the supernatural seems to come through clearly. I heard a priest suggest that what really happened at this meal was not miraculous. It wasn’t that Jesus took five loaves and two fish, blessed them, broke them, and gave them to 5000 men. It was a lesson in sharing. When the people saw the young man willing to offer his five loaves, they were likewise willing to offer what they had and then there was more than enough. It transforms the point of the gospel into one about sharing what we have with those around us. The problem with that interpretation is that it tells the EXACT OPPOSITE point of the one found in this gospel.
This gospel has two apostles that are a part of it and who act as two different types of disciples. The first is Philip. Philip is the believer whose response seems to indicate a purely natural faith. He believes what he can see, touch, taste, and smell. When Jesus tells him to get enough food to feed the crowd, Philip’s natural reaction is skepticism. “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?…Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Philip didn’t have the right to be skeptical. I imagine we’ve all looked at budgets and check books and known that bills were coming down the pike and wondered where the money was going to come from. Philip doesn’t know that a miracle is about to take place here. Yet, if had been paying attention, I think he should have.
Andrew, on the other hand, is the one with supernatural faith. Jesus told him to find food and so he does. The boy’s five barley loaves and two fish become the basis for a miracle. Andrew had the ability to put his skepticism in check and believe that God can work miracles where most people cannot see solutions.
The idea of supernatural faith is frightening, nonetheless. Heck, even the word supernatural has been corrupted by Science Fiction shows to indicate the presence of ghosts, demons, aliens, and other weird phenomena. Having a supernatural faith means simply believing that more is out there than what our senses can perceive. It means trusting that there is a God who loves you and who wants you to love him back, a prospect that is as frightening now as it was at the time of Thomas Jefferson. I say it’s frightening because if we believe in a supernatural component to God, we have to have a relationship to a God who, as Paul said in the second reading, “is over all and through all and in all.” God is complete transcendent, completely immanent, and wanting to communicate with us. It would be much easier to dismiss these contradictions in favor of a teacher of morality who passes on whit and wisdom to us. But, if we limit the Bible to something that we can grasp and accept and take out anything that we find challenging, we have to ask are we creator or creature?

Why your priest may find it hard to move.

I'm not moving this year. I'm going to be in Ames for at least one more year, maybe longer. But, I was thinking about something this morning.

Most priests are introverts. This doesn't mean that they are loners, although some are. It just means we tend to need time by ourselves. Most priests are very social in large groups but it's not something they look forward to doing. Being an introvert means that I want to form strong friendships with a small number of people and tend to get drained by multiple "professional" relationships that aren't very deep. I think this is why most priests (myself included) hate staff meetings. The relationships formed in staff meetings are necessarily shallow. The main concern is to make sure one person isn't getting into the space of another person.

The real challenge of ministry, however, is realizing that you will form deep relationships in parishes and then have to leave those relationships behind as you enter a new parish. There are some priests who make sure they don't form friendships with parishioners in order to make sure that they never have to say goodbye. To be honest, there's something to be said for that attitude. I know that, in my short time as a priest, I've been accused of "taking sides" in a disagreement between two people because I was closer to one of the parties than another. I came into priesthood thinking that I would keep a distance between me and my parishioners and have consistently failed miserably in this endeavor. It's too hard for me to minister to a group of people and not get to know them. The relationships I see in the gospels and in the letters of Paul point to me to the need to be "in relationship" with people.

I don't think I'm the only priest who has ever made friends with parishioners. I think most priests do. And, if they're like me, they need them to be effective preachers and teachers. We learn what people are struggling with from the people we interact with the most. This next Tuesday, my current pastor will move to a new assignment. He's been here for 16 years and has many good friendships here. His replacement was here and left. When he was here, he had my job of working mostly with college students. Please pray for these men as they have to say goodbye to old friends and start the process of making new ones.

No Homily this weekend

As a priest, I have few weekends that I have totally "off". The Code of Canon Law, the official "law book" of the catholic church seems to envision that a priest would only be away from his parish three weekends per year. AND there's a way of looking at it in which the code wants us to be gone during the week and back for the weekend. Most priests don't view it that way, however.

I was gone to Wichita, Kansas for a wedding on Saturday. I concelebrated on Sunday at mass but didn't have to preach, thank goodness. That's why there's no homily. However, I do have the beginnings of a homily that I will preach in the future...

The wedding was for a former student who has become a very close friend in the past few years, both while he was a student and after. I've been priveliged to have the situation happen a few times in this campus ministry assignment where a young man or woman and I have such great experiences together and work so closely that we want to keep in touch after they leave and it develops into a pretty deep friendship. That's what happened with Jeff, the groom. In fact, I was a groomsman in the wedding because of our friendship. He said that there would be sufficient numbers of priests so he wanted me to be closer, to be a groomsman. I was flattered so I accepted, something that I'll likely never do again despite the fact that it went really well this time. It wasn't weird to wear a tux because it wasn't really all that different than wearing my dress clerical clothes. It wasn't even all that weird to participate in mass as a part of the congregation instead of as a concelebrant. The weird part was having a woman on my arm as I entered and exited a room. I haven't done that for a very long time and it just wasn't symbolically right. I'm not supposed to be in a "couple" situation. I have forsaken that for the sake of the Kingdom. On the one hand, it's good to know just how deep my celibacy is felt in me and it's good to be able to explain that to people in the future why I don't feel comfortable doing this.

I've learned that I am a person that often has to learn things "the hard way." I should be able to see how things will play out before I do but I often don't and end up wishing I would have done something different. It's just who I am. I hope it makes me a better confessor. I know people make mistakes. It's not like we plan them. There are times when the lesson that was learned from the mistake was "worth" making the mistake in the first place.

To feel like Paul and give people peace

Yesterday evening, I had the opportunity to celebrate mass for the people of Holy Family parish in Parkersburg. The pastor there, Fr. Dennis Quint, was celebrating a wedding in Ames for me so I offered a few months ago to switch with him, not knowing the tragic events that would take place this week for this community. In case you haven’t heard, a former student of Applington-Parkersburg High School walked into the weight room of that school early Wednesday morning and shot the beloved football coach, Mr. Ed Thomas. As you probably know, it adds to the tragedy this community has felt when a tornado cut a mile-wide path through the city a little over thirteen months ago. Despite a massive clean up and rebuild effort, there is still so much to do. As I drove into town, I noticed the phenomenon everyone had warned me about. There are no trees on the entire south side of town. You can see where the tornado went both by the neighborhoods filled entirely with new homes and the complete lack of trees in the skyline there verses the more northern area which still has older homes and taller, though some badly gnarled, trees. I tried to drive slowly to see what was left to do in terms of clean up. What no one could have prepared me for was a in the heart of the road that the tornado went down that had a listing of state championships won by Coach Thomas. I couldn’t help but think that this sign, most likely intended to be a defiant statement about the town’s strength and resiliency now stands as a reminder of the fragility of life and the in frustration, fear, and confusion that surrounds this inexplicably evil event.

I had been praying since Wednesday about what I should say to this community. The readings seemed to be a perfect fit for it. “God did not make death nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.” So says the first reading from Wisdom. Jesus sees two hurting people in the gospel and gives them healing and peace. His statement to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction" is a profoundly comforting source of grace for those undergoing affliction. I had in my mind what I thought would be a beautiful, consoling, ten minute homily utilizing those two statements to talk about the fact that death is not God’s will but is a by product of the evil one and finish up by talking about how we need to be healed by Christ and be able to go in peace. Then, I got a call from Fr. Quint telling me that he had invited a person from Catholic Charities to talk at the end of mass so I wouldn’t even need to preach. Which, in some ways, was a good thing. It allowed me more time to think about things and put together this homily.

This Sunday, for all intents and purposes, marks the end of the Year of St. Paul. During this past year, we were encouraged by the Pope Benedict XVI to increase our ecumenical efforts through the intercession of St. Paul, utilize St. Paul in special Biblical studies and programs, and spend personal time studying him. I have tried in several homily to give special focus to St. Paul. Nonetheless, most of you probably have had no idea of this was the year of St. Paul but hopefully some of you did. If there’s one thing in the life of Paul that is true it’s that he had his fair share of experiences similar to mine in Parkersburg. At one point, Paul had to defend himself to the Corinthians against charges that since he broke his promise to visit, he was a liar. He had been jailed for proclaiming Christ and had nearly been killed by a mob of rock throwing town’s people a few months prior to the jailing. I mean he wasn’t just sitting around. He was busy. I can imagine St. Paul being prepared to walk into a city to preach and evangelize only to find out that some circumstance seemed to prevent him from doing so. There may have been an earlier Christian evangelizer that had a few of the details wrong and so he would have to straighten things out. Or, they may have already heard about Paul, thinking that he was a pest. Paul doesn’t really talk about these situations for some reason. I’d like to believe it is because his heart was so filled with the love of Jesus that he couldn’t help but evangelize. He fully believed that he was spreading the Good News to all people and probably even got energy from doing so.

The more I prayed over these readings, the more I realized that Paul speaks to us today, in my opinion, a more authentic model of Christian hope. Saying to grieving people that God did not make death could seem like you’re trying to make excuses for the most high. If God didn’t make death, why didn’t he at least stop it from happening? He does it for others, after all. He did it for some woman in the gospel. Why couldn’t he have done it for Ed Thomas? And, if death is from the evil one, then it could appear that I’m saying that the psychologically disturbed kid was from the devil. But, of course, we believe all life is a gift from God so I don’t believe this kid is the devil or that he should be killed or anything terrible like that. He and his family will suffer in different ways than the Thomas’ family.

I think St. Paul is much more encouraging because he uses an analogy of faith to talk about money. He basically said that God shared so much with us in his Son. We are, consequently, called to share that with others. Paul says that the same should be true of money. It’s not that the lazy should be rewarded but that those who cannot provide for themselves should receive the attention of those who have an abundance. I’d like to suggest that the same is true of good fortune. We all know people who are a lot worse off than we are. It may be financially but it just as easily could be spiritually, morally, or in terms of hope. How can we share the hope given to us in Christ with those who have no hope?

Corpus Christi

Last Sunday for the homily, I had a B homily, I'd say. I talked about how the Eucharist sacramentally ties us into the redemptive suffering of Christ and challenged people to not call it bread and wine because we weren't saved by bread and wine but by the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. The worst part was that I was struggling to come up with an example of someone leaving a legacy and, at the last moment the idea came to me. I said it was Andrew Carnegie who, after he read his own (falsely run) obituary in the paper, decided to change his life for the better. But, instead, it was Alfred Nobel.

I'm thinking about that today with the particular set of readings in which Paul is worried about how his people are being affected by "super apostles". He's worried that, since they can speak better and have more flash and glamor, they will lead his new Christians away from the truth to some form of Gnosticism or Arianism or some other heresy. It's amazing that, as I look at the big fundamentalist church down the road and think about the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons moving into town my first thought isn't, "Maybe they'll get some non churched folks to go to a church" but "How many catholics will be led astray by this cult?" Two thousand years later but, in so many ways, the same issues.

The Church must continue listening to the Spirit in order to be guided

A few months ago, I went to a meeting with Archbishop Hanus called the Priests’ council. This body brings together priests from different parts of the diocese in order for the Archbishop to articulate his vision and listen to the concerns of his people from various parts of the diocese. It was my responsibility to bring him the concerns of all the parishes close to Highway 30 from Tama to Ames, an area we call the Marshalltown deanery. Several of the priests had heard that the insurance rates for our parishes were going to increase dramatically so I was given the responsibility of asking about the particulars increase. The Archbishop and his advisors did a very comprehensive presentation that lasted for a few hours on Sunday night and again on Monday morning. Since I was the youngest person in the room, I thought it best to listen and not ask my question too early. Finally, toward the end of things, the Archbishop asked for questions. I raised my hand and asked about the insurance rates and saw this pained look come across his face. He acknowledged that the rates were likely going to triple because of the floods in Cedar Rapids, the tornado in Parkersburg, and the immigration raid in Postville. I was kind of taken aback because, while I could understand why natural disasters like floods and tornadoes would affect insurance, it had never occurred to me that federal agents raiding a processing plant would likewise affect insurance. So, being young and insatiably curious, I asked what the connection was. The same pained look deepened in the Archbishop’s face and he said that the government’s actions were a disaster. They separated families. People were afraid to go back to their homes out of fear that the government would leave their children and deport the illegal member to Mexico. There were rumors that a sizable immigrant population was living under a bridge in town because of the situation of fear. Up until this point, I have to admit that I was at least not entirely pro immigrant. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a xenophobe like Lou Dobbs. But, I believed that the government’s right to protect its borders meant that it should prosecute those people here illegally and send them back to their native countries. But, hearing the Archbishop tell us stories of families being separated, homes being abandoned, and individuals being punished while the producer finds a way to avoid persecution, just made me angry. And, what especially made me angry was when the Archbishop told us that he receives far more letters criticizing him over his stance on immigration than he ever did criticizing the church’s handling of the sexual abuse crisis.

We heard in the first reading today that the first gift of the Spirit was the gift of tongues. In the sixties, a group of very feeling-oriented spiritual people used this phrase almost exclusively about their particular spirituality. This charismatic spirituality involved a person being so overwhelmed by the Spirit that they start making what seems to most people as nonsense sounds. But, to the person involved in charismatic prayer, these nonsense sounds are a gift from the Spirit to show God’s presence to them. But, that’s not what is happening in the first reading. The first gift of tongues was, in a sense, a miraculous learning of other languages and dialects. It was a Rosetta Stone experience of learning a foreign language quickly and well. This happened in a way that seemed to reverse the Genesis experience of the tower of Babel in which the entire believing world was separated by words. Now, God the one who brought the Word into the world will bring the world together through words.

This unity of faith is what we have been given both as a gift and a responsibility. The Spirit is what guides us to help continue bringing about greater unity in the church. And, it is our responsibility to strive to bring that unity ever more fully to the church. One of my greatest frustrations about this country is that there are those who seem to believe that English is the only real language that exists. This attitude has become especially troublesome since the church made the concession of translating the mass into the vernacular. Whereas before 1960, it was obvious that the church was larger than the United States, was universal, because the entire mass was in Latin. Nowadays we only pray in English. We may occasionally pray Kyrie Eleison during Lent which is a Greek phrase. And we sing “Alleluia”, which is Aramaic…sort of. I fear that we are in danger of losing the mission given to us both in the first reading and the gospel, to bring ALL PEOPLE, not just Americans, together in Christ.

So, how do we get out of this? Let us listen to the Apostle Paul from the second reading. In that reading, Paul said, “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” In other words, there is room for diversity amongst the unified body of Christ. There’s a part of me that wonders how we would react in most Catholic Church's in this country if the stranger was Latino, African, or Asian, especially if the person had a strange language or spirituality to go along with the strangeness of the color of their skin. This is as much if not more of a challenge to me as it is to anyone here: what are we doing to make the stranger to feel welcome, to be open to the diversity of gifts in order to bring together the one body of Christ?

Some observations

I haven't been posting much recently. I'm honestly not sure why that is. I think I just don't remember to do it. There's definitely a lot that deserves mention. For instance, the supreme court of California didn't expand the definition of marriage to include relationships that aren't marriages. There's the new supreme court nominee...who I admit knowing nothing of. There's the stuff surrounding water boarding in which Mancow, the Chicago based radio talk show host, came to terms with the fact that it is torture after he had it done to him.

Personally, I went to the ordination last Sunday. I even preached about going there for Sunday mass. It was so awe inspiring. I didn't get to go last year for various reasons but I got to go this year and it really renewed my commitment to priesthood. I think I was especially receptive since I was coming off a week of vacation which consisted of camping and relaxing around Dubuque. But, it is just amazing that men still open themselves up to the possibility that God is calling them to be a priest. It is so edifying to realize that there will be others after me. And to feel the show of support for these young men as their family and friends come together reminds me of my own ordination seven years ago.

What made it even more special was that one of the ordinands and two of the servers have Iowa State connections. One of them, in fact, was here just last year. Even though this place can drive me crazy sometimes, men still find the path to God in the midst of this chaos. Praise God for working in the messiness of a hectic university setting!

Sixth Sunday of Easter...God first loves us

My dear friends in Christ

Grace and love and peace to you in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I love spring. I love the fact that we aren’t going to get anymore snow on the ground. I love feeling the warmth of the sun on my head and arms as I sit next to my camper on a relaxing day off. There’s just something about this time of year that makes our readings explode of the page for me. LOVE! Our readings today are filled with love. It made me thing: it’s one thing to say that I love the sun. It’ s another thing to say, “I love you.” It’s a lot harder, a lot more intimate, isn’t. How do we show that we love one another?

There are safe ways to show love to one another. There’s the hand shake. There’s the high five. And, as we might remember from the election, there’s also the “fist bump” that the President and First Lady like to exchange. All of these are signs that are pretty safe to do with anyone you meet, right?

Then, there are more intimate ways of showing love. There’s the hug. Now I know some of you think that a hug should be bestowed on almost everyone and probably don’t agree that it’s more intimate. I can remember being seminary with just such a guy. At the end of a class where he had disagreed with a professor quite vehemently on a point, the seminarian wanted to hug the professor. The stuffy professor immediately fired back, “That’s why these tables are here, to prevent you from doing that! I think we’d all agree that a kiss is very intimate, right. It’ s not something you do for just anyone. During the next few months, I get to celebrate several wedding and, to be honest, my favorite part is when they exchange the kiss at the end of the liturgy. To me, this is something so beautiful about a man and woman exchanging that first kiss as husband and wife and doing so in front of the congregation of friends and family.

As I was praying about this, I asked myself, how do we show love to God? So far, none of the ways I talked about demonstrating love work for showing love to God. We can’t shake hands with God. We can’t hug God. We can’t fist bump God. So what can we do? We can sit in prayer and think in our hearts over and over again “I love you.” It’s really a powerful exercise and one that I encourage you to do sometime. But, that’s not very active. Love usually involves action. I show love by doing those simple actions to people. What are the actions I can do to show God love. What did our readings tell us to do?

“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an expiation for our sins.” This quote from the second reading today sums it all up. The point of love is not that we loved God but that he loves us and gave us his son so that we might life through him. Oftentimes with the sacrament of reconciliation, I hear people express statements that seem to infer that they have to earn God’s love. People seem to think that, since they haven’t done a good enough job as a Christian, God won’t love them anymore. But, that’s not possible. God is love. And God, who is love, cannot but love us. This amazing realization is what Peter was teaching in the Conelius’ house. This was so astounding to Cornelius that he felt like Peter himself must have been some kind of god, instead of just working for him. Peter’s reaction of lifting him and telling him that he is not a god would have seemed rather harsh to the people around. It reminds me of Pope John XXII who decided to abolish the tradition of kissing the pope’s feet. He didn’t want people bending over seeming to worship his feet just to show him honor and respect. A hug was better for John XXIII.

Nonetheless, even though God is love and loves us dearly, we are told that we need to live in God’s love. In other words, this doesn’t mean that our lives can be terrible and God sits by like a neglectful parent still loving even when the children are wreaking havoc on the neighborhood. We are told to keep the commandments. Of course, Jesus simplified them down for us to love God and love neighbor. All our life needs to be filled with this. We are told to lay down our lives for our friends. We shouldn’t put our own needs and comfort first, in other words. We need to be looking around to see who is in need in order to be of service to them. Lastly, we are told to go and bear fruit. To me, this is why I feel honored to be present when a man and woman express God’s love for them in marriage: because they can go forth and bear the fruit of children. It’s what makes the marriage of husband and wife unique and worth celebrating and why it is such an honor to watch them exchange their first kiss as husband and wife. For one second, we get to witness two people experiencing God’s love for them and it inspires us to live in that love too.

Post 600...The good shepherd wants the best for all his sheep

My dear brothers and sister in Christ
Grace and Peace in God, our Father through the good shepherd, Christ, in the power of the Spirit. I give thanks to God always for calling me to this ministry of presence with you. A few weeks ago, I was invited into one of our Religious Ed classrooms to answer questions from the students. I started off talking to them all about Holy Orders and then just answered general questions. After I had completed the closing prayer and thought we would all leave, one little girl said she had one more question. She said that, while driving with her mom, sometimes she sees a sign that says, “No salvation outside of Christ” and she and her mom both think that’s bad because it makes it seem like people in other religions are going to hell. I sat there for a second and tried to think of a one sentence, very short answer to her comment/question and just had to give up. I told her that I’d have to come back and talk about that some other time because it’s such a tough question to understand.
On this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we are confronted with this very question. The first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles tells of Peter’s speech to the Jewish leadership called the Sanhedrin. This same group had condemned Jesus and now they’re getting an ear full from Peter. At one point, Peter said of Jesus, “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” This seems to clearly state to what the sign says that the mother and daughter find so offensive. But, then we hear the gospel today and Jesus seems to leave the door open to dialogue on the subject. He says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead…” These seem like contradictory statements. Either only Christians will be in heaven or there are others that Jesus is leading to be with him in eternity. So, who is right?
Nine years ago, the Vatican released a controversial document entitled Dominus Jesus that, I believe can help us resolve this tension. It says, “It must therefore be firmly believed as a truth of Catholic faith that the universal salvific will of the One and Triune God is offered and accomplished once for all in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.
Bearing in mind this article of faith, theology today, in its reflection on the existence of other religious experiences and on their meaning in God's salvific plan, is invited to explore if and in what way the historical figures and positive elements of these religions may fall within the divine plan of salvation...The Second Vatican Council, in fact, has stated that: ‘the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude, but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a participation in this one source’. The content of this participated mediation should be explored more deeply, but must remain always consistent with the principle of Christ's unique mediation: ‘Although participated forms of mediation of different kinds and degrees are not excluded, they acquire meaning and value only from Christ's own mediation, and they cannot be understood as parallel or complementary to his’. Hence, those solutions that propose a salvific action of God beyond the unique mediation of Christ would be contrary to Christian and Catholic faith.”
In other words, we do not believe that all other religions aside from Christianity are evil. But, we do believe that, if those religions have hope for salvation, it is because of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension. How do we work this out? Some theologians have put forward the notion of anonymous christianity. This means that, even though other people in other religions believe they aren’t Christian, they really are. It’s just that Christ is working anonymously in them to the extent that Christ, who is love, is working in them. I prefer to listen to Christ’s words. I sort of cropped off the end of the quote from earlier. He actually said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.” In other words, Christ is working to bring us together but it will only be when we are gathered together in the one fold, in heaven. As we continue to celebrate the joy-filled hope of resurrection during this Easter season, let us also continue to pray that Christ’s death and resurrection may lead to greater unity among all people who believe in God.

Surrounded by first communion celebrations

Last weekend, at my little rural parish, I celebrate first communion. I had to get up very early (for me) and get there by 7:45 but the kids were just awesome. I love that little parish. I'm really learning who the families are out there since I've been in this assignment for four years. I can see the value of stability in this position. It would be really neat for me if I could be here long enough to watch the kids that I gave first communion to when I first got here be confirmed. I don't anticipate that will happen but one can dream.

This weekend I get to relive the experience, in a sense, by doing it for my University parish. The format is different but I love the excitement of the kids. Some of them have been watching their parents go up and receive for years and will now finally be able to do it themselves. I think it was at St. Thomas that there was a little kid who would go away crying each time he couldn't receive Jesus in the Holy Sacrament. I got to give that kid communion a year ago. I can't wait to see the surprises of who can receive this year.

So, here's what happened last Sunday

It occurred to me that, even though Thomas' faith seemed to be at issue, the real thing that was lacking was Thomas love was lacking. If he really loved Jesus, he would have been excited to think that his friend was alive. But, his love didn't transcend death. I talked about how we need to be more loving in this world and allow that to define who we are so that, when people see us love, they will see Christ and be able to express with Thomas, "My Lord, and my God."

So I focused, in the end, on being loving instead of on personal prayer.

A little bit of inspiration for the tough times.

Ever felt like you just can't get through?

Try this...

The importance of being personal

My homily actually went in a slightly different direction than this in the end but this gives you an idea of what I originally had in mind. I'll talk about why I changed it mid weekend at some point this week.

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ
May the Grace and Peace of our resurrected savior come upon you as we continue to celebrate his resurrection. He is risen! He is truly risen! Alleluia. Each Second Sunday of Easter, we hear the story of doubting Thomas. And, to be honest, I usually focus most of my preaching on the person of Thomas and ask you to put yourself in his place. In some ways, it’ easy to do that. Not only were none of us there when they crucified the Lord but none of us were there when he appeared to the twelve in the upper room. We all rely on the testimony of our ancestors in the faith, each year getting farther and farther and farther from their testimony. So, there is something to be said for focusing our attention on the saint of doubt-filled faith. But, as you probably suspect by now, the more I prayed this week about this, the more I found myself focusing on the other ten apostles.
Imagine for a second that you were the ones sitting in the upper room when Jesus appeared. You’re afraid because of the violent, cruel, and public death of your friend and leader and now you’re basically hiding away to make sure you don’t follow him down the road to crucifixion. Suddenly, when things seem totally hopeless, the very man you thought was dead is standing in your midst. You know he’s dead. You were with him when they came to arrest him. Your friends witnessed the murder and told you all about it. So how is he standing here just as Sr. Lorraine and the Bereavement Committee come walking up to your home to start preparing the funeral? You’re undoubtedly excited but you also confused and kind of freaked out. He’s not a ghost. He’s not a zombie. He’s not a mummy. He’s not an angel. He’s just Jesus, though not exactly like he was before. And, right once you work up the nerve to say, “So, what the heck is going on here, friend?” he disappears.
Of course you’d have to be excited and would want to share this with others. But, what do you say? How could you explain to people that the person they saw brutally murdered just three days before appeared to you and shared a meal? I know, personally, I’d start with my closest friends and see how that goes before I start telling the general public and end up in a straight jacket. Let’s start with the one apostle not in the room, Thomas. But, when we tell him, he doesn’t believe what we’ve said and he won’t believe until he can probe the wounds and see for himself that it is Jesus. “Gosh,” I may say to myself, “I didn’t probe his wounds. Am I even sure that this was really Jesus?” And suddenly, even we who had seen the risen Lord are doubting that are actually have. In my mind, this is where we are. Sure, as I said before, none of us have ever had direct contact with Jesus. None of us have ever walked with him. But, hopefully, all of us have encountered him in prayer. All of us encounter him in this upper room of the church in the sacrament of his body and blood. All of us encounter him where two or three are gathered together. Yet, there is a sense of mystery about it each of these experiences. In prayer, we both have faith that Christ is present and wonder if this is just our imagination doing all the work. In the sacraments, we are told that it’s Jesus’ body and blood but it looks a lot like bread and wine to me. And, if this is the gathered body of Christ on earth, why are there so many sinners, myself included?
In some ways, life would be a lot easier if we could somehow recreate the situation from the first reading. This passage that I like to refer to as the part of the Bible that fundamentalists ignore, harkens back to a time when the church was still very small and it was expected that the end was near. So, since Jesus is going to return tomorrow, they sold all their stuff and lived in common, each person sharing what they have with the rest of the community. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don’t live in that same situation. And, to be honest, oftentimes, when we turn to our friends and neighbors to support our faith, they simply raise even more doubts, complaining about church teachings or figures within the church that they don’t like. It’s, in some way, the down side to being a part of a 1.31 billion person religion. Sometimes, you may feel more burdened by the people in your community than uplifted, like the apostles were by Thomas. In these times, I believe we are called to enter even more deeply into our upper rooms in personal prayer. Make the time each day to make room for the encounter with God so that our communal celebration on Sunday is even more profound. That way, when our faith is tested by the doubting Thomases of our world, we can remain strong and remain in the faith, which has been handed on to us by our ancestors and, in turn, hand it on to others.

A truly Catholic student at Notre Dame!

One of my brother priests told me about this story from the Des Moines Register about a student from Notre Dame who is skipping his graduation in order to stay in the church and pray for the commencement speaker, President Obama. Now, I'm sure that there will be those who will immediately label it as racism but, to me, it's encouraging.

When the leaders of institutions like Notre Dame refuse to make Catholic theology a priority and reward people who support abortion and stem cell research with honors, it really goes to show how pathetic the Vatican II generation is at promoting a catholic world view. They claim this will open up a dialogue with him but it will not. You can't dialogue with a politician any more than you can dialogue with a terrorist. If we want to dialogue with them, we don't invite them to campus to preach and then give them an honorary doctorate. We invite them to sit on a panel debating the merits of infanticide and give them a certificate of participation or something. But this attitude that we need to engage the modern world by letting them preach the gospel of death on our campuses is just ridiculous.

I'm especially proud that this is an Iowan who is standing up here and doing what is right. We should pray for him and for his parents because the progressive side of the Catholic Church cannot tolerate orthodoxy. You can believe whatever you want but you cannot possibly uphold the teachings of the Catholic Church. This young man is going to be harassed. Pray that he stay strong.

A Blessed Triduum and good start to Easter

For some reason this year, I decided that I wasn't going to update too quickly on my Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday experience. So, here it is...

I was out at my little rural parish, which tends to be more "in step" with the way I like to celebrate these "high holy days" of the church year. Holy Thursday had a small congregation of mainly the core members. There were probably somewhere between 50 and 75 people there. I love this mass since it is one where I wash the feet of twelve parishioners in the same way that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. It's a liturgy that, for me, focuses on the role of the priest in the community.

Good Friday was beautiful, although I forgot to take the Good Friday collection for the Holy Land for the second year in a row. If we lose Beit Jala this year to the Saracens, it's all my fault! No, but in all seriousness, I feel bad for not doing it, especially since the Holy Land was such a formative place for my faith. The carrying of the cross and veneration of that cross is so tied to Jerusalem and the church of the Holy Sepulcher that I can't believe I forgot.

I decided not to attend the Easter Vigil this year. I won't get many years where that will be possible so I decided to do it this year. But that meant that I started Easter on Sunday morning, which seemed a little strange. Nonetheless, the absence of an Easter Vigil was deftly made up for by my little rural parish. Incense! Candles! Easter Candle! Renewal of Baptismal Promises! Chanting all the prayers! Alleluia! It was incredible. It sort of confirmed for me that I really do hope to be a pastor someday. I made the decisions out there, which means I followed what the book calls for. It really felt celebratory.

He is Risen! He is truly Risen!

A blast from the past

So, as a kid, I was fascinated with this song. Maybe it will dislodge some memories...or just drive you crazy with its repetitive rhythms. In any case, pop goes the world!

The view from my porch...yuck

This is what I saw this afternoon from my porch. It started to snow sometime before seven because, as of seven a.m., there was a layer on the ground.



Welcome to spring in Iowa!

Statement of the Iowa Catholic bishops regarding the Iowa Supreme Court decision

We, the Roman Catholic Bishops of Iowa, strongly disagree with the decision of the Iowa Supreme Court which strikes down Iowa's law defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman. This decision rejects the wisdom of thousands of years of human history. It implements a novel understanding of marriage, which will grievously harm families and children.

This unwarranted social engineering attacks the good that marriage offers to society, especially the good of children, and weakens the critical relationship between marriage and parenting. We will resolutely continue to protect and promote marriage as a union between a man and a woman because of its unique and historical contribution to the common good.

We uphold the right of all people to be treated with respect and live in peace. This right, like the right to enter into a permanent, monogamous marriage of one man and one woman, derives directly from the intrinsic dignity of the human person. These are rights which the state has the duty to recognize and protect. They are not something that the state creates or may redefine. The citizens of every state who have been given the opportunity have voted to preserve civil marriage as it has been recognized and defined since the beginning of recorded history.

Therefore, we exhort Catholics and other citizens of Iowa to recognize the clear need for a constitutional amendment on marriage. We affirm that supporting the ideal of marriage as the stable union of one man and one woman is necessary to defend marriage, families, children, and the common good.


Most Rev. Jerome Hanus, OSB, Archbishop of Dubuque
Most Rev. R. Walker Nickless, Bishop of Sioux City
Most Rev. Martin Amos, Bishop of Davenport
Most Rev. Richard Pates, Bishop of Des Moines



[For a fuller explanation of our position, check the "Statements" section on the website of the Iowa Catholic Conference, www.iowacatholicconference.org. An alert is available in the Action Center.]

I'm just frustrated.

Today the state of Iowa decided that equal protection under the law meant that they had the right to turn marriage into a relationship that does not involve the possibility of involving new human life. Marriage no longer has to do with a husband and a wife who are capable of having children and, because of the uniqueness of that relationship, it deserves some protection. Now it just has to do with two people that think they love one another right now, regardless of their sex.

The worst thing is that children will suffer for this. We already see children as accidental consequences of recreational activities. Now, since this ruling basically solidifies that marriage should not involve them, we will continue to look upon them as disposable unless they are totally, one hundred percent wanted.

And, of course, since we cannot imagine a situation in which everyone gets whatever they want whenever they want it wherever they want it, the church is going to have to figure out some sort of way to deal with lawsuits that will inevitably come from gays and lesbians denied marriage in the church. We may lose our hospitals by refusing to perform abortions. Will we soon have to forsake a sacrament by refusing to marry gays?

What were you doing four years ago?

Four years ago today, I was helping with a TEC retreat at Wahlert High School. During that year, I was very ambitious. I was associate pastor for one parish and I helped out in five others. It was a good time but very busy as well. I was asked to help with this retreat and I said yes before I really thought about the consequences. It would make more sense if the guy who was associate pastor for one parish. But I decided to do it. During one of the breaks, the priest leader (who I was helping) had us all go to the media room of Wahlert High School and he told us that Pope John Paul II was not expected to live much longer. He had put together a power point presentation on the life of JP II and led us in prayer. The Pope died shortly thereafter.

I've said this before and I think it's doubly true today. During his life, I didn't know his writing well. He was the pope for my growing up years but I had no real idea of the theology of the body or how he really carried on the reforms of the Vatican II or all the many encyclicals he wrote. But, for three years of my priesthood I prayed for John Paul, our Pope because that's who he was. A Pope for us all. A gift given by God to his church to lead through tough times. Four years ago, I was going the same thing I am doing today: joining with the chorus of voices chanting "Santo Subito!" True holiness is easily seen in the life and love of JPII.


JPII: We love you!

My annual Lenten cold arrives

Sorry about not posting my homily this weekend. To sum up, I talked about the grain of wheat that falls to the earth and dies but remains a grain of wheat. I preached in my little rural parish and told them that I'm always leery of getting too agrarian in my homilies out of fear since I'm a city slicker. I am always concerned that I'm going to sound like the guy who owns a dog lecturing at a dog catcher's conference.

In any case, I awoke last night with a scratchy, dry throat and realized that my annual Lenten cold has arrive. It tends to show up around now and stick around the third or fourth week of Easter. I attribute it to the changing seasons and the stress associated with that. The good thing is that it gives me more sympathy for the sick. I hate having a cold. I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it would be to have to live with sickness all the time.

more from Zenit.org

I've been taking some time recently to get caught up on catholic news ever since the entire controversy regarding the Pope's comments about condoms almost entirely passed me by. So, while perusing, I found this story about how Great Britain is going to advertise for abortion. The bishops there are appalled. I wonder what the point is. Do we advertise for heart bypass surgery? Do we advertise for breast reduction surgery? If, as the pro-abortion forces say, it is a medical procedure, then why would you advertise for it?

But, that's sort of the point isn't it? They want it to be advertised so that people will think it's just a normal part of life. They want to remove the guilt that people feel when they murder someone by making it seem like any other normal thing. It's just like buying life insurance, or getting a fish sandwich from McDonalds.

But, of course, it's not and I think people will see that. We know murder when we see it. We might not like to admit it but a commercial isn't going to convince someone that abortion is just like going to an amusement park anymore than a commercial for a gun seller is going to convince people that guns don't kill people.

The Pope and condoms

In case you didn't hear, the pope recently visited Africa and, among other things, said that Africa didn't condoms to stop the spread of Aids. Of course, people flipped out. The obvious solution to AIDS is condoms, right. I found a very interesting article on zenit.org that commented the following on that attitude from a woman working in Africa.

"The Pope," Busingye emphasized, "is doing nothing else but defending and supporting precisely that which will be useful for helping these people: affirming the meaning of life and the dignity of the human being."

She continued: "Those who attack him have interests to defend, but the Pope has no such interests: he is concerned about us, and he is concerned about Africa.

"He is not the one, who is bringing mines to blow up our children, our children who become soldiers, who become amputees, without ears, without mouths, unable to swallow saliva: and what should we give them, condoms?

"When a few years ago there was genocide in Rwanda, everyone stood by and watched. Nearby there is a tiny town, which could have been protected, and no one did anything.

"My relatives were there, and they all died in an inhumane way. No one cared, and now they are coming here with condoms."

Have you ever seen this picture?

I was sent an email that contained this picture this morning.
Sometimes God sends both a man and a woman to call his people to holiness.

Benedict and Scholastica
Francis and Claire
Mary and Jesus

Our generation has these: John Paul the Great and Mother Teresa. One fell the scourge of communism. The other served the poor in India one person at a time. The influence of both will be felt for generations.

What I really like about this picture is the joy reflected in their faces. I get the sense that they aren't Brad and Angelina posing for paparazzi. They are expressing the hope that is inherent in their life of faith.

We don’t need to earn God’s salvation but we still have to do good works

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ
Grace to you and Peace in Christ Jesus, our Lord, as we continue on our Lenten journey of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. In today’s readings, we hear three difficult passages that challenge our conceptions of God’s relationship to us and our relationship to God. In fact, the second reading and gospel are favorite passages of our Protestant brothers and sisters. You may recognize the gospel as the oft cited John 3:16 from sporting events, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that those who might believe in him might not die but have eternal life.” On the other hand, one could argue that the second reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was the passage that caused the Reformation. So, this Sunday more than most, I’m going to do something that I don’t normally do: I’m going to focus on a reading other than the gospel for this homily and see what we can understand from that reading that may help us understand better the gospel.
The letter of Paul to the Ephesians is very interesting, not the least reason being that the title may be a complete fabrication. Several scholars don’t even believe Paul wrote this letter, preferring it to have been written by one of Paul’s disciples after the apostle’s death and given his attribution since most of the theology was based on his teaching. Further, the letter may not have been intended for the Ephesians at all. The earliest manuscripts have no notation as to its destination. Marcion, an anti-Semitic early church heretic, said that it was to the Laodicians. Oftentimes, when Paul writes a letter to a specific community, there are names of people he has met there that he wants to greet. However, in this letter, he only ever greets one person, a fellow named Tychicus. Now, imagine for a second that you had lived in a town for three years and spent a lot of time with the leaders of the town helping them to convert to Christianity. You made tents during the day but you spent a lot of time at night and during both Sabbaths (Saturday for the Jews and Sunday for the Christians) evangelizing. Wouldn’t you think you would have a ton of people he would want to greet? I think, if anything, there were just too many to mention.
I mention these two controversies because I think they help us understand a bit of the controversy surrounding this letter and, perhaps, a bit of what we need to understand about this letter in our own day. If Paul did write this letter, he did it basically on his deathbed. And, he did so with a yearning for “better days.” And, he may have done so wishing that he could have done things a little better. You may remember from a few weeks ago, Paul had to defend himself against charges that he was lazy. He made a promise to return to the Corinthians and he couldn’t quite get there so he sent a second letter instead. Paul has regrets that he failed in ministry, that some didn’t hear the gospel because he couldn’t keep on evangelizing. Did Paul fail in gaining heaven because of this failure in ministry?
In some ways, in the passage we read from the letter to the Ephesians, Paul is answering the question of how much we have to do in order to earn salvation. Paul’s answer: there is nothing we CAN do to EARN salvation. Salvation is freely offered to us in Christ. He says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” It’s not as though my giving up pop for Lent has saved me. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the life-giving sacrifice that ends all sacrifices. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He is the light that conquers all darkness. He is the word that breaks the silence of doubt. Jesus alone can save us.
And yet, does this mean that we are left entirely off the hook? Does it mean that the people who just spent an entire week serving the poor on spring break didn’t earn salvation by doing that? Yes it does. We can’t earn heaven. We can, however, cooperate with the gift that is offered to us. For, even though we don’t earn heaven by doing good works, Paul says in the very next sentence, “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” As believers, God points out to us certain things that we should do in order to grow in the grace that he offers us. Just like a gifted athlete or musician or architect or janitor still needs to train each day and grow in that gift, so we Christians must continue to grow in grace throughout our lives. And, the amazing thing is that God has kind of set us up for these good works. Even the good works we do are really prepared for us by God. The sense of injustice at seeing flood damaged areas after Hurricane Katrina has forced people to work for those who have been homeless for years. The sense of injustice at seeing places of deep poverty in our own country as is present the Appalachia mountains. The sense of injustice that our politicians take private planes while deriding those who come before them in the same private planes and while ignoring those who, in Washington D.C., are incredibly poor and destitute. The sense of injustice at seeing people in our own state ravaged by floods in Cedar Rapids being ignored while their homes and businesses remain abandoned and unlivable. God planted this sense of injustice in the hearts of some of our parishioners and it forced them to do good works. They heard the call of God to reach out in loving service to do good works for those in need in those places I listed and we thank them for representing this community and for listening so intently to God’s voice calling them to that service. But, thankfully, that call to do good works does not simply exist in these exceptional calls to go somewhere else and show God’s love to a foreign people. It happens in our daily lives, we just need to be intent enough to listen. That’s why the church continues the call that our Jewish brothers and sisters received so long ago. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Prayer is where we hear the voice of God. Fasting is what leaves space in our crowded lives. Almsgiving is where we fill that space with the love of God lived out in good works. It is truly by grace that we have been saved through faith. It is not from us; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should (find eternal life) in them.

The Great American Novel

Please read the following post with the same seriousness that the conservative commentator Stephen Colbert gives to his television program. In other words, there's a core of truth (that I'm actually writing a book) but that there's a lot of fluff surrounding it (that I think it's going to be worth publishing/good).

Twain? Hemmingway? Poe? Garrison Keiller? Soon we will all wonder who in the heck any of these people are. I'm writing the Great American Novel! It's going to be my first foray into the genre and, considering how much of an incredible priest that I've become in the last 7 years, I'm sure I'll conquer this as well. It's a jaunty novel about a retired military priest that comes home to parish work and has to adjust to the egalitarian, bureaucratic model of contemporary parish ministry. It's sure to be on the New York Times best seller list as soon as it is written. I have three of the ten chapters done at this point so there is a lot of work to do. Of course, since I'm the hardest working guy in the area, I'm sure it'll be done weeks earlier than anyone else could get it done.

Do you really want to be the beloved Son?

My dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ
Grace and Peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit who calls us this week to the mountain be with you all. Last week, Fr. Ev very eloquently walked us through that place of testing that is the desert. He reminded us that each of us walk through the desert in one way or another in our daily lives. The desert is a rough place to have to walk. And Lent is nothing if not a desert. Yet, this week, I was relieved to hear that my readings were the mountain, the place of encounter with God. The mountain is where Moses encountered God in the form of the burning bush. The mountain is where, upon his return from Egypt having freed the people of Israel from slavery, God gave them the law. The mountain is where Solomon built the temple, that perennial place of encounter with God for our Jewish brothers and sisters. And, yet, there is a tradition about the place where Solomon built the temple, a tradition that this place was also the scene of the first reading, the sacrifice of Isaac.
The story of the sacrifice of Isaac is, for me, one of the most perplexing stories about God in the Old Testament. In order to test the father, you order him to kill his son. What was God trying to test in Abraham? His faith? I’d think there are better ways to test Abraham’s faith than telling him to kill Isaac. Try not hanging around for a while and see if he still acts like you matter, that’s what God did with Christian mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Calcutta. That can’t be right. Was he trying to test his trust? Abraham was a man who went for a very long time without having children. He trusted when God told him that he would be the father of many generations of believers. Abraham was nothing if not a person of faith and trust. What about his obedience? That seems more plausible, given the particular test that is offered. And, yet, I can’t help but feel that there is a more sane way of doing this than offering first-born sacrifice. I know that, if a father today were to approach me with the same assertion that Abraham is making in the first reading that God told him to kill his first-born son, I would be certain of one thing: God did not do that. God doesn’t want us to kill. God doesn’t need us to kill to show our obedience. God gave us life and wants us to live. So, what is happening here?
The question that surround this story is shared by our Jewish and our Muslim friends, by the way, though I suspect the conclusion we come to is slightly different than theirs. One thing we do know is that first-born sacrifice was much more common at the time of Abraham and Isaac than it was at the time of Christ and certainly than it is now. Most of the peoples surrounding Abraham and his tribe would have sacrificed their first-born son to appease gods. So, part of what his happening here is an open declaration that human sacrifice is not going to have a place with the followers of the one true God. And, yet, I couldn’t help but notice something from our Christian perspective that caught my ear. Isaac is called, “your only one, whom you love” which is kind of weird because Abraham had another son by his maid named Ishmael and, as any father will tell you, he probably loved both Isaac and Ishmael, even is his older son was a bit wild. It makes you wonder if Sarah had some kind of suspicion about Abraham’s intentions Such a suspicion, in fact, that she followed them up the mountain and hid behind a rock pretending to be God. Probably not but that would be a better sitcom explanation. As Christians, we hear this phrase “whom you love” and the phrase from the gospel, “my beloved Son” and we hear a connecting identifier, beloved. Both sons are loved by their father. Both sons are ordered by God to be sacrificed, Isaac to test his father’s obedience and Jesus to free the world from its sin. And, yet, even as we set up this comparison, we can hear our own hypocrisy. We cannot understand why God would order the death of Isaac and call it off at the last minute and we spend millennia trying to understand it. Yet, when God’s son was sent before humans to be judged, we had no clemency. Humanity collectively shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” We needed Christ’s sacrifice because of our own iniquities, the beloved for the sake of those who forgot how to love.
On this Lenten mountain, we once again encounter the God who gave his life for us out of love, the just for the sake of the unjust. Let us remember that, all our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is intended to make us more loving, intended to give us a heart closer to the beloved who gave his life for us.

A homily that is very late in coming

I preached this a week and a half ago, before Lent even began. But, I think it was good to help people prepare for lent?

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ
Grace and Peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ be with you in the power of the Spirit that draws us all close to him who made us. Have you ever had one of those experiences in life in which God seemed so close to you that it almost felt like you were being embraced by pure love? For some of you it may have been receiving one of the sacraments, maybe in the midst of confirmation, receiving the sacrament of reconciliation or perhaps during your wedding ceremony. For others of you, it may have happened in the midst of an especially difficult time in your life such as a health crisis or a difficult relationship or work situation that forced you to turn to God who gave you peace in the midst of a storm. Still others may have experienced God on a retreat of some kind like the Antioch retreat that some of our students are on this weekend. In my own life, there have been many such times when God seemed so close that I could only feel privileged at being invited into the relationship. From the high of my ordination to the lows of times feeling like a failure with some grades in seminary, to the great retreat experiences I’ve had at Conception Abbey and St. Meinrads, I do feel blessed because of how close God was to me.
And, yet, if I were to look over my life, and I imagine most of you would say the same thing, there have been more times when God seemed an aloof, remote concept than times when God seemed so close that I could get a hug. It seems to me that our scripture passages want us to focus us in this mystery of transcendence and immanence. In some way, each of the readings warn us against attitudes that can get in the way of our relationship with God. Starting with the first reading, we hear the prophet Isaiah say something remarkable. The job of the prophet is to call people back to holiness. I’ll say this till I’m blue in the face. A prophet usually doesn’t predict the future inasmuch as tell people that if they don’t change, the future will be bad. The prophet usually wants to remind people of how good things were in the past so that they’ll stop doing what they’re doing in the present. But, in the passage we just heard, Isaiah tells his people not to think purely in terms of the past. In fact, something new is happening here! He says that in the past, people still grew weary of God, people still sinned. Isaiah even ties it into the Exodus event by reminding the people that, as their ancestors were being freed, they still complained that God wasn’t giving them enough food or good enough food. But, don’t we all have the tendency to do that; to make the past seem so much better than the present. It was so much easier to be holy in the past. We didn’t have the complexities that we do now. But, if we are honest with ourselves, it’s not the complexities that make it difficult to have a close relationship to God. It’s our use of those things. We cannot use an idealized view of history as an obstacle to God.
Next we hear from Paul in the second reading, a reading that took me a couple of times to understand what he was saying. I kept asking myself what he was talking about with all the “yes’s” and “no’s” and Jesus was all “Yes”. Well, Paul had promised to visit the Corinthians in the first letter and this letter is, in part, answering critics there that are basically calling him a liar. Paul is acknowledging that things didn’t go the way he was expecting but also acknowledging that, if he was supposed to get there, nothing would have stopped him from getting there. In some ways, Paul is having to get past past faults in order to evangelize to the people. Our past has a way of handicapping us from living in the present. We let past failures and regrets stop us from living life fully in the present. And, at times, we can feel most frustrated that, when we were failing, when it felt like we most needed God in our life, God was not there. It was like we were on that beach in the footprints poem dragging ourselves along instead of being carried by God. But, if that’s what happened, it’s only because we couldn’t let go of past hurts in order to have a good relationship with God.
Lastly, we reach the gospel. Last week, Fr. Schatz pointed out to us that we were going to hear another healing and so we did. I couldn’t help but ask this week: which is easier to forgive someone or heal someone. And, of course, it’s easier to forgive someone. But, this question that Jesus asks is really tricky for the scribes who knew the bible in and out. On the one hand, only God can forgive sins. But, on the other, in several places throughout the Old Testament, healing the lame is a sign of God’s presence among us. So, which is easier, something that only God can do or something else that only God can do? Then, Jesus goes on to do both of them. The scribes would have been infuriated! But, the amazing thing is that we know that the scribes view is the real problem. Forgiveness is the desire of God, God wants us to forgive one another. And, God doesn’t desire for us to be sick. He wants people to be healthy so that we can glorify him. The scribes were all too willing to put restrictions on God and what God wants. I think we do the same thing in our relationship to God. We wonder why God would want to love us, and demand a sign from him. Or, we think that prayer and holiness are the job of a few, not the vocation of all the baptized. We cannot let our own limited understanding of God stop us from loving God either.
As we draw closer to the great Lenten retreat that we begin this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, let us not let an idealized view of history, all our regrets, or our limited understanding of God stop us from feeling God’s love but, instead, let us once again turn away from sin so that we can turn towards God.

Olberman on children

I like Keith Olbermann. I listen to his show each morning while working out. I agree with him on finances. I think that a flat tax would be terrible for this country and that trickle down economic theory is why this country is bankrupt. I'm not a socialist but I don't think democrats are either. They just believe those with more need to contribute more and those with less...well you follow right.

Okay, then he starts talking about moral issues and I get uncomfortable. In particular, last night he said, "...and yes, oh ye Puritans among us! Americans will pay for CONTRACEPTIVES. Taxpayer dollars for evil condoms and horrible birth control pills. Contraceptives for states that already have the option of providing for low income fornicators, fornication that would otherwise lead to untold, unwanted pregnancies, unwanted babies, unwanted abortions, unwanted drains on families, unwanted drains on the national economy. Yes. The congressional economic office estimates two hundred million dollars saved over five years for contraceptives and family planning...."

Here's my issue. I'm not being puritanical when I worry that contraceptives will destroy the world. I'm being Catholic. And I worry when children are seen as "unwanted". A child isn't some thing that you want or don't want. A child is a person that you get the privilege of raising. But, let's not miss the most insidious part. He said, "Contraceptives for states that already have the option for providing for low income fornicators..." You may have thought he was deriding the Republicans for their dislike of the poor. But, what I heard him saying is that the best thing the poor can do to be rich is prevent the expense of children and contraceptives will do that.

Margaret Sanger, founder of planned parenthood, thought that the way to get rid of minorities was by having them kill their babies. That's why planned parenthood is so abortion happy. Their founder was, why wouldn't they continue that on. I think Olbermann is echoing the sentiments of a lot of liberals, and it's what annoys me. To get rid of the poor, we need to have THEM kill their babies so they don't have a second generation.

Until we learn to see sex in its appropriate place within marriage and confined to that relationship and that marriage is the only place where new life should be introduced, we will continue to get this wrong. Sex isn't just one aspect of dating and abortion isn't the only way we've managed to hurt life. It all started when we devalued sex to the level of a recreational sport.