Bishops encourage us to do something most catholics don't even know what it means

The United States Bishops have asked catholics to pray a novena for the election. I found out about it on their website. It's interesting because I think most American Catholics don't even know what a novena is, let alone to committing to pray for something for nine straight days....

It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.

This harsh phrase was uttered by Christ in the Gospel this weekend toward a Canaanite woman. You can find it here. It seems rather uncharacteristic from the same man who wouldn't carry out a death sentence for a woman who was caught committing adultery despite the clarity of the law. (Although it appears our evangelical brothers and sisters are trying to eliminate this passage from the gospel.)

I think that we miss a nuance. I believe Jesus was "playing along" to make a point: If Jesus disciples think that a Canaanite is not worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, how are they going to deal with a Greek or a Gaulite? They need to see the universality of salvation and not be so exclusive. Jesus wants all people saved, not just the people we like.

the government inspector

I got back from the Twin cities yesterday after watching a really great play with the above title. It was just a lot of fun, though somewhat crass. But it was really funny at the same time. It was, as always, good to see my friend Fr. Bob Hart. And I really do like the Twin Cities.

Heroes is back!

A friend sent me this link to a preview for the new season. I was genuinely disappointed in the one that happened a year ago and even more upset when the story was disbanded for a year while the writers got their money but now I'm getting excited. I am giving this ultimatum, though. If the shows aren't as good as they were the first season this fall, then I'm not going to watch it. I'll watch the Fox rip off called Fringe that you can find previewed here. I need to be entertained not annoyed.

Pray for our deacons

This Sunday is the feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon of the Roman Church who was martyred in the second century. He is the patron of deacons and mine is preaching for me as a result. So, let's pray for the deacons who faithfully assist the priests and bishops and carry out the important work of serving widows.

Three weddings in one weekend...yikes

I've never before done more than one wedding on a weekend. I've been in a church when I had one and another priest (the pastor) had one either the day before or the day after. This weekend, I have one wedding today, one tomorrow and one on Sunday. I have no idea if I need to prepare for this or not. Jumping Jacks? Sprints? Intense concentration on people's names?

I have a feeling it won't be the first time that I'll have a wedding during Sunday mass, however. I'm afraid that, in the future, with a declining number of priests, this will be a solution to the problem of having too many liturgies on one weekend. I haven't yet had a wedding where the normal Sunday mass crowd couldn't have been there. And it's not as though there has been a wedding liturgy that has added so much time to the normal Sunday Mass that people would be angry. The exclusivity would suffer. It would turn it from a private family mass into a celebration of the whole church. I'm sure some will bristle, especially those that are really shy! But those catholics that think a Saturday wedding covers for Sunday mass would finally feel vidicated.

Have you read the new liturgy translation?

You can find it here. There are more changes that we've been led to believe. The good news is that we have until 2010 until the changes take effect. We may be able to use the next two years to help our people get used to them slowly.

The Lord be with you
And with your spirit

and

Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.

Lord, I am not worthy
that you should enter under my roof,
but only say the word
and my soul shall be healed.

I have a feeling, however, that we won't do anything until we are forced to do something.

Grace builds on nature

This weekends gospel (found here) was the feeding of the 5000 men, not counting women and children. One commentary I read suggested that Jesus needed the apostles to bring forth their five loaves and two fish in order to perform the miracle. I couldn't help but think of how God fed his people in the desert without the people putting forth anything. I thought that the lesson was a limitation on the power of God (he could only do it if he had the five loaves and two fish effectively treating him more like a god than God) and more that the ordinary way God works in this world is by building on the work that we have already done. If there wasn't the desire on our part and the willingness to do whatever it takes to make sure God's work done, then we have effectively turned God into a god again by making him an interference in this world.

What I'm trying to articulate is the long-held catholic belief that grace builds on nature, that God waits to see the choices we make and then adds to the work that we are doing. That's the lesson that I took from the gospel. Jesus first challenged the disciples to ask the right question. They wanted to ask Jesus to dismiss the crowd so that they could get food but, instead, he wanted them to get them food for themselves. Then, he took their meager effort (five loaves and two fish) and made it abundant.

Saying goodbye again...

As a priest/campus minister, my job is to walk with men and women during four years of college to help them find God when they are lost and help them avoid getting lost in the first place if at all possible. All priests have to say goodbye and hello a million times to a bunch of new people but the tough part of this job is that it happens so damn often. I get to know awesome young people and then realize that the same awesome young people that have become such an important part of my life are off to a job or graduate school. It's as inevitable as it is tragic in many ways.

Immediately after the school year is over, I am so tired that I'm glad that the students are gone. But, by this part of the summer, I realize that some of those students who have become such an important part of my life are not going to come back. It's like the realization doesn't hit me until this part of the year. And, even though I'm sure that others will step up and fill their shoes, they can never replace the great people that have been here.

I'm going to miss them.

17th Sunday in Ordinary time: The search

Oftentimes, when I think about prayer, I have that text from Jesus that we read at the Ash Wednesday liturgy in mind, “But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” As an introvert, this appeals to me. In fact, I have even converted what should be my spare bedroom into a private chapel, an “inner room” of sorts, for my daily prayer. And, even though I think we should all have to have our favorite prayer places we visit daily, whether they be an empty room at home, a favorite outdoor chair or a daily visit to the blessed sacrament in the tabernacle, I don’t think that Jesus was saying that this is the ONLY way that Jesus wanted us to pray. The context of that message, which also comes from the Gospel of Matthew, is that we shouldn’t pray just so that others will see us and admire us for how holy we are. Prayer is our communication with God.

Last Sunday night, I was camping with my family down in Adventureland Campground. I was in my fold-down camper and my parents were in their larger, hard side camper. At midnight, I saw a flash of lightening that seemed to be immediately followed by a loud canon-shot of fire. This was followed by about a half hour of these frighteningly close lightening strikes, though they eventually stopped and I rolled over and went back to sleep. About an hour later, a heavy rain shower with some light hail moved through though they eventually stopped and I rolled over and went back to sleep. At three fifteen, I woke up annoyed because the tornado sirens wouldn’t turn off. I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep. Thankfully, my dad knocked on my camper door and knocked some sense into me. There was a tornado coming and I needed to get to safety. I stumbled out of my camper at about the same time that the wind and rain hit. I ran toward what I thought was a shelter house only to discover that it was really a completely locked up front office. I had no idea what to do. If I ran to a different building there was no guarantee that it would be unlocked and the only building I knew would be open, the bathroom, was far, far away through rain and winds. I was afraid that, if I started to run, it would hail or a tornado would come and pick me up. I felt cold, scared, and lost. So, I did the only thing I thought I could do. I prayed. I wasn’t locked away in my chapel, though I wished I could have been. I was asking God, through the intercession of the saints, to end this so that I could get back in my camper, change my clothes, get into bed, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Let’s face it, if religion is confined to the purely private recesses of our houses, we are the ones that are going to suffer. We need God just as much in the social parts of our lives as we do in the private. That old truism that there are no atheists in foxholes reminds us of a truism that I think our evangelical brothers and sisters understand better than we do. It’s oftentimes harder to believe in God when life is good than when life is challenging. We may think that the goal of the ideal spiritual life should be to bring us to peace but that’s not authentic Christian spirituality. You may think that was what Paul was saying in the second reading today but when he said, “We know that all things work for good for those who love God,” but this isn’t Paul’s way of saying that it will get better or all good things come to those who wait. Paul expects persecutions and sufferings in the life of Christians. What Paul is expressing is that in the midst of this suffering and persecution, God still brings good things to us as long as we love God. And that’s the journey each of us is called to be on.

The life of the Christian is not meant to be easy. Jesus uses two images of searching for treasure and a willingness to give up everything to have that treasure in order to convey this message to us. The real challenge of the Christian is similar to the challenge Solomon felt in the first reading, how can we know what God wants us to do? It’s the intricate matters of discernment that are hardest: knowing whether we should put aside money for difficult days ahead or give that money to the poor who are having difficult days right now. Knowing whether God is calling me to marry THIS person. Knowing whether God wants me to stay in THIS job or if another job that pays more but is uncertain would be better. These and a million other times when the journey becomes difficult are when we need to have the same prayer that Solomon has in the first reading: God Give your servant an understanding heart to distinguish right from wrong.

Are we weeds or are we wheat?

In 1982, Pope John Paul the Great canonized St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe. St. Maximilian was born in 1894 in a Russian town named Zduńska Wola. He eventually crossed the Russian border into modern day Poland in order to be ordained a priest for the Franciscan order. He seems to be a very good student and preacher, eventually becoming a superior for the order and founding several monasteries, including one in Nagasaki, Japan that, not only survived the Atomic bomb attack in 1945, but exists to this day. St. Maximilian got into some trouble, however, during World War II when it was discovered that he was sheltering Polish Jews and using his radio station to preach against Nazi atrocities. In the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, when ten men were ordered to be starved to death, St. Maximilian stepped forward and offered his life in place of another man who had a wife and children. Before his death, St. Maximilian led his fellow starving prisoners in songs and prayers and, after three weeks without water or food, his Nazi captors murdered him with an injection of carbolic acid. The man he replaced, Franciszek Gajowniczek, not only lived to see his wife and hear of the death of his sons, but also lived tell the tale of the heroism of St. Maximilian Kolbe to the world.

One would think that the canonization of such a great man would be unquestioned. Yet, there were reporters in this country that unearthed statements by St. Maximilian in a 1939 article in which Fr. Kolbe referred to "international Zionism" as the guiding hand behind the "criminal mafia" of Masonry, which in turn was stoking the fires of "atheistic Communism." According to the reporters who unearthed this, it proof that John Paul was acting incorrectly by calling this man a saint. The Vatican’s response was to release 1500 pages of Fr. Kolbe’s writings to show that only 31 of them even refer to Jews and most of those references were what you might call “missionary zeal” for the conversion of people to the faith. This, along with Fr. Kolbe’s zealous protection of up to 2000 Jews during the war seemed to indicate that he was a truly holy man, not a rabid anti-semite.

Stories like St. Maximilian’s and Blessed Pope Pius XII remind me of one thing: we are truly blessed that, in eternity, we are judged by God not by people. We hear this sentiment also in our readings today. From the first reading’s insistence that, despite the fact that God has no reason to be patient with us, he nonetheless is to the gospel’s understanding of the God who patiently waits to clear and burn the weeds while the wheat work to differentiate ourselves so as to be reaped with joy, we hear this message of the leniency of God over and over again. God gives us time to confess our sins, to repent, and to prove to him, what we are really made of. Life is less like a sprint than it is a long-distance endeavor. We don’t just find a moment in time when we can declare ourselves saved, regardless of what our fundamentalist brothers and sisters say. God’s judgment of the status of our soul comes after we have lived our life and shown whether we intend to live as weed or wheat.

If we intend on living as wheat, it doesn’t mean we won’t experience the fire, however. While the weeds will be uselessly burned up, let us remember that it took wheat to make the bread that the Israelites took into the desert. It takes wheat to make the bread, the body of Christ, that we will soon eat. We are the members of the body of Christ. Just as Maximilian Kolbe suffered but somehow found a way to still be joyful when he did so, so we must reflect the light of Christ even in the midst of difficult situations. This is one way that we show the hope that is part of being a member of the body of Christ: when we maintain hope in the most frustrating situations. We may be surrounded by weeds in this world, the friends, family, and coworkers that sow weeds of intolerance, lewdness, pornography, impure language, and other such immorality, we must not give in but, instead, live the wheat life and inspire others to do so as well.

Apartment shopping

I live in what some would call a less than ideal situation. It's an apartment building where a good number of college students live right next to a fraternity. The alley right outside my bedroom is a major thoroughfare during the school year for college students to use while going to and from the bars. I have had five bats and seven mice in my apartment in the three years I've lived there and I always get these weird bugs too.

So, I got approval to look somewhere else for housing. After what I believe was a pretty thorough search, I found a nice apartment about two miles from work. The ironic thing is that this is the first time that I've had to do this. I've never before had to search for an apartment. The only time prior to priesthood that I could have had to do this was when I lived in a traditional rectory with three other priests. I feel like I never know what questions to ask. The one that I chose has a lot of nice amenities so I hope the structure is good. Like, I don't want it to have a lot of frills but be basically falling apart. I hope that's not true. In the end, it's far enough away from campus that, in comparison, it's got to be quiet.

A couple of really interesting stories about mass

It appears that the new sacramentary will never be released. One story said that the bishops rejected the latest translation of the some of the prayers of the mass. It goes down the the division within the US church between so-called liberal and conservative bishops. Do we want more sophisticated language or more simplistic language?

Then, if we do get the translation passed, it appears from another story that the Pope is considering moving the sign of peace and having us say the consecration in Latin. That would be quite a radical change and, given what the Holy Father has said about how we don't need to change the liturgy any more than it has already been changed, I have my doubts.

If we can take any consolation from these stories, it's that I have more time before I have to convince people to say, "And with your spirit" in response to the phrase "The Lord be with you." Just 46 more years to retirement. I think I'll make it!

Wow...that was uncomfortable...

So, yesterday I had a wedding for some really active students. They were really great people and I can't wait to see how they'll be as parents. I didn't have a huge amount of time to prepare a homily but I had what I thought was going to be a very strong homily about on the parable of the sower who scattered seed on four different soils.

Unfortunately, our sacristan didn't show up yesterday so I had to help with that which meant that I was kind of running around until the very beginning of mass. As I walked over to the pulpit to read the gospel, I had the homily in my mind. I opened the book and realized it was in the entirely wrong spot. Since last week was a feast day (Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul) it was still there. So, I frantically looked through the book for fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary time year A. I got to it but it wasn't the parable of the man who scattered seed. It was this one instead.

When I was prepping the homily, I accidentally turned one too many pages. I guess I learned a good lesson about double checking and not just assuming that I actually have things right in the missal.

Did you hear about this

This past Sunday, the Orthodox community living in Ames celebrated their first divine liturgy in our little rural parish of Sts. Peter and Paul. Peter, one of the original 12 called by our Lord near the Sea of Galilee and Paul, a reluctant convert to the faith who eventually became one of (if not THE) best evangelizers in the earliest church both serve as the basis for the church in Rome and many other church's along the way. We pray that our association with this venerated tradition will strengthen unity among the followers of Christ.

If Paul and Peter can come together after a few differences in their ministry, let's pray that this story about our Holy Father pope Benedict will also prove to unite the lungs of Christianity into the one true church.

And I'm back...again

My class is over. I just spent a few days on rest and now I'm back. I think the best way for me to celebrate being back is to take my ordinary day off tomorrow. I'm hoping to go for a nice bike ride tomorrow morning out to my little country parish just to see if I can do it. I don't know what I'll do if I can't. But, hopefully you'll be reading more posts including better homilies.

Crappy homilies for a reason

In taking this class, I've been absorbed in reading theories for my class on families. My homilies have really suffered and I hope my people will forgive that I'm basically borrowing them from past years or stealing ideas from the internet.

So today, for instance, I borrowed the content from this site and talked a lot about water. The problem is that we don't want to hear about water that can't drain. There's water in Iowa City that needs to drain and Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls...and other places. I just couldn't think of a better analogy for "giving what we ourselves received." So, if you have ideas of what you would do, let me know. What would you have done?

Rain, Rain, Go away....but please come back at the end of July or early August

The pattern for the last several years in Iowa has been that we have wet springs and dry falls. We are past the point of a wet spring at this point...closer to a flood of biblical proportions. Streams and rivers that are already out of their banks are filling farm fields that should be filled with the first signs of corn stalks are filled with water. Farmers will suffer. Ethanol will suffer. Food will suffer.

But, I'm fearing that we'll dry up and not get any more rain until late November or early December when it turns to ice like it did last winter. The few plants that barely survive the flood will die because of dehydration. I guess I'll just keep praying that we get the amount of rain that we need and see what happens.

I wish I knew why God did these things. Maybe God does these things because we have forgotten how important he is in our lives. Maybe he figures that a little suffering is good for the soul...it reminds us of the suffering of Christ. In any case, I think we understanding suffering for now. But then again, I'm not God. Maybe there is something more that we need to learn.

I should be studying...

I know that I told you that I wasn't going to post but I couldn't resist. I'm slacking off. I have a test on Tuesday and should be studying for it but I'm going to do this for a couple of minutes before getting back at it.

It felt good to be able to use some of the stuff that I'm learning in class in my homily today. In my family theory class, we're learning about symbolic interaction theory which is a rather weak theory that says that family is a societally constructed reality to help us create meaning out of events and relationships. I talked in today's first reading about how Paul is saying to Timothy that he should follow the example Paul has given him because we all need examples in our lives. But, Christ has to redefine the example that he has. He is not equal to David. He is equal to God, the Son of God.

It was one of those homilies that I realized at the last moment that I had completely forgot the most crucial aspect of contemporary homiletics...the answer to the question "So what?" When they leave, what should make their life different? I tried to find it but feel like I failed. That's the way it goes sometimes.

On the plus side, I decided to post a bible study I did on the book of Tobit on blogger. Just go to tobitbiblestudy.blogspot.com and you'll find it. I'm hoping to follow it up with one over the course of next school year on the two canonical books of the Maccabees. I'll keep you up to date about that one.

Why the silence

I'm taking a summer class at Iowa State University and can't find the time to blog anything. Sorry. I'll be back in July.