Not Presumption, Not Despair. Hope.

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In our second reading at Sunday Mass, from chapter four of St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we hear St. Paul tell us to “have no anxiety at all.” Philippians 4:6: “Have no anxiety at all.” [CLICK por español.]

Now, far be it from us to question the holy Apostle, when it comes to the consistency of his teachings. But any diligent Bible reader knows what St. Paul wrote, two chapters earlier, in Philippians 2:1. “Work out your salvation with… fear and trembling.”

Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Philippians 2:12.  Have no anxiety at all. Philippians 4:6.

Did our beloved Apostle Paul contradict himself?

Let us try to understand.  Maybe when he said, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” St. Paul was thinking about us, the human race–weak sinners that we are.  When he said, “Have no anxiety at all,” he was thinking about our loving and generous Father in heaven.

Okay. Quiz. Haven’t had one in a while. Everyone knows that God helps us get to heaven by infusing three theological virtues into our souls. Right? What is the second theological virtue? Correct! Hope. By hoping in God every day, trusting in His Providence, we become the people He made us to be.

Now, the world throws plenty of stress at us. Fear and trembling come naturally enough.

But that’s not quite what St. Paul means–fearing and trembling about the economy, or Kim Jong Un, or lone-wolf shooters, or any of the other bogeymen of the world. Things can get bad, but one way or another, God will always provide for us in this pilgrim life. Even death can’t do us any harm if we die in God’s friendship.  So when we get right down to it, there is really only one thing for us truly to fear.

The one genuinely frightening thing is:  H—E—double hockey sticks.  When we seriously consider the possibility of winding up there, we really do tremble.  Not a good prospect.  Not at all.

And hell is a real possibility.  We sin against holy hope if we presume on God’s goodness.  Hope is hope, not certainty.  During this pilgrim life, I cannot know for sure that I am going to heaven. I have to get to purgatory first, to know for sure.  Heaven isn’t automatic for anybody.  So my job is to strive every day to do good and avoid evil. I have to confess my sins and beg for mercy.  Being presumptuous with a friend is rude; being presumptuous with God is a sin.

On the other hand, St. Paul also wrote, “Have no anxiety about anything.”  Pray, make your requests known to God, and “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” The peace of God means no despair and no discouragement. Living the virtue of hope means trusting with confidence.  If it really were all up to us, we would be in trouble, serious trouble.  But it is not all up to us.

The good Lord has a perfect plan to get us all to heaven.  He has a plan to get each of us there, starting right now.  No matter what we have done or failed to do, up till now. Until the moment you and I draw our last breath on this earth, the Lord always has a plan to save us.  He will always forgive us our sins, if we ask Him.  He will give us what we need to persevere.

All we have to do is ask.  That is why St. Paul urged the Philippians to pray, right after he told them to have no anxiety. Pray with hope, in the peace of Christ.

And the Lord Jesus has given us the perfect way to pray.

We read a rough parable in our gospel reading on Sunday. But at the heart of that rough Parable of the Tenants, we actually find our greatest consolation, our greatest source of holy hope.

The vineyard owner sent his son to collect the fruit of the vineyard. He sent his son, in peace—even though the tenants had already killed the owner’s servants.

Was this father living in some kind of dream world? ‘Oh, they killed my servants, so they must be vicious murderers. But let me send my son, my heir, my one and only. He won’t have any problems.’

No. The owner knew the danger. That’s precisely why he sent his son. He wanted to make peace with these dangerous tenants. He thought that he could make peace by respecting the tenants and believing in them. But he also knew perfectly well that his son went to them as a lamb ready to be sacrificed.

This is our consolation and our hope, in the face of everything that life can throw at us; our consolation and hope in spite of all our own incorrigible weaknesses: The Lamb of God has been sacrificed for us. The Lamb of God came among us, ready to die, to overcome all our evil. His sacrifice for us is the perfect prayer of Christian hope. And that sacrifice is: The Holy Mass.

In the Mass, we ask for exactly what we need to get to heaven.  And in the Mass, the Lord gives us everything we ask for, and then some:  He gives us Himself.

If we want to learn how to hope in God and how to pray with hope; if we want to learn how to avoid presumption and avoid despair–all we have to do is ‘tune ourselves in’ to all the prayers of the Mass. All we have to do is make the prayers of the Mass our own.  To pray the Mass is to hope in Christ.

Better Future

As the earth brings forth its plants and a garden makes its growth spring up, so will the Lord God make justice and praise spring up before all the nations. (Isaiah 61:11)

Hard to imagine a more hopeful book than the prophecies of Isaiah. The most beautiful passages accompany us during Advent.

The Lord God can and will give us a good future, by His power, according to His wisdom. The future will be brighter, because the Almighty holds it in His hands. His promises, wonderful as they may be, will certainly be fulfilled. Justice will spring up. The earth herself will sing to God a canticle of praise. Creation will reflect and magnify the splendor of the majestic Creator.

When the grace of Christ fills our souls, three theological virtues operate, namely: _____, ______, and ________.

Third Sunday of Advent, we seem to be talking about things, as yet unseen, that will give us joy in the future. In other words, because we believe that God will make good on His promises, we live in ________.

For the past two years, we have from time to time recalled the fiftieth anniversary of the great gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church in the 20th century, namely… When we look back at the days of Vatican II, we might get filled with nostalgia, nostalgia for the optimism of those times. Back then, in the 1960’s, the future appeared to open up like a fabulous suitcase, full of style and new possibilities. Hope practically grew on trees then. A better future seemed to lunge into the room like an eager hippopotamus.

Fifty years later, the atmosphere of the world has certainly changed. The hopefulness of the Sixties has all but vanished. The age of international peace that everyone dreamed of has been disturbed by terrorism and widespread political instability. The economy can’t snap out of the doldrums. I think it’s fair to say that we live in cynical, dispirited times.

Will our children have a better life than we do? Most Americans think not. It’s one of Tim Allen’s jokes: looking forward to having just enough to live on, in a small apartment—that’s the ‘Canadian dream.’ The measure of our short-term hope these days. Our grandparents nurtured the ‘American dream.’ But not us.

What about a year of favor? What about a jubilee? When captives held unjustly get liberated, and broken hearts heal, and debts racked-up in desperation get wiped away? What about a day of vindication—a day when everyone who has suffered wrongly gets compensated and made whole? Can we hope for better times? Better jobs, better government, and better Redskins’ seasons?

Not to imply any nastiness toward anyone in particular, but: I think people have cast ballots for candidates who talk about better things. Saying that an era of political compromise will come doesn’t make it come. Saying that America has a great future doesn’t make America have a great future. Saying that races and cultures and people need to get along better doesn’t make them actually get along better.

What, then, do we hope for? Well, if I might put it like Gandalf put it to Frodo, when the little hobbit started to realize how hard it would be to get the ring to Mordor:

We are going to hope, by God’s grace, that we ourselves, when everything is said and done, will stand before God without shame, because we did our little part to try to build a better world. It’s not for us to choose the times we live in. It’s for us to choose good over evil, no matter what happens.

After all, even though all long-term economic indicators for the middle-class suggest that we are living through one of the worst decades ever, and the movies they come out with these days seem more and more boring—even though these are pretty cruddy times, as times go—they don’t totally suck. Because we have each other. And we have opportunities every day to act with kindness and honesty and courage. Even though the world has grown cynical and dark, we can greet each single day for what it really is: an opportunity from Almighty God for us to practice the teachings of Christ.

Hoping for satisfaction and pleasure from what this world has to offer has always been a vain business, whether the times be good or bad. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero Jay Gatsby lived the high life, in a decade when money seemed to grow on trees. He had it all. But he did not have happiness. He longed in his heart for the kind of communion that this world cannot give.

So if the American Dream seems practically out of reach, we hope for a better future anyway. Because the work of God, and the fulfillment of the kingdom of God, comes down to little daily acts of honesty and kindness.

Little acts of Christian heroism plant hidden seeds. Here a seed of patience. Here a seed of chastity. Here a seed of self-sacrifice.

On a day that only God knows, all these seeds will bear fruit, glorious fruit. It won’t matter then what the Dow Jones industrial average is that day, or the gross domestic product, or the national debt, or even the air temperature. It won’t matter. Because God will be all in all.

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answers: Faith HOPE Love

The Unjust Judge and the Second Coming

Frankfurt Schoolers Horkheimer and Adorno

When the Son of Man comes, will He find justice on earth?

Whether or not He will find faith on earth (cf. Luke 18:8), only time will tell. But will He find justice on earth?

Will he find the virtuous fairly rewarded and criminals punished proportionately for their crimes? Will He find the world’s goods equitably distributed among honest people living in harmony, with a care for the vulnerable and reverence for the wise? Will He find people communicating discreetly, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, working out their problems gently, helping each other generously, rising above petty antagonisms with serene mutual respect? Will He find all this when He comes again?

Hitting the Heresies, Part Two

What spiritual goal do we strive after for the next 2 ½ weeks?

Seems to me that we want to focus, as best we can, on the experiences of the heroes of the original Holy Week—primarily, of course, our Lord Himself.

To do this, we have to lay hold of the truth about the Person of Christ. Heresies only lead us away from what really happened in Jerusalem.

Last week someone mentioned the heresy that we could probably call the NCAA Champion of all heresies. The ancient error that made Christianity meaningless in the name of making it more respectable. Right: Arianism.

“The Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing.”

We have been baptized in the name of the Blessed Trinity. Our hope for eternal life rests on the divinity of the Son. When Jesus died on the cross, it was not simply a matter of unjust government crushing an innocent citizen—though it was that. It was not just a matter of the noblest man who ever lived dying peacefully for the highest imaginable ideals—though it was that, too. If it were only these things, then the death of Christ would be beautiful and admirable, but it could offer no enduring hope. His death would simply be the most painful of all the human tragedies that make up our history.

The Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing.

Arius regarded this statement as clear evidence that Jesus is not equal to the Father. But, with these words, the Lord does not indicate that at all.

We do not understand the mystery of the tri-unity of God. But we do know what the Son has revealed to us. The Father begets the Son by giving Him everything—the infinity of divinity. The Holy Spirit proceeds by the Son giving it back.

The Son does only what the Father does, but this does not make the Son any less divine, since what the divine Father does is: give everything to the Son.

The Trinity is not the Trinity because of us. The Trinity has been and always will be. We are what we are because the Trinity has willed it so.

Jesus died on the cross as the Son of God made man. By His obedient death, Christ gave to the Father the infinite divine love—as a man, on our behalf. From this single act of infinite love, all our hope springs. Any hope we had would be altogether shaky if it rested on any other foundation. But as it is, our hope is certain, because it rests on God.

St. Josephine Redeemed

(–Hey Jason, ever heard of Hollis Thompson? Come on, buddy!)

Hope you, dear reader, are having a good Syracuse Hate Week. Carolina-Duke? Yawn. Kentucky-Florida? Snooze. Giants-Patriots? Totally three-days-ago.

Some people might have to sit through parish Finance-Council meetings during the contest in the Carrier Dome. Sacrifices have to be made for Jesus. Feel free to text me the score every two or three minutes.

As we know, Pope Benedict wrote an encyclical letter about how Christian hope redeems us. He began his letter by recalling the life of St. Josephine Bakhita:

We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God. The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to [meet] this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II.

She was born around 1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan…

Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant, who returned to Italy. Here, after the terrifying masters who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of master.

Now she heard that there is a Master above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her…

What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father’s right hand.’ Now she had hope—no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’

Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed,’ no longer a slave, but a free child of God…She was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion. [Five years later], she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and she made several journeys around Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her, which had redeemed her, she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.

…At every Mass, after the Our Father, we pray that the Lord would protect us from all distress as we await “the blessed hope.” This phrase comes from St. Paul’s letter to Titus, where the Apostle writes, “we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ” (2:13).

St. Josephine lived out in a particularly vivid way the redemption of every Christian. We confidently hope for the coming of Christ, the true Master of all, Who loves us. This certain hope frees us from every slavery.

Through the Dark Threshold

Anybody see a movie back in the late 90’s called “The Truman Show?” The true man of the movie had been the unwitting star of a reality show for his entire life. He had lived in a dome the size of a small city, which served as the set of the show. He was surrounded by hidden cameras all the time. His entire life was manipulated by the show’s producer. Everyone Truman knew was really an actor. The world loved Truman; his show was the most popular on television. The only person who didn’t know that Truman was a reality-t.v. star was…Truman himself.

In order to keep Truman from wanting to travel beyond the confines of the dome, the producer had managed to train him to fear the unknown and prefer the comforts of his day-to-day life.

But as Truman grew older, his desire to know more about the world became increasingly intense. He commandeered a boat on the shore of the staged ocean, and he sailed into the unknown. Truman managed to reach the outer wall of the concrete dome in which he had lived his whole life. The prow of the boat crashed into the cinder blocks that were painted to look like the horizon. Then Truman found a hidden emergency exit door in the wall that he had always thought was the sky. The producer got on a microphone, trying to convince Truman not to walk out the door. But Truman would not be stopped. He stepped through the dark threshold into the outside world that he had never known.

“It is better for you that I go.”

(John 16:7)

From Article 1 of Question 57 of Part III of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas:

Objection: The Son of God took human flesh for our salvation. But it would have been more beneficial for men if He had tarried always with us upon earth; thus He said to His disciples (Luke 17:22): “The days will come when you shall desire to see one day of the Son of man; and you shall not see it.” Therefore it seems unfitting for Christ to have ascended into heaven.

Reply to Objection: Although Christ’s bodily presence was withdrawn from the faithful by the Ascension, still the presence of His Godhead is ever with the faithful, as He Himself says (Matthew 28:20): “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” For, “by ascending into heaven He did not abandon those whom He adopted,” as Pope Leo says. But Christ’s Ascension into heaven, whereby He withdrew His bodily presence from us, was more profitable for us than His bodily presence would have been.

First of all, in order to increase our faith, which is of things unseen…For ‘blessed are they that see not, yet believe.’

Secondly, to uplift our hope: hence He says (John 14:3): “If I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to Myself; that where I am, you also may be.” For by placing in heaven the human nature which He assumed, Christ gave us the hope of going thither; since “wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together,” as is written in Matthew 24:28. Hence it is written likewise (Micah 2:13): “He shall go up that shall open the way before them.”

Thirdly, in order to direct the fervor of our charity to heavenly things. Hence the Apostle says (Colossians 3:1-2): “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth”: for as is said (Matthew 6:21): “Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.” And since the Holy Ghost is love drawing us up to heavenly things, therefore our Lord said to His disciples (John 16:7): “It is expedient to you that I go; for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.”

Looking for a Cheerful Thought?

…If so, you have come to the wrong place.

Do we live on “in memory” after we die?

When I visit my dear father’s grave, I also visit the graves of my great-great grandparents. They are buried next to my father. Their graves are well over a century old.

They were dead before my father was even born. I never knew them. I can say without the slightest doubt that there is not a soul on earth who remembers anything about my great-great grandparents. I may be the only one who ever gives them a thought, which I do when I see their grave markers, and I pray that they will rest in peace.

Someday, a century or two from now, no one on earth will remember any of us.

A century or two after that, our graves themselves will be forgotten, their markers destroyed by some force of man or nature. All memory of us will be wiped off the face of the earth.

Shall we not, therefore, hope in Christ?

What other hope do we have?

Either we hope to live forever in Him, or we accept the inevitable darkness of utter oblivion.

I choose Christ.

Also–I root for the Caps!

Enough

Pope’s 83rd birthday! May he live to be 100!!

…As I lit the Easter candle this morning for the fourteenth time this Easter season, I thought to myself:

What if the Lord had given His Church only one ceremony to manifest Her faith?

What if the only Catholic observance were the procession with the Paschal Candle and the chanting of the Easter proclamation on Holy Saturday night?

What if that were the entire Sacred Liturgy, and there was nothing else–just a gathering of the faithful once a year on Holy Saturday night to light the candle and hear the Exultet?

Would that be enough to get us through life? Would it be enough to keep us hoping for heaven, doing good and avoiding evil?

Yes. Yes, it would be. All the rest is beautiful, wonderful gravy.

There is Always Hope

This scene is not in the book (like a lot of the movie version of Two Towers). But it is pretty sweet.

…Did you know that when a man is ordained a bishop, two deacons hold the book of the Gospels open over his head?

Meanwhile, the ordaining prelate prays the consecratory prayer.

…Speaking of hope, here is today’s homily…

Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two…He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there. Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” (Mark 6:7, 10-11)

The Lord Jesus sent the Apostles out to teach the human race about getting to heaven. The Apostles preached repentance and healed the sick. They were able to restore those who believed to moral and physical health.