Deacons Now a Part of Parish Life at CtR!

I haven't been able to post a Sunday homily for a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we had fourteen of the sixteen new permanent deacons with us at Mass, and one of them preached; last Sunday I was so enthusiastic that I preached without notes.

But speaking of deacons... one of the newly-ordained preached last Saturday at the morning Mass, which the eight men now preparing for the permanent diaconate attended together with their wives. Deacon Henk Luyten, a high school principal, gave such a bracing homily that I asked if I could post it here. 

The gospel for the day was this short and rather shocking passage in Mark:   

Jesus and the disciples went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”

Here below is what Deacon Luyten shared with us. He began by thanking the parish for being so welcoming and supportive to the permanent deacons, candidates, and spouses.

            Before reflecting on our readings this morning, I would briefly like to take the opportunity to thank you personally and on behalf of all the deacons for your support and prayers. I started my journey of discernment and formation in your community some four years ago and I am now happy to be back with you to help Monsignor Smith, your pastor, in continuing our program with these fine candidates. You have sacrificed much, especially with Monsignor’s absences while he was with us. We are grateful to you and the entire Archdiocese for your support during our formation. I would ask a further favour, that you please continue to extend your warm welcome and pray for both the deacons and the candidates and our families. Again, thank you.

In this morning’s Gospel we find Jesus so busy preaching, healing and casting out demons that he doesn’t even have enough time to eat. The well behaved young carpenter who had spent most of his life living quietly surrounded by his relatives in Nazareth had suddenly become the leader of a band of twelve itinerant preachers, vagabonds to some, attracting huge crowds wherever he went. Leaving relatives and neighbours, he made his new home in a stranger’s house in a strange town, Capernaum, with fisherman and tax collectors as his new friends. When his family finally discovered this, they concluded he had gone out of his mind and set out to restrain him and perhaps bring him home. They were scandalized and embarrassed by his actions, not able to understand the changes in their native son.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose memorial we celebrate on Thursday, had a very similar experience, he was born into nobility and his mother had great expectations for his success in the world. Yet Thomas resolved to leave his family and join the Dominicans against the wishes of his mother. His family also thought him “out of his mind” and his brothers “restrained” him by imprisoning him in the family’s castles. But Thomas did not give in and regardless of apparent scandal to his family, set about to following his passion to the glory of God and us all.

We might ask what motivated Jesus and later Thomas to make such radical decisions, to give up so much, even to tear their families apart in times when family was the most important thing in life.

Jesus himself gives us the answer a few verses later in Mark’s Gospel. When he is told his mother and brothers (and sisters) have arrived asking for him, he responds, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). Doing God’s will, carrying out one’s mission, is decisive in the Kingdom of God. And doing God’s will very often looks crazy to the world.

Jesus teaches us a valuable lesson here. We often encounter people in our communities and even families who appear to be doing crazy, even scandalous things in our eyes or those of others. How do we respond when a daughter whom we expected to enter a prominent career or provide us with grandchildren suddenly announces that she wishes to enter a religious order? Or when a good friend suddenly tells us that he is contemplating the priesthood? I myself was surprised by the few good friends who told me that I was “out of my mind” to become a deacon at this point in my life.

And many don’t just respond this way to religious vocations but also to other countercultural behaviours such as virginity, natural family planning or even marriage, where friends and family react with “you must be out of your mind” when we or our brothers and sisters are attempting to do the will of God.

We must not allow ourselves to fall into this trap of demanding that “our own will be done”. Let us commit ourselves today to follow Jesus and do at least one thing; offer a sacrifice, support a vocation, whatever it may be, in which we too might be called “crazy” in the service of God.

The Baptism of the Lord

Blessed John Henry Newman was a man who comforted Protestants and Catholics alike during an era of dried-out theology and who tenderly invited his countrymen to hear an authentic message about God and the love he has revealed in his Church.

I’m reading a good biography of this saintly scholar, whose careful study of the teachings of the ancient Church led him to embrace the Catholic Church, abandoning the beautiful Anglican tradition that he loved so much. His bold decision brought comfort to some but conflict to many.

Newman is a reminder that comfort and tenderness—which must be hallmarks of Christian preaching, as the were of his—can only go so far. When the claims of truth conflict with our settled opinions or personal desires, the truth will hurt.

God, we know, comforts his people, just as he calls the prophet to do in our first reading. St. Paul calls the Father “the God of all consolation,” which some versions translate as “the God of all comfort.” Jesus said that he longed to gather the children of Jerusalem together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and we see him comforting his disciples on the night before he died. The Holy Spirit, of course, is called the Comforter.

In other words, it is right and good that the words of Isaiah should comfort us —that we should hear God speak tenderly to our tired hearts, our confused hearts, even our sinful hearts.

And we can claim as our own the great gifts that St. Paul talks about in the second reading: salvation, a share in the inheritance of Christ, and, in the end, eternal life.

The astonishing fact that even Jesus was baptized brings our own baptism into sharp focus; and the Gospel promise of a baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire makes us recall our confirmation. It’s easy today to feel thankful for the graces we received in baptism and conformation, and to renew the commitment that both sacraments require.

All of which could make for a good—and short—homily on this feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

But John Henry Newman would never have given such a homily. Feel-good preaching was not his way of bringing the comfort of the Gospel to the men and women of his time; he wanted them to know the whole story, to have the complete picture of the Christian life. And so he asked, in a famous sermon, what difference all this good news makes to our lives.

That is a challenging question.

Let me rephrase it. Would you live differently if you were not baptized?

Newman’s answer was, to put it mildly, pessimistic. “I really fear…” he said, that “it will be found that there is nothing we resolve, nothing we do, nothing we do not do, nothing we avoid, nothing we choose, nothing we give up, and pursue, if Christ had not died and heaven were not promised to us.”

That’s a bit tough. But throwing cold water on comfortable folks is a kindness, a sort of tenderness—a way of reviving a drooping spirit.

In another sermon, Newman tackled an even tougher question he heard people ask: why it is necessary to be holy to get to heaven? We are weak people, why are God’s standards so high? If God’s really merciful, couldn’t he have saved us without demanding holiness? Baptism alone ought to be enough.

Newman says that we really have “no right to ask this question. Surely it is quite enough for a sinner to know that a way has been opened through God’s grace for his salvation, without being informed why that way, and not another way, was chosen by Divine Wisdom,”

He further explains that eternal life is God’s gift, and undoubtedly he can set the terms on which he will give it.

There are Protestant churchgoers who doubt the necessity of baptism for salvation but who believe in the need for holiness; there are Catholics who are convinced of the necessity of baptism but who don’t quite believe in the need for holiness.

Newman tried to convince both groups of the ancient and unchangeable truth. He knew that doing what God demands could be hard at times—which is why his toughest sermon on baptism ends with a note of comfort: as we work at holiness, he preached, “it is our comfort to know… that we are not left to ourselves” but have the Holy Spirit to help us.

“It is a comfort and encouragement,” he said, “to know that God works in us and through us.”

We recognize today that we are all beloved sons and daughters of the Father; let us resolve, with his help, to do what he expects.

Epiphany: Taking Christ Seriously

In his Christmas homily, our newly-ordained assistant pastor compared the Christmas story to the latest Star Wars movie. He certainly had the congregation’s full attention—even the folks who knew little about the film got a chuckle when he revealed that I fell asleep half way through. (The movie, not the homily!)

But what if we turned things around and tried to explain today’s Gospel to visitors from another galaxy?

You’d probably have no trouble holding their attention—they'd know a whole lot about stars, and a star plays a central role in this story. The hero of the story seems to be a man called Herod—a fine fellow who takes stars seriously. And since the visitors know a little English from galactic grade school, they figure we might even get the word ‘hero’ from ‘Herod.’

I don’t need to remind you, of course, that Herod is actually the villain of the story, not the hero—unless there’s an extra-terrestrial or two in the congregation, we all know the real reason for his interest in the Christ child.

And yet I wonder whether we might learn something if we paid Herod some extra attention this morning.

Evil despot though he was, Herod got one thing right: he took the Saviour’s birth seriously. Dead seriously: he wanted to kill Christ.

Hatred, of course, is the wrong response to the Lord of Love. But it makes more sense than indifference. It’s more logical than apathy.

C. S. Lewis very famously wrote that you can shut Jesus up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But you cannot speak nonsense about His being a great human teacher, for Jesus has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In other words, there are two very logical responses to the birth of Christ: one is Herod’s, the other is that of the Wise Men. Scorn him or adore him; but do not ignore him.

The Epiphany is our invitation to take Christmas seriously—to pay homage to God not only with our lips but with our lives as well. And if you think about it a little, the three Kings give us a very good example, starting with the fact that their homage was neither cheap nor easy. The gospels are vague on the details, but T.S. Eliot dramatizes them powerfully and believably in his poem The Journey of the Magi:
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

Eliot describes all the hardships, from lazy camels to overpriced hotels. ‘A hard time we had of it’ observes one of three Kings.

Nothing has changed: the path of discipleship today will not always be convenient; we’ll have a hard journey sometimes if we follow that star.

And when we arrive and find ourselves standing before God, we may find it’s been an expensive trip. The three Kings do not arrive before Christ empty handed, and neither should we. Have we brought gifts this Christmas, or only received them?

Of course He doesn’t want gold, or frankincense or myrrh from us, but he wants the best of what we have. Our time, talent, and treasure are the only sincere ways we have of offering homage to the One who gave us everything in the first place.

With respect to time: Have we decided to give more time to prayer—which is the homage of our hearts—as a joyful response to God? Is it time to reorder our priorities between work and home?

As for our talents: Have we considered whether we are doing enough to serve others, our church, and our community? 

As for treasure: Do we see Christ still naked and helpless in places in the world that need our material support? Are we generously giving to support the Church’s mission at home and abroad? The answers to such simple questions may reveal whether Christmas has really touched our hearts—whether we’re taking it seriously.

The Epiphany is called in some Catholic cultures the feast of the three Kings. But we mustn’t forget that there are four kings in the story: three Kings and Herod. But there are no bystanders, no-one who sees the star and goes back to an ordinary life. Shepherds and Wise Men alike are filled with joy.

If Christmas has passed like a blur, let’s slow down today and gaze at the star that fills the night sky over Bethlehem—a star that guides, invites, and challenges us to believe.

Feast of the Holy Family

My first pastor told me that my shortest homily of the year should be the Sunday after Christmas.

A priest friend said his first pastor told him his shortest homily should be on January 1.

I’m not sure who was right, so I try to preach as briefly as possible on both days!

It’s easy enough to be brief on the feast of the Holy Family. This day has many lessons to teach us, but they are simple and straightforward.

The first lesson comes from the Gospel, which tells us that even the best of families meets both joy and sorrow.

What a good time Mary and Joseph must have had in Jerusalem! They had celebrated Passover with relatives and friends, and their trip home would be much like the drives back from Christmas at my grandmother’s—weary but happy and contented by the festivities.

Then suddenly fear and anxiety interrupt this happy holiday. Even today there is no greater panic than a lost child, but imagine three days of that terror in a society much more dangerous than our own.

When that’s over, Mary and Joseph suffer something most families know very well—a breakdown in communications. What they say to Jesus is perfectly reasonable, but his truthful reply is impossible for them to understand.

St. Luke wants us to know the story does not end with that standoff. He adds quickly that Jesus returned home and obeyed his parents. It’s a happy ending, at least. But the story reminds us that it’s not possible to avoid all conflict in any family.

Expecting a perfect family, free of misunderstanding and pain, is a recipe for bitterness; accepting the realities of family life, and seeking always more to understand than to be understood, is the realistic path that leads to the reasonable level of happiness that is all we can expect in an imperfect world.

A second lesson comes from the first reading, which reminds parents that children are not their own. Hannah surrenders her son Samuel to the Lord because she knows the Lord has given him to her in the first place.

As a general attitude, this is important—because claiming ownership of any human being is asking for trouble. We don’t even own ourselves, as St. Paul taught when he told the Romans that no-one lives for himself and no-one dies for himself because we are the Lord’s (cf. Rm 14:7-8).

So if we don’t own ourselves, we certainly don’t own others, even our children. Parents have enormous rights and duties in regard to their children, but there are firm limits. Hannah offers Samuel to the service of the prophet Eli not only to pay a vow to God, but because she knows her son is called to this—he has, we would say today, a vocation.

Parents can learn from Hannah that God has the first claim to their children, which sometimes means being willing to surrender our plans for them so that they can follow God’s call.

Finally, we learn a great lesson from the second reading when St. John says “We are children of God.” We have all the same Father so we’re all part of two families—the one into which we were born and the family of God.

It’s interesting to see where St. John goes with this. He doesn’t emphasize the prestige or the benefits of being children of God—he goes straight to the place where this morning’s Gospel ends: obedience.

Children have a natural and supernatural duty to obey their parents. This homily might be over the heads of the younger members of the congregation, but they all understand they need to do what their parents tell them to do. So it is with each member of the family of God, since through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Father has clearly taught us what he expects.

We obey God’s commandments for a number of good reasons, but today’s second reading gives the best reason of all: because it pleases him. What a simple a lesson that is! Children also obey their parents for a number of reasons, even fear of punishment, but the best reason is because it brings joy to their mothers and fathers.

Celebrating the Holy Family of Nazareth comes naturally at Christmastime. But today’s feast invites us also to think supernaturally about our own families, praying not for perfect families but for holy ones, created in God’s image and following his laws amidst the joys and sorrows of daily life. 

The image above is purloined from the website of the artist, iconographer and author Michael O'Brien, who has devoted much of his talent and time to promotion of the family. Judging by its title, "The Family - 2," it represents not the Holy Family but a holy family, blessed by the loving hands of Christ.

What Does Christmas Have To Do With Self-esteem??

Our staff party for St. Anthony’s School started this year with a Christmas quiz.

I was stumped by the very first question: what do Santa’s helpers learn in school? But the grade seven teacher answered right away: the elf-abet.

I figured the schoolchildren would get a laugh from that, so I asked them the question the next morning. I was about to call on their clever teacher when a grade seven girl put up her hand.

She answered: elf-esteem!

You might think that’s an unusual introduction to my Christmas homily, but Father Paul started his by explaining the theology of Star Wars! Actually, I thought it was a brilliant homily until he got to the part about my falling asleep during the movie. I thought he might have skipped that…

Let’s go back to the student’s answer. It’s quite clever, because modern teachers, whether in North Vancouver or at the North Pole, work hard to teach self-esteem. There are all kinds of lesson plans and ideas to help youngsters, and it’s certainly an important goal.

But teaching children they are special, and helping them value themselves and their gifts only goes so far. What happens to the youth or adult who realizes he or she isn’t very special at all?

And what about the person whose pain, physical or mental, makes it almost impossible to affirm the goodness of their existence?

Or even worse, what happens to the person whose self-esteem is shattered by failure, betrayal or sin?

Christmas, the miracle we celebrate tonight, has an answer to all of these crucial questions.

In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah proclaims a great light. But before he says a word about the light, he speaks about the darkness. The darkness that engulfed ordinary people. Not bad people, but ordinary people, living in a land of deep darkness.

On them light has shone.

Isaiah was writing some eight centuries before the birth of Christ, and his prophetic words applied to his own time. But they apply to us as well, as we can tell from the phrase “from this time onward and forevermore.” His prophecy is a promise we all can claim.

And that promise changes everything about our lives, especially in the dark corners where we can’t see things clearly. The promised light offers the only self-esteem that nothing can take away, because it’s not grounded in what we can do but in who we are.

And who we are has been made known to us, just as “this thing that has taken place” was made known to the shepherds in the fields. We are brothers and sisters of “a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”

The consequences of this—God becoming one of us—are almost too hard to grasp. Writing in the fourth century, St. Athanasius said “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

If his words weren’t repeated in the Catholic Catechism, I couldn’t bring myself to believe them. But I do, and an unavoidable conclusion flows from them. Our self-esteem acquires its highest, its richest, and its most indestructible form on this holy night.

The birth of Christ is not good news just for religious people. As the angels told the shepherds, it is “good news of great joy for all the people.”

Listen to what the shepherds say to one another when the angels leave: “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

Are they convinced? Have they figured it all out? Not likely, given what the shepherds call the event that the angels have announced: “this thing that has taken place.” Many of us also are a bit confused about what it all means, even if we do not doubt what happened.

So let us rush to the stable along with the shepherds. Let us find Mary and Joseph and their child, tonight, and see not a myth or even a mere historical event; with eyes of hope let us see healing for our wounded self-esteem, restoration of the dignity that others have taken away from us or which we have surrendered freely.

Look at the child in the manger and see your brother, your own flesh and blood, God who has brought salvation to you and to all.

Look at the Christ child and see yourself as God wants you to be—“godly” is the word St. Paul uses in our second reading. The grace of God that has appeared in Christ teaches and empowers us “to live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly.”

Whatever has robbed you of true self-esteem, accept it back as the best Christmas gift of all.

Some of us have found great peace by working with professional counsellors, who can be a real blessing and bring much help to wounded spirits. But we should start with the one who is named Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of Peace. He who breaks the yoke that weighs us down, and shatters the bars that oppress us is the true source of self-esteem.

But our Christmas thoughts must not focus too much on ourselves, important though it is to know how much we are loved by God. Let’s end with a look at the bigger picture. The future of the world depends greatly on our rediscovering our human dignity and worth.

“If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity,” the Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote more than thirty years ago.

He continued “There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography ..., the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.” 

It sounds all too familiar today, and Francis Schaeffer’s somber words are not out of place on Christmas night—because they cry out for the rediscovery of the nobility of our human nature.

So whether you’re worried about the world or about yourself, let the light of Christmas truth shine on your problem. Go now to Bethlehem to find the source of your greatest dignity—God made man, that men might become God.

The Pathway to Peace (Advent IV.C)

Our Friday morning men’s prayer group celebrated Mass together at 6 a.m. last week. Like other members of the group, I invited some men in the parish to join us.

I was surprised by those who turned down the invitation because they were busy. Not because they didn’t want to be in church so early, but because they already had a work commitment at the crack of dawn.

Think about that. None of these men was a coal miner or a taxi driver or a doctor in the emergency room, but all of them were expected to be on duty shortly after most people wake up.

We can’t just blame their nasty bosses in Toronto. Many of us are living in the eye of a hurricane of busy-ness, whether we’re in business, managing a home, or serving a parish.

Is it any wonder that the Friday morning group chose “peace” as a theme for our Advent Mass?

Peace is a word that rings in our ears. Our hearts long for it, even if we aren’t entirely sure what it is.

In our first reading today, the prophet Micah doesn’t tell us what peace is; he announces who peace is. Writing at a time of political disaster and impending doom, he promises security from the Messiah who will be born in Bethlehem.

But he doesn’t say the Messiah will bring peace; he will be peace.

St. Paul says the same thing about 700 years later, when he tells the Ephesians that Christ Jesus “is our peace.” (Eph. 2:14)

Many people today seek peace through techniques. You can find dozens of books online that promise peace through deep breathing, yoga, or something called mindfulness training. Much of this is rooted in Eastern or New Age methods.

But only Christianity promises peace as a person—Someone on whom we can unload our limitations, our sorrows, our shortcomings, our imperfect spouses and children, our bad health, our fears—all of the ordinary “stuff” which we allow to rob us of our peace.

The security and peace promised to us in Christ comes from surrendering control of our lives to Him—not asking him to change everything we’re dealing with, but asking him to change us.

In our second reading, Jesus himself accepts God’s will, in an act of total surrender to the Father. None of can make such a complete sacrifice of ourselves, but all of us, made holy by Christ’s sacrifice, are also called to surrender ourselves to the will of God.

Doing God’s will can be as simple as bearing with the trials life sends us, uniting them to the supreme sacrifice of Christ through the Mass, through a morning offering, and by accepting them.

What does God’s will mean for you this week? For some, it might be accepting without complaint the arrival of a mother-in-law who likes to say “that’s not really how we stuff a turkey in our family…”

It might be bearing with the loneliness that comes from missing a departed loved one at Christmastime. Maybe we need to resist family social events that will make it all but impossible to come to Mass on Christmas.

For me, it will be finding time to pray during this wild week, trying to find time to write a good homily for Friday while getting to Costco before Thursday.

God’s will is different for each of us, but God’s peace is the same for all of us—Christ, who is our peace. Christ, born in Bethlehem, Christ, coming anew at Christmas.

The famous Serenity Prayer may be just what we need to help us understand how we are to accept God’s will and find the peace that Jesus promises, a peace the world cannot give, even at Christmas.

Let me close with its power-filled words:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.   Amen.