Author Archives: Father L
Our Child King
Solemnity of Christ the King
Beloved in Jesus Christ, in ancient times there lived St. Christopher. He was a huge man, 7½ feet tall, and at first he was a pagan. Now Christopher wanted to do a great thing with his life, and so he wanted to find the greatest king that there was, in order to serve him. After traveling around, he found a great King and entered into his service.
.
One day however, the king heard someone speak of the devil; he immediately made the sign of the cross. Christopher noticed this, and asked what this sign meant. The king said, when I hear the devil mentioned, I defend myself with this sign. Christopher realized that the devil then, must be more powerful than the king so he went off to find the devil to serve him.
.
Coming upon a very wicked man, Christopher said: ‘I am seeking the devil. ‘You have found him,’ said the man, because the devil lived in him. And so Christopher followed him; but as they were walking along the road, they came upon a cross. The devil became very afraid. Why are you afraid asked Christopher? He told him: There was a man named Christ who died on a cross, and when I see this sign, I am filled with terror. So leaving him, Christopher went in search of Christ, to make him his king.
.
Finally he came upon an old hermit who lived in a hut, and this hermit taught him about Christ. He told him: Christ asks that you always do his will in your life. ‘Tell me what should be my work, said Christopher, and I will do it for Christ. Your work will be this said the hermit: Go and live near the Great River where many travelers perish trying to cross it, because there is no bridge. You are big enough to carry them over the river. ‘Good! Said Christopher, I will do it!
.
And so he built a shelter near the Great river, and, for many years he carried travelers across the river; and it came one day that a small child asked to be carried across. Seeing the beauty of the Child, he hoisted him onto his shoulders, and began carrying the Child across the river. The child grew heavy – as heavy as lead, and reaching the other side, he said: ‘Child, I felt as though I carried the entire world on my shoulders.’ And the child responded, you carried not only the world, but He who created the world – I am Christ your King, whom you serve; with that, the Child vanished.
.
Friends in the Lord, today is the Feast of Christ the King. Now our King is a Child King, who uses his Divine power to help us to become great; for this reason, when we enter Church, we look to the tabernacle, wherein lives our King, and we genuflect on our right knee to Jesus. Also, after Holy Communion, we kneel down and speak to our Beloved King, who joins to us in body and soul. But what about the rest of our life, outside of Holy Mass? Is Jesus then our King? And here we come to the question of the Christian life, that is, sanctifying all our daily activities.
.
How do we sanctify – how do we make our daily activities holy? Quite simply, we offer it to God and do it well, for Him. When we rise, we make a morning offering. It can be a prayer we read, found in prayer books. Or we can make it up ourselves, like this: O Lord, I offer you this day. All that I do and say and think, I offer as praise to you. Let my life today give you glory and honor. Something like that. It is essential that we offer our day to God, for his glory. This is to make Jesus, Lord of our life.
.
Now if Christ really is our King, we must do all of our activities for him throughout the day. In the machine shop, we are careful in cutting or grinding, so as to do things well – not for our self-satisfaction, but for the Lord. When we are on the job-site, or in the office, or doing laundry or sweeping, we speak and act and work as true sons and daughters of God. As we lay down to rest, and the baby starts to cry; ‘O Lord, I offer this up to you;’ – and we get up.
.
Young people should think of Jesus during their sports; play with good sportsmanship, in wins and losses. There are a thousand little ways we can offer our activities to Christ.
.
“Are you the King of the Jews?, Pilate asked Jesus. Jesus Christ is king of all. No one is above He who has created the universe. No president or senator or mayor or executive is above Christ. And we ourselves will always call him our King.
.
‘My kingdom does not belong to this world,’ says the Lord. We can say as well, that our kingdom is not in this world, but in the next – with the Great King, the Child King. St. Christopher carried this Child King on his shoulders. Let us too, carry Jesus with us, all our day. In our work and in our play.
.
A young woman recently was lamenting what a horrible day she had; everything went wrong; ‘Did you pray?,’ I asked. ‘Did you think of the Lord during your day?’ ‘No, she said, I guess I was too busy.’ Glancing to Christ during our work, whispering a short prayer – this can make our burden much lighter and easier to carry.
.
Some serve kings of the earth – money or material things or power, and that is unhappiness. Some make the Devil their king, and that is sorrow. But our King is not like those who rule the earth, nor like the devil who rules with fear; Our King is the Child King, and if we serve him well in our daily life, he will prepare crowns for our heads; golden crowns for each of us, to reign with him.
.
And we will also reign with our Queen, the Blessed Virgin. May this Queen of heaven intercede for us – Mary pray for us, to live each day for the glory of Christ our King.
.
[Entrusted to the prayers of St. Teresa of Avila]
They forgot about the Gentiles
Friends in Christ, today in the gospel we are presented with the scene of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple. What is the Lord upset about here? Is it just the matter of buying and selling in the temple precincts? No.
.
Let us think a bit about the temple. The entire temple complex was arranged in various sections. Inside was the Temple proper itself, then the court of the priests, the court of Israel, the court of women, and the huge outer court – of the Gentiles. There was a place for the Gentiles to come and participate, to some degree, in the worship of God.
.
Yes, the Jewish people were chosen by God to be the carriers – the guardians of true religion, but God’s goal had always been to ultimately bring all the Gentiles, all people, into his kingdom. As Isaiah 56:7 said: “Foreigners will bind themselves to the LORD to serve him, these I will bring to my holy mountain, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
.
The outer courts were a special place of prayer, just for the Gentiles. So here comes Jesus; Christ has come into the world, he has come to die for all people, to bring even the Gentiles to salvation. And what does he find? He finds that this special part of the temple for Gentiles to pray, has been converted into a place of business. The Jews have forgotten about the Gentiles. This is why Jesus is upset. You have made my house a place of business. ‘No!’, says the Lord, My father’s house shall be a house of prayer for all the nations.
.
We must not become like those Jews; we must not become so parochial, that we forget about the people outside; it is our mission to invite everyone into the kingdom of God. Those on the outside, other Christians, non-Christians, other religions, everyone – we are called to invite all of them to enter into the Church. The Church is to be a house of prayer, for all the nations.
St. Gertrude the Great
Beloved in Christ, today are the feasts of a two different saints, but I thought we could speak today about St. Gertrude, also known as Gertrude the Great.
.
She was born in 1256 in Germany. Nothing is known of her parents, so she may have been an orphan. As a young girl, she joined the Benedictine monastery of St. Mary at Helfta. She dedicated herself to study, becoming an expert in literature and philosophy. Through the years, she came to a deeper commitment to Christ, and she began to strive for perfection in her religious life.
.
Gertrude had frequent mystical experiences, including a vision of Jesus who invited her to rest her head on his breast and to hear the beating of his heart. She also had a great devotion to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. At every Holy Communion she asked Jesus to bestow his mercy on them. Once she experienced the descent into Purgatory with Christ. She heard Him say: “At Holy Communion I will permit thee to draw forth, those to whom the fragrance of thy prayers penetrates.” As it turned out, Jesus actually brought more people from Purgatory than she had even asked for in her prayers.
.
One time Jesus said to her, regarding the Holy Souls in Purgatory: If a good king has a friend in prison, he waits with longing for one of his nobles to plead for the prisoner, for his release. Then the king joyfully sets him free. Similarly, I accept with great pleasure what is offered to Me for the Poor Souls, because I long to have near Me, those for whom I paid so great a price.
.
Saint Gertrude had that boundless confidence, which opens the Heart of Christ. She urges us also, to have this total confidence in Christ. “All that I have received,” she said, is because of my confidence in the generous bounty of God.”
.
Our Lord told St. Gertrude that the following prayer would release 1,000 souls from Purgatory each time it is said. The prayer was later applied to other sinners as well.
.
“Eternal Father, I offer Thee the most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the holy souls in purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal Church, those in my own home, and within my family. Amen.
Our humble lives
6th Sunday after Epiphany Resumed
Beloved in the Lord, in the year 404AD there lived a holy monk named Telemachus. He was a hermit of the desert, a man of prayer, but at one point he felt that God wanted him to go to Rome. There, the gladiator games were continuing – the source of blood-lust and evil in which people reveled. The Catholic faith was by this time, legal, but it was evident that many were still living pagan lives.
.
When Telemachus saw the horror of the gladiator games, men fighting each other and killing each other to the roar of the crowd – he was horrified. He jumped from his seat right into the arena, and stood between the gladiators. He was tossed aside, but he went back again, and then a sword appeared – and then he was dead. The massive crowd suddenly stood silent: A holy man was dead. Something happened that day in Rome, because after that day, there were never again, any more gladiator games.
.
Friends in Christ, Jesus speaks today by way of parables, of the effects that our one, little life can have. The tiny mustard seed seems insignificant, but it becomes a huge tree. and yeast by itself, seems trivial, but it produces a great effect.
.
Most of us will not be Senators or Presidents or St. Paul’s or Padre Pio’s; we are ordinary people; yet as people of faith, we believe that each of our lives, lived fully for Christ, possesses an enormous capacity to influence this world. This is the irony of the life of a cloistered nun for example: ‘What good is their life?’, the world asks. A young woman, Veronica Payne from our own parish, made her temporary vows last month – cloistered life. But we know, and she knows, that the life of grace, although hidden, has great effects.
.
Who affects the world more, the CEO of General Motors, or the mother, who is daily teaching her children, to be God-fearing? The Statesman in the halls of congress, or a nun? This is what Our Lord is showing us today; just as a little yeast is placed in the dough – you can’t even see it when it is mixed in – yet it leavens the whole mass, it produces quite an effect. Our Lord is saying that there must be no discouragement, his followers must serve, each in his place, doing his own part. As it is said, Paul planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.
.
Masters of the spiritual life have noticed that the more our lives are hidden in humility, the more effective they can be. St. Josemaria urges us to ‘hide and disappear.’ “Don’t wish to be like the gold weather-vane on top of a great building: however much it shines it adds nothing to the strength of the building. Rather be like an old stone block hidden in the foundation, underground, where no one can see you: because of you the house will not fall.”
.
Generally, we each underestimate how much God can do with our life, even if, and especially if, our actions are hidden. Dom Chautard wrote a whole book on this subject: The Soul of the Apostolate. His point which, appears on every page, is that it is not a flurry of activity and constant busyness that will build God’s kingdom; our actions must be based on a real interior life; prayer must be the foundation for us, and then our work will flourish and bring many results.
.
Our Lord wants us to be the catalyst for good in our own circle of influence. And we do this by daily prayer, and choosing the path of holiness and humility at every step. We don’t know where each step will lead us, but God does. A group of young people from many nations were discussing different methods whereby missionaries could spread the gospel. And then a girl from Africa spoke: ‘When we want to take the faith to another village, we don’t have methods or systems. We send a Christian family to live in that village, and they make the village Christian by living there.’
.
We have to have our methods and our institutions to spread the faith, for sure; but it nearly always comes down to each person’s silent life which becomes a cause of grace for others. And in this way, the Kingdom of God grows, imperceptibly.
.
Our Lord tells of the mustard seed. A mustard seed is so tiny – 500 of them weigh just one gram – but as Christ says, it grows into a veritable tree such that that the birds of the air come and make their nests in it’s branches. The Great Tree is Jesus Christ, and we are to build our nests in his branches, twig by twig by twig.
.
St. Frances de Sales says, that in the Castle of a prince, you will find little birds kept in colored cages, and they give pleasure to their master. But God does not cage up birds for pleasure. His birds live in the wild, in nests, and like prayers each day, they sing their praises to God. Birds come from nests, but prayers come from us. And the Lord wants us to live in his arms and build our little nests quietly, constructed of prayers and good works.
.
No one should ever underestimate the value of his life or be discouraged; each soul is precious to God, and capable of enormous good.
.
Let’s ask Mary then to help us. May this heavenly Mother urge us on, to believe and to know, that our humble lives are really able to bring about great good.
.
[Entrusted to the prayers of St. Paul]
Mary, help us be recollected
Friends in Christ, in the gospel today, Our Lord urges us to ‘pray always.’ How do we pray always? After all, we have work to do, duties to carry out, and God certainly wants us to focus on doing our work well.
.
The way that we ‘pray always,’ is to try to keep the Lord in mind all day, to keep the Presence of God, and our great model in this, is the Blessed Virgin.
.
In the hymn Stabat Mater, or ‘At the Cross her station keeping’, there is a line that urges us to be like Mary: ‘Make me feel as thou hast felt, make my soul to glow and melt, with the love of Christ my Lord; this was Mary’s heart, glowing with love for her Lord, we must be the same.
.
In his letter on the Rosary, Pope St. John Paul II spoke of Mary’s gaze on her Son. She gazed on him in his infancy, during his life, at the cross; but this gaze on Christ was ever-present, even after his Ascension. This must be us. With a gaze on Christ all through the day.
,
As Mary, said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord.’ She will help us also, to magnify the Lord in our life, and this is best done by keeping God’s presence in mind all day. The saints often spoke of this:[i] St. Ignatius says, ‘We should keep the presence of God in all things, in our conversations, our walks, our eyes, listening, or thinking, when we are eating and in all we do.’
In writing advice to a young woman, St. Francis de Sales says: ‘In this point I wish you to be most docile: real devotion is found in recollection and in aspirations. It can supply the lack of other prayers, but nothing can take it’s place.’ And here he means keeping the presence of God – ‘recollection’
.
The reason we pray in the morning and at the night; the reason we pray at meals and the angelus at noon; we read from a holy book, and the bible, and say our Rosary – all of this is to help us to keep the Presence of God all day. To walk with Christ.
.
St. Teresa says that once the Lord has given us this habit of keeping his presence all day, we would not exchange it for all the treasures of the world.
.
Mary, help us to make many aspirations, and cultivate this awareness of God’s mighty Presence in us. And this will get us to heaven, which we want the most of all.
.
[i] How to Pray always, p. 108, 112
St. Josaphat
Friends in Christ, many of us know people who are Greek Orthodox, or Ukrainian Orthodox or other Orthodox Christians. These Churches, even though not Catholic, do have the Holy Eucharist and the 7 Sacraments. They are the closest to us of all other Faiths. In fact, if you are traveling, and can’t get to a Catholic Church, you may attend an Orthodox Mass.
.
The Orthodox Mass is a different style than ours. The sanctuary is covered with a wall of pictures of saints, and at the Consecration, the priest is inside an enclosure which represents heaven. Our Mass too, in ancient times, had a curtain pulled around the altar. We still require a sanctuary in a Church to be elevated, to signify that we are touching heaven. Still, at our Latin Mass, during the Consecration, the priest whispers the prayers, signifying that he has slipped into heaven, Christ enters heaven to offer his Blood for us.
.
In any case, the Orthodox DO have a valid Mass. But what are their Churches missing? They are lacking union with the Holy Father, the Pope. Now the Catholic Church has been working hard the last 20 years to restore our union with the Orthodox, and it may happen in our lifetime.
.
This brings us to the Saint of today, St. Josaphat. St. Josaphat was born in Lithuania, nearly 400 years ago (1580.) He was born Orthodox, but he converted to the Catholic Faith. Though he had a good job and the opportunity to marry a pretty girl, he decided to become a monk, and lived an ascetical life at a monastery. He went barefoot in the winter, and did not drink wine or eat meat – He was quite bright, and came to know many languages. Soon, he was elected Bishop, and later Archbishop.
.
He worked hard to bring union between the Catholics and the Orthodox. Josaphat brought millions of Orthodox into the Catholic Faith. Those who converted, retained their ancient Liturgy, and these are now called Eastern Rite Catholics. So there are other Rites within the Catholic Church, and one of them, which does celebrate this style of liturgy, is right down the street from us. They are just as much Catholic as we are, merely a different Rite.[i]
.
In the days of St. Josaphat many did not want reunion with the Catholic Church, so they planned to kill him. His enemies called him a Papist – ‘Kill the Papist!’, they yelled. They bashed in his head with a rock and shot him. His body was thrown into the river, but miraculously, it floated to the surface with rays of light coming from it. In the end, his murderers repented and became Catholics. St. Josaphat was the first saint of the Eastern Rite churches to be canonized by Rome.
.
[i] Sometimes Eastern Rite Catholics ask me to anoint them in the hospital, and that is no problem.
St. Martin of Tours
Friends in Christ, today is the Feast of St. Martin of Tours.
St. Martin was born in the year 316 and although his parents were not Christians, the nurse that cared for him taught him about Jesus.[i]
.
At age 15, his father, who was a roman soldier, urged him to follow in his footsteps. Martin had a feeling that he was called to something else, but nevertheless he became a soldier. As he went about his duties, although he was not baptized, he found ways to teach others about Christ.
.
One day he saw a poor beggar in the cold; no one helped him. he felt that Jesus would want him to do something, so he took out his sword, and cut his cloak in two, giving half to the beggar. That night, Jesus appeared in a dream to Martin; he was wearing half of a cloak and said, ‘Martin, you have clothed me.’ Soon after this, he was baptized into the Faith.
.
When his army went to battle, Martin told the general that he preferred to serve Christ. “You’re a coward, they told him. So he was put into prison. But after serving time in prison, he founded a community of monks and sought a life of prayer. The people of the city liked him very much, and they insisted that he become their bishop, and so he was.
.
Martin possessed the gift of discerning spirits. Once the devil appeared to him in beautiful, royal clothes, and spoke as if he were Christ. But Martin, recognizing the deceit, replied, “The Lord Jesus Christ never prophesied that He would come in purple robes and royal crown.” The apparition immediately vanished.
.
St. Martin of Tours healed people by his prayers, and raised three dead persons to life; also while celebrating Mass a luminous sphere once appeared above his head.
.
In the cold November, of 397, St. Martin approached his death, but as he expired, the gloom of Autumn disappeared, and for three days it was as sunny and beautiful as summer. St. Martin is the patron saint of soldiers, which is very appropriate on this Veteran’s day.
.
[i] By age 10 he was a catechumen, that is, one who is preparing for baptism.
Give Him your life
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Beloved in the Jesus Christ, in the 13th century, Angela of Foligno was a beautiful, wealthy, and vain lady. As a rich man’s wife she lived in luxury. Her passions were expensive clothes, flashy jewels, and extravagant meals. She dressed and acted in ways that provoked envy among women and lust among men. When she was not indulging herself, she spent hours gossiping with her friends.
.
But then at one point she did something very bad and started to really have a fear of hell. It was suddenly clear, that she had not been living a real Catholic life. she desperately prayed and asked Gods help and mercy; she went to confession and resolved to begin a new life, and this would lead her on a saintly path; we now call her ‘Blessed Angela Foligno.
.
Friends in Christ, not only Angela, but all of us can easily slip into living a lukewarm religion. Because we go through the motions of being Catholic, or say ‘I was brought up Catholic,’ our faith-life can become only a façade.
.
In the gospel today, we are shown this striking contrast between the Jewish Scribes and this humble widow who puts her last pennies into the temple treasury. Our Lord is not pleased with those religious leaders, who were living a ‘fake’ religion; they were more concerned with outward appearances and what people thought of them.
.
Jesus specifically points his disciples to see that poor woman, who is more generous than all the others; she is more generous because she does not donate to the temple funds out of her surplus, but out of her need. In other words, her heart was in the right place.
.
So how could someone end up living a phony religion? Well, the devil does not attack us head-on: for example, he doesn’t try to trick us into becoming a Muslim or something – we wouldn’t do that; instead, he tries to hollow out our faith-life, until we are only doing some outward, religious things – like those Scribes; this way, we will think we are Catholics, but we really are not any more. And there are many people living sinful ways of life who will often say: ‘But I’m a good person!’
.
Spiritual blindness can happen very easily, especially if ‘everybody else’ is doing it, or saying it. We always have to ask ourselves, ‘ok, I’m at Mass on Sundays, that’s good, right? But am I really receiving Jesus with love and faith in Holy Communion? Is it clear that I am a follower of Christ on days other than Sunday? On Monday, or Friday, am I known as a Christian, by my behavior?
.
A good test for us, is to notice how we behave when we are pressured. What do I say when my peers at work or school criticize a moral teaching of the Church? Do I speak out? What do I say when a girlfriend or boy friend want to do something impure? Do I speak up and lead that person on the path to Christ? When I could get in trouble or be embarrassed, do I lie?
.
You’ve probably heard it asked: if you were on trial, would there be enough evidence to convict you of being a Christian? Is there enough evidence that we belong to Jesus?
.
There was a guy who generally tried to be a good man, he felt that he followed the Lord; he heard in a sermon that it’s good to sometimes ask others how they see you, to see if you are what you think you are. So, for the heck of it, he one day asked his daughter, ‘Sweetheart, what do you think is the most important thing to your father?’ Now he figured she would say that God is the most important, since he knew that God should be most important; but his daughter said, ‘’Daddy, most important thing for you is Bowling.’ He was crushed. Is that how it looked to her? Was his heart really more captivated by bowling than Jesus?
.
Friends, we can easily delude ourselves into thinking that we are faithful Catholics, but we can be deceived; Christ Jesus might not really be the center of our life. St. James in his Epistle says, ‘If anyone thinks he is religious….’ ‘If anyone thinks he is religious – and then he goes on to explain, that one’s religion is in vain – – is worthless, unless we are living it. If we have an evil tongue, if we have no compassion or go along with the false morality of the world,’ he says, our religion is vain.
.
There is a tendency for us to keep the Lord – to keep Our Faith – in a kind of convenient box, mostly for Sunday. I go to Mass, I pray at meals, I Confess once a year – there – that takes care of that. That’s the ‘religion-thing.’
.
But even if we have given ¾ of our heart to Christ, we are not a Christian, because Jesus wants our life, our whole heart. Angela of Foligno tried to live as a supposed Catholic, but her life did not reflect the gospel, it was a shell of a religion. It took a serious sin to shake her out of her fog, and give her life back to Jesus. Christ says, ‘I wish that you were either hot or cold, but the lukewarm I vomit out of my mouth.’ At least if we are cold – that means, in serious sin – at least then, we might be shocked back into our senses, even for fear of hell. But coasting along in lukewarm Catholicism is not the way to get to heaven at all. Lukewarm Catholics will be sweating it out in the next life – I mean, REALLY sweating it out!
.
Let us look back to that poor widow in the gospel today. She gives her last pennies to the temple fund; Jesus says, ‘she has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.’ I was curious about that phrase, ‘her whole livelihood,’ so I looked it up in the Greek – the gospels were written in Greek. That line from Christ is translated different ways. Some bibles say, she put in all she had to live on.’ Another says, ‘she gave her whole living.’ But the greek word is ‘bios’. The first definition of it is not ‘living’ or livelihood, but ‘life.’ So one could really translate this as: ‘she gave all she had, even her whole life.’ This is what we must do to be true Christians. We must give our whole life to Jesus Christ. Not withholding parts; not holding on to our favorite sins. If we want to be alive with his love, we must give our whole life to the Lord, even if we have to suffer for it.
.
St. Peter says, if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.
.
May the Blessed Virgin pray for us; Mary, pray for us, that we will praise God by a true Christian life, and become worthy of the promises of Christ.
.
[Entrusted to the prayers of St. Bernadette]
