Author Archives: Father L

Friends in the Lord, in 1891, a whaling ship was operating in the South Atlantic. Suddenly, they spotted a huge sperm whale off the port bow. A young man, James BartIey was in the first longboat to reach the whale. He was an apprentice and inexperienced. The longboats crept up to the whale from the rear, the harpooner leaned over and struck his spear into the whale. Bartley and the other oarsmen rowed frantically to get out of the way of the massive tail. The whale dove down, taking eight hundred feet of heavy line.

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Then an ominous slacking in the line signaled that it was going to surface. But where? The oarsmen readied themselves, and without warning there was a crash which sent the longboat spinning into the air. The whale thrashed about, snapping at the men with its huge jaws, and then dove down into the depths. Another boat picked up the survivors, but two men were missing – one of them the young apprentice, James Bartley.

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Later in the day, the dead whale floated to the surface. A line was fastened to it and brought alongside the ship. The hot weather made it imperative that the whale be cut up at once, so they took their flensing spades and peeled off the blubber as they slipped and slid along the immense back of the giant mammal.

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Late that night, working by lantern-light, the tired crewmen removed the stomach of the whale and brought it to the deck. They were startled to notice movement inside the large sack. It was cut open and out slid the missing sailor. By medical care, and a long recovery, he was eventually able to relate his terrifying experience. Bartley had been in the whale for over 15 hours. Today if you go to the cemetery where he is buried in Ireland, a note on his tombstone says: James Bartley, a modern-day Jonah.

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If Bartley did it, then we see that it is possible that Jonah also lived in that whale. Yet the story given in the scriptures is not given as a history lesson, but as a remarkable prophecy, an image, of the Messiah to come. Jesus himself explains it. He says: ‘This generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish 3 days and 3 nights, so will the Son of Man be 3 days and 3 nights in the heart of the earth.

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Jonah was a sign of the Messiah, but Our Lord himself IS the Messiah, and if even the people of Nineveh listened to Jonah and gave up their sins, all the more should we listen to Christ and change our lives.

Friends in Christ, our Lord tells us today, that when we pray, we should not babble on and on like the pagans do. The early fathers of the church used to pray many, very short prayers during the course of the day, many aspirations; they warned against prayers that go on and on, because it is easy to become forgetful of who we are speaking to, and easy to loose the fervor, when we rattle off tons of prayers – quality is better than quantity.

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Today, Our Lord gives us the BEST prayer to say: the Our Father. From the earliest days, the Lord’s Prayer, has been our family prayer, which we say together at Mass before Holy Communion.

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All prayer should begin by glorifying God, and indeed, we begin by saying: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

May thy Name by hallowed – may it be holy.  And so we speak with respect about God and His Name. There is even a society dedicated to guarding the honor of God’s Name, called the Holy Name Society.

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‘Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

‘We desire Lord, that – not my own plans be done, but your plan, your will. ‘Your will, today, in my life – make it known to me, help me do it. ‘Help me to accept what is difficult, as your plan. ‘Thy kingdom come – When people ask: why are there so many evil people in the world? We say, because the kingdom of God has not come everywhere yet.

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We pray that the Lord’s will be done on earth, as it already being done in heaven. The saints in heaven are already are doing God’s will perfectly; they are praising God and praying for us. Let it be so on earth as it is in heaven.

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‘Give us this day our daily bread – this is the bread of the Holy Eucharist that we ask for. The Greek here literally means, ‘give us today this super-substantial bread, this bread which is supernatural. ‘Lord, would that I could receive the Bread of Life daily, make me worthy to receive you. Give me this Bread, that I may live forever.

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St. Catherine was overjoyed when her confessor gave her permission to receive Holy Communion every day, not just on Sunday; we too should be very prepared when we are going to receive the Lord.

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‘Forgive us our trespasses; we promise to forgive those sinning against us. How can God forgive us, if we fail to forgive others? We can’t enter heaven bearing a grudge.

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And ‘Lead us not, into temptation – Lord, we are weak as water. This life is a spiritual war against demons – I cannot withstand temptation without You in my life.

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‘Deliver us Lord, from evil.’ Literally, deliver us from the Evil One, from Satan. Let us not fall for his tricks. Lord, guard me from hell.

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St. Alphonsus says, no one can be saved, unless they pray. The great prayer: The Our Father, is our family prayer. If you are in God’s family the Church, you say this prayer!

Dear young people of St. John Vianney,

if you go to the bible and read the book of Numbers, you will see something there. Moses and the people of God were in the desert journey; that journey took them 40 years, which reminds us of Lent which takes 40 days. Their journey was to get to the Promised Land, a beautiful, rich land with wonderful foods and farms and fruit.

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So when they were nearby the Promised Land, Moses sent spies, to go into the land and check it out secretly, to see what it was like, and if they would be able to go there. Two of the spies were Joshua and Caleb, but there were 10 others who went. What did they find?

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For one, the land was so rich that a single cluster of grapes had to be carried by two men. It was a wonderful land, very rich. Joshua and Caleb told the people they should go there, but the other spies complained. The other spies said that those living there were very big men, and it would be a difficult fight to move there; they complained a lot, and so the people started to give up on the whole idea and did not want to go. Moses was disappointed.

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God was not happy with this. And for this reason, the people had to spend the next 40 years in the desert, until they decided to trust him and go to the Promised Land. Those complainers were the downfall of Israel.

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When we complain, we tear down the spirits of everyone, we discourage everyone, and many times, something really good does not happen. Joshua and Caleb tried to show hope and trust in God, but the complainers won out, and ruined everything.

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I know that everyone is trying to give up something for Lent, do a good deed or a new good habit; but I want to suggest also trying to go through all of Lent without complaining at all. When St. Josemaria was quite young, he made a decision to never, ever complain – and look at all that he accomplished!

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People exaggerate their problems.

You have to wait for only 10 minutes while your mother goes into the store – it is no sacrifice at all – but then you complain and whine!

You have to get up early for school on a cold day, it’s a little sacrifice; but then we sometimes complain, complain, complain: ‘I’m tired!’

Usually our problems are not big at all, they are nothing. Instead of complaining, we should count our blessings, God gives us many blessings.

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A lady was a big complainer, so her granddaughter gave her a little mite box, to put money in for the poor. On the front of the box she wrote, ‘Count your blessings.’ She said to her grandma, put a penny in there every time you have a blessing from God.

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Days went by, and the lady only complained, not a single penny went in. But then the granddaughter was telling her of how much the poor people suffered in Africa from not enough food; and the grandmother said, ‘Well, I thank God I have enough food.’ ‘There! said the niece. There is your first blessing – in went a penny.

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The next day, grandma got a nice phone call from her son; after speaking to him, she said ‘Oh thank God for my son.’ Another penny went in. Then she started to realize how many blessing she had, and in went the pennies and more.

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Instead of complaining this Lent, why don’t we instead thank God for his blessings.

Friends in the Lord, we begin Lent this week, and Mother Church gives us today this gospel, in which Our Savior says: ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’

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Here, he is speaking to each of us. What does it mean to ‘deny ourself.’ It means first of all, that we do God’s will, not our own. Frequently, doing what we know God wants of us is harder than what WE want. To indulge in the gossip is fun, but to do God’s will is not so easy. To stare at the pretty girl is easy, to turn the eyes away and be pure is not as easy. To deny ourself, means to choose the good path instead of the easy path.

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To deny ourself also means to deny ourself some legitimate things from time to time. St. Alphonsus says that if we never deny ourself legitimate things, we will not have the strength to turn away from evil things. The children in the school are all giving up something for lent, legitimate things. We all should do some mortification this Lent, this is also to deny ourself.

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‘You must deny yourself and take up your cross.’ What is ‘to take up your cross?’ When Jesus was only a boy, about 11, he would have heard about a Jew who was near by Nazareth who led a rebellion against the Romans; he had raided the royal armory at Sepphoris which was only 4 miles from Nazareth. The Romans were angry; so Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and two thousand rebels were crucified on crosses which were set in lines along the roadside for all to see. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would have known about that.

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To take up our cross means to be prepared to endure even such things as that, but for loyalty to Christ and his Church. But we won’t be able to do any great thing for the Lord, unless we practice in the little things, and that means denying ourself.

Friends in Christ, Lent begins today.

The holy Gospel calls us to repent, do penance, and turn away from our sins. We all must do it, and we all have plenty of sins to atone for.

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St. Catherine of Genoa had once lived a rather worldly life; but at age 27 she had a conversion, and resolved to change her ways. As she was preparing for Confession, God gave her a vision of her own wretchedness and faults. Seeing the truth of herself, she fell to the ground and cried out: ‘No more sins! No more sins!’

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Friends, we can’t hold onto even a little bit of our sin, we can’t have both God and evil in us. Lent is the time to kill the evil in us. We must kill our sins to please God, to find peace, and above all, to avoid hell.

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I was on a priest-retreat recently, and you know, every good retreat includes a meditation on hell; St. Josemaria says, at least once a day we should consider the real possibility of hell for ourselves. It keeps us sane, it reminds us of what is at stake, because in the end, if we would turn away from the path of Christ, we will be separated from God forever.

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St. Teresa of Avila was one day given by God a brief experience of hell. She says, I understood that the Lord wanted me to see the place the devils had prepared for me and which I merited because of my sins. This experience she says, took place within the shortest space of time, but even were I to live for many years I think it would be impossible for me to forget it.

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She saw a place of horrors. A foul stench – dirty – and she was placed into a small hole, crammed in. ‘I experienced an interior fire that I don’t know how I could describe,’ she said. There was a suffocating unhappiness, but the worst was that interior fire and despair.

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Friends, we must avoid hell at all costs; to end there would be the final disaster of our life, but it is always a real possibility. Lent is a time for us to kill our sins, and turn back to Jesus Christ. It is the time to choose again the path of heaven instead of hell.

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St. Bernard says, sometimes we think we have cut down the evils in our life, but they will always bud new shoots;[i] ‘Remember, he says, you have within yourself an enemy whom you may overcome, but whom you cannot exterminate.’

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So, we begin this penitential season;

Holy Mother Church loves and guards her children so much, that she insists that we all go to Confession once a year, it is required. It’s for salvation. And Mother Church gives us Lent as a time to repent, confess, and begin again.

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[i] Mirror of Priests, p. 13.

Friends in the Lord, in the gospel today we find the apostles so very concerned, because they were going across the lake in the boat, and in their haste they had forgotten to bring enough bread to eat. Jesus sees them fretting over this, and he warns them to ‘guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod.’

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For the Jewish people, leaven was a symbol for human weakness toward sin and corruption; leaven was fermented dough left over from before, and it could easily become moldy and corrupt  So in their complaining about forgetting the bread, Our Lord is poking at them, to not have the faults of the Pharisees and Herod.

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The great fault of both the Pharisees and Herod, was that they trusted only in themselves, not in God. They had to be in control of others and call all the shots, and lord it over others, there was no trust in God’s providence at all.

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But Jesus says to his disciples, ‘You are worried about not having enough bread to eat? Don’t you remember what I just did? We fed 5000 people with a few loaves, don’t you think I can take care of you?

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We worry about so many things that we wish to control, instead of just handing them over to God, and accepting his plan of how it will turn out. If we look back on our life, we see those times of darkness when we didn’t know how we would do it, but it worked out.

– that problem that seemed insoluble, but somehow it was solved

– that broken heart that we thought would never heal

.The Lord has so many times brought us through troubled times, but still, today, we don’t trust him – we fret and worry.

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St. Francis de Sales says that sin is the worst thing that can happen to us; but the next worse thing, is worry. The Holy Spirit can’t work in us if we are full of anxiety, trusting in ourselves instead of God. Putting everything in God’s hands doesn’t mean it will work out the way WE want it to; it doesn’t mean we won’t experience the cross – it means that we are ready to accept however God allows it to work out, because he never gives us more than we can handle, and he is with us every step of the way.

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Lent begins tomorrow. Maybe we can work on trusting God more during this Lent.

Friends in the Lord, at the time of Christ, many believed that when the Messiah would come amazing and unusual things would happen.  False Messiah’s were promising that they would one day do things, such as part the Jordan River like Joshua did, or bring down the walls of the Jerusalem by a single word.

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Such a sign, the Pharisees were demanding of Jesus: It says that ‘they were looking for a sign from heaven, to test him.’  These demands were not out of faith, but challenge.  

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But this was not the intention of Jesus Christ. To him, the whole world was full of signs of God, we can just look around us.  St. Paul says that God has made himself known in the beauty of creation: ‘for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made.’     

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Some people are always wishing for signs, to know that God is really listening, that he cares about us. But for heaven sakes, let us look at the miracle of the world around us.  

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We love summer days and blue skies and flowers, but these cold and snappy winter days also help us in a different way, in a way that makes us strong.  

The daylight is getting longer, and we can’t help but feel that spring is not so far off – we see daily the miracle of the sunrise and sunset, the miracle of life in babies, in children, in others; the Lord is present in every person, or he wishes to be.  

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To ponder for just a short while, leads us to recognize what a gift our own existence is,  and all of this cries out, that God is alive, he has made everything for us; his creation is a daily sign of his love.  

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When St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi held a flower in her hand,  she felt God’s presence, and she would say to herself: my Good Father has thought from all eternity, to create this flower for me, that I might love him.   

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In Ecclesiastes we read: ‘God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done.’ Eccl 3:11  

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The sign of a truly religious person is not that he only comes to Church to find God, but that he finds God everywhere.  William Barclay will say: ‘For him who has eyes to see and a heart to understand, the daily miracle of night and day,  and the splendor of all common things, is sign enough from God.