Et Reliqua
The Chaplain's Log
Archives since August 14, 2012
Whitsunday
For the past nine days, the Apostles have been waiting and
praying along with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Nine days ago they witnessed one of the most astonishing sights ever
seen by man – their Saviour, right in front of them, rose up from the ground,
ascending higher and higher until he was lost from their sight beyond the
clouds of heaven. But he did not leave
them orphans.
An orphan has neither father nor mother. First of all, with his dying breath on the Cross,
he made sure the apostles had a mother: “Mother, behold thy son,” he said to
his own most Blessed Mother, indicating his beloved apostle St. John. And of course St. John, the lone apostle at
the foot of the Cross, represented all of the apostles, and all of us today,
and Christ was giving his Mother to us poor banished children of Eve, to be our
Mother. “Son behold thy Mother”. My dear faithful, behold thy Mother. And now, the apostles were gathered around this
same Mother in the Upper Room, waiting for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
So Our Lord did not leave his apostles without a mother. And to be sure, the apostles had a father
also, the same Father we acclaim in our prayers. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be
thy Name!” The same Father we share today
with the apostles, and the same blessed Mother – our sacred parents in heaven
whom we love so much.
Certainly, Our Lord did not leave us orphans. But even then, Our Lord was not
satisfied. He knew our weaknesses. He knew that we lacked faith. That we lacked strength. He knew of the future troubles and
persecutions, the martyrdoms and the sufferings of his children. He knew that only Love, a tremendous Love, is
capable of making us strong enough to withstand our temptations, to carry our
crosses, to be able to live and die for him.
And so he wanted to share with his most beloved creature, Man, that
extraordinary love that exists between his Father and himself, a love so
extraordinary that it defies description and must simply be labeled as a
Mystery. That Mystery of Love binding
Father and Son together, which is the Holy Spirit.
Pray often then to that same Holy Spirit the words of the
hymn: “Come down, O Love Divine, seek
thou this soul of mine, and visit it with thine own ardour glowing.”
As befits any great event, much preparation had to precede this
descent of the Holy Ghost. God the
Father began these preparations by enlisting the help of the Holy Virgin,
giving her that most sacred privilege which is the Immaculate Conception, to
ensure that his Son should have a fitting dwelling place wherein to be made
flesh. With the cooperation of our
Mother, he then sent forth his only-begotten Son, who was born of this Virgin
Mary, and then suffered a most terrible death for us on the Cross. He opened the Gates of Heaven, he rose from
the dead, he confirmed the apostles in their faith and gave them their mission,
and finally he returned to his Father.
All was now ready for the coming of the Holy Ghost. And yet even then, he willed that the Blessed
Mother and the apostles should spend yet nine more days in prayer to prepare
themselves for this greatest gift of God, which is Himself.
Finally, the day came, the day of Pentecost. And the hour came, the “third hour”, that is
the third hour after the rising of the sun, the hour of Terce, mid-morning on
the day of Pentecost. Today, and
throughout this coming week, the Octave of Pentecost, Whitsuntide, we pray the
hymn Veni Creator Spiritus at the
Office of Terce, marking the only time during the entire year that a hymn at
one of the Little Hours of the Breviary is changed for any reason.
Mid-morning on Pentecost Sunday. The hour at which the Holy Ghost descended
upon the BIessed Mother and the twelve apostles. I want to stress the time to you now, as this
is indeed about that same time when the Holy Ghost came down. This is why we must pray very fervently here
and now, that the same Holy Ghost may descend now upon us all, here present in
this church of Our Lady, in Monroe, in the State of Connecticut.
This town has suffered much this past year, along with our
neighbours in Newtown and Sandy Hook.
And the inhabitants of this town
should be proud of the love and compassion that was shown to those who suffered
the most. These towns, where, as once in
Bethlehem so many years ago, Rachel wept for her children because they were no
more. To you was given this singular burden
and trial, and today, we must beg God that the Holy Ghost may descend upon us
with his sevenfold gifts, and give us the Faith and the Fortitude not only to
continue to show such Love and Compassion to our neighbours, but also the Faith
and the Fortitude simply to live our Catholic lives during these most
extraordinary and difficult of times.
Pray
therefore. Pray that we may be led not
into temptation, pray that we may be delivered from evil. These are not easy times to practice our
Christian faith. We are called upon to
struggle simply to hang on to what those before us took for granted. Our Holy Mass, our Sacraments, our Catholic
way of life. We have seen what happens
to our poor friends who remained trapped in the abuses of Vatican II. They have lost so much of their faith, they
barely even know any more what it is to be Catholic, a son or a daughter of the
Church. And who can blame them? Who could continue to have allegiance to the sacrilegious
substitutes they have in place of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, their liturgy
which ranges from the banal to the downright ugly?
Cast
your eyes towards heaven therefore and pray.
Look up to that heaven into which Our Lord ascended in triumph and from
which the Holy Ghost descended on the feast of Pentecost. Keep your eyes forever focused on heaven,
detach yourself from the world, save your love only for the things that are of
heaven. Do this and the Holy Ghost will
bring to you this day the gift of Wisdom.
Learn
your faith and the truths of our holy religion as well as you can, and the Holy
Ghost will give you his gift of Understanding.
And how important this gift is in today’s world where the understanding
of our faith has been left to so few of us!
We who have been chosen to pass the torch to our children must plead
with God for this gift of Understanding.
And
where there are choices to be made in life, when we aren’t sure what to do,
whether this path is the right one, or that one or another, pray that God will help
you choose correctly the road that will lead most directly to your salvation,
and which will be to the greater glory of God.
The Holy Ghost brings his gift of Counsel to help you with these choices
and make sure you do not fail to follow God’s will.
He
offers you this day his gift of Fortitude.
When we find it difficult to pray, when we are tempted, when we cannot
seem to summon up the strength to practice a particular virtue, when the
overwhelming burdens of this world weigh most heavily upon us, his gift of
Fortitude is there to help us overcome these obstacles and carry these crosses.
And
then, like the Finger of God’s right hand pointing the way, the Holy Ghost
brings his gift of Knowledge, pointing out to us the road to follow, the
dangers to avoid, in order to do our duty and reach heaven. And again, in these days where dangers abound
in numbers and magnitude unimaginable to our forefathers in the Faith, it is
this gift of Knowledge that will surely be our present help in time of trouble,
guiding us like a lighthouse in the tempest, to our eternal reward.
Finally,
the twin gifts of Piety and Fear of the Lord, help us in two different ways to
reach that same goal. Piety, by
inspiring us with a tender and childlike confidence in God, making us embrace
joyfully anything that pertains to his service.
While the gift of Fear fill us with a respect for God, making us dread,
above all things, to offend him.
With
these sevenfold gifts that the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, offers to us today,
we have the seven pillars upon which we can build our lives and maintain our
Catholic peace in this world of insanity.
They are ours for the asking. And
today, Pentecost Sunday, is the day
on which to ask. When we were confirmed,
we became warriors of the Holy Ghost, did we not? The history of our Church is filled with
examples of such warriors. We think of
mighty St. George who fought the dragon.
Of St. Michael Archangel who cast into hell the devil and his angels. But think too of a little girl in Italy, who
fought for her chastity and who died a martyr’s death not too many years ago,
St. Maria Goretti. Or another little
girl in France, who became a great warrior, the Maid of Orleans, who drove out
the English from the shores of France in the Name of the Catholic King. Today, I hope you will not drive out the
English from your shores. But I do want
you, all the same, to pray to receive these seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, to
become true Warriors of Christ. From the
oldest among you, veterans of past wars, down to the two little girls of this
church who today will receive their first Holy Communion.
Let
the Holy Ghost descend upon you. Open up
your heart to his inspirations.
Cooperate with his graces and become Warriors for the Catholic Faith, so
that your forefathers in heaven today may look down on these sons and daughters
of Connecticut, New York, wherever you’re from, with pride. For Pentecost marks
the birthday, the coming to life, of the Holy Catholic Church. In his
encyclical Mystici Corporis, Pope
Pius XII states that “the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church”. The soul.
The principle of life. In other
words it is the Holy Ghost who gives the Church the impulse to accomplish God’s
will, thus enabling her to fulfill her mission, the continuation down through
the ages of the redemptive work of Christ.
Just as the soul quickens the body, so too does the Holy Spirit quicken
the Church. Indeed we invoke the Holy
Spirit in the Credo at Mass as “the
Lord, the giver of life” (Dominum et vivificantem). He kindles in the Church her zeal for the
glory of God and the salvation of souls.
He gives light and strength to her shepherds, fervor and energy to her
apostles, courage and invincible faith to her martyrs.
And
we few Catholics who are left to preserve the true faith are the only remaining
apostles left in this world. We are apostles
and we have our mission. It is up to us
to complete the mission Christ gave his first apostles, that redemptive work of
giving glory to God and saving souls.
Let us meditate profoundly on this mission, and fulfill it, each of us,
to the best of our ability. And may the
Holy Virgin, full of grace, intercede for us to that same Holy Ghost, by whom
her Son became incarnate, that we may rise up as Warriors today to carry out
this apostolic mission. Let us follow
her example in the Upper Room, that we may first receive and then cooperate
with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, that we may each help in our own way to renew
the face of the earth.
Ascension Day
Since his Resurrection from the
dead, Our Lord has appeared many times to his beloved disciples. For forty days now, he has been seen amongst
them, walking with them on the road to Emmaus, entering the Cenacle through
locked doors, calling to them from the shore as they were fishing in the See of
Genesareth. He has explained many things
to them, things for which they were not ready before his death on the cross,
but which now they would need to remember and take with them on their voyages
over the seas and beyond to evangelize the nations. He had called Peter to be his rock, the rock
upon which he would build his Church, he had instructed the apostles to go
forth unto all nations, teaching and baptizing in his name. Finally, on the fortieth day of Easter, which
is today, he appeared one last time to them near Bethany on the Mount of
Olives, and there he gave them their final instructions—that they should remain
in Jerusalem and there wait for their baptism with the Holy Ghost.
It is difficult to imagine the
feelings of the apostles that day. There
were only eleven of them. One of them
had taken another path, betraying his friends, and then committing suicide in a
final act of despair. The others had
lived to see Our Lord put to death, and then to see him walking again in their
midst, the miracle of the Resurrection.
These were men that had seen so much!
So many miracles. Healings,
exorcisms, walking on water, feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of
bread, and then finally that indescribable moment when they first saw Our Lord
after the crucifixion, after the third day.
What had all these events done to the psychological makeup of these
simple men from Galilee? I could hardly
say, I’m no psychologist, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what was the
reaction of these men, who probably thought they had seen it all, what on earth
could have gone through their mind, when Our Lord finished speaking to them
today, and started rising up into the air…
In our childish fantasies, we
think of the Ascension of Our Lord, and we think of him floating up to the
clouds with the apostles standing on the ground and maybe waving. Like a navy family on shore watching their
son’s ship pulling out into the harbor.
Only one member of the family hadn’t come along to see him off. There’s no mention of Our Blessed Lady in the
account of the Ascension. It’s possible
she was there, but I doubt it. I prefer
to think that Our Lord had a private meeting with his Mother before his
Ascension in front of the Apostles, a meeting where he made his own private
farewell, in words that were never meant to come to the ears of the Evangelists,
never meant for our ears.
So with no Blessed Mother to look
to for guidance what did the Apostles do now when they saw him gradually
getting smaller, smaller, until he disappeared into the clouds and was seen no
more? What does one do after such a
spectacle as this? Banal conversation
would seem so out of place, the shock of the scene could not have left them
much in a mood for discussion or even for prayer. It must have been one of those moments when
all you can do is just stand there and give your brain time to adjust to the
enormity of what it had just seen. Our
Lord certainly knew they would need help with this, and so he sent them two men
clad in white apparel—angels obviously.
And as the eleven apostles gazed into the sky with their mouths wide
open, these angels break the shocked silence and say to them: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up
into heaven?”.
And with a jolt these eleven
apostles returned to the practical consideration of what to do next. They had their instructions—not to depart
from Jerusalem. So they obeyed their
Master’s last command, and journeyed back to the Holy City, about a day’s
journey away. They went back to the
Cenacle, that same Upper Room where Our Lord had celebrated his Last Supper
with them, where the Holy Mass had been instituted, where they had been
ordained, where they had returned a day later overcome with horror and grief at
their sight of Our Lord in the agony of his final Passion and death. This was their comfort zone, the place to
which they returned. And they remained
there nine days.
The first order of business was
to take care of the group. Christ had
called Twelve Apostles, mirroring the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Judas had died a traitor’s death, and now
they were only eleven. And so Peter,
called by Our Lord to be their leader, made his first act as first Pope, and
called an election to fill the vacant chair left by Judas. Accordingly they drew lots and chose Matthias
to be the Twelfth Apostle. And then they
sat back and they waited.
By now they had been joined by
Our Lord’s Mother, the other faithful women, like Mary Magdalene and her sister
Martha, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the rest. Many of the other disciples also flocked to
the apostles to hear of Our Lord’s Ascension and to find out what they should
do next. But they didn’t really know
what else to do. They had been told to
wait. And so wait they did. They waited and they prayed. Prayed for nine days. You’ve often heard this time called the First
Novena. They prayed their Novena, not
knowing it was a nine-day novena, not knowing what would happen next or when.
Let’s come back to the 21st
century now. Two thousand years later,
and the last anyone saw of Our Lord was this day twenty centuries ago. He has not been seen since. We are still waiting for his Second Coming,
still praying, still not knowing what will happen next. We live in a world where certainly, anything could happen at any moment. There are nutcases all over the world who
could pull the trigger any minute and plunge the world into catastrophe. Most of us here today will remember that day
in September 2001 when our smug peace was shattered as those planes flew into
the Twin Towers and our lives changed forever.
When is the next big event going to take place? When are we going to get a phone call in the
middle of the night from some relative telling us to turn on the news: “You’re not going to believe this…” What scenes of horror lie out there in that
dim and scary, oh so uncertain future, waiting for us? And so we wait and we wonder.
We are just like the twelve
apostles, aren’t we? We cling to our
comfort zone, and there we stick like glue.
And we wait. And hopefully we
pray like they did. But we wait and pray
with fear.
The apostles need not have
feared. Look at all the promises Our
Lord had given them. For example, he had
just promised them he was going to heaven to prepare a place for them, for
us. He promised them he would send the
Holy Ghost, the Comforter. He had
promised that wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, there is
he in the midst of them. That he would
be with his Church until the consummation of the earth. But they continued to fear. And so do we.
We have not learned that lesson yet.
The lesson not to fear. Learn it
today on this feast of the Ascension of Our Lord into heaven, when our Paschal
Candle is extinguished for the last time and the Light of the World is hidden
from us till the end of time. Hidden,
Christ may be. But absent he is
not. He ascended into heaven, but where
is heaven. Heaven is where God is, and
God is everywhere. Only a thin veil
separates us from this hell on earth from our heavenly paradise. Only a thin veil separates us from the
tabernacle here in which is contained God himself. But again even in the tabernacle he is hidden
in the veil of the host, unseen to our eyes.
Some of the saints learned to see beyond this veil, to see the angels,
and the demons too, as they winged their way to and fro, influencing us for
good and evil. We need to learn to look in
the right way for God, beyond our fears, our distractions, our needs, and our
trivialities. Learn how to see God where
he truly is, which is everywhere. Don’t
take this too far. We don’t want to
become scientologists or pantheists, where God is a tree, every tree, every
blade of grass. No. God is not a tree. But remember that indeed his majesty and his awe,
his delicacy and his love for us is reflected in the nature he created. And in his greatest creation of all, mankind,
fashioned in his own image and likeness, then surely there, in our fellow man, we
can find the face of God. In the smile
of a baby, sure that’s an easy one. But
look too in the face of your enemies, for there God is surely also.
And finally, take a lesson from
God’s supreme creation, the Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, Mother
of God and Virgin most pure. When all
else fails, let us do what surely those apostles must have done as they waited
for the coming of the Comforter, and that is to turn every now and again to
Jesus’ mother, now their mother, and now ours.
How much solace they must have drawn from her presence there with them, from
that face that resembled his, as they waited and prayed. Don’t stray far from her side. For she is the one, the only one who has been
given the privilege to follow Christ, body and soul, by being assumed into
heaven. She is our inspiration that we
too shall one day join them both, in in blessed bliss, forever and ever. Amen.
5th Sunday after Easter
“Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
It seems so obvious to us, doesn’t
it, that whenever we want something, we simply ask for it. We have many ways of asking: from a simple request to getting down on our
knees and pleading, begging, for some favour.
The more we want something, the greater lengths to which we are prepared
to go in order to get it. And who better
for us to ask than the good Lord God Almighty, from whom all blessings flow,
and from whom all good things come. “Ask,
and ye shall receive.” So we ask God for
the things we need. And from his bounty
we receive.
The Latin word for “ask” is “rogare”,
from which we get the word “rogation”.
Which is why today, the Fifth Sunday after Easter, is usually referred
to as “Rogation Sunday.” Because of this
reference in the Gospel “Ask, and ye shall receive.” And the
three days that follow, Monday through Wednesday of this week, these are called
“Rogation Days”, because on them we pray the so-called “Lesser Litanies”, where
great processions used to be held through the villages to bless the fields and
the crops. In some places these
processions are still held even today.
What day then could be more
appropriate on which to have our May Procession? On a day which has been set aside to ask God
for the favours we need from him, what better day on which to carry the statue
of Our Blessed Lady in humble procession, and ask her to bestow her own sweet
favours on her children. For who is it
that takes our petitions to God and makes them her own, interceding for us at
the throne of the Most High, making most of the time her simple requests, but if
necessary pleading with her Divine
Son that our prayers may be answered.
And he, who turned water into wine at her request, he who can refuse his
Mother nothing, he answers her petitions.
Not some of the time, not even
most of the time, but every single
time. “Never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored
thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided.”
Let us remember these things as
we walk in procession around the church today.
And let us thank God also for another small gift from his Divine
Providence for giving us today the feast of Pope St. Pius V. This was the great Pope of the Holy Rosary, who
urged all Christendom to pray for the defeat of the Moslems at the Battle of
Lepanto, and whose prayers were most resoundingly answered. May this church of Our Lady of the Rosary
resound with her praise today, as we celebrate her coronation in heaven. May our prayers ascend as incense in the
sight of God, to be brought before his throne in praise and thanksgiving.
Yet another tiny little gift of
Providence this morning is one which is barely worth a mention. And yet such a simple gift carries a lesson,
a lesson that the great Almighty God cares, even in the tiniest of details, for
those who come to him in prayer. This other
little gift from God today is just one of those simple “coincidences”, that the melody of the Introit at today’s
Rogation Sunday Mass is exactly the same as for the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception of Our Lady on December 8th. It’s not important in itself, and most of you
probably would not have noticed it at all, but God is making the connection for
us between Rogation Sunday and Our Lady and her May Procession. And I just wanted to share that with you, another
little sign that the good Lord is smiling down upon us all this morning, and in
a sense, helping to orchestrate our little endeavours to make things “nice” for
his Mother. Truly, there is nothing that
makes God happier than when we and all generations shall call her blessed.
Today then is a special day. It is a day set aside for making your prayers
to God. A day of Rogation. I hardly doubt that each of us can think of plenty
of things to pray for. There’s no need
to burden you with a litany of worthy favours that you should be begging God to
provide. However, I’d just like to
mention to you a couple of things for which you should not pray.
Fortunately, God is all-wise, and
knows how to answer our prayers, even
when we ask for something stupid. Or
worse still, for something wrong for us to have. I was on a website the other day, reading
through some of the prayers that people had posted. There was one anguished prayer from a young
woman who was trying to conceive a child without success. I started to feel sorry for her, and then
read the rest of the plea where she explains how she and her boyfriend have been trying so long to have a child. Her boyfriend! As though God would bless such illicit unions
with good fruit!
It’s certainly possible for us to
pray, unthinkingly, for favours which would go contrary to the will of God. It’s
especially possible for those not of our faith, those unfortunate, ignorant
children of protestantism and modernism today, uneducated by their false religions
or their Novus Ordo upbringing. One of
the worst examples I saw was a prayer uttered the other day by none other than
the President of the United States of America.
In his address to “Planned Parenthood”, the nation’s largest abortion
provider, he assured them first of all “You’ve also got a president who’s going
to be right there with you fighting every step of the way.” Fighting to kill more babies! And then he had the blasphemous audacity to
call down Almighty God himself to bless, to
bless the work of these baby-killers.
Prayers like this are for God to answer in his own way. And you may be sure that he will answer them,
and in his own way. Let not your heart be troubled…
The idea then is when you pray,
let your prayer always be ultimately that the will of God be accomplished. What you pray for should certainly not go directly
against his will, as in the case of the pathetically confused Barack
Obama. But neither should it be focused
on our own will. Sometimes these prayers
are made innocently. “Please God, don’t
let Grandma die.” Meanwhile, Grandma is
110 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s and lung cancer. Pray for the right things. Because when we, with our fallen nature, pray
for things our fallen nature wants, we are obviously going to tend to pray for
what is not good for us. “Please God,
let me win the lottery.” Don’t pray for
things we don’t need! There’s a prayer
in one of the responses of Matins that is repeated at one time of the year,
that says basically: “Lord, I don’t pray
for riches, but I don’t pray for poverty either. Please just give me what is necessary to get
by.” This is the kind of prayer God
answers. Our Blessed Lady herself tells
us so in her Magnificat: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and
the rich he hath sent empty away.”
We know God is smiling down on us
today, ready to hear our prayers. After
the High Mass, join our procession round the church, sing your praises to Our
Blessed Lady, as we crown her statue and acknowledge her Queen of Heaven, Queen
of the Angels, Queen of the May. And amongst
all this rightful praise and veneration, slip in your little requests, your
little rogations, and ask God for the needful things of life, and most
importantly for the grace of a holy life, and when the time comes, a holy death
in the welcoming arms of Jesus and our Blessed Mother.
4th Sunday after Easter
Today is the Fourth Sunday after
Easter. Four Sundays already since Our
Lord’s glorious Resurrection from the dead, and only a week and a half to go
before his equally glorious Ascension into heaven. Not long now before Our Lord leaves this
world to go back to his Father. These
are the twilight times, the last golden days of Our Lord’s earthly visitation,
when the Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary, the Divine Word was made
flesh, and dwelt amongst us. In the
Gospel he is preparing his apostles for his departure, his return to his Father
in heaven. They know it is getting late
and that he cannot stay with them much longer.
They are saddened by their master’s imminent departure, and seek to
cling to him, like a little boy whose mother has to leave him for a while. “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” The darkness gathers, and if we are well
attuned to the Church’s liturgy, we too will feel that twinge of sadness, that sense
of imminent loss.
But make no mistake. This is no death watch. Christ has died already. And on the third day he rose again from the
dead. And so he consoles his disciples
that his departure will not be one of sorrow, but that he will rise in glory to
the sound of the trumpet. He consoles
them that unless he depart from this world and return to heaven, they will not
be able to receive the Holy Ghost: “It
is expedient for you that I go away,” he says.
“For if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
depart, I will send him unto you.” The
disciples had no idea what Our Lord was talking about. Who was this “Comforter” who would come unto
them after Our Lord had left them? They
did not know that Christ was telling them about the coming of the Holy Ghost at
Pentecost, that the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity would descend upon them
with his sevenfold gifts.
To be honest, the apostles had
other things on their mind. This promise
that Our Lord made to them in today’s Gospel was actually not made just before
his Ascension. Christ made these
promises in a far different context. It
was in fact the night of the Last Supper.
They had just eaten their last meal with their Lord before he was
betrayed by one of their own, Judas, to be led away to die on Calvary. This was not a happy time for the apostles,
and it is unlikely they were able to concentrate too clearly on this future promise
of a Comforter. And so, and possibly in
part for this very reason, Our Lord gave them another gift that night. He knew they needed to be comforted now. Not just later after his Ascension. But now when all the horror of the Great
Night of Darkness was about to descend, here, now, was the need for comfort.
Thus was instituted the great
Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. “This
is my Body,” said Our Lord that same night.
"My Body that is given for you.
This do in remembrance of me.”
Not content with sending us the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the
Holy Spirit, the Comforter, Christ left us his own Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity
in the Holy Eucharist. The next day, Christ
the Eternal High Priest would sacrifice that same Body and Blood to his Father
in heaven. But first he would establish
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which that same Body and Blood would be
offered daily on the altars of his Holy Catholic Church throughout the
ages. The very same sacrifice as on Calvary,
identical, except for the shedding of blood.
The same priest, Christ the High Priest.
The same Body and Blood of the same Our Lord Jesus Christ, offering the
same sacrifice to the same God in heaven.
Bringing with it a continuation of the graces and merits that flowed from
his sacred wounds on Good Friday.
This, my dear faithful, is the
lesson we have before us today. Not just
a Gospel story. But the reality of what
Christ speaks in the Gospel. We have here
a gift so great that we can never comprehend its magnitude. A gift from the very height and breadth and
depth of the infinite God. A gift from
the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A gift for
you and for many, unto the remission of your sins.
I won’t waste your time by
reminding you of how our brethren in the conciliar Church have come to treat
this greatest of all gifts. How they chatter
away in their churches, clapping their hands, hugging each other, dancing even,
all dressed up in their jeans and t-shirts, ready in the depths of their mortal
sins to grab the Host from the painted fingernails of some Eucharistic mini-skirted
minister. I don’t need to remind you of
what you have already rejected. Pray for
these poor deluded children of God, for they have no idea of what they do.
But what about us? Let us not even think about congratulating
ourselves just because we do not act like gorillas in the presence of God. We owe more to him than that. It takes more than wearing a mantilla to be
worthy of receiving this Sacrament. More
than putting on your Sunday best, more even than all your fasting and all your
prayers. It takes everything we have,
and then it isn’t enough. So who then
shall approach this altar to receive this gift today? Who considers himself worthy, good enough, to
receive Our Lord in Holy Communion? But
let us call to mind the last words we hear before we approach the Communion
table to receive Our Lord on our tongue:
“Domine, non sum dignus.” O Lord,
I am not worthy. None of us is
worthy. But God commands us to approach
nevertheless. “Say but the word, and my
soul shall be healed.” By the very act
of receiving Holy Communion we are healed.
We must never think lightly of receiving Holy Communion. But neither must we fear to approach.
The Church requires only three
things for you to receive Holy Communion:
that you are a baptized Catholic, that you are fasting according to the
rules with which you are all familiar, and that you are in a state of sanctifying
grace. We are very familiar with these
rules, and I hope none of us would even think of receiving Holy Communion right
after eating, or worse yet, in a state of mortal sin. And by the way, while we’re on the subject,
let me just remind you that some of you may be in danger of committing a mortal
sin very soon. Easter Duty! It binds under pain of mortal sin, don’t
forget! There are only a few weeks left
now for you to perform this Easter Duty of Confession and Communion. Make sure you take care of this and don’t
leave it till the last minute.
Now let me ask you another
question. It’s a good question, and one
which we hear often enough. You probably
think you have the answer too, but I’d just like to add a few thoughts to the
standard response, and then you can see where it leads you.
The question is “how can I best
attend Mass?” “What is the best way of
participating in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?” Many of the popes have taught us through the
ages that the faithful should not just attend the Mass, passively, like
mindless sheep grazing in the pasture.
You are exhorted to take part in the Mass. And here of course comes that standard
response I mentioned, namely that the best way of attending Mass is by silently
but attentively reading with the priest the words of the missal. Especially the propers of the Mass which vary
according to the feast, and which are in keeping with the spirit of the feast
or liturgical season. I cannot stress to
you enough the importance of doing this.
For many of you it will be enough.
But for others it may be just the springboard from which your soul may
rise up to contemplate the very essence of what is happening, the renewal of
the Sacrifice of Calvary, the re-opening of the Sacred Heart of Jesus from
which all blessings flow. Use a brief
passage to focus on, and then be transported into the presence of God, to the
very foot of the Cross. Just as the
Blessed Mother participated in her Son’s Sacrifice on Calvary. Hers was no passive attendance, just standing
there watching and feeling depressed.
Our Lady united herself with her Son’s intentions, offering him to God
thse Father as he himself did. We can
share in the role of the priest in some way, by offering this divine Victim to
God the Father. Be careful here. The Novus Ordo has taken this concept and
exaggerated it in such a way as to increase the role of the people,
substituting it for the ordained priest (think of those horrible Offertory
processions where some well-meaning elderly couple or scantily clad teenagers
bring up the “gifts” to the altar, think of those Eucharistic ministers again,
priest facing the people instead of towards God, reception of Holy Communion in
the un-anointed hands of the non-ordained).
But there is still a way for you to participate in this priesthood,
simply by joining the priest in offering Our Divine Saviour to Our Father in
heaven.
A sacrifice requires not just a
priest but also a victim. And I hardly need
to point out that the Novus Ordo don’t pay much attention to this aspect of
participation in their New Mass. But in
the true Sacrifice of the Mass, of course the Victim is the Lamb of God, who
takest away the sins of the world, the “Salutaris Hostia”, the Victim of
Salvation. But this same Lamb of God
tells us “Take up your cross and follow me.”
We are called too to be victims on our own crosses, our very own
Calvaries. When we pray the first
Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary, when we really
pray it, do we not dare to say the words of Our Lord, “Please, take this
chalice of suffering away from me, nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” Do we not dare to agree to accept whatever
crosses God gives us? And how are those
Crosses? Do they hurt? Of course they do. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be crosses. It’s always so amazing, isn’t it, how we all
recite the Our Father: “Thy will be done”, or the Angelus “Be it done unto me
according to thy word,” and then complain when God answers our prayer and those
heavy crosses are placed upon our shoulders.
But this is one of the most effective ways there are to participate in
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It’s a
real participation. You are offering
yourself as a victim, sharing in the suffering of Our Lord, participating in
his Sacrifice. When the priest turns
round to you after the Offertory, and says to you “Orate, fratres”, take a look
at the words that follow in the Missal: “Pray,
brethren, that my sacrifice and yours,
may be acceptable unto God, the Father Almighty.”
Make Your attendance at Mass on
Sunday the great highlight of your week.
Not because of the nice music, the beautiful ceremonies, or because you
like the smell of incense, or you get to see your friends. But because it is your great opportunity actually
to take part in the Sacrifice of Redemption, offering Our Lord and your very
being itself, to God for the salvation of mankind. Surely, that beats anything else you do
during the course of the week? This is
the gift of the Mass, and when Our Lord departs from this earth on Ascension
Thursday, and the Light of the World as represented by the Paschal Candle, is
extinguished one last time, this gift abides, on our altars, in our tabernacle,
waiting for you.
3rd Sunday after Easter
For those of us blessed to have
been born into a loving, caring family, we hold in our hearts many cherished
memories of our childhood. We remember a
place called “Home”, and all the happy times we enjoyed there. We remember when we first left home, perhaps
to go off to college, or to fight overseas in the war, and we remember the
wrenching ache in the pits of our stomach as we yearned to be back home, home
with our mother and father, our brothers and sisters, home where we were loved
and cared for by those we loved the best.
Home, sweet home! And the older
ones among us today, what would we give to be back home one more time!
The idea of home, then, is very
dear to our heart. For those fortunate
enough to live still at home, you parents and children, thank God for these
wonderful days you still have, do all you can to help one another, to work
together, to make your home a home after the heart of God, a truly Christian
home. Do this and your home will be to
you the dearest spot in this world—a paradise of happiness.
To help us turn our home into
such a paradise on earth, God has given us the example of the Holy Family of
Nazareth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Those loving patrons of family life, perfect
examples each in their own way of how a mother, a father, a child should
be. Holy Mary, God’s Blessed Mother, was
a model of purity, charity, and godliness, caring for her divine Son with
tender, loving affection. Her spouse,
the good Saint Joseph, the provider, the protector, taking care of his spouse
and the Child entrusted to him. And Our
Lord himself, who the Gospel tells us, was obedient unto them. How could a home like theirs not have been
anything but the most sublime and loving paradise on earth? An example for us all to follow.
Today is the Third Sunday after
Easter, and the Sunday within the Octave of the Solemnity of St. Joseph. We have already celebrated the first and more
ancient feast of St. Joseph on March 19th. But this date always falls during Lent, and
so we are prevented by the somber atmosphere of fasting and penance from
celebrating the feast with all the solemnity it deserves. And so the Church provides us, on the
Wednesday during the second week after Easter, with a more fitting Solemnity of
St. Joseph, complete with an octave, a full eight days where we can contemplate
the virtues and example of this great saint, foster father of Our Lord Jesus
Christ.
On his feastday on March 19th,
we celebrate St. Joseph as the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We are reminded at that time of all that he
did to look after and protect his Spouse and the young child entrusted to them
by God. Indeed he did such a good job of
protecting his Holy Family that he was given another role to play in the
history of our redemption, one that he continues to work at long after his
death, even unto the present time. For
Our Blessed Lord so loved his parents on earth that he gave them another reward,
over and above that of their eternal recompense in heaven. He rewarded them by continuing until the end
of time to entrust them with the safeguard and protection of his person. No longer his physical body, but now his
mystical body. The Church. When, from the Cross, he gave his blessed
Mother to St. John, he was giving her to the Church, to us, so that we might
flee to her protection, implore her help, and not be left forsaken. And he did no less for good Saint
Joseph. Through the decrees and liturgy
of his Holy Church, he made St. Joseph the supreme Patron and Protector of that
Church. And it is in this aspect that we
revere St. Joseph on this second of his feastdays, this great Solemnity and its
Octave which we are currently celebrating.
And is it not truly right and
fitting, that St. Joseph should be not only the head of the Holy Family, the
head of the household, the head of the home,
but that he should also be the head of that other great Family, the family to
which we all belong, the family of the Church! This Church which is, or should be, our second home. Not just the entire family of the Roman
Catholic Church, but even our own intimate little family here at Our Lady of
the Rosary Chapel. I hope your memories
of this home will one day fill you
with the same happy memories, the remembrance that here you were cared for,
here you were loved, here you were fed with the graces of the Sacraments, here
you experienced that peace and joy of being in the presence of God in the
tabernacle, and in your souls at Holy Communion. Prepare now for a future that will bring you
such happy memories. Don’t waste your
opportunities to make this second home your paradise on earth. Pray to St. Joseph, especially during this
great Octave, that he will grant that prayer we say in the 26th
Psalm: “One thing have I desired of the Lord,
which I will require; even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the
days of my life.”
To dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life. To dwell in the
state of sanctifying grace, a member of God’s holy Church, God’s holy
Family. All the days of my life. And then what? Those “days of my life” and your lives, are
slowly ticking away. In the midst of
life we are in death. Slowly (or perhaps
more quickly than we know) we are approaching that portal we call death. It is a portal, a gate, by which we leave our
home here in this world, and go to our eternal home in the next. It is a portal that we fear, perhaps, because
it is outside our experience, unknown.
And God understands this fear, and has given us a helper for that day on
which we take the step from this world to the next. And we should not be surprised that this
helper, this Patron Saint of the Dying, is again, St. Joseph. He who according to tradition, died
blissfully in the arms of Jesus and Mary.
Who could ask for a more blessed death than that? He who is the Patron of the Universal
Church. Universal—we all know that the
Church is divided into three branches, the Church Militant, we living souls
here on earth, the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant,
the saints in heaven. St. Joseph is
there with us wherever we go, precisely because he is the Patron of the entire
universal Church, Militant, Suffering and Triumphant. And so he provides for us and protects us in
this life, he prays for us during our sojourn in Purgatory, and he rejoices
with us when we reach our final destination.
And he remains with us every step of the journey, just as he accompanied
the Blessed Mother every step of the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem, as he
accompanied her and their Son during the Flight into Egypt, and later back to
their home in Nazareth. He remains with
us as we transition from Church Militant to Church Suffering, and from Church
Suffering to Church Triumphant. Because
he is the Patron of the Church Universal.
He abides with us from one home to another.
And by the way, it is surely no
accident that the freemasons, during their reforms of the liturgy in the 1950s,
saw fit to desecrate this divine plan by abolishing the Solemnity of St. Joseph
and its Octave. As they began their
attack on Holy Mother Church, the Feast of her holy patron Saint Joseph was, I
think, the very first feastday they got rid of. It is such a sad thing that many of our
friends in other traditional churches no longer venerate St. Joseph in his
God-given role as Patron of the Universal Church, choosing instead to honour
its masonic replacement, a secondary feast on May Day—the Communist feastday—calling
it the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.
What a poor substitution! Let us
pray for the restoration of the Solemnity together with its Octave, that St.
Joseph may once again be given the honour he truly deserves.
But to get back to this passage
from earthly life through death to eternal life, which is common to all men, there’s
just one more observation I’d like to point out, which is the one exception to
the rule. Because one man’s journey took a slight detour. This man of course is our divine
Saviour. He lived his life of 33 years,
it is true. And then he died, it is true. But what followed next was completely without
precedent, nor will it ever happen again.
He rose from the dead, and remained on this earth for a further forty
days. Only then would he ascend into
heaven for all eternity. During the
Church’s liturgical year, we are now in this rather strange and unprecedented
period of forty days between his Resurrection and Ascension. And because this is a strange and
unprecedented time, we must try and understand Our Lord’s words in today’s
Gospel in that context. “A little while,
and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me,
because I go to the Father.” Because Our
Lord wants us to look beyond the narrow boundaries of our own home here in this
life. He bids us look beyond the grave;
he points heavenward, and bids us think of our “eternal home.”
But here lies our difficulty
during this transitional period of 40 days between Easter and Ascension: the apostles are overjoyed that Our Lord has
risen from the dead, that he walks once more amongst them. But gradually, Our Lord is making it apparent
to them that he must leave them, that he must return to his heavenly home with
his Father. And so, in spite of our Easter
joy, we have now the beginnings of a twinge of sadness in the knowledge that
Christ must leave us. We are now
counting down the days to the moment when he will rise up and be seen no more
until the end of time, to the moment when the paschal candle will be
extinguished, and the light of the risen Saviour dimmed until his Second
Coming.
There is a famous English hymn,
which is typically sung at funerals, but which can be applied equally well to
this time of year. Its first lines are
taken from the Vespers of Eastertide:
“Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” Let us make these words our own, as we seek
to keep Our Blessed Lord with us as long as we can. Cling to the hem of his garment, and ask him
to abide with us. But at the same time
be consoled by his response: “And ye now
therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall
rejoice, and your joy no man shall take from you.” Our heavenly home sweet home awaits.
This is where we should be
looking during these forty days. Towards
our eternal destiny. Every day during
this season we say these words at the Office of Prime: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those
things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.
Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth.” St. Joseph will help us if we ask him. He will help us through our life, through our
death, our suffering and our triumph.
Keep the name of this our beloved Patron always on your lips, and the
sight of your eternal home ever before your eyes. And as that wonderful old hymn describes so
beautifully:
Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
2nd Sunday after Easter
During the darkest hours of the
night, the Church’s thoughts revert to the worship of God. In monasteries and abbeys and convents all
over the world, monks and nuns, souls dedicated to God, rise from their beds in
the middle of the night, and make their way to the chapel. There, by the light of the flickering
candles, they will sing the Office of Matins, their solemn chant rising through
the night air, even as incense in the sight of God. And each night the Office begins with the
chanting of what is called the Invitatory, the invitation or call to prayer,
the 94th psalm. And as the
world sleeps, these men and women of God sing through this psalm, until
suddenly, in the middle of their solemn verses, they come to these words, and fall
to their knees, calling upon all Christians everywhere to adore their God: “O come, let us worship and fall down, and
kneel before the Lord our Maker: For he is the Lord our God; and we are his
people, and the sheep of his pasture.”
We are his people, and the sheep
of his pasture. Reflect for a moment,
this Good Shepherd Sunday, on the utter simplicity of these words, and the
humility it takes to say them and mean them.
We have no trouble of course, thinking about Our Blessed Lord as the
Good Shepherd. But did we ever really
stop to consider what that makes us? We
are the sheep of his pasture. Now if
anyone were to tell you that you were a bunch of sheep, I’m sure that your
first reaction would be to take offence.
Who wants to be thought of as a sheep?
For after all, what is a sheep?
Nothing more than a stupid animal, mindlessly following the sheep in
front of him, as the flock moves about, bleating, without a single thought in
its collective head. The sheep has none
of the aggression and hunting skills of animals like the lion. It has none of the cunning of the fox, none
of the loyalty of the dog, none of the usefulness of a beast of burden like the
horse, the ox, the mule. The sheep is
just a mindless creature, too stupid even to fight or complain when it’s being
led to the slaughter. No. We don’t want to be thought of as a sheep.
But many of our enemies often do
refer to us Catholics as ignorant sheep.
According to them, that’s exactly what we are, sheep who mindlessly accept
whatever Rome tells us. Never thinking
to question anything, we blindly follow our popes and bishops, doing whatever
they tell us to do, believing whatever they tell us to believe, not a single
original thought in our heads. Just obeying, always ready to fill the pews on
Sundays to be fleeced by our shepherds.
Obviously, we must take some time
here to make distinctions. All
comparisons fail in one or another aspect, and this is no exception. So we must take the aspects of “sheepness”,
and reflect on which of those aspects should apply to us and which we must
reject. For a start, don’t be the type
of sheep that blindly follows any
shepherd, good or bad. Our Lord tells us
to beware the false shepherd. You
already took this stand when you rejected the changes of Vatican II. You have turned your backs on the false
shepherds that have tried to lead you astray, and so in this sense you have
acted not like mindless sheep, but
have obeyed the advice given by St. Paul, that “if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received,
let him be accursed.” You have not practiced
the kind of blind obedience that follows the false shepherd, even when he leads
you over the cliff of heresy, or delivers you to the wolves of false ecumenism,
married clergy, the destruction of the Mass and the Sacraments. See to it that you continue to remain
faithful to this “same gospel that ye have received”. Beware of any
false shepherds, any man, pope,
bishop, priest, conciliar or
traditional, who suggests anything to you which is not according to the faith
we have been taught. Never listen to
suggestions merely because they appear to come from a pious man, nor because
they seem to be prompted by a regard to the will of God. We may be always sure that, if we are to be
tempted, it will be by someone having a great appearance of virtue and
religion.
So what kind of sheep are we
supposed to be then? Obviously not by blind trust in our shepherds today. Today’s Gospel shows us how we should
approach this. It shifts the focus from
us as the sheep to Our Lord as the Shepherd.
The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep. So let us take a brief look at the role of
the shepherd, so that we can find our own true identity as his sheep.
The shepherd’s job, simply put,
is to look after the sheep. To care for
them. He loves them, feeds them, and
guards them. The shepherd is the man who will make sure
they are fed, that they are led to waters where they can drink in safety, he
will look after them when they are sick, search for them when they are lost,
protect them when they are attacked by the ravening wolves. All this is the job of the shepherd. Some shepherds have their hearts only partly
in their job. These are the mercenaries
Our Lord talks about, those who don’t mind feeding the sheep, watching over
them, but at the first sign of trouble run away, saving their own skin and
leaving the poor sheep to the wolves.
But the good shepherd does more. He
is not content with just feeding and guarding his sheep. He is ready to lay down his life for his
sheep. And of course, the pre-eminent
Good Shepherd, Our Lord himself, did just that, giving his sheep life at the
cost of his own. He came into the world
in search of men, who, like stray sheep, had wandered away from the sheepfold,
and had become lost in the dark valley of sin.
And he died for these, his people, the sheep of his pasture.
So we can see perhaps a little
better now, that when Our Lord refers to himself as the Good Shepherd and to us
as the sheep of his pasture, he is providing us with a striking and most
beautiful analogy of the loving relationship between God and his people. And in this analogy, the aspects that apply
to us now become obvious. Who among us
has not been at one time or another one of those “stray sheep”, wandering
around helplessly in sin. Which of us
does not need to be loved, fed, and protected?
Are we not all fed by our Good Shepherd with sound doctrine, the great
truths of the Faith, and above all the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist? Are we not all protected by our Good
Shepherd, who preserves our souls daily from the attacks of the devil by his
loving grace? Is there anyone amongst us
who can honestly say that God does not love him, or her, and in fact that he
didn’t love each of us enough to die on the Cross for us that we might have
eternal life? This is our Good Shepherd,
and we are the sheep of his pasture. We
are the trusting, grateful sheep, who place all our confidence, all our faith,
in this our Good Shepherd, who follow him wheresoever he leads us. And we will stay faithful to him, not
straying from our pasture, but as loyal sons and daughters of the Church,
preserving our Faith, our Holy Mass, our Sacraments. And in this pasture of the Good Shepherd, we
place ourselves entirely in his hands, and because he is a “Good” Shepherd, we
will have nothing to fear under his protection, and we will want for nothing.
“The Lord is my Shepherd, there
is nothing I shall want: he maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters, he
restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the
paths of righteousness for his Name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil; for thou art with me. Thy
rod and thy staff, they comfort me. And
surely thy mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for
ever. ” (Psalm 22)
The Latin word for shepherd is
“pastor”. So when we priests read the
Gospel of Good Shepherd Sunday, we read it from a different point of view than
you, the faithful. Like you, we too are
the sheep of his pasture. But we are
also conscious of the very heavy burden of responsibility we have as your
pastors, your shepherds, the ones whom God has chosen, for better or worse, to
lead his people and the sheep of his flock.
None of us can say, like Christ, “I am the Good Shepherd.” If we do compare ourselves ever with the Good
Shepherd, it is only to realize our own shortcomings in performing our duties
as shepherds of souls. For this reason,
I ask you today to please pray for your pastors, your shepherds. Ask God to grant us the graces we need to
feed you with the right doctrine, to provide you with the true Mass, valid and
holy sacraments, to protect you from errors of the faith and from dangers to
your morals, to heal you when you are sick with the Sacraments of Penance and
Extreme Unction, to seek you out when you go astray. Orate pro nobis!
But please, don’t even think of
going astray! There are wolves out there
when you wander over the river and into the woods. Many demons and other beasts of prey who go
about as a roaring lion seeking whom they may devour. As we say in Compline every night: “Whom resist ye, steadfast in the faith.” So stay safe in the true fold of this Faith, safe
in God’s grace, remain as God’s people and the sheep of his pasture. So that “when the Son of man shall come in
his glory, and all the holy angels with him,” you may be gathered together by
the Good Shepherd one last time. For “then shall he sit upon the throne of his
glory: and before him shall be gathered
all nations: and he shall separate them
one from another, as a shepherd divideth his
sheep from the goats: and he shall set
the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his
right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world.”
Low Sunday
Today is the Octave Day of
Easter, a week since the Resurrection of Our Lord. We know this day by many other names: as Low Sunday, for example, to contrast it
with the “high holydays” of the Sacred Triduum and Easter itself. Or as Quasimodo Sunday, after the first word
of the Introit. A common name in Latin
is Dominica in Albis. The word “Albis” means white and refers to
the white robes of the newly baptized catechumens, who have been wearing these
“albs” during Easter week, and who today would finally put them aside after
receiving their First Holy Communion. In
the Eastern Church today is known as St. Thomas Sunday, after the story in the
Gospel of Doubting Thomas.
Whatever name we give to this
first Sunday after Easter, we are reminded of the continuation of the Easter
season beyond the octave itself. In our
churches, the lilies continue to adorn our altars, and white continues to be
the liturgical colour. The Alleluia, so
long suppressed during the time leading up to Easter, is now used more than
ever, with the Great Alleluia replacing the Gradual and Tract before the
Gospel. It is still a joyful time, and I
hope this joy is reflected in your sense of peace and tranquility, knowing that
the gates of heaven have been re-opened.
Our joy during this extended
period of Eastertide, however, can be nothing like the breath-taking joy
experienced by Our Lord’s disciples during that very first Easter week. In the Gospels of Easter week, we see example
after example of Our Lord’s apparitions to his apostles and disciples. One of the most moving of these of these
accounts is the story of St. Mary Magdalene, and the path she walked, from
anguish to mere worry, and then from panic to exsultation.
Her anguish of course came when
she stood at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday, along with the Blessed
Mother and St. John. Poor Mary
Magdalene, who seemed to spend so much time at the feet of Our Lord. We remember her in the house of Simon the
leper, the Saturday before the Passion, when she broke the vase of precious
ointment, pouring it over the feet of Jesus, bathing those feet with her tears
and wiping them with her hair. Now we
meet her again at the foot of the Cross, unwilling to tear herself away. Her burning love for Our Lord makes her
indifferent to everything else. She
wants him and him alone, the rest doesn’t interest her.
On Easter Sunday she cannot keep
herself away from Our Lord, and returns early that morning to the
sepulcher. She immediately notices that
the stone has been rolled away from the entrance to the tomb, and she is
gripped by anxiety: “They have taken
away my Lord.” So strong is her fear of
not being able to find him, that she seems to become disoriented, and questions
everyone she meets, repeating the same questions: Who could have taken him? Where have they taken him? She tells it to St. Peter and St. John, who
come running to see for themselves. She
tells it to the Angels she finds at the tomb.
She tells it even to Jesus himself, when she mistakes him for a
gardener.
The other women, when they find
the sepulcher open, they go in to find out what has happened. But Mary Magdalene runs off to bring the news
to the Apostles. Then she returns. She comes back to the empty tomb. She isn’t really sure why, but she knows she
must remain close to the place where Our Lord’s body had been, that body she
wants to find at any cost.
She sees the Angels, but is so
consumed with grief at not finding Our Lord, that she doesn’t marvel, she
doesn’t even have room for fear in her heart, or any other emotion. And when the Angels ask her: “Woman, why weepest thou?” she has only one
answer: “Because they have taken away my
Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.”
Later, Jesus asks her the same question, and Mary, totally absorbed in
her own thoughts, doesn’t even recognize him, but “thinking that it was the
gardener”, she says to him: “Sir, if
thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take
him away.” The thought of finding Jesus
has now so occupied her mind, that in her panic she doesn’t even feel the need
of giving his name; it seems to her that all the world must be thinking of him
too, that everyone would immediately understand.
We think back on the Resurrection
as a joyful occasion, we who have the benefit of knowing the whole story. But imagine the worry, the panic even, of one
like Mary Magdalene, who loved so much (said Our Lord) that she was forgiven so
much. One who loved Our Lord with every
fiber in her body, where there was no longer any room for other loves in her
soul, or for other desires, or pre-occupations.
The movements of this soul were directed solely towards God, and through
all her other thoughts, words, and deeds, she did nothing but seek God alone.
How far removed is this from our
own state. How regrettable it is that
our own love of God is so lukewarm in comparison with this woman’s. How it must wound Our Lord, bitterly, when he
hears our poor excuses why we don’t desire to be holy, or at least to be
without sin, when we consider someone fanatical because they want to go to
daily Mass or receive Holy Communion as often as they can. And yet we make these excuses all the time. We’re too pre-occupied, too busy with other
“important” matters for intangible things like “Sacraments.”. As if anything could be as important as
God. As our salvation.
Keep this picture of yourself in
your mind. And then compare it with the
picture of Mary Magdalene dashing around in her panic to find Our Lord. How ashamed we should all feel at our lack of
true love for God, our lack of desire and enthusiasm to find Our Lord.
There is a story about a holy
monk who lived in Egypt. One day a young man came to visit him. The young man
asked: "Oh, holy man, I want to know how to find God." The monk was
muscular and burly. He said: "Do you really want to find God?" The
young man answered: "Oh, but I do."
So the monk took the young man
down to the river. Suddenly, the monk grabbed the young man by the neck and
held his head under water. At first the young man thought the monk was giving
him a special baptism. But when after two minutes the monk didn’t let go, the
young man began struggling. Still the monk wouldn’t release him. Second by
second, the young man fought harder and harder. After five and a half minutes,
the monk pulled the young man out of the water and said: "When you desire
God as much as you desired air, you will find God."
The key to finding God is simply how
much you desire to find him. St. Mary Magdalene, on that first Easter
morning, wanted desperately to find her Lord.
And when the man she thought was a gardener spoke to her, calling her by
her name, “Mary,” she finally recognized him, and fell once more at her
familiar place, at the feet of her master.
The Good Shepherd “calleth his own sheep by name, and the sheep follow
him because they know his voice”. When
Mary hears her name, she recognizes the Lord and cries out, “Master!”
At that moment she was perhaps
closer to God than she had ever felt before.
Her Lord was risen from the dead, he was truly God. And she must have reached out to clasp again
those feet over which she had so recently poured ointment and dried them with
her hair. But this time Our Lord pulled
away and said to her gently: “Noli me
tangere” – “Touch me not”. He is God,
the Most Highest, the Most Holy. There
is always an infinite distance between the Creator and his creature, between
the one who is, and the one who is not.
And the nearer the soul comes to God, the more it is made to realize (as
Mary Magdalene was so very gently reminded by Our Lord that first Easter
Sunday) that there is this infinite distance, and so is born in us a profound
sentiment of reverence for the supreme majesty of God.
Today Our Lord is asking us the
question he asked of St. Mary Magdalene.
“Whom seekest thou?” Can we reply
that we are seeking him alone? Look in
the mirror and ask yourself the question.
Could it possibly be that your answer is something like: “Well, yes, I’d like to find God, but if I
don’t I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
How far removed is this from the desperation of St. Mary Magdalene, or the
young man with his face in the water gasping for air. He wanted to be a saint. But this wasn’t the answer he was looking
for. He thought the monk would tell him
to recite a list of prayers, or give his coat to some poor beggar, but this? This desire to breathe so strong he has no
ability to think of anything else…
We are not Protestants who
believe that because they simply “accept” that Jesus is Lord, they are entitled
to heaven. For us Catholics it is not so
easy. Or rather we are not so
simple-minded as to believe that that is all God requires of us. He died on the Cross for us, not so that we
can just smile and say thank you, but so that we will learn by his example that
it is in a life of struggling against our fallen nature, struggling to carry
all our heavy pains and sufferings (our
crosses), struggling to practice virtue in the face of the persecution and
mockery of others, and in the face of the lukewarm and selfish appetites of our
own poor flesh, it is only in all this that we may learn to find our risen
Lord. And we never quite get there,
there is always that infinite distance between us and him. But if we desire it, we will do what it
takes. We will struggle. And we will persevere until we find him. And how great will then be our joy when our
loving Shepherd calls us by our name, and we can finally lie down at his feet
for ever.
Easter Sunday
This last week was Holy Week as
you know, the single most solemn and spiritually demanding of all the weeks of
the year. The joy of today’s feast
cannot be fully appreciated unless you experience it in stark contrast to the
emotionally devastating path you were asked to make with Our Lord on Good
Friday, the path known as the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross. I hope you made that journey with Our Lord
this week, and that you now understand what I mean, and are able to feel the wonderful
joy of the risen Christ.
Another reason why I’d like to
revisit Calvary this morning is because of what else happened there. On
Friday we were focusing, and rightly so, on the suffering and death of Our
Lord. But something else very
interesting was going on at the same time, and if we would just go back there
today for a few moments, we can observe these phenomena and see them for what
they truly were.
So put aside your joy for just a
little while, and journey with me back to what was probably the most striking
moment in all of human history, in more ways than one. Stand with me now at the foot of the
Cross. The moment of Our Lord’s death is
approaching. Look up at him hanging
there on the Cross. But then look beyond
his poor battered body, the head crowned with thorns. Look up into the sky behind him. Storm clouds are gathering in the heavens, great
black ugly clouds. There’s something
just not normal about them, and as you glance around to see if others have
noticed, you notice the growing unease among the soldiers and the jeering
Jews. They too have seen the coming
storm and are anxious to bring to an end the long torture of their victim on
the Cross if only so they can return home.
The soldiers prepare to give the death blow to the three men hanging on
the crosses of Calvary. Christ and the
two thieves are now suffering the worst torture of crucifixion, the final
suffocation, as they use up all their available remaining strength to pull
themselves up a few inches so that they can take another breath. They can do this only for so long, before
they are unable to summon up enough strength to raise the full weight of their
bodies. When this happens, they will be
unable to snatch even the smallest of breaths and they will die. But it’s taking too long. The soldiers want to get back to their
barracks before the storm breaks, and they take out their heavy wooden hammer
to break the legs of the three men. This
will prevent them from being able to continue raising themselves to breathe. It will kill them. Meanwhile, the clouds continue gathering, and
the heavens turn black. The sun is
hidden behind the blackness, and all the world falls into darkness. At this moment Our Lord breathes his last
words: “It is finished,” and expires on
the Cross.
Imagine the great flash of
lightning suddenly illuminating this scene of horror, silhouetting the figures
of the Blessed Mother and St. John, who gaze up with the dawning realization
that Our Lord has stopped moving, stopped breathing. That he is dead. Simultaneously, a gigantic clap and roll of
thunder blots out the dying cries of the two thieves as their legs are smashed to
pieces by the soldiers’ hammer. The Romans
now shove the Blessed Mother to one side so they can finish off Jesus. But finding him already dead, another soldier
pushes his long spear into Our Lord’s side, just to make sure. Blood and water flow from the side of Christ,
mixing with the rain as it starts to pelt down in huge drops over the Cross.
And then more thunder. Thunder like the world had never heard
before, not even during the great flood of Noah. Thunder so loud that it made the ground
shake, and the rocks were rent. Down the
hill in Jerusalem, in the midst of God’s holy temple, the high priest is
preparing to enter the Holy of Holies as he does once a year for the feast of
Passover. As he approaches the veil separating
the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple, he looks up to see a great bolt
of lightning pierce through the roof of the Temple and tear this veil right down
the middle. The Old Covenant is
over. All around the city, men and women
run out of their houses as the earth shakes.
The quakes continue far beyond a normal earthquake, causing great
upheaval of the land, buildings are crumbling and falling, and in the
cemeteries, the ground opens up, and the dead rise and walk about the streets
of the holy city.
What a moment that must have
been! No wonder then, that a simple
Roman soldier, on guard at the scene of crucifixion at the top of Calvary,
would gaze around at what was happening as Jesus died, and say, with awe in his
voice, “Truly, this man was the Son of God.”
Christ had led a life of
obscurity, born in a stable, raised as a carpenter’s son in Nazareth, and
lately living a nomadic existence as he brought new hope and a new faith to the
chosen people. To the bitter end he had
endured the mocking and taunting of the soldiers and the Jews: “If thou be the Son of God, descend from the
cross, save thyself!” But this was not in
God’s plan of course, and Our Lord patiently endured his cruel and most painful
death. But scarcely had he drawn his
last breath, when his divinity revealed itself in such a powerful manner that
it impressed even those who, up that moment, had been jeering and scoffing at
him. He may have patiently endured his
torment, but this was after all the Divine Word of God, He without whom was
made nothing that was made. The enormity
of this crime caused Nature itself, the very universe which he created, to rise
up in one great protest against a mankind who would try to destroy their
Creator.
This great rebellion of Nature
was proof of Christ’s divinity, even at the moment of his death. This rebellion transformed the moment of his
death from merely a moment of defeat into a moment of victory. And the whole world was made witness to this
victory. And those of good will would be
forced to acknowledge that victory. Truly,
this man was the Son of God. It was the
greatest victory the world would ever witness, the victory over sin, the
victory over death (which was the consequence of sin), the victory, which
restored to man the life of grace. It’s
the reason we call it “Good” Friday.
And now I want to tell you
something most strange and most wonderful.
We have been focusing on that incredible moment of Our Lord’s death, so
awful in its apparent finality, and yet so awe-inspiring in its true meaning of
victory and redemption. But the only
reason we can understand this underlying message of hope and triumph is
because, let’s face it, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know how the story will unfold after Our
Lord’s death scene. We know “how it
comes out.” “On the third day he rose
again from the dead.”
Today is that third day. It is Easter Sunday. The day of the glorious Resurrection. “Hail thee, Festival Day, blest day that art
hallowed forever.” “This is the day that
the Lord hath made; let us be glad and rejoice therein!” Yes, we can look back from our vantage point
to these events of two thousand years ago, and we can see the forest, not just
the trees. One of those trees, the tree
of Calvary, the Cross, is merely one aspect of the Redemption story. This moment of unparalleled drama surrounding
the death of Jesus is, as I said, perhaps the most striking moment in all of
human history. But, surely, isn’t there
another moment, even more striking, even more dramatic, even more phenomenal in
its import and significance. I refer of
course to the moment, not when Christ died, but when his soul re-entered his
lifeless body, and he rose again from the dead.
What of that moment? We’ve seen what
happened at his death. What more could
nature display than the great thunderstorm, the earthquakes, the shock and awe
of all those terrible events? How was
God going to “top” that?
And so here’s the strange thing I
wanted to point out. And indeed it is
both strange and wonderful. For as Our
Lord’s soul left his body to the accompaniment of thunderclaps and lightning
bolts, it returned to his body like the “still, small voice of calm.” His resurrection from the dead in many ways
resembled his nativity 33 years earlier in Bethlehem. Only this time, there was no fanfare, no
mighty choirs of herald angels singing Gloria
in Excelsis Deo, no mysterious stars in the heavens leading wise men from
afar to the holy sepulcher. There was
only the simple silence of the night—this one note of Christmas was repeated on the first Easter—Silent
Night, Holy Night. And somehow, in the
midst of all that silence, all that holiness, the divine soul of Jesus Christ,
only-begotten Son of God, rejoined his broken body in that tomb, and a heart
began once more to beat, blood began again to flow through veins and arteries,
and the Son of God lived once more.
Perhaps there was a great flash
of light, imprinting the image of Our Lord on the Holy Shroud? Perhaps so, but what noise does light make? Maybe there was some commotion as the great
stone guarding the entrance to the tomb was rolled back? Again maybe, but it apparently didn’t wake up
the soldiers who guarded it. No, this
greatest event in the entire history of our world was unseen and unheard,
silent in its magnitude, tranquil in its supreme moment of victory and triumph.
And what is the message this
conveys to us on this joyful Easter Sunday?
Simply this: that in spite of our
human nature, and its need to proclaim from the rooftops that “Christ is
Risen”, we must remember that the simple and perfect truth of the Resurrection
transcends all this joy and fanfare, and is ultimately a message of peace. When Our Lord appears to his disciples after
his resurrection, he greets them with the words “Pax vobiscum”, Peace be with
you. And to you today I say the
same: Peace be with you. Be at peace.
The turmoil of Calvary is over for another year. Just as the turmoil of your own lives will
one day come to a similar end. But the
hour of our death, which would otherwise be a terrible and fearful thing, has
been turned into the hour of our glory, our own glorious resurrection. For when that hour comes, if you have lived a
godly life under the shadow of the Almighty, you will all, my dear faithful, be
able to lay down your heads one last time and say the words of the prophet: “I will lay me down in peace and take my
rest. For it is thou Lord, only, that
makest me dwell in safety.” And when
that moment of drama, of sadness and bereavement, has passed, and your soul
departs this vale of tears, you will be able to rejoice in that final eternal
Eastertide in heaven, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection, which was
promised to us, vouchsafed to us, and handed down to us in that first Easter night
so long ago.
This is the true joy of
Easter. Remember it through the other
joys that are meant to be nothing more than its pale reflections: the end of the Fast, your new Easter bonnet,
the Easter Egg hunts, maybe a few days off work or school. Easter is so much more than these
trivialities. Rejoice by all means in
these things, but don’t forget why.
Don’t forget that peace which has descended now upon us all, as we
breathe this fresh Easter morning air, and sigh with relief that the gates of
heaven have been re-opened to us. “Peace
I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.”
This is the peace that offers joy without limit, and on behalf of Fr.
Rodriguez and myself, we wish to all of you and your families, an abundance of
that peace, and a very very Happy Easter.
God bless you.
Palm Sunday
One of the most poignant moments in
St. Matthew’s Passion comes in the Garden of Gethsemane when Our Lord is so
overcome with emotion that he falls down on his face. And lying there on the ground, he manages to
lift his head a little, and raise his voice to his Father in heaven, with these
words: “O my Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
We stand today on the threshold
of Holy Week. A week filled with
suffering. Our remembrance of our
Saviour’s sufferings for us. As the week
relentlessly proceeds, we are drawn closer and closer to the Cross, until at
last on Good Friday, we walk the hill of Calvary with Our Lord, we stand
beneath that Cross as he is raised upon it, we listen to his last words, and we
watch him die. And if there is love in
our heart, any love at all, for that Saviour who gave so much that we might
live, we are moved to tears of grief at these terrible sights. We weep with Our Blessed Lady, his Mother, we
weep with St. John, his beloved disciple, we weep with the Angels.
It is good that we weep. But how quickly do we forget our tears as the
joys of Easter replace these dark days with the glorious good news of our
Salvation, as Our Blessed Lord rises from the dead. In one sense, this is as it should be. The glorious mysteries of the Rosary have
every bit as much right to our attention and emotions as the sorrowful. But it is perhaps a sign of our own
shallowness, that as soon as those happy festival days of Eastertide are come, we
tend so quickly to forget our tears, to the point where we actually turn our
back on the price of that happiness that we are then enjoying. That heavy price which is the bitter suffering
of the Son of God made Man.
How do I know we turn our back on
his suffering? It’s very simple when you
think about it. It’s because we are so
very ready to turn our back on our own sufferings, our own crosses! We are so very ready to pray with Our
Lord: “Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass from me,” – without bothering to pray the second part. We just say: “O God, take away this suffering from me. It’s more than I can bear. It’s not fair I have to suffer when I try so
hard to be a good person. Why don’t you punish
sinners with crosses like this, instead of giving them to me? What did I do to deserve this?”
And we forget the second half of
Our Lord’s prayer: “Nevertheless, not as
I will, but as thou wilt.” “Thy will be done!”
“Aha!” says the blasphemer, as if
he has stumbled across some profound and thought-provoking truth, “What kind of
God do you Christians worship that wills
suffering? How can a loving God allow
suffering in the world? All he has to do
is snap his fingers and we could all be happy right now. So why doesn’t he?”
It’s a question we have all
struggled with at some time or other.
Usually when we are suffering, naturally. Sometimes the overwhelming depths of woe we
encounter in our lives threaten to drag us under into the cold, dark abyss of
despair. But only if we have completely
the wrong idea of who God truly is. Only
if our superficial picture of God is nothing at all like the all-loving, caring
Creator that he actually is.
I want to explain to you today
something which is of vital importance in each of our lives. My message to you is perhaps not something
you will need today, or tomorrow. But I
guarantee that each of you will need it some
day. We all have to suffer eventually,
some most bitterly. But there is
consolation to be found in our suffering if only we would look at it the right
way.
For a message of such importance,
rather than entrust your souls to my own words, I prefer to read to you from
the writings of that reverend master of the spiritual life, Belgian Carmelite
Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen.
Take these words home with you in your hearts, meditate upon them, and
discover how a loving God wills us to
suffer.
“The Cross is suffering viewed in the supernatural light of faith as an instrument of salvation and sanctification, and therefore, as an instrument of love. Seen in this light, the Cross is certainly worthy of love: it is the outstanding means of our sanctification. Our union with God cannot be accomplished except through suffering. St. John of the Cross has explained the means by which the soul is to be purified, scraped to the bottom in order to reach this life of divine union. A program of total mortification is required to break all our bonds, for we have within us many obstacles which keep us from being entirely moved by God: and the accomplishment of this work is impossible without suffering. But active suffering, that is, the mortifications and penances inspired by our personal initiative, is not sufficient. We especially need passive suffering. In other words, the Lord himself must make us suffer, not only in our body, but also in our soul, because we are so covered with rust, so full of miseries that our total purification is not possible unless God himself intervenes directly. To plunge us into passive suffering is, therefore, one of his greatest works of mercy, a proof of his exceeding love.
When God acts in a soul in this way, it is a sign that he wants to bring it to very high perfection. It is precisely in these passive purifying sufferings that the concept of the cross is realized pre-eminently. In The Living Flame of Love (2, 27), St. John of the Cross asks why there are so few souls who reach the plenitude of the spiritual life: and he answers: ‘It is not because God wants to reserve this state for a few privileged souls, but because he finds so few souls disposed to accept the hard task of purification. Therefore, he stops purifying them, and they condemn themselves to mediocrity and advance no farther.’ It is impossible to become united to God without these spiritual sufferings, without bearing this ‘burden’ of God. Suffering and interior desolation alone enlarge the powers of the soul and make it capable of embracing God himself.”
I told you last week that we need
to be men and women of courage to be able to carry our crosses with Jesus up
the hill of Calvary. I’m talking about
real courage, ‘true grit’. The kind of
courage that trembles each time before pronouncing the words of the Angelus “Be
it done unto me according to thy Word,” or before hearing those words of Our
Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not
as I will, but as thou wilt”. These men
and women tremble, yes… but they repeat those words anyway. They repeat them as their own. “Yes Lord, I want to do thy will, not mine. Thy will be done.” These are the men and women God is looking
for in his Church. These are the men and
women who would never condemn themselves to mediocrity and advance no further. These are rather the men and women who will
take up their cross and follow their Saviour to Calvary.
One little saint who had such courage was St. Catherine of Siena. In a vision, Jesus presented her with two crowns, one made of gold, fashioned with diamonds and glistening jewels, and the other one made up of thorns. He asked her to choose which of the two crowns she would like to have. Her answer was astonishing: "I desire, O Lord, to live here always conformed to your passion, and to find pain and suffering my repose and delight." Then, she eagerly took up the crown of thorns, and pressed it down upon her head. Do you have that kind of courage? For sure enough her life was transformed into one of terrible pain and sorrow. You need to be careful what you ask for. But if you are a generous soul, full of the love of God, and not one of those superficial types who weep a few forced tears of compassion for Our Lord this Holy Week, if and only if you are generous and courageous enough to repeat Our Lord’s words during his Agony, and mean them, “Not as I will, but thy will be done,” then you will surely merit to weep great torrents in your lifetime, and be swept along in the tidal wave of your tears of suffering into the eternal and immeasurable love of God.
Passion Sunday
What a grim and lonely feeling we
had this morning when we walked into our church to find all our images and
statues gone. Well, not exactly gone,
but hidden. Hidden beneath these gloomy
purple drapes, taken away from our reverential gaze for a while, removing from
us, it seems, all consolation in this the most solemn and austere of the Church’s
seasons which begins today, the climax of our Lenten penances, the holy Season
of Passiontide.
Today, we also lose the joyful Prayers
at the Foot of the Altar, the Gloria
Patri is not sung at the Asperges or the Introit, nor said by the priest at
the Lavabo. And then of course, whenever
we look around the church, seeking relief perhaps, or some distraction, from
the severity of the Church’s liturgy at the altar, what do we see? Once again, we are faced with these grim
reminders of the coming Passion and Crucifixion, these purple hangings.
We older ones recognize these
trappings as part of the Church’s calendar. We see the statues draped in purple, and
immediately we think “Passiontide”. But
please, parents, take a little time if necessary and explain to your children
what is going on. All these purple
figures standing around the church can be sometimes a little bit bit scary for
a small child, and it’s your job to reassure them from whatever unpleasant
theories their little minds might conjure up for themselves. I remember when I was younger, they reminded
me of purple ghosts, and I was afraid to go into the church alone after dark.
But what do all these purple figures represent? What is
meant by hiding all these images? The
brief answer is to be found in the last few sentences of today’s holy
Gospel. “Your father Abraham,” said Our
Lord to the Jews, “rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.” Then said
the Jews unto him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen
Abraham?” Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before
Abraham was, I am.” Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus
hid himself, and went out of the temple.
Jesus hid himself. And as he hid
himself from his people in those days before his Passion, so too today he hides
himself behind all these purple veils.
Not just himself, but even those images of his Blessed Mother and the saints
who followed him. We remember a time
when God was hidden from his people.
The last time I spoke to you
here, we were concerned with the first two Sundays of Lent. Today we begin Passiontide and our focus now
is on the last two Sundays of
Lent. And believe it or not, there are some
similarities. Look back to the First
Sunday of Lent for example. Remember how
Christ went out alone into the wilderness?
And now today, the First Sunday in Passiontide, he again goes off by
himself, hiding himself from the people.
And then the Second Sunday in Lent, if you remember, dealt with the
transfiguration of Our Lord, as he appeared in all his glory before his
apostles, strengthening them for the coming Passion. Just as next Sunday, Palm Sunday, we shall be
strengthened one last time before his Passion, as he is glorified, this time
before all his people, when he makes his final triumphant entry into the holy
city of Jerusalem, to the waving of palms and the chanting of Hosanna to the
Son of David.
So there’s a very similar
message, isn’t there, between the first two and the last two Sundays of Lent. That message is for us to prepare. Prepare for our glory in the next life by our
sufferings in this one. Prepare for our
crown by our cross. And how? First we must go off on our own into our own
wilderness of prayer and fasting. The
Church reinforces this idea that we are alone now with God, by hiding all our
images and statues, our dear friends and consolations in this life of
suffering. We must now stand alone and
face God alone. We must lay bare our
souls to our Creator, and humbly acknowledge our nothingness, confessing our
sins, thanking him for taking those sins upon himself, and carrying our cross
for us. Take this opportunity this
week. Stand alone before God. Go to Confession. Repent your sins. Vow to lead a more godly life. And then next week perhaps, at the sight of
the new images the Church gives us, images of that triumphal procession into
Jerusalem as our Holy Week begins, then perhaps we can be strengthened one last
time before Good Friday. Then perhaps,
we can receive from our loving God the graces to suffer with Our Lord and for
him, on that other procession up the hill to Calvary.
This last week has been an
interesting one. I’m sure many of us
waited for that first puff of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine
Chapel, signaling that the world once more had another man to play the role of
Pope. The more cynical among us perhaps
had no illusions that this new Pope Francis would be any better than the last version. And yet who among us could escape that tiny
glimmering of almost extinguished distant hope that perhaps, by some miracle of
divine intervention, we could indeed once more proclaim “Habemus Papam.” But from the stories being told out of Argentina
about their Cardinal Bergoglio, that tiny spark of hope has been quickly put
out. That wonderful show from the
Sistine Chapel of red-robed Cardinals in all their splendor has now vanished in
a puff of white smoke, and can be seen for the magic show, the great illusion,
that it was. And our cynics say “I told
you so”, while our more sensitive souls weep tears that they are unable to join
the cheering crowds in St. Peter’s Square and welcome a true Vicar of Christ to
rule and govern our Holy Mother Church.
The Church’s Passion must continue.
And just in time for this first Sunday of Passiontide, what better time
for this Great Illusion to have been perpetrated.
Look around you at the draped
statues of our saints. They don’t do
that in the Novus Ordo anymore. They can’t,
because they have removed the statues from their churches altogether. There’s nothing left to throw a purple drape
over! What for us is merely a reminder
of life without God, is a reality for those countless tens of thousands of poor
souls in the conciliar Church. God has truly hidden himself from them. And from us, he has hidden himself from us too. Where is the true pope? Where is the true Church? “But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the
temple.”
We have moved now, my dear
faithful, away from the world of Holy Scripture, the story of the Passion and
Death of Our Lord, to the present day, our own lives. We are living this second Passion
ourselves. What Our Lord experienced,
the Passion and Death of his own physical body, is now in our lifetime being
repeated, this time to his Mystical
Body, the Church, to you and me, each and every one of us. It is as though purple drapes have been
thrown over our true popes, our bishops, our pastors. As we walked into church this morning and
looked around to see our beloved statues hidden from us, to see our God hidden
from us, have we not experienced that same awful feeling every time we walk
into a Novus Ordo church? Tabernacles
hidden in side chapels, all hint of beauty hidden among the ugliness of modern
art and architecture, eternal truths draped over with the doggerel of
modernism. This crucifixion of the
Mystical Body of Christ, is the Passion of the Church today. You and I are the ones called by God to cling
to the now hidden truths, the truths of the everlasting hills.
Why did God hide himself before
his Passion? Because they wanted to
stone him. Why did they want to stone
him? Because he said “Before Abraham
was, I am.” No "I was, I am, I will be." Only "I am". "I am eternal". Eternal truth. Before Pope Francis was, I am. Before Vatican II was, I am. The Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and
the end. God who is unchangeable like
our holy faith in him must be unchangeable. In
this brief snapshot of time in which we live, whether we have a good pope or a
bad pope or no pope at all, God watches each and every one of us from heaven
and gives us the graces we need to save our soul. That is all we need. And even though God may be hidden from us in
these dark days of the 21st century, he IS just as much as he has
ever been.
So on this Passion Sunday, as we
prepare to commemorate Our Lord’s most bitter Passion and Death, live up to
this call of God, and cling to God alone.
Not to our images of God, not to works of paint and clay, plaster and
marble. Put aside all reminders of God,
and cling to God, himself, now. Take all the sufferings and sins of your own
life and bring them to God. Who is going
to carry them this Good Friday? Are you
going to pile them once again on the back of your poor Saviour and make him
carry them again? Or are you going to
accept them lovingly and perhaps offer, like St. Simon of Cyrene, to take even
a little of Our Lord’s heavy burden from him, and carry some of them yourself
this time? It takes men and women of
courage to follow Our Lord to Calvary, and I hope he will find such men and women in
abundance here at Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel.
To us has been given those extra graces to see a little into the truths
and falsehoods behind the events of the last fifty years in Rome and the
world. To us therefore has been given
the responsibility of action.
God may be hidden under these
purple drapes, but God is still here. He
is the Godhead hidden in the tabernacle.
Each of us must find him. “O
Godhead hid! Devoutly I adore thee.” Make your Communion with God, and then ask of
him, as St. Francis of Assisi asked, “Lord, what wouldst thou have me do?” To what task are you calling me?
What role do you want me to
play in this Passion of the Church today?
Your answer will may not come right away. But it will come in time.
Prepare for it now by preparing for Holy Week. Confession, Communion, prayer, penance, avoid
sin, practice virtue. Lead a godly
life. And God will eventually no longer
hide himself from you. He will reveal
himself in all his true glory, the glory of the Resurrection, and the life
everlasting. Amen.
