Silence of Anthony: Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbot (Ephesians 6:10-13, 18; Psalm 16:1-2a and 5, 7-8, 11; Matthew 19:16-26)

When we think of the desert fathers, one of the first to come to mind is likely to be today’s saint, Saint Anthony the Abbott.  In fact, he is often thought of as the father of wilderness monastic thought through asceticism.

Anthony was born in upper Egypt in the year 251 to a wealthy family, but his parents died while he was young.  In the wake of this, he was extremely moved by the following passage that we heard today from the Gospel of Matthew, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor.”

That’s exactly what he did.  He sold everything and gave it to the poor.  Then, he moved out to the Egyptian desert wilderness to live a life of growing virtue and holiness through prayer, poverty, and solitude.

He became known for his virtue and was sought out for spiritual direction.  After a while he began to ponder moving out deeper into the wilderness.  

At this point, a voice came to him from heaven saying: “Anthony, where are you going? And why?” Anthony answered: “All these people will not let me be quiet. They cause me weariness here and above all they want me to do things I am not able.”

The voice spoke again: “Even if you go as you want, you will have twice as much to go undergo. If you truly desire a solitary life, go into the inner desert.”

It seems Saint Anthony truly followed Jesus into the desert,…exteriorly, yes; but more importantly, interiorly.  The interior desert is where Anthony was shown the path to true life, fullness of joy, and delight in the refuge of God.  

The lesson for us is that when we can properly detach ourselves from the busyness of life and from the noise of the world, we can have a true encounter with the Lord and we can obtain the promise of His rest.  

Fortunately, we don’t have to move to some remote desert cave to heed the lesson of Saint Anthony the Abbot.  Instead of traveling to some remote desert destination, we can journey inward to the innermost recesses of the interior desert of the indwelling Trinity.  That spot “where the Holy Spirit speaks to you,” as Pope Saint John Paul II would say.

There are a number of ways we can make this journey.  We can make a holy hour with the blessed sacrament in Adoration.  We can spend a few minutes of meditation in the presence of the tabernacle following Mass.  We can make a silent retreat at the White House or other similar spiritual facility.  We can retreat to a private room for silent prayer or to ponder the Word of God.  We can take a quiet walk in the woods.  Whatever we choose, the key is to make ourselves available, completely surrendering to the moment, and allowing the Holy Spirit to draw us ever deeper into the holy silence.

The life of Saint Anthony the Abbot personifies the human desire for peace and tranquility, and gives us a blueprint for how to achieve it.  He gives us an example of how to let go of the distractions of life and how to silence the voices of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Through this example, may we more clearly hear God speaking to us through the silent whisper and more fully respond to Him in charity.  Through the holy silence, all things are possible for God.

Thanks be to God!

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Jubilant Epiphany: Friday after Epiphany (1 John 5:5-13; Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; Luke 5:12-16)

I have come to see this week that we are in as an octave of the Epiphany, though you aren’t likely to find that referenced in any sort of recent Church document (at least not anything published since the mid-1950’s).  I came to adopt this personal perspective as a way to wrap my head around the timing of the Christmas season and the realization that this is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated periods of the Church year.  

For all intents and purposes Christmas music stopped playing on the 26th, and at that point the world stopped looking a lot like Christmas even though the season had hardly begun.

Unfortunately, we are not immune to following the tone of the world around us, which can cause us to slip from the Christmas spirit and fall into the spirit of the mundane.  When this happens, we miss out on the full effect of the hope and joy that can be made manifest through the Epiphany.

There are actually three major events that we celebrate under the umbrella of the Epiphany (or the Theophany as we may hear from the Eastern Rites of the Church):  the Visit of the Magi that we celebrated last Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord that we will celebrate this coming Sunday, and the Wedding Feast of Cana (which is the Gospel reading for the following Sunday).  Each of these events were revelations of hope and joy to the world that can in turn strengthen virtues of hope and joy in our lives.

True to the season, today's readings seem to fall under this theme of Epiphany, reminding us that the true revelation of Christ is to be found in the Sacramental life of the Church, particularly,  the water and blood that flows from the side of Christ on the Cross, representative of the Sacraments He instituted, ultimately the fount of Divine Mercy.   It is a reminder that it is through the Sacramental life of the Church that we have true life, true hope, true joy, and true healing. 

On Christmas Eve, our Holy Father opened the first set of Holy Doors to kick off the Jubilee Year of Pilgrims of Hope.   Our Holy Father has called this Jubilee to be a restoration of a climate of hope, trust, renewal, and rebirth, particularly from a sacramental perspective. 

He said, "Tonight, the door of hope has opened wide to the world" and "God speaks to each of us and says: 'there is hope also for you!'"

He said, "We can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!”

"With haste, therefore," he said, "let us set out to behold the Lord who is born for us, our hearts joyful and attentive, ready to meet him and then to bring hope to the way we live our daily lives. For Christian hope is not a 'happy ending' which we passively await, but rather, a promise, the Lord’s promise, to be welcomed here and now in our world of suffering and sighs."

Whether you are joining us on our Jubilee Pilgrimage to Rome in September, going to Rome with another group or perhaps on your own, or planning to participate locally at one of the nine Jubilee sites designated by Archbishop Rozanski, this is your invitation to allow yourself to fully enter into the true spirit of the Jubilee.  Make this Jubilee your year of Sacramental rebirth and renewal.   Make this Jubilee the year you truly experience the hope and healing we can only receive from Jesus Christ through the Sacramental life of the Church.   May this Jubilee be a series of personal epiphanies for you that you may come to possess the Lord through the Eucharist in ever more powerful ways, increasingly praising the Lord with your entire being.

Our Holy Father concluded his Papal Bull announcing the Jubilee with the following:  "Through our witness, may hope spread to all those who anxiously seek it. May the way we live our lives say to them in so many words: 'Hope in the Lord! Hold firm, take heart and hope in the Lord!' (Ps 27:14). May the power of hope fill our days, as we await with confidence the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and glory, now and forever."

Thanks be to God!

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Epiphany Watch: Thursday after Epiphany (1 John 4:19–5:4; Psalm 72:1-2, 14 and 15bc, 17; Luke 4:14-22)

Leading up to the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Archbishop William Lori challenged us to meditate on the poor shepherds who watched over their flocks on the night He was born.  In doing so, he challenged us to identify one way we can better incorporate watchfulness into our own life.

I believe this is a pertinent challenge for us to consider as we continue through the Christmas season, which is defined by a series of epiphanies.  Epiphanies are moments of conversion.  Epiphanies are moments to let go of our false sense of reality and to conform ourselves to the objective Truth of God as taught by the Catholic Church.  Epiphanies are moments to seek the Truth with all our heart and to serve it once we have found it.

The Visit of the Magi, the Baptism of the Lord, and the Wedding Feast at Cana, as well as our Gospel reading today where Jesus reads from the scroll in Nazareth, are all examples of epiphanies.  

Epiphanies occur when people are hungry.  The wise men represent a hunger for a king.  John the Baptist and his disciples represent a hunger for a savior.  The wedding feast attendees represent a hunger for a priest.  The congregation at the synagogue in Nazareth represents a hunger for a prophet.

We come to recognize our own hunger through internal watchfulness.  We must nurture a sense of internal watchfulness, which is meant to focus on the world within us (where the Holy Spirit speaks to us) as opposed to the world around us.  It means being mindful and vigilant to what we are thinking and feeling.  It means having a discerning heart.

Do we allow ourselves to be hungry, or do we constantly fill ourselves with the things of this world? What are we looking for and where are we looking for it?  What are we actually watching?  Do we maintain a practice of daily prayer, regular examination of conscience and frequent confession, or do we sometimes grow spiritually lazy? Do we commit ourselves to steady growth in holiness and virtue as preparation for the final judgment? Do we teach and encourage our loved ones to do the same?

Saint Symeon the Theologian said, “He who does not have attention in himself and does not guard his mind, cannot become pure in heart, and so cannot see God. He who does not have attention in himself cannot be poor in spirit, cannot weep and be contrite, nor be gentle and meek, nor hunger and thirst after righteousness, nor be merciful, nor a peacemaker, nor suffer persecution for righteousness sake.”

The more we can adopt this spirit of watchfulness associated with the Epiphanies during the Christmas season, the better we will understand those things that we must confront and renounce as we enter into the spiritual desert of Lent.  

The more deeply we can do this, the more we will experience the victory that conquers the world through our faith.

Thanks be to God!

Ahaz or Mary: Friday of the Third Week of Advent (IS 7:10-14, PS 24:1-2, 3-4AB, 5-6, LK 1:26-38)

At first glance, Ahaz may seem very pious, but the more we get into the details of the context, we come to realize his response has less to do with piety and more to do with a desire to simply remain ignorant to the truth.

All of this reminded me of a stage I went through when I was first coming back to the Church.  

Shortly after I started to attend Mass with Virginia, I noticed an ad for Covenant Network radio on the back of the bulletin and I decided to check it out.  Long story short, one of the first shows I caught was  “The Lamb’s Supper” with Scott Hahn and Mike Aquilina.  I was immediately captivated by their descriptions of the book of Revelation, and I was hooked to Catholic Radio.

I started listening to the afternoon call-in shows.  These shows were invaluable in terms of how they helped me in the initial phases of my conversion process.  Especially in terms of resuscitating some level of conscience and rebuilding some sense of a catechetical foundation/framework from which I could live life.

All of that being said, I was still avoiding the Truth.  

It was common for me to shut off the radio because I didn’t want to hear what they were about to say.  If someone asked a question where I could tell they were talking about some sinful pattern I was still entertaining in my life, I just shut the radio off.  I remember thinking “surely the Catholic Church does not teach that”.  The reality is: I was still blind and didn’t want to see.  I wanted a sign but, deep down, I knew I didn’t want to see it.

After a couple of months of this, Virginia and I went to a Bible study here at Incarnate Word.  One evening, the facilitator (a lady named Alice Watson) went on a tangent about living a sinful life, and she shot a look at me that bore a hole right through my skull and touched my very soul.  I have no doubt God spoke through her in that moment.  It was extremely powerful.  I feel like I blushed the deepest darkest red you can possibly imagine and I looked around to see if anyone else noticed the look she gave me.  I will tell you this, she could have hit me with a sledgehammer and the hammer would have had less of an effect on me than that look did.  

I knew at that point, that it was time to take a hard look at my sinful life.  I immediately stopped turning off the radio whenever a personality was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.  I finally started to learn about the true Jesus, the true Christian faith, and the true moral life.

A big topic on the radio at that time was examinations of conscience.  I found a good one, and I went to work.  The level of conviction I received from the Holy Spirit left me literally trembling for two weeks before I could muster the strength to go to the confessional.  My first confession in over 15 years.

In many ways that evening with Alice was the beginning of my spiritual journey.  A spiritual journey that has been both beautiful and challenging, and has culminated (so far)in the diaconate.  That change was not overnight by any means, and the Good Lord knows I still have a lot of conversion to go.  

Throughout this journey, I have learned that every day offers a choice…a choice to be an Ahaz or a Mary…a choice to ignore the Truth or embrace it.  I’m not going to lie, I have chosen to be Ahaz more times than I care to admit.  But, gratefully, I have chosen to be a Mary more than I probably realize.  

For me, I simply endeavor to simply do the next right thing…the thing where God has the opportunity to do great things through me in order to extend the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the world around me…which is ultimately what Christmas is all about.

That is our spiritual invitation for today, particularly as we continue to prepare for the Christmas season.  What are those ways that we tend to be an Ahaz?  When are those times that we choose to look the other way when we are confronted with a hard teaching of the Church or another objective truth revealed by God?  When are those times that God is trying to work through us, but we would rather do our own thing?

Saint Maximilian Kolbe said, “No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.”   

Brothers and sisters, when we truly become a servant of Truth, then we (like Mary) will more clearly see the favor we have with God.

Thanks be to God!

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Rejoice! The Lord is Near!: Third Sunday of Advent (ZEP 3:14-18A; IS 12:2-3, 4, 5-6; PHIL 4:4-7; LK 3:10-18)

I want to wish each of you a joyful Gaudete Sunday.  Not only is this one of the two days of the year where we get to make the color rose look really cool, but this is the day that the Church seems to shift gears during the Advent season as we get closer to the highly anticipated Christmas feast.

The word gaudete is Latin for joy.  This is the day where we are reminded to be joyful that the “the Lord is near” and that in the midst of the hustle, bustle, and sometimes outright struggles of this time of year, we are to “rejoice in the Lord always”.

Now we can look forward to Christmas, as we are reminded that Christmas itself is a Eucharistic feast, with the Eucharist as the primary and ultimate Christmas gift.

Now we can look forward to Christmas with great joy and exultation knowing the Great and Holy One of Israel is truly with us in a very real and substantial way through the Eucharist.  The Eucharist is the gift that is initially given to us at Christmas.

As Cardinal Ratzinger put it: “The Mass is the means by which earthly time is inserted into the time of Jesus Christ and brought into its present.”  Theologically, we call this anamnesis.  But, we can simply think of it as participating in the eternal now, which is something we do at every Mass.

Jesus Christ, who is omnipresent to all of time from the eternal now, is present to us through the Eucharist while at the same time present to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph at the moment of His birth. The same Jesus Christ omnipresent across time and space.

The same Jesus Christ, who is to be born of the Virgin Mary, is the same Jesus Christ given to us when we receive Him in the Eucharist under the veil of bread and wine.

Jesus Christ is to be born in the town of Bethlehem, which in Hebrew literally means “house of bread”.  Saint Bede said, “The place He is born is rightly called ‘The House of Bread’ because He comes down from heaven to earth to give us the food of heavenly life and to satisfy us with eternal sweetness.”

At every Mass, we mystically participate in the events of Bethlehem, a place where heaven truly touches earth.  Just as Jesus told us in the Gospel of John, “I am the living bread that comes down from heaven; whoever eats of this bread will live forever” (Jn 6:51).

In Arabic, the name of Bethlehem literally means “house of meat”.  This should remind us that the Eucharist is not a mere symbol.  The Eucharist is truly the very body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.  As Jesus emphasized in the Gospel of John, “For my flesh is true meat, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (Jn 6:55-56).

Once Jesus is born on Christmas day, He will be laid in a manger.  Unfortunately, many of us have come to adopt a romanticized image of the Christmas manger.  But, we must always remember that we are really talking about a feeding trough for animals.  We’re in a farming community here.  I think we all know how pleasant animal feeding troughs can actually be.

The reality of the animal feeding trough is the authentic Christmas imagery that frames the message of Jesus in the Gospel of John when He declares, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.”

The early Church fathers were quick to compare the manger of Bethlehem to the altar at Mass.  Saint John Chrysostom, for example, said, “You no longer see him in the manger but rather on the altar; you do not see a woman holding him in her arms, but rather the priest.  The priest who is standing with the Holy Spirit who flies with great liberality over the offerings placed on the altar”.

But, the reality of all of this lies in the word “manger” itself.  The word “manger” simply means “to eat”. But, the context isn’t ”to eat” in the sense we might picture a civilized person eating.  But rather, the word “manger”  is far more bestial in nature.  In fact, the Gospel of John, which was originally written in Greek, uses the Greek word “trogo” for the verb “to eat”.  The word “trogo” is a decidedly more gruesome term that literally means “to chew on” or “to gnaw on,” similar to when an animal is ripping apart its prey.

Now that is savage!  But, that is the savage reality of how Jesus comes to us at Christmas.  The reality is that the nativity is just as savage and brutal as the crucifixion itself.  And that should be a shocking thought.  But the shocking truth is that the nativity, the crucifixion, and the Mass are all intimately interconnected through the Eucharist.

We’re told that when Jesus is born, He will be wrapped in swaddling cloths.  This is an important detail.  The shepherds from the Christmas story are not normal shepherds.  They are Levitical shepherds associated with the Temple.  It was their job to raise the lambs to be used in the Temple sacrifices.  All sacrificial lambs were required by Covenant Law to remain unblemished.  These shepherds would swaddle the lambs to ensure they remained worthy of sacrifice.  

The shepherds would have most certainly realized that upon seeing Jesus in swaddling cloths that He was born for a specific sacrifice.  They would have known that He was born to be sacrificed for the salvation of the world.

This is the sacrifice that we, as Catholics, are privileged to substantially participate in at every Mass. 

 
Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, born in the House of Bread, is truly the Great and Holy One of Israel.  Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, born in the House of Meat, is truly the savior of the world and truly the Eucharist we consume at every single Mass.

Of course the shepherds learned of the birth of Christ from angels on high.  The heavenly choir chanting most beautifully, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to people of good will” (Luke 2:15).  Brothers and sisters, it is our unique and extreme privilege as Catholics that when we worship God in the Mass, we are worshiping alongside that very same choir of angels.  All throughout the Mass, but particularly when we sing “Glory to God in the Highest” and when we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” we do so in unison with the angelic realm.

Every Christmas, in fact, every single time we go to Mass, we mystically experience Bethlehem.  Just as John the Baptist pointed the world to the coming savior, so too does Gaudete Sunday point to this reality and in doing so reminds us that "The Lord is near".  

With the angels, let us cry out with joy and gladness: for among us (through, with, and in the Eucharist) is the Great and Holy One of Israel.  Let us truly be glad and exult with all our hearts that we, as Catholics, get to truly receive the full body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ every single time we receive the Eucharist.  

Brothers and sisters, look forward now with great expectation for the primary and ultimate Christmas gift that God has for you….His only begotten Son in the Eucharist!   

Thanks be to God!