Holy Trinity Catholic Parish

Dear friends of God,

We continue along our Advent journey together.   I hope that this time of preparation for the coming of Christ is fruitful for each of us in love, kindness and nearness of the Lord. When I prepare the prayers that I use for Mass, I use a number of resources. One shared the following reflection regarding this weekend’s readings.

“We hear from both Baruch and Isaiah today, the latter through Luke’s description of John the Baptist’s work, challenging and comforting the people of Israel. Baruch calls the people back to Jerusalem, where they will be ‘wrapped in the cloak of justice.’ Isaiah promises that when the Lord comes, ‘all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’ Let us prepare for the Lord’s coming, assured that justice and salvation are nigh.”

Pope Francis said in his Advent homily Dec. 1, 2019:

“Resist the dazzling lights of consumption, which will shine everywhere this month, and believe that prayer and charity are not lost time, but the greatest treasures…”

We are consuming ourselves to death. The way of life comes from love and prayer.

Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest and spiritual writer. He was a learned cleric with a heart full of love. As we continue our Advent journey, I want to share his Advent Prayer:

“Lord Jesus,

Master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas.

We who have so much to do and seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day,

We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us.

We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom.

We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence. We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light. To you we say, “Come Lord Jesus!’

Amen.”

This weekend we welcome Father Jerry Balwinski to be with us. I am taking a time for prayer with a monk friend of mine.

This week we celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.   We will have masses at 9AM and 7PM on December 8th to honor our Mother Mary on this holy day of obligation.

Dear friends of God, Happy Advent!

Advent is the beginning of our liturgical year. It is a moment of new beginnings as we prepare for Christ’s birth in Bethlehem 2000 years ago and every day in our hearts. Advent is a time when we recognize that God always keeps his promise to be present to us.   The prophet Jeremiah reminds us that “The Lord is our justice.”   From his chosen people God has raised up a savior, Jesus Christ. We are fortunate that God is his love has shared the gift of the Messiah with the whole human race and all of creation. St. Paul’s first Letter to the Thessalonians reminds us that God desires that we “…abound in love for one another and all…”. Advent is a time to begin to love again. Our world certainly needs to enter in the Advent mode of living where we place the love of all at the center for our lives and our choices. We believe that God is love and when we fail to love our neighbor, our enemy and ourselves, we fail to live as God desires us to live in harmony and peace. It is fitting that Advent is a new year for us because it is an opportunity to be the loving people that we have been created to be as we await the birth of the incarnation of Divine Love.

Love is more than words. Love is reflected in our actions. Love is as simple as sharing our daily bread or daily spaghetti. Advent is a time of prayer and almsgiving in a similar way to Lent, but this gets forgotten in our consumer-addicted culture. I want to encourage us to assist our local Pinconning Area Emergency Food Pantry with this Reverse Advent Calendar. You can simply leave your contributions in the pantry box which is found at the entrance of our church.

Let’s offer care for our Pinconning community as we prepare for the coming of the Christ Child on Christmas.

Dear friends of God,

This weekend our gospel is Mark 10:35-45. We hear about James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who are seeking worldly power within the eternal kingdom of God. Those closest to Jesus completely missed the point of the reign of God that had come to fruition in the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus was inaugurating a kingdom that was on Earth as it is in Heaven. It is a kingdom of justice and peace where we are realizing that we are each beloved children of God, and sisters and brothers of each other. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized the jeopardy we are in if we fail to remember that we are all members of the family of God. He wrote prophetically that we “…must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.” In our present world, those who are foolish seem to have the loudest voices. We need to search for those who are wise and ignore the fools. Jesus is the wisdom of God, so he is the wisest of wise ones. We need to seek his counsel and teachings found in the Gospels and in the teachings of the church. “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve…”. If we follow the way of Jesus, our lives need to be about service: serving our sisters and brothers in Christ; in particular, serving the most vulnerable in our community and in our world.

Next weekend (October 23-24) at our Masses, we will be celebrating the anointing of the sick for those in our community who might be need of healing prayers and the anointing with the sacred oils for the sick. There is great power in prayer, and in the gathering of the community to pray for those who need the support of the community and the healing from our Divine physician. Jesus, in his earthly ministry, was clearly a healer. From the earliest days of the Church, Christians knew intuitively of the healing love of God. Celebrating the anointing of the sick in community reminds us of the role that we are to play in our modern world as women and men of healing. May this time draw us closer to each other and to the heart of our healing God.

Next weekend, we also have the opportunity to pray the Rosary as a community after the 9AM Mass. We will pray the traditional Marian prayer in church. I would encourage everyone to take part in this prayer if able. There are so many ways for us to pray as Catholic Christians, and all of them are meant to draw us closer to Jesus and to each other. This closeness helps us grow in love for the community that we are called to create as disciples of Jesus Christ.

May God bless you with peace in these fall days as we see more and more that our God is part of the changing of times and seasons.

Dear friends of God,

A number of years ago, I came across a way of glimpsing how God is active in our lives. It is beginning to see that Jesus is the Teacher Within. I originally saw that way of seeing Jesus as the title for a book and it touched my heart in such a way that it continues to have an impact on my own experience of Jesus. I have intentionally capitalized that since it is a reminder that Jesus in his divinity, has shared the fullness of God’s life within each of us. Jesus is the Teacher of all teachers. We traditionally believe that Jesus is the Logos; that is, the Word of God.   John’s gospel begins with the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word is God’s creative spark enlivening all of creation from the moment that creation began with the Big Bang. A friend of mine is a Dominican priest and theologian. He often says that “God creates evolutely;” meaning that God creates through the evolution. During the evolutionary process God gave humanity a soul which truly made us human. Throughout all of time, and even before time as we know it, God was sharing the life of the Trinity through the gift of the Logos, the Word. When God was ready, the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. Jesus was born because it has always been God’s desire to share the fullness of life with us-his creation. God continually loves us with a love beyond our understanding. Because of that unconditional love, God continually shares his Word with us.

God our Father continually shares the Word with us and the word that Jesus, the Word of God continually says to all of creation is peace. That was the first word that came out of his mouth after the resurrection.   Christ always calls us to peace just as our creator God always shares his Word with us. It is a reminder to me that words matter…the Word matters.   It is so easy for us to forget that words matter and rather speak and act for peace act in a way that obstructs the Word in our hearts and in our world. Jesus, the Teacher Within is continually showing the way of peace because Christ is peace itself. In a world of violence and division, we are to be people of peace and nonviolence. We have the capacity to move mountains for a new world where God reigns with peace, mercy and compassion.

This morning I presided at our school Mass. I remind the kids that they will learn so much in our school in areas like math, science, social studies and English. These are essential areas of study and will prepare them for life. I told them that God has given them their brains and their gifts and talents not simply for their own benefit but for the life of the world. God has made us his own and calls us to share our lives with our sisters and brothers. The most important things that our children will learn at St. Michael’s School are about God, and the skills to grow in relationship with the God who has loved each of us even before the dawn of creation.

Dear friends of God,

Father Bede Griffiths, OSB Cam. had this profound insight after decades of monastic life in both England (for the first half of his life) and in India (for the second half of his earthly life).

“I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.”

Imagine that-God is continually seeking each of us. We simply need to pay closer attention to the movements of the Spirit to recognize God’s Presence in our midst. The good news is that whether we realize it or not, and whether we call on him or not, God is always tight with us, loving us into existence. As Dr. Karl Jung, a Swiss psychologist put it: “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” Dr. Jung had that quote above the door of his home. That might be a good quote to have around our own homes and certainly in our own hearts. Bidden or not bidden, God is present. We simply need to turn around and see God right there. There is something consoling for me struggling to understand that there is nothing that I can do to earn God’s presence and there is nothing that I can do that would push God away from me. God is our relentless Divine lover who simply wants to be with us. May each of us turn toward others and to God and leave ourselves aside as we follow the Lord.

This week I will be away for an interfaith experience of mediation. I will keep all of you in prayer and ask that you do the same for me. I will be learning more and more about how prayer and meditation can be transformative as we grow into the true selves that God created us to be, and leave behind the false self, our persona, that so often we think of as our real identity. Over the last number of years, I have been working on my own growing understanding of God’s presence and action in our world and in my life. Taking time for silence and stillness is one of the ways that I open the eye of my own heart to God’s faithfulness.

Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton decades ago had an epiphany that reflects our true selves that we seem to miss. He experienced this mystical moment as he was in Louisville for an appointment away from his monastery. He described his experience in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander in this way:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self- isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

We are shining like the sun, but we don’t seem to notice the Divine life that radiates from each of us. Imagine if we noticed this about each other. How would we respond to each other, how would we share love for each other, for all of creation and our very universe?

Dear friends of God,

Happy Labor Day!

This weekend is more than just about enjoying the waning days of summer. It is more than about gathering with friends and family to BBQ. It is a day when we remember the importance of labor as an aspect of human dignity. In our Catholic Christian Tradition, there is a long history of honoring human labor as well as fighting for the rights of workers. That Tradition continues today, and is as necessary today, or maybe even more so, then it was 100 years ago.

Saint John Paul II was a great philosopher. In his younger days, he was a laborer. In 1981, he wrote an encyclical titled Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) that called for a more just economic system for those who labor in our world. He knew that the market economy was broken. Pope John Paul II was highly critical of Soviet style communism, but he was equally critical of the market economy that we have created. I can only imagine what he is thinking in heaven as we have billionaires fly to the stars while our neighbors are starving. In the encyclical from 1981 he wrote this:

“We consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.” (#15)

We are still fighting for fair pay. A good example would be the atrocious minimum wage that we provide to so many workers in our nation. This might seem far afield to some regarding our Catholic Faith. But we need to remember that how we relate to the world is a reflection of the faith that we embrace. It is about loving our neighbor. Human dignity is at the center of our faith as Catholics. If we don’t protect the dignity of those who labor, it seems challenging for us to say that we follow Jesus who knew the experience of working with his own hands and shedding sweat from his brow, just as he knew what it felt like to shed water and blood from his side during his crucifixion.

Our second reading this weekend comes from the Letter of James. James is a short letter (only 5 chapters) but quite direct in its teaching that to have faith means that one needs works as well. My grandmother would say that talk is cheap.

Our faith in Jesus Christ needs to flow in our relations to each other and especially to our poorer brothers and sisters. We will hear the following proclaimed from chapter 2 of this letter:

“If a man with gold rings on his fingers and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Sit here, please,” while you say to the poor one, “Stand there,” or “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs?”

Treating each other with our God-given dignity is essential to our faith and goes back to the earliest days of the church -and even to Jesus himself who had what the Church now calls a “preferential option for the poor.” Jesus was the incarnation of the God of Love, and in his earthly life was born to a poor family far away from the center of the known world. But that is where God decided to plant himself in our human family. God became poor to care for the poorest among us, and to work with his own two hands as a workman like so many who labor today in our world.

This Sunday, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. God’s gift to Mary of her Assumption, body and soul, into heaven is what we all anticipate at the end of time. For us, we will die at some point, and for a moment, our souls and bodies will be separated. However, in God’s own time our bodies and souls will once again be reunited in the resurrection of the body. Then, all of creation will once again be united as God desires. God came to be one with us to save us in our entirety. Our bodies and souls are meant to be together. Our belief in the afterlife is much more about Life after life rather than an escape plan for another world. The deepest desire of God is to bring his healing love to all of creation. The gift of his son, and the yes of Jesus’ mother and our sister Mary, was the way that God has chosen to save all of us body and soul.

Today I was listening to a podcast about silence and the speaker mentioned that when she first went on a silent retreat, the nun who welcomed her to the retreat center as she led her to the room for the weekend, said to “enjoy God.” That struck me as an important notion to embrace. I don’t think most of his hold onto the idea that we are even able to “enjoy God.” Maybe we fear God, are intimidated by God, do our best to appease God or don’t want to disappoint God. But the truth is that those other notions don’t reflect the healthy relationship that we are created to have with God. We are to be in awe of the way that God loves us, to open ourselves to God’s permanent presence in our lives. We are to see God as a relentless lover and yes we are to even to “enjoy God” as much as he enjoys us. Imagine our time with God as quality time with a lover or a dear friend. We know that feeling when we are with someone who knows us for who we are in our imperfection and yet we are perfect for them. We are all imperfect people and at the same time we are perfect for God. So, please in these lovely days, “enjoy God.”

Dear friends of God,

Recently Pope Francis shared the following wisdom to our human family and our frenetic activity: “Brothers and sisters… Let us learn how to take a break, to turn off the mobile phone to gaze into the eyes of others, to cultivate silence, to contemplate nature, to regenerate ourselves in dialogue with God.” That is very good advice in our time and especially during the summer when many of us have the privilege of traveling. We all need times to be re-created by God. This idea comes to my mind more and more. That is why we need to take time every day for prayer and for fun. God desires that we grow as people and take time to rest and recreate. Let us take time to look into the eyes of those whom we love, rest in the quiet of God’s presence, and to walk in the ways of the Lord during these waning summer days. This last week, I did just that with some short days of hiking. It was a time to stretch my legs and my soul. I certainly kept you in prayer as I walked in the nature that God has created as his first Cathedral.

Next weekend we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since the feast falls on Sunday, the liturgy for the weekend will honor Mary, our Mother and our Sister. We will also host our annual mission speaker who comes this year from the Sisters of Charity. May God open our hearts and minds to the needs for the missions in the United States and around the world.

Dear friends of God,

Faith can be a challenging word for many of us. A traditional definition from theology by the great scholar St. Anselm is that theology is “faith seeking understanding.” That might seem far removed from our everyday experience. I don’t think many of us think about theology: the study of God. But we are always marinated in God’s presence. For me to think about God’s presence and action is both an occupational hazard and a gift as a priest and preacher. As a parish priest, I have the gift of meeting so many different people in our parish and our local community. I have found this benefit of ministry in each of my assignments. I am better for the people that I have met in my years as a priest for our diocese. I met some of them in their death. That might sound strange, but being present to families and having them share their grief with me has taught me so much about God and how God calls each of us to faith in our unique ways.

Recently, some thoughts about faith came to my mind as I was preparing a funeral homily. I want to share some of these thoughts as I continue to understand the impact of faith has on my own relationship with God and neighbor, and as I minister as a parish priest.

He continually has our backs; we as disciples of Jesus are to care for those who have “their back against the wall.” People who have “their backs against the wall” are those who society seems to have forgotten, those who are left behind in the successes of the world. That might seem like a new idea, but I would suggest that is where Jesus’ placed his priorities. He lived what the church calls the “preferential option for the poor.” If we are to follow Jesus, we need to live the same way. Look around our world, our nation and our neighborhoods and find those who have the roughest time in our society. These are the people who have had their backs against the wall and we need to cover them with our active love.

These are simply thoughts crossing my mind in my own spiritual life and the growing relationship that I have with God and neighbor and my life as your priest.

May God bless us with a deeper understanding of faith as we stumble along the way of the Kingdom of God as followers of Jesus Christ!