24th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 - Embracing the Lost

 This last Monday, aside from being our national celebration of Labor Day, was the feast of St. Theresa of Calcutta, known throughout the last decades of her life as Mother Theresa. 

During my semester in Rome during college seminary, I had the honor of working alongside the Missionary Sisters of Charity—the Religious Order founded by St. Mother Teresa, at a house for destitute men near the Coliseum there in Rome. Many of those sisters had been with Mother from the beginning of the order and certainly embodied her spirit—patience and love for the poor. And at this house for the destitute, men—mostly homeless men—would come off the streets and would be fed and bathed and treated with dignity and respect.  The sisters were breathtakingly patient and gentle as they treated these men as they would treat Jesus himself.  And they did so because that was Mother Theresa’s gift to them. She modeled for them, and for us, how to love Jesus in the poorest of the poor.

When anyone met Mother Teresa, they were often shocked at the fact that no matter how busy she was and no matter how many other people were around, when she talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the world. She gave you her total attention, her total love, her total self every moment. It was as if the whole rest of the world dropped away and ceased to exist while she was talking to you. She wasn’t looking past you to see if there was someone more important in the room. She wasn’t bothered because of the other duties she had to attend to. She wasn’t trying to get back home so she could sit on her couch to veg-out or binge her favorite television show or get home to get dinner going. She certainly was not concerned what other people would thing about her by talking to you.

Why did she do that that? How did she do that? For one, it’s because of her prayer life. She made a daily Eucharistic holy hour, and mandated her sisters do the same, no matter what. She gave Jesus her full loving attention in prayer, and was thereby able to give you her full loving attention. 

Secondly it’s because she had come to know Jesus’ love for her. She knew that Jesus died for her—not just for general, collective “humanity”; she knew that if she had been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would have done no less for her than he did for all of us. 

God loves you, each of you, every ounce of you—warts and all. And his love for you is perfect. God’s love is not divided, as if each of us only receive one 6 billionth of his love and attention. God loves each individual with the entirety of his love. 

And that’s important to keep in mind as we consider our scripture readings this weekend. In the parables of the finding of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son in the Gospel today, we are to come to recognize that we cannot be lost to God’s attention or to God’s love. Even when we turn our backs on God, God is search for us. We cannot become lost amidst the nameless, faceless masses. None of us are nameless or faceless to God. 

It is possible to turn our backs on God—to try to hide from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden hiding from God out of shame for their sin. We can separate ourselves from the life of the flock—from the family of God, the Church. We can engage in a life of dissipation outside of the Father’s house in sin.

Like the first son in the Gospel parable—we can act on the dumb idea that we’ll be happier if we just make our own way—if we claim our independence from the Father. But, that’s what sin is, isn’t it? Claiming independence from God and his ways? I’ll do it my way, thank you very much.

But like the prodigal son, that ends in disaster—unhappiness, unfullfilment, misery. If we just trusted God—and stopped playing games with God—and his simple call to holiness—we would be so less depressed.

The real turn in the parable is when the son feels something knocking on his heart. He recognizes everything he has lost because of his choices, and decides to return to the house of his Father.

“And while he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him,” the father had never stopped looking for his son, “and was filled with compassion. The Father runs toward the son to embrace him. Similarly, God, is always knocking on the heart of the sinner, and filled with compassion, is always ready to embrace us in mercy. 

But then, in the Gospel parable, there was another son, and this second son had remained in the Father’s house. But,  there was something lost about him as well—an emptiness. He was lost because he did not share his father’s joy at his brother’s homecoming. Love for his brother had at some point died in his heart. And without love, there can be no joy.

The two sons are two different dangers for Christians. The first danger is that we justify wandering from the Church—embarking on a lifestyle of sin—that brings its own joylessness and emptiness. The second danger, is that those who remain must never lose our love for our brothers and sisters who wander. If we do, it can result in joylessness, bitterness. Those of us who lose love for the sinner, will not know the joy of the Church’s mission to reconcile sinners to God. God forbid we become like that second brother. 

To borrow an idea from Pope Francis…why would anyone become Catholic if all they encounter are scowling, bitter, joyless, complaining sour-pusses. Or the cold, silent treatment. A life-long Catholic annoyed at a stranger sitting in their seat. Someone parked in my spot. Someone is encroaching on my territory. Someone who doesn’t know the right time to sit, stand, kneel. What are they doing here? I never left. We must never harden our hearts against embracing the lost--and those trying to find their way home.

How can we assure that doesn’t happen. Again, like Mother Theresa, prayer enlivens the heart. We need to lovingly gaze upon the face of Jesus in prayer, especially in the Eucharist, so that we can attend to Him in other people. That which you did for the least of my brethren you did for me.

There was a sister who complained to Mother Theresa. Mother, why do we have to waste our time with the daily holy hour. There are children dying in the streets of starvation and disease. The holy hour takes us away from the real work. To which mother replied, sister, because you believe this, you need two hours every day. She wasn’t kidding. 

May our parish always be a place where the lost are embraced and God’s love is joyfully celebrated and shared, where loving attention is given, where God’s children are serious about the sort of prayer that enlivens and emboldens charity, and where the Gospel is learned, cherished and lived out, for the glory of God and salvation of souls. 

10th Sunday in OT 2018 - The Good God is in the details... (farewell Mass)

There is an idiom you hear from time to time, that “the devil is in the details.” The phrase is usually meant to describe how it is often the small details of a task which make it difficult or challenging. The great violinist Itzhak Perlman might use the phrase “the devil is in the details” to describe the challenge of getting a piece of music just right, through hours and hours of practice. What separates an amateur from a professional or a great artist is oftentimes that painstaking attention to detail.

Well, in his new apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, Pope Francis wrote about how attention to detail is part of the universal call to holiness. Holiness often involves paying attention to the details and needs of people’s lives. “Let us not forget” the Popes writes, “that Jesus asked his disciples to pay attention to details. The little detail that wine was running out at a party. The little detail that one sheep was missing. The little detail of noticing the widow who offered her two small coins. The little detail of having spare oil for the lamps, should the bridegroom delay. The little detail of asking the disciples how many loaves of bread they had. The little detail of having a fire burning and a fish cooking as he waited for the disciples at daybreak.”

When I first read that passage, I immediately thought of our pastor, Fr. Klasinski. Father, if you didn’t know, is detail-oriented. “A place for everything, and everything in its place”, whether it be the sacristy, the church, or the rectory. If you’ve ever attended the easter vigil, you know that Father is practicing with his elite team of servers right until we light the easter fire, to get their movements and maneuvers just right for that most sacred of all nights.  Hopefully these last four years over in the rectory weren’t too much like a four year long episode of the Odd Couple: you can guess who the clean one and who the not-so-clean one was.

But, I believe Father’s attention to detail, is a lot like Jesus’. His care for the church, for liturgy, for the rectory, is because he cares, he loves. “A community that cherishes the little details of love,” the Pope writes, “whose members care for one another and create an open and evangelizing environment, is a place where the risen Lord is present, sanctifying it in accordance with the Father’s plan.”

Many of us can relate to the Holy Father’s words. When it comes time for the holidays, or having house guests, we pay attention to the little details, out of respect, out of love, for our guests and family. It takes a lot of attention to detail to make relationships work, to make marriages work, to make parishes work.

The phrase the “devil is in the details” actually derives from an earlier French phrase, “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail”—"the good God is in the details.” Christian charity isn’t simply a vague sense of love for all of humanity, it’s about making God’s love present in the concrete details of people’s lives.

And, I think the Pope points to Our Lord’s own attention to detail, to show us that holiness is found in loving attention to other people. For the Lord’s love for us is not just this vague sense of love for humanity as a whole; God’s love reaches the details of the concrete difficulties and challenges of every human life. God knows every obstacle we face, every joy we celebrate, every hair on our head, every yearning in our heart, and he wants us to know that he is with us, in every detail.

Jesus in the Gospel today speaks of the divided house of Satan, of unclean spirits, and there really is something unclean, isn’t there, of the ego-centric attitudes which lead us to ignore the details of the lives and burdens of others. So many of our own divided houses and divisions in our nation, would be healed if we were ego-centrism was replaced with other-centeredness.

I think that is one of the great blessings of priesthood. Priests get to share in the details of your lives. They are not always pretty: the details of the confessional, the details of grief and suffering and illness which afflict the body of Christ. They aren’t always pretty, but they are important, for God is present in them, inviting us to discover him there. And so many of the details are beautiful and edifying.

I’d like to take the opportunity to say that, after four years here at St Clare, I’ve been edified by your dedication to making St. Clare a vibrant parish. I’ve been edified by all of your generosity, especially the hard work I’ve witnessed in running the parish festival, the school and academy and psr programs, and celebrating such beautiful liturgies.

I ask for your prayers as I begin my new assignment this week at Holy Family Parish in Parma. Please always pray for your priests, daily, for Fr. Klasinski and for Fr. Cosgrove, as they seek to serve you with hearts of our Good Shepherd, Christ the Lord.

And one more request, one I’ve made before and I make again: parents and grandparents, encourage the young people in your lives often to prayerfully consider God’s call to the priesthood or consecrated religious life. Help them to be courageous in discerning God’s call, and to turn away from the voices and vices that obscure that call. The religious vocation offers the happiness I know you want for the young people in your lives—joy and fulfillment, a sense of closeness to the Lord and to his people, that nothing else can imitate. Our world needs young people willing to hear and answer the call, and when we do that, we’ll never be disappointed.

As Fr. Klasinski and the bulletin have mentioned these past few weeks, there will be a reception after the noon mass in the academy gym. Please join us if you can. I’d love the opportunity to say farewell to you face-to-face.

Thank you to all those who have dropped-off delicious pastry for us to share, and to the pastoral council for organizing the reception.

May the Lord in his kindness bless all of you and your families in all the details of your lives, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.