14th Week in Ordinary Time 2026 - Tuesday - Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind

 

Every few years I like to reread, Dante’s Divine Comedy.  And this morning’s reading from the prophet Hosea reminds me of a scene very early on in Dante’s Inferno. After venturing through the gates of hell with his guide Virgil, Dante the pilgrim comes to the second level of hell—the level of hell set aside for the eternal punishment of those unrepentant of the sin of Lust.

In Dante’s poem, the punishments are different for every sin, and the punishments fit the crime. The Wrathful for example are condemned to an endless physical and violent battle against each other—they were wrathful on earth, and so they are subject to the wrath of others forever in hell.

The punishment for the Lustful is to be blown about by overwhelming winds and whirlwinds for all eternity. Dante was likely inspired by the line from the Prophet Hosea this morning: “those who sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.” Those in hell reap in eternity what the sowed in their earthly life.

Dante reserves this particular punishment for the Lustful because in life they allowed themselves to be blown about by their sensual feelings and bodily craving. Ignoring the commandments and the use of right reason, they only followed their bodily desires, which are as fickle as the wind.

Yet, this is a problem not just for the Lustful. Saint Paul warns the Ephesians about “being tossed here and there, carried about by every wind”.  He warned the Ephesians of allowing themselves to be carried by the various cultural winds, the various ideological currents, making a political agenda or social ideology the impetus of their lives rather than the Gospel. 

This line from Hosea was the inspiration for another literary work, Harper Lee’s American Classic, “Inherit the Wind”…which focuses on the ideology and injustice of racism.

But again, those who “sow in wind” are not just the lustful, but those who are not firmly rooted in the truth of the Gospel.  If we are not rooted in prayer and knowledge of the Word of God, we’ll be blown about by whatever catches our fancy. 

Folks aren’t coming to Sunday Mass because they have some intellectual opposition to the Sunday obligation, but because they are doing whatever they want.  Young people aren’t cohabitating before marriage because they’ve studied the church’s theology on marriage and found it lacking. No, they are being blown about by the winds of the culture and their passions and choosing not to think about what they are doing. 

We even describe the sin of gossip as getting “caught up” in gossip, or grumbling and complaining, like we are “caught up” in some windstorm. 

When we surrender our intellect and our faith to the winds of human desire we are going to be blown to places we aren’t meant to go.  So, God help us, to remain firm against the various bad winds which blow throughout society today, and remain rooted in faith, prayer, the study of scripture, the lives of the saints, and works of charity, in order to be faithful to the Gospel of Christ for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

 

That all bishops and clergy will lead the Church well in standing strong against the winds of error and immorality in our modern culture.

 

For all those who have fallen away from the Church, those who have fallen into serious sin, for their conversion, and the conversion of all hearts.

 

For Pope Leo’s prayer intention for the month of July: For respect for human life—for the respect and protection of human life in all its stages, recognizing it as a gift from God. Let us pray to the Lord.

 

For all the needs of the sick and the suffering, for all those recovering from or undergoing surgery today, and for the consolation of the dying.

 

For all who have died, and for all the poor souls in purgatory, and for X. for whom this Mass is offered.

 

Incline your merciful ear to our prayers, we ask, O Lord, and listen in kindness to the supplications of those who call on you. Through Christ our Lord

 

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023 - Unless your righteousness surpasses...

 For the past two weeks we’ve been hearing from the Lord’s Great Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. Two weeks ago, we heard the beatitudes, which the catechism says, “express the vocation of every Christian”. Every Christian is called to pursue beatitude, to pursue holiness by putting on the mind and heart of Christ. The beatitudes are the standards by which every action of ours is to be measured. Does my use of money help me to obtain beatitude? Does the use of my time help me to obtain beatitude? Do my choices and habits and the way that I treat family members, strangers, and enemies, help me to obtain beatitude?

Then, last week we heard the Lord tells us that we must be the salt of the earth and light of the world. The influence of Christians in the world is to be detected like salt in food, like a light shining in the darkness. Our faith that Jesus Christ is Lord and God is to be detected by those we encounter—again in our families and in society. 

This week, the Lord gives further explanation of how his disciples are to live. In fact, he sets a very high standard indeed. “Unless our holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees we will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” So the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Christian conduct goes beyond merely keeping the natural law or the Ten Commandments. We are challenged us not just to be “good” but genuinely “holy”—transformed by God’s grace inside and outside.  I often meet people who say, “I don’t go to church, but I’m a good person.” Fine, be a good person, try with all your might to be a good person. But Christianity isn’t simply about being a good person. It’s about becoming holy—filled with the life of God. Being good isn’t enough to get into heaven. Good is not good enough. Do you believe that?

Let’s look at what the Lord teaches us about holiness.

First, he says, it’s not good enough simply to avoid murder. Of course, we need to avoid murdering each other. But that’s not enough for heaven. Christians seek conversion even from the sort of thoughts that set us down the path to unjust violence, and seek to love others with Christ like love. And we don’t love our neighbor as ourselves if all we do is not kill them. We avoid all envy, jealousy, and vengeance, rivalry. We turn away from hurting others with our tongues and machinations. If you detect an ounce of anger toward anyone, pray for the Lord to free you. If you can detect that you have failed to forgive anyone, pray that the Lord give you the grace to help you to forgive.

Secondly, the Lord says it’s not good enough for us to avoid adultery. Again, of course adultery must certainly be avoided. We must avoid all lust and any attitude or reasoning or habit that allows lust to take root in us, that views other humans as objects for our own gratification. Rather we seek the beatitude of purity of heart. And purity of heart is obtained through prayer, self-discipline, avoiding occasions of lust as best we can, and repentance for lust in the sacrament of confession.

Thirdly, the Lord gives married couples special instruction here: to not only avoid divorce but any selfish behaviors that could lead to someone wanting to divorce you.  Just because someone married you, does not give you the right to be selfish toward them. Rather married couples have the duty of helping your spouse grow in holiness by your own example of prayer, forgiveness, patience, and fidelity to the commands of God. And that’s true for each of us: whether a priest, married, single, monk or nun we must set good Christian example and help each other obtain heaven.

Lastly, the final standard the Lord mentions in this section of his sermon to his disciples is about truthfulness. It’s not good enough to simply tell the truth when you are under oath, or to be the sort of person that people only believe when you are under oath. 

Jesus, the Lord, who is the truth incarnate, wants his followers to be distinguished as people of truth, integrity, honor, and transparency. 

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven” Christians seek not just to be good,  we seek to be righteous. Not self-righteous. 

The Pharisees got their name because they refused to eat and speak with sinners. We must not self-righteously distance ourselves from those who have different beliefs than us. In fact, we are to be seeking them out, to bring them to Christ. 

We are not to be self-righteous, but actually righteous…where the law and commandments and virtues and life of God transforms us from the inside out, where every obstacle to authentic Christ-like love is transformed into the charity.

This morning I had a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the rectory door. I did not turn them away. Rather, I invited them in. I sat down with them. And to be honest, they scrutinized me, for almost an hour. They tried to poke holes in Catholic theology, for Jehovah’s Witnesses deny many truths of our faith, including the bodily resurrection of Jesus, that Jesus is true God and true man; they deny the Trinity. I did my best to answer their questions and perhaps reexamine their errors.

But, I shared with them that this parish is both committed to the truth, and also serving those who do not have the truth. We feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and teach the ignorant, no matter what they believe. The Good News isn’t just believed and professed. It is lived. I pray that Christ might convert their hearts, and recognize that each of us must do penance for their conversion. 

Providentially, in just 10 days, we begin the season of Lent. A time for us to do penance for ourselves and for others. In the next 10 days, please, take some real quality time to discern the type and level of prayer, fasting, and works of charity that God wants from you, for the sake of souls and to help you pursue the righteousness God wants for each you. For God didn’t make us to be mediocre and lukewarm, but on fire for pursuing his Holy Will for the glory of God and salvation of souls. 

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 - Lust and Pride in the Inferno and Purgatorio

 
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that for my spiritual reading this summer, I’m making my way through Dante Alighieri’s 800 year old epic poem, the Divine Comedy. In the three books of the Divine Comedy, Dante chronicles a pilgrimage he makes through hell, purgatory, and heaven.   He describes the horrific sights and sounds of the punishment of the damned in hell. He then makes his way up the mountain of purgatory, where he meets those who still need to be purified of the effects of their sins before entering heaven where amidst glorious celestial light he meets the blessed saints enjoying the beatific vision of the Holy Trinity.

And throughout his journey, Dante often stops to speak to the souls he meets in the afterlife. In hell, Dante meets Popes and political leaders who misused or neglected their responsibilities; heretics who spread their errors and led others away from the Gospel of Christ, he meets those who betrayed their nation and families; and in the very lowest and iciest depths of hell, there is Judas Iscariot who betrayed our Lord.

Well, near the entrance of the Inferno, Dante meets a pair of souls, Paolo and Francesca, a married woman and her brother-in-law who are in hell because of their joint sin of lust.

The conversation Dante has with this lustful pair is interesting because like most of the souls in hell Paolo and Francesca refuse to admit they did anything wrong. They explain how they were simply spending time in a room together, reading a rather lurid romance novel, when their own passions were kindled. 

For allowing themselves to be carried away by their passions, Dante describes Paolo and Francesca with all of the other lustful souls as being blown about hell in a sort of whirlwind for all eternity. Their sin was allowing their passions to lead them to sin. They failed to exercise their intellect—and refused to admit that an unmarried couple shouldn’t have been in room together, alone, reading erotic literature—failing to reasonably protect their chastity. We call that the near occasion of sin, don’t we, when we knowingly put ourselves in a situation where, given our fallen human nature, we are likely to fall into sin.

The Catechism explains that our passions—our powerful emotions are an essential part of our human nature—hunger, thirst, desire for physical intimacy—are part of human nature, but it is our responsibility as rational beings that these passions be put under the direction of right reason.

Our passions are like horses, and they need to be directed by the bridle and bit of truth and reason and self-control. And if our passions are allowed to run-away on their own without proper direction, we will not reach the destination God wants for us—and in a very real sense our actions become little different from the animals. To allow our passions to rule is to abdicate our responsibility as human beings.

In our first reading, we hear of the grave evils running rampant in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The book of Genesis describes God Himself taking note of the grave sins taking place in these cities. Like Paolo and Francesco in the inferno, the Sodomites and citizens of Gomorrah were engaging in sins of lust. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had become so corrupt, Abraham, as we heard in our first reading from Genesis chapter 18 is really struggling to find 50 or 40 or 30 or 20 or even 10 innocent people.

Sodom and Gomorrah are spared for a time, but In the following chapter of Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by God with fire and brimstone, which is certainly a foreshadowing of the eternal punishments of the cities inhabitants who allow their passions to become corrupted by sin and fail to repent.

After traversing through hell, Dante eventually makes his way to the mountain of purgatory. And on Mount Purgatory, Dante encounters the holy souls who, repentant of their sins, now undergo purification in order to prepare for heavenly glory.

In purgatory Dante meets souls guilty of the same sorts of sins as those he encountered in hell: sins of gluttony, and lust, and wrath, and avarice and theft. But the big difference between those in purgatory and those in hell, are that the souls in purgatory acknowledged in their earthly life that their sins were offensive to God. And so they repented and began to hand their lives over to God.

The first group of repentant sinners Dante meets in Purgatory are the souls being purified of the sin of Pride—and this is a big group—a very big group. For Dante, and St. Thomas Aquinas, every sin, really can be traced back to pride. For Pride is when we turn away from God, when we claim to know better than God, when we act as if we were the center of the universe.  Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their pride and traced their inability and unwillingness to recognize him as the Son of God back to sinful pride.  

As part of their Purgatorial purification from pride, Dante describes the souls pushing heavy stones up the inclined mountain, the heaviness of the stones proportional to the measure of their pride while on earth. Additionally, the souls being purified of pride are found praying; they are praying over and over and over again, the prayer we find in our Gospel today, the Lord’s prayer.

The Lord’s prayer is the antidote to pride. For in the Lord’s prayer, we humbly surrender to God’s will, over our own. The sin of Pride weighs us down from living in the freedom of the children of God, so Our Lord teaches us the Lord’s Prayer to combat our earthly pride—to be devoted to doing the will of the Father, and relying on the providence of the Father, as Our Lord himself. The Catechism states praying the our Father should develop in us the desire to become like Christ, to behave like Christ, to be holy like Christ—free from all selfishness like Christ.

A good priest once suggested to me that our holiness as a Christian can be measured by our ability to pray the Our Father from the heart.    In Dante’s purgatory, the Our Father is prayed over and over until they really learn to pray it from the heart. Do you pray the Our Father from your heart? Being one of the first prayers we learn, praying it daily, and every week at Mass, it becomes easy just to rattle off the Our Father without praying from our hearts.

The Catechism devotes its last 100 paragraphs explaining the words of the Lord’s Prayer. I recommend reading through those 100 paragraphs over the next week, you won’t regret it. But also, I invite you, each day this week, set aside some time to pray the Our Father from the heart. Pray it slowly, reflectively, pondering each word, each phrase, each petition. Allow the Lord’s Prayer to help you overcome the pride, the willfulness, the arrogance, the disordered passions that keep you from living in the freedom and peace God wants for you.

My God’s Will truly be done on earth as it is in heaven, in our lives, the lives of our families, and nation, and parish, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

First Friday Holy Hour - February 2022 - The truth that conquers lust

 This morning at mass I reflected upon how today’s Gospel helps us to understand that as disciples of the Lord, we, like John the Baptist will experience hostility when we stand for Truth.

John the Baptist was hated by Herodias for speaking the Truth about her adulterous conduct with King Herod. “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife” he told the King. 

For speaking the truth, the Baptist’s life, like Our Lord’s culminated, in a violent death: for speaking the Truth of God, John was beheaded.

Herodias did not want to hear the truth, so she did everything in her power to silence it. John was silenced for challenging Herodias’ lust for flesh, foreshadowing how Jesus would by silenced by the scribes, chief priests, and pharisees, for challenging their lust for power. 

Nothing incurs some people’s wrath like speaking the truth about their lusts. They do not want to even acknowledge the possibility that their life has become bent on something disordered, something harmful to their souls, to their families, to society. But the Truth of the Gospel helps us to unravel the lies of our life, in order to live more fully for God.

Here in the Lord’s Eucharistic presence, in the silence, we ask him to speak to our hearts. Our lives are so frenetic, but this time of silence with the Lord, will help us to quiet down in order to hear him. Anything True that the Lord wants to tell us, any truth that he wants to communicate to us, we need to open our hearts and our minds to. For the Lord desires our greatest good, he desires what will make us eternally happy in heaven. 

We can be sure that he will tell us nothing that will contradict God’s laws, but what he has to say will help us to follow them more faithfully. Speak O Lord your servants are listening, you have the words of everlasting life. 

May our time with the Lord open our hearts and minds to his truth, and help us to communicate that truth with patience, boldness, conviction, courage, and clarity. May we hear the words he longs to speak to us, the words we long to hear, that we need to hear, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

17th Sunday in OT 2019 - Purification from earthly pride

The Catholic poet, Dante Alighieri, wrote a famous poem, almost 800 years ago now, called the Divine Comedy—La Comedia Divina.  In the three books of La Comedia, Dante chronicles a pilgrimage he makes through hell, purgatory, and heaven.   He describes the horrific sights and sounds of the punishment of the wicked in hell for their failure to repent from their self-centeredness. He then makes his way up the mountain of purgatory, where he meets those undergoing purification from the effects of their life’s sinfulness. Dante finally visits heaven, il paradiso, where amidst glorious celestial light he meets the blessed saints who free from all selfishness now enjoy the beauty of being in God’s presence.

Dante uses an interesting literary device to depict the suffering of the wicked in hell, a device called Contrapasso. Contrapasso means the punishment fits the sin. For example those who in hell unrepentant of the sin of lust are caught blown about the second circle of hell by this terrible hellish whirlwind. How does the punishment fit the sin? As the lustful allowed themselves to be carried by the winds of their passions on earth, in hell they are subject to these uncontrollable winds for eternity—without rest.

In purgatory, for Dante, the purification also fits the sin. At the base of the mountain of purgatory, the largest group of people Dante meets are those who need to be cleansed of the sin of pride. For Dante, every sin can be traced back to pride. Pride turns away from God, pride claims to know better than God, better than the Church. We commit pride when we act as if we were the center of the universe. Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their pride and traced their inability to recognize him as the Son of God back to pride.  Our self-centered pride keeps us from loving God and loving neighbor as we should.

So if for Dante, the purification fits the sin how did he depict the purification of the prideful? Well, what is the opposite of pride? Humility. The purification of the prideful of purgatory involved a very specific act of humility, an act of humility prescribed by the Lord Himself. Their purification, the healing of their willfulness, their self-centeredness, their sinful egotism, was to recite over and over, humbly and devoutly, the prayer we find at the beginning of the Gospel today, the Our Father.

Why does Dante see the Our Father as a fitting purification for pride? Sinful Pride claims “MY WILL BE DONE”, the Our Father prays “Thy Will be Done.” Sinful pride asserts its own self-sufficiency and control; the Our Father approaches God with open hands, seeking the daily bread that can only come from God. Sinful pride refuses to forgive, never forgiving an affront to our almighty egos, the Our Father asks God for the grace to forgive, allowing the wounded ego to heal. Where sinful pride does not acknowledge that it could ever make a mistake, could never sin, the Our Father pleads mercy for our sins, mercy that can only come from God.

A good priest once suggested to me that our holiness as a Christian can be measured by our ability to pray the Our Father from the heart. In Dante’s purgatory, the Our Father is prayed over and over as an act of purification from pride, until these souls truly learn to pray it from the heart, with a heart in union with the heart of Jesus.

The Our Father is one of the first prayers we learn as Catholics: we commit it to memory, we pray it every week at Mass. I remember committing it to memory in first grade PSR. Now, once committed to memory it becomes easy to rattle off the words, barely thinking about what they mean.  So, there is certainly a difference between praying the Our Father from memory and praying it from the heart, isn’t there? 

To pray the Our Father from the heart means to pray it from your very depths, to mean every phrase of it, to pray it with the heart and the mind of Jesus Christ.  As a spiritual exercise it is helpful from time to time to pray the Our Father, very slowly, reflecting upon every word, what those words really mean for us as Christians.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, by the way, is a wonderful resource for this, the entire final 100 paragraphs of the Catechism deal with each line and each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer.

Let’s just like at the first word of Jesus’ prayer. Where pride focuses on me, me, me.  The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to focus on us, on we.  We are to address God as part of a community.  The first word of the Our Father is Our. 

In teaching us to pray, Jesus teaches us to focus not just on ME, my life, my needs, my desires, rattling off my wish list. For Christianity is not a mere private affair.  The Church Jesus founded is not just a gathering of isolated individuals, but persons who have been brought into a new communion with God and one another.  We go to God together. 

Look at Sunday Mass.  We cannot fulfill our Sunday obligation by sitting in a room, by ourselves, communing with God.  We are meant to come together, at least every week, in united prayer. Someone who claims that they don’t need the Church to be Christian needs to reexamine the data and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The Christian Church is a communion, a community, a family of souls on earth united in faith and prayer to the souls in purgatory who both receive the help of the blessed souls of the saints in heaven. And the Our Father, to be prayed by every Christian every day, opens us, reminds us, recommits us, to being a faithful members of this communion. It humbles our egocentrism, opening us up to new vistas of charity and living in harmony.

Seek and Ye shall Find. And in the Our Father, the Lord teaches us a prayer of perfect and unselfish love offering ourselves entirely to God and asking from Him the best things, not only for ourselves but also for our neighbor.

May this Holy Eucharist help us to truly be purified from all earthly pride, to grow in humble surrender to the holy will of God in all things, to pray with the hearts and minds of Jesus, united with all of the holy souls and the saints, that Our Father may truly be hallowed on earth as He is in heaven, for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls.