7th Week of Ordinary Time 2024 - Thursday - Instructions for the Last Day of School

Happy Last Day of School everyone. When I was studying to be a priest, on the last day of seminary each  year, we would always gather for mass just like we are doing today. At the end of a long school year, our seminary rector would give us some instructions for the summer. Even though the school year was over, we still had to keep some things in mind. He would remind us of the importance of going to church as much as possible, and praying and reading scripture every day. He’d remind us not to play too many video games and to exercise and get some sunshine. He’d remind us to keep our minds sharp by reading books throughout the summer, and looking for opportunities to volunteer at our parishes. 

But then, he’d give us the most important piece of advice. He would remind us of the importance of turning to God and turning to Jesus every day, and to seek our happiness in Him.

And wouldn’t you know it, all of our scripture readings today, on this last day of the school year, contain that very same advice.

In our first reading from the Letter of James, we hear a strong message about the dangers of putting too much trust in money and material things. James tells us that riches can decay and lose their value, and that living a life focused only on luxury and pleasure can lead us away from God. This reading reminds us that true happiness and peace come from following God's commandments and living a life of kindness and generosity.

The Responsorial Psalm echoed that message, telling us that those who trust in their wealth will not find lasting joy. Instead, it is the poor in spirit who are blessed and will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. This means that those who are humble, who recognize their need for God, and who seek to do His will, are the ones who are truly rich in what matters most.

Then, In the Gospel reading from Mark, Jesus gives us some very vivid images to help us understand the seriousness of sin. He tells us that if something causes us to sin, we should remove it from our lives, even if it is something as important as a hand or an eye. Jesus uses these strong words to show us that we must do whatever it takes to avoid sin and to stay close to Him. 

As we prepare for our summer break, let us remember these important lessons. Summer is a wonderful time to relax, have fun, and enjoy the beautiful world that God has given us. But it is also a time when we can sometimes forget to pray, to go to Church, and to make good choices. So, how can we keep our souls from sin during these summer months?

Stay Connected to God: Make time each day to pray. Even just a few minutes in the morning or before bed can help you stay close to Jesus. Remember to thank Him for your blessings and ask for His guidance in all you do.

Attend Church Regularly: Remind your families on Saturday, that on Sunday you need to go to Church. 

Be Kind and Generous: Look for ways to help others, whether it's doing chores at home without being asked, being kind to your siblings, or helping a neighbor. Acts of kindness bring joy to others and to ourselves.

Make Good Choices: Think about the decisions you make each day. Ask yourself, "Is this something that would make Jesus happy?" If the answer is no, then it’s probably not the right choice.

Stay Pure in Heart: Remember that what you watch, read, and listen to can affect your thoughts and actions. Choose entertainment that is wholesome and uplifting, and avoid things that can lead you away from God's love.

Remember, Jesus loves each one of you very much and wants you to be happy and holy. Stay close to Him, and He will guide you always. 

May God will bless our summer, keep us safe, and help us to grow in our faith. May we return in the fall with hearts full of love for Jesus for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021 - Restful waters

20 years ago, in 2001, the summer after my first year of seminary, I went up to northern Ontario for a little summer vacation with a few fellow seminarians, to a quiet, remote cottage sitting on the bank of Little Hawk Lake about 4 hours north of Toronto. Since 2001, we’ve gone back up to the cottage, well over 20 times. We couldn’t go last year due to COVID, and it doesn’t sound like we’ll be able to go up this year, as the Canadian border is still closed to tourists. 

We try to take vacation right before the school year starts up again. We swim, we cook, we pray. We celebrate Mass. We catch up on reading. We’ll play board games, watch movies. Nothing too strenuous. In a sense, we try to fulfill the words of our Lord in the Gospel today today, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.”

Rest is a good and holy thing. The Creator rested on the seventh day. He calls us to sabbath rest, away from the busyness and business of the rest of the week, to be refreshed in worship and family. We require rest. A third of our lives is spent resting. Healthy minds, healthy bodies, healthy souls need rest. 

In the 23rd Psalm, God is the good shepherd who leads his flock to restful waters. What a beautiful image. Not the violent stormy sea. But restful waters. One of my favorite things to do on vacation is simply to sit by the restful waters with a book or to take a flotation device and just float around the restful waters. 

That beautiful word in the Hebrew  for rest is “menuchah”. It’s found a number of times throughout the Old Testament. It’s used often to describe the promised land—the land of rest and refreshment for God’s people. Psalm 116 speaks of the soul filled with the rest of God after recognizing how blessed it has been by God’s graciousness. Psalm 132 uses the word to describe how God will rest upon his throne in the eternal Jerusalem upon completing his work of salvation. Psalm 95 speaks of how the hard-hearted, for turning their minds and hearts from God—shall not enter into the rest—the menuchah—of the promised land. We long for the rest and refreshment only God can provide. 

Hopefully, each of us experiences a foretaste of heavenly rest when we come to Mass. For, the Mass, on this side of heaven, is the place of restful water where the Shepherd leads his flock, each week. 

Many many people have shared with me, how something is amiss, something is missing, when they can’t get to Mass every week. That rest. That refreshment in God’s presence is missing, and their souls know it. It affects the rest of the week. The batteries begin to lose their charge. It becomes a greater struggle to be patient and generous and pure of heart without it.

This is why many people attend daily mass. The rest and refreshment of daily mass gets us started off on the right foot. If you are retired, consider attending weekday mass once and a while. It will do wonders for your faith life. 

Our spiritual director in seminary would often say that each of us needs an hour per day, a day per week, and a week per year of this spiritual refreshment. That’s good advice, not just for seminarians and priests, but for all Catholics. An hour a day for quiet prayer and mass and spiritual reading and meditation. A day per week for Sunday Mass of course, a day free from the stressful concerns of one’s job, and one week per year for some sort of spiritual retreat. Priests are even mandated by canon law to make a spiritual retreat.

When we fail to recharge our spiritual batteries, we risk becoming like those misguided shepherds in the first reading. Instead of living for God, we become bent on fulfilling our own will, seeking fulfillment in all the wrong places, ultimately becoming a source of division. Instead of gathering others to God, the spiritually defunct Christian is like that wicked shepherd who scatter the sheep, driving souls away from God. 

Stress, discouragement, and so many other crippling emotions can wear us out if we aren't prayerfully resting in Jesus every day. Only our union with Christ can supply us with the strength and wisdom we need to be the people God made us to be, and do the work God has for us. Without prayer, study, and time alone with God, our well will soon run dry - we will have nothing substantial to offer others.

So in order to be the shepherds we are called to be, the parents, grandparents, employers, priests, we are called to be—we need to allow God, daily, weekly, and yearly, at the restful waters of prayer. 

Why is the Lord Jesus constantly leading his disciples to the quiet places to pray and listen and teach them? It’s So that they will be equipped for his work. Rest prepares us for work. Prayer prepares us for apostleship and evangelization.

When I go up to northern Ontario, it usually takes a few days to unwind and enter into the rest,  but then something happens. As the batteries begin to recharge, I start to long to come back to work. I really do. I want to put the theological insights from my reading into practice. Having encountered God in prayer, having good heart-to-heart talks with God about the challenges facing the parish, I want to come back here to face those challenges.  

Rest and prayer for the priest is eminently important for his ministry, but that’s because rest and prayer are eminently important for all of our vocations. All of the work God has for us requires us to be rooted in Him. Not in some abstract political philosophy or utopian ideology. We need to be rooted in the living God. God wishes to be our portion and our cup. God wishes to be our peace and our strength, our light, our food, our life.

Make time to rest every day. Rest from your work. Rest from your electronic devices. Rest from your anxieties. Rest in God. God wants to meet you in your rest. He wants to refresh you there. But you’ve got to allow yourself to rest. You’ve got to say no to distraction. You’ve got to withdraw from the whirlwind of family drama, in order to hear the consoling whisper of God. Make time, every day, every week, and for a dedicated portion every year, to allow God to lead you to the restful waters for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

23rd Sunday of OT 2019 - Silence and rest

Since my first year in seminary, my seminary classmates and I, who are now priests, take a week or two vacation at the end of August up in the Algonquin Highlands in Ontario, about three hours north of Toronto.  We canoe a little bit, we swim, we don’t really fish much, we really just enjoy the quiet of the wilderness, good food, and good fellowship.  Two weeks in the wilderness in order to spiritually and mentally prepare for the busy-ness of the school year, when parish life really begins to kick into high-gear. 

And it usually takes a day or two to adjust from the busy, loud world to the quiet of nature.  But then things begin to settle, we settle into the quiet, and then you really begin to notice the beautiful surroundings: the lapping of the lake, the gentle breeze, the occasional cry of the Canadian loon.  It’s a wonderful atmosphere for good prayer and reflection and spiritual reading.

What does my summer vacation have to do with the readings this weekend?  Well, from our first reading we hear how the concerns of the mind, our earthly plans, and the burdens of the body can distract us from the plans of God.

Sometimes we are just physically and emotionally warn out, aren’t we? And we know all too well how our many earthly concerns can weigh down upon us. Our health, our jobs, our family obligations.  And our materialistic culture certainly doesn’t help things when it drums into us over and over that we cannot be happy until we have the next-new thing, the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect job, that we watch the next new series on Netflix. No wonder why the practice of the faith and Sunday worship  takes second, or third, or last place for so many Catholics who are busy about their worldly business.

Honestly, I considered skipping my Canadian vacation this year, not quite a whole year into my pastorate, with all of the fall parish programs starting up. First Friday Holy Hour. Second Friday Faith Formation. The rockiness of the beginning of the school year. Getting ready for RCIA. Fall weddings. Head start contract renewal. Repair projects. But rest and respite, offers the opportunity to ready ourselves for the challenges ahead. Quiet and prayer is needed to prepare for busyness.

The Catholic Philosopher Svoren Kierkegaard went so far as to say that the constant busyness of the modern world is a sort of disease. The inability to be quiet and unstimulated, is a sort of disease. And If he were a doctor he would prescribe as a remedy for this disease, “silence”.

We had about 30 people Friday night, we came to spend time in prayer with the Lord in silence. That is reason number 72 for us to have a scheduled Holy Hour, where we can spend a long period of silence with Jesus. One parishioner said that Holy Hour, that period of silence with Jesus, allowed the stresses that build up throughout the week to melt away, silence with the Lord allows her to focus on what was most important.

And really, Christians need those moments of quiet every day, don’t we? To stop from the busyness, to recollect ourselves, to seek strength and peace that only God can bring, to remember that our first loyalty is not the earth, but to heaven, not to the things and riches and pleasures of this world, but to God.

This of course does not mean that we lay down our crosses, or take a vacation from our vocations. While on vacation in Canada, every day we celebrated Mass for our parishes, we prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, we engaged in personal prayer. But even our rest from work serves a purpose; holy rest is not selfish, but rather, it serves the purpose of seeking refreshment and union with God. And like the king in this weekend’s Gospel, who sits down and takes time to strategize for battle, our rest from work can give us perspective in how to prioritize our life wisely, and to ready ourselves for the spiritual battle of being out in the world fraught with temptation and trial.

Many find silence disagreeable, even abhorrent, because in silence we are also confronted by our personal demons, guilt from past sins, uncomfortable truths we do not want to face, grief from departed loved ones. But for that very reason, how blessed silence is, for in silence we encounter the Lord who can exorcize those demons, who can bring those sins to light that they may be confessed and forgiven, who can help us face those uncomfortable truths, who can heal our greatest griefs.

The remedy for so many of our ills, so much of our anxiety, so much of our dis-ease, can be found, as Kierkegaard said, in silence and holy rest, where we can encounter the Lord in prayer, and seek his will, and fall in love with Him above all else.  How much of the violence and anger and tension in the world would dissipate if we put down the cell-phones, turned off the internet, and television, and video games for an extra half-hour every day, and read the bible, prayed the rosary, reflected on our life in light of scripture and the teaching of the Church. Would not the paths of the earth be straightened, as our first reading describes?

I hope you can all join us for our parish picnic (tomorrow/today) to rest from busyness in the company of your brothers and sisters in Christ. For our crosses our heavy and we need each other, strong relationships with fellow Christians, to help keep us strong and focused on our Christian mission, the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

5th Week of Easter 2019 - Last School Mass - Perfect Joy

Just about a month ago, we all gathered for prayer, here in the church, on Holy Thursday. We spoke about the words and actions of Jesus at the Last Supper. Jesus knew he was about to die, and so the lessons he taught at the Last Supper would be pretty important, don’t you think.

He taught a lesson about humble service by washing the feet of his disciples. No act of service is too dirty, no act of service is too lowly or too difficult for the follower of Jesus. We must wash feet, as our Master washed feet.

Secondly, he taught a lesson about the Church. He wanted the Church to celebrate the Eucharist in his memory. Taking bread, taking wine, Jesus said, “DO THIS in memory of me.” And, when we do this, Jesus becomes really present: bread and wine are really changed into his body and blood.

Thirdly, Jesus taught by his words. And today’s Gospel is part of the speech he gave, his final farewell sermon. When someone knows they are about to die, you listen carefully to their last words because people aren’t going to waste their final breaths on insignificant statements.

And so what were the words Jesus just uttered, what was his most important lesson? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to have joy? Do you want to have eternal life? Follow my commandments. God wants us to have joy. Jesus says, God wants your joy to be complete, he wants your joy to be perfect.

And what is the key that unlocks the door of joy? Following Jesus’ commandments. Now, we might think, following commandments is hard, it’s difficult. It’s hard to pray every day, when you have the excitement of summer vacation. It’s hard to go to church every Sunday, when you have other things to do. It’s hard to love those who hurt you. It’s hard to be faithful in times of temptation. It’s hard to share your things with others: to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty.

As hard as these things might be, Jesus, in the final discourse of his life, says, do these things, and you will have joy.

Friends, I hope your summer is filled with joy. But I promise you, joy will not be discovered by playing video games all day. It will not be found in selfishness or envying the possessions of others. It will not be found on the internet or with a mobile phone in your hand. It will not be found in skipping church or the million and one other activities the world has to offer. I pray, teachers and students, that you will discover the perfect joy of friendship and true discipleship of Jesus Christ this summer, by practicing the faith daily in your words and actions, by daily prayer, daily acts of service,
love of God and neighbor for the glory of God and salvation of souls.