For a few Sundays now, following Corpus Christi Sunday, the
priest has been wearing the liturgical color, green. We’ve really had the whole
spectrum of liturgical colors these past few months; we’ve had the purple of
Lent, rose on Laetare Sunday, the white of Easter, the Red of Pentecost. I wore
gold for Corpus Christi, black for funerals. And now we’re back to liturgical
green.
I’ve always been partial to green. For one, it was the color
of my first car, a hunter green 1992 firebird. Green is also a color of my
childhood: I spent a lot of time as a kid in the woods, building forts and
climbing trees.. Also, in high school and college, during the summers I would
work in the nurseries, taking plant clippings. For two whole summers, for 8
hours a day, I simply watered plants and trees—if I didn’t see the color green,
I wasn’t doing my job. Green is the color of new life. And liturgically, too,
green is the color not simply of plants and trees, but the new life and growth
which is to occur in our souls during Ordinary time (this season after
Pentecost.)
In fact, though we Roman Catholics wear red on Pentecost, the
Eastern Catholics wear green on Pentecost—to symbolize the new life of the Holy
Spirit—the new life the Spirit brings to the Church and to the Christian soul.
Spiritual growth is one of our goals for Ordinary Time. In the
spiritual life we are either growing or rotting, there is no in between. We are
either growing toward God or falling away. We are either growing in our prayer
life or diminishing, growing in self-sacrifice or tending toward selfishness,
becoming more patient or less patient, increasing in virtue or becoming
hardened in vice.
The Green of Ordinary Time is a reminder that God wants
growth for his children, constant growth. He wants us always learning, always
developing, always increasing in grace, always producing spiritual fruit,
maturing spiritually, improving in the use of the many gifts he gives us.
In our Second Reading this weekend St Paul provides us with
two important laws of spiritual growth.
The first law of spiritual growth sounds paradoxical. In
order to grow, we must die, to sin, that is. “You too must think of yourselves
as dead to sin,” St. Paul says.
Being a disciple of Jesus Christ as each of us profess to be
means turning away from sin. For sin, is poison to the soul. The Lord died to
save us from sin and death. So the Christian is constantly seeking to eradicate
sin, from our life-- rooting out the tendrils of selfishness which choke out
the life of God in us.
When we making little compromises with the commandments, when
we give-in to sinful inclinations and habits, these choices suffocate the life
of Christ in us—in our souls, families, and parish. We will never have the
peace and joy that God wants for us when we accommodate sin.
Rather, as St. Paul tells us, we are to “die to sin”. Now, dying
to sin is hard - because temptation is tempting. Because we are fallen, we have
this magnetic attraction, at times, to what is bad for us—for our relationship
with God. But, the heart of Jesus burns with ardent desire to purify us from
our sins. When we make the effort to resist sin, when we pray for his help in
the moment of temptation, God comes to our aid.
There is a story of from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. The
great saint was being overwhelmed with temptations to break his vow of
chastity. He would pray, but the temptations just got worse. He knew something
had to be done to wake himself out of this cycle of temptation. So on a
particularly cold winter’s day, he stripped down naked and threw himself into a
ditch full of snow. It was a shock to his system, and it was a way of showing
the devil that he is willing to suffer in order to remain faithful to God.
Popular culture depicts St. Francis as having a special love
of God’s creation, and he did. But that creation includes the human soul, the
most important part of creation. And so the man was serious about uprooting sin
in himself and preaching against sin so that God’s life might flourish.
If there is a particular sin which keeps lingering in your
life, like St. Francis and each of the saints, get serious about it. Make
frequent use of the sacrament of confession, undertake some fasting, pray daily
for God’s help. Effort in overcoming sin will be rewarded by God and will
result in Spiritual growth and its fruits.
So St. Paul tells us, firstly, we must die to sin. The
second law of Spiritual Growth, he says, is that we must live for God. Paul
writes, “you too must think of yourselves… as living for God in Christ Jesus.”
Dying to sin, bridling our self-centered tendencies, is
necessary for spiritual growth, but spiritual growth also involves become like
God in charity. We are to engage in works of Charity, such as the corporal and
spiritual works of mercy.
The saints give us countless examples of what living for God—the
life of charity—looks like. July 1 this week is the feast of St. Junipero
Serra. Listen to his heroic charity.
During the time when our founding Fathers were fighting for
our nation’s independence, the Franciscan Priest Father Junipero Serra was traveling
up the coast of present-day California, establishing missions—outposts to evangelize
the indigenous peoples.
Junipero Serra wasn’t born a Franciscan of course, he was
originally a university professor in Spain and a very learned man. But he detected
the Holy Spirit urging him to grow. So he gave up his university career to travel
to California to teach the Native Americans about the Lord Jesus. And mind you,
this was a time in our history when the civil authorities were not friendly to the
humanity and rights of the indigenous people. St. Junipero, the good priest stood
up for these people, helped them to improve their spiritual and material
well-being, while boldly fighting against their mistreatment.
Those journeys up and down the coast of California must have
been grueling for him. For, when his body was exhumed for the purpose of the
canonization, it was shown that St. Junipero Serra had cancer of the legs. Yet,
he traveled, he labored, out of love for God’s people, fueled by zeal for souls—he
lived for God, as St. Paul urges us to do, and was transformed into love.
How is God calling you to live more fully for him—bringing
the Gospel to those ignorant of it, providing material assistance to those
genuinely in need of it, or emotional support for the lonely?
We might not be called to travel halfway across the globe to
engage in missionary work, but each of us are called to help others know
Christ, likely at the cost of some suffering on our part, to die to sin and to
live, not just for ourselves, but for Him who died and rose again for us. This
week, perhaps every day, take time, intentionally each day: ask the Lord what
is the growth you want for me at this point me in my life? What is the work you
have for me? What are the sins you are calling me to die to today, who am I to
share your goodness with today, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
