The Two Orders

The Resurrection of the Lord
April 9, 2023 – Year A
Readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43 / Ps 118 / Col 3:1-4 / Jn 20:1-9
by Rev. Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant

Today’s gospel has a great theme, in this season that introduces death to life, light to darkness, good and evil.  It goes back to the two great dimensions of what God gives us, and I think I’d like to leave you with the same homework assignment that I left with the folks at the Easter Vigil last night.

These two dimensions of God that we focus on, that come front and center when we celebrate the sacrament of Baptism, are the dimension of God as creator and God as redeemer.  We call these the Two Orders – the order of creation and the order of redemption.

At the Vigil Mass, we begin a long series of readings beginning with the creation account from the very first pages of the Book of Genesis.   God creates the world, the sky on Day One, the seas and the waters on Day Two, the earth on Day Three, and on Days Four, Five, and Six what fills the sky, the birds and the flying things, what fills the waters, the fish and the sea monsters, and what fills the earth – all that creeps and crawls and all the animals, and at the crown of creation, the human person.  That is the six days of creation.

And of course, the seventh day is what we do today. That’s why the commitment is so important to us, because it keeps a rhythm of time that we have a foreshadowing of the eternal Sabbath, remembering that in a sense every Sunday is Easter.  We have a foreshadowing of the eternal Sabbath with God – the day without work, they day you pray and play, the day to renew relationships, the day for a foretaste of Heaven.

So God has ordered that for us when we speak of the order of creation.  Everyone does not realize that there is an order, a nature of things.  We can explore and learn; it’s not like we are cast adrift and have to find our own meaning for everything.  There’s a meaning already there.

I learned it as a kid growing up in post-war America.  Like many kids, we were not that far removed from the immigrant experience, as all my grandparents were immigrants.  You get roughed up a little bit as an immigrant.  I remember those stories, especially when you add Catholic into that.  But I also remember very early on being given that sense of where I fit in, because the first question in the Catechism class every year was, “Who made you?”  And the answer that you had memorized and had drilled into your head was “God made me.”  Well, that’s not a bad start.

Think of how many people today haven’t been baptized, haven’t been given that greatest gift, “God made me,” that I’m not a meaningless cipher.  I’m not just happening to be there and not knowing if there’s any reason for this. We say that you can tell your friends, “I don’t always act like it and I don’t always think right and part of me rebels against God, and part of me wants God, but He created me in His image and likeness.”

That’s true of all my brothers and sisters, and that’s true of the people I like and the people I don’t like.  He created us in His image and likeness, so that the closest you’ll come to God today is the next human being you’ll look at.

And so, there’s an order of creation.  That’s what allowed the Church to be the first ones in the West to explore science, because of the belief that God has created an ordered universe and invites us to study that.  Therefore, all that does is reveal more of Him.  Many of the great Church leaders going back into history have been great scientists – the founder of genetics, the founder of the Big Bang Theory (a priest from Belgium.)  There’s an order to things, and the human person has a place.  Now, how marvelous is that?

There are so many who have no idea where they fit in, thinking they are on this big map, but there’s no X saying, “You are here.”  If you come across folks in those moments, you can begin to say, “You know, I may have something for you.”  We believe that we are created for a purpose.  It takes a lifetime to find it out and not everything goes right, but there’s a deep joy.  That’s the order of creation.

Then of course, we have the order of redemption.  Because what you know about yourself, and what you know about every other person who was ever conceived, is that somehow there’s a flaw in there.  There’s something that’s begging to be redressed or redeemed, to be purchased back by God.  There’s a distance that’s crept in between us and God; we are not living in the human nature for which we were originally designed.  We are living in the human condition, after that separation from God came in which we all inherit.  We know that about ourselves.

One thing I like about that is that when I know I’m not perfect, I don’t have to kill myself.  It’s true of all of us; we all suffer.  But we finally discover a beautiful thing, that God did not wait for me to be perfect to love me.

That’s something you may be able to pass onto someone who may be suffering.  Put it in your own words; illustrate it with your own story.  Get familiar with using these words because this is exactly what happened after the Resurrection.  They were pretty clueless; they didn’t understand, but they began to put those words together and gradually took those words to the ends of the earth.

Now, as we are often surrounded by folks who haven’t been baptized, we have an opportunity to speak of the order of redemption.  The older folks will remember saving your Green Stamps, putting them in the book, and then redeeming them for a spoon or a Corning Ware dish.  This is more sophisticated, but redeem still means “bought back.”

If you’re wondering about your self-esteem, or if you’re wondering if you have any worth or not, or if you’re worth working on, you can say, “I have been redeemed by the precious blood of the Savior.”  We are not designed in the blueprint to be able to make it on our own.  I like to think He’s designed us with limits so we will need others, and that we will need Him, because that’s the way we’re meant to be.

So this season, I think we have a good story to tell, with all our imperfections and all the ways we miss a mark here and there, to say you know, that order of creation, to meet my maker, to thank Him for the order with which He made things, to thank Him for making me and the order of redemption, to thank Him for putting me back on the right track and offering through the Church the whole toolbox of what it takes to bring me to His feet, to bring me before His face.

I’d like to think that once we begin again as they did in that early century, once we begin to speak those words confidently and humbly again, the first century happens again and then people will say, “You know, I want some of what you have.  I like the way you live. Let me explore this life of which you speak.”

A Very Good Friday

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion
April 7, 2023 – Year A
Readings: Is 52:13-53:12 / Ps 31 / Heb 4:14-16; 5:7-9 / Jn 18:1-19:42
by Rev. Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant

There is a dimension to our faith that allows us to see and experience things in a way that’s deeper and contrary to the initial impression.  For instance, the very name that we have for this day is Good Friday. How can that be? How can that be, this greatest chaos, the unimaginable? The unimaginable is not that God rose from the dead, the unimaginable part is God in Christ died. He really did, that’s the unimaginable. How could this happen? This absolute chaos, and we call it good.

The letter to the Hebrews was written late enough in the first and second generations of Christians, for them to have had some time to reflect as a community, to absorb this trauma, and to reflect on it and then begin to develop a vision.

In the reading we just heard, “Son though He was.” When we are called son or daughter in baptism, it means you’re an inheritor, you’re in the will. I guess we would say everyone is conceived a child of God from that moment on. This familial relationship, this being a son, this being an inheritor of God, comes with baptism. God willing, it doesn’t end there, but begins a long journey, a great adventure of life.

Son though He was, He learned obedience from what He suffered and when He was made perfect. But wasn’t He perfect the whole time? In His mission and role as the Son of the Father, the first begotten of the Father, the mission becomes perfected in the obedience to the Father’s plan. The Father says this is what has to be done.

These people I love are yelling at me right now, are shouting insults at me right now, are denying they know me right now.  To bring these people whom I’ve loved from the beginning, to bring these people back up on the rails, back on track: This is the perfection. John even uses the word glory.

When I hear the word glory, I assume he must be talking about the Resurrection or maybe the Ascension. That’s the glory.  But no, when John writes about glory – “I will draw all people to me” — that’s not at the Ascension, that’s on the cross, the perfection of obedience. When He was made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.

How unusual is this faith? We can’t really wish anyone a “Happy Good Friday.” Yet this is the day the work gets done. It’s a work that gets done not only so that we can benefit from it, so that we can take the fruits of it and be nourished and grow up in it and become an adult in it and become mature in it and go through a whole life with it as the mysteries continuously unfold and more will be revealed, always more will be revealed.

It’s not just so that we can benefit from it. The strange part is the work gets done so we can do it. We become perfected by that openness, by that obedience to the will of God. Accomplish in me, Lord, what You will. Accomplish in me, Lord, what You will, and let me get out of the way so You’re free to do what needs to be done.

What is so good about this day is of course we see disaster; we see the emptiness of it. Did you notice in the liturgy that there was no singing when we came in today? There was no singing because of the day. You realize something different is going on right now, and it is. But it’s a great gift.

I believe that if you can imagine it, you just say, Lord, I haven’t got this figured out now, and I’ll never get it completely figured out. But somehow, I’m looking at You and Your suffering. I’m thinking of the scourges, I’m thinking of the crown of thorns, I’m thinking of Peter’s denial, I’m thinking of the apostles running away. No illusions, but in that is Your glory. and when my heart becomes shaped over the years along Your lines, maybe I’ll be able to do something like that. because I will have morphed through Your grace into You.

I was talking to a parent up in Lexington a couple of days ago, and one of the kids is having a hard time and just feels that it’s impossible to be good enough for God. It’s funny how conscience works. I suspect parents can identify with this. With one child something happens, and it goes right by. With the other one, the same word is said, and it sinks in deep, and it alters things.

Similarly, I’ve seen over the years people who have a particularly keen conscience. We use the word scrupulosity when it really goes to the far end and becomes a serious problem. But some have a greater conscience than others and have a deeper sense that whatever their sin is, it is so serious and irredeemable that not even God can touch it.

This is what happened to Judas, as we hear in Matthew’s gospel. He felt that somehow his sin was greater than God’s grace could ever be. His sin was greater than the divine mercy could ever be, and so, he acted accordingly in his hopelessness.

Remember that God didn’t wait until you’re perfect to love you. That’s what we learned today. God didn’t wait for you to be perfect to love you. Yes, Good Friday is very good, because, as St. Paul says, nothing can keep us from the love of God.

A New Day, a New Life

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 26, 2022 – Year C
Readings: 1 Kgs 19:16b, 19-21 / Ps 16 / Gal 5:1, 13-18 / Lk 9:51-62
by Rev. Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant

This was a week like no other, with the big elephant in the little living room: major cultural shifts.  And to many of us, what came down from the courts is not necessarily friendly.

There were three decisions that came down from the high court.  The first one was about the second amendment. The second sort of gets blocked out, about faith in education.  It was a case brought from the state of Maine, in which the county agreed to pay for public or private schools, as long as there was no religion involved.   Parents challenged the decision that no religion could be involved.  The court’s ruling stated that as long as a full education was offered, public funding could be used regardless.  So, we’ve all learned that it’s very important for Catholic parents to keep a close eye on education.

The third one on Friday has to do with the whole culture of life.  I think of all of your prayers that have been going up for these forty-nine years since January of 1973, for an end to abortion and to respect the dignity of every human being from moment of conception to moment of natural death.  That’s the first right, after which all other rights follow.

The Supreme Court decision does not mean an end to abortion.  It was more of a judicial thing that says we took a case forty-nine years ago that was not settled law.  In fact, it overturned state law for most of the states in the country and almost guaranteed an ongoing controversy.  And so it returns to the states, for those of us who consciously wish to establish that culture of life in which every life is welcomed.

When I visit the nursing home and see the person whom I once knew in the prime of life, ranting and incontinent – no, you’re not a vegetable!  You’re never a vegetable; you’re a human all the way to the end of your natural life.  We don’t interfere with that.  And you are human from the moment of your conception.

So, it’s up to us going forward, because in Virginia nothing has changed between Thursday and Saturday.  To work for that right to life is still what lies before us.  It has just been brought back to the state level now.  The feeling was that the judiciary had been too activist – they had taken too active a role in what should have been up to the people at the polls to decide, not the unelected judge, so it wasn’t a constitutional issue.

I have the sense that you are probably getting hammered by those who know you are Catholic, because not everybody out there is friendly to what we stand for.  Like in the early Church, in some ways we stand alone.  I hope to give you a couple of things that you can say, because I don’t want to see you unequipped or defenseless.  I want to see you with some words that you can believe in.

Long ago, as early Christians, we separated ourselves, often at the cost of life and limb, from the Roman Empire, and it was remarked upon by commentators and historians, that all these Christians don’t want to abort their children and they don’t expose their children.

What was common under the Roman Empire was that children who weren’t wanted were put out where the animals were, or in the forest, or on the roof overnight.  Of course, many of them didn’t survive.  That was called exposing, and if they survived, the family would often take them back.  Christians didn’t do that.

And I suspect that it was because we were taken from all walks of society, and we recognized that since Christ came for all, and since all were made in the image and likeness of God, and that since Christ had taken on flesh, that means that I have to treat their lives with enormous respect.

I always love first confessions.  You know when the kids come in, and some of them have very keen consciences, and some not so much.  But I always remind them that God loves you and that you are not here by accident.  You’re not some cosmic waste; you’re here for a reason (although they may not know it yet), but you’re not here by accident.  And so, it opens us up early on, hopefully.  From the beginning we stood apart, regardless of how the empire went, and regardless of how the empire goes now.

This is in the future and I don’t have a crystal ball for you.  Whatever happens, we’ll stay the same.  Now we think it’s a great way to live.  It is profoundly liberal, because it says there’s room for you.  We don’t know how we’re going to put that extra plate at the table, but there’s room for you.  That’s the best of the word “liberal” – an openness to the unexpected, an openness to what God’s doing that I may not be completely in touch with.

So, not only do I go back to the beginnings of things, I go back to when my own life began, which wasn’t the day that I appeared to the world in August of 1947.  I’m guessing it was around Thanksgiving time the year before when my life first began inside my mom.  She didn’t know I was there.  Dad didn’t know; I guess God was the only one who knew.  But what I know now that I didn’t know then is that even at that point, I was a person.  I had a right to life.  I was a human being.  And now we know scientifically that I even had my own DNA.  My mother was the one who carried me, but I wasn’t her, I wasn’t a part of her in that sense.  I was dependent on her, but I was not her; I was somebody different.  And that’s what we keep saying – the baby is somebody different, and the baby deserves that protection.  We speak of the baby because maybe our first experience of faith was to think of a baby, because babies are voiceless.

A number of different numbers come to mind as I reflect back.  The number 49.  The number 43.  The number 95.  Forty-nine years ago, when I had just quit the seminary, I had been in for ten years – high school, college in Rhode Island, where I am from, and then over to Belgium for my graduate work for three years.  Times were sort of wild in 1972; it was a crazy, crazy time.  I said to myself that I had too many reservations, so I left the seminary, stayed in Europe after being in Belgium for three years where it was always cloudy and gray.  I needed to clear out the cobwebs, so I hitchhiked down to the south of Spain and worked there for six months, got some sun, and then hitchhiked up to Switzerland where I waited on tables in the Alps and was a ski bum for six months before coming back to the states.

It was during that time that the Roe ruling came down.  Of course, it was not on my radar, so I knew nothing about it.  I only heard about it later on, and life has a way of coming full circle. After a business career I was drawn back to the priesthood, and I moved from Boston down to Virginia and was ordained here.  There I became involved in the Pro-Life movement, because once I began to think about it, I said, “This can’t be.”

And on a day like today, I think of those in parishes throughout the world who are praying.  I think of all those Marches for Life rarely covered by the news media and the longest peaceful protest in history.  All those people who said, “This ain’t right.”  In a culture that doesn’t have an attention span of 49 seconds, this is 49 years and that March for Life becomes like a great family reunion every year.  It’s sort of like Woodstock without the dope – it’s the same average age as Woodstock was.  There’s a sense of ‘we need to be here.’  And of course, now that is reversed and sent back.  I think of all the people who have gone before us during those forty-nine years and those whose prayers, in this respect, have been answered.

Think of the number 43.  There was no long history, no constitutional right to abortion.  It was a very activist decision because the laws of 43 states were changed by this, overnight.  And that was hard to swallow.  So, this time around, the court says it is not constitutional – it must be taken back to the people.

I think of the number 95, for it was 95 years ago, not far from here in Amherst and Charlottesville – that the Supreme Court case was Buck v. Bell, dealing with involuntary sterilization of imbeciles, feebleminded, and people who were ‘less.’  It was the eugenics movement.  It eventually got exported to the Third Reich.  The eugenics movement – some lives are worth more than others – who would breed and who wouldn’t.  And that Supreme Court, perhaps the most illustrious of all time, came down to permit it.

All the way up to the 60s, thousands were victims of involuntary sterilization, and that Supreme Court consisted of luminaries.  Former President Taft was on it, and perhaps the most well-known of all Supreme Court justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis.  This is a list of the greats, and they came out 8 to 1 in favor of eugenics.  Now it had to get overturned and was overturned in the 1940s, when we saw what it wrought.  But the one dissenter, which sort of struck me, was the one Catholic justice.  He was raised not in the lap of luxury, not with a silver spoon, but in a log cabin in Minnesota with ten other kids in the family.  Somehow, he knew.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I feel very inadequate.  The first time around we didn’t have the words; we didn’t know what to say.  Perhaps when you get confronted, maybe we can begin to get the words now.  What I always ask is if a baby is a baby is a baby, and I was who I was before my mom knew I was there.  Science tells me that.  I wasn’t part of Mom in that sense.  I was who I was.  The other thing I say is when you look at much of this back and forth is that nobody talks about Baby.  And I simply say, “Who speaks for Baby?”  You’d expect Mom to be the one to speak for Baby, but if not, we will.  Keep Baby at the center of the conversation.

Listening to today’s gospel, I would say put this on my tombstone.  Where he says to Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go.  And Jesus says, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest His head.”  That to me, is the great romance of the priesthood, or trying to follow Christ, I think for all of us.  To eventually let go of all the little props and little securities that I need, and to turn myself over completely to Him.  Where the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head, there is no security but Him.

This is a chance for us to move forth, to say no, we think a culture of life is a great thing, and yes, we may have to revise the whole sexual revolution.  We may have to revisit that and say that it was not such a great idea.  Look at a lot of the results.  Now we may have to go back and do a lot of work, but the battle is always Christ’s, and so may we be graced with all the fruits of the spirit in going forth.

My Lord and My God

Second Sunday of Easter
Sunday of Divine Mercy
April 24, 2022 – Year C
Readings: Acts 5:12-16 / Ps 118 / Rev 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19 / Jn 20:19-31
by Rev. Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

In the gospel for today, I think we need to be in touch with the apostles in that closed-off room on this first Easter Sunday night. The gospel tells us they were afraid; they were in there because of fear of the Jews.  Jesus had just been crucified, and they were His followers. The Jewish people could be after them for the same reason.

Besides fear, there was probably a great deal of confusion. Jesus had been crucified. What were they going to do? Where were they going to go? They’d heard news about the empty tomb, but they hadn’t seen Jesus or anything like that. They were probably very confused.

They probably had a certain amount of guilt, too. In Jesus’ hour of suffering, they slept through it, and when He was taken away, they ran away. So there was probably a certain amount of guilt.

Fear. Confusion. Guilt. They were huddled in that closed room with the locked doors. In the midst of that, Jesus ends up standing among them. The first thing He says is, “Peace be with you.” And He repeats it.

What is peace? Peace is when creation is ordered as God would have it. The tranquility of order; that’s peace. Those people He was standing among were in serious need of peace.

Then He tells them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus was sent, then He preached the Gospel of peace, justice, and love, against the reign of sin, evil, and death. And with His death and resurrection, it is now the responsibility of His followers to continue His mission. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

He doesn’t send them forth alone. He says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” That’s another aspect of resurrection existence: The Spirit that animated Jesus in His lifetime, through His death and resurrection, is now passed on to His followers. And so they don’t go off alone to do the work of Jesus.  The very Spirit of Jesus is with them as they continue that work.

But before He says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” the gospel says He breathed on them. That’s a symbol that could be easily missed. To understand that symbol, you have to go all the way back to the beginning: the Book of Genesis and creation. When God creates the human, He makes the human out of the mud of the earth. But the human only becomes human when God breathes God’s life into the human. And what that is a symbol of in Genesis is that the human is of the earth and of God. That’s how all human beings are: We’re of the earth and we’re of God.

The fact that Jesus breathes on His apostles is saying He’s breathing new life into them. They are a new creation in Christ Jesus. That’s the meaning of Jesus’ breathing on them.

He does that before He says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Thus they are commissioned to continue the work of Jesus.

The Bible is the living word of God for us today. So that’s not just written about the apostles on the first Easter; it’s written about us. Jesus says to us, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Those are words to us today. And “Receive the Holy Spirit.” We have received the Spirit of Jesus in Baptism and Confirmation. That Spirit is constantly being renewed in Eucharist. And so this gospel is not just about the apostles; it’s about us and what our responsibilities are.

It’s also significant that we have the doubting Thomas in the gospel. Thomas who doubts: He’s not there when Jesus comes. They say, “We have seen the Lord.” And he says, “I’m not going to believe until I touch Him, until I feel the wounds in His hands and touch the wound in His side.  I’m not going to believe.”  A week later, Thomas is there, and Jesus comes. Thomas sees Jesus’ wounds, and he touched the wounds, and he makes the comment, “My Lord and my God.”

A lot of scripture scholars say that this Easter appearance to the apostles was the conclusion of the Gospel of John; the appearance by Jesus at the Sea of Tiberius was a later addition to the gospel. And so Thomas’ professing, “My Lord and my God,” is the apostles’ coming to full faith. Thomas is speaking, but it’s in the name of all the apostles, proclaiming the risen Jesus: “My Lord and my God.” It’s a culmination of their faith. It’s the final profession of their faith in the presence of the risen Jesus: “My Lord and my God.”

Of course, as we are called to continue the ministry of Jesus, we are called (“As the Father has sent me, so I send you”), with the grace of the Spirit we have received, to give the spirit of Jesus to others, and we can say like Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

Prophets

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
January 30, 2022 – Year C
Readings: Jer 1:4-5, 17-19 / Ps 71 / 1 Cor 12:31 – 13:13 / Lk 4:21-30
by Rev. Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

In the gospel you heard last week, Jesus presented a grand vision of God’s plan for humanity:   God’s plan for humanity through Jesus, God’s presence among them.  The people of Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth at first were impressed – They liked it.  But then they started asking, “Hey, isn’t this the son of Joseph, the local carpenter?”  They go from seeing Jesus’ grand vision to seeing things from their local small-town viewpoint only.  In their narrow vision, they miss God’s presence in Jesus, and they resent Him.  That’s what’s going on in today’s gospel. (more…)

Baptism: Together in Ministry

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord
January 12, 2020 – Year A
Readings: Is 42:1-4, 6-7 / Ps 29 / Acts 10:34-38 / Mt 3:13-17
by Father Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and an interesting question is why did Jesus get baptized? He had no need of it, yet He did it. In Jesus’ baptism, He gets baptized in solidarity with us. He identifies with us in our simple state. He walks with us as we are.

That’s the baptism of Jesus, and of course, there is a good analogy here, in that we are made holy in the waters of baptism. Jesus, in His baptism, makes the waters holy. And so we have Jesus identifying with us, and He is identifying with us in a simple way, walking with the people, curing people, taking care of them, preaching to them, preaching a kingdom of peace and justice and love. (more…)

Life-long Repentance

Second Sunday of Advent
December 8, 2019 – Year A
Readings: Is 11:1-10 / Ps 72 / Rom 15:4-9 / Mt 3:1-12
by Father Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

We heard in the gospel about John the Baptist in the desert – wearing weird clothes and eating weird food. He’s attracting quite a crowd, calling people to repent. His baptism is a baptism of repentance. Repentance basically means to make a 180-degree turn – to turn away from a sinful life to a life of the Lord.

Of course, for Jesus to be born in our hearts, we have to repent. I suggest that repentance is not a once-and-for-all thing: one time you’re here and then suddenly you’ve done a 180. It’s a life-long process. We have to spend a life turning away from sin and evil and turning toward what Jesus wants for us. We have to keep working on it. (more…)

What Kind of King?

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe
November 24, 2019 – Year C
Readings: 2 Sm 5:1-3 / Ps 122 / Col 1:12-20 / Lk 23:35-43
by Father Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant

What an unexpected joy for me, on this last Sunday of this Year of Grace. You notice we wear white, because it’s joyous. We look forward to God’s great mercy, that divine mercy that we look forward to at the end of everything. Christ gathers everything that the Father gave Him – everything! To return it to the Father.

Although Thanksgiving is a civil feast, it’s a very important feast for us. It has a real sacred character to it, perhaps more than Christmas even, unfortunately. Here’s what I want to do in my front lawn, now that I’ve got my own house. I want to put in the front lawn: “Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.” (It’s a college town; somebody’s going to understand that.) “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s the only thing that Christmas is about; everything else is derivative. (more…)

Living In Mystery

Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
November 10, 2019 – Year C
Readings: 2 Mc 7:1-2, 9-14 / Ps 17 / 2 Thes 2:16-3:5 / Lk 20:27-38
by Father Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

We’ve had two readings today of seven brothers, all of whom have passed away. The first reading from the Book of Maccabees is about the time when the Jewish people were being persecuted and tells of seven brothers who went to their death for what they believed, with the hope of resurrection and new life. And that is what today’s readings are all about: resurrection and new life. (more…)

Taking Time to See Jesus

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 21, 2019 – Year C
Readings: Gn 18:1-10A / Ps 15 / Col 1:24-28 / Lk 10:38-42
by Father Louis Benoit, Guest Celebrant

In the Bible, hospitality was a very important thing. That’s the first reading, with Abraham and his visitors. And in the gospel, Martha welcomes Jesus into her home. Hospitality: a very important thing.

However, Martha gets so involved in making this meal for Jesus. Mary, her sister, is just sitting at Jesus’ feet, doing nothing about the serving. Martha gets rather ticked off, so she comes to Jesus, “Tell my sister to help me.” Notice Jesus: “You are anxious and worried about many things. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.” (more…)