Thank You

Back when I was in school, some of my more creative colleagues acted out this gospel [Luke 17:11-19], changing the 10 lepers to 10 “leapers,” hopping around the sanctuary accordingly. I remember the occasion, but not the point. And ever since it has been challenging for me as a preacher to approach this story with the seriousness Luke intended (and which it undoubtedly deserves).

Diseases scare people. You don’t have to be a hypochondriac to be unnerved whenever some new plague presents itself. I was a boy back at the time of the last big polio epidemic in the U.S. in the 1950s, and I can remember how frightened people were by a dangerous disease, against which they felt so defenseless. I remember the panic in the 1980s when HIV/AIDS was killing thousands of people. More recently, we’ve seen epidemics of viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. And now we see one of the consequences of climate change in the spread of malaria and other so-called “tropical” diseases.

Having experienced all this in our own time, we should easily understand how frightened and threatened ancient peoples felt faced with the mysterious illness they called leprosy. Those afflicted with it were often legally segregated outside cities and towns (as was done in 19th-century Hawaii). Indeed, the sick are often seen as a threat – or at least a source of discomfort – to be avoided by those who think of themselves as healthy and normal.

In actual fact, what the ancients called “leprosy” was often a curable skin condition – hence the Law’s provision of a procedure for examination by the priests, But until one had been examined and certified as cured, the leper was considered impure and unclean. Cut off from normal social life, the lot of the leper was a hard one - until suddenly into all this misery moved Jesus, for whom the fact that the sick were shunned and despised did not detract from their significance in his sight. All the lepers said was, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” The sick don’t need to say much. They can communicate quite effectively just by being who they are.

Desperation often makes for hope. So, when commanded to go and show themselves to the priests, they went immediately.

And, suddenly, they were cleansed - whereupon one of them, realizing what had happened, returned to thank Jesus.

Presumably, the other nine went on to Jerusalem to show themselves to the priests as Jesus had directed them to do. But this 10th leper was a Samaritan. As misfortune often does, disease had brought together people who would not normally have associated with each other. Once they had been healed, however, once the barrier that united them by separating them from the society of the healthy had been breached, then all the normal social barriers reappeared.

Perhaps the Samaritan could have found himself a Samaritan priest in Samaria. It is quite likely he did that anyway when he finally returned home. Once healed, however, something special had happened to him, something so special it changed his whole outlook. He returned, glorifying God in a loud voice, fell at the feet of Jesus, and thanked him. Seeing he had been healed, his vision broadened and (like that other famous foreign leper Naaman the Syrian [2 Kings 5:14-17]), he was drawn into the deeper insight we call faith. He recognized not only what had happened but why. And the why was Jesus. Leper no longer, he was still a Samaritan; but he was no longer an outsider in relation to God. And so he responded with faith and thanksgiving.

Gratitude is the first fruit of faith. It’s our response to the God who (as Paul said to Timothy [2 Timothy 2:8-13]) always remains faithful. Giving thanks is what it actually means to live as a Christian. It is our awareness – made individual and personal in each one’s own experience of God’s particular kindness – an awareness that God’s power to save is greater than all the obstacles we or the world put in his way.

And that is why the Eucharist (a word which literally means thanksgiving) has to be at the very center of our Christian life. Our thanksgiving finds its center in the Eucharist, because that is where we find Jesus, our one and only healer and savior. Through him, with him, and in him, we give thanks to God the Father for all that he has been for us and done for us.

But true gratitude cannot be confined to one hour each week or one event in a year – any more than the Samaritan’s gratitude could authentically end in one single emotional scene. My whole life must become one extended Eucharist, one prolonged prayer of thanksgiving, giving thanks for what God is doing right now for me and with me and within me.

After he had been healed, Naaman, that earlier foreigner, also found faith, and he too returned to give thanks. Not only had he been healed, his whole life had been changed. So he took some of Israel home with him, so that, wherever he went in the world, he would be able to worship the Lord on the Lord’s own land. What will we taken home from here? We are here today, as every Sunday, to celebrate the thanksgiving that stands as the very center of our lives as the Lord’s grateful people. So how will we continue to give thanks – to be truly thankful people - today, tomorrow, and every day?

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 13, 2019.

Heart Speaks to Heart

Cor ad Cor Loquitur ("Heart Speaks to Heart") was the motto on the coat of arms of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), an influential member of the English Oxford Movement while still an Anglican and a famous English convert to Catholicism, whose feast day is today and who will be canonized by Pope Francis on Sunday. 

He was the author of a famous autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1866), The Grammar of Assent (1870), the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865, published in the new Paulist magazine The Catholic World), and the popular hymns Lead, Kindly Light and Praise to the Holiest in the Height. A priest of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman was created a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the United Kingdom at an open-air Mass in Birmingham on September 19, 2010.  Newman’s significance for the wider English-speaking world will be reflected in the presence of the Prince of Wales at Sunday’s ceremony in Rome.

Newman never visited the United States, but Paulist founder Isaac Hecker visited him several times in England. After Hecker's death in 1888, Cardinal Newman wrote to his successor as Paulist Superior, Augustine Hewit: "I have ever felt that there was this sort of unity in our lives - that we had both begun a work of the same kind, he in America and I in England, and I know how zealous he was in promoting it." 

Living By Faith

How long, O Lord? I cry for help, but you do not listen!

Who hasn’t felt like poor old Habakuk [Habakuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4] at times? Who hasn’t felt helpless and abandoned? Even saints – some of them certainly – have been known to suffer through such experiences. Some people just never seem to get a break. No matter how hard they try, things just don’t go right for them. Jobs are lost. Careers fail. Husbands and wives betray each other. Children disappoint their parents. Parents disappoint their children. Sickness strikes indiscriminately. Our economic system is unjust and unequal. The world is warming quickly and dangerously. Our society seems too divided to address any of these problems. And the sheer frustration of it all takes its own terrible toll.

And, when things go wrong, don’t we all want to blame someone? And then there is God – often a popular object of blame and complaint. For many, searching for answers to their struggles and pains, the struggle and pain of it all can become a complaint about God. Habakuk too wanted an answer, but for his complaint was not a complaint about God but a complaint to God – an acknowledgment of God’s perplexingly mysterious power in the face of human limitations. Complaining to God instead of about God, Habakuk becomes paradoxically a spokesman for hope: For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint. …the just one, because of his faith, shall live.

Nice words, to be sure, encouraging words even; but what exactly does it mean that the just one, because of his faith, shall live?

Faith – famously defined in the New Testament as the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen [Hebrews 11:1-3] – seems a lot easier said than done. Even the apostles asked, Increase our faith!

Now faith, of course, is more than just belief. But even belief can be a challenge. Among the reasons Americans identify as one major motivation for leaving their childhood religion behind, some 60% say it is because they simply stopped believing.

Like Habakuk, Jesus [Luke 17:5-10] offered encouragement to his questioning disciples - assuming one is encouraged by the image of a mulberry tree, despite its deep and extensive root system, being uprooted and transplanted into the sea! Where, one wonders, would one ever find such faith even to try to transplant a mulberry tree into the sea?

Personally, I can think of no reason to want to transplant a tree into the sea. But, like the apostles, I do certainly want to increase my sometimes at best barely sufficient faith. At minimum, don’t we all want to have sufficient faith, as Habakuk says, to live?

And, indeed, it is in the living, day-in, day-out, that Jesus seems to suggest that faith is to be found – as unprofitable servants doing what we are obliged to do. Even supposing I did somehow miraculously transplant a tree into the sea, what difference would that make? Whom would that benefit? On the other hand, if I could at least qualify as an unprofitable servant, successfully doing what I am obliged to do, now that just might make a difference!

Faith is about living daily the way we are supposed to live, becoming over time, through the kind of life I live in response to God’s grace the kind of person God intends me to be –living by faith, surrendering to God with confident hope and love.

Maybe living as we do now in an increasingly superficial culture that overdoses on image and special effects, doing what one is supposed to do lacks the spectacular drama of transplanting a tree into the sea. It is, however, in fact the real challenge of a humanly serious and morally worthwhile life, the real challenge that faces each of us every day.

Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 6, 2019.

Ever this day, Be at my Side

I think I was in 5th grade when Sister tried to teach us about the particular Judgment using the analogy of a criminal trial, in which God will be the judge, each of us the defendant, the Devil the prosecutor, and one's Guardian Angel the witness. What really struck me about that analogy at the time was that there was no Defense Attorney!

I get the point, of course, why there will be no Defense Attorney on judgment day. Still it seems natural to want one, and the closest to obvious candidate would be one's Guardian Angel. After all, we were all taught as children to pray to our Guardian Angel: Ever this day, Be at my side, to light and guard, To rule and guide.

Of course, such angelic protection is obviously designed for "this day," i.e., for the present, for this transitory life. And in this challengingly transitory life, the idea of angelic guardians is certainly reassuring.

Today's feast of the Guardian Angels is a relative latecomer to the calendar. It apparently appeared first in Spain in the 16th century from where it spread to the wider Church. In 1608 Pope Paul V allowed it as an optional feast on the first ferial day following the feast of Saint Michael, until finally in 1670 it was inscribed in the universal calendar for this date.

The Church's belief in the assistance of our Guardian Angels is, of course, considerably older. In the Gospel, Jesus famously instructs his disciples not to despise these little ones, whose angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father (Matthew 18:10), and in his Commentary on Matthew, Saint Jerome suggested that each soul has such an angel to guard it, a view reaffirmed by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa.

Today's liturgy refers to the Guardian Angels in the context of God's unfathomable providence, which is perhaps the best way to think of - and be grateful for - it.

(Photo: the Angel at the top of the Baldacchino at the Paulist "Mother Church" of Saint Paul the Apostle, NY)

A Phone on the Sidewalk

I briefly lost my iphone one day last week. We had been having lunch at a local diner after a community meeting, and on the way home I realized that the phone case attached to my belt was empty. Thinking I must have left it at home before going to eat, I searched all the obvious places  - to no avail. Finally I drove back to the diner, praying to Saint Anthony all the way, knowing I had not used it there but thinking I might have inadvertently put it on the table for some reason. When I got there, as I approached the door, there it was - lying on its side on the sidewalk in front of the door! In an earlier era I would at least have intoned a Te Deum and maybe rung a bell in gratitude! As for why Saint Anthony should be expected to find lost objects I don't know, but if he interceded on my behalf, I was certainly grateful for his merciful compassion!

Of course, a lost phone can be replaced. But in that terrifying interlude when I thought I had lost it for ever, all I could think of was all the information - contacts, my calendar, photos, etc. - that would have been irretrievably lost. not to mention all the time and energy I would have to expend to try to reassemble whatever information I could. It was, indeed, nothing short of terrifying - every bit as bad as the time I thought I had lost my wallet with its precious cargo of identification, credit cards, insurance cards, etc.!  It is certainly a reminder - both salutary and scary - of how dependent one is on such modern things!

Like most modern technologies, the smartphone is neither an unmixed blessing nor an unmitigated evil. I can well remember a time when one could easily find oneself alone - stranded or sick or injured - and unable to seek assistance. That the invention of the cellphone has served to make many aspects of life easier and, indeed, safer, there can be no doubt. And the convenience of being able to communicate - or at least leave messages, be they vice mail, text, or email - is, well, convenient!

That said, the damage done to human society and genuine social interaction by the phone cannot be understated. 

The late 1960s movie, The President's Analyst imagined a plot by the phone company to inject miniature telephones into everyone's bloodstream. Have we in the interim inadvertently done to ourselves something analogously mischievous?

Around 1970 or so, I had a friend who was strongly opposed to the telephone. She acknowledged the safety factor and advocated that everyone be connected in some way to enable emergency calls, but opposed owning a phone for any further purpose. I thought here position extreme at the time - as extreme as the cultural snobs who refused to have a television in their homes. But, as is so often the case with extreme cultural positions, it was rooted in a recognition of a real problem.

Along with phone calls, I rely on my iphone for emails and texts and even for praying my daily Divine Office. That said, making some sort of provision for the safety caveats even my long ago anti-phone friend allowed for, apart of me still wonders whether we all wouldn't be better off at soem basic level of reality, if the modern cell phone had never been invented, had never invaded our lives, had never conquered our culture!

Meanwhile, however, in this world of woe where dependence on one's phone is inevitable, I am glad i found it on the sidewalk. Thank you, Saint Anthony!