how's my tongue?

Homily

Saturday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time

+BVM

19 February 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Center at the University of Kansas (Koinonia retreat)

AMDG 

How's my tongue?

Catholics pay attention to body parts.  This is my body, given for you, says Jesus.  Catholicism will always be a full-contact sport, an engagement of the complete person, soul and body, and all the senses.  Note how many times Jesus talks about eyes and ears and such.

St. Paul famously says that no part of the body can belittle another part.  If the parts of the body could talk, not one part can say to another 'I don't need you.'

Today, however, St. James highlights a part, the tongue.  So much of life is changed through the tongue.  

Peter blurts out nonsense today out of fear of the Transfiguration.  It's a reminder to us to use our eyes and ears and tongue in proper proportion.  When I don't know what to say, I should say that and no more.

So, how's my tongue?

+mj

what wins hearts?

Homily

Friday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time C2

18 February 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG 

What wins hearts?

Ultimate choices about life are made from the heart.  They ought be directed by words and enabled by virtue, yet they are made from the energy that is the passions.  What do I feel so strongly about that I'm willing to suffer.  It's the only way to lay hold of eternal life.

Discernment is confusing when the heart grows cold, bruised as it is by life's inevitable abuses.  What can inspire such a heart?

St. John says it is works of mercy.  When the proclamation of the Gospel loses its hearing and relevance, only works matter.  To put it as bluntly as he does, faith without works is dead.

Pope Francis has always longed for a Church known first and best by her love of the poor.  There is too much talking, not enough service.  So the faith suffers when it is not proclaimed above all through works of mercy.

It's what wins hearts.  

lightly or tightly?

Homily

Thursday of the 6th Week in OT C2

17 February 2022

AMDG +mj

What must I hold lightly or tightly?

I need the Holy Spirit, particularly his intellectual gifts of wisdom, understanding, knowledge and counsel, to help me.  For knowing how and when to hold tight or let go is a dance that is hard to master.  Come, Holy Spirit!

Peter nails his confession in today's Gospel yet mere moments later is called Satan for holding on to an misguided expectation.  He needs to hold tightly who Jesus is but hold lightly to all that could mean.  What Peter is most right about is so close to what he is most wrong about.

So too for me.  I must learn when to hold tight, and when to hold light.  It's a dance whose music is the Holy Spirit.

What must I hold lightly and tightly?

am I blue collar?

Homily

Wednesday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time C2

16 February 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

Am I blue collar?

Today's scriptures reject a sanitized experience of reality.  Yes, in the end, God's mercy and grace will make us clean and white as new snow.  Yet the process to get there will be messy.

St. John cautions against an ephemeral religion.  Our encounter with the word is more than a fleeting glance into a mirror.  The encounter leads to a blue-collar perseverance in almsgiving.  That's the true way.

So is the experience of the blind man, whose therapy is not a sermon but a messy, private mud bath from Jesus, twice over.  It's followed by Jesus's instructions to not show-off, or indulge sensationalism, but to go straight home and get back to work.

True religion is more than a show.  It's for people who roll up their sleeves.

 

am I rich or poor?

Homily

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time C2

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

13 February 2022

AMDG +mj

Am I rich or poor?

That's the pivotal question I hope to answer later.  But first, I want to answer this one.  Am I am winner or a loser.

I don't know which I am, but I know this.  I like to win.  I really like to win.  My grandpa used to say one learns more from losing than from winning.  My uncles replied they wanted to be dumb then, cause winning is so much more fun.

I gave up the fear of losing long ago.  I can't stand KU fans who are afraid of close games.  Get a life, I say.  I don't let the thought of losing even enter my mind.  We are KU, who do you think you are?  Arrogant, I know, but that's my attitude.  When my team in fact does lose, like the Chiefs two weeks ago, I go into denial.  Today is not Super Bowl Sunday, and if it is, I do not care.

I like to win, you see?

Yet in this I am not a disciple of Jesus.  Jesus doesn't prefer winning to losing.  He cares living and dying! So however you get more life, that's what He prefers.  Jesus invites me his disciple to not be afraid to be a lovable loser, so long as I'm trying my best.  For He knows what my grandpa did, that failing early and often is key to learning how to truly live.  For only when I lose do I see in perfect contrast how I must change for the better.  When I win, there's always a chance that I got away with something, and became entitled.  In his Beatitudes, Jesus teaches it's better always to get caught in our mistakes, and stay hungry.

Again, Jesus is more interested in living than winning.

Now to the pivotal question.  Am I rich or poor?  Darn it, anyway, I have to say I'm rich.  I'm really rich, which by the standards of the Beatitudes means I am not happy.  I could have anything I want in this world, but the Gospel reveals that if this is so I am not dreaming or desiring nearly enough.  

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I would take the money.  What is worse, I don't think the money would destroy me. Which by the standard of the Beatitudes means I am an idiot.  I am not the exception to the rule.  I can rationalize all day long that I am 100% detached from my things, but it's a lie.  As soon as I got the money, it would occupy a place in my soul.  I would fear losing it.  The Beatitudes say that if I have a fear or losing, my soul is already lost.

All this is just to say I need to worry less and laugh and play more.  St. Luke uses the world laugh in His Beatitudes, the only time this word appears in the Gospel   How do you tell a person is beatified, that he or she is happy?  By their laugh, says the Gospel!  The Gospel standard of poverty, emptiness, availability, readiness, hunger and humility are seen in those who don't take themselves too seriously.  Those who can laugh have a lightness of heart and pure joy that will not be taken from them.

Do I laugh as deeply and as often as I could?  The key to this question lies in the Beatitudes.  Am I rich or poor?

Do I want to be well?

Homily

Friday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time C2

Our Lady of Lourdes

World Day of Prayer for the Sick

11 February 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

Do I want to be well?

I hate to say it, but I think the default answer to this question is no.  At least for me.  I prefer to get by, by masking symptoms and self-medicating.  

6 million people go to Lourdes every year seeking healing.   Yet 6 billion people are sick.  Nobody is immune from illnesses of body, mind and spirit, that are inherent at every turn in life.  I avoid my health to my own peril.

Yet to want to be well is worse.  It's a venture into the unknown.  It's to stop trusting the lie that I have the most faith in, that's there's something wrong with me that will never change.

If Jesus has touched that part of me, it will be a healing I can never shut up about.

What is truth?

Homily

Wednesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time C2

8 February 2022

transferred Feast of St. Albert the Great

Golden Mass 

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

What is truth?

I'm sure you recognize this question most famously said by Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor.  Pilate is exasperated by Jesus, who had responded to his questions by saying whoever belongs to the truth listens to my voice.  Whatever, says Pilate.  My truth is this impossibly treacherous political and moral trap before me.

What is truth?

I dare say it's the most pivotal and essential question at a university.  I pray today that it's a unifying question at KU.  St. Albert, our patron for today's Golden Mass, contributed greatly to several universities, even founding a couple.  He saw a tremendous value in a unified search for truth among a community of learners.  By example. St. Albert put the scientific, philosophical and theological pursuits of truth together, to mutually purify and enrich each other.

I hope you find yourself in your real life moving between these disciplines which grant access to the one fullness of truth.  I'm sure you do.  I wish I studied more, but recently I've played around with a free online class entitled from the Big Bang to Dark Energy.  The class was immediately helpful when I just read a commentary in First Things, a journal on how religion affects politics.  The commentary was a reminder that the Big Bang cannot and should not be identified with the moment of creation ex nihilo by God.  Fr. Lemaitre, the Catholic priest involved with the Big Bang theory, cautioned even the Pope against such a temptation to identify the two, reminding the Pope that the revealed doctrine of creation will perhaps always be made reasonable not by science, but by philosophy.  Then last night, my facility manager taught me how a kegerator is engineered so I can make sure we have beer for our theological discussion nights here at St. Lawrence.  

It's great fun, you see, for the scientific, philosophical and theological disciplines to enrich and depend upon one another. It's so much better than attempts to misrepresent and cancel each other.

We joke in my diocese that our best priests were STEM majors in college.  To take nothing away from other approaches that access truth, it seems that STEM majors when they want to have a special aptitude for putting the pieces together, connecting material, spiritual and theological dimensions and realities.

Anyway, today's Scriptures also point us toward a unified approach to truth that frees one to live.  Solomon, who from the dreamy subconscious psychological realm was asked by God what he wanted, asked for wisdom.  Such is a theological grace given to the baptized in the sacrament of confirmation, elevates the nature of Solomon so that he can see as God sees.  Solomon picks up a nice research benefactor today, in the Queen of Sheba.

Jesus in the holy Gospel for today corrects scruples by confirming that the moral life is never reducible to the material body, but involves a free act of the will in relation to the philosophical transcendental of goodness.

So here we are, praying to God that our pursuit to Pilate's political question - what is truth? - would be enriched through an integrative not compartmentalized pursuit of truth at KU.  I think it's what St. Albert would want.  Great doctor of the Church, pray for us!