Homily for Tuesday, 21 August 2018– Memorial of St. Pius X

Tuesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 28:1-10; Responsorial Canticle: Deuteronomy 32:26-27ab, 27cd-28, 30, 35cd-36ab; Matthew 19:23-30

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

What does Jesus have against rich people, anyway? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone to enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel. In other words, if we are rich, we have no chance of being saved, right?

Well, yes and no. Without God, our salvation is impossible. “But for God, all things are possible,” Jesus says. So what does Jesus mean by these words?

Having grown up and now whenever I return to visit here at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, I get an impression that this parish; this community of Sherwood Park is fairly well-off, especially compared to some communities and parishes in which I have served in various places in the world. Of course, there are poor people among us here at OLPH and in Strathcona County, as there are in any parish, especially of this size. But even our country; our society is quite materially rich. Does this lessen our chance of salvation?

Let me suggest that this is not quite what Jesus is saying in our Gospel reading today. We get a clue, I think, toward the end of our Gospel reading today to the point Jesus is trying to communicate. Jesus gives his disciples two key images of what heaven will be: First, they will “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Second, Jesus says that everybody “who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for [his] name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold” in return what they have left to follow him, “and will receive eternal life.”

Here Jesus is speaking in what we call apocalyptic tradition, which dates the Old Testament. By apocalyptic, I do not mean the images of fiery end-of-the-world disasters brought to us by Hollywood. “Apocalypse” means “to make known”; “to reveal.” Old and New Testament writers, and Jesus in his own teaching and preaching, responded to crisis experiences in their own times (such as the Roman occupation of Israel in Jesus’ time) with language designed to give the people hope that God would resolve their crisis, and then some.

If we understand Jesus as preaching in this kind of apocalyptic language, revealing a message of hope, the rest of our Gospel reading today makes more sense. Material richness in itself will not result in our being denied heaven. Yet the onus is especially upon those of us who possess worldly riches; who have the gift of strong, united families; who do not have to struggle to get enough to eat, or for shelter, or against forms of mental, physical, or spiritual illness, to be mindful at least of people who do struggle and even suffer in these ways.

The onus is on us never to believe ourselves to be self-sufficient; to be our own gods. This is the same lesson Ezekiel speaks to the prince of Tyre and that Jesus speaks to his disciples: Only “for God all things are possible,” including our salvation. And our salvation depends on letting go of our worldly riches; putting them at the service of people who have less. Our salvation depends on letting go of the good but still finite gifts of this world for something eternal. Our salvation depends on how well we let go of our self-sufficiency to hope in God who alone saves us.

Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2016– Nativity of the Lord

Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

A little over two thousand years ago, Caesar Augustus was emperor of Rome. “Quirinius,” we hear today from Luke’s Gospel, “was governor of Syria.” Would this not have been a terrifying world in which to be born; in which to raise a family; in which to live?

I invite us to imagine the world of the time, under the so-called “pax Romana,” the peace of Rome. This peace of Rome was a false peace; a peace gained in large part by suppression and oppression. The peace imposed by those in power, by the likes of Augustus and Quirinius, was a peace dependent on the greater political and military might of Rome over its enemies. And anybody who challenged this rule by might could find their well-being and even their lives in danger.

In this world governed by the “peace of Rome,” in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, the village of Nazareth in Roman Palestine, there lived a faithful, humble, quiet Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph. And do we not know how the story unfolds from there? Mary, “engaged” to Joseph, finds herself “expecting a child.” This child, revealed by “an Angel of the Lord” to “shepherds living in the fields” and now to us as the “Saviour, who is Christ the Lord,” would bring to this world a long-awaited peace, not the “peace of Rome” but peace that can only be from God.

This child of Mary and Joseph, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whose birth we remember and celebrate today, made the prophecy of Isaiah a reality: “For a child has been born to us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” And yet if we go back to the time of Isaiah, his prophecy we hear in our celebration today is all the more remarkable because Isaiah spoke it in a world that was anything but at peace.

The world and nation of Israel in which Isaiah lived and prophesied were a world and a nation obsessed with peace, security, and authority, but only for an elite minority of the people. On the surface, all was well in Israel of Isaiah’s time, a nation at its most prosperous; its most powerful. But Isaiah says to the elites, the kings and rulers of Israel, that all their wealth; that all their prosperity; that the peace of the nation is fickle and superficial so long as it remains concentrated in the hands of a few. Israel will be brought low, its people exiled. Only then will true prosperity, true justice, true authority, and true peace be able to take root and flourish in Israel and in the world. This prosperity; this justice; this authority; this peace will uphold the dignity of the least well-off. Nobody will be in need.

Returning to Jesus’ time, we hear from Luke’s Gospel that, sadly, not much has changed from the time of Isaiah. The names of Israel’s and the world’s rulers have changed, but the fickle and superficial peace of the end of the line of Israel’s kings had become the fickle and superficial peace of Rome, hinging as ever on the worldly might and wealth of a few.

Into this world “is born this day in the city of David [our] Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord.” Into this world of fickle and superficial peace is born, in a manger of all places, our “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” This reality might raise for us some questions: First, why would God choose to be born into this world as a helpless and vulnerable baby in a manger? If this Jesus were truly the one Isaiah foretold, “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” why did he not impose God’s true peace on our world? Instead, Jesus would die broken and shamed, helpless and vulnerable on a cross! Why?

We might answer questions like these (rightly) by saying that God’s way is a way of mercy, not one of imposing but of inviting us and remaining with us on this long journey toward the peace God has willed for our world since its creation. But if this is so, then clearly God is more patient with our world than I am and I anticipate many of us are. God sees, I imagine, a broken world and yet a world never beyond the reach of true peace; of redemption; of salvation. This is why God sent his only Son into this world, and why God promises that Christ will return to this world at the end of time to complete God’s work of redeeming and saving this world. But then what is worth redeeming and saving in this world?

The answer to this question is right here among us. My sisters and brothers in Christ, moments ago we heard from the letter to Titus that “he it is,” our God, “who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.” Are we not, then, “a people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good deeds”? If we were not, I do not think we would be here. If we were not “a people of [God’s] own who are zealous for good deeds,” there would be no Church; no Christian faith; nobody to worship and to celebrate our memory as a community of faith of Christ’s birth and our waiting for his return. And our world would be poorer for it.

And so where does our zeal “for good deeds” leave us? At the end of this Mass, I will send us forth with the Church’s blessing, inviting us to “go in the peace of Christ.” We will “go in the peace of Christ” into a dark winter’s night; into a world with many people who still “walk in darkness”; a world of families; of human relationships; of entire nations deeply immersed in the “land of deep darkness” of which the prophet Isaiah once spoke. And too often “deep darkness” is masked by a fickle and superficial peace: A peace that may be the mere absence of war; peace that is at best the temporary respite of tens of millions in our world displaced from their homelands by war and persecution; so-called peace that denies countless people basic human rights, beginning with the fundamental right to life from conception to natural death; peace that is, not far beneath the surface, gossip, passive aggression, and silence that block paths to truth and reconciliation. This is false peace, not the “peace of Christ” in which God and the Church invite us to “go forth” from this celebration.

No longer is Caesar Augustus emperor. No longer is “Quirinius… governor of Syria.” In their place today are far more murderous leaders, if not a lack of leadership that breeds war, terrorism, and other forms of extremism, much of it happening in regions that are the cradle of our Christian faith, unchecked and even encouraged by more powerful nations. Yet still, through Isaiah, God promises us: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness‒ on them light has shone.” God promises us a redeeming and saving “authority” that “shall grow continually”; the authority of the one we call “Prince of Peace.”

God’s promise; God’s Word; God’s Christ; God’s true peace lives among us here and now. Our God respects our freedom too much to impose peace on us. And so, in freedom, God invites us to “go in the peace of Christ.” God invites us to go out willingly, to be the “great light” amid the sometimes “great darkness” of our world. God invites us to sense, to take “great joy” in the signs of God’s presence already in our world, and to be these signs by our zeal “for good deeds”; for words and deeds of kindness, of generosity, of justice, and of peace.

Today this longing and in places terrifying (and terrified) world celebrates the birth of its true peace. From Bethlehem, “the city of David,” to Sherwood Park to the world may we be a sign of our “Prince of Peace”; active, zealous signs of our “good news of great joy for all the people: To you,” to us, “is born this day… a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”  

Homily for Sunday, 27 December 2015– The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Readings of the day: 1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; Psalm 84:2-3, 5-6, 9-10; Colossians 3:12-21; Luke 2:41-52

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

Are we not right to celebrate the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as a timeless model of family life? And yet for how many of us does the Holy Family seem like an unrealistic model for our families; our households here to take after?

I think of my own family members; of their gifts and acheivements. I think of all the ways in which being with my family, especially in this Christmas season, brings me great joy and even a sense of awe in their presence. My parents will celebrate forty years of marriage in May. Dad’s logical mind is in constant dialogue with his commitment to deepening his faith; his clear awe of God’s creation in dialogue with his love for science as a retired meterologist. Dad will often say how often he turns to me for the advice of a priest; as or more often, as independent as I can be, I turn to Dad for the advice of a father. Mom has the uncanny ability to discern the character of other people accurately and to bring calm, reason, and listening skills to any conversation. My sister and brother-in-law, both engineers, are two of the most talented mathematicians I know. They have given our family and our world the gift of two beautiful children, my niece and nephew. My brother is the easy-going one; reserved yet humorous, and he is your go-to person if you need your car windows replaced. I was born with neither the mechanically-inclined gene nor the math gene; my talents are elsewhere.

And yet, as far as I know, unlike in the Holy Family, nobody in my family or any of our families here is God. Just think of the disadvantage this would be if one of our family members were God made human! A cartoon of three couples of proud parents on donkeys on their way to Bethlehem circulates on the Internet at this time of year. Each of the donkeys displays a bumper sticker. The first says, “Our son is an honour student.” The second donkey’s bumper sticker reads, “Our son is in medical school.” And on the back of the third donkey, bearing a pregnant Mary with Joseph looking on, says, “Our Son is God”! Those on the other two donkeys scoff, “Well, if it isn’t Joseph and Mary”…

So it is probably fortunate for us that none of us have been tasked with raising the Son of God, as Mary and Joseph were. But for us to take after Jesus, Mary and Joseph in our lives of faith; in our households, our families, may be more realistic than we think. The Holy Family may have more in common with our families here now than we realize at first.

Our Gospel reading today ends with twelve-year-old Jesus returning home with Mary and Joseph to Nazareth, where Luke says he “increased in wisdom and in years, and in favour with God and human beings.” To their joy and relief, Mary and Joseph have just found Jesus safe and sound among the teachers in the Temple of Jerusalem after three days of searching for him in the crowded city during the Passover festival. Is it not a temptation for us, when we speak reverently of Mary and Joseph (as is right of us), to gloss over incidents like this in which Mary and Joseph are anxious, even frantic?  “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety,” Mary says to Jesus.

Parents here, especially of teenagers or pre-teens: Might you be more likely to relate to Mary’s experience of anxiety than, for instance, those of us without children? At this age, children begin to assert their independence. They need the space to question and to listen as Jesus did in the Temple of Jerusalem; to discern their faith on their own terms; to build a peer group. This in itself does not mean they love you any less as parents. Teenagers and pre-teens: Please do not take this as permission from me to become lost for days at a time. Your parents will never stop worrying about you when you are not with them, even well into your adult years. And Luke’s Gospel does say that, when Jesus returned to Nazareth, he “was obedient to” Joseph and Mary. Here the Son of God models for us obedience. But if you ever become lost, few places are better in which to become lost than a temple or, in this case, a church. May our Church always be a place of welcome for you, young people; young families!

Might we be able to relate in still other ways to the experience of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? After Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the Temple, Joseph is not mentioned again in the Gospels. Joseph models for us the prayerful, silent love of a father. And Luke says of Mary that she “treasured all these things in her heart.” Even amid times of anxiety, of being unable to understand why Jesus “must be in [his] Father’s house”; of accompanying Jesus from manger to cross to resurrection to his sending forth of his Holy Spirit who gave birth to our Church, Mary models for us the contemplation; the pondering, treasuring heart of a mother. And so Mary is Mother of God. Mary is our mother.

Mary, Joseph, and Jesus together model for us the gift of attentively hearing; discerning the presence of God in our day-to-day experiences, in particular our experiences of family relationships. I imagine that few if any of us have the “perfect” family. Our families experience anxiety. Our families experience illnesses, even deaths. Our families experience physical distance among members. Our families experience conflict, sometimes to the point of division, stemming from our sin. And still God invites us; our families, through the example of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, to be holy people; holy families ourselves.

And so how might we hear God’s invitation to us, as individuals; as households; as families, to holiness? How might we hear and discern God in our day-to-day experiences and relationships? Besides taking after Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the most perfect model we have of family life, we might take up the example of Hannah and Samuel, mother-and-son of our reading today from 1 Samuel. The name “Samuel” is Hebrew for “God has heard.” Hannah recognizes that God has heard her prayer for a son. Her grateful response to God is to dedicate Samuel for life to God. “God has heard,” and so Hannah and eventually Samuel, through his mentor Eli, hear God. Hannah and Samuel model for us; for our families the gift of hearing God with gratitude. Their example in the Old Testament sets up for us that of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the New Testament.

And how else might we build holy families for our time? Prayerful gratitude is an essential, timeless value of holy families, says the Letter to the Colossians from which we hear this morning: “With gratitude in your hearts sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.” Jesus, Mary and Joseph; Hannah and Samuel prayed with gratitude to God. And God calls us, too, as families and as a Church, to pray with gratitude.

The Letter to the Colossians gives us a long list of other essential values of holy families: “Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And when, in our weakness and sin, we fail to live up to our God-given holiness, Colossians invites us to forgive. Forgiveness (and our honest discernment of our need to be forgiven) is a must for holy families: “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”

Forgiveness is the foundation of love. Forgiveness is the foundation of the “perfect harmony… peace” and “wisdom” to which God calls us through the Letter to the Colossians. Forgiveness is the foundation of unity in our families; our Church; our world. Forgiveness is so often the way to gratitude; to hearing the “Word of God” that dwells “in [us] richly.”

Forgiveness, harmony, peace, wisdom, and gratitude; compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience: These are challenging but not unrealistic values that God asks us to treasure in our hearts and to live out among ourselves and within our families. We have the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; Hannah and Samuel, and countless saints and holy families through the ages as models of these values on whom to draw. They, and we, the Church, make these gifts of holy families; of the Holy Family, real and active in our world here now, today, forever.

Homily for Friday, 25 December 2015– Nativity of the Lord

Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

From the prophet Isaiah we hear tonight [this morning]: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness‒ on them light has shone.” And from Luke’s Gospel we hear of shepherds, about to travel to Bethlehem to meet our newborn Saviour, Jesus Christ. These shepherds are “keeping watch over their flocks by night” when their night watch is interrupted by “an angel of the Lord” who announces Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, “City of David.” Their night watch is interrupted by “the glory of the Lord” that shines “around them.” And we hear from Luke that these shepherds “were terrified” at this light breaking into the darkness surrounding them.

And yet is this not what our celebration of Christmas is all about: light breaking into; interrupting our darkness? Yet, unlike the shepherds outside Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth or the people of Israel of Isaiah’s time, I imagine not many of us are terrified at light taking the place of darkness. In fact we celebrate it; we celebrate him, Jesus Christ, with a joyous song of thanksgiving: “Today is born our Saviour, Christ the Lord”… “A child has been born to us, a son given to us… He is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

We celebrate the Birth of “our Saviour, Christ the Lord,” in many ways. We celebrate by gathering together with family and friends. We celebrate by decorating our homes and often our workplaces and public spaces. We celebrate by exchanging gifts. Very importantly we celebrate by gathering here as a community of faith; a People of God to worship. Most of us here are anything but terrified.

But how many of us have experienced darkness as a reality deeper than physical, literal darkness? I think that here, in the centre of Alberta, we are somewhat privileged. We live far enough north to experience Christmas as near the shortest day of the year. I am now living and studying in Paris, France, and so on my way home to visit family here I have been keeping a close eye on the weather in the Edmonton area over the last few days, maybe like those shepherds near Bethlehem so many years ago, but for more selfish reasons: I wanted to be prepared for any extreme weather on my way here. Now, I expect cold weather in Alberta at this time of year. But in the corner of my computer screen, a reminder of the shortness of late December days here would stare me back in the face: Sunrise 8:50 am; sunset 4:15 pm. I love you, Alberta; even at your darkest and coldest you are my home; our home!

And still, amid not even seven and a half hours of sunlight each day this time of year, at Christmas we celebrate. The sun is unconquered by darkness. The unconquered Son of God, Jesus Christ, also promises to return. Christ promises once again to break into and interrupt our darkness, as he did more than two thousand years ago, to complete God’s work of our salvation at the end of time.

We celebrate, even though Christmas brings many of us face-to-face not with joy and light, but with our world’s darkness and, for some of us, the darkness in our families and among our loved ones and in our own experiences. Our world faces an unprecedented number of refugees and of people displaced within their own countries by violence and persecution: A record sixty million people worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes! More wars begin than end in our world today. The dignity of all human life; of creation is so often disregarded. This has led even the ever-joyful Pope Francis to lament recently that our world’s violence threatens to reduce our celebration of Christmas to a kind of charade!

But this does not need to be. Our celebration of Christmas, of Christ’s Nativity, has meaning if we renew here and now the Biblical call to welcome refugees and migrants; people who experience physical, mental, or spiritual illness; people who have lost family members or loved ones; people living in poverty; the unemployed; people with disabilities; people who are alone, without family or loved ones with whom to celebrate Christmas; people who are estranged from our Church... This parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, is a place where all these people are supported and given dignity. OLPH has sponsored refugee families. Through a wide variety of ministries OLPH supports the economically disadvantaged; the bereaved; those who are alone; those who are searching in their lives of faith. Here the heart of the Christmas message is lived out.

And our celebration of Christmas is meaningful as long as we do our best, knowing our imperfections; even our sin; our darkness, but also the light of God’s grace and mercy, “to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly,” in St. Paul’s words to Titus. Our Christmas celebration finds meaning in our response to God’s call to welcome all who are on the same pilgrim’s path that we are all on, back to a manger scene in Bethlehem and forward to Christ’s return in glory.

Luke’s Gospel renews this call to us today by the simple remark that, when Jesus was born into our world, Mary and Joseph “laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” There was no place amid the darkness of our world for our Saviour. In fact our world would reject its Saviour. Life that began in a manger would be nailed to a cross, in the greatest act of darkness and sin ever known. Yet even death would not stop Jesus Christ, the Light of our world. The manger, a place beneath human dignity where animals fed, would be transformed into a place where our God entered our world in human flesh from the Virgin Mary’s womb. The cross, a place beneath human dignity where common criminals were publicly tortured and killed, would be transformed into a place where our God gave his very life to save us. Likewise, are we allowing our lives, our experiences of light, goodness, and peace but also of darkness and sin, any experiences we have that are beneath our human dignity, to be places into which Christ is welcome? Are our hearts the “inns” into which Christ enters to transform; to redeem us?

Sure, our lives; our hearts probably are not, even by some of our own standards, fit to welcome the King of the Universe; our God. Fear not! Jesus is not asking us for a five-star hotel. After all, he first entered our world “wrapped… in swaddling clothes,” lying “in a manger.” Even there, in the darkness and stench of a manger, Jesus brought light. Even there, Jesus brought peace. Even there, Jesus calmed the fears of the shepherds who left their flocks and fields at the invitation of an angel, an invitation that left them “terrified” at first, to welcome Jesus into our world. Even there, from a manger, Jesus brought heaven and earth, angels and all “people of good will” to joyful song, a song we still hear in our world today; a song we still hear from the beginning of today’s celebration of our Eucharist: “Glory to God in the highest”!

Glory to Jesus Christ, Light of our world! Do we dare to join in this song of joy? Is our song too much of an interruption; a breaking into our world’s violence, hostility, and darkness for it to bear? Are we in need from time to time for Jesus to interrupt our own darkness with his light; his mercy? Is Jesus Christ; is his Gospel proclaimed and authentically lived in ways that are “self-controlled, upright, and godly” a danger to the security and comfort of some who would prefer to bar his way into our countries; our public spaces; our hearts; our relationships; our lives?

Yes, but this has yet to stop God in Christ. If Jesus must, he will enter as he has already entered our world in the deepest of darkness to bring us God’s own light. This is why Isaiah proclaims so boldly that  “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”; that “those who lived in a land of deep darkness‒ on them light has shone.”

And this is why today, on this Christmas night [morning], we sing just as boldly as of old to welcome the Light that interrupts and breaks through our world’s darkness: “Today is born our Saviour, Christ the Lord”… “A child has been born to us, a son given to us… He is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Homily for Thursday, 1 January 2015– Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

World Day of Peace

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:1-2, 4-5, 6-7; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada.

“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

What makes this prayer special to me? We hear it in our first reading today, from the Book of Numbers. They are the words with which Moses and Aaron are to bless the people of Israel, who are re-entering Israel after escaping Pharaoh’s Egypt. When I was still living in Edmonton, before I joined the religious order I belong to now, the Basilians, I lived with two roommates. Often, when I made a pun or bad joke, one of my roommates would pretend (at least I think he was pretending) to be upset, and then he would make the sign of the cross over me and say this prayer from Numbers: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.” Unfortunately, attempts to exorcise the pun demons have so far failed miserably.

This beautiful prayer from Numbers is also engraved on a plaque on the wall in our dining room where I live now, with the Basilians at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish in Rochester, New York. “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

Is our world today not in great need of the Lord’s peace, perhaps even more so than in Moses’ and Aaron’s time, or in Jesus’ time? Our world is in need not so much of peace as in the mere absence of conflict and violence; it is in need of peace that begins and resonates from our hearts. Is this not the kind of peace that resonates from the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen and Mother of Peace; Mother of the Church; Mother of God whose feast we celebrate today? Is this not the kind of peace for which we pray on this day, the first of our year, World Day of Peace?

Our Gospel reading today, from Luke, says that the “shepherds… went with haste to Bethlehem” to find “Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.” And then “they made known what had been told them about this child” by the angels who had sent them to the newborn Christ. What was the message the shepherds “made known” to everyone near them, who were then “amazed” at what they heard? What was this message that our Gospel says our Mother Mary “treasured… and pondered… in her heart”? Was it not the message of the birth of our Savior, “Son of God and Son of Mary”; our Prince of Peace?

Perhaps the shepherds announced and Mary “treasured” and “pondered… in her heart” the same message the angels sang to the shepherds in the fields. It is a message of peace. It is the message that, except during Lent and Advent, we announce every Sunday and Holy Day near the beginning of our Mass: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to people of good will”… “On earth peace among those whom [God] favours.” Peace to each and every one of us. This is the message we announce to one another and that we are invited, after our Blessed Mother Mary, to treasure and ponder in our hearts every time we give the sign of peace before receiving our Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, in communion.

And yet to announce this message of peace is one thing; it is another to live by it. How, then, do we live by the message of peace we announce; the message of peace first announced to the shepherds and “treasured” and “pondered” in the heart of Mary; the message of the LORD’s peace from the Book of Numbers; the message of the birth of our Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ?

We could ask ourselves: Am I at peace with God? And am I at peace with my fellow people; with God’s world; with God’s creation? This could be for us a little examination of conscience on how we are living the peace we are invited to announce to our world; the peace for which we pray especially on this World Day of Peace.

Am I; are we at peace with God? Do I show reverence toward God’s name when I speak? Do I not only attend Mass but participate with joy in this gift of the Eucharist that God has given us; this gift of receiving the real presence of Christ, the Prince of Peace; of making this presence of Peace one with ourselves? Do we pray regularly, even if our prayer is a brief, informal giving of thanks for God’s gifts to us every day, or (this is not wrong) do we question God in prayer when we have felt God to be distant from us? Or do we pray even if our prayer is a simple moment of silence, to treasure; to ponder God’s presence; God’s peace in our lives and hearts as Mary once did?

Am I; are we at peace with one another?  How peaceful are my relationships with other people, especially with those closest to me: My family; my parents; my brothers and sisters; my children; my wife or husband if I am married; my relatives and close friends? I do not mean by this that we need to like everybody. With due respect to Facebook and other social media, clicking “Like” on every posting and sometimes living this way in our relationships does not bring true peace. Gossip or silence while we feed into our anger with other people is also not true peace; this is a sin against peace that can masquerade as peace. No, God asks us to love one another (especially the people we have trouble liking); to be at peace with one another.

If at times we have not been at peace with God and with one another, please let me try to encourage you with this: As long as there is love in our world; as long as there is goodness and kindness in our world (of which there is so much, visible right here in this parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help); as long as there is a God who is the source of love, goodness, kindness, and peace, there is a chance at peace. But I also encourage all of us to meet God in God’s goodness, kindness, and peace.

How do we do this? We meet God and God’s goodness, kindness, and peace by acknowledging thankfully areas in our lives where we are at peace with God and one another, and by reconciling those areas in our lives where we are not fully at peace. By this I do not just mean receiving the sacrament of reconciliation often. And yet, as in the sacrament of reconciliation, if we need to receive or to give reconciliation in our relationships with one another and with God, it is never too late for reconciliation; for peace.

And may this be the measure of true peace: When we, like Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Peace whom we celebrate on this World Day of Peace, can treasure and ponder God’s peace deep within our hearts. We will have true peace when the peace in our hearts shows itself as peace among ourselves; as holy peace when we greet one another: Peace be with you. “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”