Homily for Sunday, 16 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings of the day: Proverbs 8:22-31; Psalm 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

Our brother Basilian priest of happy memory, Fr. Peter Etlinger, had little use for when people would compare our present time or experience with almost-mythical “good old days.” “Don’t tell me about the good old days,” Fr. Etlinger would grumble, “I was there; they weren’t so good”!

But does the Word of God we hear today not call us to remember the “good old days”? I do not mean to remember the “good old days” in the sense of imagining for ourselves a mythical golden age that never in fact existed, as if to diminish any good in our present world and present experience. No, the Book of Proverbs begins today by pointing us back to the very first moments of God’s creation of the universe, through a figure Proverbs names “the wisdom of God.”

Even before there were “good old days,” or any kind of days or nights to count; “before the earth” was formed; before heights and depths, “fountains or springs of water,” mountains, hills, or fields, the wisdom of God was there. And God’s creation of the world, of our universe, which “the wisdom of God” witnessed, was so very good. The Book of Proverbs is far from the first text of our Bible to marvel at the goodness of God’s creation. If we remember, in the very first lines of the Book of Genesis, after each “day” of God’s creation, God looks upon his creation and sees that it is good.

Yet in Genesis and even more so in Proverbs, the one being singled out as especially good, in whom God and “the wisdom of God” take particular delight, is us: “I found delight in the human race.” Why is this? What about all the chaos, the divisions, the violence, and the sin in our world; the suffering we human beings inflict on one another and on our world? What is there in “the human race” for God to delight in?

Even if there were no sin, no human-caused suffering in our world, our Psalm asks, “What [are we] that [God] should be mindful of” us; “the son of man that God should care for him”? And yet God has made us “little less than the angels”; little less than God himself. Why would God have made us so? Why does God delight in the human race so much?

This may be a completely inadequate answer on my part to such a deep question as why God should delight so much in “the human race,” but please let me do my best to answer this question here anyway. God delights in us so much because we are unique among creatures on earth in our ability to form relationships not only with one another but with our Creator, God. How many of us have looked up at the “heavens, the work of [God’s] fingers, the moon and the stars,” or looked out at nature and the life that fills it and thought, “Wow! It had to have taken an awesome creator—we call this creative being God—to make all this so beautifully and perfectly”?

How many of us have listened to the sounds that echo through this place and this Eucharistic celebration, both the expected sounds of the Mass itself, like its ritual and music, and more spontaneous sounds, like the cooing of small children? How many of us have thanked God for a success in life like a new job, a happy retirement, or graduation, or have prayed to God for any of these things? How many of us have thanked God for a good friend, or our wife or husband who, sacramentally, is the foremost person in our lives, for those of us who are married, who shows us the face of God and leads us to eternal life with God? How many of us have ever sought or received healing from God, for ourselves or for another person? How many of us, especially on this Father’s Day, have prayed and thanked God for our fathers or, for those among us whose fathers have gone to be with our Father in heaven, how many of us have prayed for our fathers to intercede for us and watch over us from on high?

In these and many more ways, we form relationships not only with one another but with our God, in a way that only we human beings can. And we also believe, fundamentally about ourselves as human beings, that we are created in God’s image and likeness. If this is so, then the God in whose image and likeness we are created, who enables us to marvel at God’s handiwork in his creation as “the wisdom of God” in Proverbs does; who enables us to ask for what we need from God and to thank God in prayer; to form relationships with one another and with God, must be a relational God.

But how can God be a relationship within God’s self—we speak of God as a relationship of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—if we also believe that God is fundamentally one? This is at the heart of the mystery we celebrate on this Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: God fundamentally one and fundamentally a relationship of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This and any other true mystery cannot be explained logically, theo-logically, or with any increase in our “head knowledge.” The mystery of the Trinity, how God is one and also three, and any other true mystery, may only be comprehended through faith-filled experience.

This is what Jesus says to his disciples in John’s Gospel, from which we hear today. To try to comprehend mystery through our reason alone would overwhelm and even frustrate and sadden us: “You cannot bear it now,” Jesus says. We, like Jesus’ first disciples, have experienced relationship with God the Son, especially because God the Son took on our human nature, which maybe makes the Son easier for us to relate to than God the Father or the Holy Spirit. We have experienced relationship with God the Father from the first moments of creation, to the giving of the Law and the Prophets to Israel, to God’s sending of his only Son as one like us in all but sin. And now, through the Son, God sends us God’s Holy Spirit, our promised guide “to all truth.”

But we cannot absorb “all truth” all at once, without becoming overwhelmed, frustrated, and sad. In order to grow in relationship with and in our experience of the Holy Spirit; in order to grow in our comprehension of “all truth,” not taking it to the head but taking it to heart, requires time. It requires patience. It requires prayer. It requires us to be disposed to awe at the beauty of God’s creation that surrounds us.

The process of which St. Paul speaks to the Romans, that of the Holy Spirit, sent to us from the Father through the Son and “poured into our hearts”; the process from endurance to “proven character” to hope that “does not disappoint,” even in times of affliction, is a process of love. It is a process of growth in relationship. Those of us who have ever been in love, think about this: Did you go from attraction to somebody to the deepest intimacy, perhaps marriage, in an instant? Probably not.

The same is true of our faith-filled experience of the one God as Trinity; as a relationship of three, as of love: It takes time, patience, prayer, and a disposition to awe to allow it to grow and deepen. This does not happen in an instant, but over a longer process. And then, as happens in the best of relationships—imagine again a long, happy marriage or a great friendship—our experience of relationship in all its complexity draws us closer to oneness with the person with whom we enjoy the relationship. This is true of our relationship with God as it is with our relationships with one another: We experience God in an awesome multiplicity of ways. We enter into relationship with the God we experience and name as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and, as we grow and deepen in this relationship of love with God, we are drawn closer to oneness with God.

We are drawn closer to the appreciation of God’s oneness. But, as in our human relationships, we never lose our unique individual personalities in our relationship with God, and the distinction in the ways we experience God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is never lost. Our relationship with God, three-in-one, grows and deepens into a future in which, more and more, we comprehend and take to heart “all truth,” while still remembering fondly the “good old days” when God first made us, when we first knew delight in God and when God first “found delight in the human race.”

Homily for Sunday, 19 August 2018

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

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

When we gather for a meal, what are some of the things that happen before, during, and after the meal?

First, depending on how elaborate the feast is and how many people will gather together, we may invite people to the meal. And then, whether we are attending a grand feast with hundreds of people or with a small group of friends or family, or one friend, or our wife or husband, girlfriend or boyfriend, or whomever, we need to prepare or have somebody prepare the food and drink. Closer to the time of the meal, we set the tables. We gather at table. We pray in thanksgiving for the food and one another. As we eat and drink, we may tell stories, laugh, sing… We enjoy ourselves. Depending on the occasion, the number of people present, the culture, and so on, the meal may be simple or it may be a several-course feast that lasts all evening, or all day, or longer.

As somebody who enjoys good food and good company, and especially enjoys food and drink from all parts of the world and the cultures and people that inspire and prepare this food, I can think of many meals I have enjoyed over several hours. I think of the devout, generous families I have known and stayed with in places like Spain and France while working or studying there. For these families, meals after Sunday Mass would involve large groups of friends connected through their neighbourhoods or parishes, and would go on for what seemed like forever. I think of the impoverished people of my order’s parishes in Colombia whose doors were constantly open; who constantly offered what little food and drink they had; whose children, from house after house, seemed to stream out into the streets to greet their beloved Basilianos—Basilians. How humbling this giving of abundance out of poverty is when we see it! I think, most recently during my multi-city journey across North America this summer, of when I would enjoy meals with several families during the same day, or have a few hours to be with one family or good friend. Many times, my brother Basilians have put on great feasts. I think of many feasts after weddings, funerals, baptisms…

My sisters and brothers in Christ, we have all been invited to a great feast. When I say this, are many of us perhaps thinking of the Eucharist? If so, I cannot fault us for this. When we think of a great feast, it would be a good sign if we, as Catholic Christians, were to think immediately of the Eucharist. When we hear Jesus promise us his very self for our salvation in today’s Gospel reading from John, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,” it is natural and right for us to connect Jesus’ promise with our experience of the Eucharist. And yet, while our Eucharist is Jesus really, truly, and fully present among and within us here in this celebration and in bread and wine that we consume, our Eucharist is a sign—we call it a sacrament—of an even greater feast we have yet to experience, the everlasting feast of heaven.

This everlasting feast of heaven requires us to prepare for it. So how, then, do we prepare for heaven? We might prepare for heaven, for a feast for whose glory we can only hope this side of heaven, the same way we prepare for any great feast we have seen and known in this earthly life. The way we prepare for and then partake in meals, everything from small-scale meals with family or one or a few friends to great feasts, goes back before Jesus’ time. We hear of it in the Book of Proverbs. The main character of our reading from Proverbs today is a personified Wisdom. First, Wisdom puts “her house,” a large banquet hall with “seven pillars,” in order. When we are receiving company at home, how many of us, like Lady Wisdom, clean our home? After cleaning, Wisdom prepares the food. She invites guests to the feast, not the rich or the elites first, but from “the highest places in the town,” she invites the poor; those of less-renowned intellect or understanding: “You that are simple, turn in here.” The feast that Wisdom prepares will nourish and strengthen those who enjoy it. They will grow, “live, and walk in the way of insight.”

The letter to the Ephesians picks up the banquet scene where the book of Proverbs leaves off. The feast is underway. The people invited have gathered and are eating, drinking, enjoying themselves, and are amusing one another with stories, humour, and song. Do we not often do the same when we gather for a meal? Sing “Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves… giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Ephesians asks of the people invited to this feast. And yet this permission from Ephesians to enjoy ourselves at the feast in God’s name, no less, comes with a call to moderation: “Do not be foolish,” the letter to the Ephesians says.

Perhaps many if not all of us have been to a feast or a party when somebody behaves foolishly; somebody or many people eat, drink, or behave excessively, or speak in a way that is not careful or ruins others’ reputations. “That is debauchery,” the letter to the Ephesians says, when we become filled and fill others with gossip; so filled with worldly food and spirits that we cannot “be filled with the Spirit” of God. As Christians, invited to this feast of the Eucharist, we are called to better than this. We are called to this feast, having already made room to some extent within ourselves and in our world for God; for God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

This making room for God is the wisdom and “insight” to which our readings from Proverbs and Ephesians call us. After all, God has invited us to the feast, so it would be foolish for us to act in ways that ignore the graciousness of our host, just as this would be foolish to do at any meal to which we were invited. And yet it is all too easy, even for usually well-mannered people like us, to fall into excess; to fall into the foolishness that Ephesians warns against. Is our foolishness and even sin not often a product of excess and a kind of impatience? Instead of accepting that heaven, for which we are invited to hope as Christians, remains something not yet fully realized—that the greatest feast is yet to come—sin is when we try too hard, to excess, to impose our incomplete experience of heaven on one another, ourselves, and our world as if it were complete. We abuse the gifts God has given us to enjoy wisely and in moderation; gifts that point us to heaven without revealing everything of the grandeur of heaven all at once: Food and drink, the gift of speaking, our sexuality… And when we try too hard to impose “heaven” on earth instead of hoping, praying for, and cooperating with God through works of kindness, mercy, and justice toward heaven’s full realization, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as in heaven,” we end up not creating heaven but hell on earth, for ourselves and for one another.

We hear of this kind of excess, the imposition of a false “heaven,” in our Gospel reading today from John. It is telling that, as Jesus repeatedly identifies himself as “the living bread that came down from heaven,” the people’s response progresses from complaining to grumbling to a full-on dispute in today’s Gospel. If our reading from Proverbs today speaks of the advance preparations for a great feast, and Ephesians speaks of enjoying the feast in moderation, in John’s Gospel Jesus reveals to us what heaven will be in its fullness and how we might taste already the heaven that awaits us: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in them.”

Do we, then, have the patience to make room within and among us for Jesus, the only “true food” and “true drink” that enables us to “live forever,” and not to grumble, dispute, or gossip among ourselves? Do we have the wisdom to enjoy without mistaking God’s gifts to us in this life, which point us to heaven, as heaven already in its fullness? To the extent we exercise this patience and wisdom, we taste the food of the everlasting feast of heaven to which God has invited us and of which this Eucharist is a sign of our hope.

Homily for Friday, 5 September 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time

St. Kateri School Mass

Readings of the day (Adapted for Mass with children): Proverbs 2:1-12; Psalm 25; John 14:15-22, 27

This homily was given during the first Mass of the 2014-2015 school year for St. Kateri, a pre-Kindergarten through Grade 6 school within our parish, St. Kateri Tekakwitha.

Who here likes treasure hunts? When I was living in Toronto, Canada, preparing to become a priest, I also worked in a parish like this one to prepare children to receive their first communion. When we learned some of the important things that happen during Mass (how Mass starts “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; when we pray the “our Father”; when we receive communion, and so on…), we would learn by going on a treasure hunt. The “treasures” were little cards with parts of the Mass written on them. The children would find these cards in different parts of the church, then bring them to the front of the church and put them in the right order of the Mass.

What if we were to go on a treasure hunt right now? We won’t go all over the church this time. But who here noticed a card sitting on your pew when you came in? There should be three cards. What do they say? [The three “treasure” cards are knowledge, insight, and One Lord, One faith, one baptism.]

Why this treasure hunt during our first Mass of this new school year… besides the fact that treasure hunts are fun? Our first reading, from the Book of Proverbs, says this: “Beg for knowledge. Plead for insight. Look for it as hard as you would for silver or some hidden treasure.”

You will receive and give one another a lot of knowledge and insight this school year. We will learn and grow through this year. Our readings that we have just heard ask us to enjoy learning; look forward to and treasure growing. “Look for knowledge and insight as hard as you would for silver or some hidden treasure.” Learning and growing; looking for knowledge and insight from each other; from our teachers; from our parents may be hard work. It may not always be as easy as finding a card on your pew, but it is worth it when we find these treasures.

And there are more treasures than knowledge and insight that we are asked to look for. Someone here has a very important treasure on her or his pew. Who has the card that says, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism”? We have received this treasure of one Lord; one faith even before most of us remember: When we were baptized. Baptism is the first treasure we find and receive, and this brings us into the Church, where we can look for other treasures: More faith; deeper faith; knowledge; insight…

And our Gospel reading from John says that there is somebody very special who is in and all around us who helps us to find all these treasures. Jesus promises us “another helper” in our treasure hunt! Who is this special helper? The Holy Spirit is this special helper whom Jesus promises us.

Who has the Holy Spirit? Where is the Holy Spirit? St. Kateri students, do you have the Holy Spirit? Teachers, do you have the Holy Spirit? Parents, do you have the Holy Spirit? [When called, one student, one teacher, and one parent show cards with an image of the Holy Spirit.]

Yes, we all have the Holy Spirit, who helps us to find all the treasures we need: knowledge, insight, one Lord; one faith; one baptism. May God bless you in this new school year; in your searching for and finding treasures that are from God; as you learn and grow in the love of God and of one another.