Homily for Sunday, 2 July 2023– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 6:3-4,, 8-11; Matthew 10:37-42

A week ago, I was preaching a retreat for our Basilian novice Bishoy Dawood, who is at the end of his novitiate year here in Edmonton and will profess first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience within my order next weekend. I invite us please to pray for Bishoy; some of us might remember him from when he served weekday Mass with me here at OLPH once or twice during his novitiate year. (And implicit in my opening lines here is a call for anybody who may be discerning a call to religious life, maybe as a Basilian—in which case, please come and see me—or to the diocesan diaconate or priesthood). On retreat, I preached conferences on our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and on our order’s motto, “Teach me goodness, discipline, and knowledge.”

I feel, every time I have spoken publicly on the religious vows, especially that of poverty, that I should have an official license made somewhere: Class one hypocrite. Because, visibly-speaking (I can speak for myself as a religious priest), I am not suffering. We live in an affluent country [and, here in Sherwood Park, an affluent community, on average]. We have food on the table and a roof over our heads. Now, there are poor and disadvantaged persons among us, I will guess even in this parish. I and my brother Basilians live at St. Alphonsus Parish on 118 Avenue in Edmonton, a neighbourhood that visibly reminds me of Jesus’ words to Judas Iscariot in our Gospels, every time I look or go outside: “You will always have the poor, but you will not always have me.” I learned recently that there are 80 000 Aboriginal people in the City of Edmonton, many living with trauma inflicted upon them over generations. There are many poor concentrated in our area of the city, people with addictions, recent migrants and refugees, and so on.

Whenever I speak on our vow of poverty, I do the common “preacher thing” of outlining the traditional Bible passages associated with poverty. Last weekend, I spoke about Jesus’ first Beatitude in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I spoke about the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the rich man who wants to be Jesus’ disciple, has followed all the commandments since his youth, yet goes away sad because, the Gospels say, he is unable to part with his “possessions.”

On Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, let me emphasize that his material wealth is not the problem, the obstacle to discipleship. The possessions he is unable (or unwilling) to let go have nothing to do with money or material goods. The problem for the rich man is that everything becomes an object to him, something to be counted and costed, something of which he is unable to let go: His wealth, yes, but also the number of commandments to which he is faithful (and how faithful, and for how long he has been faithful), and discipleship of Jesus itself.

Contrast the rich man of the Gospels with the woman of Shunem in today’s reading from 2 Kings. Our reading begins by describing the Shunammite woman as “wealthy.” For the Shunammite woman as in Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, wealth is not and will not be the obstacle (or a help) toward right relationship with God and other people, toward acting in a right and godly way.

The woman in 2 Kings notices that the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, is “passing through Shunem” as he frequently did. And Elisha apparently had a favourite café pit stop in Shunem each time he was in town. This reminds me of my pre-priesthood, pre-Basilian life when I was a lab technician and occasionally did house calls as far away as Rocky Mountain House. My favourite pit stop for lunch on house call days on that route was just outside of Bentley, Alberta, a coffee and sandwich shop called “Bean There.” Or, if any of us are ever traveling toward B.C. on the Trans-Canada Highway, your last chance for gas at Alberta prices and a decent lunch (if you are hungry) before the B.C. border is at the Husky at the top of the hill in the morbidly named village of Dead Man’s Flats. So, there are a couple of road trip pit stop recommendations from me.

The Shunammite woman recognizes Elisha as a frequent visitor to her town, so she calls her husband to help her to prepare her home to receive Elisha “whenever he comes to” them. Elisha is grateful for the Shunammite couple’s hospitality. So he calls “his servant Gehazi,” we hear, who says to Elisha that the only desire this otherwise well-to-do woman has is to bear a child. Here we have the frequent biblical motif of an elderly woman or couple longing for a child. (Please allow me to insert a prayer here for anybody among us or anybody we know experiencing infertility. This can be agonizing). Elisha ends this visit with the Shunammite couple by prophesying that, “in due time, [they] shall embrace a son.” And, if we continue in 2 Kings, Elisha’s prophecy comes true. And, still later in 2 Kings, the son dies, sadly, but Elisha raises him back to life.

The Shunammite woman and her husband are the picture of poverty. They live poverty in the way I, under a public religious vow of poverty, would like to live it, better than I do. Wait, did I just say that the Shunammite couple in 2 Kings today are the picture of poverty? I did. Why?

The Shunammite couple of whom we hear today in 2 Kings is such a great example of poverty not despite or, somehow ironically, because of their wealth. They are a great example of poverty because they are so unreservedly hospitable toward Elisha as he passes through their town. The Shunammite couple does not count the cost to themselves of building a whole new “small roof chamber with walls” onto their house and furnishing it with “a bed, a table, a chair, [and] a lamp,” all for when Elisha visits their town.

Now, maybe they do not count the cost of the home improvements because they are just that rich. Yet, if we think for a moment about some of the details 2 Kings gives us about this couple, we realize they are Shunammites. Shunem was a simple agricultural village in the Jezreel Valley near the Sea of Galilee, in the northeast of Israel. It was susceptible to drought. So, even though the Shunammite woman in today’s reading is said to be wealthy, her and her husband’s wealth is precarious.

The son they long for dies, only to be raised by Elisha, all within the same chapter 4 of 2 Kings from which our first reading is drawn today. And then, a little later in 2 Kings, Elisha advises the Shunammite family to flee to Philistia for seven years. They live there, in a foreign (non-Israelite, Gentile) land, to wait out a famine. All their wealth is lost—their home, with its rooftop addition built for Elisha, and their land— before Elisha ends the famine and restores to the Shunammite family what they had lost.

Wealth in and of itself is not the measure of how poor the Shunammite woman, her husband, and her son are. The measure of their poverty, which is always exemplary and does not vary with the cycles of gain and loss through the many vignettes of their story in 2 Kings, is that their wealth (or periodic loss of it) is never an object to be counted. They are generous and hospitable toward Elisha. And God rewards this pious family from a little agricultural Galilean village with restoration of their longed-for son to life, their home, their land, and with great friendship with the itinerant prophet Elisha when Elisha was probably looking for a simple coffee shop in town.

Jesus’ message in Matthew’s Gospel today is difficult for us to hear. I hope Jesus does not literally mean that I am not supposed to love my father and mother nearly as much as I love Jesus. [I should be careful here, since my mom and dad are among us at Mass this morning]! I think, in line with Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite family in 2 Kings, Jesus is inviting us to be somehow like the Shunammite woman and her husband are toward Elisha: Welcome the prophet to town, into our homes, no matter how much or little material wealth we have. Be grateful and generous for the opportunity to be hospitable. Do not count the cost of hospitality and of discipleship, even if it is to the point of giving our lives: “Take up [your] cross and follow me.”

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that baptism is our initiation into the poverty to which Jesus invites us. We have all “been buried with [Christ] by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father”—and just as God, through Elisha, raised the Shunammite couple’s son and saved them from famine and loss of everything—“we too might walk in the newness of life.” We, too, might know the restoration of our eternal wealth, eternal life in Jesus Christ.

This is an invitation to poverty, sisters and brothers: Not necessarily to give up our material wealth, unless this has become no more than a precious, countable commodity, more important than God and each other in our lives. We never know when or how we will encounter God in another person, in the situations of our lives—in a small agricultural village in Galilee, in our care for somebody in need or in a situation of pain or loss, in a small coffee and sandwich shop in Bentley or Dead Man’s Flats, Alberta—until we have lived the poverty, the gratitude and hospitality without cost and commodification, to which our Lord invites us today.

Homily for Tuesday, 13 April 2021– Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 4:32-37; Psalm 93:1ab, 1cd-2, 5; John 3:7b-15

The first part of the Acts of the Apostles refers, in at least a couple of significant instances, to how united the earliest communities of Jesus’ disciples were. Today we hear that these first disciples “were of one heart and soul”; that the unity of these earliest disciples of Jesus was connected with their strict common ownership of material possessions: “Everything they owned was held in common.”

This passage is one of the most frequently-cited Biblical references to uphold the vow or counsel of poverty. I think, in this respect, of a book I studied during my novitiate on the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Francis Moloney’s A Life of Promise. Might this also make us think of the variety in practice of the vow of poverty, even within our own Basilian Congregation, let alone among different communities of vowed religious? I think, for instance, of the many gifts from different countries in which my great aunt Jeanne, a Sister of Holy Cross, ministered, that she gave to family members, because she was not allowed to keep these gifts for herself. Her order’s vow of poverty was and is, by my observation, lived much more strictly than ours.

But how closely is the insistence in Acts on how the earliest Christians held “everything they owned… in common” a reflection of historical reality, versus an ideal for life especially in Christian community? Scholars still debate over this question. Francis Moloney, in A Life of Promise, points out that, after the reading we hear today, the very next event in Acts is that of Ananias and Sapphira, who keep part of the proceeds from the sale of property for themselves instead of turning it over to their community of disciples. And then both Ananias and Sapphira drop dead on the spot!

So which was it: Did the earliest Christian communities truly hold “everything they owned… in common,” or was this an ideal that was not necessarily (or usually) followed to the letter? My thought is that it was a bit of both historical reality—that these earliest Christian communities strove to practice common ownership of goods—and an ideal, much as it is both-and today. There was and is still variety in how material goods were owned or shared communally. And maybe how individuals or communities practiced, we may say, a precursor to our vows of poverty was not in itself essential to one’s standing as a good and faithful Christian.

Yet I think Acts’ emphasis on this common ownership characteristic of these earliest Christian communities may lead us to ask ourselves questions like: What, if not strict common ownership of material goods, is essential to our Christian way of life, from the message we hear from Acts today? And is there something that the example of these earliest Christians calls us to hold in common, if not strictly or only material goods?

Especially as somebody who has taken a public vow of poverty, I interpret Acts as inviting and reminding us that we (as vowed religious, but this is true of all baptized Christians) hold in common a responsibility for one another’s whole-person well-being—spiritual, mental, physical, and so forth—in this earthly life and, ultimately, for one another’s salvation. We are not saved as individuals so much as together, in and by one God. Common ownership of earthly goods, or any expression or vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, can be a sign of our universal call to holiness and ultimately to salvation.

Homily for Thursday, 1 August 2019– Memorial of St. Alphonsus Liguori

Readings of the day: Exodus 40:16-21, 34-38; Psalm 84:3, 4, 5-6a, 8a, 11; Matthew 13:47-53

Thursday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel, St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What kinds of homes do we live in, and with what kinds of keepsakes or treasures do we fill our homes?

Is it fair for me to presume that, since we are near the middle of a major city, most of us live in houses, apartments, or other, say, permanent dwellings? Having said this, I think of and invite us to pray for everybody, especially in the midst of our city of Edmonton but around the world, who are homeless or who otherwise do not have a permanent home; a permanent and safe place to keep even a few treasures.

As a member of a religious order under a vow of poverty, my experience is nowhere near the experience of poverty, of uncertainty as to where to find safe shelter, food, and other necessities that homeless people experience. Yet, as a Basilian, I have had the experience of moving from one place and one form of ministry to another often enough that this tends to minimize the amount of material goods I and my Basilian brothers might accumulate. We have in our Basilian houses decorations that show both that these are religious houses and that they are places of warm hospitality, not only toward fellow Basilians but anybody who may visit our homes.

Today, the Book of Exodus features Moses, who builds the tabernacle that is to house the Ark of the Covenant, and all this within a structure called the Tent of Meeting. The impermanence of this structure, even though it was to be the dwelling of God himself among the people of Israel, is remarkable to me. The Ark of the Covenant and its tabernacle within the Tent of Meeting was designed to be disassembled and reassembled as the people of Israel under Moses’ leadership journeyed from Egypt to their more permanent homeland of Israel. It would be many more centuries before the home of the God of Israel on Earth would become a more permanent structure, the Temple of Jerusalem, and even this first temple and its successor would not last forever.

Our Gospel reading today, from Matthew, focuses on our most permanent dwelling of all: The Kingdom of Heaven. It is to be the dwelling of “the righteous,” those people who have acted according to God’s love for us toward one another, especially people most in need. The Kingdom of Heaven will not be a place for people with the greatest number of earthly treasures, but for people who have made in their hearts a permanent dwelling for our God, our ultimate treasure, “beauty ever ancient yet ever new,” as St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed.

Through the likes of Moses and Jesus, God proposes for us today a dwelling that is much more permanent than anything we have ever known. God proposes to make God’s dwelling, heaven, forever our home. All God asks of us is to make of our hearts God’s home on earth—a tabernacle of sorts, meant to move about, to change, to be disassembled and reassembled as our earthly pilgrimage progresses—but still God’s home on earth. As St. Alphonsus Liguori, whom we celebrate today, once said, “The human heart is, so to speak, the paradise of God.” Jesus, too, asks us to make of our hearts “the paradise of God,” the storehouse of “what is new and what is old,” while God prepares our permanent home in heaven.

Homily for Thursday, 23 August 2018– Ferial

Thursday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time


Optional Memorial of St. Rose of Lima

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 36:23-28; Psalm 51:12-13, 14-15, 18-19; Matthew 22:1-11

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

What does St. Rose of Lima, whose feast we celebrate today, have to do with the relationship between the king and the guest in Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel reading who arrives at the king’s wedding feast without his wedding robe?

Is Jesus’ parable we hear today not strange, in the sense that the king seems inconsistent in whether he metes out justice toward some who abuse his generosity, while he is abundantly merciful toward others we would expect him to punish more severely? In the case of the guest who arrives at the wedding feast not wearing his wedding garment, the king responds with particular harshness: “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Why is the king in Jesus’ parable so harsh with this guest? This man does not make light of the king’s invitation to his wedding feast or, worse yet, mistreat and murder the king’s slaves as other invitees to the wedding feast do, so why is the man who might merely have forgotten the proper or have been too poor to dress in attire for the king’s wedding singled out to be excluded from the banquet hall?

Here, I would like to return to my reflection on St. Rose of Lima, a third order Dominican from Peru who lived from 1586 to 1617. St. Rose of Lima was the first saint from the Americas ever canonized. Although she was a layperson (she had taken a personal vow of virginity but never took formal vows in a religious order), St. Rose of Lima is almost always depicted in art and icons in a Dominican habit.

The religious order to which I belong, the Basilians, has no habit besides the usual clothing of priests, a clerical shirt and Roman collar when serving in ministry. Yet our clothing, even when we are not in ministry, is meant to reflect the values we strive to live as religious and priests: Poverty as simplicity of life; modesty; solidarity with the people with whom we minister. And yet these values, expressed in the formal vows we take in religious life, poverty, chastity, and obedience, are values to which every one of us, as baptized Christians, is invited to strive toward.

This was true of St. Rose of Lima, regardless of whether, as a layperson, she ever actually wore a Dominican religious habit. She wore the garment of the king’s wedding feast; the Lord’s feast of heaven, in her heart, and this was expressed in a life of outward solidarity with the poor and suffering in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Lima.

Jesus asks this of all of us: To clothe our hearts with the Lord’s wedding robe, a garment we are given at baptism. The garment is what we most value, even more than what we wear outwardly, which ideally is a sign of the values deepest within our hearts. If what we most value is love of God, love of one another and especially solidarity with those most in need, then I do not think we will need to worry about meeting the same end as the man without his wedding garment in today’s Gospel parable. The values deepest in our hearts will naturally express themselves outwardly; they will be our God-given garment of the feast of eternal life.

Homily for Friday, 28 July 2017– Ferial

Friday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11; Matthew 13:18-23

What commandments do we find the easiest to keep? And what commandments do we find the most difficult to keep?

Today we hear in Exodus of God calling Moses up Mount Sinai to give him the Ten Commandments. We know that the people of Israel whom Moses was leading through the desert were able to hear God as he gave the Commandments to Moses, so God hid nothing from the people as to the Law he expected them to observe. Do we ever wonder, though, if the people of Israel were standing at Mount Sinai, hearing God give the Ten Commandments to Moses, and thinking if not saying things like these among themselves: “That commandment not to kill should be easy enough, but that commandment not to covet— what does “covet” mean again?— may be more difficult. We know that one of the first of the Ten Commandments the people of Israel would break, when they made the golden calf, was the commandment not to make idols; images of other gods. What were the most and least difficult commandments to keep for the people of ancient Israel?

We might ask the same question of our time and culture.  Almost ten years ago now I was a postulant, just beginning formation with the religious order I belong to now, the Congregation of St. Basil or Basilians. I am originally from here in Edmonton, and the first place to which I was appointed by the Basilians was Cali, Colombia, to teach high school French and English. An article at the time written in a religious newspaper or magazine reflected on the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that we in religious orders both of men and women take. Let me say, on this note, that poverty, chastity, and obedience are not only vows that set men and women of religious orders apart from the rest of us. These are standards by which we are all called to live by our Baptism and any specific vocation that flows from Baptism: Religious life, priesthood, single life, married life, and so on. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are called “evangelical counsels”; they are essential standards for all of us to live by. They are somewhat like commandments.

The article, as I remember, said that in more wealthy parts of the world, poverty is the most difficult of the evangelical counsels to live by, and obedience is the least difficult. In less wealthy regions, as in my experience in Colombia, poverty is the easiest of the counsels to live by. I do not mean this, and neither did the article, simply because regions like these have less material wealth, although might less wealth allow us to live with greater gratitude and take less for granted? And, at the same time, there tends to be a greater focus in wealthier regions on social and moral order, and so obedience.

Each of us; each culture and region of the world has its commandments; its social and moral standards that are more or less difficult than others to keep. Let me suggest that, hearing the Ten Commandments from Exodus, our prayer today might be one of thanksgiving to God for the commandments we find easier to keep, and for help with those we find more difficult. In this way, in the words of our Psalm, we might more and more hold God’s commands in reverence, as “words of everlasting life.”