Homily for Thursday, 16 October 2014– Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 1:1-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3ab, 3cd-4, 5-6; Luke 11:47-54

In what ways have we been blessed by God, sisters and brothers in Christ? Have we not been blessed by God in more ways than we could count?

Today St. Paul gives us from his letter to the Ephesians a beautiful hymn of gratitude for the many ways in which God has blessed us. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens,” St. Paul writes.

St. Paul goes on to name some of these blessings we have received: “Adoption” as daughters and sons of God “through Jesus Christ”; the calling in light of being daughters and sons of God in Christ “to be holy and without blemish before” God. For the times when we have not been so “holy and without blemish,” we have been blessed with “redemption by [Christ’s] blood; the forgiveness of transgressions.” We have been blessed with “the riches of [God’s] grace”; by God’s plan to save us in “the fullness of time.” Like us, St. Paul cannot list all the blessings we have received as a people of God; as sisters and brothers in Christ. He stops at speaking of God’s plan; God’s blessing of us as the sum of “all things in Christ.” Have we not been so blessed by God that the amount and ways in which we have been and will continue to be blessed becomes a mystery?

St. Margaret Mary, patron saint of our parish whose feast we celebrate today, speaks of God’s many blessings in a similar way to that of St. Paul. St. Margaret Mary developed and promoted the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that is shared by many saints and by many of us here. In a letter she speaks of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the fount or “abyss of all blessings” into which “the poor” are invited to “submerge all their needs.” The Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, St. Margaret Mary says, “is an abyss of joy in which all of us can immerse our sorrows. It is an abyss of lowliness to counteract our foolishness, an abyss of mercy for the wretched, an abyss of love to meet our every need.” In the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ we are blessed with “peace of heart” ourselves, St. Margaret Mary writes in the same letter. This “peace of heart” is the same “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” with which St. Paul greets the Ephesians.

On this feast day of St. Margaret Mary, we pray for our parish in a special way through one of its patron saints. United especially through the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, we pray in gratitude to God who gives us his grace; who has given us his beloved Son by whose cross and resurrection we are saved; who has given and continues to give us “every spiritual blessing in the heavens.”

Homily for Wednesday, 16 October 2013– Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and St. Hedwig

Wednesday of the 28th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Romans 2:1-11; Psalm 62:2-3, 6-7, 9; Luke 11:42-46

I imagine that not many of us would enjoy being characterized as judging or, worse, judgmental. Not only is the notion of judging one another or even ourselves difficult for many people, but so is understanding God as a judge. Those of us in legal professions might recoil at the severe criticism in today’s readings by St. Paul and by Jesus of those whose work it was to judge other people according to religious standards: among them the Pharisees and “scholars of the law.”

And yet we are all called to judge more often than we might think, whether between right and wrong; between what is according to God’s will for us and what is not; between a good and a greater or longer-lasting good. To fail in our responsibility to judge these matters is relativism. It is not the way of truth; the way of the Gospel; the way of God.

Scripture does not prohibit us from judging, although some of its sayings can be misinterpreted to mean “do not judge under any circumstance.” In today’s first reading and Gospel reading, St. Paul and Jesus do not prohibit us from judging. However, they do caution us strongly as to how we judge.

Our readings from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and from Luke’s Gospel identify two ways we understand judgment. In the negative sense of being “judgmental,” some early Roman Christians and some Pharisees and lawyers of Jesus’ time condemned others for “the very same” wrongs they themselves were committing. They were “stubborn” and “impenitent”; going even beyond the necessary observance of the law while neglecting what is most important: “judgment and love for God.”

Here we have the second, positive, sense of the word “judgment.” St. Paul describes God as judge in this positive sense. While God is able to condemn those who unjustly condemn others, in Paul’s words God’s judgment is primarily one of “priceless kindness, forbearance, and patience” that leads us “to repentance.”

What, then, would our world be like if we were to judge and act toward one another with God-like “priceless kindness, forbearance, and patience”? Even as we hold others to account, what would our world be like if we were to hold ourselves to account by the same standards with which we judge others: with self-awareness and occasionally self-criticism (this is difficult!), but with the same “priceless kindness, forbearance, and patience”? We might see this kind of judgment lead many “to repentance.” We ourselves might be led to repentance; to conversion.

For St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a patron of St. Kateri Parish whose feast we celebrate today, judgment and action by these criteria of kindness, forbearance, and patience mean judgment and action in the manner of our loving God. “Love,” St. Margaret Mary said, “triumphs in humility and enjoys itself in unity.”

Here, then, is a litmus test for our judgment: When we judge one another or ourselves, do we judge with love? Do we judge with “priceless kindness, forbearance, and patience”? Do we judge with humility before God, our final judge? Does our judgment in love triumph “in humility and” enjoy “itself in unity”?