Homily for Wednesday, 26 June 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 7:15-20

Wednesday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I or my family would travel in the Rocky Mountain National Parks of my home province of Alberta, Jasper or Banff, I would get a chuckle out of one of the t-shirts in the gift shops in these parks. The t-shirt I enjoyed features a bear standing next to a sign, like the many real signs seen throughout these parks, that reads, “Do not feed the bears.” The bear on the t-shirt wears a hat with moose antlers, and carries a sign that says, “I am not a bear. Trust me.”

In Matthew’s Gospel, today we hear Jesus warn us to “beware of false prophets, who come to [us] in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.” Do we not wish maybe that these “false prophets” would be easy to discern as if they wore “sheep’s clothing” but held up a sign that read, “I am not a wolf, trust me”? Unfortunately, when speaking of our faith, to differentiate “false prophets,” those who deceive and distract us from the true and right priorities of our faith, from those who speak and teach the truth, is occasionally not so easy.

To add to our challenge to discern real sheep from wolves “in sheep’s clothing,” or good trees bearing good fruit from rotten trees bearing rotten fruit, do Jesus’ pithy proverbs we hear today not sometimes work in different, even opposite ways? On the one hand, even among self-professed Christians there are people who do seek to seek to deceive and distract us from God and the true priorities and ethics of our faith. At the risk of judging them too harshly myself, I become especially irritated at people with authority who promote what I hear as a charade of the Christian faith that more closely resembles idolatry of wealth and prosperity, nationalism, militarism, or forms of xenophobia (a rejection of anybody who does not look, think, or behave “like us”), than anything Christ or his Apostles taught.

On the other hand, I encounter brother and sister Christians (and I have been guilty of this myself) who are at times too quick to seek errors in other Christians’ message or how their message is articulated and lived. Words like “heretic” have become the most recent curse words from ostensibly-Christian media outlets, especially but not only on the internet, against fellow believers who hold differing views or struggle more openly to understand or live by some of the Church’s teachings. Quick insults like this and the animosity that can exist today even among Christians create and aggravate divisions and breed still further animosity. Too-ready a search for wolves “in sheep’s clothing” risks misjudging as wolves our sisters and brothers who are in fact sheep, if black sheep, within our Church and even our social groups and families.

Please let me suggest these possible remedies to these problems, for me as much as for each of us: The next time somebody says something or acts in a way with which you disagree or that you think is wrong, make an intentional effort to discern (if not write down) something good or true in the other person’s message or action, even if the balance of this person’s message or action is still wrong or erroneous. This intentional seeking of the good in one another will help us to differentiate sheep from wolves, good trees and their fruit from bad, while maintaining the charity for one another, especially as Christians, which our Lord teaches us is the highest good of all.

Homily for Monday, 24 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist, Mass During the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 49:1-6; Psalm 139:1b-3, 13-14ab, 14c-15; Acts 13:22-26; Luke 1:57-66, 80

Those of us who have children or have otherwise ever participated in naming children: What was your experience in naming your children? Did you have their names picked out long in advance; right before the children’s birth; maybe within a few days after their birth? From when I was a child, if a teacher or my parents called me in a stern tone by my full name—“Warren Roger Schmidt, come here right now”—or if my parents cycled through my sister’s and brother’s name (it was even more ominous if they included the dogs’ or cats’ names) before calling me, I knew I was in trouble!

John the Baptist’s parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, were the type of parents who were decisive in naming their child. “No, his name is John,” Elizabeth answers for her still-mute husband Zechariah, silenced by an angel for doubting that Elizabeth, in her advanced age, could conceive a child. Zechariah then supports his wife, calling for a tablet on which he writes, “John is his name.” Elizabeth and Zechariah give their child the name John over the objection of some of their relatives, who protest that “There is no one among your relatives who has this name.”

The name John for Elizabeth’s and Zechariah’s child is not given out of the blue, though. John means “God is gracious.” This name, John, reminds us of a few verses before our Gospel reading today from Luke, when Elizabeth prophesies about the child she has conceived: “So has the Lord done for me at a time when he has seen fit [or when the Lord has been gracious, in some translations] to take away my disgrace before others.”

I suppose the name Elizabeth and Zechariah were expected to give John, Zechariah, after his father, meaning “the LORD has remembered,” would have been a perfectly appropriate name for this child. Maybe if Elizabeth and Zechariah were anything like my parents, they may have wanted to give John a name that was not too susceptible to shortened forms or schoolyard nicknames: “Hey, Zack”! Or perhaps simply “Z., Jr”…

My Old German-derived first name, Warren, fittingly meaning “keeper of animals,” is not too common and not easily susceptible to being shortened. But my Norman-derived second name, Roger, meaning “famous spear,” runs in my extended family: My uncle is Roger and my great grandfather was also Roger. My Colombian brother Basilians, because of their difficulty in pronouncing “Warren,” call me Roger.

The name of John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, is an apt reminder to us that God is gracious to us now, as God has been gracious to us going back to the first moments of creation. Through John’s parents Elizabeth and Zechariah, we are reminded that “God is a promise, oath, or abundance,” and that “the LORD has remembered” us and our needs. God sent us, through Elizabeth and Zechariah, John, “God is gracious,” to be the forerunner of Jesus, “God saves.”

Homily for Sunday, 23 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:1, 2, 3, 4; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

This homily was given at the Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.

Have any of us ever received a gift from somebody, or has somebody ever done a good deed for us that we felt we could never possibly repay adequately?

This would happen regularly when I ministered in Colombia, among the poor of Cali and Santa Marta, where the Basilians have a parish and school and had a novitiate house. The people would be so grateful for any good deed or anything we could give them, and even simply for our presence as Basilians among them, that they would often say to us, to mean that they did not have anything to offer us in return for what we had given them, “Dios te pague” (“May God repay you”). More recently, Fr. Paul English, my brother Basilian and a graduate of St. John Fisher College (with whom some of us may be familiar), who knows several Colombian seminarians, both our own Basilian brothers and seminarians of dioceses in which he has served, has occasionally added humorously to his hello or goodbye greetings to these seminarians: “Dios te pegue” (“May God smack you”)!

Our reading this morning from the Book of Genesis places both the king of Salem, Melchizedek, and Abram (later Abraham) in a Dios te pague moment. In Genesis, just before the reading we hear today, four kings who were Abram’s enemies had been making war against kings who were Abram’s allies, including Melchizedek. Even Abram’s nephew, Lot, had been taken captive by one of the enemy kings. Abram pursues Lot’s captors until he is victorious in favor of Melchizedek and his other allied kings, ending the war and recovering Lot and the other captives. Interestingly, the name of Salem, Melchizedek’s kingdom, derives from the same Hebrew root as does shalom. Like many words in ancient languages, shalom, which is usually translated to English as “peace”—so we could think of Melchizedek as a figure representing peace who, in our first reading today, has in fact just won victory and peace, ending a disastrous war—has a greater range of meaning than we often realize. Shalom can mean peace, but also wholeness or completeness, harmony, or prosperity. It may also take on the meaning of a simpler greeting like hello or goodbye. If we were to translate shalom in this idiomatic greeting sense into Spanish, we might say, Dios te pague (“May God repay you”), although hopefully not, unless with good humor, Dios te pegue (“May God smack you”)!

Our reading today from Genesis places us on the scene of a meeting of two representatives of shalom, Melchizedek, king of Salem (or perhaps, appropriately, king of “shalom”), and Abram. This meeting between Melchizedek and Abram, after which Abram has returned goods and prisoners taken by their enemies in the war they have just won, is a shalom moment; a Dios te pague moment.

To thank Abram, what does Melchizedek offer him but simple bread and wine? Melchizedek realizes quickly that he is unable to offer Abram any appropriate gift for having saved his kingdom and his people from the enemy kings who had attacked him and taken his goods and people captive. So Melchizedek offers Abram simple bread and wine, accompanied by a blessing of these gifts. Melchizedek’s offering to Abram of bread and wine, with a blessing, may call to our minds what we do every time we celebrate Mass; every time we celebrate our Eucharist (a Greek-derived word that means “thanksgiving”), especially on this feast focusing on the gifts of the Eucharist, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.

Like Melchizedek, we offer bread and wine because we can offer no more. When we bring bread and wine to the altar during our Eucharist, we bless it. The priest blesses the bread and wine with a prayer that is often silent, especially at Sunday Mass, but a prayer that hearkens back to Jewish table blessing prayers: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: Fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life… Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you: Fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”

And then, through our Eucharistic celebration, our offering of bread and wine to God because nothing we might offer to God measures up to God’s goodness to us, something altogether miraculous happens before our eyes: This blessed bread and wine, our all-too-little gift to God, becomes “for us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God chooses this simple bread and wine, “work of human hands,” as the sacramental means by which God offers himself, God’s Son, really, truly, and fully to us. This becomes our Dios te pague moment: “May God repay you.”

More than we could ever repay God, God “pays” us with his very self, really, truly, and fully, in our Eucharist, under the form of simple bread and wine. God’s Son Jesus Christ has been offering himself really, truly, and fully since the night he freely accepted being “handed over” in an act of betrayal by one of his own apostles; an act of denial by another; an act of fearful fleeing from Jesus’ passion and death by still others. On that night, Jesus offered us his very self really, truly, and fully: “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me… This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” This deepens our Dios te pague moment and projects it into our history, as it becomes our Church’s celebration “in remembrance” of Christ’s passion and death, until he returns at the end of time.

But this first Dios te pague moment in which Jesus hands himself to us; this Dios te pague moment now projected into our history as Church, did not happen without any previous sign to prepare us for the moment when Christ gave himself to us under the form of bread and wine. This preparatory sign of Christ’s real, true, and full self-offering to us first at the Last Supper is recounted to us in the Gospel we hear today from Luke.

Any sign, any miracle, properly-speaking, is not only a nature-defying action of God, but it involves our action. At the Last Supper, Jesus said to his Apostles as he handed himself over to them, to us, really, truly, and fully: “Do this in memory of me.” What, then, are we to do in memory of him? What could we do; what could we offer God that could measure up to God’s real, true, and full gift to us of his very self?

Nothing we could offer could ever measure up to God’s offering of God’s very self to us: This is precisely the point of the Last Supper. This is precisely the point of Jesus’ miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes of which we hear from Luke today. Still, Jesus says to the Twelve, who have asked him to “dismiss the crowd” following them to buy themselves some much-needed rest and quiet: “Give them some food yourselves.”

This, without a doubt, would have caught Jesus’ disciples off guard. They were unprepared to “give them some food” themselves, out of the little they had to offer; out of their own poverty. For the Twelve, this was not only their Dios te pague moment—“May God repay you”—but, with all the due gentleness and good humor of the Son of God, it was Jesus’ Apostles’ Dios te pegue moment: “May God smack you.”

“Give them some food yourselves.” In other words, Jesus says to us, offer what you are able out of your poverty, and I will multiply it beyond your wildest imagination. But I will wait to multiply your gift; I will wait to work a miracle until you are confronted with your poverty, your inadequacy in offering any gift that could possibly measure up to God’s real, true, and full offering of self. I will wait until you are confronted, “smacked,” with having to bless and offer simple bread and wine, or five loaves and two fish for five thousand people.

I will wait until your Dios te pague moment meets a Dios te pegue moment. Give one another and the world “some food yourselves.” “Do this in remembrance of me.” Offer this world shalom, and only then will I multiply your “work of human hands” beyond your wildest imagination.

Homily for Thursday, 20 June 2019

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 11:1-11; Psalm 111:1b-2, 3-4, 7-8; Matthew 6:7-15

Thursday of the 11th week in Ordinary Time

“Please put up with me”: Am I underestimating the probability of success in beginning an important message or trying to convince somebody with such a plea? Well, we know from the fairly spread of the Christian faith in the time of St. Paul, especially in large cities of the then-Roman Empire like Corinth that developed thriving Christian communities even under intermittent persecution from Rome and some Jewish leaders, that St. Paul was quite successful and convincing in spreading our faith.

I think it is important for us to remember that these Corinthians of St. Paul’s time were especially difficult people to bring to the Christian faith. Corinth was a rich city and proud of it, thanks to its possession of not one but two ports on the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed for increased trade by sea and therefore wealth to enter the city. Change, especially conversion from one faith, Greco-Roman paganism, to another, Christianity, is a tough sell when all is going so well for a city the way it was for first-century Corinth.

Scripture scholars often refer to St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians as his “tearful letter.” St. Paul pleaded with the Corinthians in bringing them to the Christian faith to the point of tears, out of a deep love for them, like no other people or city to which he wrote and ministered. To the Corinthians especially, St. Paul’s message, his preaching of a poor, humble Christ who freely accepted death on a cross to save us was, we could say, a religious culture shock.

In wealthy cities like Corinth, one paid handsomely to study under an elite teacher. This clashed, as we hear from 2 Corinthians today, with St. Paul’s preaching of “the Gospel” to the Corinthians “free of charge.” No self-respecting teacher or preacher in an ancient Greek city like Corinth would have taught or preached “free of charge” as St. Paul did, not only to a few wealthy students but to the whole city and to the world. Yet St. Paul’s strategy, along with pleading with the Corinthians to “put up with” him, worked splendidly anyway, no doubt by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

If we reflect on St. Paul’s loving pleading with the Corinthians to the point of tears, “Please put up with me,” what are the messages we find most difficult to accept today in our lives? Have we ever had difficulty accepting change even when change is necessary or right?

Maybe we have difficulty hearing somebody and accepting her or his message when this person differs from us politically or in understanding of the Church and its mission, for example, or when another person does not share our Christian faith or moral understanding at all. Maybe as difficult for many of us (if I have heard accurately from some of us here at St. Kateri Parish) is the impending change in leadership in this parish after anywhere from nine to forty-three years of Basilian leadership here.

I pray that we at St. Kateri will not only “put up with” but come to love St. Kateri’s new pastor when he begins here next week. I pray that everybody who leads, who prays, and who loves in this parish will continue to lead, pray, and grow in love with a new pastor and vicars, as the Corinthians went from putting up with St. Paul in his time to leading, praying, and genuinely loving him and one another for the growth and unity of the Church.

Homily for Tuesday, 18 June 2019

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 8:1-9; Psalm 146:2, 5-6ab, 6c-7, 8-9a; Matthew 5:43-48

Tuesday of the 11th week in Ordinary Time

Is anybody here able to think of somebody you would consider an enemy?

In one sense, I have difficulty thinking of anybody I would consider to be a true enemy. But what do we mean today when we speak of an enemy, compared to what Jesus meant by our “enemies” in his time, as we hear today in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus asks us to “love [our] enemies and pray for those who persecute” us?

Today, as in Jesus’ time, we might think of an enemy as any foe, any adversary, anybody who demeans, disrespects or, as Jesus says, persecutes us. Some of us in our not-too-distant Church history, or maybe even still today, might speak of Satan as the (arch-)enemy. These definitions of an enemy have persisted for centuries and still exist now in English and many languages. Yet many ancient languages spoken in Jesus’ time and before then distinguished our more common definition of an enemy as a persecutor from another form of enemy as essentially a stranger.

If we include within our possible range of meaning of “enemy” somebody who is a stranger to us, does Jesus’ command in our Gospel today, “love your enemies,” not become somewhat more challenging to us? Is it not challenging enough to love somebody who constantly demeans or persecutes us, without having to love also anybody who is a stranger to us? I cannot think of many, if any, people who demean or persecute me to the point that I would consider them enemies. But I am able to think of people, some at one time close to me, with whom I could make a better effort to communicate; others who think and behave differently from the way I would think or behave about whom I could avoid gossiping or whose differences I could make a more deliberate effort to understand and even honor. I could make a better effort than I do to listen attentively, and not only to reply but to understand and honor, to people I differ from in various ways.

How many of us could “love [our] enemies” more than we do in the sense of loving and honoring people who are or who have become strangers to us, even when this estrangement is more-or-less unintentional? Who are the strangers in our lives from whom Jesus is inviting us to become a little less estranged; to love more than we do?

Some people are easier to recognize as strangers than others, for example the neighbor who has just moved into the neighborhood. The farther another person’s experience is from our own, the easier it can be to define this person or situation as strange to or estranged from us. Perhaps the integration or lack thereof of migrants and refugees into our countries shows this especially strikingly. For undocumented migrants, refugees, or trafficked persons, there is yet another layer of estrangement, of “not like us.”

Yet estrangement exists within families and between people whose relationships were once close, let alone with people whose situations and experiences are far from us. How often do we make enemies, in this sense of estrangement, with people with whom we would otherwise be close, as in by blood or by friendship? The internet and its “social” media, and other forms of modern communication too often further accelerate this estrangement.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus invites us today. Work to bridge estrangement. Jesus’ challenge to us today through this commandment is great indeed.

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 Thursday, 13 June 2019– Memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 3:15-4:1, 3-6; Psalm 85:9ab, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Matthew 5:20-26

Thursday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

“Dear St. Anthony, please come ‘round. Something is lost and cannot be found.” How many of us have prayed this prayer or a prayer like this to St. Anthony when we have lost something?

St. Anthony of Padua is known as the patron saint for finding lost items. This association between St. Anthony and lost items is based on a legend of a Franciscan novice under St. Anthony’s guidance who left his religious order in anger, taking with him St. Anthony’s breviary, or book of daily prayers. According to the legend, an angry St. Anthony appeared in a dream to the novice the night after the novice had suddenly left the Franciscans with St. Anthony’s breviary. St. Anthony’s appearance in his dream convinced the novice to return to the Franciscans and to return the breviary to St. Anthony while accepting to do penance for having stolen the breviary and for his outburst of anger.

Maybe the novice’s vision of an angry St. Anthony in his dream was so effective in persuading the novice to return St. Anthony’s breviary and return to the Franciscans because it was so out of character for St. Anthony to lose his temper. St. Anthony is one of the most versatile saints of the Church, and a patron of many causes besides lost items, but he was not known as an angry saint. However, St. Anthony is associated with instances in which he interceded to quell anger or to repair the damage of angry outbursts. In one instance, a knight in Tuscany had beaten his wife, but then turned to St. Anthony in sorrow for his own sin. St. Anthony healed the knight’s wife. Another version of this legend has a young woman whose hair had been torn out by her husband turn to St. Anthony. Miraculously, while St. Anthony prayed for the woman as well as for repentance for her husband and reconciliation in their marriage, the woman’s hair grew back in St. Anthony’s presence.

St. Anthony of Padua is a saint of repentance and reconciliation. In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus intensifies the Old Testament commandment not to kill to include outbursts of anger that are meant to destroy or demean others: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors… ‘You shall not kill,’ and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

On the one hand, anger in itself is not a sin but an emotion with which God has created us all. Even God; even Jesus becomes angry occasionally, as the Bible shows us. On the other hand, God calls us to master our more intense emotions like anger so we do not use these emotions to destroy other people or ourselves. Jesus’ commandment could be extended, appropriately in our time, to avoidance of gossip, passive aggression, and other subtler but as-destructive forms of lack of control of our anger.

Maybe most important, though, is what Jesus says further on in today’s Gospel. If we are aware that another person “has anything against us,” Jesus says, “go first and be reconciled with your brother.” In other words, we might recognize that we are all sinners and that, sooner or later, we will need another’s forgiveness or need to forgive another person. Jesus asks us to anticipate this need for forgiveness, to be reconciled to one another, in a sense, preemptively. On this memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, may St. Anthony intercede for us, so that we might master anger; that we might know our own and one another’s need for reconciliation, and anticipate one another in this need, going “first” to “be reconciled with” our brothers and sisters.