Use those talents!

What do you say? I encourage you to reflect on today's gospel reading at Mass: Matthew 25:14-30.

God bless and have a blessed day!

"Let's not lose our heads!"

On the memorial of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, I'm pleased to announce my first "Willing The Good" video blog entry! Enjoy:

Augustine, Grace, and True Love

Today is the feast day in which we honor our father in the faith, the great Doctor of Grace, Saint Augustine of Hippo. A man of unmatched influence in the life of our Church, he remains the great Prodigal Son of early Christianity.

Today I was fortunate enough to attend the Diocese of Harrisburg Religious Education Director/Coordinator Convocation and we were blessed to celebrate Mass with Father Edward Quinlan, Diocesan Secretary for Education.

In his homily, Father Quinlan gave the usual biographical highlights of St. Augustine's life but he then turned to a rather beautifully simple point - something that really helps to understand the saint's great bout with Pelagius about, amongst other things, the nature of grace.

Pelagius famously taught that we were essentially able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and reach God the Father. But Father Quinlan pointed to the profound lessons Augustine had learned in his own life that had given him a very different view.

You see, Augustine had been a great sinner. He was a man who had looked in every nook and cranny he could find searching for fulfillment, meaning, and value. Yet all he found was pain, unhappiness, and an ever increasing emptiness he could never fill. His life was like the proverbial barrel with a hole in the bottom that one tries hopelessly to fill, only to find it emptying over and over again.

But then something happened. As Augustine frames it in addressing God, "Our hearts were made for You, O Lord... and they are restless until they rest in You." He understood that GOD HAD FOUND HIM - not the other way around. He knew firsthand the dramatic, ungraspable grace of the Father in Heaven which is His alone to give. Our role is to assent - to humble ourselves and to receive willingly the gift.

Real love is always a gift! Love, joy, happiness cannot be taken. They are beyond the reach of the one who seeks to take hold of them on his own terms apart from the One from whom they come.

This is a beautiful lesson for us today, I think. This world is filled with voices promising us that if we just WANT hard enough, if we DESIRE with our whole being, we can have anything we want. Maybe Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said it best when he said, "The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness."

Open our mind, our hearts, our souls O Lord that we may receive every grace that comes from you with a spirit of humility! Amen.

Why exactly is it a "hard saying" after all?

I love to think about, pray about and discuss the Church's teaching on the Eucharist because it's truly at the core of the Catholic faith. It's also important, I think, for us to recall that all of Christianity was united on this doctrine for 1500 years (and most Christians throughout the world still are). It is a reality that has defined the faith of countless disciples since the Last Supper. I've addressed this topic before a bit (see my 2/25/2013 post) but it's one that is never exhaustible, so here goes!

From the very beginning, Christ's followers understood his instructions to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be literal. John 6 bears this out quite plainly in that the crowds (of his followers, mind you) were taken aback and said that it was "a hard saying" indeed (see John 6:22-71). Then, something amazing happens: THEY LEAVE IN DROVES!

But surely Jesus spoke up when this happened, right? Surely he called them back and clarified the confusion by explaining that he was merely speaking symbolically, that of course he wasn't actually referring to his real, physical flesh and blood...

Wrong. He lets them leave!

This is absolutely crucial to face. The earliest followers of Christ came to understand this plainly - Jesus fills us with his grace and truth and so too does he leave us the eternal sacrifice promised in Malachi 1:11. He does this by making fully and substantially present his body, blood, soul and divinity in the midst of his Church for us to literally consume. We are nourished by the glorified flesh and blood of Christ, flesh and blood made present at every Mass by the power of Christ working through the priest. We, in a sense, "become what we eat" as we are strengthened and graced by Jesus' spiritual AND physical presence within us.

I am thrilled more and more each day as this reality sinks in. The awe this truth inspires is hard to describe, quite frankly. All I can say is "THANK YOU JESUS!" And now, just for fun, here are a bunch of quotes from some renowned early disciples of Our Lord:

St. Ignatius of Antioch (110 AD): Referring to "those who hold heterodox opinions" or, in other words, those who do not conform with accepted or orthodox standards or beliefs of the early church, Ignatius writes in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans:

"They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again."

St. Justin Martyr (ca. 148-155 AD): I've quoted this passage from Justin's First Apology before but it's too clear-cut not to use again:

“This food is called among us Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake except one who believes that the things we teach are true, and has received the washing for  forgiveness of sins and for rebirth, and who lives as Christ handed down to us. For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink; but as  Jesus Christ our Savior being incarnate by God’s Word took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the Word of prayer which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation, is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus.”

St. Athanasius (373 AD): The legendary Alexandrian bishop had this to say in his Sermon to the Newly Baptized:

"You shall see the Levites bringing loaves and a cup of wine and placing them on a table. So long as the prayers of supplication and entreaties have not been made, there is only bread and wine. But after the great and wonderful prayers have been completed, then the bread is become the Body, and the wine the Blood, of our Lord Jesus Christ."

St. Ambrose (390 AD): In his treatise entitled The Sacraments, the venerable bishop further explains how the priest is able to "confect" the bread and wine only by Christ's power, not his own:

"You may perhaps say: 'My bread is ordinary.' But that bread is bread before the words of the sacraments; where the consecration has entered in, the bread becomes the flesh of Christ. And let us add this: How can what is bread be the Body of Christ? By the consecration. The consecration takes place by certain words, but whose words? Those of the Lord Jesus... Therefore it is the word of Christ that confects the sacrament."

Paschasius Radbertus (831 AD): An abbot of Old Corbie Monastery near Amiens, Radbertus wrote quite plainly:

"This is precisely the same flesh that was born of Mary, suffered on the Cross, and rose from the tomb."

There are far too many examples to quote here. I encourage you to look into it and to read the primary sources for yourself!

(Note: Huge hat-tip to Karl Keating and his wonderful book

Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Ignatius Press, 1988.)

Holy Action Figures!!!

When I was a kid, like so many young boys with wild imaginations, I LOVED action figures.  I would spend countless hours (not to mention Lord knows how much of my Nana's generously given dollars) picking out my favorite heroes - Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, Zeddemore, He-Man, Darkwing Duck, Luke/Han/Obi-Wan, Batman... you NAME it!

No contest... After all, who do you think Batman turns to when he can't
find the keys to the Batmobile? My patron St. Anthony, of course!

When I surrounded myself with these guys, I was transported to other worlds, other places where good and evil duked it out to the death.  I was in control of their every move.  I made them go wherever I wanted, say whatever I wanted, do whatever I wanted.  I called all of the shots and it felt pretty good - usually much better than it did to do homework, clean up my room or let my brother play what he wanted to play.

Recently, it occurred to me as I was glancing around at the plethora of religious figurines and statues I have surrounding me at work, in my car and at home just how similar this characteristic of my life these days is to when I was a kid with all of my action figures.  I don't collect toys of my heroes from Ghostbusters, Star Wars or Ninja Turtles anymore (although every now and then I'm tempted to!).  But I have other heroes - SAINTS!  Men and women of courage and devotion who gave everything in the name of justice, peace, honor and love.  They have great names, too - Saint Ignatius of Antioch (bishop who knew the Apostles and who was eaten by lions in ancient Rome), Saint Tarcisius (killed by a mob for refusing to hand over the Eucharist he was carrying to condemned Christians in prison), Saint Therese (paradigm of humility and pure witness to the love of Christ).

These are my heroes now.  But I notice that there is one HUGE difference with these "holy action figures."  I don't bend them to meet my will - it's the other way around.  When I look at these depictions of my true heroes, I'm once more transported to other places where good and evil duke it out to the death.  But I'm not in control of their every move.  I don't make them go wherever I want, say whatever I want, do whatever I want.  I don't call any of the shots - and it feels pretty good.  These heroes call me out of myself.  They invite me to a life of service, a life of love in which I look to them for guidance on how to bend my own will to be more like the will of Him whom they all cherished to the end and beyond.

I wonder if this isn't the reason we all search for heroes in the first place?  In the end, they indeed exist.  But the most powerful ones of all are the ones who discover what true power is - to lay down one's life for Another.