Saturday, March 30, 2013
Blessed Among Us - Father Karl Rahner -
Our long journey through Lent came to an end with our Holy Thursday mass. We are now in the Triduum - Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil mass. It is seen as one continuous commemoration of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. As we celebrate Holy Week, I was struck by one of the reflections in the daily prayers that I use each day in the publication Give Us This Day. They list a "Blessed Among Us". For this past Tuesday, the Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner was chosen as the "Blessed Among Us". Rahner is consider one of our Church's most significant theologians of the twentieth century and the Vatican II era. Reading his theology is hard work, but the insights that he brings out are amazing. In The Word Among Us, it states that Rahner's quiet and methodical approach to theology bridged the gap between Catholic theology and the modern world more than any other theologian.
It is interesting how many in our secular world, and many in our government, now see the Church as the enemy and as irrelevant to the world. I never thought I would see such a thing in my lifetime. In the past fiver years in particular, I have seen such a change in the mentality of our world. Rahner tried very hard to implement the ideas coming out of the Second Vatican Council to the modern Church, and he expressed sadness as to how much of the promise coming out of the Council still remained to be fulfilled.
All of us as modern believers try are called to apply our faith in an attempt not only to understand the modern world, but to transform that world as well. I am thankful for examples such as Karl Rahner who help us and inspire us on our journey of faith.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
3/31/2013 – Easter Morning – Juan 20:1-9; Acts 10:34a, 37-43
Today is the morning we have been
anticipating throughout our Lenten journey.
Lent has been a very special time of preparation for us as
Catholics. We have been kneeling at the
beginning and ending of mass during Lent, signifying for us the penitential
nature of this season, of the need to repent, to seek forgive, and to change
our lives. The Church asks us to go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation during
Lent, and to practice the Lenten disciplines of prayer, almsgiving, and
fasting.
We knew that this Lenten time of
preparation would lead us to this joyful celebration of Easter. But it is interesting for us to see the
reactions of those in our Gospel today as they come to the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene is worried and anxious,
wondering what they have done with our Lord’s body. Peter and the other beloved disciple ran to
the tomb to see what was going on, trying to figure out why the stone had been
rolled away and why the burial cloths were sitting there in a pile. There is not a lot of joy in their responses,
but rather anxiety, worry, and activity.
Sometimes it takes us a long time to
realize the significance of an event, for it to penetrate our hearts and our
lives, to reflect on its meaning and to ponder it. We have talking about the pilgrimage to
Santiago de Compostela – the Way of St James – all during the Lenten
season. Being a pilgrim is a spiritual
journey, but sometime it takes a while to really have that journey make
sense. In the pilgrimage group that I accompanied
to Spain back in April, one of the members of that group was an 80-year-old
parishioner from St Richard parish in Jackson named Lyons. I cannot even imagine what I would be like to
go on that pilgrimage at 80 years old, walking about 200 miles over the course
of 2 weeks. While we were walking on the
pilgrimage route, Lyons kept on remaking to me – “Father Lincoln – I just don’t
feel like a pilgrim. I don’t feel the
Spirit on this journey.” When a pilgrim
is hiking 15 or 16 miles a day in rough terrain and through whatever weather
there is – through snow, sleet, rain, and hail that we had throughout our
journey – it is tough not concentrating on what is going on physically during
the pilgrimage. The spirituality of the
pilgrimage is there, but a lot of times it is not until the pilgrim has some
time to pray and reflect upon what has gone on, then the real profound
spiritual lessons hit home. When we
finally arrived at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compestela, when we hugged the
statue of St. James and went to mass and did all the other pilgrimage rituals
upon arriving at our destination, the spirituality of the pilgrimage took hold
a bit more. And when the pilgrims arrive
back home, the spirituality of the pilgrimage starts to resonate more and more
with each passing day. I still have
insights and reflections about my pilgrimage experiences as the days and weeks
and months go by.
The Passion of Christ, our salvation
through his death and Resurrection, his real presence in the Eucharist – these
are all mysteries of our faith. And by
the word “mystery”, we mean that its fully meaning can never by fully absorbed
or understood by us, that on our faith journey, we will always grow in our
understanding and comprehension of God and the divine presence in our
lives. I always think about what St
Augustine once said – that when we think we fully understand God and know what
he is all about, then we know we really don’t understand God at all. Think again about Mary Magdalene and the
disciples that found the empty tomb that morning. Their first reaction was not initially
“Alleluia! Praise the Lord! Christ has risen!” They had not expected the resurrection, and it
took them a long time to figure it out.
But even on that morning, our Gospel says that the “other
disciple,” the one who first arrived at
the tomb, “he saw and believed.” Our
belief will help us grow in our understanding, and our understanding will help
us in our belief.
During Lent, many of us took on
disciplines that helped up in our preparation during this Holy Season. When I was visiting one of the CCD
classrooms, one of the teachers was remarking to the students that those Lenten
disciplines should not end with Easter, but should influence our life of
discipleship throughout the year. I
recall one young man from St Richard parish in Jackson who started praying the
rosary and offering support to the women at the abortion clinic in Jackson as
part of his Lenten observance one year.
Many years later, he now is one of the most active Christians in the
pro-life movement in the Jackson area.
As a new priest, this young man often came to me and tried to get me
more involved in my pro-life efforts. I
started going out to the abortion clinic myself during Lent my first year as a
priest to pray the rosary with a group of parishioners, and that group still
continue that practice to this day.
So, as we celebrate the resurrection of
Christ today and the salvation we have in him, may we ponder its significance
in our lives as we now journey through the Easter season, and may we live out
the reality of the resurrection in our lives each day.
3/30/2013 – Easter Vigil – Genesis 1:1-2:2; Luke 24:1-12
The Easter Vigil mass is such a joyful
and wonderful time for us as Catholics – there is really no other mass like it
in the rest of our Church’s liturgical year.
I was speaking to some of our parishioners about this mass several weeks
ago, and we were all remarking how the symbolism of this mass sticks out in our
minds, how it so very dramatically represents what our faith is all about. The sun sets before our Easter Vigil mass
began this evening, and then the Easter fire became a light shining in the midst of the
evening’s darkness, symbolizing the light of Christ that is brought into our
world and into our lives in our very special way through tonight’s celebration of
our Savior’s death and resurrection.
Our first reading from Genesis tonight
brings us back to the very beginning of the world, where there is this formless
darkness covering the abyss, where wind is sweeping over the waters, and God
announces: “Let there be light.” As we
hear this reading in the midst of the darkness of our church, the symbolism is
striking. The lights of the paschal
candle – the lights of the small candles that we held which were lit off that
paschal candle – they are all lights penetrating the darkness of the
world.
We celebrate Christ’s resurrection
today as we hear about the women who go to the tomb to anoint his body, but to
their amazement they find that the tomb was empty. It took awhile for those women, the apostles,
and the members of the early Church to figure out all the implications of what
resurrection meant to them in terms of their faith. And that is for us to figure out as
well. How does Christ’s death and
resurrection affect our journey? How does it influence the ways we live out our
faith?
The significance of these events, of
the cross and resurrection, is present in our community in a special way in
some of the sacraments that we will celebrate this evening. We have three adults who are coming into
full communion into our Church. They
have been journeying through the RCIA process this past year, they have
undergone a time of prayer, discernment, and preparation. They will receive the sacrament of
confirmation and will receive Christ in the Eucharist for the first time in
their lives. We also have a group of six
youth and children who will be receiving first holy communion for the first
time as well. And a member of the RCIA
group who is coming back to the Church in a very committed way will receive a
special blessing tonight as well. The
Easter Vigil mass had been the time in the early Church when adults would enter
into the faith. The reforms of the
Second Vatican Council, which we have been celebrating this year in the Year of
Faith, revived this practice. With
great joy, we celebrate this special moment with these members of our faith
community.
As we celebrate this evening's mass, what
we cannot forget is this: that the resurrection is intrinsically tied to the
cross; that the cross is intrinsically connected
to the resurrection. We had 40 days in
the desert during Lent in order for Easter to really mean something to us in
our lives of faith. We live in a world
today where our faith is under attack, where our government is taking stabs at
the freedom we have to practice our religion and to live out our faith. In
order to see the light of the resurrection, we in turn must be lights shining
in the darkness of our world. And while
we had 40 days of Lent, we need to be aware that the Easter season does not end
with this Easter Vigil mass and with Easter morning tomorrow. We will travel through the Easter season to
Pentecost on May 27. For these next
weeks during the Easter season, we will ponder what the resurrection of Jesus
really means to us, we will ponder what it really means to live the
resurrection in our lives.
3/29/2013 – Good Friday –
We have had this cross of iron
accompanying us during our Lenten journey in our parish this year, a symbol of
how we have been accompanying Jesus during Lent as he makes his way to the
cross. The cross of iron is located on
the highest point on the pilgrimage route on the road to Santiago de
Compostela. Last April, when I walked to
the cross of iron with two other members of our pilgrimage group that had been
walking for almost 3 weeks, I knew in my heart that I was approaching holy
ground. That day we had some of the
worst weather of our pilgrimage route.
Our whole hike was filled with cold, wet weather, but that day in
particular it was raining and sleeting, and the fog was everywhere. I had the stone with me that I had gotten
from the backyard one of my parishioners in Yazoo City, a lady who had been
suffering a lot of physical ailments that had confined her to her home for many
years. I used to visit her each month in
her home to bring her communion. She
gave me that stone to take on my pilgrimage journey. I also had with me a plastic bag full of
prayers and intentions that many parishioners and prisoners had written down
for me to take. I also placed at the
cross of iron a rosary that the Ladies Auxiliary of the Knights of Columbus
from St Richard parish had made for me symbolizing the prayer of the Blessed
Virgin Mary that I felt with me on my journey.
One can see the cross of iron from a distance from many miles off – it
looked so tiny on that far away mountain.
Then, it gets lost in the midst of the mountainous terrain until you’re
right there. As I turned that corner and saw the cross of iron before me, tears
started streaming down my cheeks as I felt the presence of Jesus before me, as
I felt all the prayers and intentions that I was carrying in my heart for
myself and for many other people. After
I spent some time at the cross of iron praying and placing the objects I
brought with me at the cross, I went to a small shelter that was located there
to get out of the wet, chilly weather. There were three young men from New York
at that shelter who had been walking on the pilgrimage route. They were standing at the shelter watching
the other pilgrims place their rocks at the cross of iron; they were joking around
and telling off-color jokes. I was taken
aback, and almost said something to them, but refrained from doing so. As we
started walking again on the trail, one of these young men started walking with
me. He started telling me how he and his
friends decided to go on this pilgrimage after seeing the movie THE WAY with
Martin Sheen about it. He recounted how
he had grown up Catholic but had really lost his faith and had not gone to mass
in a very long time. He told me how he
was a divorced father, how he missed his kids so much. He told me that this journey he was making
was in penance for all the sins he had committed in his life, and thought about
how he needed to regain his faith. I
thought about the crosses that we all bear, crosses that sometimes seem
insurmountable and so difficult to bear.
While I was put off by this seemingly disrespectful attitude I saw in
this young man from New York at the cross of iron, at that holy ground, I began
to see the crosses that he was carrying, the things that were weighing him
down. I saw that in his own way, he was
finding God again on this pilgrimage, he was struggles with his crosses and all
that was weighing him down in life.
As we come to church today on Good Friday,
on the day that Jesus died, at the culmination of his journey to the cross, our
hearts are opened once again to the importance of Christ's passion to the
context of our faith as we try to grow in our understanding of the salvation that
we receive through his suffering, death, and resurrection. In the
passion narrative from John’s Gospel, we hear the details of how Jesus is abandoned
by many of his followers: how he is denied by Peter, victimized by those in
religious & political power, and tortured, tormented, and abused by the Roman
military. While we see the many facets
of betrayal and abandonment in today's Gospel, we have great witnesses of faith
as well, with the great testimony of the beloved disciple, the Virgin Mary, and
the women who remain with Jesus at the cross.
We venerate the cross of Jesus today as we
commemorate Good Friday. As his
followers, we unite our sufferings with the sufferings that he endured on his
way to the cross. In a few moments, we will venerate the cross of Jesus, the
cross of redemption and salvation. We
will place our stones at the cross and we will show a sign of veneration, love,
and respect for his cross. We will be on
holy ground in this holy place on Good Friday.
May the meaning of this moment truly penetrate our hearts and our
faith.
Monday, March 25, 2013
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