2/4/2012 – Mark 6:30-34 – Homily - Saturday of the fourth week -

        Today, we have a very interesting Gospel reading, with the apostles having just returned from their missionary travels, excited about telling Jesus about all they did & all they taught.  And what is his response to them? -  “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." As I meditated about this Scripture passage, I thought about the philosophy of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a group I was a part of in the Jackson area.  Doing good works and helping the poor are an important part of our faith and the ministry of Jesus, but they flow out of our faith and our spirituality.  Our compassion for the poor and our outreach to them, our work for justice and peace, our solidarity with them, must flow out of the faith and spirituality we cultivate from within.  So Jesus told the apostles that they must get away, that they must pray, rest, and renew themselves in their faith.  

        This so goes against the grain of our society, where many of us feel the need to be connected by cell phone or internet 24 hours a day.  When I was with a youth group several years ago at Catholic Heart Work Camp, the youth told me that the hardest part of that experience was not having music or noise filling up the space while they were working. And when I suggested to another priest that our youth should maybe put away their cell phones and technology when they go away on a weekend mission trip, he looked at me as if I were stark-raving mad, like that was not even within the realm of possibility, that we couldn’t ask them to undertake such an arduous sacrifice of not having a cell phone for the weekend.  If we try to fill up our lives with all kinds of external and superficial noise, when do we have time to listen to God in silence and in what He is calling us to do?  When are we giving ourselves the space and time to refresh and renew our faith?  We can be moved with compassion for the poor like Jesus was when he saw the crowd without a shepherd to lead them, but we need to first feed our own faith and find the time to maintain & nurture our connection with God.