19 March 2017 - Third Sunday of Lent - JN 4:5-15, 19B-26, 39A, 40-42

       Last weekend, on the 2nd Sunday of Lent, we heard about Jesus being transformed on the mountaintop in the transfiguration, a revealing and instructive event for his disciples. Today, in our Gospel reading from John, another transformation takes place in the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well.  At the beginning of this encounter, we see how the Samaritan woman is separated from her community, how she is an outcast. She is getting water alone by herself in the hot afternoon sun when everyone else in the village would not dare brave that terrible heat.  Through this encounter with Jesus, she is able to turn away from her sins and her hurts, all that is keeping her from moving forward in her journey of faith. Now, not only is her life converted, but she becomes an evangelizer to the rest of her community.  Her sufferings and her longings are converted by Jesus into faith and hope, not only for herself, but for others.  

       Every weekend during Lent, we are looking at different saints or holy men and women who can edify us and encourage us on our Lenten journey. This brings us to the saint we are celebrating today.  Many Catholics mistakenly believe that St Vincent de Paul himself was the founder of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.  Yes, he is that organization’s patron saint and it was named after him. His work with the poor and the needy in 17th century France inspired the work of this society.  However, the French priest Vincent de Paul, the founder of the Vincentians and the founder of the women’s religious congregation the Daughter of Charity, died in 1660, more than 150 years before the start of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.  In May 1833, 20-year old Frederic Ozanam founded this society with a group of his friends while they were university students in Paris. Frederic was the fifth child born in the family of a French doctor.  Of 14 children born in this family, only 3 reached adulthood. As a teenager, Frederic starting having doubts about his Catholic faith.  His discussions with a priest helped him a lot. In the decades after the French revolution,  much of the population of France were openly hostile and mocking of the Catholic faith.  Frederic defended his faith against the condemnations of his professors and his fellow students. In a discussion club at the university that Frederic helped organize, Catholics, atheists, and agnostics debated the issues of the day. In one particular discussion, Frederic defended Christianity’s contributions to Western civilization.  One of the club members replied:  “Let us be frank, Mr. Ozanam; let us also be very particular.  What do you do besides talk to prove the faith you claim is in you?”  Frederic reflected on that question.  Yes, how did his actions reflect the faith that he preached?  He realized that he needed to start putting his faith into action.  He started visiting the poor neighborhoods of Paris with a friend, offering assistance to the residents there as best as he could.  Soon, a group of dedicated individuals formed around Frederic offering assistance to the poor - this was the genesis of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Even after Frederic became a professor of literature, he remained a passionate advocate for social justice and for helping the poor. The Society of St Vincent de Paul spread throughout Europe during these years. In 1848, a revolution rocked France. The unemployment rate in Paris skyrocketed.  The government asked Frederic and the Society of St Vincent de Paul to supervise dispersing aid to the poor. Later, Frederic founded a newspaper, The New Era, that advocated social justice for the poor and the working classes.  Some Catholics were put off by Frederic’s frank and honest words, but he persevered in proclaiming the Gospel of social justice in the midst of the industrial revolution that brought about harsh working and living conditions to the working classes.  Ozanam struggled with poor health the last decade of his life.  He died in 1853 at the age of 40.  At his funeral his friend Father Lacordaire described him as “one of those privileged creatures who came directly from the hand of God in whom God joins tenderness to genius in order to enkindle the world.” Frederic Ozanam was beatified by Pope John Paul II in the Cathedral of Notre Dame at the Catholic World Youth Day in Paris in 1997.  Ozanam once said: “It is our vocation to set people’s hearts ablaze, to do what the Son of God did, who came to light a fire on earth in order to set it ablaze with his love.” 

       Here are some suggestions you can incorporate in your Lenten journey in the spirit of Frederic Ozanam. As Ozanam tried to inspire others to live out their faith with zeal and enthusiasm, perhaps you could invite someone back to the Church who has fallen away from the faith or who is having doubts. This may not be easy.  But Christ calls all of his disciples to be evangelizers. One of the tenants of the Society of St Vincent de Paul is that the members of that society need to constantly grow and develop in their faith, and then out of that faith, to do good works.  Are we are part of a religious education program?  Do we read the Scriptures regularly on our own?  Are we spending time and energy studying and praying in our faith? If not, what can we do to be a lifelong learner? As the Society of St Vincent de Paul is devoted to good works, may we devote ourselves to good works as part of our Lenten journey.  This Friday, our confirmation class is having a soup supper, with funds benefiting different organizations in our community who reach out to the poor and need.  We will have a raffle to raise such funds too.  You could attend this soup supper as a part of your Lenten journey.  Soup will also be available for takeout. Frederic Ozanam once said:  “To become better - do a little good.”  A good quote for us on our Lenten journey.  

2nd Sunday of Lent - mass patterns

Penitential rite: 

As we continue our Lenten journey this 2nd Sunday of Lent, let us pray for transformation and renewal as we prepare for mass and recognize our sins  

1. Lord Jesus, you are the light that dispels the darkness, Lord have mercy. 

2. Christ Jesus, you are the Savior of the world: Christ have mercy.

3. Lord Jesus, you are the way that leads to everlasting life: Lord have mercy. 

Prayer of the Faithful -  Priest: The Lord looks upon us as we approach him in awe and respect. Let us now pray for our needs and the needs of others.

1. That the Church throughout the world might listen to God’s beloved Son and trust in his promises, let us pray to the Lord.

2. We pray that our world may be transfigured by peace and harmony. We pray for an end to war, violence, and terrorism.  Let us pray to the Lord.

3. For all who bear their share of hardship and suffering for the Gospel message, especially those persecuted because of their religion in the Middle East, in Asia, and in Africa, let us pray to the Lord.

4. For those children preparing for first communion, for the youth preparing for confirmation, and for those adults in our RCIA program.  May their Lenten journey help them deepen their faith and trust in the Son of God.  Let us pray to the Lord.  

5. For our community of faith as we grow in hospitality and service to our neighbors in need, let us pray to the Lord.

6. For the sick and shut-ins here in Tupelo, for those in the hospital, the hospice, and in nursing homes.  

7. For the repose of souls of faithful departed.  

Priest:  Our soul waits for you, O Lord, for you are our help and our protection. Hear these our prayers and graciously grant them through Jesus Christ your Son, our Lord for ever and ever.  AMEN.  

16 March 2017 - Thursday of the 2nd week of Lent - Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 16:19-31

       What is our priority?  That is the overall theme of our readings today.  And it is a good theme for us to contemplate on our Lenten journey.  The two men that Jeremiah contrasts are very apt descriptions in our modern world as well. We can trust in material things and worldly success, in power, strength, and might, in self-sufficiency and pride. Or we can trust in the Lord and in the values of the Gospel. The rich man in the Gospel also trusted in the values of the world and did not think about charity and service.  Lazarus was at his doorstep, but he was virtually invisible to the rich man.  Charity and helping others were not his priorities. Perhaps it is the same with out Lenten journey.  Some just think about giving something up for Lent, doing their duty, and that is it.  And if giving up drinking cokes or playing video games or eating chocolate is truly a sacrifice and something that normally had priority in our lives, then doing so is truly a Lenten disciples.  But we should not do so blindly and resolutely without reflection and prayer about it.  It is not about showing God how strong we are.  It needs to be about conversion and renewal.  But the true grace of Lent is not just giving up cokes or chocolate, but rather in allowing God’s grace transform our lives to make us truly free to live as disciples of Christ.  And rather than blindly going back to eating chocolate or drinking cokes at the end of forty days, we might want to reflect upon how God is inviting us to change during these days of Lent, if there is something deeper God is stirring within us.  Are we comfortable with what we see in our lives, in the movements of the heart that are going on?  Or do we need to look deep at our choices?  Are repentance and conversion during these 40 days a priority for us, or just another task we check off our list?  

15 March 2017 - Wednesday of the 2nd week of Lent - Jeremiah 18:18-20, Matthew 20:17-28

       In Mark’s Gospel, James and John themselves are the ones who ask Jesus if they can sit at the place of honor with him in God’s kingdom.  However, Matthew changes it a bit to have their mom ask for this favor for them. We all like to be recognized, don’t we?  We like to receive honor and praise, accolades and thanks.  Rather, in our faith, we are called to be loyal to the truth, to do the right things in the right way, not to act out of ulterior motives or for our own glory.  Just as Jesus’ critics plotted against him, so the people wanted to get rid of Jeremiah as well.  God uses Jeremiah to communicate the uncomfortable truth to the people, but they don’t want to hear.  They plot against him.  They want him to go away.  It seems like we live in a society where everyone wants to get an A, to win an award, to be the best.   We are called to do our best, to follow God’s will, but not everyone can be number one in everything all the time.  I remember that once a lady remarked to Mother Teresa that she wanted to be just like her, but Mother Teresa responded by saying, no, you are not called to be just like me.  You are called to be you.  G. K. Chesterton once said: “It is always the secure who are humble.” May God help us to be secure in our faith.  May God help us to be humble.  May God help us to follow his calling in life.  May our Lenten journey help us to be true.  

14 March 2017 - Tuesday of the 2nd week of Lent - Isaiah 1:10, 16-20

     We human beings can often be hypocritical, can’t we? We can offer prayers and offerings to God, but if they are not accompanied by words and actions that are congruent, perhaps God will see our hypocrisy and will doubt our sincerity, according to Isaiah. I recently saw a quote from Anthony of Egypt, the most famous of the Desert Fathers, and considered one of the inspirations of the monasticism movement in the Church. Anthony said: "Whoever has not experienced temptation cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Without temptations, no one can be saved.’”  We pray that we not be led to temptation, but I never considered seeing this from Anthony’s perspective.  I think in a lot of ways, our temptations can lead us to the hypocrisy that Isaiah and Jesus warn us of today. Jesus was always pointing out to the Pharisees that they were hypocritical in many ways, that they preached one thing and then put something else into practice, that they observed the strict little nuances of God’s laws, but then violated the spirit of the law, so not really following the laws at all. Do we need to look into our lives today to see how we are hypocritical, how we are leading ourselves and others away from the road of faith?  

17 March 2017 - St Patrick - Matthew 21: 33-43, 44-46

     I remember being in a parish as a lay person when I heard a member complaining that she had gone to the daily mass on March 17 to celebrate St Patrick’s day.  She was very proud of St Patrick and very proud of her Irish-American heritage.  After the mass was over, she came up to me, very upset that the priest had not even mentioned St Patrick once in the mass.  In many ways, St Patrick’s Day has become a big part of our cultural landscape in the US, since there are so many Irish Americans, with many of their ancestors having come over to the US during the Irish potato famine. I grew up in Chicago.  That city, to celebrate its large Irish-American population, had a huge parade downtown on St Patrick’s Day, led by the Irish-American mayor - Mayor Richard Daily, with the Chicago River being dyed green on that day.  But who was St Patrick?  We might not know a lot of details about this saint, or we might just assume a lot of things about him.  He lived in the 4th and 5th century.  I always envisioned him as being more recent in Church history.  We might not even know that Patrick was born in England, not Ireland, having been kidnapped from his village in England to be taken to Ireland as a slave where he served a king there for six years.  Patrick escaped slavery and returned to England, firm and devout in his Catholic faith.  He went to Gaul (present day France), where he became a priest and bishop.  He returned to Ireland as a Bishop.  His missionary success in Ireland in converting the faithful there to Christianity is honored in his role as the patron saint of that country. Having been a slave in that country, he turned his humiliation and sufferings into a source of Irish pride today.  Bishop Kopacz honors the Irish American heritage of so many priests in our Diocese and the contributions of Irish Americans to the Catholic faith by giving the Catholics in our Diocese a dispensation to eat corned beef and cabbage on this day, even though it is a Friday day of abstinence during Lent.  Honoring a man today who was a slave and who returned as a missionary to convert and help the people who enslaved him, we hear in the Gospel of the servants and the son of a landowner who are killed and rejected by the tenants of that landowner.  We might think of the many ways we see the message of the Gospel rejected in our own society, of the many ways we reject the Gospel message in our own hearts, of the ways we need to be open to the Gospel message of conversion and renewal during these days of our Lenten journey.  As St Patrick’s Day is a day of celebration and joy in the midst of Lent, as we honor the contributions of Irish Americans to our country, let us not forget the values of the Gospel and the way they call out to us today. 

12 March 2017 - 2nd Sunday in Lent - Therese of Lisieux - Matthew 17:1-9

      It is an ancient tradition of the Church to include the reading of Christ’s transfiguration in the weeks of preparation before Easter. As we hear about Jesus being transfigured in front of some of his disciples, we can reflect upon how all of us as disciples of Christ will be transfigured one day, when our redemption comes to its completion in the Resurrection of the body, when we will behold the new heaven and new earth.  But we do not have to wait for an end of our earthly lives to experience some of the reality of the transfiguration in our lives.  Christ’s transfiguration can have an affect on us right now; it can open us to the way our lives can be transformed during these 40 days of Lent.  The transfiguration was a central event in the life of Jesus.  Our experience of our life in the Lord, and in his holy Church, is only the beginning of what is to come when we enter the fullness of God’s kingdom.  Even now, we participate somewhat in that new reality.  Our participation in the Church gives us a glimpse of that kingdom that is to come, of the eternal realities of that kingdom.  Their witness to Christ’s transfiguration on the mountaintop strengthened the disciples’ faith. It came before they were to witness the events of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.  

    The faith of the disciples was to be shaken and tested through those events, so the transfiguration was there to encourage them, just as it is to encourage us as we hear this reading on the second Sunday of Lent.  The community of saints is always with us in their prayers and intercessions to encourage us and help us as well.  The holy woman we have chosen to discuss on this second weekend of Lent is St Therese of Lisieux.  I find it fascinating that this cloistered nun who died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 in a remote area in rural France more than a century ago is one of the most popular saints in the modern world. Therese Martin, affectionately known by the faithful as St Therese, the Little Flower, left behind a notebook containing her story, as well as correspondence that she wrote to family and friends.  She did not write huge volumes of complicated theology like St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas.  Yet, the profound nature of those writings and the way they have touched the souls of the faithful throughout the world prompted Pope John Paul II to name her as a Doctor of the Church, one of the few women to hold that distinction.  Here is a quote from St Therese from a morning prayer that she wrote, consecrating her day to the Lord:  “O my God! I offer you all my actions of this day for the intentions and for the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I desire to sanctify every beat of my heart, my every thought, my simplest works, by uniting them to Its infinite merits; and I wish to make reparation for my sins by casting them into the furnace of Its Merciful Love.”  Therese is a very much a product of her time and of the reality of her life.  She was very much spoiled and dotted upon by her family, especially by her father after the death of her mother when Therese was only 4 years old.  Therese entered the Carmelite convent when she was 15 years old - a very young age to become a religious sister.  Therese’s writings and her story should be read in the spirit of her reality and in the reality of our faith.  One suggestion I have is for you to read Therese’s  autobiography The Story of a Soul  during Lent, or to reread it if you have done so already.  I reread her autobiography when I was on the Camino pilgrimage last year; the words really spoke to me on my journey, they touched my heart very profoundly.  As you read Therese’s words, ask yourself: How is God speaking to you through her writings? Try to apply the spirit of her writings in the midst of your own reality.  Even though Therese was a cloistered nun whose life was confined to her convent in rural France, Therese was named the co-patron saint of missionaries in 1927, along with the great Jesuit missionary St Francis Xavier. Even though Therese did not go overseas to the missions herself, she had a special love of the missions.  She prayed for the missions; she prayed for the missionaries.  She wrote letters of support to them. This is a reminder to all of us who feel we can do nothing if we are not missionaries living in a far away land that it is the little things that keep God's kingdom growing.  We can all pray for the missionaries each day during Lent.  You can ask yourself how can you be more missionary and support the missions on your journey during Lent and after Lent as well. St. Therese believed that the people of her time lived in too great a fear of Gods judgment. She saw this fear as stifling, not allowing people to experience the freedom of the children of God. She went to God as a child approaches a parent with open arms and a profound trust.   Therese developed what she called “the little way.”  She believed that we could translate little everyday acts and chores into ways of manifesting our love for God and our love for our brothers and sisters.  In the convent, Therese worked as a sacristan by taking care of the altar and the chapel.   She served in the refectory and in the laundry room.  Her daily life had a lot of routines and ordinary acts. She believed that she infused these daily acts in loving commitment and the values of her faith.  This is a way we can infuse the ordinary acts of our life with great love.  This Lent, in the spirit of Therese, we are challenged to see the little things in life as a part of Therese’s “little way”, doing ordinary acts out of your love for God.  Whether we are doing chores around the house, running errands, doing our work, interacting family members, these can be acts that are lifted up to God, acts that come out of our faith.  Therese once said: “Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant deeds, count as nothing.”  Just as as Jesus was transformed in the transfiguration, may the love of God transform us and the way we live our lives during these days of our Lenten journey.