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2006

Holy Family

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Whatever age we are, the feast of the Holy Family provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the role of family in our lives. For most of us no other group of people shaped us more than the family in which we grew up.
 
We tend to idealize Jesus, Mary and Joseph as the perfect family, but as today’s gospel reveals, their lives were filled with stress and strains, joys and sorrows, along with misunderstandings and the need for reconciliation. Yes, they had their share of heartfelt human experiences.  
 
Having never been awakened by a crying baby in the middle of the night, I won’t claim to be an expert on family life, but like the sportswriter who has never played football, I can offer some worthwhile insights.
 
Blood ties alone do not create a family. As a pastor, I have unfortunately encountered many examples of relatives who refuse to communicate with one another. What transforms a group of people into a family is love. That is why John urges us to love one another. Without love, there is little to really bind a family together. But what does love mean to you?
 
In one of his favorite lines concerning his love for Bing Crosby, the late Bob Hope often said, “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for Crosby, and there’s nothing Crosby wouldn’t do for me. But that’s the trouble. We spent our lives doing nothing for each other.”
 
By chance, is Mr. Hope describing your family? In your family, is love for one another expressed verbally or visually? Or is this love simply taken for granted, that is, never spoken or demonstrated?
 
When was the last time you told your spouse, child, parent, sibling or other relative, “I love you?” Failing to express love now can spell trouble down the road. Many marriages have failed because the love that once brought couples together grew silent over time.
 
Our children especially need to see and feel that they are loved. Many teens who feel unloved make their needs known too late by committing either suicide or a serious crime, sometimes even in the home, in the very place where they expect to find love. PD James put it this way, “What a child doesn’t receive, he can seldom later give.”
 
Dr. Lee Salk, author of numerous books on parenting, told of a moving interview he had with Mark Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon. At one point, Chapman admitted, “I don’t think I ever hugged my father. He never told me he loved me. I needed emotional love and support. I never got that.” If he could ever be a father, Chapman added, “I would hug my son and kiss him and just let him know, he could trust me and come to me.”
 
In his book, My Father, My Son, Dr. Salk wrote, “Don’t be afraid of your emotions, of telling your father or your son that you love him and that you care. Don’t be afraid to hug him and kiss him. Don’t wait until the death bed to realize what you’ve missed.” What is true for fathers and sons is equally true for mothers and daughters, and for that matter, mothers and sons along with fathers and daughters.
 
In the gospel, we witness just how real Joseph, Mary and Jesus are. Like any of us, they experienced great anxieties of family living. Still, they demonstrate with love, respect encouragement and affirmation for each other that every family can be holy yet real. 
 
In the coming year, I invite you to think of your family as a garden.  Planting those four values will bring forth a harvest of abundant life. I am not much of a green thumb but I have learned the law of a fallow field; if a garden is neglected, it will always revert to weeds. If nothing of value is planted, then nothing of value will be harvested.
 
Like any garden, the garden of one’s family needs time and attention if love is to be cultivated along with the sunshine of laughter and affirmation, which help to deal with the tense moments caused by anxieties and differences that are bound to arise like rain and thunder. Its soil of hardness, created by envy, bitterness, and anger often needs to be turned with tools of forgiveness and understanding.
 
Maybe you aren’t a green thumb either, but I invite you to plant and cultivate these 18 rows in your family garden:
•    Six rows of p’s: perseverance, politeness, praise, prayer, patience and peacemaking.
•    Four rows of “let us”: let us be faithful in word and deed, let us be unselfish, let us be loyal, let us love and respect one another.
•    Three rows of squash: squash gossip, squash criticism, and squash indifference.
•    Five rows of “turn ups”: turn up on time for events with your kids. Turn up for family gatherings. Turn up with a better attitude. Turn up with new ideas and the determination to carry them out. And turn up with a smile.
 
Any family’s survival depends on the shared sensibility of its members. If you plant and nurture these values in your family garden, you will bring to harvest a real family as well as a holy family.

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Christmas

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My friends, what an awesome mystery we celebrate tonight. Two thousand years ago Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So what does that mean to you and me? If Christmas is to have any meaning to us, we should ponder that question, as one man did in a manner he never expected.  
 
He didn’t believe in God and he didn’t hesitate to let others know how he felt about religion and religious holidays like Christmas. If you said anything like “Merry Christmas,” to him, he likely would reply, “Bah, humbug!” (Maybe you know such a person or maybe you were once that way yourself.) His wife, however, very much believed in God and she raised their children to also have faith in God and Jesus despite his critical comments.
 
One snowy Christmas eve, his wife was taking their children to Mass. She invited him to come along, but he declined. “The story of Christmas is pure nonsense!” he said. “Why would God lower himself to come to earth as a man? That’s ridiculous!” So she and the children left and he stayed home.
 
Soon, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a blizzard. As the man looked out the window, all he could see was a blinding snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire to read. Then, he heard a loud thump. Something had hit the house. Then he heard another thump. He looked out the window but couldn’t see more than a few feet. When the snow let up, he ventured out to see what had hit his house.
 
In the field nearby, he saw a flock of wild geese. They must have been migrating south for the winter when they got caught in the storm and couldn’t go on. They were now lost and stranded on his farm with no food or shelter.
 
They flapped their wings and flew around the field in low circles, blindly and aimlessly. The man guessed that a couple of them had flown into his house and were injured.
He felt sorry for the geese and wanted to help them, but how? ‘The barn would be a great place for them to stay,’ he thought to himself. ‘It is warm and safe; they could wait out the storm there.’ So, he walked over to the barn and opened the doors wide. He watched and waited, hoping that they would notice the opening and venture inside but the geese continued to flutter around the yard aimlessly. They didn’t seem to notice the barn or understand what it could mean for them. The man tried to get their attention but anything he did just seemed to scare them instead. He went into the house and came out with bread. He broke the bread, making a trail of crumbs into the barn but they still didn’t get the idea.
 
Now he was getting frustrated and very cold. He got behind them and tried to shoo them toward the barn but they only got more scared, scattering in every direction except toward the barn doors. Nothing he did could get them to go toward the barn where they would be warm and safe. “Why won’t they follow me?” he muttered. “Can’t they see this is the only place where they can survive the storm?” He thought for a moment and realized that they just wouldn’t follow a human. “If I were a goose, then I could save them,” he said aloud.
 
Then he had an idea. He went back into the barn, picked up one of his geese and carried it in his arms as he circled around behind the flock of wild geese. He then released his goose, which then flew through the flock straight into the barn. One by one, the other geese followed it to safety.
 
The man stood there silently watching what happened as the words he had said replayed in his mind. “If I were a goose, then I could save them!” He then thought about what he had said to his wife earlier in the evening. “Why would God want to be like us? That’s ridiculous!”
 
Suddenly, it all made sense. That is what God had done. We were like the wild geese, the man realized. Blind, lost, and perishing, not in the darkness of a winter storm but in the darkness of sin. God sent his son to become like us so that he could show us the way and save us from harm. That he realized was the meaning behind Christmas. As the storm died down, he pondered this wonderful insight. Now he understood what Christmas was all about and why Christ had come into the world.
 
Years of doubt and disbelief vanished like the passing storm. He fell to his knees in the snow and prayed for the first time in ages. “Thank you God for coming in human form to get me out of this storm!”
 
Years ago, I recall the late Archbishop Oscar Romero saying that those who have no need of God will have no Christmas. Only those who need someone to come on their behalf will find the gift of Emmanuel, God with us. On a dark wintry night in a way he least expected, after madly chasing some geese, this man found the light of Christ. At last, he could see why God did what he did on that dark winter night in Bethlehem so long ago.
 
So what does Christmas mean to you? Do you see why God became one with us in this amazing way? He did this to set an example for you and me to follow, showing us the way to peace, by rejecting godless ways and worldly desires and living instead justly and devoutly. We no longer need to walk in darkness for we have seen a great light. Merry Christmas!      

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4th Sunday of Advent

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Perhaps you have read the story of the Little Prince. Simple enough to be enjoyed by children yet profound enough to be appreciated by adults, this delightful tale is about an alien from another planet, known as the little prince, who finds himself stranded here on earth.

At first, the little prince is lost and confused. One day he meets a fox who helps him. Eventually a close friendship emerges between them. At one point, the fox and the little prince must go their separate ways. Before they do, the fox insists that they set an exact time for their next meeting, so they agree upon 4:00 on a certain day. Once they are done, the fox observes, “If you come at 4:00 in the afternoon, then at 3:00 I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At 4:00 I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.”
 
The fourth Sunday of Advent is like that. We find ourselves waiting in anticipation of Christmas and the coming of another little prince, one whom we call the prince of peace. Knowing that his birth is near, we ought to be happy as the fox, knowing that this prince is coming into our lives!
Hopefully on the eve of Christmas, our hearts are ready and we are filled with the same joy we witness in the fox and in the gospel, where we find Elizabeth telling Mary, “the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.” What John experienced was the magnetic presence of his cousin, Jesus.
 
Can the same be said for us? Many people have felt the joy John experienced in his mother’s womb. Perhaps you have too. For me, one such profound moment happened 12 years ago when I celebrated Mass with my sister and our 86 year old aunt. I had sent Ruth a card telling her that we were coming to visit her before Christmas. When we arrived, we could tell that she had been eagerly waiting for us.
 
In her tiny neat apartment, we sat around a TV tray. The Mass was very low key; no music, nothing fancy, but when we were done, my aunt was overwhelmed. Because she was my godmother, the moment was deeply moving for both of us. As her godson, I had fulfilled my dream to celebrate the Mass in her presence.
As my sister and I drove back to Sacramento from Yuba City, we agreed that this had been the best visit we ever had with Aunt Ruth. Usually we would find her despondent and our visits would be short. She was a widow who had outlived all her siblings and had no children. Her nieces and nephews were her only family and few of them lived nearby. This time, because she knew we were coming, Ruth was in great spirits and our visit lasted all afternoon. She even called that evening to again thank us for coming to see her.
 
Because of her frail health, our aunt had not been to church in years, so the visit was indeed special for her. The joy she radiated made the trip so worthwhile for me. I left her, feeling that she had been transformed and uplifted. I could not have given her a better Christmas present.
 
On the eve of that first Christmas, the world for Elizabeth, Mary, and John was transformed; their lives were filled with joy. The same could be true for us. Both Christmas and the Eucharist have the potential to truly fill us with joy.
 
While we may never encounter Jesus in this lifetime with the same intense joy they did, we certainly can be open to the possibility, awaiting the coming of our prince with the same eagerness that the fox did as he looked forward to the coming of his friend.
 
Speaking from my own experience, I know a fair number of us take our relationship with Jesus too much for granted, passing up many opportunities to be with him in prayer because we have other so-called priorities in our lives.  When we do, we become the losers, denying ourselves the chance to be transformed by the gift of God’s presence in both scripture and the Eucharist because we are more captivated by other pursuits instead. A friend recently wrote me, “The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything.”
 
Thomas Aquinas once said, “No man truly has joy unless he lives in love.” That is the example Mary sets in the gospel, traveling to be with her cousin in spite of whatever hardship such a trip posed. She knew well that joy is found in serving others. Caring for and about others will provide you with more joy than anything you’ll find under the tree.
 
For countless generations, God has kept his promise to lead his people to the joy of his kingdom through good times and bad and God does so today, offering us the most precious gift he can, his prince of peace. Blessed are they who, like Mary, have trusted that God’s word would be fulfilled. For them peace and joy became quite real. For those whose hearts are ready, Christmas ought to be a season of light that will dispel the darkness of their world and a time of joy that will transform their lives.
Like the fox in the story of the Little Prince, may we eagerly greet another little prince, namely, our prince of peace, Jesus of Nazareth with hearts that are ready. 

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3rd Sunday of Advent

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What an interesting beginning to a gospel passage. Perhaps years from now, might some story teller begin with this line? “In the ninth year of the administration of George Bush, when his brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida, Christine Gregoire was governor of Washington, and Neil Colburn, mayor of Langley, during the high priesthood of Alexander Brunett and Benedict XVI, the word of God came to the Amish community. Like countless other victims of tragedy in the past year, they had sustained a desert experience. A deranged truck driver stormed into a one room school house in rural Pennsylvania last October and shot ten girls, killing five of them, before turning the gun on himself.

 
What was even more stunning than the killing was the response of the Amish community.  The parents of one of the murdered girls personally approached the widow of the shooter to offer their forgiveness. The self-reliant Amish insisted on establishing a fund for the killer’s wife and three children from the proceeds they received from donations to help the victims’ families.  And when the shooter was buried, half of the mourners in attendance were Amish.
 
The tragedy in Nickle Mines allowed the outside world a rare glimpse of the remarkable values of the Amish people. We tend to dismiss them as a quaint cult that avoids any interaction with modern technology. They isolate themselves from the consumer-centered values of mainstream America, not because they think they’re bad, but because the Amish see them as obstacles in their search for God.
 
What happened at their school affected them all deeply. They love their children as much as we love ours and the deaths of these five girls devastated their families. Their hurt was great but they didn’t balance that hurt with hate.  As one Amish woman said on the news, “We can tell people about Christ and actually show you in our walk that we forgive, not just say it…”
 
In their uncompromising living of the Gospel values of compassion and forgiveness, the Amish community have been nothing less than prophets, inviting us, in their simple, gracious generosity of heart and spirit, to heed the message of John the Baptist, whose call to repentance we hear every year as we await the coming of Christ. John challenges us to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” He urges us to make “straight” those roads made crooked by greed and hatred and “smooth” out ways made impassable by sin and death. There are so many wastelands and barren places into which we can bring life, so many crooked roads we can transform into highways if we would work for justice and reconciliation like the Amish did last fall.
 
Undoubtedly, you have a wish list of what you would like for Christmas, a thing or two that you would love to add to your worldly possessions, but John speaks to us of a gift worth far more than anything we will ever find under a Christmas tree: the salvation of God. To experience this gift, he urges us to think of what we need to let go of that stands in the way between God and us. Unlike the Amish, that would not be our modern conveniences, so what might they be?
 
In so many words, the prophet tells us that sin and apathy block us from having an honest and forthright relationship with Jesus Christ. They hinder us from savoring the gift of salvation that God so generously offers us in the person of his son, Jesus, through the Mass, scripture, prayer, and the teachings of our Church.  If we want this gift, John is telling us that we must first do some road construction in our lives.
 
We must fill our valleys and level our mountains, not literally with bulldozers but with attention to our relationships. The valleys he speaks of we create with kind words left unspoken, compassionate deeds undone, bread not shared, prayers unsaid, neighbors unwelcomed, the poor overlooked, the expressions of another person’s love ignored, or forgiveness withheld.
 
John challenges us to level our mountains of pride, blind ambition, arrogance, unbridled selfishness, domineering attitudes, all of which hinder us from experiencing and sharing God’s gifts of salvation and love. He calls on us to smooth the rough ways in our lives created by anger, impatience, intolerance, prejudice, racism, bigotry and favoritism that leaves anyone feeling excluded and unloved. Heeding his call to forgiveness and reconciliation could result in some of the best Christmas presents that you and your loved ones could ever receive.  
 
Granted, the task of moving our personal obstacles may seem overwhelming but just as God led the Israelites so long ago, God seeks to lead us in joy. One way God does this is through the sacrament of reconciliation. For a lot of us, that gift is like the Christmas present we didn’t appreciate or know what to do with so we’ve left it in the closet to collect dust. Instead of ignoring this beautiful gift, I urge you to come to our Advent Reconciliation service this Thursday evening and see for yourself what a wonderful gift God offers us in this sacrament.
 
Joy is what many of us seek in life, especially at Christmas and that is something both the giver and receiver experience when a gift is fully appreciated. But joy is more than an object. It is also the echo of God’s life within us. Joy will be ours when we seek God’s gift of salvation.

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2nd Sunday of Advent

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In the sixth year of the administration of George Bush, when his brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida, Christine Gregoire was governor of Washington, and Neil Colburn, mayor of Langley, during the high priesthood of Alexander Brunett, archbishop of Seattle and Benedict XVI, the word of God came to the Amish community. Like countless other victims of tragedy in the past year, they had sustained a desert experience. A deranged truck driver stormed into a one room school house in rural Pennsylvania last October and shot ten girls, killing five of them, before turning the gun on himself.

What was even more stunning than the killing itself was the response of the Amish community.  The parents of one of the murdered girls personally approached the widow of the shooter to offer their forgiveness. The self-reliant Amish insisted on establishing a fund for the killer’s wife and three children from the proceeds they received from donations to help the victims’ families.  And when the shooter was buried, half of the 75 mourners in attendance were Amish.
The tragedy in Nickle Mines allowed the outside world a rare glimpse of the remarkable values of the Amish people. We tend to dismiss them as a quaint cult; one that avoids any interaction with modern technology. They isolate themselves from the consumer-centered values of mainstream America, not because they think these values are bad, but because they see them as obstacles in their search for God.
What happened at their school affected them all deeply. They love their children as much as we love ours and the deaths of these five girls devastated their families. Their hurt was great but they didn’t balance that hurt with hate.  As one Amish woman said on the national news, “We can tell people about Christ and actually show you in our walk that we forgive, not just say it…”
In their uncompromising living of the Gospel values of compassion and forgiveness, the Amish community have been nothing less than prophets, inviting us, in their simple, gracious generosity of heart and spirit, to heed the message of John the Baptist, whose call to repentance we hear every year in advent as we await the coming of Christ. John challenges us to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” He urges us to make “straight” those roads made crooked by greed and hatred and “smooth” out ways made impassable by sin and death. There are so many wastelands and barren places into which we can bring life, so many crooked roads we can transform into highways if we would work for justice and reconciliation like the Amish did last fall.
Undoubtedly, you have a wish list of what you would like for Christmas, a thing or two that you would love to add to your worldly possessions, but John speaks to us of a gift worth far more than anything we will ever find under a Christmas tree: the salvation of God. To experience this gift, he urges us to think of what we need to let go of that stands in the way between God and us. Unlike the Amish, that would not be our modern conveniences, so what might they be?
In so many words, the prophet tells us that sin and apathy block us from having an honest and forthright relationship with Jesus Christ. They hinder us from savoring the gift of salvation that God so generously offers us in the person of his son, Jesus, through the Mass, scripture, prayer, and the teachings of our Church.  If we want this gift, John is telling us that we must first do some road construction in our lives.
We must fill our valleys and level our mountains, not literally with bulldozers but with attention to our relationships. The valleys he speaks of we create with kind words left unspoken, compassionate deeds undone, bread not shared, prayers unsaid, neighbors and strangers not welcomed, the poor overlooked, the expressions of another person’s love ignored, or forgiveness withheld.
John challenges us to level our mountains of pride, blind ambition, arrogance, unbridled selfishness, domineering attitudes, all of which hinder us from experiencing and sharing God’s gifts of salvation and love with others. He calls on us to smooth the rough ways in our lives created by anger, impatience, intolerance, prejudice, racism, bigotry and favoritism; anything that leaves anyone feeling excluded and unloved. Heeding his call to forgiveness and reconciliation could result in one of the best Christmas presents that you and your loved ones could ever receive.  
Granted, the task of moving our personal obstacles may seem overwhelming but just as God led the Israelites so long ago, God seeks to lead us in joy. One way God does this today is through the sacrament of reconciliation. For a lot of us, that gift is like the Christmas present we didn’t appreciate or know what to do with so we’ve left it in the closet to collect dust. Instead of ignoring this beautiful gift, I urge you to come to our Advent Reconciliation service this Thursday evening at 7 and see for yourself what a wonderful gift God offers us in this sacrament.
Joy is what many of us seek in life, especially at Christmas and that is something both the giver and receiver experience when a gift is fully appreciated. But joy is more than a reaction. Joy is also the echo of God’s life within us, which becomes very real when we dare to seek and celebrate God’s gift of forgiveness.

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