The Goal

Brothers and sisters:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing

compared with the glory to be revealed for us.

                                                                                                        

There are tough times that come into everyone's life.  As Matthew Kelly says it is not an "if" but a "when" the next storm will befall us.  So often we try so very hard to make our way out of the raging storms with its roaring waves and flashes of lightning without any help.  To ask for help is seen as being cowardly or if you are a man, unmanly.  We are taught from early on to stand on our own two feet and to grit our teeth and bear it.   Asking for help in times of need does not feel good to our ego.  Asking for help is seen to put us under an obligation to the one that assisted us.  But we forget that the so-called obligation to that other person is already there because we are to help one another bear each other's burdens.  As Christians, we are there to serve, not to be served.  So, asking for help is what one Christian does to another Christian. 

What happens when even though you ask for help, it does not come?  Some burdens are ours alone to carry for reasons known only to God.  When everything seems to be going against us and we can find no one to share the burden with us then we have to remember that we will not be tested beyond our strength.  God loves us so deeply that He will help us if we let Him.  

In the end, the sufferings we encounter in this world will seem like nothing once we arrive in heaven.  Once there all knowledge will come to us and no subject will be too complex for us to understand.  We will see those things that we considered burdens in our former life, God considered stepping stones.  The storms of life we endured, God saw as passing spring showers that would make the seed of goodness inside of us grow.  The darkness that was in our life will be recognized for what it really was, an opportunity to search for the light. 

Our sufferings in this world will come, some of them will be intense, but none of them will be spiritually fatal if we trust in God and in His Son Jesus.  

Remember our brothers and sisters in purgatory.  They need your prayers and want your friendship.  Please take a moment and read about purgatory by clicking on the link at the right. Pray for them today in your spare time.  It will mean so much to them.

This Is What Being A Christian Is All About

Yesterday's readings defined for us what Church is. Today's readings define how we are to treat one another as members of this Church.  In the first reading for this Sunday, we are told to treat everyone with kindness, not to abuse immigrants, not to take advantage of widows and orphans and not to take advantage of others with the example of usury being given as one thing not to do.  God also tells us that if we abuse widows and orphans that His wrath will rise up and make our relatives widows and orphans.  In the Gospel reading, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is.  He rightfully quotes the first commandment, we are commanded to love God and he quotes the second commandment, we are to love our neighbor not just a little bit, but as we love ourselves.  Jesus tells us that in these two commandments is the whole of the law of God. The eight remaining commandments tell us exactly how we are to execute the requirements that God has given us. 

It is not easy to perfectly follow the ten commandments.  The old testament Hebrews were always finding themselves at odds with one or another of the commands.  Their solution was to flesh out the commandments of God with more and more rules to follow.  They would split hairs and split them again. They had rules for everything.  For example, they had the rule that no one could walk further than two-thousand cubits on the Sabbath. That meant that you could walk about two-thirds of a mile.  The intent of this rule was two-fold.  First, it kept the Sabbath as a day of rest and secondly, it kept you close to the temple or synagogue so that you could spend your time wisely.  Even today in Israel the modern Jews can be very scrupulous when it comes to rest on the Sabbath.  Elevators stop on every floor of a high rise so they do not have to push a button for that is considered work.  Some families hire non-Jewish help for the Sabbath so that lights can be turned on or off for the act of making a spark would be considered work. 

Now that is how we humans are.  We have a tendency to take things that are simple and turn them into things that can be incredibly complex. That is okay, I guess, because some of the rules and regulations we have to follow, both religious and non-religious have to be fleshed out some so that what is expected at minimum is known to all.  But, if the truth is to be known, if we work on the first two commandments, if we truly set out sights on observing them as perfectly as we can, then the whole of the law of God will be observed because if we are doing all to love God and love our neighbor, we will not be doing the other things that the commandments forbid. Perhaps the law can be made even simpler as elsewhere in scripture it is written that we should do unto others what we would have them do unto us.   That is what being a follower of Jesus is all about.  What Jesus wants from us is to show the same love to others as He has shown to us.  He went to the cross as a victim, taking our place and paying our penalty.  We are to imitate Him and carry our cross and bear the burdens of others as best as we can. What we cannot carry on our own, He will help us carry.  

This Is Perfect !

Brothers and sisters: You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones  and members of the household of God, 
built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.
Through him, the whole structure is held together
and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord;
in him, you also are being built together
into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

Make sure that you read the quote from Ephesians 2: 19-22 above, heck, I am going to memorize it - and yes, I know I am a Catholic and am not supposed to have a knowledge of scripture, or at least that is what some of our evangelistic Bible-thumping Protestant friends might say.  I have to say that this is the first time that I have come upon this reading even though I have read Ephesians a dozen times.  This time, this passage is really, really speaking to me!  Good grief and three sun rises to Sunday, Paul is describing the Church, not just any old Church but the Catholic Church!   Let's have some fun and take this passage apart and meditate on what it is telling us. 

Brothers and sisters: You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones  and members of the household of God, 
built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.

Here we are told that we no longer need to search, we have instead become fellow citizens with the saints and all other members of the household of God. We are members of a Church built on a solid foundation, sunk deep to bedrock through the ministry of the Apostles and Prophets and held together by Jesus as the capstone - the famed stone that the builders rejected! 

Through him, the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord;

Jesus holds the whole Church together and it is a structure that is Sacred in the Lord.

in him, you also are being built together
into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

Through Christ, we ourselves, are being formed into a dwelling place of God who has sanctified us.  We now worship God in His Church, in bodies that he has made for Himself a dwelling place.

We no longer need to search for truth as it has been delivered to us vis Jesus Himself through His Church.  We can trust the teachings that the Church gives to us because it is protected from error by the Holy Spirit. 

With such assurance is it possible that we as members of the Household of God can consider coming out of our shells and develop a voice whose confident tone and timbre will cause the pagan world to stop in their tracks and take notice?  Let us pray that we take the words of this reading and meditate on them and make them part of our spiritual life.  The world will never be the same once the Household of God has its say. 

Our brothers and sisters in Purgatory form part of the Household of God too.  They need our prayers to help them to leave this place.  Please say a prayer or two for them today. 

Tick, Tick, Tick

Jesus said to his disciples:                                                                   
"Be sure of this:
if the master of the house had known the hour
when the thief was coming,
he would not have let his house be broken into.
You also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come."

The clock had stood on the mantle forever.  There was not a time that anyone going back five generations that a member of the family needing to know what time it was failed to see the ornate clock on the mantle.  Throughout all of those years, it was dusted, carefully wound, and it responded to this care by always providing the correct time.  One day, however, a bit of moisture that had started corroding one small part over a hundred years ago finally triumphed and the clock stopped.  Thinking that someone had forgotten to wind the clock, the young master of the house pulled a chair over to the mantle, mounted it, found the key and promptly overwound the clock effectively stilling the heart of the ancient clock, stilled forever, or at least until the clockmaker was able to fix it.  No one knew the exact time anymore.  They had to guess by where the sun was in the sky, where the shadows hit the terrace or of course they could look at their wrist watches or mobile phones.   Come on now, I didn't say it was the only clock!  

Just as the people in our mythical house had to judge the time using other means, so too must we.  We do not know the time or date when Jesus will return.  Maybe it will be before you finish reading this sentence or maybe it will be a thousand years after the next two millenniums fade into the period we call the past.  For the vast majority of us now living, it is possible that we will face the end of the world on our own, perhaps with family around us as we take our last breath in here on earth and make that trip to the judgment of Jesus.  We do not know when this will happen.  If we are young we feel it will be in the far distant future, sixty, or even seventy years from now.  If we are older, such as your author, we know that the time grows ever closer with every blink of our eyes.  The point is no matter if you are young, middle-aged,  or in those years we call the golden years, you must always be prepared for the call home because it will come without warning and at a time that will not be chosen by us.

I've often wondered how I would like to die.  Would I prefer everything to end at the snap of a finger, leaving this world and arriving in the next without knowing what hit me?  Or, would I like to have my end staged, gradually taking my leave as one disease or another does its mischief on my body?  I would rather have the later because it would give me time to say goodbye to those I love and to straighten any crooked lines I may have written on my soul.  But whatever God has planned for me, I accept at this moment and as I continue to live, I try to live my life in a manner worthy of my calling as an ambassador for Christ.  I place my soul into the care of the God that has loved me and who has guided me in spite of my stubborn will.  I look at the clock, its hands creep always forward, what time will the bell strike for me?  Only God knows! 

Our brothers and sisters in Purgatory need our prayers.  Won't you dedicate some of your prayer time to them today? 

Who is to blame?

Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more,  so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

A young boy was having trouble in school.  He just could not understand how numbers worked.  It wasn't that he was stupid, he just had a blind spot in his brain that made it hard for him to understand numbers and how they worked.  This was not his fault.  It was a built-in defect that he did not ask for nor did he do anything to cause it. His parents were not aware of the issue but his teacher saw that while the boy was pretty good at most subjects, he lagged behind the rest of the class when it came to mathematics.  The teacher contacted the parents and they agreed to get their son some help.  He was enrolled in an after-school program at a learning center that specialized in teaching people that had learning disabilities in mathematics.  The boy was not too happy that his after-school time was being eaten up by this extra tutoring in numbers.  The first few times either his father or mother brought him to the classes.  He went in and he actually tried to absorb what the tutor was telling him.  He started to improve a little bit at a time.  He was still very resentful that he could not use this time to visit with his friends and play video games with them.  After a few times, since the learning center was only a couple of blocks from home, his parents sent him to the class on his own.  The walk took him past his best friends house and one day his friend called to him and told him he had a new video game.  It was THE game that everyone wanted!  The boy was sorely tempted but the books under his arm pulled him away from his friend and he went to the learning center because that is what his parents expected him to do.  He was making excellent progress and starting to feel more comfortable with mathematics than he ever did before.  One day, he was on his way to tutoring when a couple of his friends were sitting with his best friend on the porch as he started to pass by.  They called out to him and invited him to play "the game."  He wanted to very much, but once again, he yielded to the wishes of his parents.  His conscience was leading him in the right direction.  About a week later, he was again passing his best friends house and this time there were more classmates there, all of them had come over to experience the video game of the century.  Today among the people on the porch was the class bully.  He saw the boy and started making fun of him, calling him a "sucker" and a "retard" and all of the other kids laughed and made fun of him.   Still, in spite of all of this peer pressure, the boy knew he had to go to tutoring because it was the right thing to do.  And so, hearing the taunts and laughter of his classmates fade as he walked away he felt good because he had done the right thing.  

All of us, man, woman, boy or girl have within us two opposing forces.  As sinful humans we can be persuaded to go our own way, to sin against God, with remarkable ease.  Just look at the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were seduced by a snake and a piece of fruit,  But because we are sons and daughters of the Great King, beloved by Him, each of us just because of who we are, we have inside of us a cache of grace that we can call on when we are being tempted to go our own way.  Sometimes, the grace we have at our command is not enough.  Our Father sees that and he immediately sends us additional grace to help us to keep on the straight path. If we accept this help, we will continue on our journey without delay. 

But who is to blame here?  If the compulsion to sin is already inside us, isn't God to blame for that?  Afterall, he did create us in His own image.  To blame God for our tendency to sin would be like blaming the boy in our story for his mental allergy to the science of numbers.  When we are born, we have the sin of Adam and Eve on our souls.  It is washed away in baptism but deep within us we still want to taste the fruit, we still want to be as God.  This remnant of original sin colors our judgment and at times makes us go off on a wrong road.  Our Father does what He can and He does send us all of the graces we need to defeat the bully of sin, we just have to be open to the graces and be ready to embrace them and just to say "no" to the sin of the moment.  If we cooperate fully with God, if we are always open to His graces, we will never sin again. Please remember I said "if" we cooperate.  In the lives of each of us, we will fail at one time or another.  At these times we can imitate one of two people.  We can be Judas and commit spiritual suicide or we can be Peter who went out and wept bitterly and came back to receive the forgiveness of Christ.   The grace of God can defeat any temptation to sin, but when it does not because of our choice, God's mercy can and will forgive any sin we have committed if we own up to it, confess it humbly and make a firm commitment to avoid the sin in the future. 

Our brothers and sisters in purgatory need our help. Please pray for them today.  On the sidebar, please feel free to access that fact sheet I have published regarding Purgatory.  

Trust

"There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.   

He asked himself, 'What shall I do,

for I do not have space to store my harvest?'

And he said, 'This is what I shall do:

I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.

There I shall store all my grain and other goods

and I shall say to myself, "Now as for you,

you have so many good things stored up for many years,

rest, eat, drink, be merry!"'

But God said to him,

'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;

and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?'

Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself

but is not rich in what matters to God."

I think that this is a good reminder for us at the start of another work week.  There is dignity in all labor and all of us are called to some form of it during the time we live on earth.  We work to provide for ourselves the things that we need to survive on this planet.   I think that it is a little bit more than what the guy on the commercial says we need; Food, Water, and Intenet.  But we do need to somehow get the basic things we need to live and for most of us, we have to exchange our labor to earn money for these things.  We are warned by Jesus in the parable to guard against all forms of greed.  The man, in this case, decides that he is going to gather all of his riches in one place and then he is going to sit back and enjoy it all.  We see that God has other plans for him.  So, is this man guilty of anything?  He sounds like a commercial for a retirement counselor.  All of us are looking to make it big enough so that we can stop working.  That is okay, there is nothing wrong in that.  We are just reminded to be aware that we can be called at any time and that the riches we have so carefully accumulated will belong to someone else when we die.  We are to keep things in perspective and to trust God more than trusting in our own abilities.

Our Father has prepared for us a place that we cannot begin to imagine.  This is where we will receive our true rest and out true happiness.  Trust in God and you will be forever glad. 

Who Do We Owe and How Do We Pay?

Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?" 
Knowing their malice, Jesus said,
"Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? 
Show me the coin that pays the census tax." 


Then they handed him the Roman coin. 
He said to them, "Whose image is this and whose inscription?" 
They replied, "Caesar's."
At that, he said to them,
"Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."

Jesus faced up to quite a large problem by answering the question posed to him by the Pharisees and the Herodians on this occasion.  He is being set up by these people who would like nothing better than to have Him give an answer, any answer to this question.  To bait the trap they first butter Him up by telling Him that they know that He is afraid of no man and will always tell the truth.  Then they ask if it was legal to pay taxes or not. 

If He says, "Yes" the Jews, his people, will consider Him a traitor and a friend to Rome and would quit following Him. 

If He says, "No" the chances are good that he would be arrested and sent to work in the lead mines or would be decorating a Roman cross in short order. 

He was between a rock and a hard place but being Jesus, He knew how He would frame the answer.  He asked for the coin used to pay the tax.  One of them handed him a Roman coin.  This was odd in itself because the Jews would not normally have a Roman coin in their pockets because it bore the image of a man, Caeser, and that was forbidden.  The Romans, who were experts at keeping the peace, one way or the other, minted special coins for the Jews that did not have the image of Caeser or any other living being on it.   

Jesus took the coin, looked at it and asked them who was it that was shown on the coin.  They licked their chops, the lamb was coming to the slaughter, Jesus was going to answer!  They responded, "Caeser's image is on the coin Teacher."   He looked at them and smiled and told them, "Then pay Caeser what is owed to Caeser and pay God what is owed to God."  He tossed the coin back to the person who provided it and then, realizing that they had been had, turned and walked away, their happiness at finally catching Jesus drained by the wisdom of His answer.

I think that this answer is meant for us too.  We must be ready to use what we have to help where we can.  If we keep everything for ourselves, our physical wealth will remain on this side of the grave to be fought over by our heirs and creditors.  Our mental and spiritual wealth we will carry with us and we will give an account on how we used both types of wealth, our silver and gold and our spiritual gifts helped to spread the Kingdom of God to those that needed to hear about it.  So we have to pay both man and God with the wealth we have been entrusted with each in its own measure. 

Pray for the Poor Souls in Purgatory. They need your help.

The Sound of Silence

Jesus said to his disciples: "I tell you, everyone, who acknowledges me before others the Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. "Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

There is a cost to being silent and it is a terrible price to pay indeed!  If we acknowledge Jesus, He will acknowledge us. If we deny that we know Him before others, He will deny that He knows us as well.  Can you imagine arriving at eternity and being friendless?  At the judgment, it will truly be a case of not what you know but who you know!  Some of us will gather there and feel self-assured because we studied hard and we know all about Jesus, every fact, the significance of every word He spoke that is recorded in scripture, the fine nuances of every parable and the history of the time Jesus lived and even why He came. But, when we look for Him on that awful day we will not see Him because we only knew about Him but we never truly knew Him. Standing to our right will be that little man who spent his life in obscurity, who gave to God what was God's and who ministered to The Christ by acts of piety and charity that went unseen by those with means and power on the earth.  This little, insignificant man will be trembling with excitement because he will be able to clearly see Jesus, his friend, his counselor, his king. He will jump up and down with great excitement and holler, "There He is, there He is."  Tears of joy will stream down his face while on your face they will be only tears.  The little man spent His life ministering to people that needed it.  Although he had very little, he gave what he could and cared for each person as if they were Jesus Christ in the flesh.  He spoke out when he saw a wrong, and it cost him on this earth, but he could not remain silent while the mighty stepped on the meek.  He will be shepherded into the flock that will join Jesus in heaven while you will be sent with the goats. 

Others on that day will be surprised when they are condemned when they are told that their sin against the Holy Spirit, their blasphemy against the very Love of God for the Son and the Son for the Father.  They will ask when they did such a monstrous thing and they will be told that they died in their sins and refused the promptings of the Holy Spirit to repent and so chose the road that is wide and easy to tread. 

I know that this is not a "God is Love Feel Good" message today.  But we have to remember, our lives, our actions, our speech, our acknowledgment of the primacy of God in our lives will matter more than the knowledge that we have about God.  We have to know Jesus and follow His way.  Which way is that you ask?  It is the Way of the Cross. 

Those brothers and sisters that have gone before us and are in Purgatory need our prayers to help them finish the purging of the effects of sin and the temporal effects of sin on their soul. Offer your Mass this week for them and please if you have time, say a Rosary for them. 

Friend and Foe Alike

You have to be careful out there.  The world is a wonderful place with many beautiful things. God has created it to be a thing that sustains both our body and our soul.  The world is both a friend and a foe and true wisdom will come to us when we can distinguish the difference between what is good and what is bad.  At the start, God knew this truth and he told His first children, Adam and Eve, that they should not eat the fruit of one tree and one tree alone.  Every other food source was okay. So, innocent Eve approached the tree one day, just to have a look at it and suddenly she was joined there by the serpent. The serpent posed as a friend and probably made a little small talk as he got ready to pump Eve with his venom.  He started with a lie, well not a full blown lie, an exaggeration would be fairer to say.  He asked Eve about the tree and she said God told them that they should not eat of this one tree or even touch it lest they die.  The snake smiled and said that God knew that if you ate the fruit you would become like Him and know the difference between good and evil.  Eve digested that bit of news and reached out and plucked a piece of the forbidden fruit from the tree. Keep in mind here that God had told them to not eat of the fruit, but the serpent put it in her head that she was not to even touch it.  So she had the fruit in her hand and in her mind, she was already guilty and she was bright enough to see her only defense was to become as God, so, she carefully examined the fruit and she saw it was beautiful, it was ripe, it looked delicious and since she had already gone against God, she felt that she had no choice, she brought the fruit up to her lips and took a big bite.  Her eyes were opened alright, she now saw God as an enemy instead of a friend.  She pulled another piece off of the tree and brought it to Adam.  She now took the place of the serpent and convinced him to eat the fruit. His eyes were opened too and together they hid from God.

Sometimes, our family, our spouse, our friends, can be the one that leads us to sin. They mostly do it innocently enough, often it is not their intention to do so, but it happens all of the time.  Sometimes we know where they are leading is sinful and since we do not want to offend them, we follow their lead. This is when our friend becomes our foe and becomes a person to be feared.  Your beautiful wife or handsome husband becomes for you a tempter and because you used your free will to turn away from God, you end up in a sinful condition. In this case, it would have been better for you to have been assaulted by a robber because he could only take your wallet and at the most your life while the other has managed to cheat you out of your soul.   

Now, wait a minute here. Are you saying that if something like this were to really happen to me I would be better off leaving my spouse than to stay with them?  No, because what God has joined, man cannot separate. What I am saying is that just because someone is your friend, that does not mean they are always going to be right. What we need to do in our daily life is to keep our eye on the prize and if temptation comes by way of a friend, we should take the lead and gently move them back onto the correct path.  A simple, "I don't think we should do that." may be all that is needed to change the situation.  We are called to lead those we love towards God, not away from Him.  It is the gentle prodding of one lover to another, one friend to a friend, one family member to another, that will bring them back home. 

Cooperate and coexist with evil and evil will be your only friend.  Take the lead, light a lamp and gently but firmly refuse to accept an evil direction in your life and reach out a hand to your spouse, child, neighbor or friend and with charity and love for them, help them back onto the path that leads away from Gehanna and towards the happiness of heaven. 

So, you don't believe in Purgatory?  Take my word that it exists and is a sign that God loves us very much.  Please pray for the poor souls today and today take a moment and pray for someone who is on their deathbed and is afraid, your prayers will help. 

The Exchange

God has given us a gift that fits perfectly and is guaranteed to operate without flaw for our whole life.  That gift is free will. When God created humans, he did not want puppets, or robots, or "yes men."  He wanted a creature that could learn to love Him for who He was, infinite love and goodness. The human being would do that through living on earth and experiencing first hand the beauty of creation.  They would experience the joy of being with each other. They would marvel at the gift of procreation, sharing in the process of God in creating a human being.  They would learn that the bounty of God, both physical and spiritual, was to be shared and treated with respect.  God Himself provided ten hints as to how this could be done, we called them commandments.  The people that obeyed them were happier and more joyful than those that did not.  That in itself is a great lesson that can be learned by the most simple of humans just by observation. 

From the beginning, however, there were those that just did not see the wisdom of obeying God's law.  Adam and Eve, for example, were told not to eat the fruit of only one of the trees in the garden God placed them in.  They were tempted by the serpent and using their free will, they chose to disobey God.  Later, Cain became jealous of his brother Abel and killed him, going down in the record books as the first person to commit murder. Years passed and the human race grew.  And instead of growing in wisdom, we grew in sin.  God told Noah to build an ark and to fill it with himself and his wife and his sons and their wives and with animals and for forty days and forty nights rain fell and all life except that which was on the ark perished, giving mankind another fresh start.   Things went on fairly well for awhile but in two towns, Sodom and Gomorrah evil things were happening between men and men and women and women. The town was wiped out except for Lot and his family who was told to skedaddle before the fire storm hit.   More years passed and the time for the Redeemer to appear on earth arrived and He set all things right.  He atoned for all of the sins committed to the date of his sacrificial death and for all that the sins that would be committed in the future. Mankind had been given yet another chance.  

Today, some two-thousand years later, we find ourselves in the same predicament that our forefathers of ancient times found themselves in.  People have once again turned away from the law of God.  The culture of death rules the land.  I am not only speaking about abortion and euthanasia here, sin in all of its guises is death. Today, the rainbow, once a symbol of God's promise to not flood the earth again, has been adopted by people who would be at home in the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Also, those that try to follow the Lord's way are scorned and when they point out sins that are occurring in the land, they are told to mind their own business because for the reprobate one belief system is just as good as another. The money god is powerful in this world and those that have a lot of it, if they are not prudent, think of themselves as outside of the law, exempt because they can pay their way clear of any trouble. 

What is my point here?  Free will is a gift that we can use for whatever we want.  It makes us in a sense like God in that no one is going to tell us what to do or not do, at least not inside our head.  True, if your free will compels you to rob a bank, you will go to jail for the exercise of it.  Free will and conscience are hard-wired together.  We use our conscience to temper the desires of our free will.  If we do not do this, if we are not prudent, we will go the way of the sinner on the wide, obstacle-free, road to perdition. 

The Lord Jesus is there to help us in this world.  He knows what it is like to be tempted.  He knows what it is like to be counter-culture and to pay the price for pointing the opposite direction that the world wants to go in. Jesus will be coming back, soon, perhaps very soon.  The day and the hour are not known to any man but we should be ready. Catholic Man, Catholic Woman, humbly admit your faults and go to the oasis of forgiveness where the Blood of Jesus will wash you clean.  The sacrament of reconciliation will make you stronger in your faith and better able to be an example for the dozens or hundreds or even thousands of lost souls around you. Turn your free will over to the Lord and be ready to be freer than you ever were before!   You may be the only Jesus some people ever see during their lifetime. 

And now a word from our sponsor: 

PURGATORY IS PROOF POSITIVE OF THE LOVE GOD HAS FOR US.  THROUGH THIS PLACE, AFTER DEATH, IF NECESSARY, WE ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE OURSELVES PRESENTABLE TO GOD BY PURGING THE TEMPORAL EFFECTS OF OUR SIN AND OUR ATTACHMENTS TO ANY WORLDLY THINGS.  PLEASE PRAY FOR THE POOR SOULS.  THEY WILL REMEMBER YOUR HELP AND WILL BE YOUR HELP WHEN IN NEED.  GOD BLESS. 

No Cholesterol or Calories In Heaven

 I love the description of what the feast in heaven will be like.  Not just food, but rich food, and not just wine but choice wine.  There will be nothing but the best for the friends of God. I can't wait!   I don't have to wait because heaven begins here on earth and Jesus has already provided for us the richest food of all, His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the form of what gives every appearance to be simple ordinary bread and wine.  It's more than amazing, it is exciting!  Can you imagine, you and the God of the universe are as close as you can get.  It blows my mind.  Let's put this into perspective.  You are in London, you are outside Buckingham Palace. Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth wanders out into the street to greet some of the little people who are gathered there in the hope of just catching a glimpse of her.  She is walking towards you.  You seem to catch her eye and you see a twinkle in her eye and you know you and she have mystically connected. You jump the barrier and take two steps towards her and you suddenly find yourself kissing the black British asphalt with the muzzle of an automatic rifle touching your head with one of Her Majesty's bodyguards with his finger on the trigger and ready to give you a new part in your hair if even one of your muscles has a twitch!  See, you could not get close to the Queen of England because she is too important, much too dignified to spend time with someone as common as you.  But at mass, at the Eucharist, you and Jesus, the Person whose will allows Liz to live, breath, and wear those silly hats, comes into you physically and for a while, you and the God of the Universe are one, together.  Our God gives us examples all of the time of how we should be.  What the queen of England is lacking, our God has an infinite supply of and that is humility.  I will leave you on this autumn Sunday with just one question to think about:

JUST WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO ME IF WHAT JESUS SAID ABOUT THE EUCHARIST WAS TRUE? 

DID YOU KNOW, THAT YOU CAN OFFER ALL OF THE GRACES YOU RECEIVE WHEN RECEIVING HOLY COMMUNION TO THE POOR SOULS IN PURGATORY? 

View from the Watchtower - JW and the Catholic Church

For near is the day of the LORD                 

in the valley of decision.
Sun and moon are darkened,
and the stars withhold their brightness.
The LORD roars from Zion,
and from Jerusalem raises his voice;
The heavens and the earth quake,
but the LORD is a refuge to his people,
a stronghold to the children of Israel.

You have to admire their pluck.  I mean the way that they stick to their spiel when time and time again they have been proven wrong just because the sun rose and set as it had done so many times over the many millenniums.  Of course, I am speaking about the Jehovah's Witnesses (JW), an organization that specializes in predicting the end of the world.  Each time they predict a date, they have been wrong. They are not a  Christian religion as they deny the divinity of Christ stating that Jesus, in reality, is St. Michael the Archangel. You have to admire them in some respects.  The believers commit a lot of time to pursuing converts.   They go out in pairs and go door to door looking for people ripe for conversion into their strange doctrine.  They come prepared with Biblical proof of all they say, of course, the Bible they use, The New World edition has been edited so that their beliefs are proven.  They rope in the innocent and uneducated, namely Catholics.  While an educated Catholic can point out very easily where the Watchtower Society, based in the religious heart of the world, Brooklyn New York, goes off of the rails. most of the JW converts come from parishes like yours and mine.

The problem we have in the Catholic Church is that we have a lack of Catholics that are able to see through the poorly thought out theology of the Watchtower people or any of the Protestant sects for that matter. Can you imagine that some Catholics who have gone on to get advanced degrees in nuclear engineering or doctorates in any one of a thousand subjects have no more than a seventh-grade education in the most important subject of all, their religion?  Why is that?  It is a sad but true fact that many Catholics are easy prey to the whiles of the Witness team or Mormon missionaries, or Bible Thumping Evangelists that comes to their door because they left the study of their religion after they were confirmed usually in middle school or high school.  

I imagine each of us can come up with a reason or two why it is not possible for us to learn more about our Catholic faith.  First and foremost, there isn't enough time in the day for me to get all of the things done that I need to.  That's a load of bull droppings.  If you had time to watch TV in the evening, you had time to spend learning something new about your religion. The Witnesses, the Mormons,  spend hours each week with their door to door ministry and for the JW's  each Kingdom Hall reports the hours spent tilling the soil for converts each week. Those that don't spend enough time going door to door or who do not have enough results to show are given a good talking to.    And some of us Catholics say we are too busy, right...hand me the potato chips and could you turn on the Notre Dame game?

Okay, here is what I really want to say to you on this Saturday.  If a seventh grader knows more than you about being a Catholic, how does that make you feel?  Our young people today take their religion more seriously than you might expect.  In our parish, every year, we see a class of teens come back from a week-long mission trip, helping the less fortunate and they come back energized with zeal for the Lord and they have seen for themselves how good it feels to follow the ways of God and to help those that need it most.  They experience a closeness with the Lord that fills them with the desire to have more and to help more.  Then, what happens, they start hanging around the older Catholics, the ones that just put in their appearance, the ones that come late to mass and leave early and they determine by watching you that being a Catholic doesn't really make much of a difference and they slowly either drift away from the church or they are snared by Protestant evangelizers who know how to reel in a healthy catch of Catholic youth and save them from Rome and get them to believe in Sola Scriptura and Once Saved Always Saved, two indefensible doctrines that lull people into a way of life where sin doesn't play a part anymore. 

Look, you just have to get up off of your dead sit upon and become more knowledgeable about Christianity, the Church and its history and why it matters that you are a Catholic and not a Baptist or Presbyterian or God forbid a Jehovah's Witness.  

Do you understand, have you any idea what-so-ever what a great gift you have been given by being born or converting to be a Catholic?  We are part of the Church that was built by Christ to last until He returns for us on the last day when in God's eyes the time of harvest is nigh.  There is nothing better on this whole earth than to be part of God's kingdom and that Kingdom is not owned by the Watchtower Society, it is owned by the people of God in the Catholic Church. 

We have so many things that other denominations do not have.  We have most of all the Real Presence in the Eucharist that we can receive daily in many places.  Can you imagine what a JW would do if he or she had that same closeness to Jesus as we have available to us?  They would be unstoppable!  They would go door to door armed with the love of Jesus and not leave a house until they either converted the person or were physically kicked down the stairs with their New World edition Bible hitting them in the head as they bounced off the curb at the side of the street. If such power would be available to a JW, why does it not manifest itself in us, the heirs and true adopted sons and daughters of the Great King?  Light the fire in yourself and watch it spread to those around you.  Do it NOW. 

To do today:  Pray for the poor souls in Purgatory. 

The Huge Cost of Division

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste

and house will fall against house."

Take a single strand of dry spaghetti out of its box. It takes very little effort to break the piece of pasta into many fragments.  It is a bit harder when you take two pieces, harder still with four, but still possible to take what was whole and to fragment it into many disjointed pieces.  If, on the other hand, you take the whole pound out of the box and try to break it up that way it is much harder to do and depending on your strength may, in fact, be impossible for you to do. 

It is said by some that Martin Luther did not want to fall away from the Catholic Church. His behavior and actions and his pride all belie this statement.  Before the "great reformer" came onto the scene, there was for over fifteen hundred years one faith, one belief, and one kingdom. Marty did have a number of good points, not the least of which was the sale of indulgences which was never what indulgences were intended for.  But his prideful action and failure to look at himself as the least of all, has had a cost that is still owing and accumulating interest some five-hundred years since the schism was created.  But, it is not about Luther and his actions that I want to write about today, I want to talk about the cost of that which divides us.  The cost is huge and people are dying because of our divisions. 

Since the Protestant Revolt, God's church has been suffering from the disease of denominationalism.  Once Luther broke from the Church it was not long before another of the great "reformers" broke with Luther and set up his own community.  All over the world brother went against brother and father against son as the rust and rot of the reformation penetrated deeply into the Christian world.  Today there are approximately thirty and some say forty thousand different denominations, each claiming to own the truth, many of them condemning the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon and consigning members of the Church to the deepest pit of hell.  They also disagree with the other sects out in the world and First Baptist would never think that they were related to First Presbyterian Church.  In reality, every denomination can be traced only as far back as Luther.  The church founded by Luther was founded by a man, the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the present leader of the Church can trace his office back to Peter who was appointed as the prime minister of God's kingdom on earth. It is for this reason that I know I could never become a Protestant. 

But what about the cost of all of this division?  For many years mainstream Protestants stood side by side with Catholics on many issues.  But over the years, the Protestant denominations, very often by democratic vote, decided to water down their beliefs to make things more convenient for the believers.  For example, let's take abortion.  At one time Christians stood together on this subject, it was wrong, it was immoral, it was murder.  Then one by one, denominations voted at yearly meetings and abortion was taken off of the list of things that they stood against. Today, the Catholic Church is almost alone when it comes to the Right to Life issue.  Take for example as well marriage.  Marriage has traditionally been seen as to between one man and one woman.  This is how God wants it to be.  The Catholic Church, to this day, preaches this doctrine.  There can be no marriage between people of the same sex. One denomination after another is coming to the conclusion that marriage is marriage just so the two people love each other, it is okay if the couple is John and Jake or John and Jane just so there is love between the two people, their sexual identities should not be allowed to get in the way of their love.  Again, God's law is discounted and rewritten for the convenience of the people.  The denominations that allow same-sex marriage for the convenience of their congregations, are leading them into sinful behavior.  This is exactly opposite of what a church is supposed to do. 

So what?  So some Christians have gone off on another path if it makes them happy, life is short, why not?  True, Life is Short, but Eternity is Forever. One of the things we Christians are to do is to be a beacon, illuminating the way to the Kingdom of God.  Disjointed as we are, we are showing the world many different examples, many of them sinful, many of them unworthy of a person who calls themselves a Christian. These sinful examples are the ones that people like to see, they are the ones that they remember.  This is giving power to the pagans, the atheists, the LGBT community and even the satanists.  Our leaders in Washington (such as they are, God help us) are seeing that true Christian morals and values are becoming less and less important to the people of their communities and they are behaving in accordance with what they see!  So the cost of not being unified into one Church and one Kingdom are staggering.  The situation is costing lives.  Besides the millions of babies murdered in the abortion mills under the guise of woman's health, a right to die law allowing assisted suicide is on the books in some countries and even in some states.  Right now, the patient is the one who decides to end things but, I can see that there will come a day when a committee meets and decides for you the date and time when your life is no longer worth living and they, without your consent, will send you on your way by giving you a lethal injection right after you finish your hearty breakfast.  This has happened in other countries where "mercy killing" is permitted.  In one case, a man was put into the hospital for a mild case of depression.  The man's wife had to go on a trip.  When she came back just a week later she was handed her husbands ashes.  In his depression, the husband asked for assistance in ending his life and it was given to him.

We can thank Martin Luther and all of the other reformers that he spawned for where we are today.  Our Lord prayed that we be one as He and the Father are one. Due to human error and human pride, we have failed in this request.  What can be done about this sad situation we find ourselves in?  To hope for all the denominations to realize that they are in schism with the Church is too much to hope for on a human level.  We need to pray for one another and ask God to release the Holy Spirit because the job of bringing us all back together is too big to do without His help.  You know, Jesus did say that there would be one flock and one shepherd so maybe our prayer today will bring a unified, revived, strong, loving, and obedient Church back into reality tomorrow. 

Do you know somebody in Purgatory?  Please, pray for the poor souls today. They will remember those who help them and it pleases God when we share our spiritual wealth with those who need it most.