Lent - Day Twelve - Between Heaven And Earth

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Second reading Philippians 3:17-4:1 © Our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes Christ to transfigure us My brothers, be united in following my rule of life. Take as your models everybody who is already doing this and study them as you used to study us. I have told you often, and I repeat it today with tears, there are many who are behaving as the enemies of the cross of Christ. They are destined to be lost. They make foods into their god and they are proudest of something they ought to think shameful; the things they think important are earthly things. For us, our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the savior we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body. He will do that by the same power with which he can subdue the whole universe. So then, my brothers and dear friends, do not give way but remain faithful in the Lord. I miss you very much, dear friends; you are my joy and my crown. This morning we almost had a tragedy and it was just the luck of the Irish that kept it from happening.  One of the brothers whose turn it was to make breakfast started the fire which had gone out during the night.  He went over to the bag which held the cooking utensils and noticed that it had not been sealed properly the night before.  He opened it and reached in and got the coffee pot and the pot used for making cereal.  As was his custom he grabbed a towel and was going to dust the inside of the pot but something made him look inside it first.  Inside was one of the deserts most fearsome creatures, a deathstalker scorpion had taken up residence there during the night my companion was just inches away from getting what could be a lethal injection of the neurotoxin that this delightful desert creature uses to kill its prey.  The tiny beast was ready and willing to dispense a jolt of his special elixir but to his credit, the man holding the pot did not panic.  Instead, he went to the edge of camp and catapulted the creature out of the pot as hard as he could.  The little guy had an experience most deathstalkers do not receive, the experience of flight!  Now, in spite of the colorful name of this creature, death to a healthy human, while not unheard of, is unlikely if they are stung by this scorpion.  From what victims say it is not an act of mercy to survive the sting as the potent venom causes great pain.  Children and the elderly are most vulnerable but it is considered a medical emergency if you are stung by one of these and in our present situation, medical help and the antivenom that is required is so far away that any dying that the victim would be doing would be done by the time any help could arrive.  So it was on this cheery note that our day began and in our morning prayers, we thanked God that our friend was spared the agony of a sting from this scorpion. After breakfast, as usual, we broke camp but it took a bit longer because we were carefully checking to make sure that the little fella hadn't brought any friends of his own.  No other examples of this miniature death machine were found and as the sun rose above the horizon, we began our trek.  While walking today, I began thinking of death but not death itself with all of the pains that might be attached to it but rather what happens after death. Physically, once the blood stops pumping your body begins it's the journey back into the elements that it is made of.  Tissues break down and in no time the only thing left of bodies that are not specially embalmed such as the Egyptians of old will be our bones.  And years from now, even those bones will return to dust.  All that was "me" will be gone.  The flesh that I work so hard to keep animated, the brain that fuels my thoughts and emotions will be no more.  Yet, through this all, I survive not as a memory on a tombstone with a date of birth and date of death and if I were rich enough some clever saying to mark my time on earth. What will remain of me is any of the good that I accomplished.  My mark will not be a long obituary story nor a small death notice.  My mark will be the seeds of love I planted while I, a body and a soul, walked and talked on this earth.  My soul will be in heaven.  I will be next to those I love and those that love me and we will glorify God together in songs of worship and praise.   This reward, this new life after death is as certain as gravity and as we are counter-culture people, our ways will receive persecution for "forward thinking" men and women who only can see what is in front of them and who take no notice of God, His laws, and His rewards.  They will be furious when we point out that their way of life is contrary to the Word of God.  They will tell us to follow our God in our own way and to leave them alone.  If that was only possible.  They do not live and let live as they want us to do, they pursue through the rule of law to make their rights to sinful things the law of the land.  They will do all that they can to enforce their rights while limiting ours.  But these people who are the most pitiful creature on earth are the enemies of Christ and the Cross. They existed at the time of Christ, at the time of the early Church, at the time of the great revolt of the Protestants, and exist until today.  Our Church is built on rock and in spite of the scandals of the moment it will survive and thrive because Jesus said so.  Paul tells us that our real homeland is in heaven.  We cannot keep silent about this because God wants a bountiful harvest and wants as many as possible to join Him in the never-ending feast. So, stir up your spirit, gird your loins and announce the Good News by the way you live and by the people you love.

Was He Kidding Or What?

Foreward:

There is no work as onerous as reinventing something that has already been invented, found to be useful and still does the job.  What follows is a reprise of a blog entry made several years ago on the Feast of Corpus Christi.  I was writing with passion that day and except for the addition of a comma here and an article there, I am reproducing it here.  Sometimes, and this is one of those occasions, I can't find anything to fix.  Praise to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Corpus Christi 2017  Michael

For fifteen hundred years there was no conflict when it came to the Holy Eucharist.  The Church believed that it was the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. Some of the "reformers" took issue with this, notably not the prototype heretic Luther who maintained that it was a sacramental union between Jesus and man.  Other reformers such as Calvin, Knox, and others believed it was only a symbolic memorial.

The Council of Trent at that time confirmed what everyone up until that time believed:

 Christ “instituted this Sacrament, in which He poured forth as it were the riches of divine love towards man” so that the Eucharist would be:

a remembrance, “to venerate His memory” and “show forth His death until He comes to judge the world.”

the “spiritual food of souls, whereby” He feeds and strengthens “those who live with His life.”

an “antidote, whereby we may be freed from daily faults [venial sins] and be preserved from mortal sins.”

a “pledge of our glory to come, and everlasting happiness”

a “symbol of that one body whereof He is the head, and to which He would fain have us as members be united by the closest bond of faith, hope, and charity…   Source: Laura McAlister

The Council of Trent like many councils was a reactionary council called to combat issues that came to because of the rebellion of Luther and the others.  Contrary to what some critics of the Church say the Council of Trent did not invent transubstantiation but rather codified what up until that time had been believed by everyone, everywhere.  I can see why today's Protestants would have trouble with the concepts codified by Trent.  The Council rightly defined the Eucharist as the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ.  This position taken to its logical end proves the Catholic point and thus was bitterly contested by the "reformers."  But for the sake of this blog let us suspend the tenants of the Council of Trent and go to what the "reformers" claim is the only source of Christian Doctrine, the Bible itself.  Let us also restrict ourselves to what the founder of the Catholic Church, Jesus, Himself said about the Eucharist.  (Please supply quotation marks where you think they should go,,,)

While they were at supper, Jesus took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave to his disciples and said; Take and eat. This is My Body And taking the chalice, He gave thanks, and gave to them saying: Take and drink this.  For this is My Blood of the New Testament which shall be shed for many unto the remission of sins.  (John 26: 26-28)

Amen, Amen, I say to you; Moses gave you not bread from Heaven, but my Father gives you the true Bread from Heaven.  For the Bread of God is that which comes down from Heaven and gives life to the world.

John 6:32, 33

I Am the Bread of life: He that comes to me shall not hunger and he that believes in Me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

I Am the Bread of Life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert and are dead. This is the Bread which comes down from Heaven; that if any man eats of it, he may not die.  I Am the living bread which came down from Heaven.  If any man eats of this bread he shall live forever, and the Bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.

John 6: 48 - 52

Amen, Amen I say unto you: Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of man and drink His Blood, you shall not have life in you.  He that eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day.

John 6: 54-55

For my Flesh is food indeed and my Blood is drink indeed.  He that eats my Flesh and drinks My Blood abides in Me and I in Him.  As the living Father has sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he that eats me, the same shall live by Me. This is the Bread that came down from Heaven. Not as your Fathers did eat manna and are dead. He that eats this Bread, shall live for ever.

John 6:56-59

If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word and My Father will love him and We will come to him and will make Our abode with him.

John 14:23

From the above, we can see that Jesus considered the gift of His Body and Blood essential to salvation. The Doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a hard thing for some people to believe. It was hard for the people in the time of Jesus.  In John chapter 6 verse 60 we read: " After hearing it, many of his followers said, 'This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?' Jesus does not say that He is only kidding, or what he said before should be taken as a symbol.  When he refuses to compromise or place a spin on what he said, the saddest moment of His life up until that time occurred because the people turned away and John says " After this, many of his disciples went away and accompanied him no more."  (John 6: 66) This too is what the "reformers" did or caused to happen among the poor souls that the clawed away from the Church.  They rejected the great gift of Jesus and just walked away, 

So, there you have it. The Blessed Sacrament is a gift that is misunderstood by some, laughed at by others, seen as a symbol, seen as a rite of passage, seen as something "you do."  The Blessed Sacrament is the union of Jesus and the recipient. You cannot get closer to God in this life than by receiving Him, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity into yourself.  If God can create the world in seven days from nothing, can He not also give us Himself in the form which appears to our senses as being bread and wine?  Does He not have the power and the will to do this?  If you say no then your God is too small.

Welcome To Gehenna

"You have heard that it was said to your ancestors,

You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.

But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother

will be liable to judgment,

and whoever says to his brother,

Raqa will be answerable to the Sanhedrin,

and whoever says, 'You fool,' will be liable to fiery Gehenna."

Welcome to Gehenna!  How do we interpret this passage of scripture?  I think it is relatively simple.  Jesus says that if you hate your brother, well, you can go to hell.  But, the news is even worse than that.  You may not hate your brother, you might just be angry with him, or you might call him a fool. In either case, you would become a citizen of Gehenna.  

The listeners did not have to think metaphysics when they heard these words of Jesus for they could go to Gehenna any time of the day or night that they wanted to.  Gehenna lay outside of the walls of Jerusalem and was a place where the, using the polite term, garbage was burned.  The fires burned day and night just under the surface the process of decay aided by the worms, flies, and maggots continued both day and night.  To be sure, Gehenna was not a place that the local Chamber of Commerce put into their brochures as an enticement to visit the city. 

As nasty as this place is, it is the place we are invited to move to by Jesus if we just call our brother a fool.  It is not easy to be a follower of Jesus, it never has been, and it never will.  What He proposes runs counter to the way we think.  When we are offended by someone, our natural self-wants to go on the offensive and strike back at the person or persons that have offended us.  

In order to avoid Gehenna, we must wage a war not against those who offend us but against that part of our soul that is reaching for the sword.  Our war should not be against our brother but against ourselves and the defects in our nature that cause us to respond with hate instead of love. 

This is not easy nor is it natural for us to do.  Yet, throughout our life, we should learn to practice forgiveness of those who offend us because there is no good neighborhood or good neighbors in Gehenna. 

There Is No Small Sin

"Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments

and teaches others to do so

will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.

But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments

will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven."

When we think of Jesus we most often think of Him as kind, loving, gentle, and meek.  This is good because He is all of these things.  In today's Gospel reading we catch a glimpse of another facet of Jesus.  We see what I call Jesus the Prophet.  Today His words tell us that we are God's children and we are called to obey and he tells us that there are consequences when we disobey and commit sin. 

Sin happens anytime when we place our will above that of God's. Our Church wisely classifies sin into two types which are venial or less serious sin and a mortal sin which is a sin that does just what it says, it destroys the relationship between the person and God.  Praise God that all sin is forgivable through the sacrament of reconciliation which we can use to express our sorrow and receive assurance that we are truly forgiven for what we have done. 

While I agree that there are two types of sin and that every sin, no matter how grave can be forgiven, I want to talk a little about the nature of sin itself.  Father Larry told this story.  He was driving to work one day and a person cuts him off.  He lost his temper and mentioned things about the other driver's ancestry that would have amazed the driver had he been able to hear them.  This act of cussing out the man that offended him was, of course, a venial sin.  He did not know the person in the other car and he did not really mean the things he said so it was not a grave sin.  Now imagine the same circumstances but the other driver happened to be his mother.  He has the same reaction.  The sin would be greater because of the dignity of the person he was sinning against. 

This is why I say that there is no small sin. There are sins that are milder than some but every sin, no matter how small, no matter how venial, is an offense against God and it is no small thing. The wonderful thing about sin is that it always can be forgiven. God is always there with His arms outstretched waiting to hug us back into His family. 

So today, I challenge you to stop and think before you consider committing even the smallest sin and remember who it is you are offending.  I challenge you also if you haven't taken advantage of the Sacrament of  Reconciliation in a while, even if it has been years or decades, to consider swallowing your pride and approach the throne of grace to be received back into God's family.  Sometimes love does mean we have to say that we are sorry. 

You Are The Light of The World

When I was young, my best friend and his family went camping in the wilds of southern Illinois at a place called "Lincoln Trails State Park."  Now, if you are going to rough it for a week, this is the place to do it in.  Each space had an electric hook up, there were honest to goodness flush toilets and immaculately clean showers.  Couple this with a beautiful fishing lake and you had a little bit of paradise on earth if you are into camping that is.  We had a good time that week.

What I remember the most is the night I walked down to the dock.  I am a city boy and when I looked up into the sky and had my first look at the Milky Way, I just knew that God had something to do with this.  The sky was black velvet and there were a billion stars in view.  I looked at that and realized just how small and insignificant I truly was. I knew from science class that the light of some of those stars had taken thousands of years to reach my eyes.  There was a great majesty in the sky above me and it took my breath away.  God is the great builder of things and of souls.  If the Milky Way is so impressive, what must the soul of a saint be like? 

We are called in the Gospel for today to be reflections of Our Father's love. We are called to shine like stars and even brighter than that!  Our brightness, fueled by our love of God, will attract others to Our Father because of the beauty our souls receives as grace from Him.  

A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  During the day the sun points out its location and at night the lights of its streets and byways show exactly where it is.  The Catholic Church, through each of us, must be that city on the hill. If we treat others with the love that God is treating us, then people will be irresistibly drawn to God and that built in desire to be one with God, which they have buried deeply in their soul, will blaze forth and they too will add to the light of the City of God.  

In The Beginning - The Creation Story

        

          "God said, "Let there be light..."

I love early mornings.  I sit here at my desk gazing out of the window watching the darkness of night, slowly being replaced by the light of day.  In the summer, at a certain moment, the birds awaken and begin their song of praise to the Father, thanking Him for bringing them through another night, another time of darkness.  Our God is Light and that is what distinguishes Him from all other deities that men worship.  With the light that the God of the Universe brings comes life.  Life not only in the physical sense, the light that the animals thank Him for daily but light for the souls of His children on earth.  This light, of course, is Jesus.  Every moment of every day God continues the work of creation.  The sun arrives to brighten the physical world and for those of us who believe and desire Him, He enters in and sheds His light and brightens our soul.  

The light of God's sun melts that which is frozen on earth and the light of God's Son, Jesus, infuses our soul with joy and peace. This is the reason that God created the world, to share Himself, to share His light, His Creation with us.  Breathe deeply of the morning air and inhale the recreation of the first day in which God said, "Let there be light."  

The Church vs The World and how it affects you.

If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own;

but because you do not belong to the world,

and I have chosen you out of the world,

the world hates you."

When Jesus spoke these words, he could have been speaking about the world we live in today. We know, some of us from experience, that it is not easy to be a Christian in the second millennium, but then, it wasn't easy in the first or even during the time of the Apostles.  

What makes us different than the animals is that we have a soul that is immortal and we have a mind that knows this and is self-aware of its existence. Our mind cannot fathom a world that does not include it.  I've said before that my one problem with dying is the knowledge that while I am busy shutting down, my former neighbor will be getting ready to go to EPCOT center. My friends and family will probably after they hear of my death, wonder what the church will feed them after the funeral service. In Washington D.C. our legislators will spend more time doing nothing useful.  In other words, life on this planet will continue and more than likely, thrive without the presence of Michael The Lesser on it, whose main contribution is filling up an internet blog with prattle! 

If we all realize that our fate is a common one, no matter if there is a God or not, why don't we play nice with each other?  A Christian person should be leading the way by giving a good example, by being kind, and being forgiving to others.  

Look at the benefits of being a Christian.  First, living a Christian life will make the time on earth that we have much more pleasant.  Next and the most important thing is we receive eternal life at the end of our time on this little blue marble that floats in the Orion arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.  When you join, let's say an auto club, you usually get some sort of premium, a map case, a dog whistle, a brillo pad, it doesn't matter, it is a free premium because you are paying to become a member.  A Christian gets what a Christian gets absolutely free because we cannot buy our way into heaven. The news, nay, nay I say, The good news is that heaven and eternal life with God is a free gift given to us by the Father because He loves us so very much.  Okay, the last sentence was over the top, but still it was true! 

It is kind of ironic that as the indication that the Church is doing a good job is that the world hates it more and more. So, where does this leave us on May 20, 2017?  We need to step up our game. We need to be more Christ-like in our lives.  We must be willing to accept the retribution, without anger, actually with joy,  and we must continue to try to live out the Word as best as we can.  We must love more, help more, work more, and especially pray more.  WE must always remember the command of Jesus to love one another as He loved us.   The hatred of the world can be overcome if we put our hearts and souls into the effort. 

God bless you today, please, take a moment right now, and pray for someone that you know that needs it.  Pray and thank God that you are on of his adopted children.  Do it now.  Schedule a five-minute prayer break for yourself every day, put it in your phone's calendar like you put the  other ordinary  things that you just have to do. Make prayer a required time in your day.  Saint Francis, who worked his whole life trying to imitate Jesus said at the end of his life,  "Let us begin today brothers, for until now we have done nothing."   Let us begin, the time is right and the time is NOW!

Tuesday of Holy Week - Betrayal

Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled and testified,

"Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me."

I don't think that there is anything more painful to the human heart than an act of betrayal.  What makes betrayal so painful is that it is an act of a friend.  A person who does not know you cannot betray you. We all have been the victim of betrayal in our lives.  When I was a seventh grader, my friend Dennis and I went over to McKinley Park, a beautiful place when I was a kid, it was filled with bicycle paths, playgrounds, and a lagoon that you could actually catch fish at. This, of course, was in warm weather.  My friend and I were going to the park on a day when only fools and idiots were out of doors as it was very cold. We had a purpose in mind.  The cold snap would have frozen the lagoon solid and we wanted to take some time to explore the three islands that were on this man-made lake.  And so we did.  It turned out that these three little islands were nothing very special, a fact which we took note of and started to use the ice for its native purpose, sliding.  All in all, it was a lot of fun for a couple young boys on a cold and blustery Chicago winter weekend.  At one end of the park was the "inlet" that kept the water fresh.  The inlet was not a spring, it was a pipe that poured fresh Lake Michigan water into the lagoon to prevent it from becoming a stinking swamp in the summer months.  We gravitated towards this pipe because even though it was freezing cold, there were six feet of liquid water surrounding the pipe.  We got to the edge of the ice and my friend pointed at something and I bent low to see what it was.  The next thing I knew I was under the water. The icy water made me gasp and I was out air quickly.  God was with me at that moment because I did not panic and thrash about so I stayed near the hole.  I remember seeing the ice from the bottom with the weak sunlight lighting it up.  I struggled and pushed myself up and my friend's arm pulled me out and deposited me on the ice like a walrus.  I began immediately to shiver. My friend found it all hilarious and called me a clumsy oaf.  My lips were blue and I knew I could not walk the two miles back to my home but luckily my Uncle John lived not too far from the park.  My friend said he had to go home and turned and left me shivering and freezing to death on the ice.  I trudged off the ice and walked to my uncle's house which, luckily, was only two blocks away. My uncle provided me with warm clothes and hot chocolate and called his brother to come and pick me up.  Later, I learned that my friend, Dennis, was bragging and laughing about how foolish I looked after he pushed me into the lagoon.  That was the first time in my life I felt betrayed and it hurt. It hurt badly.  If you think back, I am sure that you will remember a time when a friend turned on you.  How did it feel? 

Judas Iscariot was a friend of Jesus. He was one of the twelve picked to be His special friends, His Apostles.  These would be the men He entrusted his kingdom, his Church on earth to.  Judas was an important Apostle. He had charge of the money.  He saw to needed purchases and made sure that the charity people offered were put to good use.  He may have also kept a bit for himself, at least there were suspicions that he did so but Jesus did nothing when it was brought to His attention.  This emboldened Judas and he began to think that if he could get away with stealing from the common purse, then how could Jesus be the Messiah, the Son of God?  Judas could see the writing on the wall.  He could tell that the Pharisees were baiting Jesus and were just waiting for him to make a single wrong step. If Jesus were to be arrested, so would anyone close to him unless that person had a special relationship with the high priest.  Judas decided to sell Jesus to His enemies.  Of course, once Jesus was arrested he could keep the common purse because it was money belonging to a criminal.  Inwardly, Judas was delighted with his plan.  Outwardly he continued to pretend that he was a faithful follower of Jesus.  When the time came, he received all that he had hoped for. He got the donations, he got thirty pieces of silver, the cost of an unskilled slave, and he was immune from prosecution because he had turned Jesus in.  In the end, he realized his betrayal cost him a lot more than he had received.  He could have asked Jesus for forgiveness and he would be forgiven.  Instead, he gave in to despair and committed suicide.

We all like to think that had we been around in the time of Jesus we would have been faithful followers of Christ. Back then, being a Christian brought with it dangers of death. Would we have become martyrs for our faith of would we have offered incense to the emperor's statue? 

Today, in America, we do not risk death for being a follower of Christ. But are we afraid to show we are Christians?  The America we live in is hostile to Christian ways. We can lose friends and esteem if we point out things that are wrong.  But if we fail to do this we are just like Judas in that we are trying to make friends with those who are in power who may hate Jesus and His Church. We cannot choose to be an undercover Christian. To do so would be a betrayal that would make Judas's betrayal seem mild in comparison. 

As we approach the end of our Lenten journey, let us look at where we have missed the mark, where we have sinned.  Forgiveness is just one reception of the sacrament of Reconciliation away.  If you haven't been to it in years, so what?  Tell the priest and he will help you along.  Our sins are betrayals of the One that loves us. We can ignore them and sign on to follow the world or we can face them, confess them, and receive forgiveness.  We can be Judas who betrayed and died or we can be Peter who betrayed and lived.  The choice is up to us. 

The Cross

The cross is a very personal thing. Jesus knew this. The cross of Jesus affected his whole body. The pain he was feeling was so severe that the temptation to prove his power by removing himself from the cross had to be running through his head.  Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, it is this fact that makes the cross relevant. If Jesus were just human He could not use the cross to show God's great love for us, He would have been just another sacrifice like those being made at the temple. On the other hand if Jesus was just divine, He would not have experienced life and the dying process as we His creatures do. Both of the elements, humanity and divinity,  had to be and were present.  So the first way the Cross affected Jesus was mentally.  He had to refuse the all too human facility to go against the desires of the Father by using the power that He had as the Son. This required Jesus to put complete trust into God and surrendering Himself as a human to the will of the Father.  

The next way the Cross affected Jesus was physically. Death by crucifixion was a death by inches. The major process was suffocation.  The woulds caused by the nails were just "minor" injuries that the body could healed if the person had been taken down from the cross while still alive. The process that a person goes through while dying on the cross is this. You had to hold yourself up to breathe and that strain on your arms was monumental and the fatigue was cumulative as lactic acid built up in the muscles. The condemned used their legs and the nail that had been pounded through the feet to give some purchase to stay where one could breath. But the pain from the wound in the feet was great and the arms tired and the culprit would sag down into a "Y" formation. The pressure on the diaphragm would make it impossible to breathe and the victim would have to push himself up again.  Depending on the strength of the one on the cross, this could go on for days.  In the case of Jesus, He was already battered and beaten and so his strength was expended in mere hours.  Death on the cross as I said was a death in inches.  The merciless sun beat down upon the criminal and insects of all types alighted on the body. There was the psychological aspect of the punishment as well to consider.  In most of the empire the criminal was exposed naked on the cross. In Israel, the benevolence of Caesar allowed the wearing of a loin cloth because the Jews were scandalized by nudity.  

So for hours Jesus suffered through the dying process. Then near the end he did several things that showed that this was no ordinary execution.  He awarded sainthood to a fellow criminal suffering with Him on that day. On the cross a criminal could be counted on to answer the scorn heaped upon him with curses. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing." Jesus perfectly fulfilled his obligation to honor His mother and father when he put the Virgin Mary, who had no other relatives to help her into the care of the apostle John for a widow with no relatives would have to resort to begging to meet the needs of the day.  Just before He died, he said, "I thirst."  A sponge was soaked in cheap wine and held up to His lips. He took some and he then said, "It is finished."   What was finished?  Do you remember the last supper? It ended before all of the ritualistic rubrics had been completed. They sang a long hymn. After the hymn there was supposed to be a final cup of wine that would conclude the Passover meal.  It was never consumed and the Passover meal was never completed.  By taking that wine on the Cross, Jesus, the Lamb of God, completed the New Passover and redeemed us,  Then one of the evangelists says "He uttered a loud cry."  A loud cry? From the cross? After being scourged, beaten, bled and bloodied?  The loud cry was followed by Jesus handing over His spirit.  voluntarily for us.  It was very hard to speak at all from the cross. To hear a loud cry come from someone near to death must have been  startling to the onlookers.  The loud cry shows that Jesus handed over His life, that it was not taken from Him, He gave it willingly. 

Today at Mass we read the Gospel where Jesus asks who do the people think I am.  After a few answers he asks the apostles who they think He is. Peter answers "The Christ of God."  He then tells his followers that to be his follower we have to take up our cross daily and follow Him.  What does this mean?  The cross is a very personal thing.  But we as followers of Chris, what we need to do is this,  We need to wake up each morning and pick up our cross and follow Jesus with it.  A cross is a very personal thing.  For many of us it may be a fault we are working to correct and never can seem to conquer it and it is causing us anguish. For some of us it might mean going to a job you hate because you receive no recognition for your contributions and to contribute to the best of your ability anyway.  It may be dealing with any number of things, but we must pick it up, put it on our shoulder and carry it every day for that is what is means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 

Reconciliation With God and Man -

I went to confession this last Wednesday. 
My spirit always feels so much better and I feel so much more alive once experience this great gift of God's love for us. This sacrament seems to have fallen out of favor for some of my fellow Catholics and I feel sorry for them because they don't know what they are missing.  There are all sorts of reasons people do not go.  Let's talk about some of them and see how they stack up.

"I go straight to Jesus for forgiveness, I don't have to tell a priest my sins. Jesus forgives me." 

On the surface this sounds real good and is very convincing but it is not what Jesus has in mind for his followers. How do we know this? First of all Jesus gave the power to the Apostles to forgive sin. He said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me...and later "As the Father has sent me even so I send you, And when he said this he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any they are retained. (John 20: 21-23) We also read in Matthew, "Whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matt 18:18) 

That we are to confess verbally is clearly implied because how were the Apostles to know which sins they were going to forgive or not forgive unless they were told about them? 

What advantages are there in confessing aloud to a priest? The following has been harvested from an article on Catholic Answers. Click the link to read the whole article (LINK) 

1. First he seeks forgiveness the way Christ intended. 
2. By confessing to a priest, the Catholic learns a lesson in humility, which is avoided when one confesses through private prayer.
3. The Catholic receives sacramental graces that the non-Catholic does not get - through the sacrament of penance sins are forgiven and the graces are obtained. 
4.  The Catholic is assured his sins are forgiven and he does not have to rely on a subjective feeling.
5.  The Catholic can receive sound advice in avoiding sin in the future.

This assurance that I have been forgiven by God AND his Church which encompasses all believers, both those in full communion with the Church, my fellow Catholics and those brothers and sisters that are either not in communion with the Church but are brothers and sisters because of our common brother in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our savior. 

Some Catholics have not been to confession in years. Some not for 5, 10, 20 or even 30 years or longer. Being away from this great sacrament for so long causes a person to be greatly afraid as to what will happen to them if they tell a priest they have been away for so long. They envision hearing a gasp of horror from the priest and imagine hearing a long demeaning lecture.  

NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!!!  

Don't you remember what scripture says that there is more rejoicing in heaven when one sinner repents than over 99 that did not have to repent?  Be honest with the priest, tell him how long you have been away, don't remember what to say? Father will help you. He will make it as easy for you as possible. The first step is yours. You have to go into that confession room, you have to take the first step.  After that it gets easy. The Holy Spirit brought you to this place, God already knows all of your sins, all you have to do is to face up to them and to confess them, be sorry for them, and try your best not to commit them again.  Don't be afraid, the Grace of God awaits you in confession. Take advantage of it. 

God bless you today and as we prepare to enter into Holy Week, remember God loves you more than you can imagine. He loves you just as you are and wants you to take advantage of the sacrament of confession and become closer and closer and closer to Him.  Peace! 

On Death and Dying and The Christian Person

           

Courtesy/consciouslifenews.com/

                                                                During this season of Lent, one of the things we Christians are asked to reflect on is the state of our life and to think carefully about what our destiny is. The fact is that no one will leave this world alive. From the fall of Adam and Eve to the present day, the destiny of the human body is to return to the dust it was made of. If you are human, you will die. No one has escaped that fate, not even Jesus. Jesus did not go into some state of suspended animation. Jesus went through the pain of death that all of us will feel. On that most Holy Cross the body of Jesus went through the process of death. His organs began shutting down to keep the vital processes, heart and brain, going as long as possible. When it could take no more, Jesus knew it was time. To show that He was going to conquer death he cried out in a loud voice according to the Bible, which is a most difficult thing to do while nailed to a cross and He surrendered His soul to the Father. At the moment of death, the soul of Jesus left the body and there was no force to keep the flesh animated any longer. Physically, at that moment, decay began. Blood, without a heart to propel it began to sink into the lower extremities. A soldier who thought that the man from Galilee was faking thrust a spear through His heart and piercing the Pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart there came forth blood and water. The body was removed and Mary His mother held the cooling, brutalized Body in her arms. Her tears were copious and she did not want to let Him go. But the disciples and friends that were on hand gently pried the lifeless corpse from her arms and laid Him atop a shroud. They wound Him up in it and without too much fanfare on that Sabbath eve, laid him in a borrowed tomb, even in death Jesus had no place of His own to lay His head. 

The picture at the top is allegedly a picture of the soul leaving a man at the time of death. The article states that the blue color is the "life force" and you can see in picture on the left there is a lot of blue, and on the right, you can see just a bit of blue at head level, about to depart. I do not believe that they have captured the soul leaving the body. I just thought that the picture would provide an interesting focal point for this post. 

Like it or not one day, maybe today, maybe in an hour, maybe in the next minute we will die. We will experience in some form what Jesus did, that is our bodies ultimate fate. 

For some of us, the lucky ones among us, the process of dying will begin with a doctor telling us that we have a terminal disease and you have X amount of time to live. I say that you are lucky because you will have time to do what needs to be done. You will have been given a grace, a time to make repairs to relationships and in general take your leave of this world in a more or less peaceful and dignified manner.  But before this all of us will go through several phases including denial of death, bargaining with God, until we arrive at acceptance.  

At the time appointed by God, you will enter into the final stages of this life. You will say good bye in various ways and at the pre-ordained moment you will take your last breath and leave the garden God gave to us to tend and you will return home to our Father. 

For a Christian, death should not leave us quaking in fear. We know that death has been conquered and we will rise on the last day. 

I think that in our world today, especially in the United States and Canada, we deny death until the last spadeful of dirt covers our loved ones remains. We spend thousands of dollars to pickle them so they do not degrade so fast. We purchase elaborate boxes to put them in and we seal those to keep the elements out and we place these ornate boxes inside of a sealed concrete box to await the return of Christ. The death merchants sell us all manner of goods, charging five or six times the wholesale price for a casket. They charge hundreds of dollars for thirty dollars of chemicals and cosmetics and some even consider themselves quasi preachers, providing mushy "funeral committal services" at will for those not affiliated with a church.  So, what does all of this expense buy for us? The undertakers will tell you that it will give the family  closure. Well, maybe it does, but if the death was expected the act of taking the last breath may be all the closure a family wants. The morticians say that what they do will give the family a beautiful a memory picture of their loved one that have had all of the roughness and blemishes of death sanded away using the tools of the dismal trade and they say that will give them peace. Maybe it will, but what the undertaker is hoping for, besides a good profit on the deal, is looking towards the next case. He or she wants people to see how good he is at his work and he hopes and prays that the next one to go dies after saying "Let Snodgrass embalm me, put makeup in me, suture my mouth closed, put eye caps on so my eyes don't fly open and please put me in a very expensive box like X was in. Yes, the funeral directors next bit of business may very well come because of the way your mother or father, or friend looked under the theatrical lights on the day of the wake. Look at what an expensive casket (to be honest this casket was probably on the lower end of the price list, but still six times in what Snodgrass paid for it) looks like after twenty years in the ground: 

Courtest: http://www.documentingreality.com/

 Would you care to open the lid and take a peek inside to see how the occupant fared during this twenty year period?  No, me either. An embalmed corpse locked up in an airless sealed up casket and sealed vault soon putrefies and after even a week or two in the ground becomes a lot less that a beautiful memory picture as the anaerobic bacteria changes the body into a blob of goo. So much for the value the dismal trade give you for your hard earned dollar.  

The fact is that once a Christian dies, his or her body SHOULD be treated with respect, for it was a temple of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean we have to spend thousands of dollars in a vain attempt to keep the body from corrupting. "Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return." An inexpensive casket, I am opting for one of those purple cloth covered ones, and burial in consecrated ground is enough.  Overspending on the funeral only benefits the undertaker. 

I watched a very interesting movie on You Tube the other day entitled "A Certain Kind of Death."  (Click Here to View)  This movie follows the processing of two men through the system in the Los Angeles coroners department. What I took away from this movie was how simply stupid we mortals can be. We work our whole lives, we build up a store of goods and yet one day, all of it will belong to someone else as we are buried six feet under the ground.  The movie is kind of graphic, but not in a morbid way. The coroners office buries the ashes of indigents and unclaimed bodies once a year in a potters field. The scene of the workers emptying the cremated remains of sixteen hundred people into a mass grave still is haunting me today. Each of the small aluminum boxes that contained what was left of a person that lived, had dreams and aspirations, had at one time a family that loved them, had jobs, bills, vacations and perhaps hunger, poverty, disease, and finally death came to an end at that moment. Sixteen hundred people were buried that day in the ground, their only marked a bronze square with the date "1997" on it's face. 

So, let's wrap this up.  What does death and dying mean for a Christian? For us it means that we are going home to God to face final judgement for our lives.  So I think that for a Christian living life is much more important that memorializing it after death. I have to confess, while I won't actually be at my own funeral, for my soul will be elsewhere, I would like to think that there would be some who would attend my funeral and some that would mourn my passing. My family consists of two younger sisters and one younger brother, my parents, uncles and aunts have gone to their rest. My siblings have nothing to do with me, I have no idea why and I intend to make certain that all of my final arrangements are made in advance of my departure so they do not have to be bothered.  I don't want them even to be notified. Let them to continue to treat me in death how they treated me in life.  But be that as it may, I intend to be a morticians nightmare. I believe that my body will rise again as did Jesus when he defeated death. I believe that there is no reason to preserve that which is destined to decay. I will request immediate burial or cremation (I have not decided yet) and any funeral goods that I will need to purchase will be of the cheapest, most utilitarian, minimalist type. My estate, if there is anything left and my wife has died before me, I will will to my Church. 

So for a Christian, I believe we must make an effort to do the things a Christian should do NOW and not wait until the doctors give us a terminal sentence. Love, Laugh, Pray, and be Merciful. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, visit the sick and yes, bury the dead. 

Te Purple Coffin I want to be used at my funeral