“This is the will of God, your holiness.” (1 Thes 4:3) Sometimes a short verse of Sacred Scripture gob smacks you early in the morning and shakes you out of the fog and has you sit up and take notice. St. Paul gives us this wake-up call today.

This call to holiness is a personal and profound entry into a relationship that goes beyond the humdrum and into the exciting and breathtaking.

To seek holiness is to seek love and to seek love is to seek God. And this is what God wants. He wants us to seek him but here’s the catch: he is not hiding rather he is pursuing us with fervor and joy. This is why, I believe, prayer and scripture are so important. It is why Sunday Mass is vital to our spiritual life. It is in these moments that we are able to slow down and stop. To put on the brakes and stop running thinking that we are seeking holiness and allowing the holiness of God to surround us.

How does this happen? Maybe it looks a little like this. A father was taking care of his two toddler children one Saturday. All he had to do was watch them, feed them lunch and then put them down for a nap. It all went horribly wrong. By lunch he was frazzled, most of the food prepared was either on the floor, the table or in the hair. As he prepared his children for their nap time the running began the escaping from the crib and the emotional temperature began to rise. At one point the father sat down on the sofa and laid his head back. When his wife came through the door, sitting on the couch was her dozing husband with a sleeping child’s head on each leg.

This can often be our life, where God in his love pursues us as we make the blunders and stumbles of our life where we want our own way and do it our way. We want to be in charge and focused on our pleasure and enjoyment, then God calls us to rest in him. It usually is neither a large clap of thunder nor a voice from the sky but the whisper of peacefulness that invites us to come and just be with him for a moment.

We discover the fullness of God’s call to holiness when we surrender to the joy of just being with God and resting as we do his holy work. It is being the saint that we are created to be were life is never without joy.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

Tomorrow, August 22^nd is the Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary it will be also a day when people of good will and hope will stand in prayer in protest against the violence done to the unborn seeking and end to the support of federal funds supporting Planned Parenthood.

Although many of those who stand in prayer will not be Catholic, I believe, it is an important foundation for us to begin with, this Memorial of Mary, as we look at the issue of life and how we are called to be a people of life united with our Lord Jesus in the example and blessing of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I know that I do not often write about such serious subjects but this post has been on my mind and heart for several weeks. As I was reading the Papal Bull of Pope Francis announcing the Jubilee Year of Mercy I could not help but ponder some of the words and images that have been produced in uncovering the banality and brutality of the practice of this procedure. As I follow Live Action and their founder Lila Rose on Facebook and Twitter I have been brought to tears hearing the callousness of word, thought and action in the casual destruction of human life.

It is a reminder to each of us that in the faith of our Blessed Mother the life of the world was placed in our midst. The in her visitation to Elizabeth, the unborn life of John the Baptist leapt for joy. And in the birth of our Savior Jesus the shepherds joined the Angels in proclaiming God’s glory in our broken humanity.

As a person who is proud of my German heritage I am all to aware of the evil that surrounded the actions of the Nazi regime and in reading, studying and speaking to people who lived through that time it is almost to easy to make the comparison. But in truth it is when we refuse to engage in the honest and moral conversations of the hard issues and realities of life that we find ourselves slipping slowly towards our very destruction. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”  In this we must “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.” (Mt5:37)

It is the call to justice, mercy and forgiveness that we must all respond to as sons and daughters of the one true God. As Pope Francis writes in The Face of Mercy “(M)ere justice is not enough. Experience shows that an appeal to justice alone will result in its destruction. This is why God goes beyond justice with his mercy and forgiveness. Yet this does not mean that justice should be devalued or rendered superfluous. On the contrary: anyone who makes a mistake must pay the price. However, this is just the beginning of conversion, not its end, because one begins to feel the tenderness and mercy of God. God does not deny justice. He rather envelops it and surpasses it with an even greater event in which we experience love as the foundation of true justice.”(21)

I invite you tomorrow to pray Psalm 136 for the conversion of our hearts and the hearts of all as we pray that all life, from the moment of conception to natural death, will be treated with the dignity of sacredness of God’s love for us.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

“It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.” C.S. Lewis (or) Lena Horn, (or) Lou Holtz

This quote from C.S. Lewis struck me very forcefully this week. If you remember the Second reading last Sunday from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (4:30-5:2) he called us to follow Jesus as live as a “fragrant aroma” in the world. As sons and daughters of God it is often how we carry life that allows us to be evangelizers of the good news of Jesus Christ. The fragrant aroma of life invites us and others to move closer and gather as one as we are drawn by the sweetness of love. It is like the baking of fresh bread that moves us one by one into the kitchen of life. And when we think about it, if the aroma is not that of sweetness and joy then the opposite also occurs and we find ourselves the stench of hatred and bitterness scattered and avoiding the unity of Jesus and his Church.

If we carry our load with anger and resentment then we can quickly discover that the sin of unforgiveness, greed, hatred and prejudice will overcome us. The anger and resentment will color the sweetness of life and we can be isolated from the peace of living in union with love. The destructiveness of anger, especially anger that is held and never released, does harm to our call to serve as we become grudging participants always looking for the harm that is being done to us by others and missing the beauty of God’s love and grace that we participate in but never accept. Shoving away rather than embracing in hope.

If we carry the loads of life with the face of a sacrificial martyr, look at me as I suffer for you, pitying our lot in life as the unwilling bearer of life’s burdens we have lost our focus on the importance of serving and caring in our vocation of love. We enter into a joyless and loveless act of service where our load becomes ever increasingly and annoyance that wears down our ability to reach out to others. Our focus becomes ever more increasingly on the perceived injustice of our having to shoulder everything for everyone else and that no one notices our cares about my sacrifices and how much I suffer for them. Poor little me!

If we carry our load with Jesus we carry it with hope and love, “take up his (your) cross and follow me.”(Mk 8:34) It is were we allow the anger and self-pity of sin to be seen in the light of God’s love in giving us His Son, Our Lord Jesus.   It is where we recognize the load for what it is, a burden to be carried, and not for what it isn’t, a punishment to be suffered. It is when we choose to accept that our sins and the sins of the others will at times cause us heartache and hurt but cannot destroy our call to be beloved sons and daughters of God. The hope and love with which we live our Christian call is one of living within the joy and peace or a relationship with God. It is where we bear witness to the grace of reconciliation, forgiveness and mercy that unites us with one another and ultimately allow the great Other to walk with us as the others that we live in community with. It is living daily the antidote for despair, which is an inoculation of prayer, our daily conversation with God.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

It has been a great week to be on Pope watch. Our Holy Father Francis has been giving us much food for thought this past week and I would like to touch on a very particular matter, which as a parish priest, is of upmost importance to our faith and our evangelization of the world. The subject is altar servers.

Pope Francis hosted several hundred altar servers from Germany this past week and he gave them a wonderful talk. Why is this so important especially in the evangelization efforts of our community? We can ask the question and give the answer by observing our servers this Sunday, not in a hypercritical way but in asking the questions: what they are doing? Why are they doing this duty? Do they look like evangelizers?

1. They are serving Jesus through the community. Do you think that our altar servers would say that in answer to the question? But that is what they are doing. They are offering their time to God to serve His son, Jesus, by assisting in the sacrifice of the Mass. This is a great and important service. Serving God means knowing God and taking time with him in prayer and preparation for the Mass. It is a challenge to the parish, the parents and the servers to seek moments of preparation before Mass so that we can all be attentive to what is occurring within the Mass and how we are transformed in the work of the Mass.
2. The why’s of life are so very important. If we don’t know the reason we are serving God, then how can we be joyful and sincere in our service of others in our call to Christian love. This is what Pope Francis said to them, “It is important to realize that being close to Jesus and knowing him in the Eucharist through your service at the altar, enables you to open yourselves to others, to journey together, to set demanding goals and to find the strength to achieve them. It is a source of real joy to recognize that we are small and weak, all the while knowing that, with Jesus’ help, we can be strengthened and take up the challenge of life’s great journey in his company.” The celebration of the Eucharist is vital to life as we open our hearts to serve in the name of Jesus.
3. In baptism we are all called to the prophetic vocation of proclaiming God’s word. That is a scary reality for many people, especially the young. But we cannot flinch from speaking God’s mercy and love to all people and not just in the safe places but in the challenging areas of life, such as school and activities where the name of Jesus is often only whispered and hidden from the public square. Once more our Holy Father does not hold back in challenging the altar servers, “You are called to speak of Jesus to your contemporaries, not only those within your parishes or associations, but especially to those outside.”

This Sunday and the coming weeks, take time to pray and observe the altar servers and remind yourself that we all serve at the altar of our Lord when we truly and fully celebrate Mass in communion with our Catholic faith. And while the Pope’s words may have been for a group of German altar servers they are reminders to all of us of who we are called to be.

God bless

Fr. Mark

The full text of the Pope’s remarks are found below, give them as a gift to a altar server near you… http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/08/04/pope_meets_with_altar_servers_in_st_peters_square/1163018