On Spiritual Thirst and Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

[Here is a homily for the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman from ten years ago.  I’m glad I saved all these!]

Christ is risen!  Today’s gospel (Jn. 4:5-42) is a gospel for the thirsty.  If you are not thirsty, if you’re self-satisfied and complacent, and think that everything in your life is just as it should be—especially in your spiritual life—well, you can go home now.  The rest of you can stay and listen, because this is a gospel for the thirsty.

Now we meet in this gospel a thirsty woman.  She didn’t, perhaps, know how thirsty she really was, or didn’t really know in what her thirst consisted, although Jesus knew that.  So He led her into a little encounter by saying that He was thirsty, to put her at ease, though to start with it didn’t.  We can see by her whole dialogue that she was very unhappy.  She was a complainer.  Kind of like the paralytic from last week, although he was more of a whiner; this woman is a little more arrogant, but she was still an unhappy complainer about her life.

Jesus was coming to her to make things better for her, but first He had to help her recognize what her thirst was all about.  Perhaps it was a thirst for love, for security, for fulfillment, but she was looking in the wrong places.  She tried to satisfy her thirst with men, and she went through quite a few of them.  Obviously, that didn’t work, because she was still thirsty, and her life only got more and more unhappy: not only personally, but socially, too, because most likely she was ostracized from the whole community for her behavior. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be going to get water in the heat of the day; she would’ve gone with everybody else in the early morning, when they usually get water.  But she was probably a persona non grata with the whole community, so she had to sneak off at a different time, by herself.  So she was very unhappy and lonely.

But Jesus, before He could just “fix” everything for her, had to make her realize a couple of things. One of the things was that her unhappiness was her own darn fault.  Oftentimes we point the finger at something else for our unhappiness.  No matter what happens in life, we find ways to be unhappy.  If we don’t get what we want, we’re unhappy.  Or if we do get what we don’t want, we’re unhappy.  Even if we do get what we do want, we’re still unhappy, because we’re afraid we’re going to lose it, or that it’s not going to last forever, or whatever.  We can always manage somehow to be unhappy.  But we have to realize, then, that our unhappiness is fundamentally of our own making.

I just read this story recently; it’s more of a parable, I guess, about a man who was a construction worker, and he would come to work every day, just like the other guys on the job, and they would all bring their lunch to work.  He looks in his lunch bag, and says, “Yuck; peanut butter and jelly again.  I hate peanut butter and jelly!”   And he would complain like that.  And every day, the same thing:  “Peanut butter and jelly again!  I hate peanut butter and jelly!”  So finally, the other guys who were eating lunch with him said, “Well look, if you don’t like peanut butter and jelly, just tell your wife to make you something else!”  And he says, “What do you mean, my wife?  I’m not married—I make my own sandwiches!”

This is the problem that we have, and that the Samaritan woman had.  She was “making her own sandwiches.”  And we “make our own sandwiches”—and then complain about them!   Because we don’t like it, and it’s the same old stuff every day.  Well, Jesus is trying to tell us that we don’t have to do that!  Things can change, with his help, with his presence in our lives.

But we also have to realize that once we know wherein our happiness lies, we do have to make some changes.  The Lord didn’t just wave his hands over the Samaritan woman and say, “Now there: everything’s perfect for you!”  She had to make some changes in her own life: she had to stop the behavior that she was engaged in, and she also had to change her attitude about life.

It’s time that we start learning from our life experiences, instead of complaining about them.  That doesn’t get us anywhere; we just walk around with a “woe is me” attitude all the time. We’re just going to be stuck in the same rut that we’ve dug for ourselves and never get out.  We have to recognize first in us the desire for something more than our own “peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”: something that is going to change our life, that can change our life.

Jesus comes and says, “If you only knew what’s possible for you!  If you only knew what is the gift of God, and who it is that’s offering this gift to you, offering something that’s not merely going to make you feel good for a little while, like all the other things that you’re searching for in your unhappiness, but something that’s going to be a life-giving spring inside you that never runs dry, that always supplies you with what you really need to be happy!”

But, as often happens when the Lord (or somebody else at the Lord’s bidding) touches a sensitive nerve in our life, we immediately become evasive and change the subject, which is exactly what this woman did.  She finally got it, though; that’s when the enlightenment came.  She left behind her water jar—symbol of her former life—and ran to the town, telling everyone: “I have found the One!  Come and see!”   And so she, at that moment, received her enlightenment.  Tradition says that she later on became a saint, and they call her St Photina, which means “the enlightened one.”

We have to finally “get it,” too.  The Lord is going to be speaking to our hearts, speaking to our thirst, if we’re ready to come to Him and to listen, to recognize the need that we have, and be willing to make the necessary changes in our life that are going to dispose us toward enlightenment.

Enlightenment does not fall out of the sky.  Enlightenment is something that comes at the end of a long process of purification, of learning, of struggling, of growing, of opening your heart.  It’s been waiting there all the time, but we just can’t receive it—we have too many obstacles inside ourselves to accept it, to experience it and to live in it.  So we have to go through this whole process.

First of all, we have to start by recognizing our thirst—that our thirst is for something beyond the cheap little satisfactions that we’re trying to squeeze out of this life.  There’s something more than that.  We have to recognize where our thirst really is: Jesus spoke of a hunger for the Bread that endures unto eternal life.  Our hunger, our thirst and our desire have to be for that which transcends the things that just pass, and we can’t be satisfied with something less than God wants to give us.

We can’t just be self-satisfied, complacent, and unwilling to make that difficult inner journey to discover our thirst, and to see what it is, inside us, that’s gnawing away at us, perhaps, and to realize that there’s something that has to be done, something that has to change, in order to let Christ fulfill that thirst.

We may be like that Samaritan woman, and have all kinds of reasons to complain why our life is not happy—whatever it is: something happened to us in our childhood, or something happened to us yesterday, or whatever—and many things that happen to us do hurt or affect us, and we have no control over them. But we have control over how we’re going to respond to them, what we’re going to do about it. Nothing can force us to be miserable.  Nothing can force us to be depressed, to be angry: those are the products of our own thoughts and emotions that we choose to apply in any given situation or event.  It’s up to us.

We can choose: we’re free beings, we can decide how we’re going to respond to something, if we learn to live in a way that is not pure reaction—instant, emotional reaction to everything that happens.  We can think, we can pray, we can decide how we’re going to react to situations, and we don’t have to be miserable all the time, making peanut butter sandwiches and then complaining about them.  There is something that we can do for our life so that we don’t have to just carry this “cross” of our own making and be grumbling and resentful at life because it didn’t give us a better treatment.  We have no excuse for complaints.  This is the message that Jesus is giving to us.

Then, once we recognize our thirst, and the place we have to go to slake it, then we have to look at our other attitudes that have to be healed.  Then, when we find a healing of our attitudes, and we realize that the presence of the Spirit in us empowers us to make the necessary changes in our life, to recognize our true thirst and to fulfill it, we’ll realize that we need much less than we think we need to be happy.  And the happiness that we do find in God, will be a lasting, rich, rewarding, true happiness—and that will really satisfy our thirst.

Then we will come to that deeper enlightenment about what’s really true in the gospel, and our relationship with God comes alive for us, personally.  Then, we can tell others what we have found.  But we have to be what we’re preaching, first.  That’s a real hard thing; preachers are always afraid to preach, because we know we don’t practice what we preach, but we have to, and we have to at least try to embody the message, or else we will not be credible.

There’s a story about Gandhi, that this woman came to Gandhi with her son and said, “My son is eating sugar, and it’s not good for him!  Tell him not to eat sugar!”  And Gandhi said to her, “Come back in two weeks.”  She said, “OK.”  And so, two weeks later, she comes back, with her son, and Gandhi says to him, “Don’t eat sugar.”  And she said, “That’s all?  Why did it take you two weeks, just so you could say, ‘Don’t eat sugar’?”  And he said, “Because, two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”

You have to embody what you preach.  You have to be doing it yourself before you can tell somebody else to do it.   That’s why we have to go through the process of personal purification, conversion, enlightenment—and then we can say, I can show you the way now.  I can point to you the way, the truth, and the life.

If we only knew the gift and who it is that offers it, and what He can do for us, how he can heal and enlighten and fulfill us, we would open our hearts wide to receive that gift, we would leave behind the leaky water jar of our attachments, narrow-minded attitudes, and all that closes us off from true life and joy.  Then we would begin to worship in spirit and in truth, and walk the path of the enlightened followers of our Lord Jesus Christ.

On Wanting to Be Healed and Getting Up and Walking

[Here is a homily for the third Sunday after Easter, from 2004.]

Christ is risen!

We’ve just heard the account of the healing of the paralytic [Jn. 5:1-15].  Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time with a paralytic.  She’s not exactly a paralytic, but for all intents and purposes she might as well have been.  She was in the hospital with a very serious and life-threatening illness and basically couldn’t move from her bed.  I was reflecting upon that in light of today’s Gospel: what it means to be a paralytic and what it means to be healed.

A paralytic—or Laura, in this case—couldn’t do the most simple things for herself because she was in so much pain.  The pain itself was paralyzing; it wasn’t that she couldn’t walk.  She was in so much pain that she couldn’t do anything, so every little thing had to be done for her by either someone visiting her or by the nurses who came in to take care of her.

To be a paralytic is to be in a state of helplessness and infirmity and utter dependence upon someone else—upon everyone else—and that is where we find ourselves, often enough, or where we ought to find ourselves, in the sense that this is what the human condition is like.  We don’t want to accept or acknowledge that fundamentally we are weak and infirm and unable to do much of anything by ourselves, and are utterly dependent upon others and things outside of ourselves. In our society we try to create an opposite illusion—that we are strong, and independent, and self-sufficient, and invulnerable—but eventually life catches up with you and teaches you the truth.

When I was at the hospital there in Seattle, in the waiting room of the surgery wing, I was surprised: it was a huge waiting room.  It was full of people, waiting because one of their loved ones was being operated on at that moment—and it was like that the whole day!  As soon as one operation was done, another one was beginning; more people came in, and another one was done: dozens of them, in one day—and that was just an ordinary day, in the activities of one hospital, in one city.   Multiply that by all the cities and all the hospitals all over the world, and millions of people are in this condition of serious infirmity. So when I’m talking about someone I know, it’s not just an isolated case.  It’s an icon of humanity, of the human condition, in its state of existential weakness and need.  One of the first things that we have to do is to accept and acknowledge that, and not try to create the opposite illusion.

By contrast, I remember noticing in church one Sunday a young girl, maybe sixteen or so, all dressed up, all painted, polished and bejeweled, and that was an image of that illusion of self-sufficiency, independence, strength and the rest.  I remember thinking to myself, “Which of those two is really the icon of humanity: the painted girl, or the woman in the hospital bed?”  I came to the conclusion that it was the woman in the hospital bed, because that’s closer to the reality of where we stand—especially when we’re without recourse to God.

The situation of the paralytic is sometimes so difficult, as Laura told me, that the pain is so bad that you can’t even pray.  It just takes up all the energy of your body and your mind, and you can think of nothing: all you can do is hang on for life—literally.  At that point, you need somebody to help you, to bring you to God.  That’s why, in other stories in the Gospel, the paralytic was brought by somebody to Jesus—because he couldn’t bring himself.

So we also need to support each other, to rely on others to bring us in our infirmity and need to God—to the place where healing comes from.  This is the next step; it’s not that we have to say, “OK, we’re weak, sick, and helpless,” and then just wallow in that without any hope.  That’s only the first part of the picture; we have to respond to it a way that opens us to the grace of God.

I also found it interesting that one of the nurses who was helping Laura was an older, Ukrainian lady.  She was of the “old school” but she really knew her stuff, because in the old country she was a hospital administrator, but she could only be a nurse here, because in the U.S. they would never accept her credentials.  She would come in and say, “Laura!  You still lying in bed?  Get up and walk!  Is this what you do at home?  Come on!  Walk, walk, walk!”   She was encouraging her to walk, because even when you’re sick like that, your body has to have a little bit of movement and activity, in order for things to start functioning well.  When you’re under anesthesia for eight or ten hours, everything in your body goes to sleep—your head may wake up, but all your guts are still “sleeping” and it might take days for them to start functioning again.  So you need some encouragement like that.

On the other hand, there’s something that we have to do ourselves—something that only we can do.  We have to make the choice to turn to God who can heal us, who alone can heal us.  We can’t heal ourselves—you have to be aware of that—and we can’t just try to make an illusion for ourselves of self-sufficiency and think that this will carry us through, because healing doesn’t come from ourselves; it has to come from God.

In the gospel, this paralytic shows us what not to do.  He was certainly aware of his situation—he’d been sick for many years—but he seems to have sort of resigned himself to be a suffering grouch for the rest of his life, because even when the Healer came to him and said, “Do you want to be healed?” the first thing he started doing was complaining!  “Oh, I don’t have anybody to take me into the water, and then if I try to crawl in there somebody gets in before me so I’m just stuck here; I’ll never get healed.”   But the Lord didn’t ask him any of that stuff!  When the Lord said, “Do you want to be healed?” He was not just asking a rhetorical question, as if “In your dream of the Good Life, would you like to have perfect health?”  No.  He was in a very practical situation, intervening in that man’s life at that moment:  “Do you, with this particular sickness that you have had for the last 38 years, do you want to be healed—now?”   And the man could not “get” it.  But the Lord had mercy on him and healed him anyway.

There’s a kind of condition to that, because when we receive a healing from God, God is also asking us to take responsibility for our healing—to take responsibility for our life.  When things change like that, we have to change our lives, and it’s clear in the gospel that Jesus meant that because, when He saw him a little while later, He said, “Look, now you are healed.  Sin no more, lest something worse overtake you”—which, first of all, means that there is something worse than being sick with a physical illness. The Lord was warning him: “If you don’t take responsibility and respond personally in a good way to what I’ve done for you, then it’s going to be worse than it was before.”  And the thing that is worse than physical illness is the hardening of the heart.  Do you know why?  Because that is something that God, without our cooperation, cannot heal!  He cannot heal a hard heart in this sense, if our will is against Him—if we do not will Him, invite Him, choose to be healed.  The one place that we can make off-limits to God—if we want to—is our own heart, our own soul and spirit, because God will not violate our freedom.

That’s something that we have to be aware of when we are seeking healing for our life.  You have to start with that awareness, and accept that fact, that we are in a state of infirmity, dependence and need.  But we shouldn’t rebel against that and try to be like that painted girl that I mentioned earlier, because health, success, wealth, prestige and all those kinds of things tend to breed arrogance, pride, a sense of false invulnerability, and superiority over others—whereas the experience of infirmity and need can create in a person the nobility that comes from the struggle, and the humility that comes from having to reach out to someone to help you, and also the confidence, courage and peace that come from faith and hope in God, who is the only One who can truly heal.

So we come to God when He asks us that question, and we should listen in our prayer for that question: “Do you want to be healed?”  Don’t just “blow it off,” either: “Of course I want to be healed, I’m in pain!”   Well, no; think about it: do you want to be healed?  Do you want, really, to take responsibility for living as a healed person, as a new person?   We also have to be aware that we’re never going to be totally free from all pain and suffering; we may be healed of one thing, but life will bring its own stuff with it.  If you haven’t already suffered from some serious illness or injury, chances are that you probably will sometime later in your life, because that’s the human condition—that’s how life works down here.

The Lord told us that there would be suffering in this life.  But He said, “Take courage, because I have overcome the world.”  He has the power not only to heal bodies but to make us new inside—if we choose that, if we allow Him to do that.  He has to work with our free will; we have to hand over our will and say, “Yes, I want to be healed; I want to go on living in a new way, a transformed way”—on a more profound level of existence.

Some people seem to be on a permanent search for healing.  They never quite attain it, for in fact they secretly don’t want it.  They would rather simply attend endless healing conferences, at which they can endlessly make their woes known.  What would happen if they actually were healed?  There would be no more need for healing conferences!  They would actually have to get on with the business of living life, and there would be no further opportunity to seek sympathy from others.  How unhappy they would be if they were thus healed!  Well, in that case I suppose they would go to a healing conference to deal with their heartbreak over not needing to be healed anymore.

St. Paul tells us that the meaning of the Resurrection is to walk in newness of life, and this is what the Lord wants to give to us.  He comes to us and asks not only “Do you want to be healed of this illness” but “Do you want newness of life?”  Do you want to be transformed?  Do you want to see things in a new way?  Do you want to be raised up to a level of living in the grace of the Holy Spirit in a way that transcends the pettiness and the superficiality and shallowness of the world around us?  We have to walk in the newness of life that comes only from Christ.  We must embrace Him.

As you come to Holy Communion today, listen for the voice of Christ who says, “Do you want to be healed?” And then answer with your whole heart, turn over your will, your life, your resolution to be new, to be different, and say: “Yes, Lord, I want to be healed.  You alone can heal me.  Give me this newness of life.”  And then we will hear in our own hearts what He said to the paralytic: “Rise, and walk!”

Seeking the Risen Jesus

[This is a homily I gave on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women in 2005.  I edited it down from 3200 words to about 1900 so your eyes won’t burn out from being stuck to the screen so long.  I sure was long-winded in those days!]

Christ is Risen!

We’re continuing today our celebration of the resurrection of Christ, celebrating today in a special way the holy myrrh-bearers.  Now these women came out to anoint Jesus who had died and was buried.  The Gospel says they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. They didn’t realize, however, that the Son of God had risen and He wasn’t even in the tomb.  But they were seeking Jesus.  I remember reading not long ago in the letter to the Hebrews where it gives the bottom line of what we have to do for salvation: “To please God you must have faith.”  It says that means you have to believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.

I had seen several things from Scripture here and there about seeking God, but it really doesn’t talk much about finding God.  You know we’re told to seek Him, but we don’t have to find Him.  Before you think that’s too weird, let me explain.

We have to seek God with the hope of really meeting Him, but it’s God who finds us.  We don’t find God.  And if we don’t happen to find God in all our seeking, we shouldn’t be discouraged either, because it’s not our job to find God.  Our job is to seek God, and God’s job is to reveal Himself to us, to manifest Himself to us.  This is what happened in the Gospel.

The women went to seek Jesus, and when they got to the tomb they found this angel who said, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth.”  Correct.  Well, He is not here.  They didn’t find Him.  So now what?  The angel explained what happened, and whether or not they really got it I don’t know, because they were still petrified with fear and ran away.  This Gospel that we read today [Mark 16:1-8] as an abrupt ending.  But, if you attach Matthew’s Gospel onto this one, it picks up where that left off.  Here it leaves off with them running away.  In Matthew’s Gospel, as they’re running away, Jesus appears to them and they do find Him, or rather He finds them.  They went looking for Him, didn’t find Him, got scared, took off, and He appeared to them, manifested Himself to them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then they recognized Him and worshipped Him and heard his word to go and tell the others, and the rest is salvation history.

One thing we have to realize is that our part is to seek God with all our hearts, but God’s part is to manifest Himself to us.  The Lord says that in the Gospel of John.  He says, “If you believe in me and you keep my word, I will manifest myself to you and my Father and I will come to you and make our home with you.”  That’s what He wants to do.  But it doesn’t mean that we’re let off the hook by saying, well, it’s his job to manifest Himself.  The seeking of Him is a very serious work, and it’s something that demands a lot of effort and sacrifice on our part.

One of the things we see in the myrrh-bearing women, when they went to do this labor of love for Jesus—it’s only love that can propel you to do the impossible—is that what they were hoping to do was impossible.  They were going to this tomb that had a huge stone stuck in front of it, and a detachment of soldiers stuck in front of that, to make sure that nobody would move the stone even if they could.

The women are coming to this tomb saying, who’s going to roll the stone away for us?  Well, if anybody tried to roll the stone away they’d get a lance through the chest and that would have been it.  So they were trying to do something that was really impossible but, they could not not do it, because they loved Jesus so much and nothing was going to stop them from at least going there and putting up a good fight.  You know how the old babas are good at getting their way.  If they brought their umbrellas or rolling pins they could at least try to smack the guards over the head.

In any case, they were ready to get to Jesus to perform this labor of love.  We have to realize too, that in our seeking of Jesus, there are going to be obstacles.  And maybe there are going to be situations that make it look like it’s impossible to find Jesus, to meet Him, to enter into communion with Him, and even to live in the way that He asks us to live.  But we have to focus not on the impossible, not on the obstacle, the stone that’s in the way, but to focus on the One whom we seek, and just go out of love, trusting that, as they say, love will find a way.  Love for Jesus will find a way to do his will in this world.

We have to realize that Jesus may not be where we’re looking.  Don’t be complacent about what you think or where you know you’re going to find Jesus, because these women had good reason to be absolutely sure that Jesus was right where they thought He was.  He was dead after all, and they laid Him in a tomb and placed a stone over it.  So that’s where He was, and they were absolutely sure that’s where He was.  Guess what, He wasn’t there!

God is sovereign, He is the Lord.  He is not bound by our ideas and conceptions and fantasies and even hopes and dreams.  He is the Lord, and He will manifest Himself as He sees fit.  As I said in the beginning, our job is to seek Him but not to have any preconceived plan of just how to seek Him or just where we’re going to find Him. We have to be pilgrims.  We’re always on the move.  We have to always be open, always be ready for God to do something new.  Ready for God to speak the word to us and for us to get up and do it, whatever it is, even if it doesn’t fit our preconceived notion of how our life ought to be.  God is going to manifest himself to us in his way.  We may seek Jesus in our own way and find out He is not here.  Let’s be open to see where He really is.

I just read a book recently about seeking God in the wrong places.  This was a testimony of a woman who was born Catholic but who went off into this New Age and occult stuff.  She was really deep into it and was a master practitioner of various New Age things, and she would even do séances and such, trying to call up the dead.  At a certain moment—and this is how her conversion happened—she was performing this séance with all these people and they put their hands on the table and all these things started flying around the room and the demons were posing as dead relatives who manifest themselves.  Well, suddenly she was unable to put her hands on the table.  They seemed to be bound to her side.  She couldn’t move, and she didn’t know what was happening, but she heard this beautiful voice say, “I am the Queen of Peace.”  She thought, wow, what is that?  Then she realized it was the Blessed Mother who was calling her out of there.  And the first thing that she said was—because she knew something of God was happening—“I will never do this again.”  So she didn’t, although it took her a while to pull away from all of the other stuff that she was involved in, but that was the turning point of her conversion.

A lot of these people, unless they just crass mercenaries or actual satanists, are just deluded, deceived people who are trying to find God or some sense of the spiritual world, but are doing it in the wrong way—so what she was doing was looking for God in the wrong place.  Therefore Our Lady had to say to her, like the angel at the tomb, He is not here!  You have to look for him where He is.  So Mary came and brought this woman out of the darkness of the tomb.  In binding her arms she was freeing her soul.  Really, the woman was seeking the living among the dead.  This séance business is necromancy.  Mary could have said also with the angel, why seek the living among the dead?  This is something that we have to remember in our spiritual life, to seek Jesus with an honest and open heart, and trust that He is going to manifest Himself to us, and to follow the leads that we receive.

You know, we can’t pre-plan our whole life, our spiritual life.  It doesn’t work that way.  We’re in a relationship with someone, with God, and relationships are dynamic and they change and they grow and they adapt to new circumstances.  We can’t think of God as merely a person like us.  But we can’t treat Him as if He were less than that.  He’s more than that.  We have to be open, listening, seeking Him with love, and that’s the testimony of the myrrh-bearing women.

Mary Magdalene especially is mentioned here.  She is one who is like an icon of love in the Scriptures and through the whole Church tradition.  She’s a forgiven sinner who loved much, as Jesus said in Luke, and who loved Him with her whole heart and followed Him to the Cross, and went to do the impossible at the sealed tomb—and became, as we say, an apostle to the apostles, received that message to go and tell the others that Jesus is risen.

The Lord rewards those who seek Him, as it says in Hebrews, one way or another.  He may not just appear to us and allow us to embrace his feet and worship Him as the women did, but He will reward those who seek Him sincerely, consistently, faithfully, lovingly, being willing to bear the cross, realizing that we are seeking the crucified as well as the risen Lord.

So let us follow the example of the myrrh-bearing women, and we will then hear that same message of the angel: “You seek Jesus…”  Wouldn’t it be a great thing for someone to acknowledge that, for Heaven to acknowledge that.  “Oh yes, we know you, you’re one that seeks Jesus.”  That in itself, what a great honor it must have been just to hear those words from the heavenly angel!  You seek Jesus, this is the good news.  So let us hear the good news, and go out to others as the women did, saying: Christ is risen!

20,000

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming for this earth-shaking announcement: today, April 11, 2013, marks the 20,000th day since the birth of Fr Joseph, your favorite blogger!

20, 000 (count ’em!).  I never thought I would make it this far, and I feel every one of them!  I seem to be “full of days,” to use a biblical expression for old age, though I’m afraid I may have miles to go before I sleep.  But I take some consolation in this: today is also the feast day of my dear St Gemma, another sign of the mysterious Providence governing my life, in a special way in the past three years or so.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if you are fuller of days than I am, though every day there are more people in this world younger than I (the number of people older than I am seems always to decrease).  20,000 is a good round number, though it’s only good for a day.  There’s a lot behind me and God knows how much ahead of me.

There doesn’t seem to be any point in pointing out this bit of chronological trivia, except to call attention to myself.  So now you can pray for my repentance and salvation, and it will all work out for the best!

No Conditions

[A homily for the Sunday of St Thomas, from way back in 2002.]

Christ is risen!

How do you know?  Did you ever see Him?  Did you touch Him?  How do you know Christ is risen?

This was the dilemma of St. Thomas that we heard in the Gospel, and I think it’s fortunate for us that Thomas went through this little crisis of faith, because it helps us in our own struggles.

On the positive side, Thomas represents something that is very deep within each one of us, and that is the desire to see God:  the desire to come into some sort of personal, tangible contact with God—in this case, especially with Christ, who was risen from the dead, or who Thomas was told was risen from the dead.  But that desire is an important thing, and that’s something that God has put into all of us, into all of our hearts and souls.  For some people it’s buried very deeply—some say they don’t want to see God, they don’t want to meet God; and other people, they go about, searching for God in many different ways.  But all of us somehow have this deep desire, somewhere inside us, to see God, to enter into communion with something greater than ourselves, with the great Mystery of the universe.

Thomas manifested this desire.  He wasn’t there when Christ first showed up, and so his desire was like a pain in his heart.  In a sense, what he said was “sour grapes,” because he wanted to see Christ so badly.  The others said, “We saw Him!” and he said, in effect:  “No, you didn’t!” because he felt so bad that he didn’t.

Anyway, Thomas started out first with this desire to see God, which is good.  The problem was that he then went on to say, “But I will not believe unless I put my finger into his nail wounds, and put my hand into his side.”   So, there’s where the problem is: the need for some sort of empirical verification of our faith.  He had to “test it out scientifically,” so to speak.   He had to touch; he had to probe; he was not going to believe otherwise.   And he was also—and this was another problem in his situation—he was also not going to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses.  That was another thing that stood in the way of his faith.

So he’s “one for three” in this thing:  he had the deep desire to see God; that’s a good thing.  But then he insisted that he would not believe until he could prove it by his own investigation and experimentation; and, finally, he would not accept the testimony of witnesses.

When the moment came, and Thomas was with them and Christ appeared again, He immediately, of course, knew what was going on, and addressed Himself directly to Thomas and said, “OK, here I am!  You want to touch my wounds?  Here I am.”   Now, at this point, Thomas abandoned his need for “scientific investigation” and personal probing of the mystery, because Christ’s appearance already did away with the need for that.   It seems to me it would’ve been an insult to Christ if He appeared to Thomas in His glorified body and said, “Here I am!” and Thomas said, “Well, I still want to touch; I still want to check it out!”  He didn’t; his response was not going up and investigating Him—much religious art notwithstanding—but rather it was: “My Lord and my God!”

Probably his jaw dropped and then he came up with that expression of faith in the divinity of Christ, unlike anything else that’s anywhere in the Scriptures.   No place in the Scriptures do we find such clear expression of Christ’s divinity—except in John’s prologue, where he was writing as a kind of theological reflection—nowhere do we have a story of any personal encounter with Christ, no one anywhere except here says to Jesus, “You are my God!” without qualifications, without any room for ambiguity.  So Thomas went from that place of doubt, of demanding proof, of refusing to accept the testimony of witnesses, to the point of telling the whole world that Christ is God. He certainly redeemed himself in that, for that testimony has been extremely important for the whole Christian faith down through the ages.

At that moment, Christ gave us a beatitude—but first, he gently reproached Thomas, saying “You believe because you saw.”   Well, OK; practically anybody can believe what they see.  “But,” He said, “blessed are those who have not seen, but who still believe.”  That is also a very important passage in Scripture, which is very necessary for the whole life of the Church, since then up until now, and until the end of time, because they were the only ones—the apostles, and the other disciples of that time—who were privileged to have this eye-witness relationship with Christ,  the kind of relationship which St. John talks about in his first letter where he says, “What we have seen, what we have touched, what we have personally experienced.” That’s something that was reserved to a select few.  But the grace was not reserved to a select few; the blessedness was not reserved to a select few; that is for everybody.

This word is important, and has been written down and preserved for us because all ages of Christianity have to hear that word:  “Blessed are you, if you believe, not having seen”—not having performed your scientific investigations, and touching, and probing; not getting tangible, empirical proof of the things you wish to believe in.   We find ourselves in that blessedness if we believe, and outside it if we don’t.

So we should look at those same three points that characterize Thomas’ situation, and see where we stand in our own lives. First of all, that desire for God:  that’s a good desire, the desire to see God, the desire to be in communion with Him, to be in contact with Him, to know Him, personally and powerfully.  That is a good desire to have, and that is something that we should cultivate because that’s what keeps us going.  If we lose our desire to see God and to experience God, then we’re going to stop showing up for services, we’re going to stop doing anything about the whole spiritual enterprise.  The whole journey of spiritual life is just going to be shot if we do not have the desire to see God and to enter into communion with God.  So we need that desire.

But we cannot go to that point and put conditions on our desire to see God, and say, “Well I’m not going to believe, until these conditions are met,” whatever they might be.   We might not be saying, “I want to touch his wounds,” but oftentimes we may have other conditions, and say, “Well I’m not going to believe unless God does this or that for me,” or “…answers this prayer,” or whatever.   So, we shouldn’t put conditions on our faith.   Christ did not say, “Blessed are you who believe when you get what you ask for.”  He said, “Blessed are you who believe when you don’t see”—when you’re in the dark and still believe.  So we have to have the faith that’s sufficient to take us through the darkness, even when the conditions that we’d like to put on God before we would believe are not met.  We abandon that, we say, “I’m not going to put any conditions on God; I’m just going to believe anyway!”  And why am I going to believe?  Well, one of the reasons is the next point: because we have the testimony of witnesses.

The whole of Christianity is based on the testimony of witnesses.  That’s how the Church started; that’s how the Church spread; that’s how the Scriptures were written; that’s the foundation of Christianity!   Christianity is not a religion of private revelation—“I believe because God appeared to me and spoke to me.”  And then you believe because God appeared to you and spoke to you, so you believe.  That’s not how Christianity works; Christianity is based on the testimony of the original witnesses of God, and what they said, and what they did, and what they wrote down, and what they handed down to succeeding generations.

St. Paul even gives us the same thing.  He says, “I pass on to you what I myself received from others: that Christ died and was buried and rose from the dead,” and the rest, in First Corinthians.  So he’s doing that himself.  But he was a kind of extraordinary witness, because Christ did appear to him.  He was in the first generation and a lot of extraordinary things were happening then, because Christianity had to get a “jump-start,” it had to get moving.  If it hadn’t been for St. Paul, who knows how small a portion of the world would have ever been evangelized?  Paul evangelized most of the known world at the time, and really got Christianity off to a great start.  And then, from his testimony and the testimony of the other apostles, it spread and was preserved by the Church in writing and oral tradition, and has come to us today.  So that’s the “bottom line” we base our faith on, is the testimony of these witnesses.

Now, this faith can be enhanced and supported and confirmed by personal experiences of God.  God does not withhold that either, because God has been present to practically everyone who’s sought Him, throughout the ages.  I mean, some ways are more extraordinary than others, but if you talk to almost anybody who’s really living a spiritual life, they will tell you, “Yes, I know the presence of God; I have experience of God.  He has been in my life and there are evidences of it.” The faith is based primarily on the witnesses but is supported, confirmed, strengthened, and grows through personal experience of God.

Let us, then, put all these together in our lives: the desire for God, the putting no conditions on believing in God, and then accepting the testimony of witnesses who have given us the Christian faith.   And that will make us able to receive God.  As the fathers often say, we don’t see God mostly because we don’t have a pure heart.  We aren’t purified, our spiritual senses do not have the capacity to see God, to experience God, so that even if He stood right before us and said, “Here I am,” we wouldn’t even see Him!  We wouldn’t recognize Him because we’re too dull of spirit; we’re too loaded down with our passions and selfishness and all the other stuff that puts blinders on us, that makes it impossible to see God.

So it’s not a matter of us coming to God and putting a condition on it, saying, “I won’t believe unless you do this.”  God is the One who says, “Well, you’re not going to see anything unless you do this!   You’re not going to see Me unless you change your life, unless you get rid of the obstacles that make it impossible for you to see Me, to receive Me, to experience Me.”   God is the One who puts conditions—not us.  So we have to come to God and say, “Your will be done.  Do unto me whatever You need to clear out the junk, to take the scales off my eyes, so that I can see and feel and experience and know You, like your disciples knew you.”

Let us come to God that way, and let us believe without seeing, and experience the blessedness that is given to those who believe without seeing, and then, little by little, as we go through our lives in faith, we will come to know God.  We will know for certain the presence of God, we will know when He is near, we will live from his life, and we will spontaneously say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”