March 2010 Archives

I lay dejected, wanting to go to sleep. Suddenly Jesus walks in.

Jesus: Hey. What's the matter with you?

Me: You know what's the matter with me.

Jesus: Of course I do. But humor me.

Me: Well, I'm exhausted.

Jesus: Awesome!

Me: What do you mean, awesome? It's terrible! I don't feel like finishing off my penance. I can't do it.

Jesus: Of course you can't. You've given it all you have. And you're coming up just short.

Me: Yeah. That's what exhausted means. Thanks Merriam-Webster.

Jesus: Exhausted is a fantastic place to be.

Me: How?

Jesus: You know right now more clearly the truth about yourself than when you're cruising along without a problem. You know you've got nothing. You are nothing. You're spent. You're empty. You couldn't carry on one more inch. You fail. You lose. You bite the dust. ... Right?

Me: Yeah, very affirming, thanks.

Jesus: You're welcome. I try. But you know in your mind that that's the reality of who you are. You know you don't have what it takes to do my Father's will. But when you feel like your strength is sufficient, when you're just starting out with a new commitment to something, like a new year's resolution or some new devotion that you hope will bring you closer to Me, and when you're excited about this new thing and you're doing it all on your own, you don't know your own imperfection. In your mind, maybe you do, but you don't know it in your heart. Right now, you know in your heart that you can't do it by yourself. You know you need Me.

And that's great. I'm happy for you.

The best is when you haven't even really started to do the real work yet, and you already know it's gonna kick your butt. I know. I been there. Agony in the garden baby. I knew what was coming. And I felt like I had nothing left inside to give. I felt empty inside. I had emptied myself. Because when you truly are empty, that's when grace takes over.

Remember, you came from nothing. I formed you from nothing. The strength that you rely on that comes from you is nothing. It will vanish. The grace that comes to you is the strength that comes from Me, from my Father, from the Spirit within you. That will never vanish. Yet you may not even think to ask for it until you are totally spent. That's why it's so good to be exhausted, because it makes you ask for grace, which is more effective than your strength anyway.

Me: Then why don't you just give me some of Your grace?

Jesus: Hello. I'm not stopping you from asking for it.

Me: Well then, Lord Jesus, could you please give me the grace I need to carry the cross of penance faithfully with you from this moment until Easter, so that I may rise with you?

Jesus: You got it, brother.

Me: Thank you. ... But if I get tired again tomorrow, you and I are gonna have words.

Jesus: Like I said, that's the point.

Me: Oh right, because it makes me talk to you.

Jesus: Course you could talk to Me regardless. Weren't you trying to do some more of that anyway?

Me: Oh right, good call. I guess we'll talk tomorrow morning.

Jesus: Sweet. See you then.

The Second Good Friday reading.

From the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 4, verses 14 through 16:

Brothers and sisters:
Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,
Jesus, the Son of God,
let us hold fast to our confession.
For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
So let us confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.

And from Hebrews Chapter 5, verses 7 through 9:

In the days when Christ was in the flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

Yet He Himself approached His Father with reverence. Both in His public life and when He went off by Himself to pray, His attitude was always one of profound respect for His Father. Do we always have that level of respect for Jesus?

It turns out that this Holy Week will be exceptionally busy for me. As such, I will be limiting myself to shorter reflections (by comparison) each day from now to the end of Lent. I appreciate everyone who has read them.

For this final week of Lent, let us prepare for the two most momentous Church events of the Catholc year: Good Friday, and the Saturday Night Easter Vigil.

Thankfully, both the Good Friday service and at the Saturday Night Easter liturgy have an ample amount of Scripture readings, so we will not be short on material.

The first reading on Good Friday is arguably one of the most beautiful an powerful passages of the Old Testament: the Suffering Servant. It is one of those passages, like Psalm 22, that clearly describes Jesus of Nazareth as He lays down his life for us.

Isaiah Chapter 52, verse 13, and Chapter 53 verses 1 through 12. It begins:

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him,
so marred was his look beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of man,
so shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
for those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

Man's fallen state consists in taking what is beautiful, and making it ugly. What Jesus endures is what a fallen humanity had for thousands of years before Him done and has continued to do for 2,000 years since. In other words, the manner in which He suffers is a perfect example of the sins He is taking onto Himself. Fallen men have marred the look of their fellows beyond human appearance. Through lustful exploitation, through unjust war, through violence against the most defenseless.

But Jesus also was the Son of God, the Word of God. He had no obligation to lie in the bed made by fallen humanity. Yet He endured it. He allowed Himself to suffer the greatest outrage in human, and divine, history.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way; but the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all.

It does not make sense unless one recognizes that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, by becoming man, made Himself a member of the human family. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says He "established himself in solidarity" with us.

Also, the consequences of sin are in another sense still being paid, by everyone. It's called suffering and death. We all will face both these realities, no matter how righteous we are, at some point in our lives. If we are more righteous, we may have more joy, at least interiorly. But suffering and death awaits everyone.

The choice is not whether we as humans will face these prospects. The choice is what we will do with our sufferings, and what will happen after we die. What Christ offers is a choice as to both. Our suffering no longer need be in vain. He offers that we may redeem our sufferings by uniting them to His own. That is why Jesus said in Matthew 16, "whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

Here is Pope Benedict XVI's pastoral letter to the Church in Ireland, which has been riddled with abuse scandals in recent years.

At the end of the letter is a heartfelt prayer, which I would submit faithful Catholics who care for the welfare of the Body of Christ pray, for the Church in Ireland:

God of our fathers,
renew us in the faith which is our life and salvation,
the hope which promises forgiveness and interior renewal,
the charity which purifies and opens our hearts
to love you, and in you, each of our brothers and sisters.
Lord Jesus Christ,
may the Church in Ireland renew her age-old commitment
to the education of our young people in the way of truth and goodness, holiness and generous service to society.
Holy Spirit, comforter, advocate and guide,
inspire a new springtime of holiness and apostolic zeal
for the Church in Ireland.
May our sorrow and our tears,
our sincere effort to redress past wrongs,
and our firm purpose of amendment
bear an abundant harvest of grace
for the deepening of the faith
in our families, parishes, schools and communities,
for the spiritual progress of Irish society,
and the growth of charity, justice, joy and peace
within the whole human family.
To you, Triune God,
confident in the loving protection of Mary,
Queen of Ireland, our Mother,
and of Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and all the saints,
do we entrust ourselves, our children,
and the needs of the Church in Ireland.
Amen.

The Church is the Body of Christ. It has always been, like Jesus' own body as He carried the cross, riddled with wounds. Scandal and sin has haunted the Church since Judas left the table to get his thirty pieces of silver. But Jesus defeated the scandal in His Church by the power of His holy sacrifice, the gift of His very self. Not even one of His closest and most trusted disciples could by his traiterous acts put a stop to Jesus' great mission. No one could.

The Church grew stronger and the holier after Judas' betrayal. I predict the Church will do so again, both in Ireland and in other places where such unthinkable harm has been done to the faithful. But only if we pray for the healing that is needed, as Benedict has invited us. Such prayer for healing is always necessary -- for our own hearts and in our own lives first, and then for the Church as a whole.

Let's invite the healing Spirit of God into our lives and the lives of all those so terribly harmed by these crimes.

While news of Catholic clergy sex abuse is popping up all around Europe, and allegations that Pope Benedict didn't do enough when he was a Vatican official in a case involving a now-deceased American priest, I'm looking for a silver lining. Here's one:

While the Church in Europe is being hit by a wave of sex abuse allegations and investigations, similar complaints in the US are tapering off.

The number of abuse victims, allegations and offending clergy in the United States dropped in 2009 to the lowest figures since data started being collected in 2004, said an Associated Press report in the New York Times.

The New York Times report quoted the latest annual report from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said the financial burden to the church has fallen too. Dioceses and their insurers paid US$104 million in settlements, attorneys' fees and other abuse-related costs in 2009, down from US$376 million in 2008.

The report identifies 398 allegations of abuse involving clergy from Catholic dioceses in 2009, which is a 36 percent decline from 2008. Most cases involved preteen or teen males and incidents that were decades old, in keeping with past patterns.

The number of offenders dropped 32 percent, to 286. Of the allegations reported in 2009, six involved children under the age of 18 in 2009.

The Holy Father and the Vatican have come under fire in recent days. See here, here, here, and here.

But there are many who are defending him. See here, here, here, here, and here.

I think the best defense I've seen is from Westminster Archbishop Vincent Nichols:

What of the role of Pope Benedict? When he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he led important changes made in church law: the inclusion in canon law of internet offences against children, the extension of child abuse offences to include the sexual abuse of all under 18, the case by case waiving of the statue of limitation and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders. He is not an idle observer. His actions speak as well as his words.

Every year since 2002 the Catholic Church in England and Wales has made public the exact number of allegations made within the Church, the number reported to the police, the action taken and the outcome. As far as I know, no other organisation in this country does this. It is not a cover-up; it is clear and total disclosure. The purpose of doing so is not to defend the Church. It is to make plain that in the Catholic Church in England and Wales there is no hiding place for those who seek to harm children. On this we are determined.

One more fact. In the past 40 years, less than half of 1 per cent of Catholic priests in England and Wales (0.4 per cent) have faced allegations of child abuse. Fewer have been found guilty. Do not misunderstand me. One is too many. One broken child is a tragedy and a disgrace. One case alone is enough to justify anger and outrage. The work of safeguarding, within any organisation and within our society as a whole, is demanding but absolutely necessary. The Catholic Church here is committed to safeguarding children and all vulnerable people.

Providing viewers with nine fantastic years of action, romance, terrorist plots, idiot plots, suspense, extreme measures, melodrama, personality disorder, and office pettiness, Fox's hit '24' is finally getting cancelled at the end of this, its eighth, season.

That means we the Jack Bauer faithful have twelve precious weeks to enjoy watching the counter-terrorist extraordinaire, played by Kiefer Sutherland, kick some evil-doer derriere. Read about it here, here, and here.

The moral value of the program has been a subject of debate among Catholics and other Christians, and rightly so. Certainly Jack Bauer does some things in the film that would be, were he a real person, not entirely licit. Torture of terror suspects, for example. Some consider that a deal breaker for the show. Oh, and the fact that he kills literally dozens of people each season.

But for me it is not a deal breaker because, well, it is just plain entertaining. It is fun to watch Jack Bauer save the world, year after year.

Also, there are merits to this show that are sorely lacking in way too many television shows these days. One is the presence of clear-cut good guys and clear-cut bad guys. It's tempting to say that in real life people don't neatly fit into such cookie-cutter categories.

But the heroes in 24 clearly have their own flaws, their own failings. Jack Bauer is the clearest example. The bad guys, similarly, have their good points.

But there is never any doubt that one set of characters is fighting ultimately for good, and the other set is ultimately fighting for evil. The fact that there is even a good-vs.-evil struggle immediately sets the show apart from countless banal reality shows and sitcoms where all the characters care about is themselves.

Also a big part the progression of the character of Jack Bauer over the years, which I have particularly enjoyed watching, has been his gradual rediscovery of his own soul. I have noticed in this most recent season that Jack, even as he is still racking up kill after kill, is beginning to find some redemption for all the things in his past that haunt him. It is kind of redemption that he is seeking, and even beginning to find.

There's a lot to admire about Jack Bauer. His refusal to compromise. His ability to overcome adversity, to play hurt. His commitment to saving the lives of noncombatants. His love for his family.

And, of course, his ability to squarely wedge his boot in the posteriors of and strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. Here's to twelve more weeks of Jack Bauer throwing down for freedom.

Oh, and the expected movie, in which I predict everyone will finally have discovered that they should always do what Jack Bauer says, allowing the movie to take place in real time, and be called "3."

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Christians the world over will celebtrate Jesus' royal entry into Jerusalem. It is the beginning of the last leg of Jesus' journey to the cross. He has made it clear to His apostles on more than one occasion at this point that He must suffer and die. He is never swayed, nor ever deterred.

How did He do it? How did He just cruise into Jerusalem on a donkey, knowing what was about to happen to Him? He never lost sight of or confidence in His Father.

No strength is greater than that which comes from confidence in God. The prophet Isaiah writes*:

The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.

This is a perfect description of Jesus. Many of us would love to have that kind of confidence in God, but the difficulty is how to get there.

I would say there are two kinds of confidence in God. One is to be confident that God loves me and wants me to be happy. The other is to be confident that God will support my decisions and actions. The first, I can have completely right now.

The second is more difficult. For the second requires one to be confident that one understands His will and so can confidently execute that will. That is how one can be able to say, with Isaiah, that "God is my help."

As Abraham Lincoln put it: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

Some would say that a thorough understanding of God's will is not possible, and to presume it to be so is prideful.

I answer that to assume that God is unable to communicate His will effectively to us is to insult God, not ourselves. It is, however, prideful to assume that we can know God's will without the requisite effort.

In our everday life experience, how can we be confident that we understand the motives and wishes of another person? We have to get to know him well, and become good friends. It is not enough to greet him fleetingly at the water-cooler. It is not enough merely to read his facebook page, no matter how generous he is with the details of his life.

Those life details are certainly necessary. They can help us to listen more attentively to him when we talk to him. But we must talk to him. A real exchange of thoughts and ideas is absolutely crucial, if we are interested in being truly loyal to this friend. We must engage him in real conversation. We must ask questions. We must listen attentively for his answers.

This is what Jesus did with His Father. His confidence in God grew from two things: His exhaustive knowledge of Scripture, and His constant conversation with God. The first laid the groundwork for the second.

In relation to a friend, our knowledge will not be perfect immediately. Rather it will steadily grow more complete over many years of steady conversation. So with God. The confidence that Jesus had, that He was doing His Father's will, when He rode into Jerusalem may not be immediately attainable for us because we are still getting to know God.

But we can be absolutely confident that as soon as we enter into relationship and conversation with God, He will be just as invested in the relationship as we are. Even more so. He is not like an ordinary every day encounter with another person, in that sense.

He will not use us for His own advancment. He doesn't need us for that. He has all of Himself to give. If we sincerely ask Him probing questions and seek to understand what He wants from us and for us, He will answer. And then we can know that we won't be put to shame, no matter where we are going. There is no greater strength than that.

*Isaiah Chapter 50, verse 7

If God has blessed you with something that makes you very happy, do not question it. You may be tempted to ask yourself whether you deserve it, or if it is too good to be true. The answers: It doesn't matter, and no it isn't.

And if you are not sure that God has given you something that makes you very happy, ask yourself if that may be because you are questioning it. And if you are, stop.

If you strongly believe that God has not given you anything that makes you very happy, consider the risks that God has called you to take recently, and ask yourself whether you have taken them. There is no search for happiness that does not involve some level of risk. That's why it is called "faith." And if our faith is firmly in Him, no step taken in faith will be too risky.

From the Lord's Prayer:

And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

When we ask God to "lead us not into temptation," we are recognizing our own weakness. There's an apocalyptic character to the petition that does not come through in the language of the prayer that does come through in the New American Bible's translation:

and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.

The New American Bible explains that "final test":

Jewish apocalyptic writings speak of a period of severe trial before the end of the age, sometimes called the "messianic woes." This petition asks that the disciples be spared that final test.

Temptation happens. Without the grace of God we would not be able to handle even the slightest temptation, much less a final test. In a way, we are again asking God for mercy and grace.

I am not aware of God ever having led someone into temptation to sin. What I am aware of is people leading themselves and others into temptation. And of course, temptation is often the work of "the evil one," of whom the New American translation speaks.

The translation can go either way, "the evil one," as in the Scriptures, or simply "evil," as in the prayer.

A few important conceptual points about evil. One, evil has no Supreme Origin. It is wrong to think of the Devil as equal in any way to God Himself. The Devil is a creation of God.

Yet nothing that God created is essentially evil. The Devil chooses to do evil, and so makes himself into a living lie. God created him to be good (he is an angel after all), just as he created us to be good. But the Devil, for reasons we ultimately won't know in this life, hates truth. And beauty. And love. He hates them so much that he is constantly lying to himself about who he himself is. He is stuck forever in constant state of denial. He know he is fundamentally good and he hates that.

So he wants you and me to subscribe to his lie about who we are. He wants us to believe that we are rotten, filthy degenerates no more meant to love than a dung beetle. He wants us to believe this about ourselves, and each other, forever.

Evil is fundamentally not. St. Thomas Aquinas said, "Mal est nihil." Evil is nothing. It is nothingness -- the privation of some good. Now some evils are more terrible than others, because some goods are more fundamental than others. The more fundamental the good, the worse it is to be deprived of it. Mild physical hunger due to fasting is a kind of evil, because it points to the absence of nourishment. But it is arguably not so terrible as personal loneliness that comes from a lack of loving relationships. And neither of those is so terrible as the ultimate privation, which is the loss of the ultimate good, which is God Himself.

And it is that from which we pray to God to be delivered. Just as He delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. When we ask God to deliver us from evil, we simply ask Him to hold us close to Himself. Without God we are slaves to evil and the evil one in the same way the Hebrews were slaves to Egypt. We will inescapably lose sight of the truth about ourselves and about our neighbors and the world around us.

God is not an abusive, scrooge-like tyrant who imposes on his children pointless rules designed to make them unhappy. He is deliverer. He provides us with the complete shelter of His kingdom, the ultimate bread of His Son, the ultimate release of forgiveness, and the strength to forgive. In short, He frees and fulfills us. The Our Father is a prayer for freedom, freedom from evil, and freedom to be good as God wills, and thus for the complete happiness that comes from God.

From the Lord's Prayer:

... and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Forgiveness is a sign of strength, not of weakness. It is anger, not forgiveness, that damages one's happiness, and so weakens him. But forgiveness makes the victim happier. A Shakespearean character once said, "The quality of mercy is not strained. It is twice blest. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

This portion of the prayer, recall, is sometimes translated as "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." This alternate translation sheds some light on its meaning. When we "trespass," i.e. sin, we place ourselves in debt to the one against whom we have trespassed -- whether it be a friend or an employer or the government or God Himself. Point of fact, God is ultimately the victim of any and every sin we commit.

When I sin against you, you have at least a theoretical right to expect me to make it up to you somehow. If I steal some of your money, you have a right to expect me to pay it back, for example. Forgiveness, then, means not just saying, "It's okay," to someone after they hurt you in some way. It means we are in a position to require someone to somehow make up for their injury against us, and we do not.

That is what the Father does. He is in a position to expect us to make all kinds of stuff up to Him. The debt we owe to Him is more than we could ever afford, more than we could accomplish in an eternity.

Yet He forgives us. Christ takes onto Himself the burden of our wrongdoing against Him and His Father.

But if we cannot give the gift of forgiveness ourselves, then we will not be disposed or prepared to receive it from God. For to harbor anger is to insist on debts that we believe are owed to us. And those debts weigh on us needlessly, preoccupying us with other people's need for our forgiveness, rather than our need for God's forgiveness. Only by forgiveness can we jettison those burdens to ourselves. It is not easy, of course, and we need God's grace to do it. But then again, perhaps that is why his part of the prayer comes right after our petition that God give us our daily bread.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are closely linked but they are not the same thing. Forgiveness only takes one. I can forgive a person his debt to me without him even knowing or believing that a debt is owed. But reconciliation takes two. In reconciliation, he must recognize that a debt is owed, and ask forgiveness for it -- at which point it is granted. That's reconiciliation. And it is what God wants for us. His forgiveness is the easy part. What He wants is for us to recognize the debt we owe Him, and place ourselves at His mercy and trust Him. When we do that, He will always forgive us.

From the Our Father:

Give us this day our daily bread ...

The daily bread that we ask God to give to us is simply Himself. It is all that He is. God alone can sustain our souls, the way food sustains our bodies.

Asking Him to give daily bread to us implies a certain disposition on our part. When we ask someone to speak, we listen. When we ask someone to come out where we can see them, our eyes are open. When we ask someone for a high five, our hand is raised and ready.

When we ask God to give us our daily bread, we imply that we are ready to receive it. All of it. All of Him. We can hardly ask God to give us all of Himself and then run from Him..

To ask someone to feed us is also to admit a kind of helplessness. Like a baby who has to be spoon-fed. We cannot obtain for ourselves the fulfillment that conquers our hunger and comes from God HImself. We must rely completely on Him to grace us with the gift of Himself. We have to quiet and still ourselves in order for God to give us what we need -- and nowhere more completely and literally than when we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist.

Nowhere on earth is the gift of God's very self so completely and literally given to us than in that sacrament. The bread and wine mysteriously and actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

And it illustrates what God must do in order to give himself to us -- which is to make Himself, by comparison to His original form, unfathomably small. C.S. Lewis uses the image of a man turning himself into a slug, and living among slugs. But, he observes, the distance between a slug and a man is infinitely less than the difference between man and God.

Yet God became man. It is how God relates to man, and fills man up and sustains him. He makes Himself small. And then He makes Himself yet smaller, taking on the form of bread and wine so that he can really truly enter into our bodies, and thereby communicate His grace in the most intimate way possible.

Humans pay a lot more attention to what we eat than to what we touch, or look at or listen to. We obsess in a particular way over over our diets. There are many filthy things out there that we might touch that we would never eat. Why? Because we can't just wash off what we eat.

I can look at a hamburger on the table in front of me and know what it is. I could have a Ph.D in hamburger and be able to write a dissertation on what would happen if I ate it -- where all the different ingredients would go, etc. But no level of detailed knowledge about the hamburger and what would happen in my body once I ate it would actually sustain my body. I have to take it into myself. When we eat something it becomes a part of who we are. Only then does the meal truly energize us.

It is not enough merely to know who Christ is. It is not even enough to know a lot of details about Him. He wants to enter into us and change us from the inside out.

What we eat is both more crucial and more potentially hazardous to our health than anything else we come into contact with. If something is bad for us to eat, and we eat it, we may die sooner than we wish. If something is necessary and crucial for us to eat, and we don't, we may die of malnutrition or starvation. Nothing is more necessary and crucial than Christ Himself.

It is not enough simply to know God. If we are to be holy as He is holy, we must literally feed off of Him.

From the Lord's Prayer:

Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in Heaven.

God's dominion is not a democracy. It is not a constitutional republic. It is a Kingdom. There is one who rules and His rule is absolute. You and I don't get a vote.

If God's rule is absolute, then that means nothing and no one else in the universe can assume absolute dominion over us. We cannot be totally dependent on anything or anybody except God. No addiction to any substance or sensation, no allegiance to any flag, no loyalty to any political figure, no love of anything or anyone else can ever override our love of, our need for, our allegiance and loyalty to the King of Heaven and the King of our lives. Any country or politician worth their salt will freely admit this.

Now it's true, you and I don't get a vote. But the point of a vote in a representative republic like the one in which I and my fellow-citizens reside is to consent to the government of those whom we wish to empower, in hopes that their political work will help our freedom and happiness, or at least not encroach on either.

But God is a benevolent King, not a tyrant. He does not force His royal will upon us his subjects. His people are a free people. He has always desired them, since He first created them, to be free. Free from the devil's manipulation, free from slavery to Egypt, free even from slavery to their own passions. Thus He invites us to freely submit ourselves to His absolute rule. This portion of the Our Father is a direct response to that invitation.

Although we are free to refuse to submit to God's will, there is in a sense no escaping it. We may refuse to live according to His desires, but we may not refuse to live according to His desires and still be happy. The consequences of defying God are nonnegotiable and inevitable. That's what it means not to have a vote. Either we will freely subject ourselves to His rule and, by letting go of our desires for selfish and self-centered autonomy, and thereby come to know true freedom and happiness; or we will flee from Him and find that we have become slaves to powers and passions not only beneath Him, but beneath ourselves. When you're addicted, when you're a slave to your bottom line or your political interests, or whatever else, you still don't get a vote. In the end, you get nothing.

Where is the Kingdom of God? It is easy and understandable, given that imagery, to picture God's Kingdom as some geographic place where everything is beautiful and there is no injustice at all. And we may strive for that in our own geographic place.

But the Kingdom of God does not begin by works that we do. It begins by the work of grace from one who is greater than us. God's Kingdom has to consume us, and take root in our very hearts. Our works for justice flow from that.

That work of grace from God is what sustains and strengthens us to work to build the Kingdom. The work of grace is what is called in the prayer, "our daily bread." That's tomorrow.

The prayer that is today known as "The Lord's Prayer" or "The Our Father" was first taught by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6, verses 9 through 13:

This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;
and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.

I'll be dedicating one entry each day this week to each line above. The Our Father contains several different types of prayer: worship, surrender, petition, and contrition.

Today I look at the first (in the more traditional language): "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name." This is adoration, a worshipful acknowledgment of who God is. He is Father. He is the one who gives each of us life.

Notice also though that He is "Our" Father. Not "My" Father. I do not pray to Him merely on my own individual behalf. When I pray the Our Father, I am to pray to Him on behalf of all the faithful.

Part and parcel of acknowledging God's identify is praising Him -- acknowledging His exhaulted place far above ourselves, and recognizing that his name is "hallowed," meaning holy, or revered.

That reverence is important. In addition to being an expression of the reality, I think of this first line also as an expression of one's attitude. With what kind of attitude are we approaching God? We cannot pay attention to and understand the meaning of these first words of the Our Father and still approach Him with flippancy.

The words of the prayer after all are so familiar to so many of us who have been hearing them since our pregnant mothers prayed them, that we can zip right through these first crucial words. Perhaps a good practice would be, the next time we pray in solitude this prayer that Jesus taught us, to make a point to say each clause slowly and deliberately. "Our Father," ... "who art in heaven," ... "hallowed be thy name." Think about those words as we pray them. Let them to flow out from our hearts, the same as if we were to tell the love of our life, "I love you. You're beautiful."

It also may behoove us to consider whether we "hallow" the name of our Father in heaven not just as we begin the prayer but in the general practice of our lives. Prayer, particularly the adoration and respect that we pay to the Father, is not merely lip service. It has to be backed up in our lives through our faithfulness to His plan. That's surrender, which is what follows logically. And that's tomorrow.

Today's Gospel is the one where Jesus says whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. In other words, take care that in our very right and proper zeal for righteousness, we do not, in our challenges to others to live a better life, abandon charity. If we abandon charity we may do more harm than good to a person's spirit -- both theirs and our own.

We are all, basically, fallen and therefore sinful. The mercy God has shown to each of us is not the result of us having met some minimum standard that others have failed. Mercy is to be shown to all. In other words, hate the sin, and love the sinner.

To love the sinner is precisely to hate the sin. And it applies also not just to how we approach our neighbors but how we approch ourselves.

We might ask: Do I throw stones at myself when I sin? When I fall, do I beat myself up over it? Or do I allow Jesus to pick me up and invite Him into my weakness, asking Him for the grace I need to correct my behavior?

***

The second to last week of Lent is already upon us! This coming week I will be looking at the prayer that Jesus taught us. It begins with the address: "Our Father."

From Matthew Chapter 16, verses 24:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

This does not mean that we wish pain and punishment upon ourselves, or that we directly seek such things.

I used to think wrongly that the example of Christ is a kind of masochism. I could live my life my way, or I could live it God's way. And my way would be easy and feel good, at least by comparison, while God's way would hurt and be very difficult. It might even make me miserable. So what. I deserve it, right?

I thought God's way meant foregoing all my desires, even those which He gave me that are not sinful. The result was that in trying to decide which path I would choose in life -- ordained priesthood, marriage, whatever -- I could not admit to myself what I really wanted.

Lots of people are afraid to admit to themselves what they really want. I'm convinced a lot of guys out there are afraid to admit that they really do want to be ordained priests. They're afraid to do something so radically different with their lives. Still others are afraid to admit that they really want to get married and have kids. Others are afraid to admit they want to do missionary work, or that they want to write, or be a doctor or a musician or an accountant. The main reason devout religious folks are afraid to admit what they want is because they think -- again, wrongly -- that it is somehow selfish. To admit what I want means I focus on that instead of what God wants for me.

That may be a common error to find amongst Catholics, but that does not mean the error is itself Catholic.

Let me put this very simply. God does not play games. If He wants you to do something in particular with your life, He will place that desire in your heart. It is Satan's chicanery that makes you believe you are selfish to follow it. Admit to yourself what you want, because chances are* you want it because God wills it.

But the key is, once we admit to ourselves what we want in life, and once we start pursuing that good that God wants for us, we have to really pursue it. We can't take a detour from the suffering that we encounter in pursuit of the good because we think God wants us to never encounter any suffering.

Jesus came with a clear mission. He pursued it and it was His joy, and His Father's joy -- the salvation, redemption and sanctification of mankind. He did not directly seek to bring suffering upon Himself. But as it began to appear that He would face great suffering and revilement and defilement for His pursuit of this mission, He did not flee. That, His apostles did. It is Jesus who shows us "God's way," and the disciples who show us "our way." It is not that the disciples did something with their lives that they really did not want to do. They wanted to follow Jesus and share in His mission. But they shared in it only until the threat of suffering and death revealed itself. Then, they ran.

Jesus begged His Father to spare Him suffering and death. So we may.

But when, if He was to do the will of His Father, His suffering proved inevitable, He did not run. He did not retreat in the face of pain. John Paul II wrote in 1995** that our current cultural climate

... fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs. This is especially the case in the absence of a religious outlook which could help to provide a positive understanding of the mystery of suffering.

The Holy Father was saying not that suffering is the greatest thing in the world, but that it is not the worst thing in the world. What is the worst thing in the world is to retreat, to at one moment enthusiastically pursue the path down which God is calling us, only to run in fear the next moment. We may know that the one will hurt for a time, but we know with even greater certainty that fleeing like cowards will surely make us miserable wretches for the rest of our lives.

Because deep down, we want to follow God. We want to live our lives the way He wants us to. We know that the only way we can really be happy is to follow Him, even if, and perhaps partly because, it will often require great courage.






*It is necessary to examine, of course, the moral legitimacy of the desires in our hearts. For example, it is possible that someone may desire something which is morally illegitimate, like the death of his roommate***. In those cases, one often has to look deeper for the good that he hopes to achieve by killing his roommate, and find morally legitimate ways to achieve it.
**Evangelium Vitae -- "The Gospel of Life," paragraph 15
***Don't worry, roommate. We're cool.

When Jesus was a boy, He stayed behind in His Father's house, the temple in Jerusalem, even after His family had left to go home to Nazareth. Why did He do it?

My guess: He was homesick.

Jesus would speak of His Father's house again about twenty-one years later to His disciples:

In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. ... And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.

One's house is a place of security. It provides shelter. A house is where one eats, and where one rests, the way God Himself rested on the Seventh Day. A house is one's home, where one belongs.

Was Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, at home on earth? In one sense, there is nowhere in the universe that God cannot be found. All the universe belongs to Him. At the same time, where Christ was always really "at home" was in the presence of His Father who sent Him. Before his entrance into the created world, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity lived in a perfect communion of love with and knowledge of the Father and the Holy Spirit. He not only lived the beatific vision that we mortals hope to achieve when we pass from this life, He was that beatific vision.

Now think, He had to go from that to ... this. A beautiful and awe-inspiring creation, of course. But what is it compared to the complete bliss of God's own life? Obviously you and I can't make the comparison. But He could. He knew what more there was to life than this world that passes away.

Not that He begrudged it. He was happy and willing to humble Himself to take on human form. But He always felt drawn back to the place He had always been -- in the shelter of His Father. That was Jesus' home.

Now, the revolutionary idea of Jesus is that He now intends to make that home, our home. Your home. My home.

What do families do when they have a baby on the way? They prepare a room for her. A place where she can be kept safe and receive everything that she needs to be happy. So with the family of God, the Trinity, and us. Jesus' promise that He will prepare a place for us in His Father's own house means that He is telling us -- not just how we ought to live, although that is important, and not just Whom we are to worship, although that is crucial, but where we belong. It is what we search for in life so frantically. A sense of belonging. It's why people yearn for romantic relationships. They desire terribly only that they might belong with someone. Just to belong somewhere, with someone, is enough to make life mean something, to make it worth living. Not a bad thing either. God gave us those desires. He made us a people that yearns to belong with someone else besides ourselves. We yearn to belong with each other.

But those wants only point to the ultimate yearning of our hearts -- to belong with something greater than we are. And the message of Jesus is that He intends to satisfy that ultimate longing in our hearts, by making a home for us with His Father. So that where He is, at home with His Father, we may be also. His belonging becomes our belonging. We belong because we are one with and in Christ. Because He belongs, we belong.

We are not going to some strange place when we follow Jesus to His Father's house. We are not leading some strange life when we live the way He does. We are being who we were meant to be. We are going where we were meant to go.

Home.

Jesus said to them "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"

When Jesus was about twelve years old, after He and His family had journeyed to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, His mother and father lost Him.

I'm the kind of guy who sometimes gets preoccupied with details, so I am inclined to wonder: How did it happen?

The best explanation I've heard has to do with the culture of the Jews. Their extended families lived close together and traveled likewise, to a point that it was not necessarily uncommon, while traveling, for the children to be in the company of their aunts and uncles, and thus for immediate parents to not see their children for a prolonged period. Mary and Joseph assumed, as they had on previous road trips and other occasions, that Jesus was off with this or that aunt or uncle.

But this time, He was not.

It took them three days to rediscover Him.

Three days. Again, with the foreshadowing. Approximately twenty-one years later, Mary would lose Jesus again, for three days.

But at that time it would be because He went somewhere without her. In his childhood, it would be because He stayed behind in His Father's house. Think of the anxiety with which she and Joseph searched must have searched for Him. All the places they looked for Him but did not find Him. After His three days of absence twenty-one years later, those close to Him would search for Him again.

We may be reminded of how frantically we search for -- happiness, redemption, success, whatever will fulfill us. Especially when we have been blessed with it before. If we know the fulfillment of a blessed life, we will be stricken with a kind of panic when we realize we have lost it. Like Mary, we will search frantically for it in countless places, with heightening anxiety at each new failure.

Unlike Mary, who at least knew what she was looking for, if not where to look, we often don't even realize that what we are looking for is Jesus. That He alone can conquer the anxiety and the hunger that we have inside. And that He is in the last place we would normally think to look, the house of His Father.

The Christian tradition has been accused in some secular circles over the centuries of subjugating and oppressing women, giving them a lower place of dignity than men in Creation.

But it is worth noting that the first ever Christian was a woman -- Mary.

She knew before He was conceived that He was the Son of God, Luke's account shows.

But knowing His identity is just the beginning. Mary is made aware of His identity and then presented with the decision, as we all are, of whether or not to welcome Him in, to allow Him to take residence within her very being, so that she could then bear Him to the world.

And she said yes. Or to be more specific, "May it be done to me according to your word."

With that utterance, she encapsulated what it means to be a follower of Christ. It means to place oneself at the disposal of God, to be used for His purposes, to reflect His goodness to the world. Mother Teresa of Calcutta once decribed herself as a pencil that God uses to write a love letter to the world. Mary was that par excellence. She received the entirety of what God wanted to give her, which was Christ Himself. And by receiving Him openly and entirely, she was able to share Him openly and entirely with the world.

Compare that with the world on the night of Jesus' birth. He was not allowed in, because the inn was too crowded, and no room could be made for Him. Humanity, on the night its Savior was born, banished Him to a stable full of animals, where He would be born into a feeding trough. Whereas Mary allowed herself to be "overshadowed" by the Holy Spirit, the cold world, as we tragically sometimes imitate, considered that it had more important things to make room for and treated Christ as an afterthought, not worthy of real priority or dignity.

And Mary, bearing Christ within her, exemplified, by the very nature of her role in God's plan, what each Christian is called to do, which is to share in the suffering of Christ. His banishment from all places of shelter and comfort became her banishment from all places of shelter and comfort. Where Christ went, she went. That connection would not wane as Jesus' life and ministry continued.

Mary made herself small before God, placing herself at the disposal of His plan. By doing so, God made her the portal through which salvation itself entered the world.

I know it's the season of Lent, not Advent. But I think we would all do well to examine, as Lent continues, what priority we give to Christ in our lives, whether there is room for Him inside of ourselves, and whether we are truly receptive in our hearts to everything that He wishes to give us, as was the first Christian.

After Jesus of Nazareth, Mary of Nazareth played perhaps the most integral role of any human in the redemption, salvation, and sanctification of mankind. She was not God, of course, nor is she to be worshipped as God. But she was the Mother of God, since Jesus was God. She did literally and biologically what we are all called to do in a figurative but no less real way. She allowed Christ to take root in her very being and then she bore Him to the world, letting Him loose on it.

Mary of Nazareth, a teenager, was offered an enormously difficult mission by God, one which carried with it perils and sufferings and did not make a great deal of sense to her at the time. God has a habit of offering his children such missions.

Yet she had the courage to say yes to God, and so provides an enormously important model to a world that more and more needs to be reminded of how simply saying yes to God can change it for the better.

We may be inclined to think that Mary's mission to be the Mother of God was easy compared to being the mother of an imperfect child. I would venture to say it was probably more challenging. Raising up the King of Kings who will go on to save mankin

I will be taking a closer look at Mary, whom Catholics consider the Mother of God and the Mother of all who believe in Christ, in the coming days. For now what we can learn from Mary is that the mission, even when it is extraordinarily difficult, especially when it is extraordinarily difficult, can actually turn out to be a great gift.

This makes me smile.

It is actually the second video that the rock band OK Go has made for their song "This Too Shall Pass," which is on their latest album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky." The first one features the Notre Dame marching band, and is also awesome.

The father could only show the prodigal son his love after the young man returned to him. His son is not a puppet, and he cannot pull strings. The son has to recognize that his mistakes have led (or at least will lead) to his state of near-starvation.

But when he does recognize it, if he is willing to endure the humiliation of facing his father again, he will find that his father rejoices at his return. So with God and us.

As soon as we turn back to Him, He receives us.

It seems so simple to acknowledge that fact, rationally. But for some it is difficult to believe emotionally. Jesus understands that. In His parable, the prodigal son hoped for nothing more than to be given a job by the man he used to call his father.

But the father restores him.

That's what is so mind-blowing about God's forgiveness. It doesn't matter how egregious we think our crimes were, or even how egregious they were in reality. If we genuinely regret them and genuinely turn back to God, resolved with the help of His grace to amend our lives, then not only will He receive us back into Himself, He will repair the damage that our sins have done to us.

It is not that the exterior consequences of our sins will vanish, obviously. But the interior consequences -- all the bitterness and hurt that took root in us as a result of our mistakes -- all that will be replaced with His peace. Just the way the prodigal son's pain and hunger and cold were replaced with the nourishment and shelter of his father's love.

And that will make whatever exterior consequences we suffer as a result of our sins far more bearable. If we face physical pain because of our mistakes, we can endure them patiently with God's help. If relationships with loved ones have been broken, those can begin to heal because we can introduce some measure of God's peace back into that relationship.

Peace in the world begins with peace in one person's heart. Peace in one person's heart begins with the forgiveness of God. The forgiveness of God happens when we brave the humiliation of admitting our faults before Him, and therefore our complete and utter need of Him. In other words, peace in the world begins with our admitting that He is God, and we are not.

Pope Benedict's reflection from Last Sunday March 7 on conversion actually applies well to today's Gospel from Luke Chapter 15 -- the parable of the Prodigal Son.

When I wrote about the parable yesterday, I mentioned that after we stray from God, what often sends us back to Him is simply the desire for survival. We know that we cannot so much as have life without God. In order to get to that point though, some of us must hit what is called in modern vernacular "bottom," or "rock bottom." At that point only one of two things can happen: 1) despair, or 2) conversion.

Said the Holy Father on March 7:

God likewise shows himself in various ways in each of our lives. To be able to recognize his presence, however, we must approach him with an awareness of our wretchedness and with deep respect. Otherwise we would make ourselves incapable of encountering him and entering into communion with him.

Sometimes the way we get to a place like that, where we are aware of our wretchedness, is by hitting "bottom." And it is nothing that the Father directly wills. Hitting bottom is a natural consequence of seeking our happiness without Him.

He says later:

... God does not reveal himself to those in whom are entrenched self-sufficiency and frivolity but rather to those who are poor and humble before him.

And:

With regard to sin, God shows himself to be full of mercy and never fails to remind sinners to avoid evil, to grow in love for him and to offer practical help to our neighbour in need, to live the joy of grace and not to go towards eternal death.
However, the possibility of conversion demands that we learn to read the events of life in the perspective of faith, animated, that is, by holy fear of God. In the presence of suffering and bereavement, the true wisdom is to let ourselves be called into question by the precarious state of existence and to see human history with the eyes of God who, desiring always and only the good of his children, through an inscrutable design of his love sometimes permits us to be tried by suffering in order to lead us to a greater good.

God respects our decisions to depart from Him just as the father of the prodigal son did. Upon his experience of great suffering and bereavement after venturing far from home, the son did not blame his father for failing to intercede and protect him. The son rather recognized that his suffering was a result of his decisions and no one else's.

So with us. Only by ceasing to blame God and recognizing our own imperfections can we recognize our need for God. And He does not hold back when we do.

Tomorrow's Gospel passage is Luke 15, the parable of the Prodigal Son. We may think we know the story because we've heard it a million times. But the story is really about us. And how well do we know ourselves? Have we learned the parable's lessons?

Pope John Paul II teaches profoundly on the parable of the prodigal in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia (The Mercy of God), published in 1980. Pretty much all of what I have to say about the parable is from his teaching.

The parable is so powerful because it parallels so closely with the life of human beings at all times and in all places throughout history. The prodigal son demands the inheritance from his father, and then takes it with him on a journey in search of some real advaneture. In other words, what drives the prodigal son's rebellion is his hubris, or pride -- his belief that even though he has nothing that did not come to him from his father, he knows better how to use it.

So he spends it on a "life of dissipation." In other words, he spends all his riches, given to him by his father, on endeavors that starve his wealth and his health, rather than increase and improve them.

We might relate.

We think we know how to use everything that we have been given in life -- our bodies, our minds, our gifts and abilities, our life itself -- better than God does, even though everything that we have came from Him. But our favorite word is "my." It's my body, my right, my decision, my money, my house, my car, etc. The only time we don't like the word "my" is when it is followed by some word like "responsibility." Then it is usually someone else's.

The prodigal son had a ver yclear understanding of what was "his," and a very clear view of how best to use it, until times got tough. Notice his father did not chase him down and wag his finger at the son, saying "Seeeeee I told you so."

Rather:

When he had freely spent everything,
a severe famine struck that country,
and he found himself in dire need.

The father did not have to preach. The natural consequences of the son's freely chosen rebellion was that he encountered a world outside his father's house that could not give him what he needed to survive. Forget happiness or comfort or peace. He needed to survive.

Sometimes it is only that that drives us to God. We thought we could find happiness anywhere but through Him, and with Him, and in Him. And when we discover what an unforgiving place a world without Him actually is, and how starved we are for anything that actually makes life worth living, that's when we go back to Him.

'How many of my father's hired workers
have more than enough food to eat,
but here am I, dying from hunger.
I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him,
"Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
I no longer deserve to be called your son;
treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers."'

But by then we believe, as did the prodigal son, that we no longer deserve anything the Father would give us. And in a way we may be correct about that. But what we are wrong about is that God cares to hold it against us.

As the prodigal son will discover, when he returns.

(As tomorrow is Sunday and I go easy on myself, I will cover the Father's response on Monday.)

From the Second Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, Chapter 5 verse 17:

Whoever is in Christ is a new creation:
the old things have passed away;
behold, new things have come.

The world has a rather confused and superficial view of "new" vs. "old," or "young" vs. "old."

One of the more tragic examples is the constant struggle of Hollywood stars to avoid the aging process far and away beyond the point of reason. They're not just trying to be healthy. They're trying to hit the pause button.

Christ doesn't want that for us. He knows that trying to hit the pause button means clinging to the past. And He isn't about the past. He wants to change us right now. He wants to make us who we were meant to be, right at this moment, as I am writing this. As you are reading it. What if you and I let Him? What would be different about us?

We would still be fundamentally who we are, in fact we would be more of who we are, because we would stop trying to be something we aren't.

The rest of God's creation is decisive. It's unmistakable. It's real. It's sometimes beautiful. Sometimes terrifying. But it has never been old.

Volcanoes have been erupting for millions of years, yet one is just as marvelous (from far away, of course) and terrifying (from up close) to behold now as when the first one exploded. Ocean waves have been crashing, the sun has been rising and setting. There's no way to mistake it when you see it. It never gets old. It is timelessly beautiful.

Yet we don't know who we are. We can't appreciate the timeless beauty of a baby or an old person because we are worried about the future or clinging to the past.

We are constantly searching for the "next big thing." Our attention spans have gotten so short, we practically lost interest in tomorrow's next big thing yesterday. Our desire for novelty has made us bored, with everything, including each other.

Jesus gives us a new life by removing from us our preoccupation with fashion, our self-consciousness, our empty standards, our future worries and our past regrets. He takes away our need to seek a cheap thrill because the real thrill is already inside us. It's Him.

I've heard it said that there are two kinds of people. There's people who have fun. And then there's people who are fun. People who have fun always have to be doing something in order to be satisfied. Like bunji jumping* or illegal narcotics. People who are fun can bring a good time into any situation, with relatively little effort.

Jesus turns us from people who have fun into people who are fun. No matter what life brings us, be it exciting or boring by pop cultural standards, it can always be something beautiful and enthralling not because of what it brings to us but because of what we as followers of Christ bring to it -- namely, His love, a love that makes hearts new again.






*Not that bunji jumping is bad. As long as one does not need to bunji jump in order to feel happy and fulfilled, I have no problem with it. I just cannot ever see myself doing it. Ever. Illegal narcotics, on the other hand, are in my view never a good idea.

Earlier this week the Catholic Diocese of my hometown, Austin, Texas, received a new shepherd: Bishop Joe Vasquez.

From the Austin American Statesman:

ROUND ROCK -- Bishop Joe S. Vásquez became the official leader of the Diocese of Austin on Monday afternoon in a two-hour Mass of installation at St. William Parish.

The ceremony attracted an estimated 2,000 guests, among them Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dew­hurst.

"Above all today, I thank God the Father, our lord Jesus Christ, and I ask that you pray for me that I may be a good shepherd," said Vásquez, 52, who is the fifth bishop and the first Mexican American to lead the diocese. "As the new shepherd of the Diocese of Austin, I will do my best to follow the model of the good shepherd Jesus Christ."

Pope Benedict XVI selected Vásquez to lead the Austin Diocese, which serves more than 450,000 Catholics, in late January. Vásquez is a West Texas native who served as a priest for 17 years in the San Angelo Diocese and most recently worked for the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese, which serves about 1.3 million Catholics.

Bishop Vasquez comes to Austin from the Archdiocese of Galvestion-Houston, where he served as auxiliary bishop under Daniel Cardinal DiNardo. News 8 Austin reported that a group of Houston Catholics bussed up to Austin to bid Bishop Vasquez farewell.

Outside the St. William Catholic Church in Round Rock, just before the Mass of Installation began for new Austin Bishop Joe S. Vasquez, a crowd danced, sang, and played music.

The large painted signs they held read "Thank you for your support, Bishop Vasquez" and "We will miss you."

About 150 people had crowded onto three buses in Houston and traveled to Round Rock to honor Vasquez, who served as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston for eight years.

From Rasmussen (emphases added):

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters say the health care reform plan now working its way through Congress will hurt the U.S. economy.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 25% think the plan will help the economy. But only seven percent (7%) say it will have no impact. Twelve percent (12%) aren't sure.

Two-out-of-three voters (66%) also believe the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats is likely to increase the federal deficit. That's up six points from late November and comparable to findings just after the contentious August congressional recess. Ten percent (10%) say the plan is more likely to reduce the deficit and 14% say it will have no impact on the deficit.

Underlying this concern is a lack of trust in the government numbers. Eighty-one percent (81%) believe it is at least somewhat likely that the health care reform plan will cost more than official estimates. That number includes 66% who say it is very likely that the official projections understate the true cost of the plan.

Just 10% have confidence in the official estimates and say the actual costs are unlikely to be higher.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) also believe it is at least somewhat likely that taxes will have to be raised on the middle class to cover the cost of health care reform. This includes 65% who say middle-class tax hikes are very likely, a six-point increase from late November.

Sen. Barack Obama promised during his 2008 presidential campaign that he would cut taxes for 95 percent of American families. But it looks like a lot of people are not buying it now. It is simply not possible to pay such enormous costs just by taxing the rich. Everyone who pays taxes will see the cost of this healthcare legislation if it passes.

Meanwhile 53 percent remain opposed to the national healthcare overhaul. The last time that number was less than 50 percent was Nov. 13-14, 2009, when it was 49, and before that the last time it was less than 50 was Sept. 12-13.

***

And the popularity of Obama's policies continues to wane, even among young people:

Harvard's Institute of Politics released the latest results from its ongoing survey of young adults this morning, and they don't look good for Democrats. As in the rest of the population, President Obama remains personally popular (56 percent approval), but support for his individual initiatives, like health-care reform, is much weaker. Only 38 percent of young people (defined as 18- to 29-year-olds) approve of the president's handling of the deficit, and a majority disapprove of his economic management (51 percent) and his work on health care (53 percent). Young people are unimpressed with congressional Democrats, with only 42 percent approving of their performance. That's still higher than for congressional Republicans--who have a mere 35 percent approval rating--but Democratic approval is down 6 points since last November, which is a worrying trend going into the midterms.

The worst sign for Democrats is voter enthusiasm. Young voters are a critical demographic for both the president and Democrats in Congress. They were the key to Obama's success last cycle, both in the primaries and the general election.

Halfway there! Now is another good time to stop and think about how we are doing this Lenten season.

I feel like I'm doing okay, except that I still just do not pray enough. And that's crucially important. And I say this because I have a feeling I may not be alone.

Consistent prayer has always been my biggest challenge. Often it is a matter of patience, or lack thereof. I'm in a hurry to get down to the business of the day. But Christ never seemed to be in a hurry. He knew where to go first as He began his day. He spent time with His Father. He let everything else in His life go, and He simply was, with God. And that time oriented and set the tone for His entire day.

Perhaps you wake up in the morning and you feel you have to rush to get to work or start on your to-do list. Or perhaps you have the opposite problem: you wake up and you just feel like you could lie in bed all day and do nothing. I would venture to guess that Christ experienced both. But He always came back to prayer. Immediately when He woke up in the morning He made Himself conscious of the Father's presence in His life and addressed Himself to the Father.

So we must do, every morning when we wake up. The question is, what's holding me back? What's holding you back?

For me I think part of it may be that I don't want to spend so many minutes in prayer, hoping to hear something earth-shattering from God, but get nothing at the end of it. I don't want to be let down. What I need to realize, and perhaps it will help others to hear this, is that it is better for me to place myself in His presence for five, fifteen, thirty minutes at the beginning of the day, even if I hear nothing, than never to listen in the first place. Starting off the day by listening for God can give us a listening ear for the rest of the day as well.

That's what I hope to do for the rest of this Lent. If I can work on nothing else, I want to work on giving the first five minutes of my waking day to God the Father. And then see what happens.

In the Old Testament's Book of Joshua, Chapter 5 verse 9, the Lord tells Joshua:

Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you.

The Old Testament is rife with foreshadowing, because life and human history are rife with foreshadowing. I think foreshadowing is one of God's favorite literary devices. This particular verse is foreshadowing of the highest order. It is God telling Joshua, Moses' successor as the Hebrew leader, that He has "removed the reproach" of the Egyptian empire that used the Hebrews for slave labor.

But by doing so, God also foreshadows the ultimate removal of the stain of sin, not just from the Hebrews but from humanity as a whole, through the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The Hebrews were slaves. In all the earth, God's children are slaves to sin. In Egypt, some of the Hebrews were afraid to leave Egypt because their slavemasters, though spiteful and abusive, at least provided the Hebrews with a kind of secuity. In all the earth, some of God's children, in fact all of us at one time or another, fear the idea of living a sinless life after God's own heart because a life of sin is at least familiar and predictable.

God removed the reproach of Egypt from the Hebrews. In other words, He freed them.

Notice the decisiveness of His action and language here. He does not merely give the Hebrews a feeling of warm-fuzziness so that they can feel happy even though they remained in slavery to ruthless taskmasters. He really freed the Hebrews. And He really removed the reproach of their slavery to Egypt.

Christ does the same. He does not just give us a feeling of warmth inside even though we continue to be in slavery to sin. He really gives us access to the grace needed to no longer be a slave to sin.

Over the centuries there have been some incorrect ideas about the nature of Christ's redemptive action. One prominent theory was that man is a dung heap, and God's love was like a white snow that covered up the heap and made the whole thing look pretty, even though the interior reality of filth and despicability remained the same.

I have no interest in that kind of love.

If I have cancers all over my arms and I go to the hospital, I do not want a doctor who will give me a sweater to put on over the tumors. I would still suffer and die. I want a doctor who will take the pain away, who will remove the source of my suffering.

Christ does not cover over the sinfulness of man. By His death and resurrection, He removes it and frees us collectively from it. For us, that means we really are free from sin, provided we invite Christ in and allow Him to heal us personally.

From Fox News:

First Amendment be damned . . . If Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn had his way, any journalist who called Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a dictator would quickly find himself behind bars.

Penn, appearing on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday, defended Chavez during a segment in which he detailed his work with the JP Haitian Relief Organization, which he co-founded.

"Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it" said Penn, winner of two Best Actor Academy Awards. "And this is mainstream media, who should -- truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies."

It was just the beginning of a busy weekend for Penn. When asked on CBS' "Sunday Morning" about those who question his motives for his humanitarian work in Haiti, he said:

"Do I hope that those people die screaming of rectal cancer? Yeah. You know, but I'm not going to spend a lot of energy on it."

Classy.

See the latest on the Venezuelan dicta-- er, big poopooface's human rights violations here, here, and here.

I was sick last night and this morning. Therefore I am only now getting around to posting today's reflection. My apologies to you, dear readers.

The Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, Chapter 8 verse 26:

... the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.

So I was reminded this morning as I lay ill in bed. We are reminded of our weakness all the time when we sin, which is itself a kind of sickness. More on that tomorrow.

It's good to remember that we "don't know how to pray as we ought," which means it is often useful to simply shut up and ask the Holy Spirit for a little help. Even if we don't see or hear or feel it right away, He will be happy to oblige.

Jesus describes Himself thus in Matthew Chapter 11 verse 29:
"I am meek and humble of heart ..."

Humility does not mean that we constantly insult ourselves. It means that we see and understand the reality of who we are -- that we see ourselves the way God sees us. That means we acknowledge our sometimes many faults, to be sure, but it also means we love all the things about ourselves that God created and loves.

Jesus described Himself as humble even though He lived a sinless life and was the embodiment of the one true God, possessing every spiritual gift. There was nothing about Himself to insult. Yet He knew Himself as God the Father knew Him. And He acted according to that perfect knowledge. Therefore Jesus was the perfect model of humility.

I only say this because I have known people who have possessed wonderful spiritual gifts and been afraid to use them or even acknowledge that they have them because they have a false sense of humility. They believe it would be a sign of the worst vanity to allow anyone to see them using their gifts.

But the truth, as I have been able to discover it, is that Satan loves to use our fear of vanity, and our false sense of humility, to keep us from doing what God wants us to do. God calls us through the gifts that He gives us. And it is not vain to use those gifts. What is vain is to believe that we have nothing that is from Him, if we refuse to acknowledge Him for what we have been given.

That means vanity is to believe: A) that nothing that we have, no innate skill or aptitude, has been given to us by Him, or B) that we simply have no innate skills or aptitudes. In case A we insult God by ignoring Him, thinking we are our own gift to the world, and in case B we insult God by telling Him that He made nothing of any real use or import when He made us.

As Mother Teresa put it:

God told us, "Love your neighbor as yourself." So first I am to love myself rightly, and then to love my neighbor like that. But how can I love myself unless I accept myself as God has made me?

Again, this does not mean we are not fallen, that we need not work to conform our flawed or excessive appetites. We are all born wounded, and we must acknowledge that. But God sees not only our wounds. He sees, deep inside our hearts, what He originally intended us to be, and wants to bring that out of us. Humility means letting Him.

God made all things that are. And all of his Creation is gift. You and I are part of that Creation. Therefore, you and I are gift to the world. Humility is to recognize our identity as gift from Him. And to act accordingly. Let's pray that we can see ourselves as He sees us, and to act accordingly without fear.

The Associated Press reports:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's furious, final push to get a health care bill passed threatens to shove aside the message he promised would top his list this year: creating jobs.

Even as the White House juggles several enormous issues at once, the public takes its cues about the president's chief concern from how he spends his time, energy and capital. As Obama himself put it on Wednesday, from now until Congress takes a final vote on a health care overhaul, "I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform."

Everything in your power, Mr. President?

Does that mean you will not make jobs your "number one priority," like you said you would in your most recent State of the Union address, Mr. President?

Rasmussen March 4 reported a poll showing that by in large Americans want a government with fewer services and lower taxes:

Just 23% of U.S. voters say they prefer a more active government with more services and higher taxes over one with fewer services and lower taxes, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. This finding has remained fairly consistent since regular tracking on this question began in November 2006.

Two-thirds (66%) of voters prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes. In August at the height of the congressional town hall controversy over the health care plan, 70% felt that way.

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans and 68% of voters not affiliated with either major political party favor a government with fewer services and lower taxes. Democrats are more closely divided: 38% like a more active government with more services and higher taxes, while 45% prefer one with fewer services and lower taxes.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of liberals favor a bigger, more activist government. Eighty-four percent (84%) of conservatives and 61% of moderates prefer a smaller government instead.

Rasmussen also found last week that fewer and fewer Americans believe anyone in this country can work their way out of poverty. Only 48 percent say it's possible while 35 percent say it is not and 17 percent don't know. That's down from 56 percent this time last year.

Well gee whiz, I thought the whole point of these massive government spending programs was to enable Americans to do just that -- to work their way out of property.

And it may be the point, but the American people increasingly are showing that they are not as concerned with good intentions as solid results. Charitable though the motivations behind enormous government programs and spending may be, what they accomplish is a culture of people who think they can count on themselves and their neighbors for zero, and the government for what little scraps manage to make it all the way to them from Washington, D.C.
***
And yet, the going criticism of Obama's administration is that they're failing to effectively communicate their message. David Axelrod, the White House spin maestro, is under fire as the president is, as the aforementioned polls indicate, losing the public relations battle.

I suppose it is not in the nature of progressives, or some in the press, for that matter, to ever question the merits of progressive ideas. If the American peopel do not see to be buying whatever progressive policy wonks, elected officials, advisers and spokespersons are selling, then by golly they must not be using the right phrasing!

The simpler explanation is that many people are dissatisfied with the substance of progressive ideas. Many people want approaches that will cost less in the form of taxes and government spending.

The Holy Father and other Church leaders last weekend concluded their Lenten retreat. Pope Benedict spoke of the prayer of Solomon, for "a heart that listens."

Solomon's prayer is from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 3 verse 9:

Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?

Said Pope Benedict:

It really seems to me that this sums up the whole of the Christian vision of the human being. In himself man is not perfect; he is a relational being. It is not his cogito [I think] that can cogitare [think] of the whole of reality. He needs listening, he needs to listen to the other and especially to the Other with a capital "O", to God. Only in this way does he know himself, only in this way does he become himself.
From my place here I could always see the Mother of the Redeemer, the Sedes Sapientiae, the living throne of wisdom with Wisdom incarnate on her lap. And, as we have seen, St Luke presents Mary precisely as a woman with a heart that listens, who is steeped in the word of God, who listens to the Word, meditates on it (synballein), composes it and preserves it, who cherishes it in her heart.
The Fathers of the Church say that at the moment of the conception of the eternal Word in the Virgin's womb, the Holy Spirit entered Mary through her ear. In listening she conceived the eternal Word, she gave flesh to this Word. And thus she tells us what it means to have a listening heart.
Here Mary is surrounded by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, by the Communion of Saints. And thus, in these very days we have seen and understood precisely that it is not in the isolated "I" that we can truly listen to the Word but only in the "we" of the Communion of Saints.

I may try to unpack some of this as the week goes on.

Meantime, as we continue through Lent, let's pray for a heart that listens for God, and when it hears Him, listens to Him.

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama's budget would increase the U.S. deficit in 2011 to 2020 by $1.2 trillion more than the White House has forecast, the Congressional Budget Office said on Friday.

The CBO report fueled immediate criticism from Republicans who said Obama was raising government debt to "alarming" levels.

"Measured relative to the size of the economy, the deficit under the President's proposals would fall to about 4 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by 2014 but would rise steadily thereafter," the CBO said in a preliminary analysis.

What the Reuters story fails to observe, though, is that the projected deficit is expected to be $9.8 trillion. Trill-ee-yun.

Let me write it out numerically: $9,800,000,000,000. For the next ten years.

You know how you get a credit card balance every month? It could be in the thousands of dollars, but the minimum you have to pay each month is like $20 or something? Imagine that a person pays that minimum amount each month and piles on thousands in charges -- i.e. money he does not have -- every single month. Think of what that does to his financial wellbeing, and multiply that times a nation. Now multiply that by a couple of generations. That's what we're looking at. The United States of America is paying the minimum and piling up billions, even trillions, in charges every year.

So naturally the folks in Washington are looking for ways to pay for it. The first easy avenue is always to stick their hands further into the pockets of Americans.

And the Associated Press says:

The report says that extending tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 under GOP President George W. Bush and continuing to update the alternative minimum tax so that it won't hit millions of middle-class taxpayers would cost $3 trillion over 2011-2020. The tax cuts expire at the end of this year and Obama wants to extend them -- except for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making $250,000.

Now let's get something straight, here. Cutting taxes doesn't cost the government anything. That would imply the government has an inherent claim to the money that it has less of as a result of the tax cuts.

It does not. The people do.

Raising taxes costs Americans. Refusing to extend the Bush tax cuts means raising taxes on Americans.

Let's assume that the folks in Washington really would update the alternative minimum tax so that it won't hit millions of middle-class taxpayers. Why is it better for that $3 trillion to be in the hands of federal bureaucrats than for it to be in the hands of business owners who are in a position to hire people who are now looking for work? This is what infuriates people about the prevailing philosophy in Washington. The philosophy is that whatever problems society faces can be "solved" in Washington. So let's all make sure Washington has the resources to fix it by patriotically ponying up more and more of our hard-earned cash.

How little faith does one have to have in private sector citizens, how cynical does one have to be about hardworking Americans to subscribe to such a vision? Does anyone really believe all that money will be spent any more frugally or wisely by government cronies who don't know how to spend money they don't even have?

Spending the country into multiple generations of enormous debt will not cost the government. It will cost the original earners of the money the government taxes and then spends like there's no tomorrow.

As we saw yesterday, Jesus fully reveals man to himself. He shows us who we ultimately have been created to be, the kinds of lives we are intended to (and can) live. He shows to us the meaning of our lives, which is to love as He does.

Not only does Christ reflect our true selves back to us; He also propels us forward to show us the true face of God the Father. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father," he said.

I have sometimes thought of God the Father as more intimidating and distant than God the Son. What Jesus reveals is that the Father is not some kind of absentee landlord. He is intimately involved in our lives. He is like any good father. He pays attention. He cares about what happens to his children.

Sometimes He involves Himself in our lives too much for our tastes. C.S. Lewis made the point in his book The Problem of Pain that we would prefer not so much a Heavenly Father, but a Heavenly Grandfather, a "senile benevolence" who only wants his grandkids to have a good time. But no. The Father has a bad habit of not much respecting our "privacy."

And that's the part of God which is so offensive to the modern mind. We want our privacy, and we think God is an incessant intruder.

I don't know at what point it became popular for children to demand "privacy" from their parents, or to freely and loudly dispute them. When I was a child, I knew there was no area of my life for which I could not be held to account, and looking back I see how formative that was. Not that they were constantly interfering in my life, showing up at school to see how I performed in class and interacted with my friends and whatnot. But even when they were not present I knew I was expected to live according to what they had taught me. If I did well I was rewarded. If I screwed up I could expect forceful but loving correction. It is useful to live like that for 18 years. It prepares you for an adulthood where you are answerable to the Father in heaven.

But today, very young children, almost through no fault of their own, have the illusion of private affairs that are none of their parents' business. It is a little disconcerting to see eleven-year-olds at the mall ... texting. What possible need could an eleven-year-old have to text someone, especially someone her own age?

Not that such things are never useful for families. They can actually help parents to keep closer track of their kids. The problem is when parents give such technology away to their kids and then proceed to ignore them. Kids can develop a false sense of autonomy when their use of the device carries with it no accountability. If their parents try to confiscate the device, how will the children react? With indignance, as if their parents would take back something which they did not give in the first place.

Cell phones are like our lives. And God is the Father who sees every text we ever send. He generously gives us freedom to text as we please but expects us to use our cell phones according to the principals that He has taught us.

And we don't like it when God bothers us while we are texting. Can't He see we have more important things to do? But in the end, it isn't my cell phone. It was given to me, by Him.

For all the times we would rather not be bothered by God, Jesus embraces and accepts the Father's close involvement in His life. Jesus neither says nor does eanything that is not "given to" Him by His Father. He said, "the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me."

The Father gave us our lives because He loves us. What we consider to be intrusiveness is actually His desire to guide us gently toward happiness. But like Jesus, we have to embrace and accept the Father's involvement.

Reuters gleefully beams:

WASHINGTON - U.S. employers cut a smaller than expected 36,000 jobs in February, leaving the unemployment rate steady at 9.7 percent, bolstering views the labor market was on the brink of creating jobs.

The Labor Department said Friday it was unclear how the severe snowstorms, which hit much of the country last month, had impacted payrolls. Jobs losses for December and January were revised to show 35,000 fewer jobs lost than previously reported.

Did anyone in the press ask if it was at all "clear" how the continued break-neck spending in Washington has impacted the job market? The threat of new taxes on employers (excuse me, "the rich")? Sorry, it just amazes me that some in the press will sooner attribute the continued mediocrity of the economy to a snowstorm (caused by global warming, no doubt) than to the enormous regulatory uncertainty of a Washington that seems determined to spend the United States into an unfathomable level of debt.
***
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama promised 3.5 million jobs by 2010 during his presidential campaign, so the latest figures bring his jobs deficit to 8.3 million. Anybody seen those jobs? Anyone? Bueller?
***
Didn't this president and Congress say back in January, after Republican Scott Brown snatched the Massachusetts seat that had belonged to Ted Kennedy for half a lifetime, that they would focus on jobs now? The vast majority of the news I've seen lately has been on healthcare. Part of me wonders if the president can do more than talk a big game. Another part thinks if Obama gets involved in trying to create jobs it will only lead to the kinds of command-and-control policies, runaway spending, huge debt, and burdensome taxes that have the job market in its current state. No one, not even Barack Obama, can tax and spend a people into prosperity.

From ABC News March 4:

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., today said he and 11 other House members will not vote for the health care bill unless it includes more stringent language to prevent federal funding from going toward abortion services.

Some Dems want to remove public funding for abortions from Obama's proposal."We're not going to vote for this bill with that kind of language," Stupak said on "Good Morning America" today, referring to the Senate health care bill, which includes less restrictive language than what the Democratic lawmaker proposed in the House.

Stupak said he is willing to take the criticism that will be hurled at him if he blocks the bill because of the abortion language, but that he won't back down on his principles.

"I want to see health care pass. I agree... people are being priced out of the market. We must have health care but, boy, there are some principles and beliefs that some of us are not going to pass," he said. "We're prepared to take the responsibility. I mean, I've been catching it ever since last fall. Let's face it, I want to see health care. But we're not going to bypass some principles and beliefs that we feel strongly about."

The ongoing abortion debate threatens to stall the health care bill and reflects the deep divide among Democrats.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (a Catholic, by the way) is repeating a line from last year that abortion funding is not in the latest version of Obama's overhaul of the medical care system. The press at the time believed healthcare reform's pro-choice supporters but later had to backtrack and admit that abortion funding was in fact there.

It doesn't matter if abortion funding is or is not in the bill, because pro-lifers do not trust this president any farther than he can blow smoke. He could sneeze on their shirts and they wouldn't believe the boogers. They know he is a huge fan of Planned Parenthood and its mission of making "every child a wanted child," not by conforming human hearts to charitably accept the gift of life but by subjecting inconvenient children to barbaric deaths that scar their mothers for life.

Remember the Freedom of Choice Act?

From the the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes*:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.

A common mistake among Christians, including myself, is to think that Christ is very different from ourselves. That He is distant. That to be anything like Him is unachievable under any circumstances whatsoever. Not so.

Yes, I know, He is God. And Yes, I know, He is sinless. And we are certainly not God and we are certainly sinful. The question though is whether sin is a defining characteristic of humanity.

If it is, then Adam was not human until he sinned. Neither was Eve. And neither Mary nor Jesus were ever, for even one second of their lives, human.

It is more accurate to say that until Adam sinned, he was not fallen. It is also more accurate to say that Adam was more human before he fell than afterwards. It is also more accurate to say that you and I are more human when we do good and avoid evil, than when we strike and reverse that. It is most accurate to say that Jesus was the most human human ever to walk the earth.

And by walking the earth, so fully human, he reveals to us what humanity really is, and by necessity who we really are.

Christ shows me who I am.

Reread that sentence and repeat it to yourself. More than once if you have to or want to.

Christ shows me who I am. Not some abstraction or fantasy -- who I really am deep down. He shows me how I am meant to live. He shows me that I am a good person. And by doing that, He shows me that when I sin, I am not being true to myself. He shows me that my heart is strong and capable of loving and giving to others in a way that can transform lives. He shows me that I can suffer no violence so terrible as to force me to hate those who perpetrate it. He shows me that as long as I focus on my Father in Heaven, no matter what hardships befall me, I will be a force for good in the world.

Christ shows that to me by being who He is. He is a mirror into the hearts of all of us. If we want to know who we are, we must get to know Him.

*the Church's constitution on the Church in the modern world, published in the late 1960s.

It's been a while since I looked at the Daily Mass readings, but happened to do so today. Very thought-provoking indeed, and all about the Lenten season.

From the first reading, Jeremiah 17:5-10:

Thus says the LORD:
Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
But stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose hope is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
that stretches out its roots to the stream:
It fears not the heat when it comes,
its leaves stay green;
In the year of drought it shows no distress,
but still bears fruit.

Well, that's Lent, right there. Lent is all about the changing seasons. When we voluntarily pray and voluntarily fast, we prepare ourselves for the times when fasting is forced upon us.

The life of a Christian is not about avoiding difficulties and sufferings at all costs, but rather continuing to be a good person and positively impact the lives of others even when we are in pain. The easiest thing in the world is to excuse my lack of charity towards others, even the people I love most, simply because I have a headache.

By staying close to God, like that tree stretching its roots out to the stream, we are able to remain constant despite our constantly changing circumstances. We continue to bear the fruit of charity to our friends, acquaintances, and enemies alike.

In fact, by staying close to God we learn to actually enjoy those changes of season. The unpredictability of life is made more interesting, not less, when we keep God's company as we travel through it.

We tend to prefer constancy of circumstances because it is comfortable, even if it is miserable.

We may prefer 365 days of summer because we don't like the cold. That is, we may want to avoid suffering forever and at all costs.

Or we may prefer 365 days of winter because we don't want to experience the joy of spring and then be forced to remember it longingly when the cold returns. That is, we may desire never to have good times because then experiencing bad times again would hurt that much more.

God offers us freedom from slavery to the "weather." Rather than allowing us to be dependent on constancy of exterior circumstances, He gives us constancy in our own hearts -- an interior completeness and fulfillment that gives us joy even in pain and difficulty.

But we have to stretch out our roots to Him. We have to invite Him into the most fundamental parts of who we are. We must trust Him.

God promises not that all times will be good when we trust Him, but that in our hearts we will constantly know His peace and joy regardless.

"Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Jesus Himself knows that anyone who stands for actual peace and real justice will be greeted often not with acclamation but with persecution. He, again, is the foremost example.

What makes righteousness so repulsive to certain powers-that-be in the world as to inspire persecution against those who practice it?

Righteousness, in the sense that Christ uses it here, means the practice of one's life in accordance to what God wants. That means standing up for real peace, not just "peace and quiet." It means giving ultimate homage to Jesus alone and no one and nothing else. But powers today, just as did powers in the first century, demand exclusive loyalty from people who refuse to give it to anyone but Christ.

Especially in a society that recognizes the free practice of religion, we can be thankful that the penalties we face for dedicating our utmost loyalty to God alone are minor by comparison. But in other parts of the world followers of Christ continue to pay the ultimate price.

It is widely accepted conventional wisdom that being persecuted or discriminated against is part and parcel of being different and therefore often misunderstood. If anyone is called to live his life in a startlingly different way, it is the Christian.

As I've previously said, in a world marked by sin, there can be no love of righteousness that does not carry with it some manner of marginalization or discrimination. Jesus says that such persecution is a gift -- or at least it is the sign of a gift. The saying goes, "If you're not taking flak, you're not over the target." If we're not living our lives in a radical way for Jesus, then we may avoid making enemies, but we may also miss a chance to be truly blessed with the friendship of the One who matters most.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

In order to understand the term "peacemaker," we must understand the term "peace."

"Peace." What do you think of when you hear that word? Here's the wikipedia definition:

Peace (symbol: ☮) is a quality describing a society or a relationship that is operating harmoniously. This is commonly understood as the absence of hostility, or the existence of healthy or newly-healed interpersonal or international relationships, safety in matters of social or economic welfare, the acknowledgment of equality and fairness in political relationships and, in world matters, peacetime; a state of being absent of any war or conflict.

And here is the Catholic definition, which is found in the Catechism in paragraphs 2304 and 2305:

Respect for and development of human life require peace. Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries. Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication among men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity. Peace is "the tranquillity of order." Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.

Earthly peace is the image and fruit of the peace of Christ, the messianic "Prince of Peace." By the blood of his Cross, "in his own person he killed the hostility," he reconciled men with God and made his Church the sacrament of the unity of the human race and of its union with God. "He is our peace."

Notice: the Catholic definition of peace includes justice. It is called the work of justice. More secular understandings of peace tend to be more preoccupied with the appearance of peace without the work that is sometimes necessary in order to ensure the actual peace that comes only when justice is achieved. Many who say they want peace in this world really just want "peace and quiet."

If we really want to make the kind of peace to which Christ calls us, it will not do merely to avoid "conflict," in fact it somtimes may require that we dive right into conflict, that we speak difficult truths in hostile environments, that we live and behave in ways considered taboo, not for the purpose of offending others or calling attention to ourselves but simply because it is right.

It is not that we seek conflict for its own sake. But in a world marked by sin and injustice, there can be no imitation of Christ, no love of justice or peace, that does not give rise to conflict.

Christ Himself provides the perfect model for this. He came to establish justice and peace. But in another sense He understood that His coming into the world would give rise to conflict and even violence. He said "I came not to bring peace but a sword."

He wasn't claiming to be a warlord. He was making clear that to be a peacemaker is not simply to run from conflict and ignore injustice. It is to stare injustice in the face and say no. It is to stand one's ground and at times patiently endure injury and violence, as He did, for the sake of true justice and true peace. Christ did not run from conflict. Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, called the religious leaders of the time "hypocrites," and called one of His own best friends "Satan." Why? Because that friend wanted Jesus to run from the violence and conflict that comes from standing up for peace.

The key is always to respond to the conflict with charity, as Christ did. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," He would say as he endured the unfathomable violence of the crucifixion.To work for peace in such a way, as He did, is to be a brother or sister to Him. Thus it is to share in His identity as a child of God.

I remember when everyone thought it was the Republicans with a puffed up sense of righteousness, who thought they knew right and wrong better than everybody else. Religious conservatives took hits for "legislating morality" -- using their elected status to impose a narrow moral worldview on their helpless constituents.

No more.

Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has proclaimed that her Democratic colleagues have some kind of higher duty to pass healthcare reform, even if it means ending their careers. So has President Barack Obama.

"[T]he American people need it," she said. "Why are we here? We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress."

Very noble. Of course, Pelosi is not in the awkward position of representing constituents who think nationalized healthcare reform is a bad idea. Her constituents are definitely more likely to re-elect her because they are just as uncompromisingly liberal as she is. But let's assume she's sincere in saying that her colleagues should sacrifice their political careers. Why is that so? Because she and other Democratic leaders believe it is The Right Thing To Do. In other words, they are legislating morality.

That is one assessment of the current situation. The other assessment is that Democrats believe that the quickest way to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of the federal government is through people's medical care. Because through that you can control every aspect of people's lives. I can't disprove that, but, perhaps naively, I prefer to assume best attentions.

That supporters of nationalized healthcare reform think it's The Right Thing To Do explains their determination to "ram it down people's throats" no matter how much the people protest it, and no matter how obvious it may be that a vote for healthcare reform will effectively destroy one's chances of getting re-elected. Would some Republicans fall on the sword to pass major abortion-curtailing legislation, Roe v. Wade notwithstanding? Sure. This healthcare reform legislation is at that level for certain Democrats. It is so fundamental and dear to their hearts that at this point consent of the governed, and even consent of colleagues, is out the window.

But the people are opposed to healthcare reform not on coldly political grounds but moral grounds also. It's a huge tax increase. Although it has been painted as a glorious government bequest unto its people, it's a government taking. It forces people to buy something even if they don't want it. And if they already have it, it forces them to pay more for it, under the pretense that what they will get is better than what they have now. It places the next generation of Americans under tremendous debt. It may not even accomplish the extension of coverage to the supposedly 30 million people it claims. It would force taxpayers to pay for medical procedures to which they have deeply moral and religious objections, like abortion.

Supporters of the medical care overhaul will say that the government must intervene because so much uncompensated care is unsustainable. Conservatives agree that such a problem exists. The question, as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin made plain at the healthcare summit on Thursday, is whether the federal government is competent to address that problem with one-size-fits-all legislation. Conservatives believe that allowing the people to develop market-based, private sector solutions would not only work better, it would also be the right thing to do.

President George H.W. Bush made the Christian virtue known as "prudence" nerdy when he used it during his administration. But it seems our elected officials could use more of this virtue, which dictates that we cannot achieve good works solely through the righteousness of our intentions. We have to smartly channel those intentions in ways that can be effective.

"Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God."

To be clean of heart (or "pure of heart" in classical translations) is to see the world as God sees it. Great Catholic writer Frank Sheed used the analogy of the sunrise. The beautiful thing about a sunrise is not just the sun itself but the fact that you can see that light of the sunrise all over everything else: on trees, cars, house, animals. People. To be pure of heart is to see that light of God when we behold any part of hs Creation, particularly a person.

Again, like mercy, we think of cleanness or "purity" as passively or even lazily keeping our noses clean. But purity is a challenge. We have to be actively pure. Purity means that not only do we actively do what God would have us do, but we do it with the right motivations in our hearts. We love and serve others because when we look at them, we see the Christ within them. We see that they are created to be sons and daughters of God. The love of Christ must be the driving force behind everything we do. But it starts with how we see the world, and the people in it. We have to see as God sees.

How do we see as God sees? It starts with famiiarizing ourselves with the data that we have on God, in the form primarily of his revealed Word. The first thing we notice in Genesis is that God saw His creation, particular Man and Woman, as "very good."

It takes work and patience to grow even a tad familiar with God's own vision of humanity and the world, but it is worth it. Although one is tempted to think that "seeing God" is a reward for seeing as God sees, I would suggest it is a natural consequence of seeing the world through the eyes of God. If I see the world more and more with God's eyes, and recognize that my eyes are not mine but His, then the more I will be reminded of Him every place I go and in every person I meet. And after a lifetime of that, I will have been prepared to see God not just dimly through the written Word or through my experience of other people pointing the way to Him, but face to face in Heaven.