Why are you standing there looking at the sky?

NB. Deacons preaching this Sunday.  Here's an Ascension homily from 2006:

The Ascension of the Lord (C)
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation and St. Paul Hospital Chapel

No one will accuse Paul of being a fuzzy dreamer. He is not known for his abstract idealism. Later on in his letter to the Ephesians, he exhorts the new Christians of Ephesus: “I plead with you, as a prisoner of the Lord, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received, with perfect humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another lovingly…” Pretty words. Beautiful sentiment. But highly impractical, if not dangerous, for the Church! Besides, who can achieve this level of perfection now? Who can walk such a narrow path so confidently? Clearly, Paul is wishing out loud here, or at best he’s violating our image of him and exercising a bit of his never before seen idealism. He’s just setting the bar for us, calibrating the ideal soul for us to look to for guidance as we struggle along. And it’s not really clear how we are to achieve this perfect humility, meekness, and patience. What does he have to say about method or technique or first principles? It’s one thing, dear Paul, to show us an end, a goal. It’s quite another to teach us the means to that goal! Show us how. . .

And Paul would say here: “Oy vey! Have you been paying attention the last couple of months? Have you been listening to the readings, the prayers of the Church? Have you noticed the sequence of events since we entered the desert with Christ forty days before he suffered and died for us?” And we might respond: “Well, Paul, we’ve been paying attention…kinda, sorta. We’ve had Lent and Good Friday and Easter…lots and lots of Easter…weeks and weeks of Easter! But you’re avoiding our question. What do the readings and prayers of the Mass, the sequence of events since the desert have to do with your crazy dream that we live lives of perfect humility, meekness, etc., etc.?” At this point, we might imagine poor Paul hanging his head, but being the excellent teacher that he is, he asks instead: “Who have you been these last few months? Who are you becoming? And who will you be at last?” Uh?! we say. That’s right: who have you been? Who are you becoming? And who will you be at last?

 

In a homily on Ascension Sunday, Augustine asked his congregation: “Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now…?” He goes on: “While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth we are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love.” How? Why was the Son made flesh? Why did he become sin for us? Why did he suffer and die? To make good theatre? To fulfill some mythical Jewish prophecy? Entertainment for a cruel god? How can we down here be up there with Christ in love? Who have you been? Who are you becoming? And who will you be at last?

 

Let’s remember where we are in our history: the Holy Spirit announces to Mary that she will bear the Word into the world. She says, “Yes.” Elizabeth bears the Christ’s herald, John, and he is born to call our hearts to attention. Jesus is born. He is presented to the Father in the temple as the first fruit of Mary and Joseph. He is baptized by his herald and the Father declares him to be the Christ. He chooses his students. He teaches them his gospel. He preaches and heals; he feeds and frees; he shakes the foundation stones and breaks the temple gates. He draws hungry souls and repels the self-righteous. He casts out demons and forgives sinners. He goes to the mountain, the river, the sea, and the desert. And there he is given the chance to abandon us, to leave us to our humane mess. Without bending his back or lifting a finger, he picks up his cross, saying, “Yes” to his Father’s will for him and for us all. Lent. On a donkey he rides like a king into Jerusalem. Palm Sunday. There he is betrayed, tried, betrayed again, abandoned, whipped, ridiculed, spiked to a cross, mocked as he bleeds, and dies. He is buried. Holy Week and Triduum. And Mary Magdalene finds his grave empty three days later. He is risen from the dead. Easter morning. Knowing his disciples are fretful, he finds a few of them on the road to Emmaus and reveals himself again, spending forty days with them. Blessing them a final time, he is taken up; he ascends into heaven so that all of us may be lifted up with him. But for now, we wait until the promised Spirit descends! And the church is born. Born once of Mary. Born again from the Spirit. And yet again—now—from the womb of your YES. Christ’s body is born.

In case you’ve forgotten: who have you been since Ash Wednesday? Who are you becoming? And who will you be at last?

 

Perfect humility, meekness, and patience. In his letter to the Ephesians this morning, Paul bestows a blessing. We receive from God the Father: wisdom and revelation; knowledge of Jesus the Christ; eyes and hearts enlightened to see and know his hope, the wealth of His glory; to share in the inheritance of the holy ones, the exceeding greatness and generosity of His power for all who believe. And here is what the Spirit says that we need to hear in this blessing right now: Jesus is ascended into heaven to take his place of honor with the Father; he is given a place above “every principality, authority, power, dominion and every name that is named” in all ages past, this age, and in every age to come. And in rising to the Father, the Father has “put all things beneath his feet and gave him as head over all things to the Church, which is his body…” Perfect humility, meekness, and patience then are not passive virtues that leave us vulnerable in the world. They are habits of being that rise out of the rule of Christ in our lives. Does true strength need to exercise its muscle? Does true power need to show itself in action? Does true authority balk at being patient? No. Perfect humility, meekness, and patience mark us as belonging to Christ. As his slaves, we live his life and die his death and rise in his resurrection and we ascend, we ascend as his Body—one promise, one blessing, one Spirit—living, dying, rising, ascending in Christ, with Christ, as Christ.

 

Ah! There it is. There it is. As Christ. That’s the “how” of Paul’s dreaming and Augustine’s wonder. Let’s see: who have you been? Christ. Who are you becoming? Christ. And who will you be at last? Christ. Christ is your past, your present, and your future. Christ is who you have been all along; are right now; and will be when all of this is done. When you rejoice, your joy is Christ. When you suffer, your pain is Christ. When you fall, your bruises are Christ. When you stand again, your height, your dignity is Christ. And when you accept the Spirit of Love, your Word, your deed, every breath, every motion, every stir of air and eddy of scent is Christ. His ascension into heaven draws us up. His Body, all of us, his Body is drawn up and, on our way there, we are pulled into his worship, his joy, and we drink from his blessing cup for our healing and health.

 

Why are we looking at the sky? Christ has ascended to the Father and now, for now, we wait. We know that God loves us to change us. We know that we are transfigured in His love. The New You waits for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He is risen! And as Christ so will we all be raised.
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Irrational, self-deceived, repressed, and arrogant

NB.  The Laptop is sitting on a boat in Port of Shanghai, China. . .so, here's a Roman homily from 2009.

6th Week of Easter (S)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Christianity is the “one great curse, the one great inmost corruption...the one immortal blemish of mankind” (Hovey 3). Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher-prophet of the anti-Christ. British theologian, Craig Hovey, notes that Nietzsche “loathed Christianity, especially Christian morality. He thought Christians were irrational, self-deceived, repressed, and arrogant; he took Christian morality to be pettily reactionary and positively fatal to life…”(3). Will the Prosecutor of the Church in his closing argument before the judge of the world rest his case and demand a guilty verdict? Do we stand convicted by the evidence of human history—the thoughts, words, and deeds of our own hearts and minds? Are we guilty? We can point to the hospitals and orphanages we have built. Our Prosecutor can point to the injuries we have caused and the orphans we have made. We can point to the spread of the Gospel in the New World, the souls we brought to Christ. Our Prosecutor can show the jury our destruction of whole cultures in the pursuit of gold and slaves, all the souls we lost to our greed. We can point to our tireless efforts to relieve poverty, hunger, and suffering. Our Prosecutor can bring evidence of the poverty, hunger, and suffering we have caused. Are we guilty? Before the judge of the world and a jury of our peers, how do we plea? What is our defense? 

If Nietzsche were to serve as our defense attorney, he might argue that though we have certainly committed the crimes the prosecution charges us with, but that we should be found not-guilty by reason of insanity. If indeed the Church is cursed, if we are an “immortal blemish” as he claims, the slaves of a herd mentality, following our basest instincts and primitive impulses, then we are irrational, self-deceived, little more than animals doing what animals do. He could simply repeat our crimes and ask, “What sane Church would do these things?” Would the judge and jury buy this plea? Would they look at us with contempt but nonetheless find us not-guilty? 

Before the bench of the judge of this world, we have an Advocate, an intercessor, one who pleas on our behalf. Nietzsche would argue our insanity and ask that we be found not guilty because of it; our true Advocate knows we are guilty and makes no excuses. Our true Advocate knows our crimes better than we do because he became those very crimes for us. He can do more than merely show evidence of our sins, he can give personal testimony to them. He became sin for us, so that sin might be put to death and we might have eternal life. He knows we are guilty and loves us anyway. He loves us all the way to his cross, and he is with us as we approach ours. 

Is the Church “irrational, self-deceived, repressed, and arrogant”? Are we “pettily reactionary and positively fatal to life”? We can be. This is not who we are fundamentally. But we could plead guilty to the charges w/o perjuring ourselves. At our worst, we are worse than the unbelievers and those who would persecute us. At our best, we are Christ for the world. The Good News is that we never again have to be anything or anyone less than Christ. Never again are we compelled by irrational instinct or inordinate passion or selfish greed to commit a single sin, not one crime against God, our world, or one another. We are free. Free from all that would acquit us on the grounds of insanity; free from all that would excuse our crimes as animalistic and primitive. We are free to love, to show mercy, to build tighter and tighter bonds of friendship. We are free because we have been freed by the mercy of the One Who sits in judgment. 

Hovey, Craig. Nietzsche and Theology. T&T Clark, 2008. 
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No, Sister, the nature of authority and obedience hasn't changed since Vatican II. . .

Francis Throws Down the Gauntlet to Religious

Pope Francis has begun his assault against the secularization of religious life, attacking the late-20th century tendency to separate religious commitment from the Church in order to serve the spirit of the world. We have seen this tendency in the shift to purely secular service among women religious, accompanied by New Age spirituality and feminist careerism.

[. . .]

Although Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI all attempted to foster a spirit of true renewal in communities of consecrated life around the world, progress among the badly infected orders has been like the proverbial pulling of teeth—with excuses for delay and, if delay fails, then kicking and screaming. The latest evidence of the widespread rebellion against the Church was found in the effort of Sister Mary Lou Wirtz, President of the International Union of Superiors General, to derail the reform of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious last Tuesday. Sister Mary Lou claimed that the nature of authority and obedience had changed since Vatican II, that the LCWR wanted to focus on what “Gospel leadership” means today, and that the Vatican was clearly not interested in that topic.

[. . .]

But Pope Francis cannot be fooled in this. He has experienced the rot in religious life first-hand; he was marginalized by his Jesuit Superiors as a young priest, just as true men and women of the Church in so many religious orders have been for the past two generations [. . .] Will he shift from words to discipline?

We don’t know yet, but it has not taken him long to respond to Sister Mary Lou or to go on the offensive verbally in a tone which sounds suspiciously like he is ready to lay down the law. The Pope received the plenary assembly of the International Union of Superiors General in audience the day after its president gave her ill-conceived interview to Vatican Radio. The complete text is available under a striking title, Careerists and Climbers Doing “Great Harm” to the Church. Francis struck at the very heart of the religious malaise today, while responding pointedly to the leader of the IUSG. . .

Read the whole thing!

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Pope Francis Catholicity Update

This Just In. . .The Pope is Still Catholic. . .

Fr. Z. translates part of Pope Francis' address to an international gathering of religious superiors:

Finally, the ecclesial aspect as one of the constitutive dimensions of the consecrated life, a dimension which must be constantly recovered and deepened in life. Your vocation is a fundamental charism through the journey of the Church, and it is not possible that a consecrated woman or man do not “think” with the Church, which gave birth to us in Baptism; a “thinking” with the Church which finds its filial expression in fidelity to the Magisterium, in communion with the Shepherds and the Successor of Peter, Bishop of Rome, visible sign of unity. The announcement of and the witness to the Gospel, for every Christian, is never an isolated act.  This is important, the announcing of and the witnessing to the Gospel for every Christian is never an isolated act or that of a group, and no evangelizer whosoever acts, as Paul VI recalled so well, “under the force of his own inspiration, but in union with the mission of the Church and in her name”. Paul VI continued: “It is an absurd dichotomy to think to live outside the Church, to love Jesus without living the Church. Feel strongly the responsibility that you have to care for the formation of your Institutes in the sound doctrine of the Church, in the love of the Church and in the ecclesial spirit.

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Laptop Update

I wrote to TOSHIBA Customer Service to ask if there's anything I could do to speed delivery of my laptop.

Their response:  "Sorry. Your system is shipping from China."

So, my new laptop will likely come loaded with Commie Spyware!  :-)

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A deadly business

NB. Adapted from a 2008 homily

6th Week of Easter (M)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Dominic Church, NOLA

Good writers hate clichés, or they should. Clichés don't tell us anything new or interesting. But they do have their uses. For example, in polite conversation, clichés free us from potential embarrassment in social situations. Let's call these “formal noises.” A phrase like, “Hey, how you doing?” Phrases and words that we hear so often that we no longer hear them as requiring anything of us other than that we play the game and politely utter another formal noise. We can find examples of formal noises in scripture. We’ve heard them a thousand thousand times. Clichés in polite conversation are one thing, however, allowing scriptural language to become cliché, allowing the words of the Word to become dull with use or to utter biblical language like a formal noise is dangerous. We have an example this morning. Let’s see if we can reclaim a clichéd phrase and restore it to its proper luster! 

Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, is attending to one of Paul’s homilies. Scripture tells us, “[She] listened, and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.” How many times in your life as a Catholic have you heard someone use the phrase “open our hearts”? Don’t you hear this phrase as white noise? Just formal speech, meaningless filler? We pray all the time: “Lord, open our hearts and minds …” And we do this very casually, very matter-of-factly. When, in fact, this is an incredibly dangerous thing to say! How much more so to pray it! But the habit of repetition, the pattern of sound and occasion has dulled the sting of the fire in these words and so we mouth them too easily and expect little to happen b/c we did so. 

Let’s take a moment to look a little closer at what the heart is for us as believers. In the Catechism we read, “The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live…the heart is the place ‘to which I withdraw.’ The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others…The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as the image of God we live in relation : it is the place of covenant” (CCC 2563). For us then our heart is that place where who we are most fundamentally rests. To open this place and offer it to another is an awesome, perhaps fearful task. And because we are no one unless we are in a relationship, in a covenant, we are defined essentially by the one who rests in our heart…whoever He or It may be. 

Lydia’s heart is opened by the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth promised by Christ as he says farewell to his disciples: “When Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father…he will testify to me.” Paul testifies. Lydia listens. Her heart is opened. And the Spirit of Truth seizes her. She and her household are baptized. This is very dangerous. Dangerous? Yes. Jesus goes on to tell the disciples that b/c they have listened to his Word, received the Spirit of Truth from his Father by his agency, that their hearts will be opened. This is a good thing? Yes and no. As a result of this gift they will be expelled from the synagogues and killed as act of worship by those who have not listened to Word, have not received the Spirit of Truth, by those whose hearts—perhaps wisely in this case—remain closed. 

As a prayer, “Lord, open our hearts,” means “Lord, let us be killed for knowing Your Truth.” Will we be so quick to mumble this religious cliché in the future? I hope so. But we should do so remembering what Jesus tells his disciples: “…the Spirit of Truth [I send you from the Father]…he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.” Even as we pray to be killed for knowing his truth, we remember: Christ is with us, then, now, always. 

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Peace: one more thing Jesus messes up!

NB. Another adapted homily. . .

6th Sunday of Easter 2013
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. You are no longer our own; you no longer live for yourself alone. So, you can stop running and hiding. You are possessed by a spirit! Wholly owned and operated by the Holy Spirit. And if this causes you noticeable delight—Good!—but let me add a dire warning that will likely creep you out: you have, we have in virtue of our possession by the Holy Spirit, we have inherited (are you ready?)…the Peace of Christ! If this doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, you weren’t listening to the gospel. Jesus says to the disciples: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” Easy enough. Then, he adds: “Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” Now that’s just wrong! He had a good thing going there and then he messes it up by telling us that this Good Thing he’s giving us isn’t exactly the Good Thing we thought it was. And that changes everything. Except this: there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We are no longer our own. 

You would think that as heirs to the peace of Christ, we would be rejoicing in his serene calm, a well-balanced spiritual harmony. You would think that we would never argue, never fight, never become angry or frustrated with one another. You would think. And you would be wrong. Why would we assume that Christ’s Peace has anything at all to do with spiritual serenity or psychological wellness or bodily stillness? Given Jesus’ tumultuous life and his violent end on the cross; the oftentimes violent history of the Church on earth; given the sometimes painful, purifying work of the Spirit’s Fire in us and among us; and the ebb and flow of pilgrims' holiness, why would any Christian believe that Christ’s Peace is about peace at all? Shalom I leave with you; my shalom I give to you. 

Inasmuch as “love” has come to mean “that warm-fuzzy feeling we get that tells us to accept and approve anything and everything that comes our way,” so “peace” has come to mean something like “a permanent numbness of heart and mind that deflects all conflict at the expense of the truth.” Biblically, of course, peace (shalom) means “prosperity,” “security,” “success,” and even “salvation.” My research tells me that the best English translation of shalom is “well-being,” but the shading of the word leans heavily toward wishing someone material success or worldly security. This is perhaps more like the Vulcan greeting, “Live long and prosper” than it is the Buddhist idea of “eliminating suffering by eliminating desire.” Jesus leaves us his peace, true; but, he explicitly notes that this is not the peace of the world. His peace is something else entirely.

Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” My peace. Most certainly not the World’s Material Peace or the Empire’s Political Peace or the Temple’s Religious Peace. But the Peace of Christ. What sort of peace is this? Christ’s Peace comes with the Holy Spirit. Notice the sequence of events in the gospel: Christ is leaving the disciples to go to the Father. He says he is sending the Advocate in his place to teach them everything and to remind them of all that he has taught. Being reminded of Jesus’ teachings, of everything he has said, and then remembering his teachings—this is “Christ’s Peace.” Does being reminded of Christ’s teachings and then remembering Christ’s teachings bring you that pleasantly numbed feeling that we often associate with a material “peace”? Let’s hope not! In the same way that welcoming Christ’s love into your life requires a commitment to conversion and service—“whoever loves me will keep my word”—so accepting his peace means settling your troubled heart into the truth of his teachings—“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” You are no long your own. 

Being heirs to Christ’s Peace, then, is first about being heirs to his teachings; being the recipients of his Word and the certainty we have in the truth of his witness. This is the peace we live knowing that Christ reveals the Father and that the Spirit dwells among us as their Love for one another. Again, there is nothing numbing or tranquil about this fundamental fact of the faith—it bears on our souls to live this truth fully in the world. We must give flesh and bone to this truth; we must incarnate Christ’s love, and in doing so, accept his peace. How? We live Christ’s triduum—in his betrayal, his humiliation, his beatings, his Cross, and his tomb—we live these as Christ himself did: trusting in God’s care, His plan, His blessings and abundance, and then giving our lives freely for others. Isn’t this is the courage of the martyrs? Their witness to the bare bones power of Christ’s promises? They took on Christ’s Peace and their question to us is clear: will you follow…if called upon, will you follow? 

Now, knowing that Christ’s Peace might require a Red Witness, does the thought of receiving his peace make you a little nervous? If you love him, you will keep his Word, preach his Word, teach his Word, obey his Word; you will make your dwelling with him, and follow him always; you will fall, fail, rise again and peak; you will stumble and crash and you will jump and fly; you will believe and doubt and hide and find; and you will come to a passionate obsession, a loving fascination with the movement of the Spirit, the leadership of Christ’s Peace in your life. But expect no peace of mind. Rather welcome the intellectual turmoil that follows the sword of truth. Expect no peace in your body. Rather welcome the tension that comes with making your flesh a daily sacrifice. Expect nothing balanced or harmonized or gentled to rule you. You are ruled by the Prince of Peace, the One Anointed, whose reign requires you to serve against your best instincts, to surrender your greatest perceived needs, and to follow into hell and on to heaven a dead Jewish rebel executed on a tree. How absurd! And yet, the Spirit burns, with tongues of fire, the Law of Love into our hearts: to die for a beloved friend is the greatest gift. 

When you exchange the peace this morning, remember: you are not wishing your neighbors worldly well-being or cheerfulness or a pleasant day/tomorrow. You are reminding them (and you are being reminded in turn) that Christ’s Peace is more threat than promise. Think: “Peace be with you” means “You are Christ. You will suffer, die, and rise again! For whom will you sacrifice yourself today?” Perhaps you will skip the exchange of peace altogether! Don’t! Why? Jesus said, “Whoever does not love me does not keep my words…” There is no dwelling place with the Father for those who do not keep Christ’s words. So, love Christ, keep his Word. And take on his Peace with fear and trembling; take it on only when you are grateful enough to him for dying for you that you are ready to die for someone else. 

Then, only then, you are truly at Peace. Christ’s Peace. 

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Petition to Protect Religious Liberty in the U.S. Armed Forces

SIGN THE PETITION! 

There are ominous signs the U.S. military is turning its back on religious freedom.

On April 23, Pentagon leaders met with Mikey Weinstein, an anti-Christian extremist who decries “fundamentalist Christian monsters” and calls Christians “pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers.” He compares Christians to racists from the civil rights era.

If he said these things about Muslims, he’d never be permitted in the Pentagon; but now military leaders are actually consulting with him – relying on his input – as they create new policies that may roll back religious liberty – especially for Christians. This must stop!

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Frighten the world!

NB.  Still w/o a 'puter, so here's a repost of 2012's homily for today. . .

5th Week of Easter (S)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus drops a rather somber warning on his disciples, “I have chosen you out of the world. . .and the world hates you. . .[but] realize that it hated me first. . .If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” We know that the world persecuted Jesus, and we know that the disciples were persecuted as well. Despite the best efforts of the world to bludgeon, burn, crucify, and exile the Good News from its realm, the news got out, and we've been here for more than 2,000 years. Like a body infected with a deadly virus, the world reacts to the presence of the Church—attacking, repelling, isolating. But we're still here. Despite the best efforts of some in the Church to surrender to the world, to bring the world into the sanctuary, and give her away like a rare virgin bride, we're still here. We're still here not b/c we are deserving of preservation, b/c we're earned the privilege of God's protection. We're still here b/c Christ promised to be with his Church always. Because the world needs an ordinary means of receiving his Father's abounding grace. So long as the Church remains, the body of the world remains infected with the saving virus of the Good News. This is why the world hates us: they do not see any need for rescue. 

If you feel no danger, you very likely see no need for rescue. Sitting comfy and cozy on your couch, reading a good book, you would probably dismiss a neighbor who barges in yelling, “I'm here to rescue you from your comfy, cozy couch!” If you were kneeling in prayer in church, confident that all was right with your spiritual life, the rantings of a crazy friar from the pulpit about sin and God's love would be distracting but hardly alarming. However, if your world were collapsing, if your family, your nation, your civilization, all that you have come to rely on were spinning out of control, and someone offered you a way to leave that world behind, the first thing you would need to do is admit that your world was coming apart. You would need to see the destruction, hear the system tearing at its seams, feel the angst and anger rising. In other words, you would have to confess that the world you helped to build and operate was losing its soul, spiraling into a dysfunctional waste. If you make this confession, then rescue is possible. If you refuse, if you deny the truth, rescue is impossible, and you will grow to hate those who offer you a way out. 

 Christ's offer to rescue the world is an accusation. To say, “You need rescuing” is to say “You are in danger,” and I am in a position to help. The hardest part of being rescued is admitting that help is required. Why does the world hate Christ and his disciples? Because the Church sees the world in danger and knows that the only way to be rescued is to embrace Christ and leave that dangerous world behind. Leave behind contesting for social standing; compromising the truth to gain political influence; rutting with violence for the applause of mob; to leave behind self-righteous do-gooding, the easy hatred of imaginary enemies, and the lust for things and people. Christ's offer of rescue is an accusation, but it is also—if accepted—a vindication, a victory over the world, a win for those who would confess that they can only lose without God. No slave is greater than his master. If we are slaves of Christ, then we can expect nothing more from the world than he himself received. The rulers of this world fear another King, and they fear his followers. When the world stops hating the Church, we know that we have stopped preaching his Good News. Therefore, go out and frighten the world! 

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First World Problems

TOSHIBA keeps changing the estimated shipping date on my laptop. . .

They moved it from May 9th to the 6th and now back to the 9th.

Shoulda just gone to Best Buy like Fr. Mike suggested.  

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New Laptop: May 9th

Replacement parts + labor + lost productivity = Just Get a New Laptop!

So, I did.  Got a great deal on a Toshiba Satellite.  Almost half-price direct from the warehouse.

Should be here by May 9th. . .until then, it's ad-lib homilies.  

Gulp.

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RIP. . .laptop

I think the video card on my laptop died this afternoon. 

The screen just went black. It's been "jumpy" lately, frequently turning red.

Anyway, blogging and email will be slow until I can get a replacement card, or a new laptop.

Fr. Philip
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Love never compromises

5th Sunday of Easter 2013 

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 

St. Dominic Church, NOLA 

The traitor leaves the table and goes to complete his betrayal. Jesus watches him go; without a word, Jesus bears witness to his friend's treason. When the door closes behind Judas, our Lord turns to the remaining disciples and declares the beginning of the end, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.” Now. Immediately. At this moment. With Judas gone and the door closed, our Lord is given glory for his Passion: the Father's strength and the Spirit's fire—the divine majesty. With the Son of Man glorified, God is glorified in him. Amplified. Magnified. Made more brilliant. So elevated, he says to his disciples, “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer.” Can they see/feel the glory suffusing their teacher? Do his friends know that the traitor's departure started the countdown to Golgotha? Rather than accuse Judas, or flee to the desert, or shout a call to fight, our Lord issues a new command. Watching Judas leave the table, watching him go to sell his teacher and friend to their enemies, Jesus shares his glory with those who remain, who remain loyal: “Love one another,” he commands, “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” If we love one another, all will know that we follow Christ. 

Two disciples who love one another in Christ, Paul and Barnabas, travel through the churches of Asia Minor, strengthening the spirits of the other disciples and exhorting them to persevere in the faith. How do these two instruct the other disciples to persevere? They spread this bit of good news: “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” How is this any sort of good news? How is this truth supposed to strengthen the disciples, or urge them on to persevere in the faith? Wouldn't it have been better for Paul and Barnabas to encourage the others with smiling personal affirmations, or rousing songs about the wonders of achieving social justice? How about a few calming homilies on how wonderful we all are? Or how good it is that we can come together to be church? Paul and Barnabas reveal to the others a difficult truth: entering the kingdom of God is an obstacle course, a regime of hard choices, harder consequences, and frequent failures. These barriers to joining the kingdom are not God's doing. These barriers belong to the world. To enter the kingdom, we must overcome the world. And to overcome the world, we must love one another. That's the hardest truth of all. 

“Love one another” can heard as a glib slogan, a mushy motto meant to soothe a jagged conscience. It trips easily off the tongue, a nice catch-phrase that catches all the sentiments we tend to think will ease conflicts, dissolving differences into a numbing peace. When our Lord orders his disciples at the Last Supper to love one another, he does so after Judas leaves to betray him. He waits until the traitor exits the room to issue his last command. With Judas gone and the door closed, our Lord is glorified, raised up, given the honor due his impending sacrifice; and the fullness of God's revelation is made manifest in him; that is, at the beginning of his Passion and death, Jesus shines with whole glory of God, the full strength of the Father and the fire of the Holy Spirit. The treasonous disciple cannot witness this. Even had he stayed with the others, we could not see it. He does not love the Lord; he does not love his brother disciples. He loves worldly glory and riches, and so he is blind to the heavenly glory that Christ shows to those who choose to love him. Had he stayed, Judas would not have heard Jesus say, “Love one another.” The ears of a traitor are closed to loyalty and love, to faithfulness and perseverance. And b/c loving one another is its own hardship, betrayal come easily to those to who refuse to love. 

“It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Paul and Barnabas spread a bit of good news throughout the churches of Asia Minor. This good news sounds a whole lot like bad news. And it would be bad news if these hardships were sent from heaven. But they are not. Look at the hardships that Paul and Barnabas themselves have endured: arrest, imprisonment, floggings, threats from civil authorities, denunciations from religious officials. Both apostles are martyred. Paul was beheaded at the order of the Emperor Nero. Barnabas was stoned to death by Jewish authorities in Cyprus.* Every hardship, every obstacle to their apostolic ministry comes from the powers of this world, or from those allied with them. So, Paul and Barnabas understand—with the bodies and souls—that the hardships of loving one another come by way of the world. They also understand that we overcome the world while standing in the glory of God, loving one another despite the world's obstacles, sharing in the divine majesty given to the Son at the beginning of his Passion and death. And by sharing in his Passion and death, we give God glory in our own hardships. 

All this talk of hardships, glory, death, and love seems a bit abstract, a bit airy, unsubstantial. Let's put some meat on these bones. We lay claim to an inheritance through Christ, a portion of the kingdom that he announced 2,000 yrs ago. As heirs to this kingdom, we are also its stewards, responsible for seeing to the growth and maintenance of all that God has given us. Traditionally, Catholics talk in terms of “time, treasure, and talent” when we speak of stewardship. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, there is a more fundamental sense in which all of us steward God's gifts. Look at Judas. What did he squander for 30 pieces of silver? Fellowship among the disciples; his relationship with Christ; his historical reputation as a faithful disciple. But more than these, he sold his soul; that is, he allowed the powers of this world to buy his integrity, his strength as a Good Man, a man of God. He used his friendship with Jesus to sell our Lord to his enemies. The powers of this world set a hardship for Judas. And he chose the easy work-around, the profitable dodge. In other words, he compromised the very thing that made him a man of God, worthy of trust. Judas accommodated himself to the spirit of the age and ended his own life with a noose. 

The spirit of our own age is busy setting hardships for us. Oddly enough, these hardships are not all that different from the ones Paul, Barnabas, Judas, and all God's children in the early Church tackled. They were tempted to dilute the Gospel with false religions. Compromise with secular power for material gain. Accommodate moral principles for the sake of social standing. Surrender their freedoms in the name of state security. And more than many lost their struggles with these temptations. More than many exhausted their strength, extinguishing the fire of the Holy Spirit in their resistance. Here's what we need to know now: when we love another as Christ loves us, we have no need for a gospel other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ; when we love one another as Christ loves us, we don't need material gain, social standing, or security from the state. Everything we need is given by God so that we might live wholly in His love. Judas did not believe this. Paul and Barnabas did. Judas died a traitor's death. Paul and Barnabas died as witnesses, preaching the Good News to the end. Love tells the truth; it never compromises or accommodates, nor do those who love one another. Jesus orders us, “As I [love] you, so you also should love one another.” His Passion and death began when the traitor left the table. Ours begins when we approach the table and dare to share in his last meal.

*Unfortunately, this is probably a legend, but it's the only info we have on his death.

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Will that be enough. . .?

4th Week of Easter (S) 

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 

St. Dominic Church, NOLA 

It's a bit unnerving for me to wake up this morning and read in the gospel: “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip?” I'm thinking: oh Lord, what I have done now?! What have I said or done to make Jesus think that I don't know him? I'm pretty sure that that list would be too long and too embarrassing to read aloud in public. I'd like to say that the “Philip” here isn't me. But he is me. What's worse: he's also all of you. Jesus' rather pointed question to Philip is a response to a request from Philip, a request any one of us could make: “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Would it? No, it wouldn't. Jesus knows this and so does Philip. And likely, we all know this too. How do we know that showing us the Father won't be enough for us? Well, being shown the Father has never been enough, has it? What is the Old Testament but the 5,000+ yr history of God showing Himself to His children and still we don't know Him? God gives it one more try in Christ Jesus. See him, know the Father. Great! Now, where do we go to see Jesus? 

Where do we go to see Jesus?! Have you been a Christian for so long a time and you still do not know Christ? The better question is: where can a follower of Christ go and not see Jesus? He sends us out into the whole world to preach the Good News. He send us out to heal the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, free the oppressed, and forgive the sinner. He sends us out to bring in the stranger, the grieving, the poor, the meek. He send us out to plant the seeds of his word and deeds in every sort of human soil. We are sent out to overpower unclean spirits; to lift up those who are pushed down; to defend and nurture the least among us; to bear witness in body and soul to the sanctity of all life; and to make sure that there is no living sinner in the world who has not heard of the Father's freely granted pardon. Where do we go to see Jesus? “The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. . .whoever believes in me will do the works that I do.” Do you believe in Christ? Trust in him? Then do the works that he did so that your works may reveal the Father working in you. If you want to know the Father, then you must be Christ for others. Go do his works through faith, then look in a mirror. 

Will that be enough? No, it won't. The disciples travel with Jesus for three years. Day in and day out, they eat, sleep, walk, and talk with the Lord in person, sitting at his feet for personal instruction. And still they do not know the Father. What are they missing? They have yet to receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. What they are missing is the fullness of the Spirit, the Love that the Father and the Son share between them. Their knowledge is not yet on fire; what they know has not yet been kindled and set ablaze by the One Who will remain with them (us) until the end. Doing the works that Christ does, and doing these works in faith, shows the world both the Father and His Holy Spirit, both the One Who Creates and the One Who blesses His creation. To know God fully, to know Him perfectly, we must go to see Him face-to-face, which means we must live now—right now—as if we were seeing His face in every man, woman, and child we meet; heart, mind, body, soul we must turn toward Him and see, hear, think, and feel only Him, and through faith in Him accomplish everything that He has sent us out to do. Will that be enough? No, it won't. In the end, He reaches for us; pulls us up, and welcomes us to His family. Our job is make sure He finds us doing what His Son sent us out to do. 

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Way, Truth, Life

4th Week of Easter (F) 
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 
St. Dominic Church, NOLA 

Jesus has just finished washing his disciples' feet at the Last Supper. He's given them a new commandment, and told them that he must leave them. Simon Peter wants to know where the Lord is going and why he can't come with him. Jesus responds by telling Peter that he will deny his teacher three times before the dawn. Seeing his disciples heartbroken and feeling abandoned, Jesus says to them, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” What else is a broken heart but a soul that's lost its will to believe, its desire to trust? We're not witnessing a gaggle of teenaged girls moon over the latest pop star; or a bunch of men mourning the loss of a drinking buddy. The disciples are genuinely anxious about Jesus' departure. This group of hardworking men—men who've followed him all over the country—are devastated to learn that their teacher is leaving them behind. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says, “I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” If we don't know where he's going, how will we know how to get there? 

It's Thomas, the one who doubted the testimony of his fellow disciples, who asks the question we all want to ask, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Is it not enough that he's told us that he will be back for us? Is it not enough that he's gone ahead to prepare our places in his Father's house? No. Not nearly enough. We want to know where Jesus is going, and we want to know how to get there by ourselves. Why do we think we need this information? He's leaving us. He's just walking away from us and everything we've done together. How do we know he's coming back? Are we supposed to just believe that he's coming back? With no backup plan? No fail-safe in case things don't work out as planned? Jesus says, “You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” That's the backup plan: have faith. That's the fail-safe: trust in him. In other words, when it comes to believing in the One the Father sent to free us from sin and death, there is no backup plan. There is faith, and there is worry; trust and anxiety. If your heart is troubled, you have chosen worry over faith, anxiety over trust. And the Way before you is muddled, twisted by the smog of pride and the need to control. Do not LET your heart be troubled. LET your heart be free.

We don't need to worry about where Jesus is going. We already know. He's going to the cross. And then on to sit at the Father's right hand. We don't need to worry about how we will find him. He tells us, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” To get to the Father, we must follow the way, the truth, and the life. The way of Christ, the truth of Christ, and the life of Christ; becoming, along that Way, Christs ourselves. This means we are all heading toward the cross as well. And while on this trek to our deaths, we will doubt the testimony of our fellow disciples; we will deny Christ before the dawn and after; we will resist the urge to trust God's love for us; and we will beg the Lord not to leave us even though we know he must. (We can't follow behind a leader who will not move ahead of us.) While we stumble, fall, shove, and get back up to walk along the Way, we should hear Jesus say to us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Yes, it's a choice we make to let our hearts be troubled or not. Choose faith and trust in God. Choose to put your faith and trust in Christ. We know all that we need to know to make it to heaven. But it is not knowledge that saves us. Faith brings us close to God. And faith in His Christ brings us closer still.

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Disobeying God the Father

NB. It's storming in Nawlins'. I'm feeling puny. The Spirit tried His best to rouse me. . .alas, no luck. Here's a Roman homily from 2010.

4th Week of Easter (W) 

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 

St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus puts to rest any question about the source and summit of our salvation, any question about the only means available for achieving a face-to-face audience with God the Father: “Whoever believes in me…whoever sees me…everyone who believes in me…anyone who hears my words…whoever rejects me…does not accept my words…I did not speak on my own…the Father who sent me commanded me…what I say, I say as the Father told me.” There can be no question that Jesus himself is the exclusive path to our redemption; he is the only salvific show in town. If we want to spend a little more time unpacking this teaching, we can note the passion with which Jesus teaches. John writes that Jesus “cried out and said.” We can note that Jesus explicitly says that he and the Father are one; that believing in him is the same as believing in the Father; that as the Word sent by the Father, accepting or rejecting his words determines one's place in the light or one's condemnation to the darkness. We can note that Jesus says he is teaching nothing more or less than what his Father has told him to teach; and we can note that he makes this startling claim: “I know that [the Father's] commandment is eternal life.” If the Father's commandment is eternal life, why must we believe in Jesus? Isn't it enough that God has commanded us to live with Him in eternity? It would seem that God's commandment can be thwarted by our refusal to believe. 

For the sake of argument, let's assume that we want to refuse to obey God's commandment of eternal life. How would we go about about doing this? Jesus points out two ways to be disobedient: 1). we can hear his words, accept them, but fail to observe them, or 2). we can hear his words and reject them. When we hear his word but fail to live them, we are not condemned because, as Jesus says, “. . .I did not come to condemn the world but to save the world.” When we hear his words and reject them, we condemn ourselves according to his word; that is, his words stand as our judge and we are condemned to darkness because the Father, Jesus, and his words are all one. Lest we think that we can hear his words, accept them, fail to obey, and then escape the consequences, we must remember that God commands us to enjoy eternal life. Jesus says that he will not judge our disobedience. Why? Because our refusal to live out the words we have heard and accepted is itself a judgment, and we remain in darkness despite having glimpsed the light. There is nothing more he needs to do than to allow us to live in the eternal night we have chosen for ourselves. 

Why would anyone, having heard and accepted his words and knowing that God has commanded us to live eternal lives, why would anyone see the light of Christ and choose the darkness of disobedience? Well, there's the false sense of freedom that comes with making such a choice. There's the inordinate love of the transient things of this world. There's the desire to indulge our destructive passions—anger, revenge, hatred, greed. And then there's the obstinate refusal to believe, the persistence of voluntary doubt—willful disbelief. Like the child who closes her eyes and believes she is invisible because she cannot see, we choose darkness because we believe it hides us, protects us from judgment, nurtures our liberty. In fact, we are never more in danger than when we walk after dark. Jesus speaks these words of hope: “I came into the world as light, so that everyone who believes in me might not remain in darkness.” Though we may foolishly choose eternal night, we do not have to remain there. His coming among us is the dawn of salvation, our eternal healing from all the wounds that would drive us into hiding. All we need do is accept the medicine of his words and follow behind him, doing right now all that he did back then. 

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Brownskirt Tolerance in Europe

"The Church is intolerant in principle because she believes; she is tolerant in practice because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe; they are intolerant in practice because they do not love."  — Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP

Witness the fruits of Leftist Tolerance in Europe:

 
Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Andre-Joseph Leonard is attacked by femi-Nazis* during a conference.  Note well the tolerance and love of intellectual diversity radiating from their contorted faces. You can just feel how much they want everyone to be free to just live their lives as they wish.

* Yes, femi-Nazis. Hitler's Brownshirts used exactly this sort of public intimidation to silence opposition voices.  He would send his bully-boys into pubs, theaters, universities, even private homes to start brawls so that the opposition would be forced to relent.  Worked well for him. . .for a while, anyway.

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No Church, No Jesus. . .

Yet another disappointment for the Hermeneutic of Rupture Pushers:

From Pope Francis' homily for the Feast of St George:  "And so the Church was a Mother, the Mother of more children, of many children. It became more and more of a Mother. A Mother who gives us the faith, a Mother who gives us an identity. But the Christian identity is not an identity card: Christian identity is belonging to the Church, because all of these belonged to the Church, the Mother Church. Because it is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church. The great Paul VI said: 'Wanting to live with Jesus without the Church, following Jesus outside of the Church, loving Jesus without the Church is an absurd dichotomy.' And the Mother Church that gives us Jesus gives us our identity that is not only a seal, it is a belonging. Identity means belonging. This belonging to the Church is beautiful. . .Think of this Mother Church that grows, grows with new children to whom She gives the identity of the faith, because you cannot believe in Jesus without the Church. Jesus Himself says in the Gospel: 'But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep.' If we are not 'sheep of Jesus,' faith does not come to us. It is a rosewater faith, a faith without substance. . .

So, prog Catholics, can we finally stop all that nonsense about obeying Jesus instead of the Church; or, believing in Jesus but not the Church; or, following Jesus but leading the Church?

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a poem: Ararat

Ararat

By Mark Doty
 

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search

and shouting of Easter Sunday,

it was the ball of the princess,

it was Pharoah’s body

sleeping in its golden case.

At the foot of the picket fence,

in grass lank with the morning rain,

it was a Sunday school prize,

silver for second place, gold

for the triumphant little dome

of Ararat, and my sister

took me by the hand and led me

out onto the wide, wet lawn

and showed me to bend into the thick nests

of grass, into the darkest green.

Later I had to give it back,

in exchange for a prize,

though I would rather have kept the egg.

What might have coiled inside it?

Crocuses tight on their clock-springs,

a bird who’d sing himself into an angel

in the highest reaches of the garden,

the morning’s flaming arrow?

Any small thing can save you.

Because the golden egg gleamed

in my basket once, though my childhood

became an immense sheet of darkening water

I was Noah, and I was his ark,

and there were two of every animal inside me.

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Don't let a crisis lead you through the wrong gate

NB. I'll say it before anyone else does: this homily is a borderline rant. Blame it on the afternoon espresso.

4th Week of Easter (M) 
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 
St. Dominic Church, NOLA 

These anxious times offer us a huge selection of false gods to worship, a wide variety of robber-shepherds to follow. It seems that each new horror, each new disaster gives us another solution, another path to take out of our troubles. More legislation. Better enforcement. More surveillance. Better intelligence. More money. Better prevention. All of which, of course, means more state power if not better government. Rarely do we hear anyone with any authority—politicians, media-types, academics—suggest that the moral fiber of our culture is frayed and coming undone. Rarely do we hear anyone publicly suggest that the Newtown school massacre, or the Aurora theater shootings, or the Boston Marathon bombing, or the slaughterhouse of Philadelphia abortionist, Dr. Gosnell, no one ever seems connect these horrible events to a dark reality: as a culture, as a nation, as a people, we no longer look to God first as our moral compass; we no longer live believe that His love for us matters. When disaster strikes, our Betters turn to any and every solution imaginable: the law, medicine, psychology, education; they run through any and every gate opened to them. . .but one: the gate the Shepherd himself opens for us all. 

 Maybe it's our inherited pragmatic nature as Americans that sends us running after material solutions to spiritual problems. Or our need for quick and easy results that gets us rushing around looking for silver bullet answers. Or maybe we're just lazy and want someone else, anyone else to solve these problems for us. There's a pantheon of foreign gods waiting to grant our wishes, to lay out for us a whole range of fast and furious solutions. The problem with these solutions is that none of them really addresses the underlying cause of the problem. Why did those two brothers bomb the Boston Marathon? Your answer seems to depend on what remedy you want to impose to prevent future bombings? If you want more gov't control, your answer is: they bombed the marathon b/c law enforcement budgets are being cut. If you want to tar and feather all Muslims, your answer is: they bombed the marathon b/c Islam preaches hatred of non-Muslims. How about this answer? Evil is real, and its purpose is to annihilate life. The Shepherd holds open a gate for us to walk through, and that gate is called “Abundant Life.” Walking through any other gate held open by any other shepherd is robbery. It seems sometimes that our secular shepherds have led us through another gate entirely. 

If this is true—that we've been led through a gate other than the one marked “Abundant Life”—then, as followers of the One Shepherd, Jesus Christ, we need to stop bleating along behind these false shepherds and return to our Master for instruction. He walks ahead of us, and we follow him, because we recognize his voice. I wonder, do we? Or do we look to our secular leaders for spiritual instruction? Do we open our ears when they start calling us to surrender our principles, abandon our traditions, and kneel before their political agendas? If Jesus the Shepherd called his sheep to him, would we recognize his voice among the thousands that pretend to instruct us? The politicians, the academics, the pundits, the talking-heads on TV, the lobbyists, the partisan operatives, from among all those, would be hear Christ say, “Hey! Over here! Here's the gate to abundant life?” If you hear a voice preaching forgiveness, mercy, love, repentance, and obedience to God's word, that's his voice. If you hear a voice demanding vengeance, retaliation, bloodthirsty violence, and more and more secular control of our lives, that's not his voice. That's someone else's voice. The voice of a Robber and a Thief. Turn to the gate marked “Abundant Life,” and live this life abundantly in the love and mercy of Christ. 

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The voice of the Shepherd

NB. Deacons preaching this weekend. . .so, here's a homily from 2011:

4th Sunday of Easter (A)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

St. Joseph Church, Ponchatoula

While in the studium—the Dominican version of seminary—the student brothers were often told that agricultural metaphors for the Church weren't all that “helpful.” For example, using images such as harvesting grain, planting seeds, plowing fields, pruning trees, etc. to talk about complex theological ideas like redemption, justice, etc. is virtually meaningless in our postmodern age. Our fussy, urbane professors were particularly hard on the sheep/shepherd metaphors in the gospels. They really got wound up about Jesus describing his followers as sheep. Sheep are dirty, stupid, and prone to being killed unless well-guarded. And it didn't help matters at all that those who guard the Lord's sheep—the shepherds, you know, the bishops—were exclusively male and celibate! By the time our enlightened profs were finished foaming at the mouth against the image of the Church as a bunch of filthy, ignorant animals led by an all-male cadre of celibate shepherds, we poor seminarians were quaking in our habits, silently vowing to never-ever speak about or even think about the Church in terms of the sheep/shepherd metaphor! Of course, one or two of us were farm boys so we knew one thing about sheep that our profs didn't: Sheep don't follow shepherds. No one leads a flock of sheep. Sheep are driven, herded by a skillful shepherd with a big stick and a pack of feisty dogs. Now that's an image of the Church that Catholics can understand! So, what are we to make of Jesus saying, “. . .[the shepherd] walks ahead of [his sheep], and [they] follow him, because they recognize his voice”? 

Well, by nature, metaphors are always imperfect, so we don't want to spend too much time dissecting the parallels between Christians and sheep, or between bishops and shepherds. Jesus' point seems to be that those who have chosen to follow him will know his voice when he speaks and obey his word b/c he speaks with a familiar authority. Jesus emphasizes his point by noting that those who love him “will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.” In other words, Christians do not hear, cannot hear in the voice of a false teacher, a false shepherd that familiar ring of authority that proclaims the authentic faith, the Real Deal of Gospel Truth. We could play with the sheep metaphor a bit and say that the voice of a false teacher, a false shepherd always sounds like a wolf growling with hunger even when it looks, smells, and acts like a lamb. Oh sure, the occasional individual sheep—the lapsed or lukewarm Christian—may be fooled, seduced by the hypnotic thrill of the wolf's promises, but the flock as a whole is never fooled, never taken in by a stranger's voice. Together, as one flock, we remember the Chief Shepherd's voice; we remember him saying, “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. . .I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” There is no other gate to the Father's eternal pasture, no other Shepherd for His faithful flock. Christ Jesus alone brings us to a more abundant life!

As faithful sheep, we should ask: how do we come to recognize the authoritative voice of our Shepherd? In his Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke gives us a clue. Peter stands with the Eleven and proclaims to the crowd, “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Luke tells us that when those in the crowd heard this truth spoken, “they were cut to the heart. . .” Cut to the heart! Peter utters a simple sentence, twenty-one common words strung together, a declarative sentence that rings out over those gathered, seizes their attention with absolute clarity, and instantly convicts their hearts in the truth: the man Jesus, the one whom they crucified, is the Lord and the Christ long-promised by their God. Peter's pronouncement slices through their guilt; their recriminations; their religious and legal defenses; their logic, their doubts, and their fears. They were cut to the heart, that place in their souls where no lie can easily rest and b/c they recognize their sin, they ask, “What are we to do?” And Peter tells them what to do. “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. . .Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Among those who heard Peter preach that day were three thousand souls who accepted his message and were baptized. Those three thousand, once convicted in the truth and baptized in the name of Christ Jesus, would always recognize the voice of the Lord and his shepherds. A cut to the heart made by the sword that Christ himself yields is always deep and always permanent. It cannot be forgotten nor can it be mistaken for the mark of a stranger.

As men and women baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we are deeply and permanently cut by the truth of the gospel. Christ's voice always rings true; the familiar authority of our shepherd is unmistakable, and we cannot be lead astray if we graze with his flock, the Church. The apostle Peter and his successors proclaim the central, abiding fact of our two-thousand year old flock: “God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” That's the sound, the voice of gospel truth, the words and the spirit that cuts the hearts of all those who long to see their lives redeemed, who desire a life beyond this one, who know that they will be perfected only when they come to see their Father face-to-face at the foot of His throne. Do you recognize that voice? More importantly, can you speak with that voice and spread the good news it proclaims? Sheep may be dirty, stupid, and prone to being eaten by wolves, but we are no ordinary sheep! We belong to the Eternal Shepherd and the world is our pasture to cultivate for him. Having heard his call, it's time for us to answer.

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The Left's (failed) Eliminationist Narrative

De-coding and deconstructing the repeated failures of the Left's Eliminationist Narrative:

 

It started with Bill Sparkman [2009], the part-time Census worker who went missing and then was found dead, setting off an avalanche of mainstream media and left-blogosphere accusations that he was the victim of anti-government “right-wing” hate.  It turned out that Sparkman killed himself. . .

 

[. . .]

 

The Sparkman accusations were based on nothing more than a desire to demonize the newly formed and rapidly growing Tea Party movement as terrorists and un-American.  It was as if they were hoping for an act of Tea Party violence.

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition.

 

[. . .]

 

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative.  And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

• James Holmes
• Jared Loughner
• The Cabby Stabber
• The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
• Amy Bishop
• The Fort Hood Shooter
• The IRS Plane Crasher
• The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile.  The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.
 

 [. . .]

Rest assured, Good Readers. . .these repeated failures by the Left's Eliminationist Narrative to explain unfolding events will not deter their allies in the media from attempting to frame the next (God forbid) terrorist attack as the work of the ever elusive right-wing operative.

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Does this shock you?

3rd Week of Easter (S)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus knows that his disciples are grumbling. They heard him say that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood to gain eternal life. They're grumbling b/c some seem to think that he means all this metaphorically. Like that time he talked about them being like sheep. Or that time he said they were all different kinds of soil that the seed of his Word fell upon. Some think this is all just a parable and that he's telling them that his teachings will sustain them if they will just treat his words like a daily meal, symbolic food to grow in wisdom. Others, the ones who were really listening to him, are disturbed. Deeply disturbed. Jesus didn't tell them that they must eat his flesh. He used the Greek word trōgōn. They must gnaw his flesh. Like a lion gnaws the flesh and bone of its prey. He knows that they are grumbling; so, he asks, “Does this shock you?” Now they are really worried. He continues, “The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” John tells us, “. . .many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer walked with him.” Metaphors, symbols, parables. None of these brings eternal life. Only the flesh and blood of the Lamb of God can feed a soul hungry for salvation. 

Our gospel reading this morning brings to an end the long lesson we call the “Bread of Life Discourse.” Jesus spends a great deal of time drawing together various lines of Old Testament thought and imagery to produce a picture of himself as the Lamb to be sacrificed for the salvation of the world. He pulls in the unleavened bread of Passover. He draws the exodus from slavery in Egypt and the manna that fed God's people in the desert. He colors his lesson with memories of exile, return, the bloody sacrifices of the temple. And then he concludes by shocking everyone with the most ridiculous claim, “Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life. . .” We get the sense that most of those following him were with him in spirit until he utters this, this utterly revolting, impossible sentence. Is there anything more unclean to the Jews than cannibalism? Even touching a corpse, or just being in a tent with one requires seven days of ritual purification! Did this idea of gnawing on his flesh shock some of the disciples? You bet it did. And many of them simply walked away, returning to the lives they had left. 

Watching many of his disciples walk away, Jesus asks the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” He knows that they do not want to walk away from him; he asks so that they can hear themselves say, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” They will need to repeat this truth, hear themselves speaking this truth. The trials that lie must be met with tremendous courage and strength, with a deeply held faith and a firm grasp on hope. “We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” This belief, this conviction cannot be sustained w/o substantial nourishment: prayer, fasting, fraternal love; the constancy of living day in and out in the knowledge that God's promises never fail. The lives we live right now cannot be lived in truth and goodness, cannot be beautifully lived without the Body and Blood that brings us to eternal life. So, we must gnaw his flesh and drink his blood. Metaphors, symbols, parables. None of these can bring life eternal. Only the flesh and blood of the Lamb of God can sustain us. Does this shock you? Do you too want to walk away? Or have you come to believe and are convinced that Christ is the Holy One of God? If so, prepare yourself for trials. And be prepared for the Cross. “The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.” 

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Catholic Cannibalism

NB. Deacon John is preaching this morning. Below is one of my Over the Top homilies from 2007. This is a style I often used back then b/c the audience was mostly college students. 

3rd Week of Easter (F): Acts 9.1-20 and John 6.52-59
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

 SECRET DOOMSDAY CULT CANNIBALIZES EXECUTED MESSIAH, CLAIMS IMMORTALITY! The talking-head TV version of this newspaper headline opens with this talking-point: “Religious fanaticism in America today: are your children safe?” Then the talking-heads parade a line of Three-ring Circus Clowns who all demand that the Supreme Court ban religion as a public-safety hazard. The state-owned regulatory nannies and ninnies start squawking like geese frightened on a pond by a gator and before you know it Congress is holding hearings during which otherwise intelligent men and women are asking asinine questions like: “But Bishop, with all due respect, given the recent scandals of the Church, is there a way to tone down your body and blood rhetoric here?” 

Maybe we can forgive the routine ignorance of the media and its oftentimes sensationalistic and even hostile portrayal of religious folks, especially Christians in the U.S. Our faith is not easily understood even by those who have been initiated into it and strive with God’s grace to live it day-to-day! And surely we can forgive those in the Church who would have us curb the enthusiasm of Christ’s Eucharistic teaching in today’s gospel. I mean, are we really helping ecumenical efforts at the international and national level by insisting on all this blood and guts imagery? Wouldn’t it be better to focus rather on the more genteel and less violent imagery of bread and wine? These are great symbols of earth and home and harmony and human work. Besides bread and wine helps to keep us focused “down here” on the domestic community rather than “up there” on an inaccessible Big Scary Father-God. Aren’t we here really just to learn to live together and help each other and be at peace with the environment? 

No. No, we’re not. We’re here to be saved. We’re here to find the Way and walk it. We’re here to eat the body of Christ, to drink his blood and to share more and more intimately in the workings of the Blessed Trinity in human history. We are here…more literally…”to gnaw” on Christ. Not to nibble daintily or to consume politely but “to gnaw.” That’s the Greek. Gnaw. Now, let me see you gnaw symbolically. For that matter, let me see you gnaw a symbol. Let me see you gnaw on a memory, a memorial, a representation. Let me see you gnaw on an eschatological sign, a prophetic image, a metaphor for “making-present things past.” 

The quarreling Jews may have understood better then than we do sometimes now: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” This question actually belies substantial understanding! They understood Jesus to say “flesh.” Meat. Body. And blood. True food and true drink. Not mere symbols. Not just memorial signs. Not mere representational action in history. Not just an “absence of forgetting.” Real food, real drink for eternal life. And this is why they are shocked to hear Jesus teaching what can only be called cannibalism. I don’t think Jesus eases their fears any in the explanation of his baffling claim: “Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him…the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” This is astonishingly clear and simple. And outrageously scandalous! 

From the beginning we have had immediate access to Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. His real flesh and real blood. We will not eat the bread of our ancestors this morning. We will eat the bread of life from the banquet table of the Father. We will eat…we will gnaw!...as children, heirs, as a people loved, we will feast on immortality so that we may become him whom we eat. There is no other reason for us to be here this morning than this: our transubstantiation into Christ. Just ask Paul: we will not all die, but we will all be changed! 

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Iron is broken to be remade

3rd Week of Easter (Th)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Isaiah prophesies: “O, Jerusalem, the friendless, the storm-beaten, the inconsolable. . .All your children shall be taught by the Lord; great shall be their peace.” Jerusalem, an abandoned wife and mother whose children live in exile, is prepared by the Lord for the return of her children. Isaiah sees the exiles flowing through the city gates, glad and rejoicing b/c with enduring love the Lord has taken pity on them and welcomed them back. He promises, “My love shall never fall away from you nor my covenant of peace be shaken. . .” Friendless, storm-battered, and inconsolable, the children of Jerusalem hear another promise: “Every weapon fashioned against you shall fail; every tongue that brings you to trial you shall prove false.” Out of these promises and the rejoicing of God's people in receiving them, Jesus recovers an ancient lesson not always well-learned: “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” Listening to the Father, learning from the Father, brings us to Christ b/c Christ is the culmination and fulfillment of the Father's plan to bring all of His children through the city gates of the heavenly Jerusalem. Do you listen to the Father? What do you learn? 

Listening and learning from what you hear requires a particular disposition, a specific sort of attitude. In old school Catholic moral theology, this attitude is called “docility.” Being docile is not a popular way of getting through a day these days. We've come to think of docility as an unhealthy passivity, a weakness of character, or a dangerous sort of submissiveness that threatens our dignity. Docile personalities are effortlessly manipulated by aggressive minds and dark hearts. Docile personalities are unreliable, unproductive, and liable to easily break. Consciously or unconsciously, the message we receive from the world is that docility is a guaranteed way of being trampled by those with no fear of consequences. It is far, far better to be cold, calculating, unyielding, and aggressively assertive. We must be like iron to survive in this hostile world. And that may be so. But when we adopt this attitude toward divine teaching we are essentially begging God to look at us and see hard hearts and mulish minds. We're asking Him to treat us like iron. And iron must be broken to be remade. Can we bring ourselves to sit docilely at the feet of Christ? Listen and learn? Or will we stand in stubborn resistance, demanding equality with God? 

The Christian virtue of docility is not a weakling's passivity before authority. Aquinas teaches us that docility is a cognitive virtue under prudence; that is, being teachable is a good habit b/c such an attitude helps us to learn to see ahead, to make the best decisions based on the best available evidence with the Good firmly in mind. Docility is akin to humility in that it helps us to recognize and accept the truth of our natural limits and encourages us to seek out God's wisdom in revelation. Repeatedly, the children of Jerusalem chose stubbornness over docility. Repeatedly, they closed their ears to God's word and refused to listen. Repeatedly, they made themselves into iron. And God taught them the only way that they would be taught: by being broken in exile and remade. B/c Christ came among us as the culmination and fulfillment of God's plan to bring us into His heavenly Jerusalem, we do not have to be broken in exile. He died and rose again; and in baptism, we are killed and reborn, broken and remade. If we will be docile at his feet, teachable to the divine truths he has to teach us, we will not only survive, we will thrive as His beloved children; and not only will we thrive, we know know His peace. Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from Him comes to Christ, the living bread, his Flesh for the life of the world. 

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