Category: Pastor’s Corner

Dear Friends,

Today is Palm Sunday and palms were the ancient world’s symbol of triumph.  Christians see them as a symbol of our Lord’s triumph and definitive victory over sin, and death, and hopelessness.  That’s why we place them on our crucifixes.  Today is also known as Passion Sunday where Catholics throughout the world once again turn their hearts and minds to the suffering and death of Jesus.  Now in all Catholic Churches you will see the different images of the passion.   In the fourteen Stations of the Cross we see the passion played out.  And right now I want to focus on station number six; Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.

Now in the movie, “The Passion of the Christ” by Mel Gibson the actress who imitated the actions of St. Veronica had a conversion experience, right there in the midst of filming the scene.  Sabrina Impacciatore is an Italian actress and although she had grown up Catholic, she had long ago stopped practicing her faith.  At the time when they began filming, she was at a spiritual low point in her life.  She later explained that she really wanted to believe in Jesus, but she just couldn’t do it.

Her scene in the movie is quite memorable.  Jesus is carrying his cross to Calvary and he falls again for the third or fourth time.  The crowds surge in around him, abusing him as he lies on the ground.  Without much success the soldiers try to control the crowds.    And gliding through the middle of all this confusion is Veronica.  She looks at Jesus with love and devotion.  She kneels down beside him and says, “Lord, permit me.”  She takes a white cloth and wipes his face which is covered with blood, dirt, and sweat.  She then offers him a drink.  It’s a brief moment of intimacy in the middle of violent suffering.  Sabrina said it was a very hard scene to film.  The churning crowd kept bumping into her and disrupting the moment of intimacy.  And so they had to film it over and over again.  Twenty times they had to film it before getting it right.

And that was providential.  Because after twenty times of kneeling before the suffering Christ, looking into his eyes, and calling him Lord, the actress felt something start to melt inside her.  She wasn’t seeing the actor pretending to be our Lord; she was seeing our Lord himself.  Later, she explained that while she looked into his eyes, she found that she was able to believe.  “For a moment,” she said, “I believed!”  That experience lit the flame of hope in her darkened heart.

Sabrina finally understood the words Jesus spoke from the Cross when he said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” The brutality of the scene made a big impression on her.  She found herself thinking, “Jesus is someone I can trust, he went through this for me.”  Even when we reject him, scourge him, crown him with thorns, betray him, and finally crucify him, our Lord still continues to love us.  The Passion is God saying to us, I will keep loving you.

The name Veronica comes from the two words vera and icon and these two words mean true image.   This true image refers to the image of Jesus’ face that was left on the cloth that was used to wipe his face.  This relic is kept at the Vatican and scientists can’t explain it.  Vera icon, the true image, eventually became Veronica, the name given to the anonymous woman who loved Jesus.  As Christians all of us are supposed to be a Veronica, a true icon, a true image of Jesus.  Because it’s only in him, only when we live in his image, living as a true icon of our Lord, that we can truly be happy.

When we pray the Stations of the Cross, right before station number six we sing of Veronica.  We sing, “Brave but trembling came the woman, none but she would flaunt the Roman, moved by love beyond her fear.”  So as we enter into Holy Week, like Sabrina that actress, like St. Veronica herself, let us look into the eyes of our Lord, giving ourselves to him in all things.  Praying for the grace to not be afraid to love.  To pray for the grace to not be afraid to bring Him all of our sins, to bring to him our hurts, our doubts, our troubles, our hardness of hearts, our everything.  Trusting Him in everything.  In doing this our Lord will transform us, making us into a true image of Himself.

Let us be Great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

Dear Friends,

There once lived in a German village a very wealthy and leisurely couple.  They were Catholic but rarely if ever stepped into a Church.  They never made time to pray.  They rarely received the sacraments, and hardly ever served their neighbors.  They just weren’t developing a friendship with Christ.   They were more interested in their social life.  After many years God blessed them with a child, whom they loved dearly, they even had him baptized.  But, as we all live in a fallen world of free will, while he was very young, there was a terrible accident and the baby died. The couple was devastated.  Their sorrow soon turned to anger and  hopelessness, and so they came to speak with a priest.

“If God loves us,” they asked “Why did he do this to us?”  The priest answered, “God does indeed love you.  But he didn’t do this to you.  He didn’t cause the accident, but he did take your son to heaven. And his taking of your son to heaven can be seen as a sign of that love.”  They didn’t like that answer.  So the priest told them a story.

A good shepherd prepared a delicious feast for his sheep.  The feast was made of the best alfalfa hay and oats and most sheep would’ve drooled at the sight of it.    But when the shepherd opened the sheep pen, his sheep wouldn’t come in and eat it.  He called and whistled and sang, but they just kept wandering farther and farther away.  Finally the shepherd went out and picked up a little lamb, carried it into the pen, and set it down beside the food.  When the other sheep saw the lamb eating hungrily, they all made their way into the pen to enjoy the feast.

“This is what Jesus has done for you,” the priest said to the couple.  Until now you’ve always refused to prepare yourself to come to the great feast he has prepared for you in heaven, no matter how many invitations he’s sent you.  You’ve been giving so much attention to earthly comforts that you’ve neglected the care of your souls.  And now our Lord has brought your son to heaven.  Did you consider that maybe God is using his death as a way of drawing you in?  In this act of taking your child to heaven, whom you love so much, our Lord hopes you will find yourselves inspired to follow Him in the Christian way here on earth so that you can follow your son into Heaven.  Our Lord is saying to you, “Come to me I am the resurrection, I am the life.  Your son lives here with me in Heaven. If you believe in me, even if you die, you will live.  Come to me.”

Now in our Gospel today Martha and Mary are bit like this German couple.  They are both stunned by the death of their brother Lazarus, probably a young man who died a rapid death.  They’re not only in grief but a bit angered that Jesus didn’t come more quickly to prevent Lazarus from dying.  Both Martha and Mary say to Jesus, “Lord if you had been here our brother would not have died.” 

So Jesus leads these sisters to authentic faith and hope by asking two questions.  First he asks a question about hope, he says, “Do you believe that your brother will rise?”  And Martha does answer in the affirmative saying, “Yes, I believe that my brother Lazarus will rise from the dead on the last day.”  This response is typical for a pious Jew of that time period.  They believed that there was some sort of survival after death and that there is some sort of judgment at the end of time.  But this hope of life after death was kind of vague and impersonal, not much to grasp onto.

The second question that Jesus asks is about faith; the first question was about hope and the second about faith.  He asks, “Do you believe that I am the Resurrection and the eternal life you are looking for?  Do you believe that in and through me you will have life beyond death?”  And Martha answers, “Yes.” And making an act of faith she says to Jesus, “You are the Christ the Son of God, come into the world to save us from sin.”  Her hope for life after death is no longer a vague concept.  Her hope for life after death now has a name, and this name is Jesus.

These two questions posed to Martha about hope and faith still confront us today.  If Christ were to ask today the average American about life after death, the vast majority of Americans would still answer in the affirmative.  Yes, there is something beyond death, and it has something to do with the moral choices we make in this life.  But again this hope is vague; God is imagined to be a lenient Judge where everyone goes to Heaven.  This answer gives no concept of living deep within the life of Jesus, a life given to us in baptism and maintained by prayer, Sunday Mass, good works, and all the sacraments.  Christ also asks us the second question, “Do you believe that in Christ alone we find the resurrection from the dead and that in the risen Christ we see our own future communion with God?”

It’s a yes to these questions, a yes to Jesus Christ that guides us to real Christian hope.  It’s the hope of freedom from the corruption of sin and death made possible through the gift of our Lord’s passion and resurrection.  It’s the hope of that great feast in Heaven.

Now the risen Lazarus confirms the truth that Jesus can conquer death.   But his rising from the dead prefigures and points us to the perfect conquering of death in Jesus.  Lazarus points us to the glory of Christ raised forever.  In Lazarus we see the beginning of Christian hope where all faithful disciples will one day share God’s glory, a heavenly glory that is beyond the tomb and beyond our deepest earthly and momentary grief.

The Good Shepherd still beckons to us today, “Come to me,” he says, “I weep too, I have entered into your pain, I have entered into your fear, I have entered into your loss, I am not far from you, I am very close, come to me and live.”

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

Dear Friends,

Not long ago a woman asked me if I knew anything about Saint Odette.  Her granddaughter was going to receive this name and she wanted to know more about her.   I had to say no, never heard of her, never heard of St. Odette.  So I did a little research and in doing so I found a connection with today’s Gospel, a nice coincidence.  Odette is derived from the name Odilia.  And St. Odilia was born blind.  She was born in the 7^th century to Lord Aldaric and his wife Bereswindia.  Aldaric ruled over a small portion of what is now Eastern France.  And when his daughter was born blind he was furious at God.  He regarded her blindness as a personal affront to himself.  How dare God send him a blind child, “She should be killed,” he yelled.  And he would have done it if his wife hadn’t intervened.

So instead the baby Odilia was sent to a convent to be raised by nuns, and there she stayed.  Possibly she wasn’t given the best of attention because she was 12 years old before it was realized that she hadn’t been baptized.  So the local bishop was called and he came and baptized her.  In that moment that the water was poured upon her she regained her eyesight.  This singular event of baptism and the cure of blindness is pre-figured in today’s Gospel.  Odilia was enlightened by Jesus just as the blind man was enlightened by Jesus.  And us too, we are enlightened by Jesus at Baptism.  In the early church they would say to be baptized is to be enlightened by Jesus.

Bible scholars will say that to be blind from birth is a symbol for Original Sin, the result of the fall of our first parents.  Our vision is compromised we don’t see correctly.  We don’t see the way God wants us to see.  But as we know Jesus is the enemy of darkness.  “I’m the light of the world,” he says, “I’ve come to bring light.”  And with baptism we are drawn into his mystical body and with this sacrament we begin to see, we begin to get the things of the spiritual life, the light bulb comes on.

To grow in holiness, to grow in enlightenment means seeing more and more with the eyes of Jesus, and it may take a lifetime but that’s what begins to happen when we are grafted into his mystical body at baptism.  We begin to see the way Jesus sees.  Now today in the Gospel Jesus does something unusual, something my brothers and I liked hearing about, something we talked about, something we imitated.  Jesus spits on the ground and makes a mud paste and then places it on the blind man’s eyes.  My brother Joe would never let us do this to him; he always stopped us at this point.  Church Fathers would say the spit represents our Lords divinity and the mud paste represents his humanity.  And this coming together of the two forms a salve for all of our sin sick eyes.  Putting on Christ rubbing him into our eyes is what allows us to see rightly.  His incarnation is the salve for our sin sick eyes.  And finally that pool of Siloam is the symbol of baptism a total immersion into the one who is sent.  When we are salved and washed by Jesus we come to see.

In today’s gospel we follow a man’s journey of enlightenment we follow his journey of seeing more and more rightly.  And he makes this journey in a very short period of time.  After being washed in the pool of Siloam we see his faith and understanding grow; and as he’s repeatedly interrogated by the Pharisees we see his spiritual life take off.  At first he called the one who gave him sight, “The man called Jesus.”  Later with more interrogation, the once blind man said, “He is a prophet.”  And later on, exasperated by the constant questions, the man says, “This Jesus is from God.”  Through constantly explaining Jesus to others, he found his own understanding of who Jesus was and in so doing, he came to faith.  Pope Francis earlier this year said that if we want to advance in our own spiritual life, then, we must constantly be missionaries.  Like the once blind man to grow in our faith we must constantly explain Jesus to others.    We explain the reason for our joy.

Now if we think about it, the very first face that the blind man most clearly saw was the face of Jesus.  Breaking through the darkness he saw the face of our Lord.  A face that’s all strength, all innocence, all kindness, all love, all heavenly light.  We know what a relief it is to see a kind face when we are in distress.  Now sometimes there are areas of darkness in our own life, darkened areas of our heart that need the light of Christ.  We need only to expose this darkness to the light of his face.  His light takes away the power of darkness.  We find this light in Mass, in moments of quiet prayer, in the sacrament of reconciliation, in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and in worthy thoughtful reception of the Holy Eucharist.  The light of his countenance is always there for us.  What area(s) of darkness within our heart need the light of Christ?

Our Lord broke through the physical darkness of Odilia.  He broke through both the physical and spiritual darkness of the blind man in today’s Gospel.  And so my prayer for us today is that we are given the grace of knowing and allowing the Lord to break through whatever darkness, whatever spiritual blindness afflicts us, because to make Jesus the number one of our life is the key to salvation, happiness, and true vision.  To worship anything or anyone else is blindness.

Let us become great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

“I Thirst For You” – A Letter From Mother Teresa

It is true. I stand at the door of your heart, day and night. Even when you are not listening, even when you doubt it could be Me, I am there: waiting for even the smallest signal of your response, even the smallest suggestion of an invitation that will permit Me to enter. I want you to know that each time you invite Me, I do come always, without fail. Silent and invisible I come, yet with a power and a love most infinite, bringing the many gifts of My Spirit. I come with My mercy, with My desire to forgive and heal you, with a love for you that goes beyond your comprehension.  A love in each detail, so grand like the love I have received from My Father “I have loved all of you as the Father has loved me…” John 15:10

I come longing to console you and give you strength, to lift you up and bind all your wounds. I bring you My light, to dispel your darkness and all your doubts. I come with My power, that allows me to carry you:  with My grace, to touch your heart and transform your life. I come with My peace, to calm your soul.  I know you like the palm of my hand. I know everything about you. Even the hairs of your head I have counted. Nothing in your life is unimportant to Me. I have followed you through the years and I have always loved you even when you have strayed. I know every one of your problems. I know your needs and your worries and yes, I know all your sins.  But I tell you again that I love you, not for what you have or ceased to do, I love you for you, for the beauty and the dignity My Father gave you by creating you in His own image. It is a dignity you have often forgotten, a beauty you have tarnished by sin. But I love you as you are, and I have shed My Blood to rescue you. If you only ask Me with faith, My grace will touch all that needs changing in your life: I will give you the strength to free yourself from sin and from all its destructive power.

I know what is in your heart, I know your loneliness and all your wounds, the rejections, the judgments, the humiliations, I carried it all before you. And I carried it all for you, so you could share My strength and My victory. I know, above all, your need for love, how much you are thirsting for love and tenderness.  Yet, how many times have you desired to satisfy your thirst in vain, seeking that love with selfishness, trying to fill the void within you with passing pleasures, with the even greater emptiness of sin.

Do you thirst for love?  “Come to Me all you who thirst …” (John 7:37).I will satisfy you and fill you.  Do you thirst to be loved?  I love you more than you can imagine … to the point of dying on a cross for you.  I THIRST FOR YOU.  Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe My love for you.  I THIRST FOR YOU. I thirst to love you and to be loved by you. So precious are you to Me that I THIRST FOR YOU.  Come to Me, and I will fill your heart and heal your wounds. I will make you a new creation and give you peace even in your trials.  I THIRST FOR YOU.  You must never doubt My mercy, My desire to forgive, My longing to bless you and live My life in you, and that I accept you no matter what you have done.  I THIRST FOR YOU.

If you feel of little value before the eyes of the world, it doesn’t matter. There is no one that interests me in the whole world than you.  I THIRST FOR YOU.  Open up to Me, come to Me, thirst for Me, give me your life. I will prove to you how important you are for My Heart.  Don’t you realize that My Father already has a perfect plan to transform your life, beginning from this moment? Trust in Me. Ask Me every day to enter and take charge of your life and I will. I promise you before My Father in Heaven that I will work miracles in your life. Why would I do this?  Because I THIRST FOR YOU.

All I ask of you is that you entrust yourself to Me completely. I will do all the rest. From this moment, now, I behold the place My Father has prepared for you in My Kingdom. Remember that you are a pilgrim in this life traveling back home. Sin can never satisfy you, or bring the peace you seek. All that you have sought outside of Me has only left you more empty, so do not tie yourself to the things of this world; above all, do not run from Me when you fall.  Come to Me without delay because, when you give Me your sins, you give Me the joy of being your Savior.  There is nothing I cannot forgive and heal; so come now, and unburden your soul.  No matter how far you have strayed without a destination, no matter how often you have forgotten Me, no matter how many crosses you bear in this life; I want you to always remember, one thing that will never change.  I THIRST FOR YOU – just you, as you are.  You don’t need to change to believe in My love, for it will be your confidence in that love that will make you change. You forget Me, and yet I am seeking you every moment of the day – standing before the doors of your heart and calling.  Do you find this difficult to believe? If so, look at the Cross, look at My Heart that was pierced for you.  Have you not understood My Cross?  Then listen again to the words I spoke there, for they tell you clearly why I endured all this for you:  “….I THIRST” (John 19: 28)  YES, I THIRST FOR YOU.

As the rest of the psalm, I was praying says of Me: “… I waited uselessly for compassion, I waited for someone to console me and I did not find it.” (Psalm 69: 20).  All your life I have been desiring your love. I’ve never ceased searching for your love and longing to be loved by you in return. You have tried many things in your goal to be happy. Why not try opening up for Me your heart, right now, more than you ever have before?

When you finally open the doors of your heart and you finally come close enough, you will then hear Me say again and again, not in mere human words but in spirit:  “No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake.  Come to Me with your misery and your sins, with your problems and needs, and with all your desire to be loved.

I stand at the door of your heart and call…Open to Me, for I THIRST FOR YOU… “

“Jesus is God, therefore His Love and His Thirst are infinite. He, the Creator of the universe, asked for the love of his creatures. He has thirst for our love … These words: “I THIRST” … Do they echo in our soul?

St. Teresa of Calcutta

Dear Friends,

Some years ago England’s national television network, BBC-TV, sent its star journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, to India to do a documentary on Mother Teresa.

Now the BBC wanted to televise Mother Teresa and her sisters picking up the dying in the slums of Calcutta and taking them to a shelter run by the sisters.  At the shelter the dying are washed up and cared for, as Mother Teresa put it, “Within the sight of a loving face.”  The shelter to which they were brought was once a temple to the Hindu goddess Kali.  It was dimly lit by tiny windows high up in the walls.  The television crew had not anticipated the poor lighting inside the building, and had not brought any portable lights with them.  They concluded that it was useless to try to film the sister working with the dying inside the building.  But someone suggested they do it anyway.  Perhaps some of the footage would be usable.

To everyone’s surprise, the footage filmed inside the shelter turned out to be in their words spectacular.  The whole interior was bathed in a mysterious warm light.  Technically speaking, the camera crew said, the results were impossible to explain.  Muggeridge had his own theory about the mysterious light.  He wrote, “Mother Teresa’s home for the dying is overflowing with love…One senses this immediately on entering it.  This love is luminous, like the haloes artists make visible round the heads of the saints.  I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on film.”

What Muggeridge was talking about was not a figment of his imagination.  It is something that is well documented in biblical and spiritual literature.  The Book of Exodus says that when Moses came down from the mountain after talking with God, the people noticed how radiant his face had become, and they were afraid to come near him.  St. Kateri Tekakwitha when praying before the Blessed Sacrament would just glow with joy, her face seemed to shine with the love of God.  People would enter the church just to stare at her, rather than pray before the Blessed Sacrament.  And in today’s Gospel Peter, James, and John report that our Lord was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun.  The love of God can be luminous.

The word transfigured comes from the Greek word metamorphane, which is where we get the word metamorphosis.  A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a tadpole becomes a frog, and a seed becomes a plant, all of them being raised to a higher state.  All these are forms of metamorphosis.  And the bright light emanating from Jesus is also symbol of metamorphosis.  Jesus is raised to a higher level.  He’s raised to the level of Heaven and Peter, James, and John get a glimpse of the Heavenly Trinitarian love and they get a glimpse of what God intends for Jesus after the Resurrection and for all of us.

Now the Gospel also speaks of our Lord’s clothes that are white as light.  Theologians see this as an external dimension of someone who is deeply in touch with God.  A person who shares a deep communion with God, one who is deeply in love with God, radiates outward making one’s life brilliant.  When we are in deep communion with God this beautiful relationship can sometimes radiate outward and be seen.  I think this is what people saw in Moses, St. Teresa of Calcutta and St. Kateri.  These saints’ love for God was so deep that it became physically evident.  We’ve all known people like this, they just can’t hide their love for God.

Every Christian is called to this, is called to be a light in our darkened world.  Every Christian is called upon to radiate the light of Christ to the world. Jesus said to his disciples, “You are the light of the world.  Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Heavenly Father.”

Muggeridge in his book wrote of an incident where Mother Teresa gave a talk in a school.  He wrote, “I was watching… the faces of the people as they listened…Every face…was rapt, hanging on her words; not because of the words themselves-they were ordinary enough-but because of her.  Some quality came across over and above the words that held their attention.  A luminosity seemed to fill the school hall…penetrating every mind and heart.  When she had finished…they all wanted to touch her hand…She looked so small and frail and tired standing there, giving herself.  Yet this is how we find salvation.  Giving, not receiving…dying in order to live.”   Mother Teresa was a light in the darkness to these people.  She was giving not receiving and she was dying to self in order to live.

So what about us; the people of St. Jerome’s and St. Joseph’s, like Moses, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and St. Kateri we too are called to be a light in the darkness of our world.  Now maybe our face won’t be glowing but our words and actions should.  Lent is a time for asking ourselves how well we are living out our calling.  Are we pursuing the corporal and spiritual works of Mercy?  Lent is a time for asking ourselves how well we are letting our Christian light shine.  Where do I need to be a brighter light of God’s love?  Where is our Lord calling me to let his light shine through me?  Is it with the family, parents, spouse, children, in-laws, is it at work with friends, and co-workers, is it at school, is it in the community, or is it in the parish?  And after this examination if we find we weren’t doing as well as we could, Lent is also a time for repenting and beginning anew to live this calling to transfiguration.

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

Dear Friends,

It’s Lent I’m a priest and everyday my email is filled with lots of Lenten meditations.  I can’t read them all but I ran across one on Friday that made me pause.  It was written by St. Anselm.  He lived in the middle Ages.  In this meditation St. Anselm was in a way referring to the Fall of Adam.  As we read in our first reading from Genesis, “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life.”   God exalts in our physicality, it is good.  Our physical body is good.  But we are more than just physical matter we are enlivened by the very breath of God.  We are body and soul.

But then, in our God-given freedom, we gave into temptation and sinned.  We mucked it up.  St. Anselm referring to this wrote, “We sinners are like diamonds that have fallen into the muck.  Made in the image of God, we have soiled ourselves through violence and hatred.  God could have simply pronounced a word of forgiveness from heaven, but this would not have solved the problem.  It wouldn’t have restored the diamonds to their original brilliance.  Instead, in his passion to reestablish the beauty of creation, God came down into the muck of sin and death, brought the diamonds up, and then polished them off.”  “God became man so that men might be made God.”  But in doing so God had to get dirty.  This sinking into the dirt-this divine solidarity with the lost-is the “sacrifice” which the Son makes to the infinite pleasure of the Father. It’s a sacrifice of compassion.

I have a story about a man who once sank into the muck.  But he did eventually let himself be raised and polished by our Lord.  He let himself be breathed upon once again by the breath of God.  His name is Jacques Fesch born in France in 1930.  He was born into a very famous wealthy banking family.  He had it easy.  His father gave him everything.  But he didn’t appreciate it.  He didn’t appreciate his Catholic faith and he abandoned it by the age of 17.  Jacques was not a good student, he put no effort into his studies, and he coasted.  He was more interested in parties and the adventures he could buy with his dad’s money.  After high school he spent a few years in the army.  At 21 he was back home working for his dad who had given him a very high paying job.  He married his pregnant girlfriend who soon gave birth to their daughter.  Jacques was soon bored with domesticity and left his wife and his job.  He was a playboy.  He sailed boats, rode horses, drove fast cars, and hung out with musicians.  The money soon ran out and his dad wouldn’t give him any more.  So in order to fund his lifestyle to which he was accustomed, he came up with the scheme to rob the Paris Stock Exchange.  In the process of this poorly executed robbery he shot and killed a police officer.  He was quickly apprehended, he was 24.

He showed no remorse.  He said he was only sorry that he hadn’t carried a machine gun.  He could have killed more people.  He told the prison chaplain to get lost and he mocked his devout Catholic lawyer who showed concern for his soul.  Fesch was convicted and sentenced to the guillotine.  He was to be beheaded.  He remained faithless and hostile for about a year.  Until one night he experienced a sudden and dramatic conversion.  “I was in bed, eyes open, really suffering for the first time in my life  It was then that a cry burst from my breast, an appeal for help – My God – and instantly, like a violent wind which passes over without anyone knowing where it comes from, the spirit of the Lord seized me by the throat.”  Reminding us of Genesis where God blew into his nostrils the breath of life.  Jacques would later write, “I had an impression of infinite power and kindness and, from that moment onward, I believed with an unshakeable conviction that has never left me.”

After his reversion to the faith of his childhood Jacques became a model prisoner.  In his cell he lived the life of a monk.  And he expressed profound remorse for the murder he had committed.  During his time in prison Jacques wrote many letters and kept a journal.  These writings and his profound conversion made an impression on many people and it has put him on the path to beatification and possible canonization.  He was executed at the age of 27.  At the scaffold before the blade fell Jacques asked the priest standing beside him for the crucifix so that he could kiss it. After kissing the crucifix his last words were, “Holy Virgin, have pity on me.”

God came down into the muck of sin and death, brought the diamond up, and then polished him off.  Jacques lived at both ends of the spectrum first at the extreme disobedience of Adam and then later after repenting he lived at the extreme obedience of Christ. He went back to living within the breath of God, to living within the life of the Trinity.  In scripture we read that after the resurrection Jesus appeared to his disciples and he said to them, “Peace be with you.  And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” 

Today is Quadragesima Sunday which means it’s exactly forty days until Good Friday.  We have forty days to sit with our Lord in prayer, we have forty days to go to him in the sacraments, we have forty days to give of our self in charity, and we have forty days to fast from whatever distracts us from our Lord.  We are given these forty days to live more and more within the Breath of God, to be filled with God’s own life, to live more and more in the peace of our Lord.  We are given these forty days of preparation so that we can rejoice with a whole heart on Easter Sunday, and every Sunday.

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

Dear Friends,

Today our Lord tells us; Be holy, Be perfect, Be a temple of God.  And what ties them all together is charity.  Love your neighbor as yourself, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  To be holy is to love.  Holiness is measured by charity.  This is the basic ingredient of the spiritual life.

In 1943 there was a nineteen year old man who had spent his whole life spiritually asleep, totally unaware of God.  He did not love.  His name was Claude Newman, he lived in Mississippi.  When Claude was nineteen, in a fit of rage, he murdered a man.  Claude was quickly apprehended; he was tried in court, and sentenced to death.  Sitting on death row he found himself in a cell with three other men.  That very first night they talked and got to know each other.  Now one of the men in that cell was wearing a religious medal around his neck, Claude asked about it, but the man couldn’t really explain it.  He couldn’t explain who the figure was on the medal or even why he wore it.  In a fit of frustration the man took the medal from around his neck and threw it at Claude’s feet.  Claude picked it up and put it around his neck.  That medal was a miraculous medal.  A medal with an image of The Blessed Virgin Mary on it.

That night Claude had a dream, and in that dream a beautiful woman whom he didn’t know told him to call for a Catholic priest.  Claude was about to wake up from his deep spiritual sleep.  God’s grace was going to bring him out of his spiritual coma.  He was going to learn how to love.  So a priest was called.  The next day Fr. Robert O’Leary entered the cell to speak with Claude.  Fr. O’Leary was skeptical of the dream, but he was impressed with Claude’s sincerity and so he agreed to give him lessons in the Catholic faith.  In fact all the men of that cell joined in the studies.  Over the next few months, even though he could neither read nor write, Claude made remarkable progress in his knowledge and understanding of the faith.  It is said that the BVM helped him in his studies.  On January 16, 1944, Claude Newman was baptized into the Catholic Church along with all his cellmates.  His execution was to take place at Midnight four days later.  On the eve of the execution the sheriff asked Claude if he had any last requests.  To the sheriff’s surprise Claude asked if he could celebrate a Holy Hour of prayer.  He didn’t want dessert or a steak he only wanted a holy hour of prayer. And that’s what they did, along with his cellmates and prison guards they prayed for an hour before his scheduled execution.  The hour ended with Claude receiving Holy Communion.

Now about fifteen minutes before he was about to sit down into the electric chair the sheriff received a call from the Governor, Claude was given a stay of execution for two weeks.  He was allowed to live for two more weeks.  No one knew why he was given two extra weeks to live.  At first Claude was disappointed; he had so looked forward to heaven.  But at the suggestion of Fr. O’Leary he used the two weeks to pray for the conversion of prisoners, but most especially to pray for the prisoner occupying the cell next to his.  He prayed for a man named James Hughes, a convicted murderer, who though he had been raised a Catholic had led a highly immoral life.  James hated everyone but most especially he hated the ever so pious Claude.  He taunted Claude every day, calling him the vilest names, spitting on him whenever he got the chance.  If he could have, he would’ve killed Claude.

So Claude prayed; and at the end of the two weeks he went to his death.  The reporter for the newspaper wrote that he’d never seen anyone go to his death as joyfully and happily.  Now three months later James was scheduled for his execution, and for those last three months he remained unrepentant.  He remained spiritually asleep and it seemed impervious to God’s grace.  And it was only as he sat down in the electric chair that he finally asked for a priest to hear his confession.  Claude’s prayers had been answered.

Claude Newman spent most of his life spiritually asleep, he was not holy, he was not perfect, he was not a temple, and he didn’t love.  But he woke up and he ended his life spiritually wide awake loving his enemy.

What about us?  Do we love our enemy, do we love the person who’s maybe not an enemy but just irks us to no end.  Love is not always a feeling, love is not always a warm sentiment of the heart, and love is not just about being kind.  Love wants the good of the other; love wills the good of the other, and love does this without expecting anything in return.  That’s the way that God loves, he loves everyone, even the ones who don’t love him back.  Love is all he knows how to do.  To be holy is to love the good and bad alike.  And the good news is you can love someone without liking them.

I have three questions for you to consider. But first picture someone who is troubling to you, someone who maybe irks you. First question:  do you want to see this person get to heaven?  Second question:  do you pray for this person, praying especially when tempted to despise him, gossip about him, dismiss him, or hold a grudge?  Third question:  would you help this person if he needed your help and you were the only one around to assist him?  If you answered yes to all three questions, then you love, you may not like him, but you love him.

Claude ended his life by loving his enemies, the people he committed crimes against, the man he murdered, and James Hughes the prisoner next door to him.  And in loving them he became holy.

Holiness is simple.

Holiness cannot be manufactured.

Holiness grows simply and quietly.

Holiness is not argument, and it’s not philosophy.

Debate does not lead to conversion, the witness of holiness does.

Holiness does not isolate.

Holiness is found in my encounter with the other although it may not be immediately apparent.

Holiness is not on a mountaintop somewhere but in the Gospel, the sacraments, and community.

Holiness is beautiful and I need beauty – a child playing peek-a-boo, friends laughing, feet being washed.

Holiness is living in friendship with God.

By Fr. Michael Cummins

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

Dear Friends,

Each of the lessons taught in today’s Gospel passage could be expanded into an entire book and they have been.  But at the core of them all, is the heart.  Biblically speaking the heart represents the inner depths of a person, the place where decisions are made, and the place where we decide to either respond to God or to resist Him.  Ancient people saw the heart as the source of all emotions like love, and grief, and anxiety, and joy.  The heart was the source of thought, will, and conscience.  And even today it means so much more to us when someone tells us they love us with their whole heart.  It just wouldn’t sound right if someone said to us, “I love you with my whole brain!”  It might be the anatomically correct thing to say but it just doesn’t sound right.  You would never see that on a Valentine card, a big picture of a brain with the caption, “You’re awesome; I love you with my whole brain!”

Jesus came to align our hearts more and more with God.  He came to align our thoughts, our will, and our conscience more and more with God the Father.  Friendship with God, which is what Jesus offers, requires a union of hearts.  Now certainly, our exterior behavior  must follow God’s will, we still obey the Ten Commandments.  This is what Jesus means when he says, “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.”  But Jesus is also telling us that exterior behavior, that appearance, is not enough.  For a true, faithful citizen of Christ’s Kingdom, the attitudes and desires of the heart must also be in harmony with God’s plan for our lives. This is what Jesus means when he says: “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill.”  He came to bring the Old Testament Law to its fulfillment.

Christ is explaining the Law from this perspective when he explains the true meaning of sinful anger, lust, and lying.  God “wills that all of us be saved” (1Timothy 2:4),  but our friendship, our heart’s alignment with him can never be complete when we harbor resentment or contempt towards some people, or tarnish their good name by spreading rumors about them or speaking ill of them. How can we live in intimacy with a God who loves every man and woman as a father loves his children, when in our hearts we desire to use some of them only as an object of pleasure and self-indulgence?  How can we be a true friend of God, when we make promises we don’t intend to keep?

The law is being intensified.  The old law is being raised up to a new pitch of intensity.  At the very end of this Sermon on the Mount our Lord tells us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  This might seem to be an impossible request but it could also be seen as an invitation to accept God’s grace at every moment of our lives.  Divine love is constant and always present, as is God’s forgiveness, no matter what we may do.

We always have the option of accepting God’s love and moving towards perfection, and fundamentally, this is the Church’s job to make us perfect saints.  She is not satisfied with spiritual mediocrity; she is not satisfied with people that are just basically good.  She wants to make us perfect as God is perfect.  Now this is a tall order, and it’s not easy.

Some of the church’s moral demands are deemed too hard, by some, especially in the realm of sexual morality.  No intimate relations outside of marriage, marriage is between one man and one woman. No artificial contraception, no in-vitro fertilization, no embryonic stem cell research, no abortion. Completely against the tide of what the world says is right and good.  This is hard and some people balk.  But through the centuries people have always balked.  We just hear about it more in this age of constant information.  The church’s job is to make us perfect; we don’t compromise and give in to the world’s views.

This perfection is possible; God wouldn’t ask it of us if it were impossible.  We have so many examples of people in our lives even, parents, grandparents, siblings, the person sitting in the pew next to you maybe.   We can also look to the many saints in heaven, people just like us, I’ve talked about a lot of them, they failed, they sinned, but they never gave up, until finally reaching the perfection of heaven.  We are little, we will trip and fall, but we keep trusting in Gods great love and mercy, and we keep trying.  We never stop trusting and trying.

In this week’s gospel, Jesus intensifies the moral law and raises the bar.  Christ’s goal and the Church’s goal are to make saints.  His moral demands are great, but so is his mercy.  Where there is extreme demand there is also extreme mercy.  He always offers grace and forgiveness when we falter so that we can always have hope in our struggles for sanctity.  May our hearts be ever more aligned with our Lord’s so that each beat of our heart becomes an act of love and praise.

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher Ankley

Dear Friends,

Jesus today tells us, “You are salt, you are light, and you are a city set on a mountain.”  You are salt, you are light, and you are a city on a hill. All three of these things exist for something else.  Salt seasons and preserves, it makes food taste good and it also keeps food from rotting.  This is very important when there are no refrigerators.  But salt can also make the earth barren.  An army would sometimes spread salt into the fields around a city they had just conquered.  Salting the earth so that nothing would grow, so that their enemy would starve.

Light illuminates and pushes back the darkness.  Before electricity darkness was a much more dramatic reality than it is today.  The ancients understood how helpless they were without a lamp.  And finally a city on a mountain, a city on a mountain is visible to everyone and was used as a guide and point of navigation.  Without MapQuest or gps a city on a hill was a point of reference in finding your way.  Someone giving directions might say, “Keep the city on the hill to your right and you’ll find your way.”

Now many times we are told by our culture that religion is something to be kept private.  Keep it to yourselves, keep it in your homes and churches, but don’t bring your religion in to the public square.  Jesus never says this; the Bible says something else entirely.  Religion is not meant for oneself alone, it is meant for the other.  We are not to rest in our own holiness: we salt, we enlighten, and we are a city on a hill.  We are all of these, for those around us.

As disciples of Jesus we salt; preserving and enhancing what is best of our culture, but at the same time we salt and destroy what is dysfunctional and sinful.  Light:  by the light of our lives we reveal what is good and beautiful, but by our light we also expose what is ugly and sinful in our culture.  We highlight what is dysfunctional.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany on February 4th in 1906.  He was a vocal opponent of the Nazi party.  He was salt, he was light, and he was a city on a hill.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer began a promising career as a theologian and Lutheran pastor at the University of Berlin in 1931.  The political events occurring in Germany in the early 1930s, however, soon brought about many profound changes in his life.  Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the Nazi party led to his decision to abandon his academic career when Hitler came to power in 1933.  Hitler’s subsequent policies led to divisions in the German Lutheran Church, and Bonhoeffer became an active member of the Confessing Church that was formed in opposition to Hitler’s totalitarian government.  This Church commissioned Bonhoeffer to direct one of the underground seminaries that were established for the training of young pastors.  The seminary was eventually closed by the Nazis in 1937.

The late 1930s brought further changes for Bonhoeffer.  As the German war operation expanded, he was drawn more and more into active opposition against Hitler’s government.  Convinced of the righteousness of the course, he eventually became involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.  He was arrested by the Gestapo on April 5, 1943, and spent the next two years in prison.  Another attempt to overthrow Hitler in 1945 led to the execution of a number of political prisoners only weeks before the end of the war.  Bonhoeffer, only thirty-nine years old at the time, was among them.  He was executed by hanging just twenty three days before the Nazi surrender.

A camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote:  “I saw pastor Bonhoeffer…kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God.  I was most deeply moved by the way this man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer.  At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed.   Now one of the last things that Bonhoeffer was heard to have said was, “This is the end…for me the beginning of life.”  “This is the end…for me the beginning of life.” 

Our Lord is calling us to be vibrant Christians.  Without vibrant Christians the world is in a worse place.  We don’t see what is good, and the ugly and sinful are not exposed and destroyed.  What would have happened to World War II if more Christians spoke out like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or like Pope Pius XII, St. Edith Stein, or St. Maximillian Kolbe?  When Christians are not salt and light people lose their way.  What happens to our culture if we are the salt and light we are meant to be.  This is not the time be a lukewarm Christian.

“In Sinu Jesu” is a journal written by an anonymous Benedictine priest and he’s been receiving private revelations from our Lord.  One thing our Lord reminded him of was his immense love for each of us.   Jesus says to each one of us, My heart has a particular love for you, a love that My Father destined for you alone and for no other from all eternity.  How it grieves My heart when the unique love I offer a soul is spurned, ignored, or regarded with indifference.

Homework for this week is to meditate on these words.  My prayer for us this week is that with this realization of our Lord’s infinite love for each one of us, it may make us desire to be more salty and more filled with light

Let us be great Saints,

Fr. Christopher J. Ankley

From a sermon by Saint Sophronius, bishop

Let us receive the light whose brilliance is eternal

In honor of the divine mystery that we celebrate today, let us all hasten to meet Christ. Everyone should be eager to join the procession and to carry a light.

Our lighted candles are a sign of the divine splendor of the one who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of his eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ.

The Mother of God, the most pure Virgin, carried the true light in her arms and brought him to those who lay in darkness. We too should carry a light for all to see and reflect the radiance of the true light as we hasten to meet him.

The light has come and has shone upon a world enveloped in shadows; the Dayspring from on high has visited us and given light to those who lived in darkness. This, then, is our feast, and we join in procession with lighted candles to reveal the light that has shone upon us and the glory that is yet to come to us through him. So let us hasten all together to meet our God.

The true light has come, the light that enlightens every man who is born into this world. Let all of us, my brethren, be enlightened and made radiant by this light. Let all of us share in its splendor, and be so filled with it that no one remains in the darkness. Let us be shining ourselves as we go together to meet and to receive with the aged Simeon the light whose brilliance is eternal. Rejoicing with Simeon, let us sing a hymn of thanksgiving to God, the Father of the light, who sent the true light to dispel the darkness and to give us all a share in his splendor.

Through Simeon’s eyes we too have seen the salvation of God which he prepared for all the nations and revealed as the glory of the new Israel, which is ourselves. As Simeon was released from the bonds of this life when he had seen Christ, so we too were at once freed from our old state of sinfulness.

By faith we too embraced Christ, the salvation of God the Father, as he came to us from Bethlehem. Gentiles before, we have now become the people of God. Our eyes have seen God incarnate, and because we have seen him present among us and have mentally received him into our arms, we are called the new Israel. Never shall we forget this presence; every year we keep a feast in his honor.