Father Paul Weinberger
Saint William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 15, 2006
Before I begin…if you happened to have noticed these “sad translations”, remember the great one from last Sunday?
What God has joined “human beings” must not divide.
Now we read in this Gospel,
For “human beings” it is impossible…
What? Did Jesus just land in a spaceship? We don’t talk this way and this is a bad translation, which is the point I am getting across. If this kind of rubs you the wrong way…human beings? Is Jesus an alien? Anyway………………….”For human beings it is impossible but not for God…. take me to your leader!”
”I prayed and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Obviously I didn’t pray before those last comments; there was no prudence there!
What a beautiful introduction to the Mass.
”I prayed and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.”
Today is the Feast of St. Teresa of Avila. You can see St. Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face on the front of the bulletin.
View photo here
http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintt02.jpg
She is a spiritual daughter of St. Teresa of Avila, who died in 1582. She was part of the Church during the time of the Reformation, which is not a good term because the Church is always renewing and reforming herself. We are members of this Church and everyone of us are in need of reform and renewal, like the rich young man refusing reform and renewal in the Gospel today. So, the Church in every age is in a period of reformation if we understand it according to renewal. The Church is perfect in Her Founder and imperfect in Her members, all of us.
St. Teresa of Avila reformed the Carmelites and many great people have followed the writings of St. Teresa and the Carmelite influence. Tomorrow, October 16th is the day that Karol Wojtyla was chosen as the pope. He took the name John Paul II. When he was in Poland under the Nazi occupation of Poland he discerned a vocation to the priesthood and he thought about becoming a Carmelite but they turned him down. Don’t you know that the guy that turned him down is still kicking himself, right? Although the Carmelites turned him down, he was greatly influenced by the writings of the Carmelites, especially St. John of the Cross, who his doctoral work was on. A Spanish Carmelite influenced a Polish seminarian who became pope.
Edith Stein from Germany was a Jew and then she turned away from all faith and became an atheist but she was converted. One night she read the life of St. Teresa of Avila and the next day she announced to the hosts, who had invited her to their home, that she knew God was calling her to the Church and that she was going to become a Carmelite nun and that is exactly what happened. We know her as St. Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese are doctors of the Church; they are so incredibly astute at promoting the faith.
Notice that St. Therese is holding two pictures; one picture is of the Child Jesus and one is of the Holy Face of Christ just like the Veil of Veronica, know as the Holy Face. This is the image of Christ just moments before His death. St. Therese name in the convent was Sr. Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face. This helps us to understand how we are to pray. If we contemplate the Face of Christ from the very beginning of the Life of Jesus and His holy childhood forward to His death and Resurrection; even to the Assumption of His mother’s body and soul into Heaven at the end of her earthly life, those two mysteries of the Rosary tell us all about the power coming from Christ’s Resurrection and that where the Blessed Mother has gone, we hope to follow. Prayer is contemplating the Face of Christ.
St. Teresa of Avila is beloved because she is at once mystical and very practical. If you read her writings you get some meat and potatoes; you also get something to chew on later…something to think about and consider to implement into your own spiritual life. I love St. Teresa of Avila for many reasons and you will continue to hear about them in this homily.
As a priest I have to begin every morning with the Divine Office and it begins with Psalm 95. For the past few months I have been think about this Psalm, which I have been praying for years; the seventeen years I have been a priest and the seven years I was in seminary. By now I am used to it and it doesn’t affect me. No, we should worry when prayer doesn’t affect us. For the past few months this Psalm has really jumped off the page; you see, it is God speaking in this Psalm and He is talking about the report card of the Israelites following Him out of Egypt to the Promised Land. You know that business about 40 years in the desert? Here are just a couple of stanzas of Psalm 95.
Today listen to the voice of the Lord; do not grow stubborn as your fathers did in the wilderness when at Meriba and Massah they challenged Me and provoked me although they had seen all of my works. Forty years I endured that generation. I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray and they do not know My ways so I swore in My anger they shall not enter into My rest.”
That last part kind of takes your breath away. When I was in the second grade I made my First Communion so that means that forty years ago at the age of seven I made my First Communion and you can just see this big frown on God’s face and He says to me,
”So! What have you done for Me lately?”
I have to say that as I look back over the past forty years I am ashamed at how I haven’t done more for God; I should be so much further along. I look at where I am and where God wants me to be and there is big difference there. I know whom the problem is with; you are looking at him! I can just hear the words,
”Your time is up!”
Then I hear God tapping His foot. But, I take great solace in someone like St. Teresa of Avila. She was in Spain where she entered the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila. I have been there and it is beautiful. She was there over twenty years. The convent was full of women, who prayed together, help each other, talked to people in the parlor as well as go out in pairs to individual homes to meet with people and that is all nice, but that is not why God calls someone to a religious vocation, so they can be nice. Nice is for Helen Steiner Rice and greeting cards, not for religious vocations.
St. Teresa kind of had a tug at her soul where she felt she should be doing more for God, so after twenty years of rocking along and being nice, she started doing something different. She would get up in the middle of the night and keep vigil. She had a statue of Jesus; His hands were bound to a pillar and His face was bloody. The Spanish are really something else when it comes to the way they sculpt statues. St. Teresa used this statue, especially concentrating on His face, to focus on during her nightly vigils. One night she was praying all alone in the chapel and started to sing that ancient Latin hymn, Veni, Creator Spiritus, Come Holy Spirit, and what do you know, the Holy Spirit came and touched her soul. She was never the same after that; she was in ecstasy, she was beside herself and was unaware of her surroundings. After a time she came back to her senses. Afterward she exclaimed,
I no longer desire conversation with men but that of angels.
This little lady began to reform the Carmelites and if you look at the history, some of the convents went kicking and screaming.
St. Teresa wrote her life story; this is a paragraph about her while making a Holy Hour, which is when you go to Church for an hour and pray. You would think that priests and nuns do this all the time and we should, but it is really up to the individual. In the beginning, this is how the saint went to prayer.
I was more occupied and wishing my hour of prayer was over and in listening to whenever the clock struck than in thinking of things that were good.
So what was she doing for the whole hour?
Father looks at his watch as though he is checking to see if the hour was over yet.
It is kind of like kids on a trip who keep asking if they are there yet. She was always looking to see if the hour was over and maybe that is how you are here at Mass.
”Is he through yet? Wake me up when he is finished!”
Right? St. Teresa said,
I would rather have done any severe penance that might have been given me than practice recollection as a preliminary to prayer.
She would go into the chapel and would kind of collect herself. She would get everything ready and would ease into prayer and recollection would lead to meditation, which would eventually lead to the highest form of prayer, which is contemplation. She says,
Whenever I entered the chapel I used to feel so depressed that I had to summon up all my courage to make myself pray at all.
I love St. Teresa of Avila because she is honest about how difficult it was in he beginning to pray.
Look at the opening words to the Mass tonight.
I prayed and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.
St. Teresa is a model for us and she past that thirst for prayer down to her spiritual child, St. Therese’. If you keep the front of the bulletin as a religious picture I want you to make the connection between what you see in it and what you see here on the front of the Altar. I will show you.
Father walks to the mosaic at the front of the Altar and points to the Greek symbol, Alpha and Omega
Maybe you have seen this but never understood what it is. The first one I pointed out is the first letter if the Greek alphabet, Alpha. The one on the far side is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, Omega. These stand for Christ, the first and the last. Catholics believe that the Altar represents Christ; He is the Victim of the Altar as well as the Priest. Christ is symbolized in the Altar and He is in all respects, the Priest, Altar and the Lamb of Sacrifice. You see the Alpha and Omega and Christ is the beginning and the end of our lives and so if we, like St. Therese, start at the beginning of His life and go all the way to the end, if we contemplate His Face, that is always going to lead us to prayer.
On page two of the bulletin, which is available to you every week, I want to call your attention to number one and three. Number one is "Novo millennio ineunte ", which translated from the Latin into English means "On the beginning of the new millennium". This document is by Pope John Paul II and was published January 6, 2001 at the end of the Jubilee Year 2000.
Then we have document number three, "Rosarium Virginis Mariae " which translated from the Latin into English means "The Rosary of the Virgin Mary." It was published on October 16, 2002, which tomorrow will be four years ago. I have the two documents right here and they are not phone books or War and Peace. "Novo millennio ineunte " was written first and then "Rosarium Virginis Mariae ". The first document is quote in the second one extensively. Pope John Paul II says in it that we should contemplate the Face of Christ while praying the Rosary. This is a different way to pray. In paragraph #2 of the Pope’s Letter, Pope John Paul II stated:
The Rosary is my favorite prayer.
That says it all. Then in the last paragraph I have provided for you in the bulletin, Pope John Paul II is quoting Pope Paul VI concerning the Rosary.
“Without contemplation, the Rosary is a body without a soul
Have you ever seen a body without a soul? The definition of a body without a soul is “dead”! Right? So what he is actually saying is that without contemplation, the rosary is dead.
Father says this like a robot to make a point“Without contemplation, the Rosary is a body without a soul, and its recitation runs the risk of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas, in violation of the admonition of Christ:
Anyway, that sounds like something you see in the movies but I am sure I woke up a few people. It sounds like an answering machine that asks you to press #1, #2, or #3. Oh wait a minute, we have one of those here at the Church and I am the one who ordered it! [Laughter]. It is appropriate here but it is not appropriate in praying the Rosary. We don’t pray the rosary as if we are mechanical or as if we are auctioneers. No, it calls for contemplation. Pope John Paul II is constantly reminding us to contemplate the Face of Christ and this is what will bring us to prayer. We will hunger and thirst for prayer in a way we never have before. Now, we can try not praying another year or two or three or even forty maybe.
We are like the rich young man in the Gospel, which really speaks to us because Jesus smiled on him lovingly and told him that only one thing is needed and that is to go and sell what he had and give to the poor and then come and follow Him. The young man walked away from Jesus because he had many possessions.
When I look at that I have to say that it is obvious that our country is the greatest country on the face of the earth. As a kid I used to go over to my paternal grandparent’s house and on the back porch there was this machine that fascinated me. Of course every grandmother hates having a grandson near anything because we are always getting into things. After the machine on the back porch washed the clothes you had to turn this switch and pass the clothes through this mechanism, which squeezed the water out of them. You had to make sure you didn’t get your finger in there because it would do the same to your fingers. Then after you got the clothes through the WRINGER you took them and put them on the line. Some are wondering what they go on a line for, right? You see, back when I was a kid, to dry clothes you had to go outside and put them on a line to dry. Come on, it was not that long ago.
The point I am making is that we have more free time today than any other generation in the history of this country. Where does it all go? I think I know. When I was a kid we had a television and it was black and white; imagine that! It only had a few channels and most of the day those channels had a test pattern on it. Earlier I mistakenly said “test tube” and the TV did have those but we don’t have those anymore. Anyway, most of the day all that was on the screen was a blank test pattern. But today we are so rich that you can get up in the morning and go over to the couch and flip channels and on some dishes, never make it through all the channels.
”The young man walked away sad because there were many channels.”
You could say that you just don’t have the time to pray.
Recently a mother asked me about helping her with her daughter’s marriage. I asked the mother if I’d ever met her daughter and she avoided answering the question. Then I asked her when the last time was, that her daughter came to Mass at St. William’s. The woman said that it was years ago. I then asked where the daughter lived and the woman stated that she lived here in Greenville. Then I asked the mother the same question and she named a time when some priest was supposedly here way back. I told the lady to get away from me. She wanted me to deliver a Marriage Certificate to her daughter’s doorstep. You see, her daughter is in college; there are those important things. The daughter is civilly married and is in college so she can’t come here. I got mad and told her to scram. So in one sense, we’d really love to pray if we had the time. We have time for whatever we value!
Last Tuesday in the Gospel of Luke, chapter ten, Jesus is going to visit two of His friends, Martha and Mary.
Jesus entered into a village where a woman named Martha welcomed Him to her home.
I love St. Martha; don’t you know her lawn was perfect and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the floor. You could probably eat off it. But you would probably only eat there once in a while because she would drive you crazy. So Martha welcomed Jesus to the home; she had a sister named Mary, who’d seated herself at the Lord’s feet to listen to His words. Jesus is sitting on the coach and Mary is at His feet. Now Martha was busy with all the details of hospitality went to Jesus and asked if He wasn’t concerned that her sister, Mary, had left her all alone to do the household tasks. She wanted Jesus to tell Mary to help out. Now, this is probably after of few times of Martha saying,
”Mary, don’t you want to come and HELP me in the KITCHEN!”
And of course she was giving her the look. Mary wasn’t budging. You can imagine St. Martha coming out in her nice apron and shaking her finger or a spoon at Jesus and saying,
”tell her to help me.”
What does Jesus say to her?
Martha, Martha you are anxious about many things; Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be denied her.
If you and I decide not to pray then that is how you and I are around other people; anxious and upset. It is not going to get any better until we choose the better part. If you read St. John’s Gospel about the death of their brother, you see that St. Martha began to pray and that she is a totally changed woman. Yea, her lawn is probably still perfect and her house cleaner than mine ever will be, but you can see that she has begun to pray and that she has a deep strong faith that can endure all kinds of tests. St. Martha has grown rich and has probably had to walk away once in a while from a sink full of dishes so she could go and pray. This is really hard for someone who is a neat freak like St. Martha, but she found the time to pray.
In your bulletin on page six you will see where I am asking for prayers for any one of these thirty-four petitions. I am asking that you come one day during the week and receive Holy Communion. We have those twenty-eight Communion services and Mass everyday as well. If you can’t get to the Church for some reason then I ask you to pray at home for at least one of these petitions.
These petitions are listed at the bottom of the homily.
Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I spoke of Mother Angelica? She traced her cure through the intercession of St. Therese, so this saint gets credit for so much of what Mother Angelica is able to do today. That same Sunday there were two other Gospels; every Sunday there are three Gospels; the one we use and the two others that we don’t use. They are Gospel A,B and C. This year we are on B. One of the other Gospel’s on that Sunday was the Gospel on the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man. Do you remember how that ended? The rich man went to hell because he was rich and the poor man went to Heaven because he was poor. That is not the way it is! I am sure there are plenty of poor people in hell and plenty of rich people in Heaven. In today’s Gospel Jesus said that it is just harder for the rich; this is what Jesus says! The reason the rich man went to hell was not because of the way he mistreated Lazarus. Remember Lazarus’ medical plan? Whenever he got sick and had sores the dogs would come and lick them. Ulch! That is how poor Lazarus was. Now, the rich man didn’t mistreat him, but lived his whole life with Lazarus dying at his threshold and didn’t even notice.
”Lazarus? Where? Is someone poor?”
When Lazarus died he went to the bosom of Abraham in Heaven and the rich man went to hell.
If you are able to make it through a week and you won’t pray for one of these intentions, how are you any different from the rich man who wouldn’t lift one finger and tell one of his servants to help Lazarus? If you won’t pray this week, one time, to help any of these people listed here in the bulletin, you just got your spiritual temperature taken and it isn’t good. What did Pope Paul VI say about a body without soul? That is about where your prayer life is if you make it through a seven-day period and you don’t mention one of these petitions in prayer. What did that prayer say before the readings?
God, may our love for You move us to help others.
Those are not just words to fill up a space. Our prayer and worship of God will move us to help our brothers and sisters in the world. Prayer moves us to see our brothers and sisters in need and so we support married couples with problems, disable children and others with prayer. It is not taking up a collection at all; but saying that you are so rich because you have the ability to pray and that is why you should. God will not put up with such stubbornness forever; the clock is ticking on me and it may be ticking on you!
The example of and the experience of praying given to us by St. Teresa of Avila when she said she no longer desires conversation with man but with angels is tremendous St. Cyprian of Carthage centuries ago wrote this, and talks about how prayer takes us out of this world and valley of tears and transports us to Heaven. This was in the Divine Office yesterday.
The spirit of a strong and stable character strengthened by meditation endures. This unshaken spirit, which is strengthened by a certain solid faith in the future will be enlivened against all the terror of the devil and the threats of this world.
So he is saying that prayer will make us strong. At the end he says,
What an honor, what happiness to depart joyfully from this world; to go forth in glory from the anguish and pain in one moment to close the eyes that looked on the world of men and in the next to open them and once to look on God and Christ. The speed of this joyous departure, you are suddenly withdrawn from earth to find yourself in the Kingdom of Heaven.
He is talking about prayer. For so many reasons prayer is recommended but especially for what the first reading says.
”I prayed and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.”
This is the Month of the Holy Rosary. The Holy Father, Pope John Paul II recommended it as well as Pope Benedict. The Church recommends that we pray the Rosary while contemplating the Face of Christ. This will be very beneficial to us personally and we will grow less anxious and occupied with the cares of this world. We will start to resemble St. Martha after she started praying and we will be helping so many around us that need our prayers.
Let us not waste our lives; God will not endure that stubborn attitude.
”I prayed and prudence was given me; I pleaded and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me.”
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
PLEASE HELP! Can you pray for the following intentions and, IF POSSIBLE, receive Holy Communion (Monday through Friday) for these most important intentions! Father Paul
PLEASE PRAY FOR:
(1) the sick
(2) those with a terminal illness
(3) the elderly who live alone or in a facility with no family to help them
(4) Mothers awaiting the birth of their children
(5) fidelity in marriage
(6) married couples experiencing problems
(7) the safety of children
(8) the poor & the hungry
(9) those who are in prison & their families
(10) The victims of violent crime & their families
(11) children born with disabilities & their families
(12) women of any age contemplating an abortion, that they may choose life
(13) an end to wars
(14) peace in the world
(15) those in need of work
(16) men & women in US Military & their families
(17) addicts of alcohol, drugs, sex, pornography, or gambling
(18) those who serve the poor
(19) parishioners & benefactors of St. William/Our Lady of Fatima
(20) Pope Benedict: that all Bishops, Priests & Deacons will support the successor of St. Peter among us
(21) Mother Angelica’s Sisters, the Friars, Knights of the Eucharist & Staff at EWTN
(22) Poor Souls in Purgatory
(23) parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles cousins, siblings who have died
(24) Knights of Columbus & the Women’s Guild members, living & deceased
(25) those who struggle against impurity of any kind
(26) Doctors, nurses & technical aides who care for the sick
(27) lapsed Catholics
(28) the repose of the Soul of +Rev. Msgr. John V. McCallum
(29)a generous rain
(30) the preservation of traditional marriage
(31) the Fathers of Mercy, those living & deceased
(32) the Missionaries of Charity & the poor served by them around the world
(33) Our Lady’s Special Intentions during October, the month of Most Holy Rosary
(34) Police officers, Firemen, Paramedics, living & deceased.