Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William the Confessor Catholic Church
Greenville, Texas
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 26, 2007
My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord, or lose heart when reproved by Him. Whom the Lord loves He disciplines; He scourges every son He acknowledges. Endure your trials as discipline; God treats you as sons. For what son is there, whom his father does not discipline. At the time all discipline seems to cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it. So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Last November, just after Thanksgiving I went up to Detroit for the Ordination of a friend of mine, who had gone through seminary with me. He was being ordained as the Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit. He is from Corpus Christi. There is a little bit of a climate change from Corpus Christi. While we were there for several days it was as if the weather from Corpus Christi had been transferred to Detroit and vise versa. While I was up in Detroit experiencing great weather you were down here experiencing ice. It had not even gotten below freezing in Detroit at the end of November. Amazing!
There were many people who were attending the Ordination, some I knew and some I had never met before. There were bishops, priests, and laypeople and it was very well organized. Everything had to proceed smoothly from one event to another. They held a big luncheon at the Sacred Heart Seminary for all the visitors and two large dinning rooms were filled with the bishops, priests, and laypeople.
After lunch we were told that we could board shuttle busses that held about forty or fifty people. We were going to be taken in groups over to the Cathedral for the Ordination. After lunch I boarded the bus and went straight to the back. Bishops and priest got on behind me and there was only one lady on the bus; she was the driver. She drove us over to the Cathedral and we didn’t get lost. [Laughter]
We arrived at the Cathedral and the bishops and priests on the bus are busy visiting and of course I am in the back praying quietly. [Laughter] When we stopped at the Cathedral the bus driver opened the door and spoke to the first security guard, there were many, asking him for entrance into the parking lot so that we could get out. The bus driver must had been told by one of the bishops sitting near her to ask the guard where the bishops are to Vest to get ready for Mass. So from her seat on the bus she yelled to the guard who was not going to leave his position on the sidewalk and asked,
“WHERE DO THE BISHOPS VEST?”
Of course the guard replied with a “Huh?” and she had to repeat herself. The security guard called someone on the walkie-talkie and they didn’t know so they pushed us on to the next security guard and the same thing happened again. She opened the door, security didn’t budge…. there must be a law. We ended up going to the third security station; we were running out of security guards. The driver opened the door and the guard looked puzzled as she went through the same routine again.
The bishops are thinking that they will have a cushy place and the priests will have to vest where there is no air-conditioning. The driver again asked where the bishops vest and then some voice from the back of the bus yelled,
“ENTER THROUGH THE NARROW GATE!”
[Laughter]
They still don’t know who said that! [Laughter]
Father Paul said that!
Our Lord tells us this in the Gospel today.
If you look at the front of the bulletin there is a beautiful picture by Raphael of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, which we celebrated last Wednesday following the Assumption.
painting can be viewed here
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/r/raph ... nation.jpg
Now, the Blessed Virgin Mary is crowned Queen of heaven and earth, not because she is the biological mother of Jesus, which is true; she is the biological mother if Jesus. In the painting you can see her above the Tabernacle at the foot of the Cross. Because she entered through the narrow gate, she is Queen of Heaven and Earth.
The day after the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary we had the Feast of St. Rose of Lima. She was born in 1586 in Peru. Speaking of the narrow gate, this is what St. Rose once wrote.
Grace comes after trials. This is St. Rose telling us what Jesus told her at prayer.Our Lord and Savior lifted up His voice and said with incomparable majesty, “Let all men know that grace comes after tribulation.
St. Rose is so right and this is so fitting for today. Our Lord says to strive to enter through the narrow gate. This is the narrow gate.Let all men know that without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace. Let all men know that the gifts of grace increase as the struggles increase. Let men take care not to stray and be deceived. This is the only true stairway to Paradise and without the Cross they can find no road to climb to Heaven.
Father points to the Crucifix
Lets look at the First Reading today from the Prophet Isaiah. God says,
I will set a sign among them; from them I will send fugitives to the nations to Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan, to the distant coastlands that have never heard of my fame, or seen my glory; and they shall proclaim my glory among the nations.
His glory is so often subtracted from the cross. It is like emphasizing Easter Sunday without remembering Good Friday, but the two are joined and cannot be separated. The glory that God wants spread far and wide is the glory of this narrow gate known as the Cross.
We celebrated the Coronation on Wednesday then St. Rose on Thursday and Friday was the Feast of St. Bartholomew. One account of the Life of St. Bartholomew says that he went to Armenia and the king accepted what he preached. But the king’s brother was angered and had him tortured and killed; he was skinned alive. Yet, St. Bartholomew did not retract what he had preached, he did not shrink from his duty.
St. Teresa of Avila, who began her first convent about twenty years before St. Rose was born, began a reform of the Carmelites in Spain. In the Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume 1 chapter 36 she writes,
She started her first convent on the Feast of St. Bartholomew in 1562 and the Blessed Sacrament was reserved there for the first time. This was a great joy for St. Teresa.When everything was ready the Lord was pleased that on St. Bartholomew’s Day some received the habit and the Blessed Sacrament was reserved.
St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila would bring about the Primitive Observance of the Rule of the Carmelites and they were fought every step of the way by many of the Carmelites who did not want to see a reform. Cardinals, bishops, and laypeople…many were for the reform and many were against the reform. It was a tremendous cross but after having struggled a few years to get things going she finally saw the fruits of her labor in the first Convent and the first sisters who belonged, on the Feast of St. Bartholomew.
From the very beginning St. Teresa of Avila, who is a Doctor of the Church, was worried and had doubts. The first doubt was the first domino, if you will, to be turned over and then other doubts just followed along. She worried that she had not received sufficient permission for the foundation and that maybe she was being disobedient and should have asked the Provincial for more permissions. This is how she started, one doubt after the other. It is like opening a package and eating one potato chip…yea right! It doesn’t happen does it? Doubts are the same way.
St. Teresa went back and forth with this in her mind over the course of three or four hours. About this she writes,
So there she goes; she’s off and in a race for doubts. She continues,The devil stirred up within me a spiritual battle, as I shall now describe. He brought doubts to my mind about whether I had done was wrong, whether I had gone against obedience having made the foundation without my Provincial’s orders.
It was very bleak; there were no grants or steady income for the convent. They would rely totally on charity and Divine Providence. Again, she is starting a reform so she is a spiritual mother to these sisters, who would come after her. Like a mother, the next question is very consistent. What if they lacked food? Another question…And there were doubts to whether those who lived here would be happy with so much austerity.
She had a very well provided for monastery, where she spent over twenty years but then Christ tapped her on the shoulder concerning a reform of the Carmelite Order. So, it is as if St. Teresa had been abducted by aliens and told to start a convent against her will. This is how the questions are stacking up. After the fact she writes,Wasn’t it all foolishness? Who got me involved in all this since I already had a monastery to live in.
She is referring to God’s commands and all the conversations she’d had with people she respected. She says that she only remembered her own decisions and all the virtues and all her faith were suspended within her without having the strength to activate any of them or defend herself against many blows. There was a spiritual battle, as though she had her hands tied behind her back and the devil was hitting her in the face and the stomach. This was a great trial. She says,All that the Lord commanded me and all the great deal of advice and all the prayers that for more than two years had gone on without stopping, all of that was erased from my memory as thought it had never happened.
This wasn’t going to be easy because she had many illnesses and to be in such a difficult place, who was going to take care of her if she got sick?The devil raised doubts in me also about how I wanted to shut myself up in so austere a house, and with my many illnesses?
Again, the doubts are buzzing around her like bees stinging her.How would I be able to endure so much penance and leave a monastery that was large and pleasant where I had always been so happy.
It sounds like someone who has just moved into a new neighborhood, right? They wonder if the neighbors will like them. These are the same things that were going around in the head St. Teresa of Avila.How can I leave so many friends; for perhaps those in the new house would not be to my liking.
Now, this is where St. Teresa turns a corner; this is where the discipline of prayer comes in just as it mentions in the Second Reading. The devil had intended all of these doubts to take away her peace and quiet so the first thing to go overboard would be prayer. I am sure we can all look back over our lives and when similar things have happened we might have said to God,I had obligated myself to a great deal; perhaps I would despair. The devil by chance may have intended my peace and quiet so that on account of such disturbance I wouldn’t be able to pray and thus would lose my soul.
“Well, if you are going to treat me like this I am just going to stop praying.”
St. Teresa continues.
She was like a deer in the headlights; she was paralyzed.Thoughts of this sort, all mixed together, the devil put before my mind. I was powerless to think of anything else.
It is like going out into the country in the car on a night when there is no moon and the clouds cover the stars. You are out there, park the car, get out and walk away, then all the lights go out on the car and you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Without the lights of the city, stars, or moon, it is pitch black. This was the kind of affliction, obscurity, and darkness that St. Teresa was struggling with.This state was accompanied by an affliction and obscurity and darkness of soul that I would not know how to exaggerate.
This is where things began to turn around.
That means coming into the chapel and being in the presence of Jesus in the Tabernacle in the Most Blessed Sacrament.Finding myself in such a condition I made a visit to the Blessed Sacrament although I could not pray.
She is referring to someone who is about to die. She would still have twenty more years to live and this is what she is thinking at the very beginning.It seems to be the anguish I experienced was like someone in the death agony.
She is in a new place and she is starting something that God really wants and is experiencing all of these doubts flooding into her soul. She says that she thinks this was one of the most difficult periods in her life. She said,I didn’t dare speak of it to anyone, for I still didn’t have a designated confessor.
So things began to turn around for her sitting in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. The devil was throwing all these doubts at her. She continues.It seems my spirit anticipated the many things I had yet to pass through although they weren’t as severe as this suffering would have been should it have lasted. But the Lord did not let his poor servant suffer long; for never did He fail to help me in my tribulations, for He did so in my present one; He gave me a little light to enable me to see it was the devil and to understand the truth, that is was all due to the devil’s desire to frighten me with lies.
Strong resolutions are part of prayer, an Act of Faith, an Act of Hope, an Act of Love are strong resolutions that we have memorized and use often so that later on when we are in trouble we will remember them. So she began to recall her strong resolutions and she even recalled her desire to suffer for God because God gave her just a little bit of light. She says,As a result I began to recall my strong resolutions to serve the Lord and my desires to suffer for Him.
She has broken out of her paralysis and now she is focusing on her faith because God has shinned a light there. The faith that she learned and studied, the strong resolutions she made to serve God and love Him, her desire to even accept unhappiness…all of this flooded back by God’s Grace.I reflected that if I were to fulfill these desires, I couldn’t go about seeking rest. And then if I had trials they would be meritorious. If I had unhappiness then it would serve as Purgatory if I accepted it in the service of God.
You can see here what God had done for a hopeless case. He has the same thing in mind for every hopeless care here today.I had nothing to fear; for since I desire trials these troubles were good. The greater the opposition, the greater the gain. And why did I lack courage to serve One Whom I owed so much.
She goes back to that first question that the devil presented to her.With these and other reflections drawing up all my strength I promised before the Blessed Sacrament to do all I could to obtain permission to come and live in this house and make a promise of enclosure when able to do it in good conscience.
“Well, what if you don’t have permissions? Well then, I am going to taint the permissions. And I tell you what, I am even going to make the promise myself that this is where I am going to live.”
Instead of running from the problems and the doubts, she met the problems head on with God, one at a time. Then she says,
This happens when the truth is allowed in to flood the place with light.Once I did this the devil fled instantly and left me calm and happy and I have remained so always.
She anticipated all these terrible things happening and yet she found it easy.All the enclosure and penance and other things that are observed in this house are extremely for me and amount to little.
Compare that to how she got herself all worked up about how bad it was going to be. The devil had tried to convince her she was a failure and to give it up before she even started.This happiness is so very great I sometimes wonder what I could choose on earth that could be more pleasant for me.
So her health improved and she is wondering if it was because she wasn’t leaning in to all the doubts anymore.I don’t know if these observances are the reason for my having better health than ever, or whether the Lord, since it is necessary and right that I do as everyone else, wants to give me this consolation of being able to keep them and even though with difficulty.
We can see a spiritual conflict that has been successfully defeated with God’s victory.But all those persons who know about my illnesses marvel at this power, and may God be blessed, Who gives all things and in Whose power all things can be done.
This is what St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church was able to glean from this dark night of the soul, as St. John of the Cross called it when he was imprisoned by his brother Carmelites. He trusted in God, that God would show him the way. That is exactly what God did.I was left truly exhausted from such a conflict and I laughed to myself at he devil, for I saw clearly it was he. I believe that the Lord permitted this conflict because I had never known what it was to be unhappy with being a nun, not even a moment in the 28 years or more that I was one and that I might know the great favor He granted me and the torment from which He had freed me. And also so that if I should meet someone that was unhappy I wouldn’t be surprised, but would feel compassion for her and know how to console her.
Yesterday on the front page of the Dallas Morning News there was an article on Blessed Mother Teresa. I also understand that there is a sympathetic piece to Mother Teresa in Time Magazine. What? Is the world coming to an end? It is amazing. There is a new book coming out at the time of the tenth anniversary of her death. She and Princess Diana died five days apart.
What Mother Teresa writes about in her letters sounds like something right out of the diary of St. Teresa of Avila. In the late 1940s Mother Teresa started the Missionaries of Charity. She started the work with the poor when she was already a nun. Within only five weeks in 1959 did she find any peace in all the 66 years she was a nun. Five weeks of peace! It probably went like this. One…two…three…four…five wounds of Christ.
Father turns around and physically counts the wounds of Christ on the Crucifix.
So out of those 66 years she had five weeks of consolation and happiness. This is what she wrote in 1953 after having started the Missionaries of Charity.
In 1958 Pope Pius XII died and so she prayed to him for proof that God was pleased with her work.There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this, more or less, from the time I started the work.
So, she finally is getting relief. She asked the intercession of the great Pope and got a reprieve of five weeks. Five week later she reported being in the tunnel again. After that, her dark night of the soul never stopped. She was a nun teaching, so she was already giving up everything to follow Christ.Then and there disappeared the long darkness, that strange suffering that had lasted ten years.
On September 10, 1946, at the age of 36 she was on a train and Christ spoke to her directly, telling her to become a missionary in the slums to help the poorest of the poor. Just picture yourself in her position on the train; you are a nun, thirty six years old, are teaching and you’ve already left Albania to go to India and you have just been through the second world war and then Jesus talks to you and tells you he wants you to become a missionary in the slums to help the poorest of the poor.
If I had been in her shoes I would have probably asked someone in the compartment if they had a Rolaid. Or I would think that I had not had enough water and that is why I thought I heard Jesus talk to me. I would do anything to not listen to that voice, right? He spoke to her and said,
Come, be My light.
Her experience was one of darkness. In 1961 she wrote,
Anything that belonged to Jesus, she loved it. If it was darkness you read in the Gospels, pain like you read about in the Gospels, then that was for her.I have come to love the darkness, for I believe now that it is a part of a very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.
Talk about discipline, the discipline that St. Paul talks about in that Second Reading. Her discipline, prayers, and study before, combined with God’s grace gave this woman an incredible life in this dark night of the soul that lasted 66 years… minus 5 weeks. She wrote,Back then she felt a deeply personal bond with Jesus, recounting conversations and visions. It was that loss that she mourned the rest of her life although she never abandoned her work.
I’m sorry; if Mother Teresa had no faith I must not even be in the starting gate.If there be God, please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. How painful is this unknown pain; I have no faith.
Mother Teresa took care of her sisters and many other people’s children day in and day out for the rest of her life as well as training the Missionaries of Charity to work all over the world. She called her smile a mask because she didn’t feel things inside. Mothers and fathers know exactly what she is talking about.
“How are you today dad and mom?”
Everything is…fine.”
Right? This is what Jesus means by the narrow gate. Strive to enter through the narrow gate; there is not another way to Heaven. St. Rose is right and this is the stairway to Paradise. I have to say this to my shame; every time something goes wrong or doesn’t go the way I planned it, the temptations and doubts are so overwhelming that the last thing I want to do is pray or turn to God in the Blessed Sacrament. This is where discipline comes in. Even if we are unable to pray and are like a deer in the headlights we must go before God and He will shine His light and it only takes a little to penetrate the darkness of our doubts and lead us through. It is the discipline that St. Paul talks about.
My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord, or lose heart when reproved by Him. Whom the Lord loves He disciplines; He scourges every son He acknowledges. Endure your trials as discipline; God treats you as sons. For what son is there, whom his father does not discipline. At the time all discipline seems to cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it. So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen