Stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour

 

Scripture readings for this reflection can be found at Friday of the Twenty-First Week in Ordinary Time | USCCB

In our readings for today’s mass, from 1^st Corinthians and the Gospel of Matthew, we are learning that we are called to live out our lives sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others, and to be ready for the time when we meet our Lord at the end of our lives, whenever that may be.

St. Paul tells us in the first reading from 1^st Corinthians that he came to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To most people the message of the gospel is foolishness. But it is faith in Jesus Christ that we are saved by the power of God. We have those in our lives that may think it’s foolish for us to follow Jesus Christ. They, like the Jews mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, demand signs as proof that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Or, like the Greeks, demand that we use the wisdom of this world to explain why God would allow Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. They fail to understand and to accept that Jesus Christ came into this world to suffer death on the cross and to rise on the third day for the forgiveness of our sins. That is how God chose to bring about our redemption. This is the wisdom of God. To people without faith, this doesn’t make sense and lacks wisdom. But it is faith in Jesus Christ that brings us the forgiveness of our sins and salvation.

In the parable about the 10 virgins, we learn that we are to be ready always for the time of the Lord’s return, whether it’s through our own earthly death, or in the final coming of Jesus at the end of time. To gain heaven, we, like the wise virgins need to be ever ready for the time when we meet Jesus face to face. We do this by the regular use of the Sacraments. Frequent use of the Sacrament of Confession when we fall short of loving God and our neighbor, and the frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist. This helps us to be God centered and ready for the Lord’s final coming into our lives, whether through our own death, or at the end of time. Further, we are to live our lives as our Lord has taught us: Love God with our whole mind, heart, and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This, in imitation of the wise virgins, is how we are to be prepared for the eventual coming of the Lord, and to be able to enter the wedding feast known as heaven.

By doing these things, we will be ready for the Lord in whatever time he calls us to himself. We are, like St. Paul, to preach the Gospel to all in our lives, whether by word or by action. Then we will be ready for the bridegroom, Jesus Christ, when we enter the wedding feast of heaven.

XXI Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Item for blog of Dcn. Thomas Tortorella (XXI Sun. in O.T.) 8/21/22 © All Rights Reserved by Fr. Arthur  Rojas ©

 Today we have a recurring guest blogger:  Fr. Arthur F. Rojas, administrator of PRESENTATION OF THE B.V.M CHURCH, PORT EWEN AND SACRED HEART CHURCH, ESOPUS. For more information on this parish, check out their website at Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary & Sacred Heart Churches - Port Ewen - Esopus, NY (presentationsacredheart.org)

            I suppose that in these days of August – with days and hours of opportunity not only for outdoor sports and travel but also for catching up on reading of all kinds, for pleasure and for our edification in body, mind, and soul – that many readers have heard of George Orwell’s science fiction book, 1984, and its dystopian presentation of technologically sustained totalitarianism.  Fewer readers may have heard of – but should take the time to read – another science fiction book written almost 20 years earlier by Aldous Huxley, another Britisher, that is Brave New World.  If 1984 presents a “hard” totalitarian future for mankind with economic scarcity, relentless propaganda, insertion of a one-party state into family life, brute force, and perpetual warfare by the technologically sustained and omnipresent State, then Brave New World describes a comparatively “soft” totalitarian future in which people are encouraged to revel in fornication and drug use at the expense of normal family life in order to maintain a global government’s control over the lives of the Earth’s inhabitants.  Does any of this sound familiar to you, dear reader?

 

            As the sacredness of marital intimacy is denigrated and distorted by powerful sectors, as the basis of family life is undermined, and as the innocence and even physical integrity of our youth and children is targeted both in “soft” and “hard” ways by our exaltation of comfort and convenience, by repeated messages by mass media, academia, and popular culture, and the growing coercion exerted professionally, economically, culturally, as well as politically, the readings of today in the Ordinary Form remind us that the freedom of the children of God, that is of Christians is based paradoxically, it seems on the “discipline of the Lord” (Hb 12:5, from our second reading).  It may be difficult for some of us, especially if our experience with fathers or families has been disappointing or worse, to imagine God as Father, or more precisely, as the good Father and His loving wish to teach us how to live and to live well.  Yet, God would like each of us to have a personal relationship with Him in this life as a prelude – if we choose to accept His offer – to eternal union with God, which we call “Heaven.”  Compared to the future written by Messrs. Huxley and Orwell, in which the libido, the narcotic high, or the Party usurps the place of God in human life, in which one’s hopes for life are limited to the present, we hear Jn 14:6 sung before the Gospel is proclaimed today, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, says the Lord; no one comes to the Father, except through Me.”  No wonder so many leaders and forces have tried to replace, control, or sideline Christianity in history, in current events, and in the arts!  By pointing to a purpose for living beyond this life as well as in this life, by showing that true freedom is saying “no” to mindless consumption, error, lies, and sin while choosing instead the good, the true, and the beautiful as coming ultimately from God’s plan for life and love, we committed Christians move towards the narrow gate (Lk 13, the source of today’s Gospel), that is the gate of holiness.  We may be considered “last” in this society for our commitment to Christ and His ways, but God has sent us to the world now to spread the Good News (cf. Ps 117) so that at least some people may be saved from slavery to sin and eternal separation from God (a.k.a. “Hell”) and thereby be brought to holiness in this life and Heaven in the hereafter. 

To borrow from the rock music bands Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, while there may be a “stairway to Heaven,” there is also a “highway to Hell.”  Let us support each other with prayer, good example, teaching, and charity towards the narrow gate that Jesus points out to us in Lk 13.  May our words and deeds as Catholics invite and inspire others to move towards Our Lord through His Catholic Church.

XX Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

XX Sunday in Ordinary Time 8/14/22 – © All Rights Reserved by Rev. Fr. Arthur F. Rojas ©

  Today we have a guest blogger from Fr. Arthur F. Rojas, administrator of PRESENTATION OF THE B.V.M CHURCH, PORT EWEN AND SACRED HEART CHURCH, ESOPUS. For more information on this parish, check out their website at Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary & Sacred Heart Churches - Port Ewen - Esopus, NY (presentationsacredheart.org)

            As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia more than 30 years ago, one of my favorite courses was on the history of the Catholic Church of the United States.  Having read works by historians such as Jay P. Dolan and Fr. Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. and considering other sources,

I discerned that as Catholics had moved to the suburbs out of a largely urban presence in the mid-to-late twentieth century, we Catholic Americans had started to assimilate too easily into a society whose foundations were neither Catholic then and are no longer recognizably Christian today.  There will be those who will point out exceptional figures who challenged prevailing attitudes such as Dorothy Day, Archbishop Joseph Rummel, who fought racial injustice in New Orleans to the point of excommunicating defiantly racist Catholic public figures, the author Flannery O’Connor, Nellie Gray and the largely Catholic founders of the pro-life movement in New York and much of the United States, the evangelist Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughn of New York, Msgr. Philip Reilly of Brooklyn, Fr, Augustus Tolton, Fr. John Hardon, Mother Angelica (E.W.T.N.), or to some people: César Chavez, the Berrigan brothers, or Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J.  However, survey after survey finds that we Catholic Americans have forfeited our “salt and light” (Mt 5:13-16) as we largely adopt prevailing postures on contemporary issues and even attitudes towards manners, beauty, and modesty, let alone death and the supernatural.  Moreover, widespread complacency and poor awareness of our own history and identity as Catholics in America lead many of us to regard fervor as fanatical, reverence as retrograde, and to mistrust true prophecy as rabble-rousing, especially in the age of cancel culture.  Sadly, we tend to value a false “niceness” or “tolerance”, papering over conflicts or ignoring our crying need for conversion as persons and as a society, over Christ’s call to conversion and those who would challenge us out of our comfort zone towards greater holiness in this life.  Then as now, we Catholic Americans are not comfortable with our Church being prophetic to ourselves, let alone the greater society!

 

            In light of the readings today in the Ordinary Form, Our Lord Himself (Luke 12:49-53) speaks trenchantly of His message compelling people to choose for Him or against Him, in other words “division”!  Jesus came to set the Earth on fire because it was His ardent love of His Father’s plan for our salvation and for you and me that led Him to endure the Passion and Crucifixion for our sins.  Although moderation is virtuous at certain times, Christ’s call to holiness is radical - some may call it “extreme” - in that it seeks to transform you and me from the roots of our being.  Indeed, “radical” is from “radix”, the Latin word for root.   The holy prophet Jeremiah is recalled in Jer 38:4-6, 8-10 as conveying what the people needed to hear from God, even if local princes loathed the message and sought to silence Jeremiah.  In Hebrews 12:1-4, we are told of the radical holiness of the saints, the “cloud of witnesses,” as examples for us to follow Jesus, “the leader and perfecter of faith.”  Echoing the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, you and I were not created for comfort, but for greatness.  How prophetic these words are in a world that exalts comfort and convenience!  Through the prayers of Our Lady assumed into Heaven (whom is celebrated on Aug. 15), may we heed the call to conversion made by Christ through the prophets of our day.  May we Catholic Americans then become worthy messengers of God’s call to others around us.

 

 

What God has joined together, man must not separate

 

Scripture readings for today's reflection can be found at Friday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time | USCCB

In our gospel for today our Lord is teaching about the true nature of marriage. The true nature of marriage is that of love between a man and a woman, which reflects the love that God has for each one of us. Our Lord clearly points out that from the beginning that man shall leave his mother and father and become one with his wife. The Pharisees were having a problem accepting the permanence of what it means to be married. They were looking at it as just a contract between two people. And if the relationship didn’t work, the husband would write a bill of divorce and move on. This always seemed to work in the favor of the man, but not for the woman being left behind.

Even in our own society we have things like “no fault divorce.” If two people feel it’s not “working out” then they just move on to divorce. Marriage and relationships in our society have become very self-centered. People don’t seem to worry about the other person in the relationship or the children that may have come because of the marriage. They seem to only worry about their own selfish needs and concerns. We’ve become a disposable society: once we’re finished with someone, it seems it’s time to move on and throw away the relationship that we feel we no longer need. What is left behind in the divorce will be broken homes and broken hearts of spouses and children. There are no winners in a divorce.

Marital love was begotten by God himself and raised to the tremendous status of a sacrament by his Son. A man and woman united in marriage are a miracle of love – two distinct persons, yet one in the creative beauty of God.

It’s important to understand why the church encourages those considering marriage to take their time during their courtship to get to know each other and to have a better understanding of the meaning of what marriage is and who each person is to the other. During the marriage ceremony, we are reminded that we will be together in good times, in bad times, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

In the encyclical the Joy of Love, Pope Frances says, “The love they pledge is greater than any emotion, feeling or state of mind, although it may include all of these. It is a deeper love, a lifelong decision of the heart. Even amid unresolved conflicts and confused emotional situations, they daily reaffirm their decision to love, to belong to one another, to share their lives and to continue loving and forgiving.”

Let us pray for all married couples, and those considering marriage that they will understand marriage as a gift from God and that it’s meant to be a lifelong commitment.

Treasure Your Treasure in Heaven

XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Submission to the blog of Dcn. Thomas Tortorella for the XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time

by Rev. Fr. Arthur F. Rojas © All Rights Reserved ©

 Today we have a guest blogger from Fr. Arthur F. Rojas, administrator of PRESENTATION OF THE B.V.M CHURCH, PORT EWEN AND SACRED HEART CHURCH, ESOPUS. For more information on this parish, check out their website at Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary & Sacred Heart Churches - Port Ewen - Esopus, NY (presentationsacredheart.org)

Although I find the common description of life being a “journey” to be quite overused and stale because so often the “journey” is emphasized over where we are going or whom to become, it is true that the life of a Christian is one of migration. To paraphrase from St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church, as he elaborated in his Summa Theologica, God has sent man to Earth so that man may return to God.  The readings for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Ordinary Form) also recall or anticipate movement over time, space, and even preparing for our accounting for ourselves to God at the end of our lives (the particular judgment) or at the end of time (the Second Coming or the Final Judgment). 

 

            Also worthy of our rumination over the readings of today is the timing of the Feast of the Transfiguration, which fell on Saturday, August 6^th (yesterday).  The Feast of the Transfiguration recalls and celebrates over time and space the manifestation of the divine glory within Jesus, Who is both God and man, a glimpse of which He allowed his companions on Mount Tabor, as attested by Mt 17:1-8, Mk 9:2-8, and Lk 9:28-36, among other sources.  Our Lord too was preparing to move, to descend from Mount Tabor to Jerusalem, where He would suffer His Passion and death on the Holy Cross.  Moreover, the Transfiguration was meant to infuse the memory of His disciples of an encounter with the divinity of Christ, which exists with His humanity in His person so that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man (human in all ways except for sinning), as reiterated to us by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and as we further profess in the Nicene Creed.

 

            “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” (Lk 12:34)   In light of the readings of today and the feast of yesterday, where are you going with your lifestyle in the here and now?  Do we carry out our daily lives knowing that, like the servants of today’s Gospel, we shall owe God an accounting for our choices, priorities, deeds, and words of our time here on Earth? Kyrie eleison!

 

“Brothers and sisters: Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.  Because of it the ancients were well attested.” (Hb 11:1-2)   At whatever stage of life we are in and in our last days, can others around us see in Whom or in what we first place our faith concretely in good times and bad?  For those who are lukewarm in their Catholic faith or who say that they are “spiritual but not religious”: that yellow light before God, that acknowledgment of a “god” somewhere out there but without the trust to let Him truly become first in our lives sooner or later must become a green light or a red light before God.  At the hour of our death, when we have that final encounter with Christ, arguably He will reflect back to us the choice that we have been making throughout our lives to Him,   More reason, therefore, at least to seek His help to leave behind bad habits, indifference and negligence, and the chains of our attachments to sinful ways to make a “Passover” analogous to Wisdom 18:6, our first reading, to choose and live in the freedom of the children of God, to choose and share the good, the true, and the beautiful, to allow God to transform us as we seek His grace and to bear fruits of His grace in our lives and to help others to do likewise, and to show God by the end of our lives – whether it arrives tonight or thirty years from now – that we truly belong to “the people that the Lord has chosen to be His own.”  (Psalm 33, the responsorial psalm of today’s Mass in the Ordinary Form).

 

Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

 

Scripture readings for today's reflection can be found at Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time | USCCB

These are challenging words from Our Lord today: who really wants to suffer and carry his cross? And then Our Lord goes on to say if you want to save your life, you will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake finds it. It doesn’t sound too inviting being a follower of Jesus. But that is what Our Lord is calling us to do: to take up our crosses and have Him as the center of who we are.

 Jesus says that following Him is not about self-fulfilment, but self-denial. It is not getting your best life now, but about losing your best life now in order to gain eternal life! Following Jesus is not self-centred, but it is cross-centred.

Being a follower of Jesus Christ is a way of life. We are called to have Jesus as the center of all who we are. There is no one more important to who we are then the Lord. Following Jesus and the commandments of God are countercultural. We are called to do things that most everyone would turn away from. We are called to love God with our whole mind, heart, and soul. We are called to do what is always right and just in all situations in our lives out of service to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This doesn’t mean that we are to turn away from this world and to live as monks or nuns in some cloistered monastery. We are called to follow Jesus and to bring the love of God into a world that is full of hatred and violence. We are called to walk the way of truth and to be a witness that Jesus is true God and true man. Many people deny this. But we are called to share this truth with everyone we meet, whether it’s family or friends. That’s where the cross comes in. Jesus is letting us know that it’s not easy being His follower, but by having Him as the center of who we are, and living out our Christian lives, we can have that peace that can only come from loving God.

By living this way as followers of the Lord, Jesus is promising us salvation and eternal life. By losing our lives and making Jesus the most important person in our lives, we are finding true life. We will always have suffering in this life, but living God centered lives, we will have that peace that comes from God alone.

Walking the path of Jesus includes the regular use of the sacrament of penance when we fall short of our Christian vocation, and we are to receive Holy Communion as often as possible. Finally, we are to love others as we love ourselves. It’s not easy, but it is what our Lord is calling us to do to gain eternal salvation. So, place Jesus in the center of all you do in your life. Lay down your life for Jesus and find eternal life instead!