Spiritual House Cleaning

December starts tomorrow.  While winter officially starts on December 21^st, we’ve already had snow, and it has definitely become colder outside.  Depending on how you look at it, we are either really lucky or unlucky that we live in an area which experiences four seasons.

The liturgical year, too, has seasons:  Advent, Christmas, a first period of Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, and a second period of Ordinary Time.

(image source)

Advent starts this Sunday, December 2^nd.  During this time, we wait in joyful hope for the coming of Jesus at Christmas, but He is already with us.  Christmas is our time to remember Jesus’ first coming, but He comes to us at each Mass we attend, and His earthly dwelling is in each of our hearts.  So, let us make our hearts into a dwelling fit for Jesus, who is God in the person of the Son.  

Join us for our parish Penance Service on Monday at 6:30 pm.  We will have a liturgy of the word followed by an examination of conscience, and an opportunity for individual confession.  Take advantage of this opportunity to do some pre-holiday cleaning, and take care of Jesus’ home as well as your own.

Gift and Reward

The Parable of the “Workers in the Vineyard” is a parable NOT ONLY ABOUT JUSTICE but more about the parable of GENEROSITY.

It is a parable of justice because those who worked for the eight (8) hour workday received the usual, regular and just wage for a day’s work.  It is also a parable of generosity because some hired workers received more than what they deserve.

What the Lord meant was that hired men received money from the Lord not because they had to be paid for work that they did but simply because God wanted to give.  It is the same with heaven.  Heaven is not God’s reward to us for not violating the Ten Commandments.  Heaven is not God’s reward to us because we go to Mass every Sunday or because we pray the rosary, or do not kill, steal, or commit adultery.  It is not because of all of these that God must reward us with heaven.  “HEAVEN IS NOT A REWARD; HEAVEN IS GOD’S GIFT TO US.”

If we were to demand justice from God for what we do, we will all end up outside the Kingdom of heaven.  We will all be able to enter God’s kingdom not because we are worthy, but because GOD IS GENEROUS.  We will all be able to enter God’s kingdom not because we are being rewarded for the good things we have done but because GOD IS GOOD.  There is no opportunity; there is no chance for us to buy heaven.  If we try to buy heaven, it will be like buying the whole of California with fake gold, which is valueless.  We cannot buy our salvation.

Our acts of love to our neighbor, our acts of piety, our fidelity to the commandments, our praying the Rosary everyday our going to mass every Sunday, these are only expressions of our love for God.

And at the end of the day when everything is said and done, we can only say, in humility:  “Lord I still do not deserve heaven.  Please be gracious to me, let me enter heaven one day.”

If God desires to give us heaven, let us thank Him.  Heaven is not God’s reward to us.  Heaven is not something we pay for.  Heaven is COMPLETELY GOD’S GIFT to us.

God is generous, God is kind.  God is love.  Let us thank God that He is generous because if God were only just, we will all be outside the kingdom of heaven.  The generosity of God is the beginning of new life.  May we all experience the generosity of God and may we be able to be generous to others as God has been generous in loving us.

Now Thank We All Our God

The holiday season is upon us.  This is true both in the secular sense of the phrase “holiday season” and in the religious sense.  This week, we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States, and the Church Universal celebrates the feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.

When I was in middle school at the Madeleine Choir School, Christ the King was the start of some of my favorite music.  We processed around the outside of the Cathedral chanting the Christus Vincit Acclamations accompanied solely by hand bells.  I can still hear the chant in my head, and it brings a smile to my face.  It really felt like a celebration.

And that is as it should be.  The feast of Christ the King is like New Year’s Eve for the Catholic Church.  The following Sunday, we enter into a new liturgical year with the First Sunday of Advent.  It is a time of new beginnings and a time of reflection.

This ties in well with the secular holiday of Thanksgiving.  This week, we take time to be thankful for the gifts we have been given, and if we are lucky, we get to spend time with family and friends whom we maybe do not get to see very often.  It is a time of reminiscence and nostalgia for many.

My family usually hosts Thanksgiving at our house.  This year, we will have twelve people around our Thanksgiving table, which is a lot for us.  I’m looking forward to it though because we will get to see family we don’t usually see this time of year.  We are joking around the house that there will be at least eight people there who share substantial amounts of DNA, and we’ll probably be a pretty raucous bunch because of that, but that’s not a bad thing. 

Enjoying the company of others is part of what makes the holidays a special time of year.  Let us remember that, while we are renewing our connections with family and friends and strengthening those bonds, we can and should be renewing our connection and strengthening our bond with God also.

Why are You Angry?

Jesus is commonly known to be a compassionate, loving and merciful God.  We often refer to him as the Good Shepherd who never leaves His flock unattended.  He is a gentle God.  But in the Gospel of St John 2:13-22, we can see a rather surprising action of Jesus.  For some it may even be scandalous.  Why?  It is because Jesus became “ANGRY”:  An angry God who made a whip out of chords, drove out the money-changers from the temple and overturned their tables.

What could be the possible reason for this anger?  It is stated in the gospel that he would like to put a stop in making the temple, His Father’s house, a market place and a den of thieves.  It is the “ZEAL FOR MY FATHER’S HOUSE” that consumes Him.  Therefore he was angry because of his immense love for His Father and His desire to rectify the wrong things done.

We might then ask the question.  Is anger a sin?  YES or NO?  If we say YES, it would mean Jesus committed a sin, and His sinlessness is tainted by this anger.  If we say NO, then how can we explain anger as one of the Capital Sin together with, pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, lust and wrath?  Is anger a sin?  The answer can be Yes and No.

YES, Anger is a sin when it is a product of revenge, a burst of unreasonable emotion, and a show of feeling of resentment and frustrations.  NO, Anger is not a sin when one just want to straighten our wrongdoings and rectify the erroneous action committed.  Thus one is therefore angry, not because of hatred but because of love.

Aristotle says; “Anger is justified when it is done in the right time, by the right people, at the right place, and for the right reason”  And so, Jesus remains blameless and sinless because His anger is a product of correcting us in the name of love.

For those people in authority, especially parents, when you are angry, make sure it is not a sinful anger.  Let your anger be like the anger of Jesus, whose only motivation is love.  Now, it is good to ask yourself “What kind of anger do I feel?  Am I hasty person who flies into overwhelming temper once I see something is wrong?”  I believe that it is always good to ask Jesus to give us the grace to be patient.  When we ask God to be patient, let us plead from Him the grace to correct, not simply to express our anger, but to bring people to conversion, to eventually become a better person.  Only through this will our anger become life-giving.  And when it is life-giving, our anger becomes God’s instrument of grace.

Take a Breath

For me, October seemed extremely busy.  I’m sure part of it was due to the fact that I am in the first year of a new job and finding out all the things that needed to be done before November started.  Last week I felt like I could finally take a breath and think about other things – things that I had been putting on the back-burner for the last month because it felt like I just didn’t have time.  With the approach of the holiday season, I know things will get busy again, perhaps even more so, because there will be family commitments and events in my personal life as well as things going on at work.

This in-between time of fewer commitments and more time spent with my family emphasizes to me that God never gives us more than we can handle.  It might feel like we are being pushed to our limits, but He will never push us past our limits.  And, when He pushes us to our limits, there is usually time afterward to recover ourselves and regain our former strength.

So, when we are going through a difficult period in our lives, we should remember that God, who is all-knowing, knows what is best for us.  He gives us times of struggle so we have a chance to turn to Him for help.  If we turn to Him in prayer, whether directly or through the intercession of the Saints, He will provide an answer for us.

Prayers in Correction

In the Gospel of St Matthew chapter 18:15-20 Jesus put fraternal correction and prayer at the same moment of his preaching. Jesus is telling us that the most significant characteristic of fraternal correction or the best effective way of fraternal correction is to pray for the person who needs to be corrected.

There is a not holy joke that says:

“Oh, Father I prayed for the person who hurts me, I prayed for my enemies.” And then the priest asked: “So what is your prayer for your enemies?”, and the man said: “I prayed that all of them will die.”

My sisters and brothers, that is not how we should pray for them. The gospel is clear. We pray for them, confront them in order to win them back, make them realize their mistake, and bring that person back to God. There are already so many sins committed in the name of fraternal correction, there are already so many persons that are hooked under the banner of constructive criticism, but not so many are really praying for the people we wish to correct.

Trash talking somebody will not solve any dispute or solve problems in relationships. Gossip will just make it worse. Pope Francis once said: “Gossiping is terrorism.” Let us reflect and consider this; If somebody commits an offense against us, instead of talking to the person first, can we bring our conversation to GOD first? If somebody has hurt you; talk to God about the person, if somebody needs correction; talk to God about the person, and if somebody needs to be criticized; talk to God about the person. The advice is “TALK TO GOD FIRST”

The first and foremost effective and responsible way of correcting people is by PRAYER. We must realize that it is not our good works that change hearts, it is not our beautiful words that make people change their ways, it is only the GRACE OF GOD that can change the hearts of people and NOT US. That is why PRAYER is the most important, vital instrument in FRATERNAL CORRECTION.

We will pray today for the people we want to correct, we will pray today for the people we are tempted to criticize, and we will pray today for the people who have hurt us, and we will talk to God about them.

Seeking Serenity

My bachelor’s degree is in English.  In the senior seminar class for this major, my college made the informal distinction between a teaching major and an academic major, the difference being the answer to “What are you going to do with that?” which is a question English majors get all the time.  Are you going to teach the subject to others?  Congratulations, you’re getting a teaching major.  Are you going to spend your time picking apart literature, writing scholarly articles, or becoming an editor?  Congratulations, you’re getting an academic major.

I was a teaching major.  My plan, in the grand scheme of things, was to teach high school English.  Obviously, God had other plans.  I did my stint working in a high school in a special education classroom, then in two different elementary schools in special education classrooms, and then in a daycare.  None of these classrooms really gave me a chance to do anything with my English major.

My family refers to me as the “resident English major.”  Often, I am presented with their writing to edit it for meaning and flow.  I’ve done various forms of creative writing since I was little, and now, I write for this blog as well.  But mostly, I write for myself.

Writing, like any hobby, is a skill that one improves through practice.  There are many who share tips on how to make writing a habit.  Daily pages (“write every day”), stream of consciousness (“write whatever is going through your mind at a given time”), prompts (topics to write about), and many other methods exist to get people writing and doing so consistently.

For the very ambitious, there are writing “events.”  For many writers, November is National Novel Writing Month, during which people attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in just thirty days.  I have tried this several times, and I have succeeded exactly once.  Veterans of this particular event say it is doable if you allow yourself to accept whatever comes from your brain and makes its way onto the page (or the computer screen).  The focus is on quantity and not quality.  “That’s what editing is for,” they say.  Just get it all out, and then you can make it into what you envisioned it to be in the first place.

This is very difficult for people with perfectionist tendencies such as myself, but I feel like it’s also a good exercise to engage in.  Sometimes you have to give yourself permission to accept what things are for the way they are.  The same is true in life, which is why we have the so-called Serenity Prayer.

Lord, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The Courage to change the things I can,

And Wisdom to know the difference.

With this mindset, hopefully it will be easier for us to accept our imperfections and, as the morning offering prayer of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales says, conduct ourselves each day in a manner pleasing to God.

Praying for Those in Purgatory

As we begin the month of November, we celebrate the feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day.  On All Saints Day, we remember those who have gone before us who are in Heaven.  This includes those saints who are canonized (i.e., whose feasts and memorials we celebrate throughout the year), as well as other holy people who we know are in heaven.  On All Souls Day, we pray for those souls that are in Purgatory.  At St. Ambrose, we specifically remember those who have passed away in the last year at the Mass on November 2^nd.

The Catholic Church dedicates the entire month of November to praying for those souls that are in Purgatory.  But why do they need our prayers?  Purgatory is not so much a place as it is a process according to Catholic teaching.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) refers to it as a “cleansing fire” (CCC 1031).  In the summary part of this section of the Catechism, it states:

Those who die in God’s grace and friendship imperfectly purified, although they are assured of their eternal salvation, undergo a purification after death, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of God.  (CCC 1054)

Since this period of purification is a process, it makes sense that we would pray for those going through the process, just as we might pray for someone living who is experiencing a time of trial in his or her life.

It is comforting to know that we will not be condemned for our sins automatically.  As long as we are repentant for our actions, we can be saved from damnation in Hell.  During this month of November, of course pray for your loved ones who have died, but also, consider praying for the souls in Purgatory who have no one to pray for them.