Feasts and Faith

We’re entering into the season of holidays and parties, of get-togethers and dinners. As we snack through our leftover Halloween candy, many of us are already planning our Thanksgiving feasts. It seems the most natural thing in the world to share food with those we love. Even if our family meals come pre-loaded with memories of past hurts or the anxiety of differing politics or lifestyles sitting down together at one table. Sharing a meal is fundamental to our human celebrations and remembrances.

It’s no wonder that our most intimate expression of our faith in Jesus Christ is shared at His altar, in His Body and Blood—the Holy Eucharist. This isn’t something invented by the Catholic Church, but is exactly what Christ instructed us to do at the Last Supper (Luke 22:19). Jesus taught so much of His love for us at mealtimes. The images in His parables were often of food or were food-related. We hear of wine and wineskins, of wheat and figs and vines and gardens. He chose fishermen as His first Apostles. The Last Supper was itself a Passover meal, the sacred meal shared by Jews as a renewal of the covenant God gave to them out of His love. Just before the Last Supper, Jesus shared the Sermon on the Mount as He fed the 5000 with the multiplied loaves and fishes. The Gospel of Luke is full of instances where Jesus taught His followers at meals and through meal images.

God always has a plan for us. His choice of covenant meals and food images is no more chance. From the very beginning God has been leading us to Holy Communion. Jesus was, after all, born in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.” In the Eucharist,we are united to Him as a family. Passover was a foreshadowing of the Eucharist just as circumcision was a foreshadowing of Baptism In the New Covenant we enter into an intimate family relationship with God. Jehovah becomes Abba, or “Daddy.” Jesus is both our savior, our brother, and our sacrificial meal. St. Paul teaches about the Eucharist in his first letter to the church at Corinth. We hear of the “cup of blessing” (I Cor. 10:16) as the Blood of Christ and the broken bread as His Body. “Through the one Bread, we, though many, are one body: all of us who are partakers of the one Bread (I Cor. 10:17). Through the Eucharist we are united both to Jesus and to our fellow believers. This is the Good News. Our new covenant is revealed and worshiped in every Mass.

For Catholics, the book of Revelation shows us the Mass in heaven. St. John and the Blessed Virgin Mary are worshipping with the angels at the wedding feast of the Lamb. Music and incense and a shared meal, in the very presence of the Holy Trinity offer us a glimpse of the world to come for believers. God’s plan for us is always one of drawing us closer to Him. The Old Covenant with Abraham made the Jews His family and set the stage for the coming of our Savior. In Jesus, we encounter the Living God, Who freely gave himself to the Father for our sins. He is our living sacrifice, offering His own Body and Blood as our nourishment and heavenly food.

The upcoming holiday season is a time of family fellowship and shared meals. Will it also be a time of shared faith? Will you worship together with your loved ones? Will you share the importance of our faith with your family and friends? Will you take some time from your busy schedule to share your time and your bounty with the poor? Before you get too caught up in the blur of the next couple of months, remember all that you have to be grateful for and the reasons we’re gathering together to share meals and fellowship. Give to those who have less. Give thanks. Go to confession and repent of your sins. Return to the Lord and be welcomed to His heavenly banquet. Only Christ can satisfy our hungry souls.

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

—–C. S. Lewis

Saints

I love the Saints of the Church. I love that they inspire me, and challenge me, and draw me closer to Christ. Sure, I have my favorites but I also love discovering new ones. I have a few on my heavenly committee that I turn to almost every day, year after year. When I read St. Augustine, it’s as if he’s writing directly to me, not to folks in the 4th century. The words of St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Maximilian Kolbe pierce my heart with their deep love of God. I struggle to be a follower of Jesus and the Saints struggled, too. That’s a great comfort to me. They lived lives of heroic faith and that’s what I want, as well. Heroic faith.  

In the little Baptist church of my childhood, the only people we ever learned about who weren’t in the Bible were Lottie Moon and Corrie ten Boom. The first was a missionary in China and the second helped Jews escape the horror of the Holocaust. But I never heard any mention of the Saints of the early Church like St. Justin Martyr, or St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. There didn’t seem to be any great examples of the Christian life between St. Paul and Lottie Moon. Even my squishy young mind knew that couldn’t be right. Reading about the early Church and those Saints who emerged in the times of persecution and martyrdom really opened my eyes. I came to realize that there was a whole huge family of fellow Christians I’d never met. So I set about getting to know them. And I’m still on that journey. Like St. John Henry Newman (an Anglican priest who became Catholic) said: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a protestant…”. The Saints feed me with their words and the stories of their lives. They aid me with their prayers and I feel them kneeling with me at the Lord’s altar.  

I finally had to come to terms with what I was learning about the Saints. The more I read the more I found men and women living the Gospel and bearing amazing fruit. They planted churches all over the world, baptizing thousands. They suffered prison and torture and death for their Savior. They wrote of their struggles and their need for God’s grace. They founded hospitals and universities and monasteries that fed the hungry and cared for the poor and the sick (and still do to this day). If the church of my childhood didn’t offer these Christians to me as examples of heroic faith, then the church had to be wrong. If you failed to share the stories of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena with your children, then you were failing in your duties. The fruit these Saints, and countless others, have born for Christ and His Church is more precious than gold.  The Saints are alive with Jesus in heaven, just as we hope to be. Asking them for their prayers is like asking a friend or family member to pray for you.

It’s always easy to find a Saint you can identify with since there are thousands of them, from all kinds of backgrounds. Mothers and fathers, soldiers and doctors and students. If you believe the Bible, then you believe the Saints are alive with God in heaven. And just as we ask our family and friends to pray for us, we also ask the Saints for their prayers. These are folks who lived their lives as Jesus calls us to live. They’ve faced all the trials and struggles and sins that we’ve encountered and they have allowed Christ to transform their hearts and guide their lives—just as we hope to do. I hope you’ll do some reading and learn about these members of our Christian family who are alive in heaven today. I pray that their beautiful and holy lives will draw you ever closer to the Lord.  

“The deepest reason why the Church is weak and the world is dying is that there are not enough Saints. No, that’s not quite honest. The reason is that WE are not Saints.”

—–Dr. Peter Kreeft

In Times of War, Remember This

Who exactly did He come for?  He tells us He came for the hungry.  Have you ever been hungry?  Sure, hungry for food.  But what else have you hungered for?  Love?  Acceptance?  Happiness?  Then He came for you.  He came for all the starving, the anxious, empty, famished and unfilled.  He came for anyone who’s ever felt weak or hollow or faint.  He came for the unfed, the undernourished, the ones yearning and pining and wishing for more.  For the one’s who’ve never felt good enough, or smart enough, or pretty enough, or just, enough.  He came to feed you with Himself.

He came for the thirsty ones.  The ones whose hearts are dry and parched and lifeless.  He came to bring living water to the burning, dusty souls of the hopeless and the barren.  Your breathless, parched, baked and exhausted dreams will find a place in Him.  He came to flood you with hope, to submerge you in new life, to drench you in love.  He came to drown you in Himself.  He came for the strangers among us.  The outsiders who look different, talk differently and pray differently.  The visitors we didn’t expect.  The guests we didn’t invite.  He came for the interlopers, the intruders, the migrants.  He came for the wandering and the transient.  The ones not like us.  The ones who ought to learn English and try to fit in.  Only they don’t and they make us uncomfortable.  He came to make a home for Himself in that uncomfortable wound in our hearts that we allow our fears and judgments to make.  He came to draw us all to Himself.

He came for the naked.  He came for the defenseless, the helpless, the hopeless and the threadbare.  He came for the most vulnerable ones:  the baby in the womb, the disabled in the shadows, the elderly in empty rooms down long hallways.  He came for anyone who’s been stripped of hope, peeled of joy or divested of their rightful place.  For all of us left raw and wounded by the ways of the world.  He came to clothe us with Himself.  He came for the sick.  For anyone ailing or confined, broken down or diseased of body, mind, or spirit.  He came for the defective, delicate and disordered.  For the feeble, feverish and frail.  He came for anyone whose sick and failing attempts at doing it for themselves just haven’t worked out.  He came for the ones who are weak from trying; for the ones infected with the “me” virus; for the ones who just can’t do it anymore.  He came to save us from our suffering with Himself, hung on a Cross, dying for Love.

He came for the prisoners.  The ones captured by sin, barred in by despair, sentenced to death.  He came for the caged and the closeted, the apprehensive and the impounded.  For the shut-in, the shut-out, the locked up, the put away, the ones told to shut up.  For anyone who’s felt detained, constrained or forgotten.  For the ones who’ve made their own prisons, He came to be the key.  He came to be freedom for us all.  Jesus came for all the people who know what it feels like when we say “sin.”  The ones who hunger and thirst, the ones who feel alone and vulnerable, for everyone who is heartsick and imprisoned by a mess of their own making.  For the ones who’ve given up trying to find the answer.  Jesus came with the question:  “Will you marry me?”

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”

— Gospel of St. Matthew, 25:35-36

Our Eternal Trip

People are hungry for good books on our Christian faith. Without hesitation, the first one I recommend (after the Bible, of course) is “The Great Divorce” by C.S.Lewis. It’s a small book, just a little over a hundred pages. You can easily read it all in an evening. And you couldn’t spend your time any better, in my opinion. Lewis takes us on a bus ride from hell to heaven and along the way, he explains our faith in words and images we can easily understand. This is good theology for us average folk. We hear the stories of the traveler’s lives and we see ourselves revealed in them. Lewis is one of us, he uses language and references we can understand. And he’s gifted in helping us grasp the great truths of our Christian faith in his “little” stories like this one.

“The Great Divorce” opens in a sad, dark city called “the grey town.” Our narrator encounters others who are there with him and he learns their stories as they travel together on a bus to — who knows where. As they travel, we come to understand more about what heaven is and what hell is. We learn the part that our own choices in life play on our journey to our final home. Much of the despairing imagery of the grey town comes from Lewis’ own experience of wartime London, as the book was published in 1945. I don’t want to give away too much of this story, because I hope you’ll want to experience it for yourself. If you’re like me, you’ll never think of heaven or hell in quite the same way again.

And here’s the thing: all of us are on that journey to our real life in eternity. We are all undergoing a spiritual transformation, as Lewis says: We are becoming either “immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” That image stops me in my tracks. Created in God’s own likeness, I believe that I’m destined to live forever—the question is, where will that be? We are all given choices to make and these choices (or refusals to choose) shape our souls. When we choose Christ, He makes His home in us (Ephesians 3:16-17). When we deny Christ, we take a different path. But we are in the unfolding process of “becoming.” Lewis says, “There are no ordinary people—only those on their way to becoming devils or glorified creatures like the angels.” Of course, he doesn’t mean that we actually become either devils or angels. We are always human, but oh, the variety of light and dark, of virtue and of sin that we contain.

Our journey has two eventual destinations. Through Christ, we become more heavenly, more in harmony with God, our fellow humans, and ourselves. Or we choose another path and become more hellish—at war with God, our fellow humans, and ourselves. These “becomings” are at the heart of the story Lewis shares in “The Great Divorce.” In our glimpses into the lives of the characters, we’re also confronted with our ideas of both heaven and hell and what they might be like. Lewis’ vision doesn’t include harps and clouds, or lakes of fire. Heaven is a place of infinite realty, where all the beauty we have ever known is a pale imitation of God’s home for us. The closer we get to heaven, the more intense the beauty is and the more there is to experience ahead of us. Each moment is ecstasy. For those who choose a different path, reality becomes smaller, darker, duller, and more self-absorbed. It’s the saddest, most lifeless of realities you could imagine. Lewis is a master storyteller.

Our souls are being formed at every moment, and with every breath. You and I are, at this very instant, becoming either more heavenly or more hellish. We are becoming more and more like Jesus or we are walking down another path. Our ultimate destination isn’t something forced upon us, but is a place and a process we actively choose and embrace. Read this little book. Make your choice.

“While others plan your funeral, decide on a casket, a burial plot, and who the pallbearers shall be, you will be more alive than you’ve ever been.”

—-Erwin Lutzer

Letting Go

“…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”(Matthew 6:12). The mercy of God is freely given to all who follow Christ and the words of this prayer which He taught us. God forgives us as we forgive others. We pray this at every Sunday Mass, letting the familiar words form in our mouths as we have done since childhood. We are confident in them. They have become a pillar of faith. And like the pillars that support the church, we often ignore them, or peer around them to see other, more interesting things.

We forget that God’s mercy depends on our mercy to the people who have wronged us. We sing songs about His amazing grace, but rarely include themes of our own mercy in our hymns. Our forgiveness hinges on our willingness to forgive other people. If we hold onto grudges and slights, we condemn ourselves. Mercy is an exchange of God’s grace, like living water that flows into and out of a sacred pool. The Dead Sea collects all the water from a great and flourishing area of land, but it has no outlet. And because of that, it is lifeless and saline. We’re like that, too. If all we do is accept God’s mercy without sharing it with others, then our own spiritual life begins to die. Oh, but forgiving others is so hard. Yes, it’s hard. In fact, it’s impossible. Which is why we can’t do it without the Holy Spirit. Only God can help us to love like He does and to forgive like He forgives. We have to grow in humility so that our pride doesn’t interfere with His grace.  

Jesus teaches us about this when He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 5:3). We have to know our own sinfulness and spiritual poverty in order to have a heart that is open to grace. You’ve got to know how very much you need the love of Christ and that, without Him, you’re lost. That realization can be hard for some folks. It goes against our modern ideas of self-sufficiency and pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Spiritual growth isn’t like that at all. Becoming more like Jesus means becoming less self-reliant and more dependent on Him. It goes against the wisdom of the world.  

Forgiving others isn’t an emotion, it’s an act of the will; a decision that you make. You don’t have to “feel” forgiving to forgive. And it’s not forgetting what was done to you—that’s denial. You don’t become a doormat. Forgiving is letting go of your right to be right. It means letting go of your right to revenge. God is in charge of justice—not you. And forgiving doesn’t mean that the other person has to admit they’re wrong. You forgive, no matter how they act towards you. This is about your relationship with God. Jesus forgave people who hadn’t repented and maybe never would. And we have to do the same. Every time you think of that person who has wronged you, say, “I forgive you”—whether you mean it or not at that moment. And then pray the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Pairing these two together reminds us how very much we need God’s forgiveness and how entwined that mercy is with our forgiveness of others. Our Lord never intended for us to live our faith in isolation. He lived His life in a family and a Church and He left us a Church in which we may journey together, forgive together, and learn to love together. And every Sunday Mass we stand together and pray,”…forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Amen.