I recently wrote a post for the Logos blog called “Religion and Rationality.” It is directed toward an atheist audience and tries to explain why religious people are not crazy. If you think you would enjoy this essay, feel free to read it here: http://logosgplus.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/religion-and-rationality/

God bless!

Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanization of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows I as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

- G. K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man

And expand that to 8 minutes and that was my homily this week.

Happy Solemnity!

Yet, this child comes amid controversy and scandal. as the prophet Simeon called him at his presentation, this child is destined to be a sign of contradiction. As we read in the Gospel this evening, he was the result of a miraculous conception by the power of the Holy Spirit. But, this was not understood by even St. Joseph who was willing to divorce Blessed Mary because of the scandal of his betrothed being pregnant. It was only through the direct intercession of an angel that he did not. Then later in life this child would be a sign of contradiction to the religious leaders of the day by claiming that he himself was God. And lastly, this child was a challenge to the rulers of the day who did not understand that he did not come to rule as a political ruler but in the hearts of all men.

To the world, power comes through violence and so when men such as Herod hears that a new king is being born in Bethlehem, he immediately fears the loss of his power and wants to put an end to any rival. We can see a similar claim being made just by the use of the term, “gospel,” which before the Christian era literally referred to the good news of Emperors victorious in battle. In many ways, Christianity is a challenge to any worldly power because Christianity teaches that God has a will for humanity and that the state is not supremely powerful. Yet, Christians do not win converts or show their power through violence. (And when they do, it’s usually far from successful or lasting.) Instead, Christian shows that love is more powerful than violence and have overcome the power of great men though love. This child who is born is love-in-person and desires our love in return.

What is so controversial about this child? By any worldly standard, this child has nothing and is no harm to anyone. He is too young even to defend himself. His parents came too late to be admitted to an inn. His bed is a trough where animals eat. Yet, everyone admits that there must be something miraculous about this child. His birth was announced by an archangel. Shepherds come to the manger in claiming that they saw an army of angels in the sky who told them to come there. Even later, wise men from the East would come after following a star. This child is the hope of all the world.

The truth of the matter is that this child that cannot speak is somehow the Word of God. The perfect image that shows this reality is one you find in some Churches: sometimes the infant Jesus is portrayed as holding a little ball. This ball represents the whole world and the child is able to hold it as if it were a tiny toy. He cannot even life himself, yet he holds the whole world in his tiny fingers. He cannot reach further than his manger, yet he can hold all things in existence. His love sustains all things, yet he came in the must needy and helpless state ever. He is God Almighty, who is not afraid to submit to the authority of loving parents. We see in this a new answer to why God was made incarnate, he wished to assume all the limitations that come with being human: all of our weaknesses. This is truly a God who humbles himself in a most unexpected way! 

Does he gain anything by becoming human? One of the privileges I have in my priesthood is teaching in the school and in the RCIA program and this forces me to reread the catechism over the course of the year in order to refresh my memory of the faith. One particular concept stuff out to me that I would like to share with you all. Jesus Christ loves us with a human heart. (CCC 478) Is it possible to grasp the profundity of these words? It is easy to think of a God who loves us even if we do not know him and he is up in heaven somewhere. But, Christ when he becomes a human beings enters a relationship with his and will each of our own good. This means he loves each an every person individually and would sacrifice himself for any one of us at his passion. So, by becoming human he gains the ability to stand for us in judgment and to redeem us all from our sin because he loves us. 

This little child truly is God-with-us, Emmanuel. In this child rests all our hopes and it is through him the world shall be redeemed. In his own time the world rejected him at birth and reject him at death. And we can see in their exaggerated reactions that there is something wrong with the world. But, he comes to share his divine life with us. This child will grow to be a man so that we can be like little children to God. God became man some that we can become like God and share in his divine life. These are the mysteries we celebrate at this great solemnity of Christmas. 

Thanks for the prayers. I hope you are all doing well and that you have missed my presence too much.
God Bless
Deacon Todd

PS Do you think blogging breaks my Lenten penance?

As many of you know, it is a practice in the Roman Catholic Church to give something up for Lent. Sometimes people use these times to break a bad habit like swearing or gossiping. Other times, people use this time to build good habits like praying a rosary every day or spending time with scripture. Either way there needs to be a spiritual component to what is happening beyond “making a resolution” like on New Years or else it becomes a simple self-help routine and a project of vanity.

With that in mind, I’m going to try a particularly strong penance for myself this year that I need all of your encouragement to keep. I am giving up my Facebook and twitter account. For most of you, this will not seem like a big deal since you probably do not spend that much time using those services. I however am slowly growing more dependent on checking these sources for news and random tidbits on the internet. I’m becoming less aware of how much time I spend on the internet and I’m becoming distracted from my real duties of preparing for mass and writing my paper for my MA.

Keep in mind, I’m not giving up social networking because I think it is an evil thing. I love all the information I receive from many different sources and the number of friends I can easily keep in touch with. There is so much information that I do not think I would discover in any other way. I am giving it up because I think it is too good of a thing and I want to tune it down a little bit before too much of a good thing really becomes a bad thing. We all have tendencies towards sin in different ways and I realize that my root sin is curiosity and pride. I can easily get distracted with learning about a whole lot of things I really have no business in knowing and ask all sorts of questions to people who I really have nothing to do with, however I still get what I need to done. But, our Lord does not ask for the bare minimums, but whole hearts that are willing to sacrifice everything for His sake. And part of that is a removal of distractions in order to focus more fully on him.

So, for this Lent I’m going to do my best to not look at my Facebook or Twitter and just go about being the best possible student I can be. (And, I will be busy since I need to write 50 pages for my Masters Paper that is due on April 15.) I will not put my account on suspension during this time because I find it annoying when other people do that. (Since, it’s like they never existed!) And, I reserve the right to log on for solemnities and when I need to contact someone I can only contact via social networks or if I have to delete something someone posted on my wall and I will update my fb via text message to let people know when I’m preaching since that’s where people expect that information to appear.

Other than these very specific cases, if you see me log into Facebook or say something on Twiter between and including Ash Wednesday and Holy Friday, feel free to tell me to log off. Also, feel free to send me a message with your email address if you want to get in touch. (It’s sent to my email address.)

But, I really doubt anyone will need me. Since, this is a luxury, isn’t it? I hope my data jack doesn’t heal over in the mean time.

God bless!

According to the bible, you should love your neighbor. It also says you should love your enemy. This is generally because they are the same people. Though I am joking, there is a bit of truth here. Sometimes it is those who are closest to us that can get on our nerves the most. I am sure many of you are experiencing a bit of this this weekend since Christmas is such a wonderful opportunity for families to gather. It is as if the Church is asking us to reflect on family life more deeply on this Feast of the Holy Family.

We must remember that part of our salvation included Jesus entering into family life. And scripture is silent on the happenings of these years. All we have of his early life are the infancy narratives and the passage about the finding of the temple. After that, the next we hear of him is that he’s starting his public ministry at about the age of thirty. And this time of growth and development were necessary because part of being human is about growing over time. If he came to us at the first coming as a fully formed human being without birth or parents, what kind of humanity would he have? If he came like that, I’m sure many would try to claim that he is not human at all. (Like the gnostics who call his birth an illusion.)

Instead, we see a God who humbly enters into humanity and accept his parents authority over himself. Jesus is the perfect son in his humanity to Joseph just as he is the perfect Son to the Father in his divinity. He grew and learned from Joseph to be a man. God chose this family for himself because he knew he would be raised best in a family that would love and protect him. So, we have St. Joseph head of the holy family, a just man and protector who is willing to believe in what God tells him in a dream. And we have Mary, God’s mother who is immaculate from the first moment of her conception.

It is through this family that Jesus shows us that married love is sacrificial. There are times when parents will have to give up something they want or enjoy for the good of their children. We saw this in St. Joseph who picked up his whole life and moved to Egypt to protect his family. And we see this in Mary who had to bear the burden of witnessing Jesus’ death. And likewise, just like Christ, a child must be obedient to his parents and it is through their love to him that a child learns that he is loved and that he should love others. In order to do this God must be at the center of the family.

Pope John Paul II calls the family the “Domestic Church.” He said this because souls are formed within the family to be good Christians who are able to accept the vocations God gives them. Within the family a child’s first impressions of the world are developed. If he comes from a broken family where there is little love, that will fundamentally affect how he views the world and make it harder for him later to commit to a relationship. If he grows up in a family that does not consider going to church regularly important, he probably will not develop that habit later in life and consider faith unimportant. Someday this child will mature and join a different family. A man and a woman might come together, get married and have children of their own. Or, on a supernatural level a young woman might decide to enter the family of a religious order and become a sister. Or, a young man might become a religious brother or even decide he wants to spend his life bringing Christ to others in the Eucharist by becoming a priest. How will they be able to accept this supernatural vocations unless the family is strong to begin with to nurture their sense of commitment and their love of God?

And so I implore you are to pray for the strength of families and support them. Like John Vianney said, may their imitate the example of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

So, what’s wrong with the question? It assumes that everything changes except change and this is untrue for two reasons. First, there are unchanging realities that exist. Most obvious of these is that God exists and never changes but is a being of pure act. Then there are concepts and natures and thoughts which also never change. For example, you can take apart a chair and rearrange the parts into a table, but that does not change what a chair is. Second, change is not a thing itself but a property of created things. We can identify hundreds of ways things change, but there’s nothing we can point to and say “This is what change is.”

So, why is this important to me? An ancient philosopher named Heraclitus claimed that everything is change. He was a know-it-all kind of guy who liked to argue with people about how the whole world is in flux. The problem is that if everything changes, how can we have true knowledge of the reality of things? This lead to other philosophers like Xeno and Parmenides to claim that all change is merely an illusion and that true reality does not change. I believe this dichotomy was ultimately solved by Aristotle who saw the world as objects with potential for change, but they are still real objects. The problem is that as time goes on, we are slipping info a Heraclitan point of view where we cannot have true knowledge about things. Even science is expressed now as a probability thanks to skepticism. It just goes to show that if you do not believe in an unchanging God that orders to universe, really anything is up for grabs.

Thank you everyone for participating in the discussion and for tolerating my Socratic method. Feel free to critique my point of view now that I have revealed it.

God bless.

Pope Benedict in his recent letter to seminarians tells a story about his experience at the end of World War II. He was drafted into the German Army at age 17 and the officer asked each of the youth what they wanted to be when they grew up. Our Holy Father, then only the young Joseph Ratzinger, knew even at that age that he wanted to be a priest and told the officer so. This was a very unpopular answer and the German officer derided him and told him that there would be no place for priests in the New Germany. That was when young Ratzinger knew that this New Germany would not last very long. Since, he knew even in his youth that the priesthood of Jesus Christ is for yesterday, today and tomorrow.

So, how did he know that the priesthood is necessary? He knew it was necessary because so long as people need God in their lives they would need priests. For, it is a priest who gives the sacraments which brings supernatural life. This is seen most clearly in the eucharist when the priest prays over the bread and wine so that it becomes the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ. But also in the other sacraments, he stands in the person of Christ. That’s why he can be called a mediator: he makes God present and this is the way God designed his grace to come into the world, through the priest. And so the priest gives the people hope, reminds them that God is present and reminds the people of God to constantly pray.

One way he does this is through an aspect of the priesthood which is often looked down upon: chaste celibacy. But, if you look at today’s gospel reading (Luke 20:27, 34-48), you see a key reason why this is required of the priest: he is living the life of heaven on earth. For Jesus says that the children of this age marry and remarry. Yet, in the coming age they neither marry nor are given in marriage because there is no need for natural prolonging of life when we have life everlasting after the resurrection. Often celibacy is seen merely as a negative, the priest has to give something up. Yet, we see in Christ’s teaching that to be celibate is positive because it frees a priest to be even more like Christ, who was chaste celibate throughout his life. Even on a practical level one can see that a celibate is even more ready to surrender his whole life for the Church just as Christ would. And lastly, by giving natural procreation, he is able to make us all children of God and allow God to be present in our midst. For, constant prayer is more than never ceasing to pray. It is a uniting of our whole life to God’s life and to follow his will with our lives. Through his chaste celibacy, the priest is a symbol of this constant prayer.

The rest of the homily is about how seminary forms men into becoming priests and that to support the priesthood one ought to support the sem. I really feel odd about begging for money even for a good cause. So, I’m leaving that part out. I do like my conclusion, though:

If there is one point I want to leave you with today, it is this: the priesthood is a sign of God’s love for the world and so long as God loves the world, there will always be priests to serve the Church. However, will this be a vibrant sign for all people to see? or will it fade away to a mere skeleton crew? I beg you all to please support vocations and to support the seminary.

God bless!

At this point he was told that he was going blind. If the faintest hint has been given here of what Saint Francis felt about the glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about the heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds and beasts and flowers, some notion may be formed of what it meant to him to go blind. Yet the remedy might well have seemed worse than the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and that without any anaesthetic. In other words it was to burn his living eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of the tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have been no worse. When they took the brand from the furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence: “Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; 1 pray you be courteous with me.”

If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not too many poets has it been given to remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted if, while he was re-reading the noble lines, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” a large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the window of the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it, above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley, who wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried before the wind, have been mildly surprised to find himself turning slowly head over heels in mid-air a thousand feet above the sea. Even Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true, the blushful Hippocrene of which he had just partaken freely had indeed contained a drug, which really ensured that he should cease upon the midnight with no pain. For Francis there was no drug; and for Francis there was plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of his first fancies from the songs of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the flowers in the garden of God; and when that shining thing returned to him in the shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its Christian name.

I hope to expand on some of my thoughts on this passage later. But, in the meantime, I think I’m starting to appreciate accepting crosses and the evils in life along with the good. The first mistake people make when they try to understand St. Francis is how much he suffered and how seriously he took nature as his brother and how his driving force in life is his love of God. This passage, I think, sums it up well. I hope you enjoyed the passage.

God bless.

From Lawrence OP on fotopedia.com

In order to answer this question accurately, first I need to define what faith is. Faith is more than belief: it is a submission of thought to one of higher authority. When one says that he believes something, he might mean that he came to a conclusion by his own reason. If he is a true student of skepticism, he will claim that he is perfectly willing to reform everything that he believes given sufficient proof. Other times, when one says he believes something, he has no reason for it but just affirms that it makes sense to him. Faith means something more than just believing. When I say that I have faith in something, I’m saying that I believe not on my own authority and reasoning. I have faith in something because it has been handed down to me by someone who is greater than myself and therefore someone I can trust more than myself.

I think one reason it is so hard us to accept that faith is submission of thought is that it contradicts our culture which tells us, on one hand, to think for ourselves and, on the other, tells us that we cannot possible judge another’s religious beliefs because it is completely a matter of personal decision. Yet, faith is really the only way religion makes sense. If I can come up with my own religion based on my own reason, why would I need religion in the first place? But, if God reveals Himself and truths related to Him, then I have something to live up to. And if He really did make Himself known, then everyone must be expected to conform their lives to that truth or else he’s not a loving God.

Some people would then claim that if one submits their intellect to a higher authority, it undermines one’s ability to reason. In a certain sense, this is true because if the authority one has faith in is a false authority, then reason has to be hampered in order to have faith in it. For instance, if you have faith that the Easter Bunny lays eggs for you to find, then you need to disbelieve biology to hold to your faith. Or, if someone has faith in a flying spaghetti monster, one has to ignore facts about Italian cuisine. However, if a faith is from a true authority (and ultimately from God), then it will aid reason because it will reveal things that do not contradict reason yet go beyond what human reason can discover. Reason can tell us the world is messed up, but it takes faith to understand that there’s a fall. Reason can tell us that men and women naturally pair together to produce children, but faith can tell us that this is part of a divine plan. Reason can tell us about the vastness of space, but faith can tell us that God is greater than even that.

From Lawrence OP on fotopedia.com

When I defend faith, I’m not defending snake charmers and cults or even other Christian denominations. I am defending the faith handed down by the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church founded by Christ and preserved by the Holy Spirit. This is a faith that has been tested in all times and places and takes the challenges of the world seriously. It is broad enough to answer any human question and yet personal enough to be adapted to any human heart. Furthermore, if one has a question about what the church believes, all one needs to do is consult the Catechism. You may not agree with what it says, but you cannot deny that the Church teaches it.

I hope this helps you to understand that faith is not a feeling. Very often if we just trust our feelings, we are trying to fit the world into our own way of thinking. But, to have faith means to conform ourselves to greater truth even if its initially uncomfortable. Sometimes we are blessed with a special consolation and the faith will feel like putting on an old glove you never knew you had. Other times the faith will make us feel uncomfortable like walking into a bright room you’ve never seen before or the sudden revelation of nakedness when you thought you were clothed. If we were comfortable with everything revealed, there would be little room to grow. As Jesus said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” and “Behold, I am with you until the end of time.”

So, all I can say is persevere and be not afraid of the good things God desires to give you.