Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Why was the Son of God born as human? Philosophers, theologians, thinkers looking at our contemporary culture; examining aspects of the violence, the turn towards fringe groups, conspiracies, the rise of pornography, social media et al, addictions, rates of depression, narcissism… find that loneliness/alienation plays an important part, if not a vital cause for so much.  Ironic that in a time when we can talk with people on a video who live on the other side of the world, we can feel so disconnected from others. This disconnect not only is people without people, but people will feel there is nothing in the universe; it is simply cold, material, a nihilism.  And because we do not feel or experience that intimacy, that connection, we try to find it, or make meaning in groups that we seemingly offer it: gangs, white supremacists, nationalists…and at times others will take advantage of this.  Or because we feel like nothing, everyone also is nothing too, and therefore those...

NOW that I have a full church and a captive audience, we are going to have a Catholic Religious Education class…somewhat.  A definition, the best definition that I can think of, although there are a couple of others, A, the Best definition of a Sacrament is…A visible sign of an invisible reality. I will repeat, A visible sign of an Invisible reality…now you repeat it back… Catholics have this wonderful theology, this spirituality of sacraments. When we ponder sacraments more and more, this spirituality gives us an amazing concept about life, the world and us. We can even understand our connection to God at a deeper level. What our definition of Sacraments tells us is that within our reality of senses; taste, smell, feel, touch, hear…there is also a reality underneath it all that sustains it; an invisible but yet very, very potent invisible reality that becomes known through visible signs. Baptism we use water and the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the So...

King Ahaz was quite the person. He was King of Judah, and during his reign two other kings had come to him from Israel and Damascus, wanting to form an alliance against Assyria. Assyria being the rising power in the region. Ahaz does not know what to do; what are his choices? Isaiah the Prophet comes to him and says to trust in God. God will grant anything for Ahaz. Ahaz feigns piety and humility, but he is in reality not pious nor humble. Still God offers him a path; even though Ahaz defers and deflects. Ahaz needs to trust in God’s plan.  What will happen is that Ahaz will not trust God: in fact, he will go behind these kings’ backs and do something that will protect himself only. He forms an alliance with Assyria who will ultimately defeat and conquer these two kingdoms. Yet, the cost will be that Ahaz becomes subservient to Assyria, and he will even change the worship of God to match Assyria’s, and will also sacrifice to their idols. Imagine Joseph and what he experi...

Managed Expectations - a phrase we can hear about an event or situation, when somebody does not want to get disappointed, when somebody does not want to disappoint others. I first came to Nevada in 1988 on a geology trip from Cincinnati. And I was not impressed. I was thinking I would see cacti and a desert landscape as in the John Wayne movies I grew up with. We were going from SLC to Ely, and I saw no cacti, just sagebrush and more sagebrush. Then we went onto southern Utah and the parks there and were blown away. When I returned to work in Nevada in 1989 I had realistic expectations and that is when I began to love the State. In the United States, Priests, if they leave ministry, usually do it within the first 5 to 7 years. And anecdotally, those who tend to leave more often are those who are Roman trained. The thinking is that these young men are told they are the cream of the crop, the best of the best, and they go to Rome and study; yet they receive very little parish expe...

“You’ll shoot your eye out!” A classic line, prediction in our culture.  Parents are prophets, are they not? At least in some fashion. You parents can see a situation and assess, and make a prediction: “Don’t do that or you are going to hurt yourself?; He/She is not nice, don’t come crying to me when he/she breaks your heart….” Prophets see a situation, make observations and then call out the probable consequences and can provide a different way to act. Prophets have a degree of wisdom and insight. Now prophets are not just doom and gloom. Prophets, especially religious ones and in our Jewish/Christian tradition, actually want to lead people to security, to joy; ultimately to God. They declare a way to avoid one path, so as to choose another. Think of Parenting again. Those prophetic warnings to kids really comes down to teaching kids about actions, consequences and how to choose. And they can mature into healthy stable adults. As we ourselves continue to mature though, who ...

Where’s Waldo? We remember those books; the funny looking dude with glasses, hat and striped shirt hiding in plain sight amid a crowd of others. Our task was to find him, to recognize him amid all the other people. It teaches attention and concentration; and frustration!!!!!!! At times we can all get into a too comfortable position in life and become numb to our world, our reality. We do not truly see what is around us. We all notice the snow on the mountains when it first happens, but by January we become “meh” about it.  We can also get overwhelmed by situations that wear us down, and we become less able to see the positive around us.   We can fall into the trap of thinking God is not here with us. God is not working with us. God is not in our world. We can think this as we get confronted in the news by all the bad news; gun violence again and again; earthquakes, wars, drought, the divisions.  Where's God? This thinking is not sinful, but it is also not help...

Earlier this year the movie “Everything Everywhere all at once” was released. I found it a brilliant movie, and although I do admit a small crush on Michelle Yeoh, it is not because of that. It is a movie about choices in life; and making decisions that impact our lives and those around us.  In this movie, and in other recent movies and shows, there is talk of the multiverse; which comes from a line of thought in Quantum physics that there are infinite universes, all based on choices. If we choose coffee, then that sets us on one path; if we choose tea for breakfast then that sets us along a different path.  It is a fun concept, but can also lead to our heads swimming, and for some neurosis about making choices. We can come to those threshold moments in our lives in which a new direction, a new way of living is presented to us. What will we do? This is not just a new job, new house, or new car; this is also about a fundamental option to live in a different way. For some i...

There have been a lot of funerals of late. Not just here at OLS, but other priests I have talked with said the same thing: lots of funerals. So lots of thoughts and homilies about death, dying and what does this all mean.  Funeral homilies can be “Tricky”. How do we balance that sadness of death and wanting to help make people feel better, and also be true to our deeper faith; a faith in the Resurrection.  Someone remarked to me that I do not talk much about heaven in my funeral homilies. It is true. I used to and the homily would talk of doing whatever the deceased liked to do in this life, but doing it better in heaven: Golfing, fishing, gardening, etc.  In essence, Heaven seemed like a big country club where we all have perfect bodies and enjoy life for all of eternity. Really, Jesus mentions very few times any sense of heaven. He brings up talk of a court a few times, but this was not about describing heaven, rather it was to inspire followers to treat people ...

People’s perceptions can be funny. Many years ago, while in Ohio visiting family, I was with my young nephew. We were fishing. I asked him if he would want to come to Nevada and we could fish there. He responded kind of quickly, “No, there is too much sand.” Now, it took me a second, I am like what? He knew that Nevada was a desert, and he had in his mind the Sahara??? Or he was looking for an easy way out to not come visit with me. My ego wants him to have perceived Nevada wrong. Other perceptions about Nevada… early on my family would ask how often I would go to Las Vegas. I am like never. Why? How far away is it…Once they learned the distance, they learned to stop asking. Or it must be hot there all the time… I reminded them summer can be, but snow and cold in the winter. We all have our perceptions, if not prejudices. It is part of how we are conditioned, and how we internally prepare ourselves. The difficult part is those mis-perceptions and prejudices can keep us fr...

In history, there is the story of Potemkin’s village. The story goes that as the Russian Empress Catherine the Great was going to the Crimea along a river, Grigory Potemkin, the Governor of the area, would cover up the poorest looking villages with a facade and hide all the poor people so that the Empress would not know how bad of a condition the people were in, and he would not get the blame. He did this along the journey, and as they passed through the village, the facade would be torn down, rushed to the next village and set up again and again. One of the most powerful words in our Catholic Theology is the word “And”. Jesus is Divine AND Human; God is one AND three. The Church is holy AND sinful. “And” creates space and openness to experience mystery. This powerful parable Jesus gives to us, I would guess most of us take this on a personal level: how am “I” in my prayer? What is my correct attitude? We would be correct in this.   There is an “And” to this… “ And” we...

I remember very few homilies, even my own, but one I do remember at least partially, was one Fr. Mike gave in the 90’s while Pastor of Our Lady of Wisdom, and while I was an unemployed geologist. He mentioned that he had been approached by someone needing assistance and all Mike had left was $20 in his wallet. Mike considered it, and gave his last $20 to the person. The next day in the mail there was a card from someone he had known, and they wrote that they thought of him and included in the card $20. Parents, your faith and loyalty and perseverance in raising your children is amazing. Decades you work to instill values, virtues, habits into those kids. Repeating lessons, being good examples, hoping that something gets through… And getting frustrated. Yet, one day you watch them, maybe as teens or young adults and they do something that just blows your minds. They live those values. All that work, all that effort, all that patience and anger, finally it comes to fruition. I ...

Earlier this week, The Snows Women Auxiliary and I talked about “Parish”. I gave a broad brush history of what the canons say about Parish; and how parishes worked and existed in our American history.  Many parishes in the Eastern and MidWest, especially in the major cities, formed around specific ethnic communities: Irish, Polish, Italian, German, etc. During the heavy European immigration era of the 1800’s and early 1900’s, parishes helped the immigrants find community and support one another given the Anti-Catholic sentiment in this country. Yet there would also be the reality of an Irish Catholic Church on one side of the street, and a Polish Catholic Church on the other, and they would seldom interact. Even consider our own parish of Our Lady of the Snows. Formed on what used to be toward the edge of Reno and among Italian immigrants and their first generation of children.   Community was important (and still is); protecting that community was important, and in s...

Loyalty is a virtue. We praise loyalty, whether it is loyalty from our spouse, family, friends and our dogs. Loyalty means to trust in that other. So it involves a relationship of some form or another, almost covenantal. Loyalty itself does not necessarily have a specific reward. I know companies will reward “loyalty” by giving so-called discounts for using them exclusively, but that to me seems a distortion of loyalty. That borders on manipulation. Loyalty’s reward rather is loyalty itself; that relationship, that security that comes with it. Our expectation is that the person, the other will be with us. Anger is the emotional response to when an expectation is not being fulfilled. We expected something of someone, whether another human, an institution, ourselves, God…and it does not happen. The stronger that connection with the other, and the higher the expectation, the more anger we experience.  Do we see a lot of anger right now? Within ourselves, within our world, wit...

This is a familiar Gospel Story, and we may think this is about good poor guy bad rich guy; but there something else is here in our Gospel. How do we know a person of integrity? Their words and actions coincide. We would want someone helping us to get healthy who actually eats well, works out, does not smoke, et al. A chain smoking, morbidly obese trainer that eats only at McDonalds would not be our first choice, probably.  Their core value would be healthy living. Within us, we all have core truths, core values, whether we are conscious of them or not; of course the hope is that we are aware of them.  Then to be aware of them, we look to our actions: what do we do? Torah, the law, provides the Core Truths for Jews and Christians. Persistent throughout Torah is God calling Israel to protect those who are vulnerable; the widow, the orphan, those aliens among them. God reminded the people that God had rescued them as slaves, liberated them, so they must not enslave and mis...