"The Lord will keep you from all evil"*

Friday seems a fitting day for All Hallows Eve. I don't know about where you live, but here along the Wasatch Front, almost in defiance of all the delibrate chaos being inflicted on the world, we're having an utterly beautiful autumn. Even though I've never been one to dress up, I do enjoy Hallowe'en.

Sunset Wasatch Front, 30 October 2025

Today begins the Church's annual three-day festival of All Saints and All Souls. In older Church parlance, tomorrow we celebrate "the Church triumphant." Meaning that we celebrate those saints, who even now as they await their resurrection, enjoy the beatific vision. Sunday we turn our attention to "the Church penitent." This is to those who have died and are being purged according to God's mercy and grace, being made ready to enter the hallowed halls of heaven. We celebrate and observe these solemn, yet joyful, days as "the Church militant" (a moniker that can easily be exaggerated and misapplied).

To borrow and modify a slogan from a different observance: Jesus is also the reason for this season.

With this marvelous beginning, during the entire month of November, the Church urges us to remember those who have died and to pray and (gasp!) seek indulgences on their behalf. This prompts me to note that today is also Reformation Day. The day that Protestant Christians celebrate Luther's posting his 99 theses in Wittenberg, Germany. It bears noting that intially and for a long time afterwards, Luther had no issue with indulgences apart from their manifest abuse, which he was quite correct to protest.

Back to the dead. In the first instance, it is important to remember those who have died. Secondly, as Christians have done from the beginning, it is important to pray for the dead. Just yesterday, I was prompted to remember and to include in my Rosary intentions three good friends who have died: Steven, Timothy, and Kyle.

All Hallows Eve, by Lauren Hanna, used under provision of Creative Commons License

These experiences, like life itself, are bittersweet. I am grateful for friends, for family, for colleagues, teachers, mentors, people who, for no apparent reason, have befriended, loved, and helped me. As I grow older, my gratitude deepens. If we're honest, none of us really accomplishes much on our own, all by ourselves.

In my case, I cannot say that there are too many of these people to remember. On the contrary, there are too few to forget. May God grant that I never forget even one of these precious few or what each has so graciously done for me!

This week in reference to news of a Peruvian bishop, originally from Germany, who announced he has attempted marriage by being civilly united with a Peruvian woman, I read a post on another platform pointing out that this bishop made his announcement on- are you ready?- "his Blogspot page"! Leading the snarkster to further quip, if in parenthesis, "which some people apparently still have in this year of Our Lord 2025." I wrote about this back in an August post marking the 20th anniversary of my "Blogspot page." Sorry, "Blogspot page" is like "the Google." How about: "he posted this news on his blog"?

In any case, enjoy today. It's a weirdly festive day. As I have done over the years on Hallowe'en, I will end with this exhortation from Saint Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians, one of the earliest written texts that comprise our uniquely Christian scriptures:

For all of you are children of the light and children of the day. We are not of the night or of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep as the rest do, but let us stay alert and sober (5:5-6)

Speaking of not forgetting, another time-honored Καθολικός διάκονος observance necessitates the late Warren Zevon's "Werewloves of London" (with a shout out to the late Joe Strummer) as our traditio for All Hallows Eve. My late Dad loved this song:

*From Antiphon 1, Evening Prayer, Office for the Dead

Year 1 Monday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Romans 8:12-17; Psalm 68:2.4.6-7.20-21; Luke 13:10-17

Flesh, spirit, body. What? In this passage, the words “flesh” and “body” are not interchangeable. To grasp what Paul is communicating, it is necessary to distinguish between the Greek words sarx and soma. Sarx translated into English as “flesh” and soma as “body.” The third operative term in this passage is pneuma or “spirit.”

What is confusing is not making this distinction. Such failure leads to bad teaching and bad teaching to bad, sometimes even harmful, praxis. After all, whether before or after the resurrection, to live “by the spirit” is to live in the body, that is, soma while not living in the flesh- sarx. The spiritual life is an embodied life. Otherwise, the Incarnation was in vain.

According to Saint Paul, those whose spirits are infused by the Holy Spirit are God’s children. As children, we can call God “Father.” Unlike Christ, we are not “begotten” of the Father. We are God’s children by adoption. Legally speaking, an adopted child is still a child and as such a coheir along with the begotten child. Hence, our inheritance is eternal life.

Prior to adoption, we were slaves to the flesh. But through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we went from being slaves to sons and daughters. This is how God saves us.

At least in part, what it means to be enslaved to the flesh is to be enslaved to the inevitability of death and the fear it prompts. In terms of today’s Gospel, resurrection from the dead constitutes Christ’s ultimate healing. The fall was not merely the cause of physical death but also the cause of physical injury and illness.

Cistercians of Our Lady of Atlas Abbey, Algeria

By His death and resurrection, perhaps more than anything, Christ frees us from death and the fear of it. The importance of our freedom as God’s children is highlighted by Saint Paul’s repetition of this especially in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans.

Of Gods and Men is a 2011 movie about the Cistercian martyrs of Algeria. In the spring of 1996, nineteen monks from Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria, were abducted, tortured, and killed by Islamic extremists in the spring of 1996. In 2018, Pope Francis declared these 19 monks as “Blesseds,” the penultimate step before sainthood.

There is a scene in the film that serves as a beautiful example for the major theme of our readings for today. In the scene, Brother Luc, who is a medical doctor and a monk, provides medical services for the almost exclusively Muslim inhabitants of Tibhirine, Algeria, tells his abbot that he is committed to remaining at the monastery despite the danger of being killed by Islamic extremists or by the Algerian army.

“Throughout my career,” Frérè Luc tell his abbot, “I’ve met all sorts of different people. Including Nazis and even the devil.” He continues, “I’m not scared of terrorists, even less of the army. And I’m not scared of death. I’m a free man.”¹ A bit later in the film, Brother Luc is shown embracing a mural of Jesus on the cross, the true sign of his freedom.

This is what is it looks like to live in what Saint Paul a few verses on in Romans 8 calls “the glorious freedom of the children of God.”²

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1 Scene from Of Gods and Men. ^↩
2 Romans 8:21.^↩

"Most Merciful God, we humbly confess..."

Gospel: Luke 18:9-14

Today's readings are an embarassment of riches. Well, we live in a new guilded age complete with robber barons. And so, the phrase "embarassment of riches" means little-to-nothing to many people. Nonetheless, let's use some of these treasures of wisdom and truth.

One doesn't have to be too attentive to realize that at its heart Christianity is a religion of paradox. Yes, I mean r-e-l-i-g-i-o-n, which is not a bad word!. It is worth adding that true religion doesn't just lead to relationship, it is relationship, that is, communion.

The paradoxical nature of being Christian is brought into full relief by Christ Himself at the end of today's Gospel when He clearly teaches that those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves, or let themselves be humbled, will be exalted.

The kenotic hymn found in the second chapter of Saint Paul's Letter to the Philippians holds that Christ the Lord "humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross," which is precisely why He was exalted!¹.

This hymn brings together the paradox found in today's Gospel with the major Christian paradox: by seeking to save your life you lose it and it is by losing your life for Christ's sake, or after the pattern of Christ, that you save it.

There is a thread that runs through the narrative of Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater that helps flesh this message out: "Whoever imagines himself to be pure is wicked!" Speaking of the Pharisee and the tax collector respectively, Jesus says "the latter went home justified, not the former."²

The Pharisee remains unjustified because he cannot, meaning he is utterly, even ontologically, incapable, of justifying himself. Conversely, it is the tax collector, who knows he cannot justify himself, who leaves justified, not just "in the sight of God" but by God. What is required is true repentance, taking a good, hard look at your life and the ways you fall short. It's strange to me that such a suggestion, even among Christians, is now seen as an affront.

Today's Gospel reading is another of those parables only found in Saint Luke's Gospel. The central figure in each of these parables is the Gentile, the unclean person, the person deeply aware of his own flaws. These are those who gain divine favor, who do the right thing, who are apppropriately (i.e., deeply) grateful. In short, it is a Samaritan or a tax collector, not not the member of God's chosen people, but the outsider.

During his papacy, Pope Francis took aim at a certain forms of Catholic pharisaism, which not only still persist but seem to be catching. It's a works based righteousness. As with the Pharisees of old (i.e., the scrupuously observant Jews, especially those who looked down on others), Francis' criticisms along these lines didn't land well with many members of the clergy and laity alike. But then truth rarely does, especially in our post-truth/alternative fact era. Increasingly, it seems we can't handle the truth.

Christianity is lived in either the first person plural or the first person singular. Weirdly, despite it being an attempt to make us face ourselves, this parable almost always puts the listener in mind of someone other than himself. Realzing this should have the effect of a "'Gotcha!'"

What the tax collector uttered, while being so deeply aware of his own unworthiness that he couldn't even lift his gaze heavenwward, became the core of what is now known as the Jesus Prayer, the most incisive iteration of which is- "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner."³

When it comes to rightousness, making another person the basis of your comparison is damnably silly. No matter how righteous or "pure" s/he might be, that person is flawed, sinful in some respect. Even Saint Paul urges ancient Christians in Corinth to imitate him only to the extent he imitated Christ.⁴ When it comes to holiness, righteousness, purity, Jesus Christ is the measure.

I have Good News and bad news. Bad news first: on your own, try as you might, you'll never measure up, ever, not in a million billion years! Being truly human Jesus Christ measured up. But, being truly God, He had no need to do so for Himself. He measured up for you and for me as well as anyone who would believe in Him and repent.

Repentance means ever so much more than merely being sorry for one's sins- though that is the beginning. To repent means committing to change and recognizing you need God's help to do so.

What do you do in confession except judge yourself in order to humble yourself? What else do you do in making your Act of Contrition in confession other than say, "Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner"? Blessed, indeed, are the in the poor in spirit.

In our Collect for this Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we implore God to "increase our faith, hope, and charity, and make us love what you command, so that we may merit what you promise."⁵ While God's grace elicits and even actively solicits our cooperation, faith, hope, and charity, being theological virtues, are gifts from God, which is a way of saying these are graces.

It is by loving what God commands that one can "merit" what God promises. What does God command? Loving Him with your entire being and loving your neighbor as you love yourself. You have to love loving. You can do this because you were first loved.⁶

What, then, does God promise? Eternal life. Eternal life, too, is a gift. But like all gifts, it must be accepted. A gift not accepted isn't a gift.

Bear in mind that eternal life isn't the life the starts at mortal death. It begins when you die and rise with Christ through Baptism by the power of the Holy Spirit. It comes about through faith, which is a prerequisite for being baptized. Eternal life is life in the Spirit. It is the Spirit that enables the faithful to make God's kingdom a present reality.

New life starts with a death. Kill your pride before it kills you.

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1 See Philippians 2:5-11.^↩
2 Luke 18:14.^↩
3 Luke 18:13.^↩
41 Corinthians 11:1.^↩
5 Roman Missal. Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time.^↩
6 1 John 4:10.^↩

Hopeful cynicism

For me, 2025 has been just as strange as 2020, maybe even weirder. There are a variety of reasons for this both personal and professional, or really at that intersection of my life. Don't worry, I am not going to catalog those reasons.

A lot of the strangeness of this year has to do with me being on the cusp of a new season of life. Honestly, sometimes it feels more like standing on a precipice deciding whether or not to jump. Like most important things in life, no one prepares you for this. Maybe that's because there really is no preparation adequate to the task.

I am much better able now to grasp why, when people reach a certain age, it's tempting to just keep doing what they've conditioned themselves to do in most cases over decades. Beyond financial concerns, there is a whole "back end" you don't see until you're close enough to peek around the corner.

Yes, I'm being vague. In less than a month, I turn 60. Not that this in and of itself is necessarily a huge event. But there are decisions I must make about my future. When thinking about my future, it's sobering to realize that much more of my life is behind me than before me. "Disconcerting" seems to me the right word.

Like a lot of people, in getting married, raising a family, building a career, etc., it feels that in some ways my life has been pretty "plug n'play" for a long time. Perhaps too long, if I'm being honest. So, how to make the most of the years, hopefully decades, I have remaining is the question I face. It is not one I am going to answer with a blog post.

I have to point out, that rededicating myself to this little on-line endeavor about a year ago (26 October 2024, to be exact) was a step in the right direction. I had nearly forgotten how much "blogging" means to me. After all, it's been part of my life since I was about 40! Despite my desire, I wasn't sure I could pull it off. But here I am a year later enjoying and doing it with a fair amount of ease.

As I ponder "whither my life?", I have become acutely aware that I am not nearly as grateful as I should be. My natural disposition is to be critical, especially of myself, rueful, and even resentful. Gratitude doesn't come easily. Given all that I have to be grateful for, this is much to my shame. I don't even mind divulging that as I grow older fighting cynicism becomes more and more of a battle.

As to being tempted to become a cynic, I try to bear in mind an observation made by George Carlin, which I paraphrase: "Scratch a cynic and underneath you'll find a disappointed idealist." C'est moi. It isn't even that "the world" and everyone else fails to be all that I would like or once thought it possible to be, it is just as much myself.

What really keeps me from becoming a cynic is the theological virtue of hope. At least in part, this is a function of having less life in front of me than behind me. What happened to that idealistic if deeply self-doubting young man?

Life certainly has its sorrows and disappointments. In many ways, you reap what what you sow. And, I don't think it's enought, to crib from Monty Python, to simply "look on the bright side of life." I don't deny that life has its bright side. But, for me, pie-eyed optimism is not gratitude and optimism is certainly not hope. It was singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman who declared herself "a hopeful cynic." I like that maybe more than I should.

One of the songs I find myself listening to in certain odd moods is U2's "Walk On." Since I invoked this song in my homily last Monday, it is our traditio:

Year 1 Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

Readings: Romans 4:20-25; Luke 1:69-75; Luke 12:13-21

Faith led Abraham to act. He acted in the hope that what God promised He would do. Abraham loved God with his entire being and entrusted himself to God wholly. This is why Saint Paul, both in his Letters to the Galatians and Romans, holds up Abraham as an example of righteousness.

Abraham stands in stark contrast to the wealthy, successful, self-satisfied rich man in the Lord’s parable found in today’s Gospel. In 1 Timothy, we learn that “love of money is the root of all evils.”¹ Greed, a one-word synonym for “love of money,” is one of the seven deadly sins. The inspired author of this letter notes that it is due to greed some “have strayed from the faith…”²

It is empirically demonstrable that the more affluent a society grows the less religious it becomes. Wealth makes you believe you are self-sufficient. In the U.S. we have the myth of the “self-made man.” I say “myth” because no one is self-made either in terms of life or even of wealth.

This isn't to say there are no wealthy people who place their hope in God. Certainly, there are well-off people who hold their wealth lightly and whose lives aren't devoted to accumulating wealth for its own sake and who are happy to generously give.

Wealth easily deceives a person into believing s/he has no need of God or, worse, that God, a little bit of religion for the sake of morality, is one of life’s optional extras or, as a certain biting critique of Christianity understands it, as a means of social control- the opiate of the masses.³

In his classic American novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck puts these words of the lips of his character Ma Joad, who has just received a kindness from another poor person- a dime to buy sugar: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”⁴ This is a sad but telling insight.

The question our readings today pose is in what or in whom do you place your hope? Abraham placed his hope in God and God alone. At God’s command, he packed up all he owned, took his family, and left Ur of the Chaldees for the land of Canaan, a place he had likely never been and probably knew existed only because God told him about it.

The second verse of the U2 song “Walk On” describes Abraham’s predicament beautifully:

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been/
A place that has to be believed to be seen⁵

This describes not only what Abraham did but what the Lord calls you and I to do. Among the things God will not be impressed with at end of your life are your bank account, your investment portfolio, your cool cars, beautiful home, and your vacations hither and yon.

In what do you place your hope? You place your hope in what you believe will give you security. In this parable, Jesus demonstrates dramatically not only the grave error of trusting in wealth but putting your hope in anyone or anything other than God.

With this parable, Jesus urges his listeners to grow “rich in what matters to God.”⁶ And so, to extend U2’s song:

You’ve got to leave it behind: All that you fashion/
All that you make/All that you build…
All that you dress up/
And all that you scheme/
All you create/
You’ve got to leave it behind”⁷

Like Canaan, the land promised by God to Abraham, our destination must be believed to be seen.

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1 1 Timothy 6:10.^↩
2 1 Timothy 6:10.^↩
3 See Pope Benedict XVI Encyclical Letter Deus caritas est, sec. 26.^↩
4 John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 26.^↩
5 U2. Song “Walk On” off the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, released in 2000.^↩
6 Luke 12:21.^↩
7 "Walk On."^↩

Tension, trust, peace

Looking at the "Posts" page here on my blogging platform this morning (I feel so smart using such techie words), I noticed that there is some tension between what I posted Friday and my reflections on today's readings composed yesterday afternoon. Far from wishing to resolve this tension, I want to embrace and highlight it. Why? Because this tension is indicative of the tension inherent in Christian life.

To what tension am I referring? It can be noticed by simply reading the titles of my last two posts: "'Defend us, O Lord, from all peril and dangers of this life'" and "Trusting God is an experience." But the tension lies more in comparing the content of these two posts than in the titles.

On the one hand, we ask the Lord to defend and protect us from life's inevitable perils and dangers and, on the other, the importance of experiencing for ourselves how, usually, rather than spare us life's difficulties and disappointments, Christ accompanies us as we face them. Of course, the biggest of these is the inevitability of death.

Isn't the Lord's death and resurrection the pattern of Christian life? Dying and rising. Christianity is a religion of paradox. The central paradox is that in order to live you must die. If you're anything like me (I hope and pray you are not!), you have to rinse and repeat with some frequency. Isn't the fruit of the first Glorious Mystery of the Holy Rosary- Christ's resurrection- faith?

Despite many repetitions, I still want what I want. While I wouldn't say I demand that God gives me what want, I can be very petulant when I don't receive what I want and especially when I don't "get" what I feel I deserve. Also, I don't hit curveballs very well. Does this mean I need more batting practice? Don't go all Nietzeschian on me!

Yet, I am very suspicious and quickly become ill-at-ease when life seems to break my way, to borrow a phrase. I am deeply aware that, in light of Jesus' teaching, many things that seem like blessings may, in the end, prove to be my undoing. Worldly prosperity is not a Gospel value. This is a hard one to choke down. Wealth and good fortune in this life won't save you but, I have it on good authority, they can easily damn you.

Familiarity with the Gospels and with the lives of the saints is so very useful, even necessary. God is good. I am not. In His goodness, by His grace, the Lord remains with me.

Resolution of the tension inherent to the life of faith is not the goal. Rather, it's learning to live this tension, which is simply to live life, experiencing how the Lord is with me in and through its perils and dangers. As the late liturgical scholar Mark Searle wrote: "Tension creates energy."

This doesn't mean being physically or mentally tense. Paradoxically, it means the opposite. Trusting God is our peace. It is true peace. In the end, the only peace. In the words of Van Morrison's question is a perennial one: "When will I ever learn?"

Trusting God is an experience

Readings: Exodus 17:8-13; Psalm 121:1-8; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8

"Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." Dramatic Bible stories, like the one found in our reading from Exodus, make trusting God seem easy and the results immediate. As the passage from 2 Timothy intimates: Christ is King. ¡Viva Christo Rey!

Our Gospel, the center figure of which is again a sketchy person, dispels the easiness of trusting God. The lesson our Lord teaches is that of persistence. Not only persistence in prayer but persistence in life. In dealing with my insurance company over homeowner's claim (the second I've made in nearly 30 years of being a homeowner, I am learning this.

Persistence both requires and builds resilience. As I am sure you know- life ain't easy. The Lord walks with us through life's dark valleys. He doesn't provide a magic carpet for us to fly over it to the other side.

Servant of God Msgr. Luigi Giussani, in and address to high school seniors way back in 1982, set forth what he calls "this formula," for following Christ: "Expect a journey, not a miracle that dodges your responsibilities, that eliminates your toil, that makes your freedom mechanical" (see "The Journey to Truth: An Experience").

As any long time follower of Christ can tell you, it is not a good criticism of Christianity to insist that it is an attempt to take the easy way out. People looking for a magical solution and who turn to Christ for that are either soon disappointed and leave or have a true conversion borne from an experience of just how Christ walks with us. To lose faith as a Christian due to Christ's refusal to keep you from the vicissitudes of life makes no sense. Why? The Cross and the Lord's summons to His followers to take up their crosses.

In the Collect for this Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time we pray, "that we may always conform our will to [God's]." Easier said than done. "Doing" is a painful process.

But given the above, maybe the question Jesus asks at the end of our Gospel passage- "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"- isn't rhetorical.

"Defend us, O Lord, from all peril and dangers of this life"

Fall is beautiful. I love the transitional seasons. But you have to have winter and summer to have fall and spring. I believe this experientially communicates something about life.

I read somewhere recently that joy is the overcoming of sorrow. I think it's the best definition of joy I've ever read. For one thing it disentangles joy from that slippery and largely facile word happiness.

And so, you can't experience joy without having experienced sorrow. Many psalms bear this out. Take Psalm 22, the opening words of which are placed on the lips of Jesus as He hangs on the Cross by the inspired authors of Mark and Matthew: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). Verses 1-22 of this psalm are a song of deepest lament.

In Psalm 22, things begin to turn around starting with verse 23, with the plea: "Save me from the lion’s mouth, my poor life from the horns of wild bulls."

Saint Olaf church after evening Mass Monday, 13 October 2025, by Deacon Scott Dodge

From verse 24 on, Psalm 22 goes from being a song of heartrending lament to a song of praise, even an ode of joy! Or, in words from Psalm 30:12- "You changed my mourning into dancing; you took off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness."

At present, there is a lot to lament. It can easily overwhelm. But hope, which, just as joy needs to be differentiated from happiness, needs to be distinguished from optimism, sustains. Hope sustains because it is a theological virtue, a supernatural grace.

Hope remains when optimism has long since left the building because hope, like true joy, comes from God. As in all things that matter, Jesus Christ shows us this through His life, passion, death, resurrection, and sending the Spirit.

It bears noting that today we observe the Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr. Hence, one can use the Common of Pastors or of One Martyr. I always prefer the latter when these are the choices. Antiphon 2 for this Common, riffing off Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans is fitting: "The sufferings of this life cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us in the life to come."

Or this from the first reading for the Office of Readings from the same Common, from 2 Corinthians (see 2 Corinthians 4:7-5:8): "We are afflicted in every way possible, but we are not crushed; full of doubts, we never despair... Continually we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed." This is hope!

Our traditio for today reveals my Anglo-Catholic heart. It is from Greg LaFollette's lovely album Songs of Common Prayer: "Lighten Our Darkness."

Year 1: Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Romans 1:1-7; Psalm 98:1-4; Luke 11:29-32

If the sign of Jonah the Lord referred to in our Gospel this evening is His resurrection from the dead after three days in the tomb, then the Lord extends this sign to us through the Eucharist. In this context, let us not forget that Jonah’s ministry to the Ninevites began after his three-day sojourn in the belly of “a great fish.”¹ This is true, too, of Christ’s ministry.

Pentecost, the beginning of the Church, the birth of the Body of Christ, is when the Gospel began to spread beyond the confines of what was then the Roman province of Palestine. This is when, like Jonah’s proclamation, the basic kerygma began to be preached to Jew and, shortly, Gentile alike: “Repent and believe in Gospel!”

Unlike the Israelites, first with the prophets and later with Jesus, the Ninevites repented upon hearing Jonah’s preaching. But, as the Lord says, referring to Himself, “there is something greater than Jonah here.”² Yet, at least in this scenario, He sensed no urge to repent, just the desire for a spectacle. But no repentance means no faith.

For an adult, being baptized without repenting, without changing your life, is like trying to run a marathon and then trying to train for it. While there are usually other factors, this is a major reason why so many adult converts, most of whom were not even taught the five precepts of the Church, fall away fairly fast.

Hearing the Gospel requires a response. This Good News requires a definitive yes or no. If yes, repentance is required. Apart from this, one is just going through the motions, perhaps acting based on some kind of religious sentiment.

Especially now, many people want to understand before s/he believes. But love is never without risk! According to an insight Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote down long ago: you don’t understand in order to believe, you believe to understand.³ One repents to believe. To conceive of faith as mere belief is to reduce it to dust. Repenting is what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.

Jonah and the Whale, by Pieter Lastman (Dutch), 1621, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany

To summarize an insight by John Calvin, who got many things right and few fundamental things quite wrong: all true knowledge of God is born out of obedience.⁴ Or, as C.S. Lewis pointed out: “Obedience is the key that opens every door,” including the door of belief.⁵

As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote:

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact… Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith⁶

Yet, like those who sought a sign from Jesus, it’s easy to want to walk by sight and not by faith. And so, they demand a sign. Not being able to grasp the sign of Jonah when it is presented to you should not lead you to demand a better or more convincing sign. After all, you’re encountering someone greater than Jonah, even greater than King Solomon in all his splendor.

Hence, your “Amen” before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ should never be thoughtlessly uttered. This moment is always an encounter with the Risen Lord. In that moment, you behold the very sign of Jonah about which Jesus spoke.

Rather, your “Amen” should be a firm statement that you believe, even if you don’t understand. It should also be a firm commitment to repent, to allow yourself to be increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. This is the “obedience of faith” set forth by Saint Paul.⁷

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1 Jonah 2:1.^↩
2 Luke 11:32.^↩
3 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. M.J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 1.^↩
4 John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book II. Chap. 8, “Exposition of the Moral Law.”^↩
5 In Thomas A. Tarrants. “Obedience: The Key That Opens All Doors.” from Knowing and Doing, Winter 2011.^↩
7 Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, Part I, Book I, Chapter 5, “The Elders.”^↩
7 Romans 1:5.^↩

Year C Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; Ps 98:1-4; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

Rather than my entire homily, this week I am only posting the final five paragraphs

We give God thanks because, as our reading from 2 Timothy tells us, once we truly belong to Christ, he remains faithful even when we are unfaithful, which happens and is why we have the sacrament of penance.¹ Our infidelities require us to acknowledge that we are incapable of saving ourselves and to express gratitude to God for what He has done for us through Christ. Spiritually speaking, a Christian is a healed leper.

Genuine gratitude like that expressed by the Samaritan in today’s Gospel and the Assyrian general in our first reading is the Spirit-driven response to God’s goodness. As Catholics, we adhere to the truth that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. How could we profess otherwise? Doesn’t our Lord tell the Samaritan "your faith has saved you"?² Why would He say anything different to you or me?

Jesus with the one leper who returned to give thanks, by William Brassey Hole

Worshiping God in gratitude, not race, ethnicity, sex, or anything else, is what makes you a member of God's chosen people. While the moniker is a bit anachronistic, the reality that by his act of worshipful thanksgiving the Samaritan cured of leprosy became a Christian is not.

What ought to bring us to our knees in gratitude is our personal experience of God’s mercy given us in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why we kneel as we say, after being told to “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world…,” using the words of the hopeful Roman centurion, “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and soul shall be healed.”³

As our Collect, or opening prayer, asks, may God’s grace always go before and after us, making us “determined to carry out good works.”⁴ Good works are the result of faith that saves.⁵

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1 2 Timothy 2:13.^↩
2 Luke 17:19.^↩
3 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, sec. 132; Matthew 8:8.^↩
4 Roman Missal, Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Collect.^↩
5 James 2:14-18.^↩

Friday funeral

In twenty-one, nearly twenty-two, years as a deacon, I have never celebrated a Funeral Liturgy outside Mass. This morning I will be doing this for the first time. Over my years of diaconal ministry, I have celebrated countless Vigils and graveside Committal services, especially during my eleven years at The Cathedral of Madeleine. But, prior to today, not one funeral. In addition to preaching at quite a few funeral Masses, I've done many weddings and convalidations.

The person whose funeral I will preside at died in late June. Her mortal remains were cremated. Over the ensuing months, her bereaved husband did his best to gather together her family. Today is the day they all agreed on to hold her funeral. After the funeral, her remains will be committed to her resting place. One reason for not celebrating a Funeral Mass is that virtuall on one present will be Catholic. Most, like the deceased prior to her conversion a number of years ago, practice no religion.

My first first funeral rite as a deacon was on Good Friday of 2004. This was just few months after I was ordained. One of the local funeral directors, himself a Catholic, was going to bury a woman who was born and raised in Salt Lake City but hadn't lived here for many, many years. She had married but never had children. Her closest relatives were a great niece and great nephew. She had lived for many, many years in Portland, Oregon. Her relatives lived in Boise, Idaho.

So, I went to the cemetery and conducted my first Rite of Committal, which was the deceased's only funeral service. The people gathered around her grave with me were the funeral director and the men who were there to bury her, the cemetery workers. But gather reverently we did. This is a memory etched deeply in my memory.

The woman whose funeral I am presiding at today is someone I knew quite well. She was a dear, sweet, gentle person. Her husband, who I assisted in becoming Catholic (he had been Lutheran), is a friend. It is a privilege to serve them both in this way.

Photo by Brett Sayles. Used under the provisions of Creative Common License

Here is an excerpt from my homily for Nanci's funeral. The Gospel Scott, her husband, chose is John 11:25-26:

In our short reading from the Gospel According to Saint John, Jesus is speaking to Martha, the sister of Lazarus. Martha and her sister Mary had summoned Jesus several days earlier, when their brother Lazarus was still alive but gravely ill. Mysteriously, Jesus delayed going to Bethany until after he passed.

Martha expressed her disappointment, noting that Jesus could’ve come sooner and perhaps healed Lazarus, sparing him from death. Jesus assured her, saying “Your brother will rise.” To which Martha responded, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” No doubt, standing before her brother’s grave, that “last day” seemed to her a long way off, perhaps more a desperate wish than a present reality.

In kind of similar way, given the manner and circumstances of Nanci’s passing from this life to eternity, some of you have likely thought, “If I only I had…” fill in blank. Because physical death is an inevitability in a fallen world, in the end, there are no “avoidable” deaths.

Woody Allen once averred that he did not want to achieve immortality through his artistic work. Rather, he quipped, “I want to achieve immortality by not dying.” Funny as this is, what Allen gives comic expression to is something we all, or at least most of us, want. Sadly, in His infinite wisdom, God didn’t set it up to work that way.

Sorry, Woody.

A bit later, I included this:

A major difference between a Christian funeral and a non-religious “celebration of life” is the focus on the hope generated by Christ’s rising from the dead. “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” Saint Paul insisted, then Christians “are the most pitiable people of all.” But for those who have died, been buried, and risen with Christ is baptism, resurrection is a present, not a distant reality!

Our traditio for this solemn Friday is Paradisum from the traditional Requiem Mass:

The fruit of faith

Luke 17:5-10

Along with hope and love, faith is a theological virtue. Unlike natural virtues, which can be acquired through habitus, theological virtues are gifts from God. What Jesus teaches in our Gospel today is not how we earn faith but about excercising it. Faith, after all, is your response to God's unceasing intiative toward you.

Because the gift of faith is just that, a gift, it must not only be given but received. But like any gift, it can be lost. The scriptural reading for today in the Office of Readings consists of the the first twenty verses of 1 Timothy. In verse 19, the inspired author mentions by name two believers who "made a shipwreck of their faith"- Hymenaeus and Alexander.

It seems these two shipwrecked their faith "by rejecting conscience." The author writes he has handed them over to Satan for correction, specifically that they might learn not to blaspheme. We are not informed as to the exact nature of their blasphemy. We just know that it had to do with a serious violation of their consciences, which presumably had been rightly formed.

I am not suggesting that sin, even serious sin, results in a loss of faith. But I think repeatedly doing what you know be wrong weakens your conscience and eventually your faith. There are a lot of things these days that the Church has pretty much always held to be wrong that some now insist aren't only not wrong but actually right. This calls for discernment and conscience formation.

There is probably no one who has a perfectly formed conscience. Conscience formation is an ongoing project, an aspect of spiritual growth and conversion that lasts a lifetime. In dealing with conscience formation, an important distinction has to be made between wrongdoing and sin.

Sin is knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway with a fair degree of freedom. Wrongdoing amounts to doing something wrong that you don't know is wrong or are at least mistaken about how wrong it is. Wrongdoing can reduce or even eliminate personal culpability.

In this, faith and reason are in play for sure. More importantly so are faith and will but will assisted by God's grace. It isn't enough to know what's right, we all need help at times to choose it.

It isn't so much about powerfully commanding a mulberry tree to be uprooted and fly into the sea as it is about having the faith to face yourself and, with God's help, the intercession of our Blessed Mother and the saints, uproot whatever needs to be uprooted.

Repentance is the fruit of faith. And so, we must have the faith to ask God, in the words of today's Collect, to "pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask."

Oh no! Discernment, again?

Here it is October and I am dealing with the same thing I was dealing with in January. Time's relativity becomes more pronounced when going through something like this. In other words, my how ten months can fly by!

So, 2025, among other things (it has been challenging in numerous ways) has been a year of discernment. Just when I think I'm set on what I am going to do, another tectonic plate shifts and I find myself reassessing. All along, my deepest desire is to do what God wants me to do.

I have never been one of those who thinks God will be displeased with me for making the best decision I am capable of making given what I have to go on and my own limitations. God is kind if not "nice," as a recent book pointed out. And so, I find myself again exploring a different course.

Good discernment requires me not to make a big change for the sake of novelty. It also requires me not to remain where I am because it's what I know and where I am comfortable. These concerns constitute for me the boundaries of discernment. Since I am responsible for the support of other people, I need to ensure that I can meet those responsibilities.

When it comes to money, it's important to do the math. As every true adult knows, life is expensive and it isn't getting any cheaper. In the present climate, getting the cost of living under control is on no one's list of priorities. Jesus alludes to the prudence of calculating the cost before undertaking a major building project (see Luke 14:28-30). Part of this consideration is really analyze my expenses.

Ending a reasonably successful career to embark on a new journey for the last 5-7 years of my working life is no small undertaking. Yet, I think that is what I just might do. This has been the back-and-forth of the past nine months.

In January, had two opportunities presented to me quite unexpectedly. One, the opportunity to teach at a seminary just wasn't possible for personal and family reasons. In all honesty, that would've been the fulfillment of a dream. The other opportunity keeps presenting and re-presenting itself to me in different ways.

It's the persistence of these re-presentations and the convergence of circumstances that have me once again discerning with an eye toward making a change. I am grateful I have had the time. Oftentimes, you have to make such consequential choices in far less time. But then, it may be the case that I have taken too long.

When it comes to my own affairs, I am very conservative, to state the matter mildly. I admire people who are willing to take risks. I think upbringing has a lot to do with shaping us in these matters.

With this, I have posted 121 times this year. That is as many posts as I had in 2021. In 2022, 2023, and 2024 Καθολικός διάκονος waned rather than waxed. Posting with this regularity feels normal. This small effort remains for me a labor of love. I also see it as an extension of my ministry. I am on track to post between 150-160 times this year.

I have been mildly surprised at the modest popularity I am currently enjoying. I'd be lying to say I didn't take some satisfaction in that. I hope those who read what I write find it benefical, encouraging, challenging, and, once in a while, amusing.

Things around here have been religious lately. This, of course, is far from a bad thing. I am spiritual because I am religious. Our traditio is an oldie but a goodie: The Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" Since I needed a twist, I went with KT Tunstall's for our Friday traditio.