17th Sunday after Pentecost 2018

Sometimes in reading over the biblical selections for the Mass, or at any other time, one gets a sense
of how far we are from realizing its meaning in view of what the Catholic faith is and what it expects
of us. I say this in particular reference to today’s Epistle wherein Saint Paul, like a good spiritual
father admonishing his children, says that the Ephesians should “walk worthily..with all humility and
mildness and patience.” These are some of the virtues characteristic of the devout Catholic life that
I have always associated with the Church. When, at one time, one spoke the word ‘Catholic,’ it
evoked exactly that kind of reverence of life in which piety was met with a deep charity. It was
almost a kind of fear, and in truth that is what is was–the fear of the Lord, being humble and meek.
Of all things for our blustering ego-centric selves to take in! We live in a time of gross irreverence
and boorishness, with a prodding to be self-flaunting, self-promoting, self-esteeming. It’s almost a
mockery for us blithely to hear Saint Paul’s letters with our ears so full of noise and out time taken
up with the vulgarity of modern life. I wish I had some remedial course to propose to counteract this
impiety so that we could begin to live once again the reverent manner of life that used to be nearly
synonymous with ‘Catholicism.’ Is it irretrievable?

In like manner we have sublime words of our Savior in the Gospel, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul and with they whole mind; thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself.” The pious Jew as well as the devout Catholic have understood these divine
commandments, for they identity what it means to be a religious person. Far more than being mere
marching orders from on high, these precepts of the law derive strength from God Himself who is
Love and who infuses into the souls of His own the supernatural virtue of charity. As Saint John
once taught as a corrective to our way of thinking, “In this is charity: not as though we had loved
God, but because He has first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.” It is more
the action of God upon us that can make us loving Catholic Christians than the exerting of ourselves
to try to love Him. There is a movement of the Holy Spirit from the very heart of the Blessed Trinity
that seeks entry into our souls to give us divine charity. But, here again, we find ourselves at a great
disadvantage, being so self-oriented and closed-in upon ourselves, so distracted by the machinery,
technology, the so-called music, and the incessant talking, texting, and video-watching that the Holy
Spirit finds Himself locked out, and we inaccessible to divine influences. That may be an
exaggeration–to think that we’re hopelessly unreachable–but I think it’s not far from the truth.

If there’s one thing I hope would distinguish our parish–and our parishioners–it is having a sense of
the holiness of God and the reverence His rightful due to Him from us, a reverence that comes from
the Holy Spirit finding a well-ordered soul, a sanctuary of silence, purity, humility and charity. This
ought to be what we find when we enter this church, for the Lord of Hosts is here. And it is what we
should have in the interior recesses of our minds. It’s about a reverent manner of life, what Saint
Peter (1, 3:2) calls “your chaste manner of life with fear.”

I find it completely useless for you to come to this church on Sunday is you do not make earnest
efforts to live reverently, that is, with fear, during your sojourn in this life (1 Pt. 1:17)–(these words
also from Saint Peter’s first epistle). I can’t tell you how to do this in the concrete, since everybody’s
life is so different, one from another, but I know that you’ve got to find a way to do it, to hold-in the
ugly, unruly, impulsive, rude, vulgar, and loose way of living to find that circumscribed, restricted,
curbed, restrained, devout, reverent way of living that was once characteristic of the Catholic way
of life. [I began watching a modern religious film about the building of a church and was sorely
disappointed with the portrayal of the characters–supposedly ‘religious’ from centuries ago who were
not at all like those we read about from the lives of the saints. Instead, they were modern types: crass,
coarse, rude, and mildly offensive in their language. My point is that we don’t even know how to
depict holy people anymore. We’ve lost the model, the prototype. And this is the fault of clergy and
our religious as it is also of the secular world which has invaded and now dominated the ‘sanctuary’
of the Catholic life of our people, and–needless to add–of the sanctuary of our churches, where there
is no longer reverence, silence, peace, and adoration of the Most High God.] Our kind of church
structure is built like a fortress, the kind of architecture that’s meant to keep enemy forces from
attack. This is it exactly: we stand against the world.

What happens then when there is a vacuum, when the love of God dissipates from souls, and when
the Church herself seems to have run out of her holy ‘oil?’ Here is where substitutes enter in, where
charity’s absence is replaced by that veneer of sentimental religiosity that’s feeling and handshake,
and embraces, but not what proceeds from a humble a chaste love. We have this in abundance today
in the various enthusiastic movements of the Church. Another alternative to this genuine charity is
an idealism that confuses it with social justice, a Marxist twist to the Gospel. Here one’s love
becomes transmuted into a general love for all mankind without the personal, one-to-one love that
proceeds from the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul. (This false substitution for Christian love,
altruism, often leads to atheism.)

There’s only one way of being Christian, of being godly, of being, in fact, “right” as God intended
us to be. It is to be Christian in the full sense, where the virtues take over one’s life and where peace
reigns in the human heart. This is a divine work and can’t be had without the grace of God.

I so want our people to be devout Catholics, but I can’t control what happens outside the church after
Mass. We try to be reverent in the presence of God, not only because His divine majesty demands
as much, but also because it needs to be taken home and emulated in your family and in your
workplaces. The devil is standing at the door outside, ready to snatch the little gain you have made
from being at Mass. Hold on to the treasure within you, and don’t give yourselves away.

Today’s Collect: “Grant, O Lord, that your people may shun all the wiles of the devil, and with pure
minds follow you, the only God.” That says it all.