Homily for Dec. 30th

Christmas2 - Holy Family
A family can be a great blessing, but it takes work from everyone, even the children. As brothers and sisters in Christ, you are the Holy Family of Jesus. Happy feast day.

Homily for Christmas

Christmas Vigil - Jesus, the best present ever!
God gives us his Son for Christmas -- Emmanuel, God with us, God in a human face. He is proof that we are all loved immensely by God.
Given to children at the 4pm Mass at Most Blessed Sacrament Parish (St. Peter's Site).

Me on a Tree

My Mother likes to get Christmas ornaments that mark special events in our family. This year the biggest special event (in my opinion) was my ordination to the priesthood. I decided to look for little priest ornaments as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately no one sells them. However, I have this wonderful friend who thought the idea was so good, she volunteered to make priest ornaments for me! She has wonderfully talented friends and the little gang of them cooked up the most unique Christmas gift I have ever given. So now at home my family can enjoy seeing me in clerics and my brother in an alb and stole swinging on the Christmas tree. Now, as long as I don't find ornament hangers wrapped around their necks :-) Merry Christmas to you all! (especially my twin brother, who is spending Christmas in Europe, and may find out thorough the blog that he is now decorating the family tree.)

Homily for Dec. 23rd

Advent4 Who wants baby Jesus?
Children are an amazing miracle and also a great challenge. In the same way, Baby Jesus is the answer to all of our hopes -- but are we willing to give up our plans in order to accept God's plan? We all want Jesus to be born, but not to us.

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, God with us, our King and Lawgiver, the expected of the nations and their Savior: Come to save us, O Lord our God.
O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, expectatio gentium, et Salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O King of the Gentiles

O King of the Gentiles and their desired One, the Cornerstone that makes both one; Come, and deliver man, whom You formed out of the dust of the earth.
O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

O Radiant Dawn

O Dawn, splendor of eternal light, and sun of justice, come, and shine on those seated in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David

O Key of David, and Scepter of the House of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens; Come and bring forth the captive from his prison, he who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.
O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israël, qui aperis, et nemo claudit, claudis, et nemo aperuit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Root of Jesse

O Root of Jesse, who stands for an ensign of the people, before whom kings shall keep silence and unto whom the Gentiles shall make supplication: Come to deliver us, and tarry not.
O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Lord and Ruler

O Lord and Ruler of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the flame of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: Come and redeem us with outstretched arm.
O Adonai, et dux domus Israël, qui Moyse in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Wisdom

O Wisdom, who came from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly, Come, and teach us the way of prudence.
O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter, suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Antiphons

On Dec. 17 the Church begins a special period of expectation. We anticipate the coming of Christ and reflect on what that coming means. Part of this ancient anticipation is the O Antiphons, a series of 7 antiphons taken from Evening Prayer. They express what the coming of Jesus means using ancient language from the Scriptures. Each day we will reveal a new antiphon, counting down the days until Christmas. The first antiphon is proper to Dec. 17th, the last belongs on the 23rd. They are enshrined in the hymn, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." Collect all seven.

Homily for Dec. 16th

Advent3 Patience, the Lord is near
Like John the Baptist, we may become tired of waiting for the Lord to fulfill his prophecies and finally come. We have to look back at the good God has already done in our lives in order to have the patience to wait for the good things he is going to do.

ZEN Baby

I just got an early Christmas present, a Creative ZEN mp3 player. Not only does it play, it also records. How does a Mom know about these things? I bought a few cables and now I can use it to record my homilies. I think that was the idea in the first place, because Mom likes to listen to my homilies.

The non-toxic, pollution free life

At one point I did not take environmental protection very seriously. Supposedly there was a hole in the ozone layer, somewhere over Antarctica, and the hole was caused by ordinary household chemicals. I had a hard time being concerned about what happened in Europe, much less about what was happening in Antarctica. I certainly could not see any ozone layer, much less a hole in it, and if there was such a layer it was so far away from the bottles under the sink that it was hard to believe they could ever have a relationship. Limits on chemicals seemed a lot of hype that just made my life more difficult.

I suppose with a college education it was easier to imagine how all these things in the world could be related. Although I am still not convinced that carbon dioxide and methane cause the planet to be warmer every year (and coming from Wisconsin this doesn't seem like such a bad idea), I can certainly get my head around the idea that all these things could be related. I think the current discussions on limiting global emissions of "greenhouse gasses" are not a bad idea. In fact, I bought a car based mostly on what would be a good, efficient source of transportation and based very little on what would be a good looking machine for me to be riding in (I bought a Honda). Whether or not global warming is a threat, I like the idea of living a life which produces less waste and pollutes less.

For me there is a very powerful pull in the desire to live a life which is more simple, more in harmony with the world, and less large and loud and complicated. In some way I identify with the Medieval monks - even with a few modern monks that I know. The monastic insight is that it is not the quantity which matters so much as the quality. It is not a life lived large that makes a positive differences as much as a life lived well. Their search for the good life pulled them towards God, and towards a simple life in community, often growing all their own food, making their own sandals and simple habits and living mostly in silence. In many of the orders, when an old monk died they would simply sew his hood shut and bury him in the ground just like that. This is becoming my ideal of a non-toxic, pollution free life.

I am particularly jealous of the fact that the monks left a lot of pollution outside the walls of their monastery; what they used to call the vanities of the world. I am thinking especially of the kind of garbage that seems to fill human society, the shows and entertainments, the greed and the glitz and the glamour that has more style than substance and ultimately disappoints. It's like junk food for the spirit. There seems to be far more garbage than good on television these days, and for this reason I rarely watch television at the moment. I wouldn't mind if the Environmental Protection Agency fined producers and major studios for dumping and pollution for some of the things they produce. Even on YouTube, where I can (theoretically) control what I watch, I find I am always one click away from a pile of dung. Living a non-toxic life seems to require that I limit my intake of mental toxins.

Just as living well means not taking in garbage, I am constantly reminded that it also means producing less garbage. Some of the most poisonous toxins we can produce are nasty language, gossip, hatred, bitterness and jealousy. The monastic way of life pushed the monks to constantly to uproot these kinds of pollutants and to live without them. Isn't this what we really want in a healthy environment? Less yelling and fighting at home, less jealousy and less gossip at work?

This doesn't seem to be a difficult message to preach. In fact, it seems far easier to convince people that their nasty language is making the world a difficult place to live, than to convince people that the chemicals under the sink are toxic. We seem to have done a good job of the second one, and not so well on the first. Maybe that is because we do not have an Environmental Protection Agency that measures office conversation and limits pollutants, and it is a good thing that we don't. On the other hand, a self-imposed limit of pollutants-per-day sounds like a good idea to me. It is a challenge and also a sacrifice, but if we can change what we buy to live a non-toxic life, we should certainly be able to change the way we speak.

Can men drink tea?

Next to the pursuit of holiness, the pursuit of manliness is near and dear to my heart (I think, in the end, they aren't that different but that is another topic). In any case, I and a few of my friends prefer tea to coffee, which opens us up to the occasional barb from others who fancy themselves experts on the subject of manhood. So, in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, I want to ask this question to all you blog readers out there: is there anything unmanly about saying "I would rather have tea than coffee?" Is there anyone out there who learned to drink coffee because it made his life more masculine? Do you have to drink from a manly looking cup?

Keeping the space.

I began my homily this weekend by noticing that something was missing in the chapel. In front of the altar there were an angel, and a shepherd, and a sheep, a cow and a donkey, and a man and woman who seemed to be worshiping a napkin. In the place where the center of the display should have been, there was only an empty space. So, I took a purse from one of the ladies at the Mass and filled the space with it. It was a large, brown purse and it filled the space quite well.

The problem with life is that something is missing. We aren't sure what exactly we expected to find in life, but whatever we have isn't what we expected. The temptation is to fill that space with whatever we happen to have on hand, whether it is food or money, shopping or movies, friends or family. In fact, the several weeks leading up to Christmas look like one big orgy designed to fill every possible crack in our lives with something. The result is a misshapen life, like trying to fill a nativity scene with a purse. There is a haunting beauty to emptiness, a beauty that draws the soul, but emptiness stuffed with the first available thing is like a woman who dates idiots because she is lonely.

With a purse filing the nativity scene, there isn't any room for the baby Jesus to come. A full life is not able to accept the gift of the Son of God. Advent is a moment to take out what has been filling our life up to this point, so that we will have space for the Lord to come. The problem is, the Lord comes when he is ready to come, and not when we demand him. We have to keep vigil by the emptiness, protecting it from invasion, so that whenever the Lord is ready to fill our life, we will be able to receive him.

Homily for Dec. 9th

Advent2 Eliminate your false Hopes
John the Baptist reminds us to purify ourselves to prepare for the Lord's coming. Last week we talked about letting God into the places that we think our hopeless. This week we look at false hopes -- those things that we should not hope in. Eliminating those things will make us ready for the Lord's coming.

Homily for Dec. 8th

Immaculate Conception
Adam and Eve refused to trust God. As a result, they were born with original sin, which is like a drop of venom in the veins. It makes us doubt God's word. Mary was born without original sin, which means that she always trusted God.

Movies, good and bad

Bishop Jerome Listecki of the Diocese of La Crosse has published a letter on the diocesan website denouncing the upcoming movie The Golden Compass. The bishop says the movie is part of a fantasy trilogy called His Dark Materials, written by an author who is not only an atheist but strongly anti-Christian, and his trilogy expresses this. My only direct information is based on the trailer, which shows the movie as a lavish and shiny adventure in a hodge-podge world without much plot depth. It also informs me that the evil organization which threatens the world is called the Magisterium, a clear snipe at the Catholic Church, and the heroes which oppose it include Witches. This is a movie I plan to avoid.

On a more positive note, I recently noticed a trailer for a movie called Juno. The central plot is about a high school girl who accidentally becomes pregnant (funny how that happens) and struggles with facing her peers, her family, and what to do with the baby. The movie seems thoughtful, well written, and unconventional in its approach to the question of teen pregnancy. I cannot recommend it since I haven't seen it yet, but this is a movie I plan to watch.

Homily for Dec. 2nd

Advent1 - Prepare your Hopelessness for the Lord's Coming
Advent means coming or arrival. It is a season of hope and preparation for Christ. In order to really be prepared, we have to face up to the areas in our lives where we are not ready for Christ. Help is on the way - God himself is sending us a savior.