Petersboat

Last week, we spoke of emptying ourselves of the spirit of the world in order to make room for the Holy Spirit. In this episode, we'll move into a word about the knowledge of the self that the Holy Spirit makes possible.

This is the first part of a four-week spiritual preparation for Christmas, beginning with a word (based on the Mass readings for the First Sunday of Advent) about making room in our hearts for Christ.

The Feast of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to implore all people - especially leaders of totalitarian states - to allow Christ to reign in their hearts, that He might direct their thoughts and actions according to the Father's will for peace's sake. But since peace is begotten by God, not made by man, it is by the forgiveness of sin that man is then poised to bring God's peace to the world.

The title's a bit click-baity, but it was either that or "Sure Feels Like the End Sometimes," which also seemed a bit of a ploy. In any case, this Sunday's readings prepared us for Christ's return to judge the living and the dead, because next weekend is the Feast of Christ the King, which will bring with it the end of the liturgical year and a foreshadowing of the end of all things. My hope, here, was to say that by growing in our awareness of how Christ is already with us, we can be relieved of any fear of His coming again in glory - or even our own death.

I propose, in this homily, a way of understanding the kind of help that Jesus is trying to offer us. It seems to me that he dwells in us in order to help us make sense of our thoughts and feelings, which are often wrong - thank God.

We do not like waiting. Well, in any case, we're not good at it, which is obvious; in this age of invention we've all but eliminated the need to wait for anything. There was a time when we waited for the seeds, the rains, the sun. Some still do, but most of us go to the supermarket and still complain about the checkout line. We get frustrated with shipping delays, abhor traffic, and have all but abandoned television for the immediacy of binge-streaming.No wonder the suffering of purgatory is so much on our conscience these days, like a punishment the child sees coming while returning home from school. We are full of guilt for allowing ourselves to have become so alienated from the thing happening everywhere else in the natural world, which is essential for growth, namely, waiting.But I wouldn’t want us to think that the waiting we hear so often associated with purgatory is arbitrary or merely punitive. If that antechamber to heaven really is, as the Church teaches, the place where God’s mercy tempers His justice, then there must be something to be gained by the experience of waiting offered to us in this life. Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of it or resent it. Maybe we should welcome it, and grow in it.   

The title of this episode is a reference to the film, The Crossing Guard, which I mention toward the end of the reflection in the hope of illustrating the way that Christ can be of the greatest help to us, if we would open our heart to Him. Of course, it is a scary thing even to acknowledge our desire for God - as terrifying as the seemingly infinite space of the cosmos.

Looking forward to the end of time with hope requires conceiving of our lives by the Holy Spirit in light of the promises God makes to us in the Scriptures, which are themselves inspired by the Holy Spirit. The hope we find in them enables us to overcome the deception of the evil spirit.

If being together at Mass on Sundays is called "practicing the Faith" that means the world is our playing field, which means that Christ is training us to give thanks to God always and everywhere.

The root system of the mulberry tree is deep and complicated, not unlike the human heart, the ground beneath our feelings and emotions. It's a great thing to believe in God. But it's altogether heroic to trust in Him when our emotions are revolting against His will. When that happens, the mulberry tree of our lives has truly been unrooted and planted in the sea of His mercy.