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Petersboat
Peter and Pan and the United States of America | The Monday After
00:30:16
If remaining with people requires forgiving them all the time, and forgiving people all the time will make us more like Christ, then perhaps it's good for us that we challenge one another. Good for us, personally. Good for our loved ones. And good for our country.
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Well, because the sun has come out, turned into a rather nice evening after a couple of rainy days. I'll record outside here a little conversation with you reflecting on what we said yesterday in the church feast of Pentecost this weekend, and this is the Monday after. I think I would summarize it by saying Jesus is someone who awakens our desire for God. And then we also, at the same time, perceive that staying with him is how we can arrive at the fulfillment of our desire. Does that make sense? So if you fall in love with someone, you're meeting someone who becomes like Jesus for you, and you also, you would say this person is like Christ for you because you perceive that staying with them throughout your life would be like also part of what makes this good. So the Holy Spirit is sent to us so that we can remain with Christ. This is why he's called advocate. Does that make sense? So the reason that Jesus sends the Spirit to us is so that we can remain in him and he in us now, he stays in us through the sacraments in a most blessed way, the Eucharist, and then many, many ways, and in the people that we meet each day. You know, the neighborhood people. All right. Now, if we. If we live this mystery of meeting someone and wanting to stay with them, you move into something like, well, you might say marriage sometimes. For those who perceive this as a call to remain and also be fruitful and multiply or just even for all of us belonging to the church, it's like a people that I can remain with throughout my life who can be like Christ for me. You know, when I felt called to the priesthood, it was because although over the years I had been expecting to fall in love with a woman and marry in that way and have children in that way. I met the parish in a surprising way after college. I say surprising because I perceived myself to be falling in love with the parish, which is what I had always been trying to feel for or experience with another woman. And then at the same time as I'm meeting the people of the parish, the parish priest, the youth minister, the ladies praying the rosary with devotion every day, the good men of the parish who were generous and of service, the whole thing to me awakened my own desire for God. And at the same time, I was perceiving that perhaps if I stayed with Christ in this way as a priest in relationship with the parish, that that would be my way to the fulfillment of my heart's desire. Does that make sense? So Christ comes to me through the priesthood and the vocation Live this way with me as he does when he calls people to marriage. Live this way with me through this spouse. All right? And all of us, married, priests, religious, single, all of us with Christ through the communion of the Church. So the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Church, makes us the body of Christ, though many members, one body, as we heard in the readings. And again, the Holy Spirit wants us to remain with Christ. So now, this is the thing. Why the remaining. Why do I have to remain? Why can't I just say, I met him. Great, I'm saved. See you in heaven. Like, why do I have to remain with Him? Here's what I was trying to say this weekend. What does it really mean to remain with people in a fallen world? Well, it's going to mean a lot of forgiving. If we could become people who grow in our ability to forgive and be merciful and be generous and of service, and who are able to really stay by the side of someone who may be difficult. Who are we becoming like? We're becoming like Christ, right? So you see the plan of the Father for us to become like other Christs, like His Son, to enter into His Son's glory. He has called us to like fidelity in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love and honor each other for the rest of our lives. Because he knows the Father knows that that requires that we would become like His Son, Jesus, who is fidelity itself and mercy and forgiveness. That's why when we read in the Gospel this week, he breathes the Holy Spirit on the apostles, his disciples, and he says to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven them. That's what the Holy Spirit helps us to accomplish, you know, becoming like Christ by becoming merciful. And you can see the gifts of the Holy Spirit, like wisdom and understanding, counsel, even fortitude. Oh, these are all the things that are required in order for us to forgive. I mentioned this weekend, too, that we had the. The performance of the Peter Pan musical on Friday here at the parish. And I thought about St. Peter and also the Greek God Pan, because Caesarea Philippi is the place where Jesus took Peter and said, who do men say that I am? And it was the place, Caesarea Philippi, where the God Pan was being worshipped. Pan was a God that was meant to mean that everything taken together just makes up God. That God is all things together. It's not other or apart from his creation, but that he is like all of creation makes up God. So that's what's called Pantheism. But that's the place that Jesus took his disciples. And Peter, St. Peter, when Jesus asked the question, who do men say that I am? Peter is like, you are the son of the living God. You know, you are. In a sense, he was saying, you're like, begotten, not made. You know, you're something greater than all creation. You know you're greater than what this God pan is supposed to mean. Peter was perceiving. Saint Peter was perceiving in Jesus that something of something transcendent, something beyond this world was coming into this world. And Jesus responds to Peter, blessed are you for saying that or seeing that. For flesh and blood has not revealed that to you. You know, not mere human reason or rationale, but my Father in heaven, you know, the one who transcends all things. So he says, I will call you. Now Petrus Simon's name is turned to Peter, which means rock. And on this rock, I will build my church. In some sense, Jesus was saying to Peter, you're being able to see that is conceived by the Holy Spirit. Your being able to say that about me is something that is begotten, not made. Your understanding. And Peter probably still has no idea, like, what this even means, that his name was just changed, just, you know, rock and whatever it's like. But Peter continues to speak from that heart that he has for Christ, which is what I was calling his desire for God. And you see all throughout Peter's life that he deals with Christ according to his desire for him. You know, I'll die for you. He's so passionately convinced that he can lay down his life for Jesus. Meanwhile, Jesus is the one who comes to lay down his life for us. And Peter will become that, but after a life of mercy and forgiveness and fidelity. And what is the thing we hear Jesus say in the middle of his life is when they're on top of Mount Tabor and Jesus face shines like the sun. You know, like we prayed in the psalm this week, send forth your spirit. Renew the face of the earth. And we think about Peter like when he saw Jesus face shine like the sun. And Peter was like, let's just stay here forever in this glory. But Jesus says, peter, we have to go down the mountain and to Jerusalem. The way into this glory is through the cross. And Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor were actually talking to Jesus about his crucifixion, the Passover he was to accomplish, which is the crucifixion in Jerusalem, laying down his life. But you can see Peter saying, I want the glory. And then Jesus saying to Peter, you will enter into glory, but only as you were able to follow me all the way to. And then through the cross, and then fast forward, as Jesus is going to the cross, who denies him and hides and goes away is Peter. I do not know him. I do not know him. I do not know the man. And Peter's brokenhearted about it, just like this is what life is like. It's like marriage, priesthood, you know, we're all brokenhearted because we're not as faithful to Christ as he is to us. But then Jesus appears, raised from the dead. Now he appears to Peter. Peter, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? Peter's like, I love you, I love you, I love you. And he even says, you know, you know everything, Lord Jesus, you know everything about me. You knew I was going to deny you. You told me I was going to deny you. So you know everything. So you must know also that underneath my denial of you, which comes from my fear at times and my weakness, you know that I love you in the depth of my heart. I desire you, so I will stay with you. This is how Christ's faithfulness to us, you know, accomplishes our salvation if we allow it. If we allow him to forgive us all along the way. This is why I mentioned marriage this weekend, because to be legally married to someone is to have a law between you. For example, a civil union is a law. It's a real thing law. It's a natural thing. Natural law is written into this creation by God, and right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair. So you could be civilly married to someone, have a legal bond. That's a thing. But marriage is really tough. Like, living a life together requires a lot of grace, a lot of forgiveness, a lot of mercy. It requires love. So a marriage needs also to be blessed by God. Now, when a marriage is blessed by God, the love of God can be the bond between the people. And then the people will have a source of mercy and forgiveness and understanding all those gifts of the Spirit. So, like, if a couple who are Catholic marry civilly and then later bring that marriage to the church to be blessed, it's called a convalidation, meaning the state has validated the marriage, but now it will be validated with God too, convalidating it with the Church, meaning letting the bond now be transfigured into a bond of love. So when a married couple now have Christ as the bond, sacramental marriage, the bond between them is a Source of forgiveness, a source of mercy, a source of understanding and counsel and fortitude and fear of the Lord, and piety and right judgment. It's all these gifts of the Spirit and all the gifts that someone would need in order to really live marriage faithfully to the end. But again, you can summarize it by saying all the gifts we would need to forgive one another every day. So that's why I was thinking about marriage this weekend and then also Peter Pan, because I'm thinking about St. Peter, who was bold enough to say, no, it's not pantheism, some general relationship with an abstract God. It's Christianity. A relationship with God through a particular person. Jesus of Nazareth, son of the living God. But also, as Jesus now comes to us through our spouse or through the priest, or through my child, or through my teacher or my coach or my friend. All these particular ways that Christ comes to us through people whom we perceive to be someone that God wants us to stay with. Because not only does this person awaken in me the desire for God, but they also contain a kind of promise that if I stay with them, I might be led through my relationship with them to the fulfillment of that promise. Does that make sense? So you might say it this way. Our spouses, like they can awaken in us the desire for God, but they cannot fulfill it themselves. But staying with them can lead to the fulfillment, or so too. As a priest, I love the parish, and I love being a priest. But no parish will ever satisfy my desire for God. But I stay with the parish because I believe that by staying with it, remaining with it in this merciful, forgiving relationship and this fidelity, that I can be led by it to the fulfillment of my heart's desire. This is so important again, because if I think about a spouse as needing to fulfill my desire for God, I will resent that spouse for not being able to. And I will want to divorce or separate from that spouse. But if I see the spouse as a way to my heart's desire, I love my spouse even when I want to strangle my spouse. You know, that kind of thing. Or so too, with the priests and your priests. You know, if you see the priests as a man who's going to fulfill your desire for God, you will resent him for not being able to. And if a priest sees a parish as being able to fulfill his desire for God, he will hate that parish for not being able to. But if we see each other as company that God has given us companions, the word companion, meaning people, we break Bread with. This is the other great meaning of the word. Pen means bread. Like people, we break bread with companions then in the celebration of the Eucharist, all throughout our lives together. Right? Just as the upper room is the place where the Holy Spirit first descended upon the apostles and Our lady, the place where Christ broke peace bread with them. If we see ourselves as companions along the way, we can love one another and not hate each other. Why? Why do people in the world hate each other? Because they try to squeeze God out of each other and resent each other for not being able to fulfill that desire. So my neighbor's always the problem. And that stupid country over there and that stupid people over there who speak a different language and have different color skin, all that stuff. It's like, what if we were to let them be who they are and the difficult and challenging company that God wants us to have along the way so that we can become more like him who is merciful and forgiving. That's why the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church. And they all go out into the world and speak these languages that all the nations of the world understand. They're speaking in ways that are mysterious even to themselves, and yet it creates a union between people, a unity between people. So that. And that's why I mentioned a word about our country. This is Memorial Day. Right now I'm on the back porch, thankful for this beautiful weather in this terrific country of ours. And I don't want to give up on the dream of America that this dream that was conceived in liberty. And it was this possibility of living with people from different nations, different ethnicities, nationalities that speak different languages, but to live together as a kind of united people? I mean, each state a small little country unto itself. But what if perhaps we were able to live, you know, by the bonds not merely of law, but also of love? I mean, always good law. Because in a fallen world where there are evil men, you will always need to give the devil benefit of law. So that way we can move about the cabin without worrying about dying every five seconds. So you need law to frighten evil men with punishment. But what if we were to implement the law with love? And what if we were to interpret the law with love, always considering what is best for the neighbor? Then perhaps we can remember that there is something that transcends even civil union with people, even mere legal ties, rather. But the bonds of affection, the bonds of having been created by God and being all called to him and on the way to him, to love one another along the way so as to become pleasing to him and more like him. You know, we perceived, I think, although we might not have all said it this way in the beginning, we perceive that living this way as we try to live in America, it's better for us, not easier, not more pleasant. It's not because it's not homogenous, but it seems more sort of worthy of man to try to live as we live here in America. Recognizing that if you try to allow rights to give birth to freedoms, civil liberties, it's going to be a little messy, you know, and people are sometimes going to be a little annoying. And it's going to be a life of constantly forgiving one another for being different and therefore challenging. But and again, without maybe over dramatizing it or exaggerating it. I think at the beginning, the dream of our fathers and those holy mothers who are right alongside of these good men penning the Constitution, the dream was like what could come after the fruits of a well lived marriage, which is the fulfillment of the heart's desire. There was an intuition that it was better for us to live the risk of these kind of freedoms we enjoy in this country than to just merely ask a king to take care of us all throughout our lives, you know, to provide for us. It would have been easy, like Peter Pan, to stay children all throughout our lives. But even he perceived something in Wendy to be something he needed. So although he himself, I think, was never capable of living what he wanted to live on his own, I think it's a reminder to all of us too. Like we can't, we can't realize the dream of Peter Pan alone. The only way to kind of to be perpetually young would be to belong to someone who can be like Christ for us, you know, but man, when Christ says to us that he comes to us in the least of our brethren, that stings because it's true. It's like, think about the church. It's not all that different than the marriage that you bring to it or the children that you bring to it. These people that are challenging and you know, we beg Christ for grace to let him come to us in whatever way he wants to trusting that we become more and more like him when we're with people who challenge us the way that we challenge him. You want an example of this? A little while ago, a man came up and took the Eucharist instead of receiving it with reverence. So it's not exactly by the Holy Spirit, no piety or fear of the Lord in the way that some People receive the Eucharist, you know, and it broke my heart. And I felt the emotion of anger like people. But then I'm like, come, Lord Jesus, and help me to pray. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. And I. And I thought about that a little bit afterwards. I realized, like, I do this with people sometimes I take the body instead of reverence the body as a gift. That's what lust is. You know, I don't do this physically with other people, thank God. But I mean, you know, sometimes in my imagination, when your mind wanders and you give your passions and appetites to some sort of fantasy, which is basically a life that God is not giving you, but one that you are inventing for your own, then you go into that dark, nether world, which is neither here nor there, you know, cast out, feeling like Frodo putting the ring on. In any case, I realize that I'm like that man sometimes with Christ. Maybe not with the Eucharist, but with Christ as he comes to me in other people, you know, I may just take or use or instead of reverence and receive as a gift. And then I thought, this is how we can become more like Christ, who's constantly forgiving us. We can wrestle with one another in the church, you know, by living together. I don't know, if you look at some of the other communions in the world, you might say, well, I don't need the church because I've got, you know, my fellow jets fans. Well, also, you like the jets together, but that's easy in a sense, right? Or I don't need the church. I got my boys that I go to the bar with, whatever, like. But, yeah, you all come together, use the same language and talk. You're all together because you look at things in the same way, in that sense, right? And as soon as one of you steps out of line, he's out. Like, women do this all the time. Like, we're friends until we're not friends anymore. You know, basically, you know, as soon as you. Politically. Right. We're so divided politically, I'll be your friend until you tell me that you think that, you know, Biden had something to offer after all, or that Trump maybe has some good things to say. You know, we just have all these lines that we draw all over the place. You know, we're very good at separating ourselves from one another, isolating ourselves like the young people of the world who feel so alienated from one another and from. Well, in any case, the church as a place of Communion is a place of fidelity to people who are in some ways different. And the communion that emerges is a holy communion. People living together by the spirit of understanding and wisdom and knowledge. Knowledge of being loved by God, having been created by him and destined for him together. Of counsel, you know, trying to help each other along the way of piety, meaning reverencing one another, fear of the Lord, you know, trying to remember that no one's the possession of another. You know, it's really. It's the communion that we share in Christ that is in this world. The beginnings of the union with God that we're all called to share with him forever in heaven. You're nobody till somebody loves you. You're nobody til somebody cares. I've been thinking about that song. It's like the song I mentioned this week. I was singing while I was cleaning the garage. Be my life's companion and you'll never, never grow old. I love you so much that you'll never grow old. Yeah, it's a Mills Brothers cover of a song that was written, like, after the first world wars and of this past century. And it was a time when there was triumph and hope in the air, victory in war, justice over injustice, and light casting out of the dark and, you know, good conquering evil. And we were full as a country of the possibility of, like, you know, having to argue sometimes and having to fight sometimes, but nonetheless seeing that it could lead to something where there was finally no more fighting. Finally there would be peace. You know, I don't know. It's just. And it was all characterized by, like, the love songs. There was a sense of how love was, would conquer all. You know, that love was the victory. I mean, it was what gave the soldiers the confidence to fight on the battlefield, you know, for love's sake. Love of country, patriotism. And then the particular loves that they experienced in life that they were fighting for. They were picturing fate. They had pictures in their wallets of people they were fighting for. The man who was able to get really specific about a particular person that he was fighting for could handle a lot on the battlefield. But I think any guy who was out there merely for the idea of justice, he might not have had the courage. So if the Holy Spirit comes to us to embolden us, it's because he makes this thing so personal. And if our relationship with God is going to be very personal and not a mere pantheism, it has to have faces and names of real people. Which is why this jargon of I am Spiritual, but not religious. You know, I get it. You know, it might. Might be easier that way, but it's. I don't see any growth in holiness that way. You know, like Jesus saying, the man who tries to save his life will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it, you know? Yeah. So the more specific or particular that our relationship with God can become, the better. I'll end with this. A priest friend of mine shared with us a little while ago by way of his podcast, that a friend of his left the seminary to say, I'm going to get married. I feel called to marriage. And they say, oh, what's her name? And he said, well, I haven't met her yet. And then they said, that's nonsense, man. Nobody's called. Just generally to marriage. You either meet a person and fall in love or you don't. It has to be real. Christ comes to us in the particular, and he said he was thinking about that because he met with a couple who were preparing for marriage. And she said to him, to the priest, you know, he didn't want to marry. He always said he would never get married. And the priest asked the guy, he said, well, what happened to you? And the guy says, well, I met her father. That's what happened. I met her. And so when you meet a particular person, the vocation is realized. Christ comes to us through the particular person. And so I think also, too, this ability to become the person that. That God created us to be, you know, it's only possible when we give ourselves to a particular person or real people that God calls us to stay with, to remain with. And the reason this is so salvific is because to stay with people, to remain with people requires being really forgiving and merciful, and not in any kind of resentful way with disdain, but with gratitude and hope of the glory that it may lead to. You hear the church bells? Yeah, the church bells. They ring throughout the day at certain hours, in this case at six, you know, to remind us that at the end, end of the day, you know, glory awaits. At the end of our lives, glory awaits. They ring a couple of times in the beginning of the day with the promise of what may yet be. And then they ring at length toward the end of the day, the way that the trumpet accompanied the feast of Pentecost. Because the trumpet is the instrument of triumph, of victory, the victory of love over death, of life over death. You know, it's as Memorial Day, you know, and it fortuitously fell on the Feast of Pentecost this year, or close to it, so that we can remember that there is something in the world worth fighting for, like Christ on the cross, whose entry into heaven was met with trumpet blasts and the praise of the angels. Anyway, so happy Feast day, everyone. Feast of Pentecost, the great culmination of the Easter season. May our lives also culminate in the realization of what these celebrations foreshadow.