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The Monday After | Emptying Ourselves of the Spirit of the World
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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.
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So today I'll be presenting the first of four weeks of preparation in conjunction with these four weeks of Advent for Christmas, the birth of Christ. We want to this week begin by speaking a word about making room in our hearts for him. So this first week is going to be called, as I preached yesterday, emptying ourselves of the spirit of the world. And here I hope to offer you a word that will help you to make room in your heart for, say, the spirit of forgiveness of those who have hurt you, the spirit of generosity with those who need you, the spirit of patience and understanding. I'm thinking about those of you who are children being understanding with your parents even as they're trying to be patient and understanding with you. If we empty ourselves of the spirit of the world, and we'll talk about what that means in a second, or as St. Paul said yesterday in the second reading, if we throw off works of darkness, we're making room for Christ's Holy Spirit to reside and abide in us. We want him to dwell in us and remain with us. So Christ is that spirit of forgiveness and that spirit of generosity and of patience and understanding, of love, Right? So I said yesterday, I shared with you that an old student of mine came to see me this week to prepare for marriage. And I got to meet her fiance, this young guy that she met in college. And I knew he was going to be wonderful. She's a terrific young lady. I was so happy to meet her when I was chaplain of the high school and I spent four years with her. We started a pro life club in the school called the Gianna Club. And she was terrific to be at the helm of that. She was very intelligent, social, attractive, but warm heart, very, very kind person. Really terrific. So I was just really enjoying talking to them, preparing their wedding with them. After doing all the paperwork, I asked them, as I ask all couples, you know, do you have any questions about the ceremony, any other questions, or any questions for me? And she had one more, and I was so proud of her. She said, I just want to share with you, Father Rob, that we at night we FaceTime each other, we say a little prayer together, we say, I love you. What else can we do? She asked, to prepare our hearts for marriage. This is why I love her. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm so glad you're asking. And her fiance is equally interested. He's a good man, going to Mass all the time. They really met through the church at Fairfield. So I said, well, I'm preaching this weekend on emptying ourselves of the spirit of the world. So why don't you think about being careful with what you watch and what you listen to and, you know, what you take into your heart. Make sure you prepare the place for your spouse. I said to him, prepare that place in your heart, that special place for her. Make it worthy of her. And to her also, make it a place in your heart that's worthy of him by emptying that space of anything that would be profane or vulgar, whatever, even if it's just superficial and worldly. Now, we're not Puritans. We're not people who say that the world is bad, like, don't touch. I'm not saying that all Amish. Amish tend to really, like, love the Earth, but they're very skeptical of modernity and things, objects, inventions, items, possessions, stuff like that. And we're not Manicheans, though. That was the heresy that challenged St. Augustine. His time where there was this thinking that the body and the material world was displeasing to God in general, and he only liked the spiritual world. All right, but so as Catholic Christians, we're more like this guy Hiller Belloc, who said, wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there's always merriment and good red wine. At least I've always found it. So Benedikamos Domino, which is, bless us, O Lord. So we love the things of the earth, and we love music and film and the arts, and we're very passionate. We love a glass of red wine, you know, but the spirit of the world is a little different. St. Paul describes it, and we'll talk about it in a little bit here, but he describes it a little more specifically for us. So we're trying, though, to say we're going to make room in our heart for one another, as we're trying to make room in our hearts for Christ by being cautious about our possessions. What we get very attached to, what we're scrolling through, where we spend a lot of time online, our subscriptions, communities. We may belong to associations. Who do I follow? What do I spend my money on? You know, Jesus said that one time. He said, where your treasure is, there your heart will be. Also, where your treasure is, there your heart will be. And I would say it this way, what I take into my heart becomes the lens through which I look at life. So if I play three, four hours of video games a day, I shouldn't be surprised that after I stop playing, I treat people in my life as if they are an opponent out to get me Seeking to find me and kill me. That's why children who play so many video games tend to be very combative and deal with the world in an adversarial way. At least their parents, you know, it's just the spirit of the video game. But parents fall into the same trap, too, of spending too much time on Facebook when their child comes to them with a I want to speak to you personally as much as possible. Not just be like they and people, but if your child comes to you and has a real emotional, psychological, social problem, I wouldn't want you to reduce that child's very real issue to a political issue. But because Facebook is full of political rhetoric and ideology and commentary, it's hard after spending so much time in that world, not to deal with our loved ones in a merely political way. Stuff like that, you know, it becomes the lens through which I look at people. And then pornography is something that affects us all as a temptation or an addiction. And you can just see how if I spend too much time with the objectification of the person, that I would become a person who can't help but look at people in an objectifying way. So it poisons, in a sense, my view of the other person. So this is why be careful with what we take into our heart now, trying to get some of that out and make room for Christ's holy Spirit. I mentioned yesterday the cleansing of the temple is very interesting. When Christ comes into the temple in Jerusalem, he finds money changes there, money changers there. They were exchanging certain forms of currency for others to make a little profit on the deal. And hey, that's part of the economy. But they had set up their tables and their seats in the temple area. So Christ was saying to them, look, you guys can come here to pray, offer sacrifice to the father. He loves you and he would love to hear your prayers, but don't set up shop here like you own the place. So that's why he turns the tables and he's saying the same thing to these things in our lives that are like of the world you can pass through, but don't set up shop in the heart like you own the place. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but give to God what belongs to God. What belongs to God, right is our heart, you know. So when he cleanses the temple, he's reminding us that we too, we have these hearts that are called to be places of prayer where the Father dwells and we with him. In the gospel yesterday, Jesus used the expression master of the house. I wonder how Many of you just thought about that song from Les Mis. I like that one too. But he's speaking about in a parable, like a person who's preparing for his coming again, saying, if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he wouldn't let his house be broken into. So too, he says, you must also be prepared for at an hour you do not expect the Son of Man will come. But I'm interested in this expression, the master of the house. He wants us to think of our hearts as something that we're called to be master of. And so we are. As Adam was master of his heart before the fall, and Eve was master of, master of her heart before the fall. You know, to guard our heart, that it might be a place where we can pray with the Father, be with God and one another, because we're in each other's hearts too, right? And that our relationships wouldn't be poisoned by the evil One who animates the spirit of the world in so many different ways, or with our relationship with God himself. Remember, Christ said, when you pray, go to your inner room and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. It means go into your heart. So St. Paul named some of the spirits of the world, rivalry and jealousy. He said this in the second reading yesterday. Promiscuity, I would say, and lust, drunkenness and disorder. So you can just see then how the Holy Spirit of forgiveness, for example, could drive out rivalry and jealousy. The Holy Spirit of generosity can drive out promiscuity and lust. Because lust is like using a person. Generosity is trying to be something truly good for that person, not using them. And then the spirit of patience and understanding that Christ is offering us can overcome this escapism called drunkenness, or this avoidant personality called disorder, where we just give in to chaos. We kind of give in to the tendency of life to fall, the kind of gravity of the fall itself. We just kind of stop trying. I think patience and understanding in particular have to do with endurance and perseverance and love. So this is the more that Christ comes to give to us. So I hope you can hear this a little bit. Maybe as I'm speaking, you're thinking about what might tend to lead you to look at the world with rivalry and jealousy, or promiscuity and lust, or even drunkenness and disorder, which is not the same thing as having a nice glass of wine to warm the heart or even a cigarette on the back porch or something. We're Talking about, like, escaping from our eye when we want to get out of our heart and away from God, you know, choosing to get drunk or high is about giving up. It's not about going deeper, you know? So Christ comes to give us his own heart. Then when he wants to give us forgiveness and generosity and patience, because this is who he is. That's why we love him, that's why we stay with Him. And it's his sacred heart, which he revealed to us through St. Margaret Mary Alico. It's his divine mercy flowing from his heart, which he revealed to us through Saint Faustina. And it's the heart that our lady of Medjugorje, again, just these more recent revelations of God's love in 1981, when she appears in Medjugorje, teaching us to pray with the heart so we can meet her son. Jesus, who's dwelling in our heart, wants to make room in your heart for my son. My dear children, you know, it's all about his heart these days. Because we're so in our head and in our feelings, our emotions, our passions, all about our bodies, we forget about the place where God wants to dwell. And then I mentioned a story, an anecdote from my own life, that the first day of high school, I saw this girl in the biology class and was immediately infatuated with her. I asked my friend, I'm like, who is that? He told me her name. I'm like, I love her. And for seven years I was trying to marry her, but we didn't even, like, date, because there was a hookup culture all around us. And she was able to take advantage of that, as I was. And we never. We never used each other like that. I think I know for me, I would have experienced it to be a reduction of what I wanted with her. I wanted more with her. I didn't want her to be like the others that I could just hook up with. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to marry her. I wanted to be in her heart, and I wanted her to take this place in my heart that I had been preparing for her. So I mentioned it, because after seven years of this, I said, I'm going to go tell her. And it was like almost midnight one night in the summer. We had gone to different colleges, so it was like, we're home from college. I drove to her house where she lives out east, and I turned this corner to go to onto her road where she lives, and I saw there was a truck outside. And she was sitting in the truck. I saw the Exhaust, tailpipe. And, man, it just crushed me. It broke my heart to know that she was just sitting in there talking and flirting. I don't know, maybe they were kissing or something. And I was like, oh, man, this is it. This is. This is the end. This is. You know. And I actually got pulled over that night on the way home. So it was the worst night of my life. I think there were some pretty bad nights, but this ranks way up there with some of the worst. 46 and a 40. 46 and a 40. Yeah. When they say don't speed on the east end, they mean it. Those guys are serious out there. Anyway, I mentioned it because I wanted more, and she didn't make room in her heart for me. And when I prayed, I felt called to the priesthood a few years later when I prayed to God about why he would even let me experience that with her. And he said to me, so that you would have some sense of what it's like for me, because I want to give you more than you let me give to you. And this is true about the whole world. Christ on the cross is brokenhearted because he wants to give us so much more than we want to receive from Him. He would fill us with his love if we would let. If we would make room for Him. We'd make room for Him. So one last little image. And I did say this after some of the Masses, like at the end of the Mass, after the Eucharistic prayer, after Communion, you know, there's a lot of shooting stars in our lives. So people who show up intensely and quickly and brightly, and they get our attention, we're amazed at them. And they just as quickly, though, disappear into the dark. You know, like shooting stars. They're pretty to look at, and they're cool. You go, whoa. But then they're gone. And they don't offer us anything beyond that. And there's a lot of things that we take into our heart that are like that. And that's why a lot of our relationships reflect this. We're like this with each other. You know, we come on intense and start strong, and then we just. We can't endure. I mean, it's happening to priests these days. Guys are convinced of their vocation and come out strong and swinging and, you know, beautiful to look at, and then they go away. It happens in relationships, right? But then there are those stars that are fixed in their course, and that's what I want to be like with you. Stars that are fixed in our course that are giving light to the night and together, something beautiful for the world to behold. And also giving guidance, you know, going back to that time when we used to sail based on the stars. And, you know, they're being fixed in their course. But to be people who, by the way that we live, if we live by the Holy Spirit, can give people a sense of direction and even destiny, like the heavens, the beauty of the mystery that God created. So you can take that with you. That image of when you think about what you want to let into your heart, is it a shooting star or is it some sort of star that's fixed in its course? A person who truly lives by the spirit of God. A movie or a song or something online that is truly of the spirit of God. Something beautiful, good or true. So that was a word about emptying ourselves of the spirit of the world. Next week, I'll share a word about how we can come to a deeper knowledge of self, a deeper knowledge of what it means, particularly what it means to be baptized. Okay, so that's next week. All right. I'm excited to be with you like this. God bless you guys. And if I don't see you before then, I'll see you next Sunday.