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Petersboat
The Monday After | I Could Be Wrong - Thank God
00:22:37
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.
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- [00:00]
A
Hello again, everyone, and welcome back. This week's meditation will be a little bit different. I'll let you listen to a recording of the homily that I preached at the 8 o' clock mass yesterday. If you stay with me to the end, I'll offer two or three more points for meditation you might like to take with you into the week. Okay? So enjoy this homily. It's about the relationship between our hearts and our minds and how Christ is in our soul next to our heart, offering us his own, so that we can make sense of these things, things that we think a lot so we don't get stuck in our heads, which can easily become anxiety or worry or compulsions or addictions. All right, enjoy.
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B
I was going to begin this homily by saying that I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between the brain or the mind and my heart and my soul. But then this morning it occurred to me that I haven't really been thinking about it as much as I've been contemplating it. So I said, I'm going to change that to, I've been contemplating recently the distinction between our soul, our heart, where our intellect and our will is, and our mind, a brain which generates thoughts and is very much in relationship with the body. In fact, that's the function of the brain, right, is to. To inform our heart as to what our body is feeling, what it's experiencing. It also generates ideas and creativity and stores experiences in what we call memory. But the contemplate, that word, contemplating, like two temples, contemple would be like, you know, with the temple. So I. And then Christ, who is like Jesus of Nazareth, the very temple of God, the living God, whose spirit, his I is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God dwells in him. He comes to me through baptism. And so to all of you who are baptized to dwell in you, a temple in union with another temple, so that we can contemplate our lives to not just overanalyze our lives. Like, we reduce ourselves a lot of times to, like, materialist thinking. I'm just my brain or I'm just my body. But when Christ comes to us to dwell in our heart, he reminds us that our soul is this great mystery made in the image and likeness of God with an intellect and a will which is unique to the human being. So, you know, while animals, for example, have their minds and their bodies and they have this sense of, like, instinct and sensation, even affection, they don't have that same sort of soul we do, which has real intelligence and A will which makes us capable of loving by saying, I give myself to you, and then my heart is open to receiving you. I'll put the dogs aside for a second because, like you, I can feel your life. But I love my dog. I know, I know. I mean, Annie. My parents came actually for Father Charles and Laurie Mangano when they were in the church on Friday, singing and praying with us, touching the heart with song and prayer. And my parents came and I was like, oh, hi. I go, do you have Annie? I said, did you bring Annie with you? My mom goes, no, she's with your sister. I'm like, okay. So I want to see the dog, too, as much as possible. But they're a great gift to show us something of God's very simple affection for us and a gift for us also to have to comfort us a lot in this world. The beautiful everything God created is for us. And these animals, especially the ones we've domesticated, are very, very special indeed. But the point is, the human person is unique. We recognize life as gift. We experience time and also longing. And now, just to say the reason I'd be interested in contemplating a distinction between my mind and then my heart is because my mind is sometimes wrong. In fact, often wrong. And it's not always so pretty up here. So thank God I am more than my mind or my thoughts, and that my thoughts, my brain experiences just like my body does, like the weight of the fall, meaning original sin. It's. It's weighed down like a beast of burden now. And I find comfort in remembering or contemplating with the Lord that I can sometimes say, all right, even though I'm thinking that that's not who I am. I said last night at the end of the five o' clock mass, if I really thought that I were only my thoughts, I probably wouldn't be here right now. You know, I would have given up a long time ago because like, every other week, I wake up and I'm like, what are you doing? You're wasting your life. You run a cult and you're going to, like, this is. I mean, that's what goes on. But think about, like, your.
- [05:25]
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I mean, really.
- [05:25]
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I mean, I get cast sometimes into some serious doubt, like where it gets really dark. Of course the evil one will be right there to oppress that and be like, yeah, yeah, that's what you're like. You're wasting your life. He'll go right after these to get to this. But the Lord is here. He said, you turn to me. I will speak to you. I got you. You belong to me. He oppresses you sometimes, but he does not possess you. You belong to me. We can talk another time about why the Father sometimes allows a person's even intellect and will to be possessed, the evil one, to move right in, to take possession of the soul. But all the good exorcists will tell you that that is also for the salvation of the person, so that when they cry out to Christ to save them and the priest comes with the exorcism, that that becomes the extraordinary means of salvation for that person. But most often, thanks be to God, 99.99% of the time, the Father allows us to be oppressed by evil, but not possessed by evil. Who possesses our hearts? Christ Jesus. He's in there, Danny. He's in here. This is where he is. This gets confusing, but he's always here to help us make sense of this and what this might be feeling. Like, how many of you today maybe are in a little bit of a better mood just because you didn't wake up with a headache like you usually do, or, you know, the. The digestion's cooperating today, and that has a big effect, like, on my. How I see my life today. So we are in relationship with this body, but I wanted to remember today that the thoughts are also part of.
- [07:16]
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That bodily experience, which we forget sometimes.
- [07:33]
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There is a mystery of how it communicates, like the brain's hemispheres with electricity, which is somewhat immaterial, but not really. It's still of the material world. The great mystery in us, though, is this soul that knows that this soul that, as we say in the creed, believes in what is visible and invisible. Like what? Like what is this part of me that can recognize something that's invisible? All right, if we experience, for example, like, doubt. Yeah, that's here. Let's turn to Jesus. If we experience worry. Like, even if you have an operation coming, the job of your brain is to be concerned for your body. So of course, it. It's thinking a lot about that colonoscopy that's coming and the size of the polyps, because that's what it does. But let us not let that define us every single day until the operation or the procedure. It's just doing its job. It's like, be careful. That other car might be coming, but let us not live as if we're always going to be hit by a car. It's just saying, heads up. It's what it does. So I find comfort in remembering that the brain functions. It's Sometimes off base with its judgments and sometimes just a little too worried. The other day I saw one of you, the parishioners. I'm like, I've been seeing her for weeks, and I'm going to tell her this day. It was Sunday a couple weeks ago. I'm going to tell her this Sunday. Oh, there she is on the line saying goodbye. I'm like, I can't wait to tell her. Here she comes. And she came to me and I said, I love your hair. And she goes. She says, it's a wig, Father. And I went, oh, oh, well, I still love it. I love it. It's my. It's my favorite.
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I love it.
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It's great. But that's what got me sort of thinking. And then now contemplating with the Lord, like, I was convinced. Oh, I just see my parents. Nice. Hi, guys. It's like I didn't even know they were here. See, like, the brain can't do everything. But I was convinced that it was real hair. But this isn't always right about everything. Thank God. Thank God. Because sometimes this thing gets a little nasty or tries to fulfill our longing for perfect love by squeezing it out of this imperfect world. You can even see how a brain could say, to my eye, I see woman.
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I know.
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I see the maleness. But you're woman. And then you have to make a decision. Am I going to go with my brain or with my body? But you can just see how we sometimes feel like, well, that's what I'm thinking. So I got to go with that, you know? But is there something else that we could turn to and someone else that we can turn to in our heart to make sense of this? And thank God there is Jesus. I'm thinking about Constantine, who in 313 was touched by the spirit of Christ and said to Christ, you can reign in my heart and ask for baptism. Which was crazy. The Roman Emperor became a Catholic Christian. And then his palace, the Lateran palace, built hundreds of years before, where the emperors would live according to the spirit of the world. He said to the Bishop of Rome, why don't you live here now? Why don't you live here now? That's an amazing thing. And he gave the palace to the princes of the church because he said, I know that the evil one is the prince of this world. I get that now. But Christ is the king, and you bishops, you are his princes in the world on behalf of the kingdom of God. So you may reign here and reign in the Roman Empire with grace, with the sacraments. With the church, a living temple which forms the mind and the body, with the very heart of Christ. You see it. You see the person here, his mind, his body and blood and his heart. You know, so Constantine was like, you can reign here. Awesome. That's what we want to do. Then I'm thinking about St. Paul, as we heard today, who was persecuting Christians because he was a radicalized Pharisee, a very intelligent man who was like, I know the law. I know this God. And then his mind was like, yeah, and anybody who claims that there's anything else going on in this world besides thinking about him, we got to get rid of them. And so he was putting Christians to death who claimed to now live by his spirit, the Spirit of God. And as he was going to Damascus to put Christians to death, Christ himself appeared to him on the road, right? He was raised from the dead. Jesus, the fulfillment of what we heard in the gospel. Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up. And the risen Christ appears to Paul as a bright light, the light himself, Christ. He knocks Paul to the ground, and he asks him, saul, Saul, his Hebrew name. Why are you persecuting me? Who are you, sir, that I am persecuting you? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. And Paul realized, whoa, whoa, I'm going after the followers of Christ. And Jesus himself appears to me and says, you're persecuting me. He must really be united to his church. His spirit must really be in these Christians. And Paul is blinded for three days. Blinded, like into the tomb he goes. And a Christian named Ananias came. Imagine comes to him, and he's like, saul, I realize I'm risking my life, but the Lord has sent me, the spirit has sent me to give you your sight back. And things like scales fell from Saul's eyes and he could see. And then he went into the world and he said, I am giving my heart to Christ Jesus that he may reign here now. And he's going to help us to make sense of the way we think about life and what we do with our bodies. He will help us to love with him also. And then lastly, I'm thinking about John Paul II for this reason, because we just saw something interesting happen here in New York last week, where 83% of the new young people in New York who've been there less than five years have voted for a socialist mayor. Okay. Oh, Father, don't just end with politics. Oh, I won't, I won't. I would say we can either just Deal with it on a political level and just get angry. Or we can see the longing in the human heart, especially in the heart of the young people, for the church, for God. Father, how could you say that? Well, what does socialism promise? Socialization, togetherness, an alternative to capitalism, which reduces the human person very often to something to be exploited. So we all want some alternative to that. And also union. That's why they love the word unions. So union. And you can. What's the problem with it, then? Because the state promises to fulfill that desire. And we've seen this so many times in history, like, it's just going to be frustrating because we're not going to be able to squeeze it out of a temporal organization. It's a longing for God, but Christ alone fulfills that desire. But I think what just happened in New York is a confirmation that what we're doing here is good for the world and that we should invite people into our communion because Christ satisfies or fulfills the obvious desires of the human heart for communion, togetherness, and even to be provided for. I know we say that's entitlement, and it does take on those ugly forms sometimes, but if you look at the desire that gets perverted into entitlement, it's just same thing we're looking for this morning. You want to be fed? Give me bread. That's why you're here, right? Give me bread. But not just bread, like we say, money, bread. Right, the breadwinner. But give me the bread of life. All right, all right. Give me the very waters of life which Ezekiel saw flowing from the temple that are the very spirit of Christ to cleanse me, cleanse this temple, and to enable me to pour myself out with Christ by doing what water does, which is seeking the lowest place, fill in all the cracks, those cracks that the evil one sneaks into, and to humble myself before others. The way that Jesus washed our feet at the Last Supper. And the waters with which he did are symbolized by the architecture of this church, flowing from that gesture, even through the trim work into all the stained glass windows of this church, which have behind each of them water, the waters flowing from Christ's own heart, alive in us, in our baptism and into the world. Why John Paul ii? Because when he went back to communist Poland as pope, they allowed him to celebrate a Mass in the fields so the people wouldn't totally riot by not letting their new Polish pope back to the country for a visit. And at the beginning of the Mass for like 25 minutes, the people, thousands and Thousands and thousands of them cried out, we want God. We want God. We want God. And that's what Jesus comes to fulfill. I know that sometimes I can get swept up into ideologies and ideas. I can get deceived pretty easily and say, but you, you will give me the bread of life, sir. You will give me the bread of life. But then Christ says, come, come to me. The Father will feed you. Even as we mentioned water, Jesus said to the woman at the well, if you knew who was asking you for water, he would ask him for water and he would give you a life giving water, and you would never be thirsty again. Wow, the satisfying love of Jesus. So, as we go forth into the world again after mass today, I invite you to contemplate, to talk to Jesus in your heart about that distinction between your thoughts and your I, yourself, your soul, who you really are to God, and to ask him or invite him to help you make sense of some of the things you might be hearing, your brain generate or feeling in your body, so you can live truly free and much less likely to be manipulated by people who also use our thoughts against us.
- [19:22]
A
You know, listening to the homily again with you, I might say that last part a little differently. The devil does manipulate or oppress our thoughts to get into the software of our lives, our soul, but he's not in our heads, he's not reading our minds. The exorcists assure us of that. But he is very intuitive, he's very manipulative, seductive, he's very cunning, and he has all sorts of ways of getting us to think something so that he gets the error in. But it's. It's by manipulating the hardware that he gets into the software. And it's because we accept what he's doing to the hardware as gospel truth. You know, we accept the lie or we accept the. We go by the feeling, you know, whatever he's doing to the body. So Christ in us, though, can cleanse the temple and drive out the spirit of evil so that we can see.
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Clearly to the truth.
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So Christ in us reigning on the throne of our hearts as king, rightful king, and then helping us to live dominion over our thoughts and our actions so we don't get swept up into compulsions and addictions and error or worry or anxiety. The brain's just doing its job, thinking about life and the body. But if we live up there instead of in the heart, we can easily get taken up into its, you know, merely sort of analytical and cognitive function, which is not the life to the full that Christ came to give us in that spirit. I share with you that I've been thinking since preaching this weekend and talking to some of you. It seems like maybe John Paul II gave us the theology of the body, which he did. Pope Benedict in a way, gave us a theology of the mind with extraordinary Christology, even leaving us a three volume life of Christ Christ. So he worked on the formation of the mind and then Pope Francis has left us like the heart in a very real way. His papacy was discernment of spirits. He was Ignatian spirituality embodied in this Jesuit life. Ignatius of Lolit, one of the founders of the Jesuits, gave us the discernment of spirits. Live with Christ in your heart and discern the spirits. Is this thought from the Holy Spirit or is this thought of the evil spirit? So in some sense, that's why I think Pope Francis papacy will always be remembered as tumultuous. Because discernment of spirits is not easy. Spiritual direction is hard work often takes a lifetime. And that's why the directee will also not only ask for Christ's help, but the help of like a spiritual director to bring into this discernment of what's happening in my thoughts. Does that make sense? So I think in that way we can say John Paul the body, Pope Benedict the mind, and Pope Francis the heart, because, you know, he was doing this kind of discernment of spirits. If we wield these things for good, if we wield what our minds can create and what our bodies can build, if we wield them for good, then they can be at the service of our relationship with God. But man, it is tough work to do that. That's why we have to talk about these things and try to understand just how it is that Christ can help us sa.