Third Sunday in Lent [St. Thomas Aquinas]: March 7, 2021
Delivered by Most Reverend Roger LaRade
Beloved Disciple Eucharistic Catholic Church, Toronto
© 2021 Roger LaRade
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Be the healing Word of God
 
Ephesians 5: 1 – 9, Luke 11: 14 – 28
 
“Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!”
 
On this third Sunday in Lent the Church presents us with another of Jesus’ healing acts. It is presented here by Luke, himself a healer, a physician of the body later to become a physician of the soul modeled on Jesus, the ultimate Physician of the soul. I stress this as I begin today because we see this community to be a place of healing for many who have had hurtful, even damaging, experiences in their church of origin; experiences which continue in many church communities today. These are experiences which for many cause an ongoing and prolonged condition of muteness or dumbness in relation to the word of God. This is a condition which Jesus desires to heal. No. It is a condition which Jesus does heal, here and now, by the power of the word of God.
 
In the Gospel passage we read that Jesus “was casting out a demon that was mute…” Muteness names the condition of one unable to speak. Some translations use the word ‘dumb’ instead, which means the same thing. In Saint Matthew’s version of this event, he tells us that the demon was dumb and blind. One of the Fathers of the Church, Theophylactus, who was the Patriarch of Bulgaria from the year 765 to 840 A.D., has a comment which lends insight to the meaning of this healing act. In considering the original Greek term translated into English as ‘mute’ or ‘dumb’, he writes that
 
Kophos, which the Latins translate by mutus(dumb) … more correctly…means one who can neither hear nor speak. If (one) cannot hear from birth, of necessity he will be dumb. For we only speak that which we have learned to say through hearing. Should he through some misfortune lose his hearing, this will not prevent him from speaking. But the man who was brought to the Lord was both deaf and dumb.[1]
 
The condition at which we are looking, therefore, is one in which the word of God cannot be heard; and, as a consequence, cannot be spoken, that is, shared or passed on. It is precisely this condition which Jesus heals; Jesus gives us the capacity to hear the word of God and, in turn, speak it to others. We may understand this on a physical level as the ability to hear with our ears and speak with our tongue; but more to the point, we may understand it as a spiritual reality; that is, as the ability to receive the word of God in our soul and there have it take root and be the animating energy in our lives. Traditionally, this has been known as being in the state of grace.
 
Linking the demon to the inability to hear the word of God helps us make sense of the words of Jesus at the end of the passage: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” This is the response of Jesus to the woman who praises the mother of Jesus, Mary. It seems to me that Jesus means to emphasize that the reason Mary is blessed is not so much for her physical maternity as for her spiritual maternity. Indeed, “in early medieval art the Annunciation was often portrayed…as the penetration of the dove into Mary’s ear.”[2] Symbologists inform us that “because of the resemblance between the external ear and the spiral coil of a snail’s shell…there came to be a symbolic association linking the ear, the snail, and birth (which resembled the emergence of the snail from its shell…”[3]It follows then that this spiritual maternity is open to all those “who hear the word of God and obey it!” It is offered to all of us. We were brought into this capacity for maternity, for motherhood, by our Baptism in Christ; it is renewed in us every time we “hear the word of God and obey it!” This is the hallmark of Mary: that she heard the Word of God and that she pondered it in her heart, and that she gave birth to it into the world.
 
It is to this that Saint Paul is calling the Ephesians, and through them, all Christians. He calls on us to “be imitators of God, as beloved children…” He tells us that we are to do this by living “in love, as Christ loved us…” Of course, the “perfect model of a child of God is found in Christ”[4]; this Christ, the Word of God. Saint Paul speaks to this concept of hearing the word of God when he writes, “Let no one deceive you with empty words…” He is making a contrast here between these “empty words” and the Word of God. To live by “empty words” is to be in darkness; to live by the Word of God is to be in light. It is by our living that we show how we obey the Word of God; that is, how the Word of God animates and guides our living. What we hear, what we nurture in our soul, is indeed the seed which germinates and grows into our external actions; and these external actions are what shape and define our character, who we are.
 
Our capacity for hearing the word of God and for giving birth to that Word in our lives is often injured by early, and ongoing, experiences of the preaching of God’s Word. Laden with cultural and societal biases, that Word is often made to hurt rather than to heal. Wrapped in punitive, legalistic blindness, it never gives birth to God’s light which is love. Today, Jesus offers us healing so that our capacity for maternity may be renewed. During this time of Lent, we are cultivating the soil of our souls, making it fertile ground for the seed of the Word of God to take hold. With Mary as our model, may we hear the Word of God, ponder it in our heart, and give it birth in our lives.
 
“Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!”
 
[1]The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, Volume Two: From the First Sunday in Lent to the Sunday after the Ascension, translated and edited by M. F. Toal, D.D. (1964: Henry Regency Co., Chicago), p. 76.

[2]Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons & the Meanings behind Them, Hans Biedermann (1994: Meridian, New York), p. 110.

[3]Ibid., p. 110.

[4]The Letter to the Ephesiansby Joseph A. Grassi in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., and Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm., eds. (1968: Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ), p. 348.

​Dominica Pentecostes [Pentecost Sunday]: May 31, 2020
Delivered by Most Reverend Roger LaRade, O.F.A.
Beloved Disciple Eucharistic Catholic Church, Toronto
© 2020 Roger LaRade
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Acts 2, 1 – 11, John 14, 23 - 31.
 
“…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you myself.”
 
The reading from the Acts of the Apostles which is our first reading for today’s Mass is undoubtedly well-known to us. And the picture which goes with it, that of the tongues of fire sitting on the heads of Holy Mary, the Apostles and the disciples probably comes easily to mind. It is so familiar that I think it often loses its meaning for us; it loses its punch, its power.
 
But what an amazing event this is which is told to us in this reading. Think of it. This group of people, followers of Jesus, have been bewildered by recent events. First, Jesus was horribly tortured and died. Then, He resurrected and appeared to them numerous times. Then, He left them by ascending to God the Father, His Father from Whom He had come, and to Whom He needed to return. This group of followers was holed up in the Upper Room, the Cenacle, that same room where Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper with them. They are hiding there out of fear of what might happen to them. Their leader was now gone and they no longer had any sense of direction. They simply didn’t have a clue as to what to do.
 
And then this amazing event happens: As Jesus had promised them, in His returning to His rightful place with the Father, the Holy Spirit is sent to His followers. And this Holy Spirit makes all the difference. It is through this experience that the followers of Jesus begin to preach His truth. The Acts of the Apostles recounts the beginnings of this preaching and the growth of the Church. This preaching is understood by all: “Aren’t these people who are speaking all Galileans? How is it, then, that each of us hears them in his native language?”
 
It seems to me that the coming of the Holy Spirit is about an intense experience of God’s presence in one’s life. The Spirit of God is represented in Scripture, both Jewish and Christian, as breath. This Spirit is the very breath of God, the very life of God. The Holy Spirit is indeed “the Giver of Life” as we pray in our profession of faith, the Creed. And so, this experience of the presence of God is an experience of the very life of God. This is what is given to the followers of Jesus in today’s reading from Acts. This is what is given to each one of us as followers of Jesus. As Catholics, we believe that this is first given to us at Baptism and then comes most powerfully, completely, and permanently to us in the Sacrament of Confirmation. This Sacrament brings with it the Grace and responsibility to live our faith in an adult manner, in the manner of the first Apostles.
 
Just as God gave life to the first human beings by breath, so do God breathes life into us. We have been given the very breath of God. This is the reason why Jesus was born as a human being, died, was resurrected and ascended to be once again with the Father. As a favourite commentator of mine puts it: God became human so that we might become God.[i]The meaning of the life, death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus is that a place might be made in our hearts, in our bodies, for the life-breath of God. You’ll have often heard about our body being the temple of the Holy Spirit. This is precisely what this means: in us lives the life-breath of God. Our God is not only a far-off God, a transcendent God. Our God is also as close to us as our own breath; our God is also an immanent God.

“…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you myself.”
 
The Holy Spirit deepens our understanding of the post-Resurrection vision which we have been experiencing since the Feast of Easter: a vision of a new way of seeing ourselves. Today, we see that this post-Resurrection understanding makes us realize that our God is a most intimate God.
 
Furthermore, we recognize that in us lives God’s desire for justice and love, the hallmarks of Jesus’ life: “If anyone loves me, they will keep my word. Then my Father will love them, and we shall come to them and make our dwelling-place with them.” The deeper meaning of these words of Jesus comes to us through our reception of the Holy Spirit, which opens our minds and our hearts. It is this Grace-filled experience of God’s love for us that transforms our vision and our understanding. With this new vision and new understanding, we see our life, our world, and our Church with the eyes of God, eyes saddened by injustice, eyes seeking out justice based in love. We see ourselves as the very vessels of God’s justice and love for the world, and for the Church.
 
In this season of Easter, when Resurrection is followed by Christ’s Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Church calls us to rejoice and partake in the glorious love of God the Father and God the Son, that love which is the Holy Spirit. Let us pray for one another, as we share in this loving Spirit, that our post-Resurrection vision of God’s love and justice may be deepened and become the center of our lives as Catholics.

[i]See Aemiliana Löhr, The Mass through the Year: Volume Two – Holy Week to the Last Sunday after Pentecost(London: Longmans, Green & Co Ltd, 1959), p. 153.

by Father Richard Sorfleet, St. John the Evangelist Mission, Renfrew ON Canada

Friday May 22, the President of the United States called for churches to reopen starting this weekend.  The Associated Press (AP) report states:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that he has deemed churches and other houses of worship “essential” and called on governors across the country to allow them to reopen this weekend, even as some parts of the nation remain under coronavirus lockdown.

“Today I’m identifying houses of worship — churches, synagogues and mosques — as essential places that provide essential services,” Trump said during a hastily arranged press conference at the White House.

Despite the threat of further spreading the virus. Trump said that, “governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important essential places of faith to open right now, for this weekend.” And he warned that if governors don’t abide by his request, he will “override” them...
________
The definition of what constitutes an 'essential service' in an epidemic has been that from the health perpective of the minimum necessary activities to ensure that society continues to function. 

Throughout the Covid 19 crisis the evangelical Right has either pressured for relaxation or exemption from State health regulations or simply flouted them with at times deadly consequences. It is shameful that these groups cannot understand their own theology's definition of what constitutes the Church.

We believe and confess
one single catholic or universal church--
a holy congregation and gathering
of true Christian believers,
awaiting their entire salvation in Jesus Christ,
being washed by his blood,
and sanctified and sealed by the Holy Spirit....
his holy church
is not confined,
bound,
or limited to a certain place or certain people.
But it is spread and dispersed
throughout the entire world,
though still joined and united
in heart and will,
in one and the same Spirit,
by the power of faith

Article 27, Belgic Confession 1561

Instead of being a source of spiritual comfort and credible information, some wish to use the church to further their own temporal ends.

A recommended source of spiritual comfort during this trying time is reading the Book of the Prophet Job. 

One of the key Easter season Gospel readings is from John 16.

16 “A little while, and you will no longer see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me.” 17 Some of His disciples then said to one another, “What is this thing He is telling us, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me’; and, ‘because I go to the Father’?” 18 So they were saying, “What is this that He says, ‘A little while’? We do not know what He is talking about.”
NASB

We will see each other again and this requires both patience and prudence; and understanding that The Church is the People of God gathered together in Jesus Christ; and not a building. the gathering IN a building will come.

Sanctæ Familiæ [Feast of the Most Holy Family]: January 12, 2020
Delivered by Most Reverend Roger LaRade, O.F.A.
Beloved Disciple Eucharistic Catholic Church, Toronto
 
© 2020 Roger LaRade
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Colossians 3: 12-17, Luke 2: 42-52.
 
Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, doing so on the Sunday within the Octave of the Epiphany. Jesus is twelve years old. Tomorrow, the Octave Day of Epiphany we will be with Jesus at thirty years of age for His Baptism. Liturgical time moves quickly.
 
I think that we need to consider the Feast of the Holy Family within this context of God become human, that which we celebrate and immerse ourselves in at this time; after all, the family is an institution both human and divine.
 
The Feast of the Holy Family is a Canadian feast. It goes back to the year 1663, to the founding at Montreal of the Association of the Holy Family by Barbara d’Ailleboust, a native of Boulogne. This new devotion to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph soon spread across Canada, and Mgr. Laval, the Bishop of Québec, established in his diocese a feast of the Holy Family with its own Mass and Office. It was in 1893 that Pope Leo XIII expressed his approval of this celebration for certain dioceses.[1] But only after the First World War did devotion to the Holy Family become important, and, in 1921, Pope Benedict XV extended it to the whole Church. He did so because family life “had suffered greatly because of the first World War.”[2] The purpose for this feast “was to improve family life” and contribute to “the spiritual restoration of the family”[3], as it’s put.
 
It doesn’t take much probing in older missals and books of piety to discover how this devotion has been used in an extremely sentimentalized and moralistic manner to support what many of us know from our own experience to be an unrealistic – no, rather an unreal – notion of the family. There is no doubt that the family is a foundational component of society, and that our faith speaks to family life. Most of us are born into families. I say ‘most of us’, for immediately we confront the many limitations imposed on the ideal family by real life. Indeed, many children who are adopted were not born into a family and have memories of being in an orphanage for a time or of being shuttled from foster family to foster family. From our experience, and our sharing the experience of others, we know that some family stories are stories of supportive and encouraging love. We also know that some family stories are horror stories of neglectful and abusive selfishness. In-between, there exists the multiplicity of human interactions, mixed experiences composed of good, bad and indifferent relationships coexisting in our memories and our present. And so, the very idea of the Feast of the Holy Family has the potential of conjuring unpleasant, disconcerting, troubling, alienating memories.
 
This is exacerbated for many of us who don’t fit the heterosexual married normative mindset imposed onto the notion of the Holy Family. Here is a pious description of the family:
 
Of the family body the father is the head, even as Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body. The mother is the Church, and the children are members…The daily bread is provided by the father and distributed by the mother; from father and mother, children receive their blood and life…You children, look up to your father, he is Christ…And you, wife and mother, you too must see Christ in your partner. As father, it is your duty to live like Christ and to rule your family as He would.[4]
 
This was written in 1957. But, it doesn’t take long in listening to conservative commentators, both Catholic and Protestant, to find this thinking alive and well in our day.
 
I believe that this thinking is wrong and I recognize in it a perversion of the readings chosen for this Mass of the Holy Family; a perversion in the sense that the readings chosen are made to fit an ideological perspective rather than being allowed to reveal their mystery as guided by the message of Christ. This perversion is not in the presentation of the Holy Family as a model guiding us to a family life marked by love, selflessness and peace[5] – all things to which we can aspire. No. The perversion comes in presenting the Holy Family as a divine institution modeling ‘family’ as being composed of father, mother and child to the exclusion of all others. In this view, no other model has legitimacy since it does not – indeed cannot – replicate the Holy Family. To hold this view is to do an injustice to the message of Christ. This occurs every time biblical passages are chosen to support the status quo, to keep in their place those who don’t fit the norms of the ruling collective.
 
The English writer on Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill writes about Epiphany in the following words:
 
The Epiphany means the free pouring out of a limitless light – the Light of the World – not its careful communication to those whom we hold worthy to receive it.[6]
 
The Feast of the Holy Family may speak to us through the words of today’s epistle and gospel readings and through our meditation on Jesus, Mary and Joseph. But it will not as long as it is restricted to being a sentimentalized, moralizing, and heterosexist shaft of light. It needs, rather, be opened to the multiple possibilities of family lives made possible and enlightened by the Light of the World manifested among us.

[1] Dom F. Cabrol, O.S.B., The Roman Missal in Latin and English (Tours: A. Mame and Sons, 1921), p. 80.

[2] Dr. Pius Parsch, The Church’s Year of Grace, Volume 1: Advent to Candlemas (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1957), p. 289.

[3] Ibid., p. 290.

[4] Ibid., p. 294.

[5] R. P. J. Feder, S.J., Missel Quotidien des Fidèles (Tours : Maison Mame, 1961), p. 105.

[6] Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1934), p. 44.