Fr. Roger J. Landry

Espirito Santo Parish, Fall River, MA

Nuptial Mass for Nicholas Edward Pacheco and Jade Claudette Arruda

June 25, 2023

Gen 2:18-24, Ps 103, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 5:13-16

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today’s beautiful day has a long prehistory. It goes back well before Nick proposed to Jade, May 15, 2022, surprising her right after she finished exams while they walking together along the Cape Cod shoreline. It goes back beyond when they started dating nearly ten years ago during sophomore year at Bishop Stang as well as before they met during biology class a year and a half earlier. It goes back far beyond their baptisms and births. It goes back to the beginning, as we heard in today’s first reading. In the Book of Genesis, when God created Adam, Adam had God all to himself in the garden. All of creation had been made for him to govern. He was perfectly in right relationship with God. Even though he seemed to have everything one could ask for, something — more specifically, someone — was missing. And after God had said in the first six phases of creation, “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” and with the creation of the human person, “It was very good,” God finally thundered, “It is not good…for man to be alone.” So he created Eve, whom today’s first reading called a “suitable partner,” symbolically out of his side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. When Adam saw her, he rejoiced and exclaimed, “Finally this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!,” a Hebrew idiom saying that they shared the same strengths and weaknesses. As Jesus would later say, this is the reason why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh in love. The upshot of the Creation account is that God, who is love, has created the human person in his image and likeness … in love and for love. Since no one can love in a vacuum, God could not be solitary, there needed to be a Lover and a Beloved, and in God the eternal love between them was so strong as to take on personality. In creating the human person, therefore, God created not just a “him, male and female” but a “them,” a communion between man and woman, whose love for each other could be so strong as literally to “make love,” to generate new life, as a fruit of their loving communion of persons. From the first marriage of Adam and Eve, to your marriage today, Nick and Jade, marriage was created by God to be a sacrament of love, to help you to grow to be more and more like God and at the same time more fully human. Today you will not only receive a Sacrament but become a Sacrament, a visible sign, as St. John Paul II used to say, pointing to the invisible reality of the Trinitarian loving communion of persons, a living reminder of the fruitful, faithful, indissoluble love of God and an icon of Christ’s love for his bride the Church, for as long as you both shall live.

* Jesus spoke about that matrimonial vocation to be a sacrament of God’s love in the Gospel you chose for today. Christian marriage is never just about the husband and the wife alone. It’s never even just merely the family that, with God’s help and encouragement, they will together raise up, putting into practice God’s sweet command to “increase and multiply.” Every marriage has a mission, as does yours. That’s why I’m so pleased that the Gospel passage you wanted to hear and ponder on your wedding day — and have all of us reflect upon as well — was about Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount in which he told us,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

June 24, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.24.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will say to us something very consoling on the one hand and very disconcerting at the same time on the other, before teaching us how the two go together.

* Jesus first tells us “Fear no one,” and goes on to give us the reason not to be afraid: because our Father in heaven loves us more than all the sparrows in the world and knows us intimately down to our last strand of hair. Fifteen times in the Gospel, in fact, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, and regularly gives us as the reason because our Father in heaven will provide for us and protect us. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he tells us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear — things we really need — because that same Father who clothes the lilies of the field knows what we need and will take care of us (Mt 6:28-32). In this Sunday’s Gospel, he tells us that he doesn’t even want us to fear suffering and physical death, because not even death can separate us from our Father’s love (Rom 8:38-39). These words are even more important at a time in which so many are eaten alive by anxiety, insecurity and fear due to problems in their personal or family life, their studies, their career, or because of the state of the world, various worrisome trends in culture, law and politics and a litany of other concerns.

* At the same time that Jesus tells us, “Fear no one,” he adds that there is one fear we should have. “Do not fear,” he says, “those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Who is this who can destroy us in Gehenna? Saints and Biblical scholars have answered this question in two ways. The majority said it refers to God, who created us, who will judge us, and who has the ability to send us to eternal self-alienation in Hell for having chosen against him in this life. By this interpretation, Jesus is saying, “Fear God rather than men,” and then goes on in the Gospel to help us learn how to relate to God not fundamentally out of fear but out of love, since this God who we should fear is one who, Jesus says, protects sparrows, has numbered every follicle, and will embrace with love and gratitude everyone who acknowledges Jesus. The second, minority, interpretation is that the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell is the devil. Of course the devil is not divine and certainly cannot destroy in the same way God would be able to destroy, but he can torment both body and soul forever.

* Even though I’m inclined toward the first interpretation, that Jesus is telling us not to be afraid even of those who threaten to murder us but rather to focus on the God who loves us and in correspondence to the gift of fear of the Lord seek not to displease or deny him in the world but acknowledge him before others, including when threatened, I want to spend our time on the minority interpretation because the devil is getting a lot of attention today, many Catholics are asking questions and some are indeed becoming anxious. Two movies have recently been released focusing on the devil, The Pope’s Exorcist, which is really a shallow and disappointing horror movie starring actor Russell Crowe supposedly based on the life of the fo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Joseph Cafasso

June 23, 2023

2 Cor 11:18.21-30, Ps 34, Mt 6:19-23

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.23.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus, as he has been doing throughout the Sermon on the Mount, continues to teach us the wisdom of how to live as he lives, how to live to the full, so that with him we may live forever. He exhorts us to set our hearts on the true treasure of his kingdom, a treasure not measured in clothing moths can wreck, or metals rust can corrode, or money thieves or taxes can take. He reminds us that our heart will be where our treasure is. If we’re setting our hearts on this-worldly treasures — pleasure, getting our way, health, fame, material possessions big or small — our hearts will be weighed down and enslaved, and it will be difficult to lift them to the Lord. If we set our hearts on the kingdom, on storing up for ourselves treasure in heaven, then we can turn everything into an investment in eternity. Jesus says something similar in his image of the eye. He reminds us that the eye is the lamp of the body. If it is fixed on God, if it sees clearly and purely in his holy light, then the body and soul will be filled with light; but if is blinded by the shadows of the concupiscence of the flesh (lust), of the eyes (materialism) or of the pride of life (for power or control), the whole body will be and walk in darkness.

* So today is an opportunity for us to examine our eyes and hearts to see whether they’re truly set on God and the things of God. The Light has come into the world, as St. John tells us in his Prologue, but we need to choose the light instead of darkness, to purify our hearts of desires unworthy of the kingdom, to cleanse our eyes of any debris that keeps us from seeing Christ in the persons and events of the day.

* St. Paul was one who purified his heart and eyes in the manner in which Jesus is calling us all to do. He fixed his eyes and heart on Christ and began to order everything in such a way that not only did he amass an enormous, indestructible spiritual treasure but enriched us all by that same wealth given to him by God. Today’s first reading features a passage in which he summarized all of his sufferings. For me it’s one of the most moving passages in Sacred Scripture because it shows how much Paul loved the Lord, how much he was willing to undergo to obtain the treasure and to help us to grasp the inheritance Christ has won for us and is offering for us. He was in the middle of a conversation with the Corinthians with regard to the impostors who had come among them sowing darnel and bragging about their credentials. So he bragged about his own. He checked off the box that he was a Hebrew (not just a Jew but a Hebrew-speaking Jew, a real pride of honor among the Jews of Palestine versus those of the diaspora), a descendent of Abraham and a minister of Christ. He said he was all of that and more. Adding to his credentials, he presented the ways he had been crucified with Christ through labors, imprisonments, beatings and numerous brushes with death. “Five times at the hands of the Jews I received forty lashes minus one [which often killed the recipient]; three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned [and basically killed before the prayers of the Church raised him from the dead], three times I was shipwrecked, I passed a night and a day on the deep; on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, NY

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

June 18, 2023

Ex 19:2-6, Ps 100, Rom 5:6-11, Mt 9:36-10:8

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.18.23_SV_Mass_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today’s readings focus on two essential and related elements: electionby God of a group of people and the mission associated with that election with respect to everyone else. They point to something fundamental for us to understand not only in terms of sound ecclesiology but also to grasp better our vocation and mission as Christians, priests and religious.

* We see these two elements in the first reading from the Book of Exodus, when God chose the Israelites to be his special people, his “treasured possession,” and a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” He did so not because the sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were intrinsically better than any other race of people or nation — as we know from the chronicle of their infidelities — but so that he could prepare a people, through a Covenant, to be ready to receive the gift of God’s own Son as the Messiah and Savior of the whole World.

* Likewise, in the Gospel today of St. Matthew, we see that that Messiah and Savior chooses, from among all of those following him, twelve disciples, giving them a special task — both by their words as well as by the miraculous deeds he gave them authority and power to accomplish — to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand. They were not chosen because they were superior to the rest of disciples, but because Jesus wanted to give them a task to do for all the rest.

* Finally, in the second reading taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we can ponder the reality of ourelection as Christians and what that means. We were chosen by God in baptism and made his special people. The Eucharistic Preface we’ll use today (Sunday of Ordinary Time I) will paraphrase the words of St. Peter who, in an early baptismal catechesis, updated the words of today’s first reading and wrote to us Christians: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation, and a people claimed by God for his own, to proclaim the triumphs of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Like the others, we have been chosen not because we’re better than any other people; St. Paul tells us this in today’s second reading when he says that “while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” We were chosen, rather, for the sake of the mission, to continue Jesus’ saving work until the ends of the world.

* Vocation and mission are intrinsically related. Every time God chooses particular persons or particular peoples, he selects them for a mission. God calls so that one day he may send. The two great verbs in his vocabulary are “come!” — “Come, follow me!” (Mt 19:21), “Come away with me and rest for a while” (Mk 6:31), “Come to me all you who labor and find life burdensome and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28) — and “go” — “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt 10:6), “Go to the ends of the earth and proclaim the Good News” (Mt 28:18).

* We Catholics have been chosen by God for all eternity and given a special mission to announce his Gospel and proclaim his kingdom to the ends of the earth. Only one in three people on the planet are Christians, 2.6 out of 7.9 billion. Only 1.3 billion, 16 percent, have the privilege we do of the fullness of revelation, the fullness of the participation in God’s own life in this world, and the fullness of communion. But God didn’t give us his revelation or the sacraments or the Petrine ministry and apostolic succession so that...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

June 17, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.17.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we focus with him on the crucial question of vocations in general, and our vocation in particular, to be a worker in the Lord’s vineyard.

* Matthew tells us that when Jesus looked at the crowds, his heart was moved with pity because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Noting how great the harvest of souls was, he asked his disciples to pray to the Harvest Master — his Father — to send out laborers for his harvest. And while they were praying, Jesus helped Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Barthlomew, Thomas, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon from Cana and Judas Iscariot recognize that they were the answer to their prayers. He gave him his own authority and told them to drive out unclean spirits, cure every disease and illness, raise the dead, and proclaim that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” That’s what these simple men then actually went out to do.

* We learn several very important lessons from the scene.

* The first is Jesus’ mercy. Just as Jesus looked with pity on the helpless and abandoned crowds then, so he doubtless looks at so many in today’s world with the same compassion, because so many are like shepherdless sheep, searching for direction, lost in the cosmos, or like the recent Centers for Disease Control survey our American teenagers, persistently sad and hopeless. They don’t recognize or hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, and so they tune into the voice of strangers and follow them into danger.

* Second is the harvest. Jesus tells us that the harvest is huge and there are few doing it. In St. John’s Gospel he said, “Look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting!” (Jn 4:35). We don’t have to be a farmer to understand what will happen if we don’t act when the fields are ripe: the produce will corrupt. It’s a call to urgent action. The fields are ever white and ripe. We can’t waste time. For some people, perhaps for us, today may be the last day for action.

* The third thing is about the need for prayer. In response to the huge harvest, Jesus first has us pray for harvesters. This is a command with no expiration date, insofar as there will always been an urgent need until the end of time. In response to the need for vocations to the priesthood, religious life, marriage, the diaconate, Christian psychiatrists and psychologists, doctors, nurses, Catholic school teachers, catechists, you name it, the first thing we need to do is not a viral video, catchy poster, billboard, or program. It’s prayer. It’s always prayer. Vocations are always gifts from God to which human beings must respond, not things we earn from our own efforts, like salesmen showing quarterly earnings. The vocations crisis that the Church is suffering across the board in many locations is ultimately a prayer crisis. Not enough are praying for vocations, not to mention praying as if their eternal life depended on it. In response to the ripe harvest, we have to pray with urgency and insistence.

* The fourth thing is to notice what Jesus has us pray for. He has us ask God the Father, the Harvest Master, not for ‘bodies,” but “laborers,” hard workers. Harvesting for Jesus is not a cushy air-conditioned job in a plush corner of...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Monthly Mass for Young Adult Catholics

June 14, 2023

2 Cor 3:4-11, Ps 99, Mt 5:17-19

 

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.23_Young_Adult_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today Jesus serves us the third course in what is a seventeen-course daily Mass feast of his words from the Sermon on the Mount. We began on Monday with the Beatitudes. Yesterday, he summoned us to our vocation to be Salt of the Earth and Light of the World. Today he speaks to us of what his relationship is to the law and the prophets and what he therefore wants our relationship to be, telling us that the greatest in his kingdom will be the one who observes what he commands us and teaches others to do the same. Insofar as the Lord has summoned us to that greatness, let’s listen attentively to how he enfleshes it.

At the beginning of today’s Gospel, Jesus announces, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” He was coming to respond to all of the Old Covenant hopes, to be the “Yes” to all God’s promises, even the littlest: “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,” he continued, “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” He was going to fulfill all of the prophecies of the Old Testament and bring the entire law to find its completion in his two-fold command to love God with all of our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as Christ has loved us. As he will show us throughout the Sermon on the Mount, he would fulfill everything not by scrupulous observance of every letter and part of the letter, but by bringing everything he had given in the Old to fulfillment as a seed metamorphoses into a tree or an embryo into an infant and then into an adult. The fifth commandment not to kill he would fulfill by telling us not to be angry, not to insult, not to hate. The sixth commandment not to commit adultery he would complete by telling us not to look on others with lust, lest we be adulterers in the heart. The seventh commandment not to steal he would perfect by telling us not to withhold our tunic from someone who takes our cloak and to give to the one who asks of us. The eighth commandment not to bear false witness he would perfect by telling us not to swear oaths at all but to let our yes be yes and no be no. He was fulfilling the law through helping us to interiorize everything, transforming the fruit by renewing the tree. Rather than not hating, insulting, killing, using, plundering and deceiving our neighbor, he was leading us, like him, to love our neighbor and even our enemy.

The moral revolution Jesus was igniting during the Sermon on the Mount would be slow to take effect. The scribes and the Pharisees fiercely and homicidally resisted, because they wanted to maintain the letter as written and not to see it fulfilled as Jesus indicated. The laxist Sadducees and and Herodians withstood it, because they preferred to see the law and prophets conveniently ignored rather than taken even more seriously. Even many of the first Christians opposed it, because they thought in order to be a good Christian, one first needed to be a good Jew, and keep all 613 commandments in the law and the prophets. St. Paul was battling against this tendency in tonight’s first reading.

As one biblical scholar says, the Old Testament was like an unfinished symphony waiting for Christ to come and bring everything together. We’re hearing the first notes of that finished masterpiece,

Fr. Roger J. LandrySacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanWednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year IVotive Mass of St. JosephJune 14, 20232 Cor 3:4-11, Ps 99, Mt 5:17-19

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, St. Paul focuses on the great gift of the new and eternal covenant made for us by Christ by contrasting it to the former covenant. He calls the first Covenant one “carved in letters on stone,” meaning the Covenant of Sinai, and described it as a “ministry of death” or “ministry of condemnation” because it was meant to help us to learn to die to ourselves, die to our own powers, die to our dream to save ourselves by our own efforts, and open ourselves up to God’s power and his life. St. Paul in his Letter to the Galatians would call the Old Covenant or Testament a pedagogue, a disciplinarian, a tutor (Gal 3:24), who, according to ancient custom, would drill us and even “kill us” in lessons so that we might be brought by him to the Master who would build on those foundations. The purpose of the pedagogy of the Old Covenant was to open us up to receive and respond to God’s new and eternal covenant of salvation by grace received in faith. He says that if the first Covenant was “so glorious,” “how much more” will the new Covenant by the Spirit and the “ministry of righteousness … abound much more in glory.”

* Sometimes when we read such contrasts in St. Paul, who was battling against a tendency among the Pharisees and the “Judaizing Christians” to find salvation in the works of the law rather than by faith in Christ through grace, we can think that the Old Covenant was somehow annulled. No. As St. Paul would say to the Romans, “The gifts and the call of the Lord are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). The Old Testament was a great thing and a preparation for the New! As one biblical scholar says, the Old Testament was like an unfinished symphony waiting for Christ to come and bring everything together. That’s what Jesus himself describes in the Gospel today, taken from the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” He was coming to respond to all of the Old Covenant hopes, to be the “Yes” to all God’s promises, even the littlest: “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,” he continued, “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” He was going to fulfill all of the typological signs of the Old Testament and bring the entire law to find its fulfillment in his two-fold command of love, on which all the law and the prophets “hang” (Mt 22:40). He would do this not just by his words but also by his example. Some of the old forms of the “disciplinarian” would fall away in this fulfillment — like dietary laws, even circumcision! — as we received new wineskins for the new wine of the Covenant, but they would not be “abolished.” They would rather be brought to completion, they would be fulfilled, in a similar way to how a seed metamorphoses into a tree or an embryo into an infant into an adult.

* And Jesus wants us to follow him, to be united to him, in this fulfillment of every letter, every smallest part of the letter, of the Law. He wants us, like him, not to live by the “letter [that] brings death” but to live the smallest part of the letter by the “Spirit [who] gives life,” allowing God to unite ourselves to him in love. That’s why Jesus pivots and begins to speak about how he wants us to be great by living by the Spirit in fulfilling the law of love,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Catholic Medical Association Bootcamp for Medical Students

Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida

June 12, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.12.23_What_Prayer_is_and_How_Jesus_Teaches_Us_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Catholic Medical Association Bootcamp for Medical Students

Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida

June 12, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.12.23_The_Indispensable_Necessity_of_Prayer_and_Silence_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel

Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida

Catholic Medical Association Boot Camp for Medical Students

Monday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 12, 2023

2 Cor 1:1-7, Ps 34, Mt 5:1-12

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.12.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday, June 11, was the feast of St. Barnabas, nicknamed by the early Christians the “Son of Encouragement,” because of the way he emboldened so many in the first decades of the Church, including St. Paul. St. Barnabas was the one who encouraged the generosity of the first Christians by himself selling his property and laying the proceeds at the feet of the apostles to distribute as was most needed. He was the one who encouraged St. Paul, introducing this former terrorist against Christians to the apostles in Jerusalem and personally vouching for him. He was the one who eventually tracked St. Paul down in Tarsus where he was making tents to take him to Antioch and have him become the greatest Christian missionary of all time. We’re all called ultimately to be like St. Barnabas, a true person of encouragement who can strengthen others to be bold, to go on, to confront and overcome their fears. But we call him “Son of Encouragement,” not just “Man of Encouragement,” because he received the encouragement he paid forward from above, from Christ himself, who told him and others time and again “Take Courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.”

* St. Paul’s experience of encouragement, from Barnabas and like Barnabas from Christ, led him to write the extraordinary consoling words he penned in his Second Letter to the Christians in Corinth. In the first seven lines of this letter, the Apostle to the Gentiles uses the word “encourage” ten different times. He describes how God encourages us in our afflictions precisely so that, having received his strength in those difficult moments, we might credibly be able to encourage others with the same encouragement — namely God’s — we have received. St. Paul received this encouragement various times, as we see in the Acts of the Apostles and his letters. Right after this passage, he describes how his afflictions were crushing him. But God came to his aid and helped him to see that “if we are afflicted,

it is for your encouragement and salvation; if we are encouraged, it is for your encouragement, which enables you to endure the same sufferings that we suffer.” What we prayed in the Psalm happens often: “When the poor one called out, the Lord heard, and from all his distress he saved him.” God permits us to suffer so that we might receive his encouragement and then be better equipped to share that blessing with others. That’s part of the good that God wants to bring out of the hardships he permits us to endure. I think by this point we are all able to relate to this point, that if we’ve suffered, for example, a physical illness and recovered, we’re able to encourage those suffering the same illness; if we’re gone through a particularly grueling academic program, like medical school or residency, we can help those who are beginning; if we’ve had to endure the dark night of the senses or the soul in prayer, we can help those who are now just entering into it. God encourages us in our circumstances and helps us to encourage others. His encouragement is both a gift and a task.

* We see how Jesus similarly seeks to encourage others in today’s Gospel in sharing the Beatitudes. I normally prefer to preach on the Beatitudes in a straightforward way, contrasting Jesus’ notion of the path happiness from the world’s and ...