Fr. Brendan McGuire - Podcasts that Break open the Word of God

Today, I am asking us to celebrate, yes we want to celebrate the gift of Christ in our life but we also need to choose Christ day after day: I will choose to be kind. I will choose to be gentle. I will choose to be forgiving. I will choose to love. I will choose to serve. (Read More…)

There is so much to be grateful for; so much to really see God’s presence here and now, not in some future time or generation. But we must be awake and we must be prepared to see it and then we must be prepared to become it for others. That is our role; to become the living presence for others today. Stay awake. We never know the time or the hour he will appear.

When we think about it, the most precious gift that we have is life itself and the time we have left. Time is our most precious gift because it is all limited. We know that we all have only so much time. At the very end of life, there is nothing we can take with us.

We have to ask the question specifically for our own life. Who is the neighbor in my life? Who is the one who is on the furthest extremity of my life? Who do I not notice? Who might be really in need of help? And that might be a loved one whom we know; who we have not been loving as well as we know we should.

As we come to the Eucharist, it is not enough that we just come; we have to go from here, converted and changed, and the conversion of the Lord asks us to make is to be disciples; to be men and women for Christ in the world. We move from the “I” to the “we”.

The challenge has been that we understand that suffering and dying brings about metamorphosis, brings about change, but often times we always believe that it should be somebody else who should be suffering and dying. That is where the problem lies in that it needs to be somebody else who dies. 

We want to be able to pay our dues so that we can get God’s love. We want to feel like we earned it. We want to feel we deserve it. If we do this then God loves us more; we believe in completely human terms. Jesus tells us that it is just not the way God works. If the glass is already full, it’s full no matter how much more you put into the glass, it is still completely full. 

Our Catholic teaching says we do not get saved individually; we get saved communally together. And so, we do this together. And what is it that we do together? We keep our hands open to receive God’s love just like a child; we accept it completely unearned, unmerited, showered upon us.

Here is the my homily from this past weekend. During the homily, I invited the children in the community to come around the altar with me. The text is embedded below but listening to the recording is really worth it. Please feel free to share it with others. 

The most powerful transformation takes place when we are suffering. And that is very hard for us to hear but in fact, we know it to be true; not only in our own lives but in the lives of those around us. When we go through the most painful period in our life, the best thing we can do is to allow God’s Spirit, God’s grace to operate and then to allow the transformation to happen. 

The first among you will be the one who is the most humble. The first among you is the one who is the servant of all.”That is very hard for us to hear because we are all about getting on top. We are the best at this, the best at that. Not that that is bad in itself but if we really believe that about ourselves then we are fooling ourselves because Christian discipleship, according to Christ, is about humility and service. How does that work out in our own lives?