Beauty is not merely an ornament placed upon religion, as one might put flowers upon a table; it can be a signpost pointing beyond itself. A beautiful thing awakens in us a longing that no earthly object quite satisfies, as though the world were whispering that its loveliness comes from somewhere deeper. This is one reason Catholicism can appear so profoundly beautiful: in its churches, its music, its art, its liturgy, its sacramental imagination, and its reverence for the created world, it refuses to divide the visible from the invisible. The candle, the stained glass, the incense, the chant—all can become reminders that creation is not God, but is capable of bearing His glory. Catholic beauty at its best does not ask us merely to admire beautiful things; it teaches us to look through them, until the beauty of creation awakens our hunger for the Beauty who made it.

On January 15th 2019, the world saw the horrific scene as a group of heavenly armed Muslim terrorists attacked a hotel and commercial complex in Nairobi, Kenya. The sole goal -- kill as many Christians and non-muslims as possible. Unbeknownst to them, a SAS British forces solider was charging to the scene. After donning on his tactical vest, rifle and knife, he set out to engage the terrorist. But before he entered the hotel, he said a prayer. It's the only prayer that came to his mind at the specific moment... 

Last weekend, I had the great privilege of presiding over a wedding at St. Joseph’s, my old parish. The groom had once been one of my altar servers: a shy, quiet, somewhat awkward eleven-year-old boy. Now, more than a decade later, he stood before me as a young man in his mid-twenties, a competitive bodybuilder, and a bridegroom. And he had asked me to be the priest who would witness his wedding. How could I possibly say no?

I said yes gladly. For this is one of the great and hidden joys of being a priest: to watch a human soul grow. We meet people at one chapter of their lives and, if God is kind enough to let us remain, we sometimes get to see the next. We baptize children who later kneel at the altar. We teach young men and women who eventually stand before us as husbands and wives. We plant seeds whose flowering we may never see.

And sometimes, God allows us to see the flower. But there was another familiar face at the wedding. The groom’s older brother was there—a man I had not seen since I left St. Joseph’s in 2016. Both brothers had once served Mass with me on Sundays. They had stood beside me at the altar, close to the Holy of Holies, in the presence of that great Mystery where Jesus Christ gives Himself to us in the Eucharist—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. But somewhere along the way, his older brother began to drift. It did not happen all at once. Perhaps it rarely does.

He had questions. The same questions that have troubled generations of young people: Does God really exist? Why do I have to go to Mass on Sunday? Why does any of this matter? What if the Church is wrong?

Questions are not the enemy of faith. But questions can become doors, and every door may open either toward God or away from Him. Eventually, the questions became too heavy. The boy who had once served Christ at His altar walked away. He left the practice of the Catholic faith and followed the current of the world, where so many bright things glitter upon the surface of the water. And yet the human heart is a strange thing. It can possess much and still hunger.

It can taste pleasure and still thirst. It can win applause, accumulate success, pursue power, seek romance, entertain itself endlessly and still, when the noise finally ceases, hear the same ancient question whispering from somewhere deep within: Is this all?

The wedding was the first time my old altar server had stepped inside a church in years. I was, of course, delighted to see him.During the homily, I made fun of his long hippie hair. Afterwards, he returned the favor by making fun of my male-pattern baldness. But then he said something that I have not been able to forget. Referring to the homily, he said: “Now that’s how you get people back into church!” I do not know precisely what struck him. I do not know which word, which idea, or which buried memory stirred within him.

Perhaps it was something I said about marriage: that it is not merely a human arrangement but part of a divine design. That God created us male and female for a reason, and that the mystery of our bodies points beyond itself toward something greater. That we were made for a love which is not merely emotional or pleasurable, but total, faithful, fruitful, and sacrificial. And that the deepest form of love does not culminate in the possession of another, but in the gift of oneself. Which is precisely where marriage finally points us—to Jesus Christ. For the Cross is the place where Love reveals its true face.

There, the One who could have demanded everything instead gives everything. There, the Bridegroom gives Himself for His Bride. There, we discover that the strange hunger within the human heart is not an accident or an evolutionary inconvenience. It is a clue. Perhaps something in my old altar server's heart was pierced that day. What was it? I can only speculate.

But I am certain of this: the human heart was made for more than this world can give. There is a thirst in us that no earthly cup can finally satisfy. We spend our lives reaching for things which promise happiness. We pursue success, admiration, wealth, pleasure, romance, influence, beauty, experiences, and every glittering thing the world places before our eyes. And for a little while, they satisfy us. Then the satisfaction fades. So we reach again. And again. And again. Why? Because finite things cannot fill an infinite longing. There is a hollow place within us that creation itself cannot occupy. There is an ache for meaning, a homesickness for something we cannot quite name. But perhaps the ache is not the disease. Perhaps it is the invitation.

And this is the astonishing truth of the Gospel: we are not the only ones who thirst. God thirsts for us first. The One whom we have spent our lives seeking has been seeking us all along.

The Father waits for His children. Christ calls to the wandering heart. And the Holy Spirit continues to stir within us that ancient desire for something greater than the passing treasures of this world. So, my friends, I want to invite you on October 1st to the Well. Come with your questions. Come with your doubts. Come if you have been away for years. Come if you no longer know what you believe. Come if you have tried everything the world has offered and have discovered, perhaps quietly and painfully, that you are still thirsty. For the answer to our deepest questions is not ultimately a proposition, an argument, or an idea. It is a Person. The God who thirsts for us first. COME TO THE WELL. 

From the very beginning, God spoke of the Woman whose offspring would crush the serpent’s head: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” (Genesis 3:15). In the fullness of time, that prophecy shone forth in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the humble handmaid whose “yes” opened the way for the coming of our Savior. Through Mary came Jesus Christ, the One who conquered sin, death, and the ancient serpent. No wonder the devils despise her: they see in her the humble Woman whom God chose to oppose their pride, the Mother of the One who destroyed their dominion. Mary does not draw hearts away from Christ—she leads them to Him.

(Stayed tuned at the end of the homily for a hymn from a Traditional Latin Mass wedding at St. Mary's)

Have you ever wondered why relationships are so dang hard?  The answer is easy – human relationships are hard because God has placed sinners beside sinners, so that we might learn the strange art of grace. We come seeking love and find ourselves confronted with pride, impatience, selfishness—and, most painfully, our own. The faults of another can become a kind of divine mirror, showing us what we would rather leave unseen. Yet this, too, may be mercy. For God is not merely interested in making us comfortable with one another, but in making us holy. He uses the friction of imperfect love to uncover the hidden chambers of the heart, teaching us to confess where we have sinned, to forgive where we have been wounded, and to receive mercy where we have failed. Thus the difficult person may become, by God’s providence, an unwelcome but faithful instrument of our sanctification.

When Christ says, “If your brother sins against you,” He speaks to the very condition of life in a fallen world: wherever sinners dwell together, there will be wounds, offenses, and the daily necessity of forgiveness. But the Gospel does not merely teach us how to endure one another; it calls us to participate in the very love by which God has redeemed us. At the Cross, Christ did not wait for us to become worthy of His love—He gave Himself for us while we were still sinners. Thus, when we love the neighbor who has wounded us, we are not simply practicing moral restraint; by grace, we are being conformed to Christ. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” means that the other’s good must become a matter of our own concern, even when love is costly. For love “does no evil to the neighbor”; indeed, it fulfills the law because the whole law finds its deepest meaning in the self-emptying love of Christ. The answer to the friction of human relationships is therefore not withdrawal, retaliation, or the keeping of accounts, but the Cross-shaped freedom to forgive, to seek the good of the other, and to love as we ourselves have been loved.

The wisdom of the world often teaches us to trust what we can measure, master, and explain; but Scripture invites us into a deeper wisdom, one that begins not with the exaltation of man, but with the revelation of Christ. The world says that wisdom is found in possessing answers; Christ shows us that true wisdom is found in knowing the One who is the Truth. What appears foolish to the world—the Cross, surrender, humility, obedience—becomes, in the light of God, the very doorway to life. For the wisdom of Scripture does not merely make us clever; it makes us new. And when the brilliance of human thought has reached its limits, we discover that the ancient words of God were not behind us at all, but were pointing us home.

Mother Teresa reminded us that poverty is not found only in places where people lack food, shelter, or material possessions. She spoke of a deeper poverty that can exist even amid wealth—the poverty of loneliness, indifference, and feeling unloved. Her message challenges us to look beyond statistics and borders and recognize the human need for compassion everywhere. True richness, she suggested, is not measured by what we possess, but by how deeply we care for one another. 

There is a peculiar wisdom in sitting before the Blessed Sacrament, a wisdom which cannot be hurried into us by books or lectures. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who made a daily Holy Hour for nearly sixty years, discovered that the soul must sometimes cease talking in order to learn how to listen. “The Holy Hour became a teacher for me,” he wrote, because “looking at the Eucharistic Lord for an hour transforms the heart in a mysterious way.”  It is rather like standing in sunlight: we do not grasp the rays, yet by remaining there we are changed by them. Sheen even said that his preaching and “every good thought” were born from that hour before Our Lord.  Perhaps this is the wisdom the modern mind finds hardest to accept: that by doing apparently nothing but keeping company with Christ, we may become capable of doing everything else with greater truth, courage, and love.
 

There are few questions more difficult, or more easily misunderstood, than the question of why God made us male and female. Our age has given us no shortage of answers. Some tell us that sex is merely a biological accident. Others tell us that it is simply a private identity to be constructed according to our feelings. But perhaps the real trouble is that we have forgotten to ask the question beneath the question. Why did God make us this way? To ask it honestly is not to begin with condemnation, but with wonder. If God is the author of creation, then the difference between man and woman cannot be an arbitrary detail. It must somehow belong to the meaning of creation itself, to the strange and beautiful truth that we were not made for ourselves alone, but for communion, gift, and love.

This is why, on October 1st, I want to invite all of you my, dear parishioners, to “The Well” with Christopher West here at St. Mary's Parish. It offers something increasingly rare: a place where difficult questions are not treated as threats, and where Christian teaching is not reduced to a list of prohibitions. Instead, we are invited to see the human person anew. The Christian claim is far more astonishing than “there are rules about sex.” The claim is that the body itself speaks. Male and female are not merely two categories imposed upon an otherwise meaningless existence. They reveal something about the Creator's intention: that love is not fundamentally about taking, possessing, or gratifying the self. Love means making a gift of oneself. And here the mystery becomes still greater.

For if we want to understand why God made us male and female, we must eventually come to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the place where Christianity's vision of the human person ceases to be an abstract philosophy and becomes flesh before our eyes. Christ does not merely tell us that He loves us. He gives Himself to us. His Body is given; His Blood is poured out. The deepest pattern written into creation is revealed at the altar: love gives itself away. We might say that the Eucharist is the answer to the riddle written into the human body.

We were made for communion because God Himself is communion. We were made to receive love and to become a gift because Christ shows us that the fullness of life is found not in grasping oneself, but in giving oneself away. The Eucharist reveals the destiny for which the human person was created: not isolation, but union; not consumption, but communion; not self-invention, but self-gift. This is why The Well matters.

It is not merely an evening for people who already have all the answers. It is especially for those who have questions—for parents trying to understand the world their children inhabit, for young people trying to make sense of their own bodies and desires, and for anyone who senses that beneath the arguments about sexuality lies a much deeper question about what it means to be human. Christ does not meet our confusion with contempt. He meets it with truth and truth, when seen in Him, is beautiful.

So come to The Well. Come not merely to learn what the Church says about male and female, but to discover why the Church believes the human body is good, why our differences have meaning, why love demands a gift of self, and why all of these mysteries finally lead us toward the Eucharist. On the cover of the bulletin, scan the QR code, for more information on this powerful event. I want to see you and your family there at “The Well.” 

Christ has not called us merely to believe in Him within the walls of our churches, but to carry His reign into the little kingdoms entrusted to us. Within our families, we possess a spiritual authority. It's not the authority to dominate, but the sacred responsibility to pray, to bless, to teach, and to stand firm against all that would draw those we love away from God. The Christian parent is, in a sense, a watchman at the gate: not able to control every heart, but called faithfully to keep the light burning, to speak truth with love, and to make the home a place where Christ is honored. We need not fear the darkness, for the authority we exercise is not our own; it is received from the One whose kingdom cannot be overcome.