Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

When following Jesus to the full, the Christian life always leaves scars. 

This October, I’m excited to welcome a remarkable guest whose work has helped countless souls all over the world rediscover the splendor hidden within the Christian vision of the human person. Internationally known Catholic speaker and author Christopher West, perhaps the most beloved popular interpreter of the teachings of St. John Paul II on the Theology of the Body, will come to share anew the good news of why God created us male and female, and why the Church, so often misunderstood, speaks not to imprison the human heart, but to set it free. The event here at our parish is called “The Well”, named after that famous pivotal encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

For we live in an age overflowing with information yet starving for meaning; an age that has taught many to look upon the body with confusion, suspicion, or even despair. Yet Christ does not leave us wandering in that fog. He reveals a path toward freedom, toward wholeness, toward the rediscovery of what it means to be truly human.

And perhaps this raises a deeper question – why does Jesus seek us out? 

Imagine, for a moment, the eyes of Jesus fixed upon you. What do you see there? Why does His gaze unsettle us? We know the strange discomfort of holding the gaze of another person too long — the uncertainty of what lies hidden behind their eyes, whether judgment or affection, indifference or intimacy. Yet Christ’s gaze is unlike any other. He looks upon us fully, without turning away. Not merely at our virtues, but at our wounds; not merely at the face we present to the world, but at the soul beneath it.

This Sunday the Church celebrates Holy Trinity Sunday, this strange and bewildering teaching that God is an eternal relationship at his very core and wants us to share in it. The heart of Christianity is not merely that man seeks God, but that God Himself has gone in search of man. From all eternity the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have lived in a boundless communion of love, lacking nothing, needing nothing, yet desiring to share that divine life with us. And so the Son stepped down into the dark forest of our world, clothed Himself in our humanity, and walked our dusty roads that we might be drawn into the very life of the Trinity. Christ does not simply come to improve us morally, but to bring us home, to gather wandering souls into the blazing circle of divine love where the Father delights in the Son, and the Spirit binds all together in eternal joy. The Gospel, then, is the astonishing invitation that frail creatures like ourselves might one day participate in the very communion of God. That is why Jesus went to that well and encountered that woman. That is why Jesus looks intensely at each one of us. 

"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, 
a holy nation, a people of his own..."? -1 Peter 2:9

Jesus calls us out of darkness. 

Be wildly generous with God. 

There is, at present, a certain astonishment rippling through the secular world at the announcement that Scott-Vincent Borba will be ordained a Catholic priest for the Diocese of Fresno on Saturday, May 24th. Here is a man who possessed precisely what modern man is taught to desire above all things: wealth, influence, admiration, and the peculiar sort of immortality granted by worldly success. As co-founder of E.L.F., a cosmetic empire valued in the billions, he had climbed the glittering staircase that so many spend their lives ascending. Yet, having reached its summit, he quietly descended it again for the sake of Christ.

To the modern imagination, this appears madness. The world can understand a man sacrificing comfort in order to gain riches; it cannot understand a man surrendering riches because he has discovered something infinitely greater. And yet, this is the very heart of Christianity. The soul of man was never made to feed forever upon applause, luxury, or power. These things may amuse us for an evening, as toys amuse a child, but they cannot satisfy the ancient hunger hidden within us.

When Borba says, “I’ve never been happier,” the world hears a contradiction. But the Christian hears an echo of a deeper truth: that joy is never found by clutching at oneself, but by surrendering oneself. Christ warned that whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses it for His sake will find it. It is one of those divine paradoxes upon which the whole Christian faith rests.

Perhaps, then, the shocking thing is not that a man gave away billions for Christ. Perhaps the truly shocking thing is that we still believe billions could ever compare to Him. There are moments in life when a man discovers, often unwillingly, that information alone cannot remake him. One may memorize creeds, recite prayers, and speak eloquently of heaven while the heart remains cold as a winter field. Yet Christianity was never meant to be merely the arrangement of correct thoughts in the mind, but the invasion of divine life into the soul. The Holy Spirit does not simply instruct a man; He transforms him.

The Holy Spirit moves much like the wind: invisible, untamed, impossible to imprison. We see Him not directly, but in the changed lives He leaves behind. Hard hearts soften. Cynics begin to hope. The selfish learn charity. What no lecture could accomplish in twenty years, God may perform in a single surrendered moment.

There are moments, I think, when nearly every Christian has envied the Twelve Apostles. We imagine that faith would be simpler if only Christ stood visibly before us as He once stood beside St. Peter and St. Andrew by the sea or walked with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. We think to ourselves: “Surely I should be a braver Christian if I could hear His voice with my own ears. Surely sorrow would lose some of its sting if I could look upon His face and say plainly, ‘Lord, help me.’”

And so the Ascension, the great mystery which the Church celebrates this Sunday, can, at first glance, appear a rather melancholy feast. For it speaks of departure. Christ is taken from sight. The disciples remain below, gazing upward like helpless children watching the sun disappear over the horizon.  Yet that is only how it appears from the earth. We are creatures of space and time, and therefore we naturally suppose that if Christ were standing three feet away from us, then He would be more present than He is now. But the story of the Ascension tells us precisely the opposite.

For while Christ remained on earth in the flesh, His bodily presence was necessarily limited. He could be in Galilee or Jerusalem, but not both at once. But by ascending to the Father in Heaven, He did not abandon the world any more than the sun abandons the earth when it sets in the evening twilight. Rather, He ceased to be present merely as one man among others and became present in a deeper way to all who belong to Him.

This is why Pope Leo the Great  could say in the 5th century that “what was visible in our Redeemer has passed into the sacraments.” The visible Christ has not vanished; He has, in a sense, hidden Himself. Hidden—not absent. The same Lord who once healed with His hands now heals through water, bread, wine, absolution, and the quiet workings of grace within His Church.

Indeed, the Ascension was not Christ withdrawing from human life but drawing humanity upward into the life of God. The Son returned to the Father carrying our nature with Him. Human flesh, the very thing so often wounded, tempted, and humiliated, now sits enthroned in Heaven. One might almost say that the Ascension is Heaven’s declaration that humanity has not been discarded after all. Man is not merely a beastly brute, bred for earthly banality, but destined for the heavenly beatific vision of eternal blissful bewilderment. 

This is why the sacraments matter so profoundly. In the Eucharist, Christ does not merely remind us of Himself; He gives Himself. In Baptism, we do not simply enact a symbol; we are united with His death and resurrection. In Confession, it is not only a man who speaks forgiveness, but Christ Himself who restores the wounded soul. The modern man often says, “If only I could see, then I would believe.” But Christianity turns the sentence upside down. We learn, gradually and painfully, that sight is not the highest form of knowing. Love itself teaches us this. The deepest realities are often those we cannot hold in our hands. And so the Ascension calls us away from the childish notion that God is absent unless He is visible. Christ is not less near because He cannot now be touched. He is nearer than ever—nearer than our own thoughts, nearer than breath itself. The disciples stood looking into Heaven because they thought the story was ending. In truth, it was only then beginning.

Christianity is not chiefly a matter of mastering a catalogue of sacred facts, as though Heaven were won by passing an examination. A man may memorize every creed and yet remain as cold as stone before God. The heart of the Christian life is rather a love affair — the creature pursued by his Creator, the soul awakened by the terrible and beautiful love of Christ. For information alone may sharpen the mind, but only love can transform the person. The saints were not those who merely knew about God, but those who had become, in the deepest sense, enamored with Him.

In our first reading today, St. Paul arrives in the throbbing heart of Greek culture --Athens. We will witness man's ancient pursuit of truth converge with the revelation of Jerusalem. 

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! What a radiant and holy custom it is that, here in the United States, we set aside a day in honor of our mothers. And rightly so.

Consider what she endures for the sake of her child. Long before we first behold the light of the sun, we are carried beneath her heart, hidden within her very being for those mysterious nine months in which life itself is woven together in secret. And then comes the hour of birth — that fearful and glorious threshold where she willingly passes through suffering, and even the shadow of death, so that another life may enter the world.

Nor does her giving cease when the travail is ended. Having poured out her strength, she continues to sustain the child from the substance of her own body, feeding the helpless little one with nourishment only she can give. It is a love so profound and sacrificial that one is almost compelled to hear, echoing faintly through it, the words: “This is my body, given for you.” 

The cover of this Sunday’s bulletin recalls the radiant joy of last Sunday’s First Holy Communion. The young girls, clothed in garments of brilliant white, and the boys, with ties neatly fastened and collars straightened, came not merely to a ceremony, but to a profound divine encounter. For what greater marvel can be given to mankind than this: that God should feed His children with His very life? Not symbol alone, nor distant memory, but His Body offered for the life of the world. Yes — His flesh; His Body.

First Holy Communion ought therefore to be celebrated with trembling gladness and with majesty befitting heaven itself. The child approaching the altar steps nearer to the heart of the universe than kings upon their thrones or conquerors in their triumphs. Here is Love made tangible. Here is Eternity stooping low to nourish the weary children of earth.

And so we celebrate this sacred feast much as we celebrate Mother’s Day because both bear witness to self-giving love. Every Mass is another encounter with that divine charity which spends itself entirely for the beloved. Christ desires nothing less than union with each soul. At every reception of Holy Communion, He whispers again the words that shattered history and remade the world: “This is my body, given for you.”

That is why we Catholics genuflect. The bending of the knee is not mere habit, nor empty ritual, but a holy reminder to distracted minds and wandering hearts: Love Himself is here. In the Holy Eucharist we stand in the presence of the living God, who still gives Himself away for the life of His people: “This is my body, given for you.”