In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. As attractive as is the second reading, the magnificat, this morning, I want to bring back to your memory a line from our opening prayer. It says, may we who celebrate the coming of Christ as man. Now let's share more fully in his divine life.
In other we are praying to God almighty that we may share in his divine life. Now last night we had a penitential service or confessional service or whatever you want to call it. It's very much like an old time prayer meeting. But anyway, it winds up with an individual confession, which is the heart of the matter. Now what struck me hearing confessions last night, you know you don't hear many confessions of it.
I was kept pretty busy. Is this, let's say it's the same thing with two aspects. One is that there are a lot of people who are trying to do just what we have read. There are a lot of good people, total as far as the world goes, totally anonymous. They will never make headlines.
Their obituary, you'll have to use a magnifying glass to see it in the post. That's one of our daily newspapers. I am convinced that we have a no one knows the number of men and women who are sincerely trying to have their lives reflect Jesus Christ, to become as much one with him as they can. In other words, to take this seriously, we are called to be sons of god and heirs of his kingdom. Now that's that's one part of this item I wanna bring to your attention this morning for this August meeting.
The second is this, what is the biggest obstacle? Sin? Not really. Not really. Because most people aren't running around committing a bunch of mortal sins.
What is the problem? And the problem is feeling. Feeling. I tell you, and I know let me first of all make my position clear. I am all for feeling.
I can quote you on Newman. What Newman says is almost a definition of man and woman to say they are irrational animals. And then he goes on for a whole paragraph to tell to explain it as only Newman can do, that we are feeling, we are sensating, we are sensitive people, we are people of prejudices of bias, we get angry. In other words, while we say we that the definition of man going back to Aristotle, that man is a rational animal, for the most part we are emotional animals. We are feeling animals.
We are animals who react to pain and to joy, to a good word, to an ugly harsh word. We are people of our emotions. A book on anger was recently published, well it's two years old now. But the very first parrot the very first sentence in this book on anger is that we are we are slaves of our emotions. That's the first sentence in the book.
We are slaves of our emotions. I've just been reading Erasmus, sixteenth century. You know, the friend of Thomas More, and the friend and the opponent of Martin Luther and Melancon and Calvin. And he has a whole paragraph on this very same subject. That while we we say what a human being is close to being an angel and having an intellect and a will and all this, nevertheless in the day in and day out affairs of life, We are far from being that.
We come back to the fact that we are sent we are animals who feel, who have all the all the input of our senses, all the output of our emotions, our sentiments, our passions, our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, that's what we are about 9999100% of the time. Now I've said that that should in other words, I am no enemy of feeling. I know to some extent who I am. I am not a disembodied spirit. I am not just a pure soul.
I am not a Platonist. I am not a neo Platonist. I'm not an Augustanist. I know who I am, and I know my composition. Now having said all of that, I hasten to say all of that when you bounce a scale of man's commitment is not relevant.
Is not relevant. No. No. I said relevant. You want an example?
Take Jesus Christ. We forget this. Let me pick you see, here's what I meant last night. People would say, I I I I as much as I try, I don't feel close to god. I don't I'm not exaggerating this now.
I don't feel as I used to when I said my prayers. I don't feel that god hears me anymore. I don't feel I any consolation in my prayers. Now these are realities. These are realities, and these are obstacles.
The and these are scandals. You know what a scandal means? It means a barrier. These are barriers to these good people who are trying to make it. And I think here most of us come right in right here.
I'm talking to you. I'm not talking about the last night. Because we are people of feeling of our emotions, we can't resist it. Just imagine how many people will come to church on Christmas and feel good about it. They feel fulfilled.
They come and they've gotten something. They feel so good about it. I say that's irrelevant because you don't come to church to worship God to be to be fulfilled. You don't come for yourself. You come for God's sake.
You see the difference there? And how you feel about it is irrelevant. How many of you were overjoyed in getting out of bed this morning on a morning like this? Are if you're going to how many parents are overjoyed in the sacrifices they make day in and day out for all kinds of things. Think of the sacrifices and that all the troubles that children have to put up with.
I baptized two babies Sunday and these poor little kids here here's a great big huge monster pouring water over the little baby's head trying to drown it. Think what a child has to put up with with parents. You know, you have to pray for their patience and perseverance. But the thing is, you see, if you're if we're going to take feeling as a as as a standard, where do you wind up? You wind up by being nothing less than an animal.
That's where you wind up because that's what an animal is. And as I say in this question, you wanna know my authority for this? Go to Jesus Christ. Was he overjoyed when he when he went into the Garden Of Gethsemane? When he saw what he was going to have to go through?
Was he was it all light? Was he going in there for self fulfillment because he wanted it, because he was getting something out of it? Did he feel close to God? Did he pray where his prayers answered? He prayed until he was the blood came out on him like sweat.
I call that real hard praying. What did he get for it? Look at the cross, it's where it went. When he got on the cross, here he is at the at the summit of here is Christ the just think of it, the son of God, divinity. That's God on the cross, not a man.
There's only one person in Jesus Christ and that person is divine with a truly human nature, but there's only one person. Where do and here you have Christ at the very peak, at the very summit of his relationship with men, completing the work his father had given him to do. And what is his explanation? What is his statement from the cross? My god, my god, why have you abandoned me?
I'm telling you folks, this is serious business. If that's the way it is with Jesus Christ, who are we to expect something better? Now we've had a lot of saints, Saint Teresa of Avila, we've had Saint John of the Cross, we've had Saint Ignatius Loyola, we've had Saint Dominic, we had Aquinas, we had Albert the Great. Any one of those men and women, any one of them, when you read their lives, you will find that what their lives reflect is the life of Jesus Christ. It was John on the cross who wrote the dark night of the soul.
Where did he did he write his most important poetry? When he was thrown by his own confers into a dungeon and kept there for over a year or nearly a year. That's how the saint was treated. Take Saint Peter Claver down in Colombia, Cartagena. And well, why should I emphasize the obvious?
Christ doesn't ask us to feel. I don't go to God to be fulfilled. I go to God in the first place because I have to. It's my duty. He is my creator, and I'm his creation.
That's putting it in a nutshell. This you hear it all the time from the younger people. Mass doesn't mean anything to me anymore. Why doesn't mass mean anything to you anymore? Because I don't feel I'm getting anything out of father.
I just come and I'm just blah. And I say, my friend, maybe that is greatest act of religion you have performed in a long time. And they looked at me in bewilderment. This is the point I'm making, this bewilderment. This is the this is what we've got to get straight in our mind.
Why should they be bewildered? Christ didn't put himself on the cross because it was a picnic. And when he gets on the cross, when he's giving God everything, he feels that his father has abandoned him. Do you know what the word abandoned means? Well, this is an important thing.
Don't underestimate feeling. That's ridiculous. That's being less than human. You we must know what feeling is. We must know who we are.
We are people of feeling, of emotion, of sentiment. We like to rise to the occasion of a Christmas or an Easter, but that's not the stuff that daily life is made of. You're an example here this morning on what daily life is made of. And so when the chips are down, what counts is my commitment with what's up here, an act of the will with my intelligence. When all I can say is, my lord and my god, not my will, but thine be done.
In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.