A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, do not give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before swine. They will trample them underfoot at best and perhaps even tear you to shreds. Treat others the way that you would have them treat you. This sums up the law and the prophets.
Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road clear, and many choose to travel that road. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life? How rough that road and how few there are who find it. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. That road may be narrow. It certainly is rough. And our lord says, few find it. Notice that.
Christ says this. And he's talking about the road that leads to salvation. And yet today, there are many earnest, honest people who are seeking that narrow road. Now just yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend who just spent a week at Mary Baldwin College, in Shenandoah Valley, Mary Baldwin College, at a what we would call a closed retreat, a retreat where silence was not demanded but urgently recommended. To show you the contrast, our retreats have either disappeared and we have eliminated silence.
See how smart we are. Anyway, this was what we would call a closed retreat. And it was called, it was something new to me, called the Intensive Journal Retreat. Now get that word journal. Because the core of this procedure, or exercise or whatever you want to call it, the core of it is writing down what you remember of your past, good, bad, and indifferent, as you see it and as you react to it.
Writing down, see, keeping a journal of your present situation, and then finally looking forward to write down your objectives, what you want to accomplish. That's the core of this thing. Now, I understand that it's it's rather a widespread movement, but I simply can't keep track of all these movements. Now, this friend who made this was up on cloud nine, because they had, they said, never realized their potentialities. They had a new grasp on themselves.
Now I'm not downgrading this, and I'm not being cynical, I'm not being sarcastic. I respect that. My point and incidentally this was conducted by a Jesuit priest named Father Cox. And it's a copyrighted name, incidentally. It's a big operation called Intensive Journal Retreats.
And it has these three workshops, one viewing the past, one viewing the present, and one viewing the future. And you can take them one by one or take them all three, it takes a week. They have a they have a whole library of books. It's a very sophisticated operation. But here is one point I want to lay before you good people.
Remember, if you're talking about religion, for heaven's sakes, let's talk about God, not me. If you look at all these movements that we have seen which are all ersatz religion, that's what this stuff is. You I can't even think of them, but the deep meditation, the metaphysics metaphysical societies, sensitivity sessions, I don't know how many we've gone through in the last twenty years. They are all basically psychological experimentations, psychological procedures, psychological experiences aimed at the comfort, the fulfilling of the individual. Now there's nothing wrong with this.
There's nothing wrong with it at all. But you see, you can accomplish this in some instances by going into a bar and drinking two good scotches. You see, this in itself has nothing to do with God Almighty. Frankel, who went through the second world war and who wrote a mighty, important book on the the the search for meaning. Now, of course, these things have tremendous religious overtones, but the search for meaning in itself is not religious at all.
Unless you're searching for God, and unless you find him. Unless you find him. Now, some of the things that came out from the report was the admiration that that some of the retreatants had for our confession. What a what a relief, they said, it is to know you can go and confess your sins and get them off of your soul because it brings me comfort. Now you see, there's nothing wrong with this, but it is not enough.
The essence of sin isn't what sin does to me or what it does to my neighbor. The essence of sin is what it does to my relationship with God. Oh, you see, so much of this you take most of the now again, I say this with respect, even though I'm critical of it, but I say it with respect. What do you think is the great attraction for the fundamentalist movement today? Why do you think so many of the what we call main nine religions are losing are losing and losing heavily their adherence, whereas fundamentalist religions are springing up all over the country.
Why do you think that is? Because people are finding satisfaction or fulfillment or any of these words you wanna use. But all of this lingo comes back to me. I go to God for the good it does me. Now, there is nothing wrong in going to God because I need God.
Christ said, without me, you can do nothing. So you better had go to headquarters. But the the the essential, all important, the dominant objective of religion isn't self but God almighty. And the prayer that we are bound to give God is first of all, the prayer of praise, of worship. If there had been if there had never been sin in the world, you would still be bound to worship.
If you were as innocent as the most pure snow that ever fell on a highest mountain, you would still be bound to worship your creator. Now, my the point I want to make is this. We Catholics have what so many multitudes of honest and even desperate people are seeking, and we're turning our backs on it. We're turning our backs on it. We're converting our the truest the truest and the most ultimate and the most essential truths of our religion.
We're saying dogma doesn't matter. What matters is feeling. What matters is my reaction. What matters is what I get out of it. Come into church and rest a while, and you'll feel better.
Go into a bar and take a drink of scotch, and maybe you'll feel better if you don't take too many. See, it's so easy, so easy to convert religion into something very vulgar. And we we can do it easily. We can do it very easily. It will never happen to us.
It will never happen to us if we're loyal to God Almighty and the living voice of his living church. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.