A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Summoning two of his disciples, John, John the Baptist, sent them to ask the lord, are you he who is to come or are we to expect someone else? When the men came to Jesus, they said, John the baptizer sends us to you with this question. Are you he who is to come, or do we look for somebody else? At that time, Jesus was curing many of their diseases, afflictions, and evil spirits.
He also restored sight to many who were blind. Jesus gave this response. Go and report to John what you have seen, what you have heard. The blind recover their sight. Cripples walk, lepers are cured, the deaf hear, dead men are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them.
Blessed is that man who finds no stumbling block in me. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. About two years ago, a lady by the name of Catherine de Heg Doherty published a little book.
It's about 50 or 60 pages. She called it Pustenia, pustenia. It's a Russian word as far as I can make out, but what it means is having a place of solitude to which you can retire. In order to give yourself a chance to find God. Now that place of solitude may be an actuality, as it is for example up in the settlement, the complex which he founded up in Ontario, Canada called Madonna House.
Where you have these little actually little cabins where people withdraw for a day or two days, or any amount of time they want, completely by themselves, with a book, the Bible, and where they live on a minimum of food, with a little stove, and with very little other comforts of home. There's another Pustini that that she talks about, and that's the Pustini in our own hearts. By that I mean in our own lives. Even on a crowded subway train, you can create a Pustini. In two years, that booklet has sold over 50,000 copies.
Now, you know statistics, what are they? But anyway, that's this is a fact. And it's significant that 50,000 people have read this book, or and bought it. It was distributed for free. The point is, you see, we can get so lost, we can get so entrapped, we can get so enmeshed in life, even in religious practices.
I say even in religious practices, or what we call religious practices, is that we forget God. We forget him. And yet, we come back to Augustine's the very first sentence in his confessions, thou, oh God, hast made us for thyself, and our hearts will not be at rest until they rest in you. There's probably no line more quoted in the whole world than that sentence. It's the opening sentence of his confession.
Remember, Guston lived in March to 04/30. He didn't live yesterday. Catherine Daugherty is living today. She's still alive up there. I'm sure this she's acquainted you're acquainted with someone.
She was a good friend of of of the many of the people who have been active in religious movements in our time. Now this is a thing that she see, she's a Russian. And she when she became a a Roman Catholic, she brought into her Catholicism the asceticism. Now that's a that's the only asceticism simply means a practice to draw us closer to God. That's all it means.
She brought in some of these practices of the East. And one of them is this necessity of doing something for God and God alone. Penance, fasting, drawing apart, being alone with God. Try it. Try it.
I crossed the Atlantic several years ago when we used to use a ship. We were at sea eight or nine days. It was a slow boat. And there was a man there who was a pretty hotshot with a Wall Street Journal. He got on that boat with the latest copy of the Wall Street Journal.
He read it every day for eight or nine days. He couldn't live without that Wall Street Journal in his pocket. I have met people, you can go to any resort and you will meet people, especially men, after two or three days, they don't know what to do with themselves. They want to get back to work. Because there's where they're comfortable, that's where they find themselves.
That's the they're I don't know. Anyway, this is a fact. And with the same thing can happen with religion. The only meaning religion has as honest to God religion is God. Is God, not me, but God.
And not my neighbor, not the poor, not the downtrodden, not the rich, not the affluent, not the influential, but God Almighty. That's the whole story. And let me tell you, many of the Eastern religions have a better hold on this than in the Western world today. Because you see, what only yesterday, on the I mean the day before yesterday on the news, there was just a statement where there's a where there's almost a there is a huge movement of Islam. And one of the thrusts of Islam is to try to maintain its authenticity against the degradation of the West.
Now you say, oh, well, that's a lot of clat trap. Is it? Is it? Even the Russians look upon us in many ways as degraded. Just see what comes over your the boob tube, especially on the late evening shows, and ask yourself, how in the name of heavens can we be called even a God fearing country when our money says, In God we trust.
That's a joke. It's a joke if we talk about ourselves as a nation. And you can prove it just as soon as you leave this church this morning and buy your morning paper. Just read the ads for adult movies. So we're not this is not a you see, the point is that if there is there is a God or isn't.
I don't find him in me. You see, the you take Thomas Merton, and I have a great respect for him, I guess I do. But the thing is, he talks so much about finding God in myself. That's not the way we went to Bethlehem. You go to Bethlehem to discover Jesus Christ.
He's out there. He's a reality. He's a fact. He's not something that I create with my imagination or my creative abilities. God is an objective something, omnipotent something, omnipotent something.
Now the let's come back. All of this is is is in regard to Saint John of the Cross. You see, Saint John of the Cross was a was a contemporary to us for some years with Saint Teresa of Avila. Now they're down there in Spain. Saint John of the Cross is in the second half of the sixteenth that century.
That's the century of Reformation. Think of the turmoil that's going on in England and in France, and in Germany, and in Switzerland. The Protestant Reformation. The whole these countries, that is England, Germany, to some extent France, and Northern Italy, Switzerland, these are these countries are in a terrific turmoil. And you read this and you think there's nothing else happening in the whole world.
Well, this is just a little part of the world. You read read the history of Saint Teresa of Avila, you read Saint John of the Cross, both of them Carmelite standing for the reformate. Notice, they both stood for the reformation of the Carmelite order, and they got clobbered for it, good and proper, both of them. Even when John of the Cross was was in a dying state, he went to one of his own monasteries, and the and the superior was reluctant to take him in because it'd be just an added expense. But that wasn't the real reason, that he was a reformer.
You read the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, read John of the Cross, you'd never know there was reformation going on. These these people were concerned with the great truth of the reality of God. The reality of God and my coming to him. And you know the word for that is holiness. Of course, you can't use the word holiness.
We get a picture of some plastic holy card or something. But that's what we're talking about. That's the whole objective of religion, is to bring us closer to God. Not the God of my creation, but the God of my discovery, of my finding, the hound of heaven. That's what it's all about.
So when today the church is giving us Saint John of the Cross, you can't disassociate it with Saint Teresa of Avila. And remember how coincidental this all was. Saint Teresa was well on her way to trying to reform the Carmelite border, to bring it back to its pristine practices, when just after ordination, by a perfect coincidence, John LaCrosse meets her. And he immediately became a follower of her movement, and then did for the men what she was doing for the women in the Carmelite order. It put him in well, didn't know he's going into it.
But the thing is that here was a tremendous movement, and the very same thing that those people were striving for, we have a woman like Catherine de Hecht Darte doing. It's the same idea, same objective, absolutely the same object. Saint John of the Cross wrote his best poetry when he was a prisoner by his own monks in their own little jail. That's where he found his great freedom as a prisoner, finding, seeking God almighty. All else all else are means to ends, and the end is God.
And our tremendous mistake is to is to confuse the means with the end, to get lost in the means. When the one thing that matters is the end, that is God almighty and his son, Jesus Christ. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.