A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. Jesus withdrew toward the lake, Lake Of Galilee up in the North, with his disciples. A great crowd followed him from Galilee. And now notice, an equally great multitude came to him from Judea, that's the farther south, from Jerusalem, from Idomea, that's across the Jordan, Transjordan, that's across the Jordan, and from the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon, that's to the west on the seashore of the lake of of the Mediterranean Sea, I mean. So there must have been a great number of people wanting to see Jesus.
So in view of their great numbers, Jesus said to his disciples to get a fishing boat ready for him so that he could avoid the crush of the crowd against him. Because he had cured many, all who had afflictions kept pushing towards him to touch him. Unclean spirits would catch sight of him, fling themselves down at his feet and shout out, you are the son of god, while Jesus kept commanding them sternly not to reveal who he was. Very mysterious. 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. Today, we are celebrating the feast of Saint Francis de Sales, bishop and doctor of the church associated with the great city of Geneva, Switzerland. Now, in my misspent life, there have been a number of characters who have played a pretty important role. One of them was Pius X, and the revival of Gregorian chant.
Leo XIII, and the revival of Thomism. And Saint Francis of des Sails with a little book that he wrote called An Introduction to a Devout Life. Francis of des Sails was French speaking. It's one of my earliest recollections. We would have it when we had a retreat, and I was still in grammar school.
And in those days, we were supposed to keep silence during retreat, we were supposed to recollect ourselves, and I still think they're excellent ideas. And we were supposed to do some spiritual reading. And I don't know how it happened, but I fell to my lot to get acquainted with Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to a Devout Life. He wrote that book not for some mystic, not for some anchorite, not for some hermit, not for religious bound into a convent or a monastery. He wrote it for a lady of the world.
And I and by a lady, I'm putting down in quotes, a woman who had a social position to keep, who had a big household to run, who had to do what most people today do. Whether they like it or not, we have to do a lot of these things. And it was his unique and very peculiar idea that even people in the world could be holy. And I would like to add a footnote, if you don't succeed in that, you're damned. You know, that's that's your choice.
It's a pretty severe choice, but that's what it amounts to because holiness simply means being united to God. And if at our moment of our death, if we don't find ourselves united to God, then we are disunited. And you know what that means. I don't care what word you use, but we're in bad we're in bad trouble. You don't hear much you practically hear nothing about that book today, because we've gotten away from the idea that holiness is a personal thing, just the same as vice is.
We have got such an idea of collectivity. I was looking through a a calendar. I won't tell you who was put out. A beautiful calendar, all kinds of pictures of running water and snow covered trees. What this has to do with leading a Catholic spiritual life is beyond me.
But anyway, these are the beautiful pictures. They're very inspiring, you know, especially when the temperature's down to 10 below zero, and your furniture's on the blink and the pipes are splitting. You appreciate winter very much. Lovely. But in at the bottom of each page, they had something that was supposed to inspire me.
There wasn't a thing in there about personal sin or personal virtue. It had to do with racism, war against poverty, all of the all of this high level stuff. Well, there is no such thing as collective virtue. It except in the sense as our holy father in his last encyclical on the sacrament of penance says, the only truth of a collective guilt is the collection of individual human beings. There's no overriding ego called society or the community or whatever you wanna call it.
It's nonsense. Unless you're an out now Platonist. I don't know, maybe we are, but I surely am not. Even at tender age, I saw how silly that was. So we come back to this idea that in a certain sense, I am alone in this world.
I am alone facing god. I have to take responsibility for my life for its good and for its evil. Because both are possible. Because if one is, so is the other. And so if there's anything that Saint Francis brought out was this idea that each one of us, no matter what our station in life is as we say, We are called upon to be saints there.
If I'm married and living in a family, if I'm a parent, if I'm a non parent, if I'm a religious, if I'm a non religious, I don't care what I am. Saint Francis Esaias says, you are called upon to be a saint, to live a devout life. Of course, you can't use the word devout anymore, but it's still a pretty good concept. Concept. Devout Devout means means devoted, devoted.
And a devout life means we are devoted to one overriding truth, and that's the truth of god's existence that I'm traveling in this world on a very temporal situation, extremely temporal, and that I have eternity in the palm of my hand. I'm not exaggerating this. You got to all agree to this if you sit back and recollect yourself in a bit of silence. You know, it's hard to get silenced if you can't get in an elevator without having piped in music. You think, ye, gods, I'm safe in an elevator.
Oh, don't you're not safe in that. You're not even safe in a dentist chair. You're not safe any place from horrible sounds. But it's still a very good idea that we have to recollect. We have to pull ourselves together.
We have to reintegrate ourselves, and to realize what in the world is life all about. What is it all about? Because there's so much in it that fragmentizes us, that pulls us apart. And as I've said so many times, we have to do that to be loyal sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. We can't turn our backs on our personal responsibilities.
Oh, it's done, but it doesn't mean it's right. We and yet in the midst of all of this, when we're trying to serve God with things that are pulling us away from God, really, we have to pull them together to face up in the direction of God. We have to devote to be we have to be the we have to be concentrated into God, headed for him. All of these sundry things of which life is composed, they are good things. They are duties.
They are responsibilities. They are lovely things. They're tragedies. They're all of this. And in some way, we've got to pull it all together and face it all towards god almighty.
As I say that, I would like to change and put Jesus Christ. You cannot imagine god. You can't use a word to describe god. You can't give a definition of god. You can't get a hold of god.
But everything I've said there that you can't do about God, you can do about Jesus Christ and his humanity. And at Saint Teresa of Avila, we are we can do the same and attach ourselves to his humanity. He was one of us. And this is what Saint Francis of Sales does. I don't know how many of you have even seen the book or read it.
I hope you have. It's available. It's still in print. Get it from galleries or Newman. It's a wonderful book.
It doesn't set up impossible things. It it tells you how you can do it in a very simple manner, to do what you have to do, and you have to do it on the pain of loss. It's what it boils down to. And now Saint Francis died about 1622, and that, you know, is post Trent. And he was a great peacemaker.
Remember, he's in Geneva and Switzerland. And Protestantism was extremely strong there with Zwingli and Calvin. Whole city became practically devoted to Calvin, and this was this was Saint Francis Sale's own city. So he knew what conflict was, and yet he presents this introduction to a devout life. You were dedicated to that life when you were baptized.
You need help. We all need help. And many people, men and women, young and old, have found that little introduction to a devout life extremely helpful. It is great it is, to my way of thinking, his great memorial. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.