A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. If this sounds familiar to you, as I hope it does, it's because we read it yesterday morning. But there's just a few extra lines added to what we read yesterday on the feast of Saint Teresa Of Lisieux. The disciples came up to Jesus with this question, Who is of greatest importance in the kingdom of God? Jesus called a little child over to him and stood the child in their midst and said to them, I assure you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God.
Whoever makes himself lowly, becoming like this little child, is of greatest importance in that heavenly reign. Whoever welcomes one such child for my sake welcomes me. See that you never despise one of these little ones. For I assure you, their angels in heaven constantly behold my heavenly father's face. 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. As all of you of course noticed, what was added to yesterday's reading with with were or was, it's just one sentence. See, our lord is speaking, that you never despise one of these little ones, these kids.
I assure you there are angels in heaven. So you see why this is put in. I assure you there are angels in heaven constantly. Behold my heavenly father's face, and this is the feast of the guardian angels. So you can put that together perfectly and consistently for a change.
I was just reading an interview that John Updike had recently with one of our newspaper columnists. John Updike of course, as you all know, is one of our outstanding novelists, a very serious novelist, an extremely capable writer. And in the course of this interview he's been writing a note about suburbanites, and divorced, and marriage, and you know all those trivialities of life. And he said that he just about exhausted himself, and he used the word pointless about life. You know, all washed up, burned out.
These are some of the expressions we have. I don't know what his philosophy is. Of course, why we should take novelists serious, I don't know because by definition they're writing fiction. But anyway, he's a he's a very capable, articulate, astute observer of the contemporary, at least suburban scene. Now, the thought struck me as I saw that word pointless.
Life is pointless. How awful that is, But how true it is of so many people today. Life's a bowl of cherries, what the hell's the use? That's an expression that I found in the guest book of Maria Lawn, and the guest master asked me to translate it into German. Well-being extremely competent German, I wasn't competent enough to translate that into German.
And the odd part of this was, I think I mentioned this, I knew the man who wrote it. He was a priest from Catholic Euch. But you see, this is what so many are coming up to. What is the meaning of life? It's loneliness.
The feeling of being absolutely solitary and abandoned. You know, among teenagers is the second second greatest cause of death among them. Suicide. Suicide for a teenager imagine, a teenager. We've had them in this parish.
We had two in this neighborhood area at the beginning of the school year. Two. Now, see, as I've said, anybody with a half of a brain cell working has sooner or later got to ask themselves, what is this all about? And remember, doesn't need tragedy or misfortune. All those Although this kind of a thing can accelerate the process.
But the young man in this parachute killed himself, he certainly had everything going for him. Everything. Everything. You mention it, he had it. And he had nothing going against him.
No drugs, no alcohol, no smoking, nothing. What is the meaning of life? You know, that little old Baltimore Catechism. The second question was, Why did God make you? That's a second And I've said many times from this magnificent marble pulpit, there is no profounder question question can be asked.
What are you doing here? What is it all about? Whatever comes to light, and most lives have a mixture of everything. It's not all gloom and doom, but on the other hand it's not all sunlight and blue skies. Not everybody winds up in an Auschwitz.
But the thing is, all of us, as I say, we can't help but thinking about it from time to Is life all a dream as Descartes asked? And how do you know that the dreaming world from the real world? And if it's all a dream, why not get rid of it? It's not worth the trouble of getting up every morning. What an effort.
Why bother? Get it over and done with. And then when tragedies, despair, misfortunes, failure, all of these things come into life. What is going to give us stability in the tumult, in the turmoil, in the turbulence? What's gonna give us it's not a quiet life, not a tranquil life, but what's going to keep us on course?
What's going to tell us as a common sense person, this has meaning. Now I told you many times about Frankl. His book which has a tremendous little paperback, Man's Search for Meaning. Now he wrote his philosophical theories, that's all they were, before Auschwitz were confirmed by Auschwitz, and he wrote this book after Auschwitz. But it's not a book about prisoners in Auschwitz, it's a book to try to bring home in an empirical way from experience.
That what matters is meaning. Meaning. No matter what happens to us, if we can say, yes, there is some meaning to this, although I may not be able to see it clearly, we're saved. And life is worth living if it has meaning. If it has no meaning, then let's go with the ancient Greeks and get it over with in a very pleasant gentlemanly fashion.
We'll drink our own hemlock. Now the church does not define that each of us has a guardian angel, but it is an article of faith that there are guardian angels. That we are not alone. That these creatures, they're creatures. These pure spirits, that they have a relationship that binds me to the meaning of my life lived with God, and they have a care of me.
There used to be a very, very often seen picture in nurseries and children's bedrooms, the picture of a huge chasm and a log going across the chasm, and a little child walking over that log and hovering over the huge angel, of course, with wings. We all know angels have wings. But the point of that was the prayer that we all used to say, Angel of God my guardian dear, watch over me and keep near me. How often do we think about that today? Because I'll tell you why we don't, we are losing our sense of the supernatural.
We are becoming We are not We are centralized to the earth. We are not focusing on God the way we used to do, the way it was not so many years ago. We are becoming very circumscribed by the horizon of this world. And you see, we want to make this the perfect world. Just think of the posters you see out in that vestibule and see what the see what the thrust of them all are.
They all have to do with making me happier, making this world happier, eliminating disease and starvation and war, and all of these things which we think are such great evils. And in a certain sense, they are not evils at all. As Kant Immanuel Kant, who was not a great Christian said, the only real evil in the world is moral evil. That that's Immanuel Kant's in his Metaphysics. And so this feast of the guardian angels is about as far removed as Corrie Aquino's statement that she works as hard as she can, she prays as hard as she can, and then she leaves the rest of it up to God.
The world doesn't understand that kind of lingo, and certainly the world doesn't understand the reality of any such reality as an angel. But that is a reality of the supernatural order vouched for by the holy Roman Catholic church in which we say we believe. And so on this morning, when we pay special attention to the guardian angels, let us renew our faith. It's faith. In the fact, the truth, that there are these creatures of God who have a special care for each one of us as we, like the little child walking on the log across the chasm, are in danger of falling.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.