The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of god, according to Saint Mark. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you. He will prepare your way. A voice of one crying out in the desert, Prepare the way of the lord. Make straight his paths.
John the Baptist appeared in the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledge their sins. John was clothed in camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist. He fed on locusts and wild honey. And this is what he proclaimed.
One mightier than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop and loosen even the straps of his sandals. I have baptized you with water. He will baptize you with the holy spirit. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
Jesus said to Thomas, this is the scene, you know, after the resurrection and after Thomas was absent when Christ first appeared, and Thomas had said, I will not believe unless I can get put my hands in his hands, in the holes of the nails. Until I can touch his side, I won't believe. And so now this the second appearance of our lord to the apostles gathered and Thomas is there. And he has identified Christ. He has recognized our lord.
He has put his hand in the nail holes and in this Christ side in the hole of the spear. And now he says, lord, I believe. Well, you can't believe when you've done that. And then our lord said to him, have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are they who have not seen me, but who have believed.
And that is from Saint John chapter the twentieth. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, with all due regard to the great season of Christmas, as we enter into these weeks in preparation, as some of us think, for to to celebrate the anniversary of God's coming into this world, being born, we are entering, as you know, into the most sentimental time of the year. I'm speaking of our own culture, USA, chiefly.
Because other people have a little more sense in the Latin speaking countries, the feast of the epiphany is the great feast or was until they got the idea of the Christmas tree and the pencil and all that and the cash registers. I'm sorry, the computers. But we are in the great emotional setup, the buildup, the deluge of sentiment, feeling, of affection. And let me tell you, I'm not downgrading any of that. Don't get me wrong.
I'm all for it. I'm leaving from four of the computers ringing up good sails. I think it's great. But let's see it for what it is and not for what it ain't. This is a highly energized time of the year when everything, religion, commerce, good feeling, good fellowship, even the season of the year, all of it contributes to building this thing up to an emotional summit.
And the danger is we can be carried along with it. There's the danger. There's the danger. But let's get something perfectly straight. You can't set you cannot actually separate out in a human being one's emotions, one's feelings, one's reason, one's intelligence.
You can't separate the syllogism from my sentiments, from my feeling, not when you use the word I. That's the that's the absolute unity of my person. And if we do accept Descartes with his emphasis upon the intelligence, making man as someone said an angel, that includes women too, of course, let us not be feminist or anti anything. If we do accept Descartes in his emphasis upon man as spirit, as mind, let us not forget a Pascal who said man has reasons that the mind knows not of. And he was right, emphasizing what he called the heart as opposed to my man's intelligence.
But as human beings, which is going to dominate? That's the question. Not whether it's going to be this way or that way, it's going to be both and all mixed up. But it's got to come out with some kind of unity. What kind of unity will come out?
What will establish the unity in your life? Your feelings, your emotions? Or will you try to live up to your great, great vocation of being a child of God with an intelligence to know and to understand, as well as to feel and emote and have sentiments and experience? Which is going to come out? Which is going to dominate?
It's all gonna be mixed up. But what is going to govern you? There's the question. Now I'm not fighting windmills in the least. After all, Newman said, is barely, barely irrational, admirable.
He said it is almost a definition of man to say he is not irrational, that was Henry Cardinal Newman in his grammar of assent, and we'll come back to that. Just not so long ago, Leo Madow, m a d o w, wrote a book on anger. The very first page of the text, Madow says, man is not a thinking reasoning animal. He is a man of his emotions. We are I'm quoting now.
We are controlled by our emotions. That's what Medall said. He was a practicing psychiatrist or psychologist. The book was on anger. Now this is this is the situation we're in.
And this is this is we ought to it isn't that we're going to reject anything which is good about Christmas as we celebrated in USA, Garrett Park. We are going to give our it's great. It's a wonderful time of the year. Men and women do forget themselves to a certain extent more than they do in their other times of the year, much more than they do around Easter time. And there's the great feast of the church, remember, not Christmas.
And so what I'm just bringing home to you is this, where is the emphasis going to be? What does Christmas mean in your daily lives? Is it just the routine of getting out your card list and going through all the motions? Or is it something more much more sure it's that. But is it going to be something more than that?
There's the point. Is there going to be something absolutely important about it? Absolutely essential to your salvation or not? Now what my point is this, we're coming back to this great question. What in the world is religion all about?
Because today, the great emphasis is upon experience. They say that that liturgy was a great, beautiful experience. Yet we're told that religion is of the mind. You know God. You love God.
We're things are measured in terms of how I experience it. You can't give a definition of experience, really. What we mean is that even Aquinas, you know, said that I don't know anything except what I get through my senses in some way or other. So you can't accuse him of downgrading experience. But that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about what man knows through his senses, which react in him to its sentiments, with feeling, with emotion. And this is you can't define this. You can't define a color in the sense in which you see it. You either see it or you don't. You feel heat or you don't.
And you're not going to change it by showing somebody a thermometer. We've all gone through that if you've lived in an institution. And so the point is that we are very much creatures of our feelings and of our emotions. But we should we be dominated by them. There's the point.
And while I well, nobody can really give you an adequate definition of experience. Let me give you a few illustrations of what I'm talking about. And this all happened to my personal experience within about the last five years. First, here's a lady, perfectly sane, holding down a good job, who has a conversation with Jesus Christ regularly, talks with him, dialogues. I set mass up in Spring Lake, Jersey during the week, consecrated a seborium, put in the tabernacle.
That afternoon, I took some nuns into the beautiful little church there, which some of you have seen probably, and we made a visit, and when we came out one of the nuns says, Christ isn't in the tabernacle. And I looked I said, do you mean sister? She says, I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel anything. As if you can feel Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
When Thomas Aquinas says, sight, touch, taste in thee are each deceived. The hearing alone is to be to be believed. But she did not think Christ was in the tabernacle. We didn't open the tabernacle door or anything. But the point I'm making is she she felt he wasn't felt Christ wasn't there.
Another had another instance where a young man came to me, and he'd been he had dropped practicing his Catholicism for a number of years, but his sister had had a very profound religious experience. And I'm not downgrading that at all. But she had it. So he and her life was changed. She seemed to be so much.
She was a happier woman. She was doing her job with her family. She was living a good full life and he felt he that he was missing something. Life was passing him by. So he came to me and what he wanted me to do was to put him on the track of having an experience to match his sisters so his life would be like hers.
I saw that from the very beginning. And my recommendation that he begin by going to mass on Sunday fell upon deaf ears. That's not what he wanted because he tried it and said, don't get anything out of it. As if you go to mass to get something out of it instead of giving to God worship. You see how crazy people think.
They're all mixed up. And so this is what I mean. People are remeasuring their religion, their faith, their communication, if you wanna call that, with God on the basis of their experience, of their feelings, of their sentiments. Now these are good things. And when you have them, praise God, you've got them.
They're wonderful when you have these wonderful emotions of joy in serving the Lord. But folks, it doesn't last every day for the year. Because remember, after Easter Sunday, you have low Sunday, and it is usually low. And we're called to be Christians daily, not just at Easter, not just at Christmas, but daily. Faith comes not from my feeling.
Faith does not come from my talking with Jesus Christ. Faith comes by hearing. Let's not forget it. Now let me hasten to add immediately. Can God, through his son Jesus Christ, can he speak directly to you or to me?
Sure he can. Does he? Possibly. I don't know. Matter of fact, I don't really care.
But on one thing I'm sure of, it's not the normal way. It's not the way he came to lead us. It's not the way he told us that we should go. So why don't we do what he told us? Down in Cartagena last year, I met a very devout lady.
We had a difficulty of communication because like so many people in Cartagena, they don't speak English. We're putting on an educational drive down there to help them out. Anyway, I thought her son asked me to talk with her. I had no idea what it was. So I bought a little New Testament and it was in her native language, Spanish.
And it had a very nice commentary, which I liked and I thought she would. So I gave it to her and I pointed out the commentary. She says, I don't need that commentary. She said, Christ speaks to me directly. Well, I felt like saying I'll pray for you.
Now this is now I'm not I found out later that this is something important for all. I found out later that she had joined up with one of these fundamentalist biblical groups. You're forming they form little groups and they read the bible, then they talk it over among themselves, then they know what Christ means because he communicates to them. They really believe this. Now can he do that?
Can Christ do that? The son of God? Of course, can do it. But ask nine people to read a sentence from the New Testament and see how different with many tongues Christ speaks to the 10 or the nine or the eight. Triad.
Now I wanna leave with you what Saint Paul says on this subject. In speaking to the Romans chapter 10, Paul lays it right. Now remember, this is Saint Paul. He's not writing after Descartes. He's not writing after reading Pascal's thoughts.
He's not writing after reading James' varieties of religious experience. This is Saint Paul, one of the earliest documents we have of the New Testament. Here's what Saint Paul is saying to the Romans. He says, for there is no distinction between Jew or Greek. The same lord is lord of all, enriching all who call upon him.
For everyone who calls on the name of the lord will be saved. But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach to them? And how can people preach unless they are sent?
Thus, says Saint Paul, faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Jesus Christ who said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. But how do you get in touch with Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life? Have I've asked you so many times. You've got to answer that question. Does he come to you personally with a private revelation?
Can he do that? You bet he can. Does he do it? I don't know. I've met many people in Saint Elizabeth's who certainly have had communications with Christ.
Matter of fact, they identify with God. It all depends on the person you select to ask. But that's not the way Jesus Christ told us it would be. He told his apostles, these these poor ignorant men, but don't go out and downgrade them. They were capitalists.
They own boats. He told those men going therefore teach ye all nations. He didn't tell those tell them to go out and tell people to sit around in a circle and read a book. Christ never gave us a book. He didn't write a word as far as we know, but what he did say as clearly as possible as there's no doubt about the text here.
There's no doubt about the translation either. It's go ye therefore teach ye all nations, baptizing them, and teach them everything that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you until the end of time. I am the way, the truth, and the life. What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth will be loosed on in heaven.
Who hears you, hears me. So are we going to go around trying to to draw our emotions to some kind of a high peak when we start having visions and hear voices? Is that what we're aiming at, or are we aiming to serve Jesus Christ in the way he wanted us to do it three hundred and sixty five normal days of the year? Come follow me. Take up your cross daily and follow me.
And if you do it, it'll be a burden, but you'll find it sweet and even light. So this is what we are aiming to do at this Christmas time when we are celebrating not as something that is going to happen. Remember, Christ has come. Perfect past tense. We have a savior.
Are we in contact with Jesus Christ our lord? How do you do it? And it comes through his living church. Just recently, I mean very recently, A person who had drops practicing their Catholicism when asked, why don't you go to church? I don't need to go to church.
Christ speaks to me in my heart. Where does that person get that kind of a doctrine? It's a very comfortable doctrine. You don't have to get out of bed in the morning to find Jesus Christ in yourself talking to you. You don't have to make any sacrifice.
You don't have to do anything. It's a very comfortable doctrine, purely hedonistic. Christ never said anything like he said, come follow me, who hears you, hears me. And while it's true that Newman said, no man is ever converted by a syllogism. In other words, we can throw out the cart and company.
Nevertheless, we can't go all the way down the road with a Pascal telling us the heart, the emotions, the feelings, the center of us. We know factually where that led to. We don't have to guess. We wanna follow no philosopher. The only person we wanna follow is Jesus Christ, the son of god, the way, the truth, and the life.
The name of the father, and of the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.