A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. When Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him, Jesus remarked, this man is a real Israelite. There is no guile in him. Before Philip called you, Jesus answered, I saw you under the fig tree. Rabbi, said Nathaniel, you are the son of god.
You are the king of Israel. Jesus replied, do you believe just because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see much greater things than that. Then Jesus went on to tell them, I solemnly assure you, you shall see the sky opened and the angels of god ascending and descending on the son of man. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son, of the holy spirit, amen. We just had our priest part of a priest retreat from which my junior god and I returned last evening. And during those very precious days on the shores of the magnificent Potomac River, blessed by three days of the most splendid weather any human being could want, I spent some of my time reading a very a new and extremely scholarly and thoughtful book called Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox. Now it's not the sort of a book that's going to be on the bestsellers list, but it's a it's a very, very solid scholarly work. And what it tries to do is to base a judgment of what Christianity was before Constantine, roughly three before his conversion in 03/12, and what paganism was.
See, we have a very inadequate notion of this. Even the word pagan, how many people we're not even sure of its origin. Certainly, pagans didn't call them pagan themselves pagans any more than the Aztecs called themselves Aztecs. That's what we call them. Now one two things I that's well, a lot of things struck me between the eyes.
But one of them is this, that in the now we're talking about the Roman Empire, which stretched all the way from Great Britain and Scotland and Wales all the way East into India. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about a world where where the language was mostly Greek. Now in that whole world, where that whole world was submerged in contact with divinity. Now whatever we may think about paganism, it surrounded the lives of the people.
Now to what how what percentage of the people were all gung ho about Apollo or Zeus or what have you, or what percentage of them had all the intellectual convictions of a of a Socrates or the nonintellectual non convictions of a Socrates. That's I'm not no one tries to judge that. But the world was full, full of ties with divinity, with god and gods. Now very recently, in Reader's Digest, as matter of fact, it's some time ago, I read a very brief article. A traveler just come back from some country in the South Pacific, a so called pagan country.
And he was remarking how astonished he was that at the first rise of the sun in the morning, people were going around and pouring libations in different parts of the garden of the hotel. Now now this any any anyone who's toured Rome knows that. Your the guide in the tour bus is saying, look to the right. There's a there's a statue of this god. Turn to the left.
There's a statue of that god. Your neck gets tired of twisting around. That's in Rome. That's the way and that's now. In the days of paganism first before Constantine, the place was crowded with these statues, and that went for the entire empire.
Well, you can't help but asking yourself, where do we stand on our relationship with divinity? Where? How much does it enter into our daily lives? Many of those people scarcely made a move without paying some attention to the divinity. Now remember, they had some concept of god.
Don't ever underrate that. There was a hierarchy of gods, and there was a god, Zeus, although he operated with human beings through his minions. Now the there's one tie that Christianity had with pagans, and that's this matter of angels. They had they had angels too, so do we. And you can't miss the parallelism that goes on between the way the pagans worship and the way we do.
They had their shrines. We have our lord and we have our Fatima. But the thing is, when you read that and when you've seen some of it, which is the remnants after 2,500 or more in some instance or more. And you see the remnants after two thousand years of the ties those people had with divinity, and then you look at New York City, look at Washington, look at our farms, look at our look at our roads. What tie do you see with God?
Well, you say, look at our money. Yeah. You look at it. In God, we trust. But it's the weight of the money that counts.
It's your bankroll. Now it the church is giving us the feast of the angels. It's it's another attempt of the Catholic church to keep us entire and to keep the bond alive, not a static thing. We're not shackled to God. We go to God with our free will.
It's the the church is trying to bring home to us day in and day out, you are not of this world. And god sent his son to try to persuade us. Notice I said persuade. Christ didn't come in a chariot of syllogisms. Keep this in mind.
I know that. And everybody who has a heart beating in his chest knows that too. I mean, anyone who's human knows that you that the that a human being doesn't run their life, doesn't run his or her life on a syllogist. We know that. It's the whole personality, the whole person that matters.
And that whole person is what we must give to god. And god says, you are not of this world. That's a tremendous, tremendous order of commandment Because it's so hard to keep, because we are of this world. We were born into. We have bodies.
We need food. We need shelter. We need a an awful lot of things. We have to get them some way or other. We are immersed in the world.
And yet our lord said, you are not of this world. There's the rub. Believe me. There's the rub. And yet this is what we've got to do.
We have got to come back to Christ. We have got to come back to a supernatural view of life. That's what's missing today. We can talk all we want about secular humanism and materialism and positivism. I've done my share of all of that, and I'll continue doing it because it has to be done by somebody.
But the the point is we do not have the contact, the feeling, the persuasion, the conviction of we are children of god born into this world for eternity. We don't have that conviction. It doesn't come into our day in and day out decision making. I mean, little things like having an argument with your fellow worker or somebody in your family or making a decision about a school or buying something or how much money you're going to give to the church? Any how does how much does the supernatural come into our daily decision making?
There's the rug. There's your barometer. Try it out. What what guides decision making? Right now, I I I'm been talking with a number of young people.
What am I going to do? I'm about to finish college. What am I going to do next? I finished college. What do I do now?
I'm in high school. What what do I major in in college? Not once. Not a single time. And these are all Catholics, products of our great Catholic education, in quotes.
Not one time have I heard of one of them say, what does god want me to do? Not once. Not a single time. In the instances I've had anybody coming to me with problems of life, mostly married people or not, not once have I heard any one of them say, what does god want me to do? Not once.
Not a single time. These are all Catholics. You see, we have lost this contact that we are called and we are the sons of god. We are called and we are present present indicative. We are the sons of god.
Do we see that in our neighbor? Or what do we see in our neighbor? Somebody we dislike, somebody gets on our nerves, somebody we'd rather be away from, somebody that bothers us, somebody who's an embarrassment, or do we see Jesus Christ and his father god? Do we? Now the feast of the angels, whatever it is, whatever angels are, I don't know what they are, but whatever they are, it is they represent a tie between us and god and god almighty.
They are a tie between this world where we are sojourners, where we are strangers, where we are foreigners. This is a lot of rhetoric because none of us live this way. But this is what we these are the words we use. The liturgy is full of it. We are all of that.
But and then we're told, yet this is that's all we are. We are sojourners in this life. We are on the way. We are on route. We are the church militant.
We're we're the church in in battle. We are not destined for this world. You are children of god destined for heaven to be with him forever in heaven. That's what we say. How do we do it?
The church begs us to keep our eyes on eternity. I remember a pastor that I admired very much, and his one constant watch motto was quid odd eternity totem. What does this matter? What is it's worth for eternity? Quid odd eternity totem.
And yet practically all of our lives is quid odd temporary. What value has this for time? Time. We are timeless. We are born into eternity, and this feast of the angels should help us to reinstate our conviction that we are children of God.
We live supernatural lives. Let us make it actual in our daily lives with God's help. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit.