Preparing for the arrival

Yes, I know that the first weeks of advent are focused on the second coming of Jesus and not the first. But it seems to me that there is a connection. 

We tend to think of advent and waiting and we think of waiting as something passive. But ask a couple who are expecting a baby if waiting is a passive thing. For most couples I know it is a crazily busy time. From the moment they find out, it is an emotional time, a combination of excitement and fear. There are, what seem to be, a million details. Life is totally transformed. They are no longer just a couple; they are parents. 

We are 24 days from Christmas. Imagine if today you were told with certainty that you have 24 days. What would you do with them? Who would you call? Who would you visit? Who would you forgive? From whom would you ask forgiveness? When would you make time to go to confession?

We tend to live our lives as if there is always tomorrow. We waste time on the trivial. For a million different reasons, we avoid the important, the necessary.  We spend more time watching TV or surfing the net than we do talking to the people we claim to love. 

As we begin a new year, the reading are a stark reminder. 

Therefore, stay awake!
For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. 

As we count down the days to Christmas, let us behave as if we were counting down to the second coming. Along side the list of presents, make a list of people to call, the calls you want to make and the calls you need to make. Pray as if you have only 24 days and counting. Let us live with that combination of excitement tinged with fear that is the mark of expectant parents, as we pray,

Come Lord Jesus Come!

It’s all His

Today’s first reading continues an idea we heard in yesterday’s first reading. Yesterday we heard:

For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? 

Today St. Paul reminds us in more concisely:

For from him and through him and for him are all things. 

There seems to be a human desire to sort things into categories. We like binary, this or that, good and evil.

These readings remind us that it is even simpler than that.  God loves everything that is. It came into existence and is sustained in existence because God wills it to continue to exist and it therefore must have a good purpose. 

To miss the mark

Two men went up to the temple to pray...

Yes, the first man Jesus describes is a bit of a caricature.

O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.

Most of us would never quite have the hubris he describes, although I think we often come close.

We spent the last half-century building up our "self-esteem" convinced that it would make us better people.  The evidence now shows that it has done quite the opposite.  We overshot the mark and went past self-esteem to egocentrism.

The tax collector in today's gospel utters a simple act of contrition:

O God, be merciful to me a sinner

With those simple words, six words in Greek, he places before God all of his sins and begs for mercy.  He does what, in our culture, has become almost impossible. He humbles himself.

The word St. Luke uses for sinner, amartolos, literally refers to  the archer who has missed the mark and therefore does not share the prize.

We have convinced ourselves that we are so fragile we can't say, "That was bad" or "That is not good enough".

Jesus teaches us that we are stronger than that. We were created to be more. We were created to be saints. But to get there we must be able to admit when we fail, when we have missed the mark. And we must be willing to throw ourselves on the mercy of God. Then, and only then, He can remake us into the image of His Son Jesus Christ.

Reaching fully convinced

In Paul's letter to the Romans today we hear that Abraham

was empowered by faith and gave glory to God and was fully convinced that what God had promised he was also able to do.

It is easy for us when sitting in Church to speak of faith and to proclaim our belief that with God all things are possible but the faith of Abraham was not something to be lived in the isolation of a religious building.

The faith that empowered Abraham was a force strong enough to compel him to abandon everything he knew, everything that was safe and set out on a journey into the unknown. His faith took him to the brink of sacrificing his own son. There was no aspect of his life that was not shaped by his faith.

 Yes, it is true that faith is a gift but like other gifts it can and must be developed. The only way to develop it is with practice - intentional, consistent practice.

We use phrases like "work-life balance" to try and categorize and manage our activities. The simple truth is that work is part of life.  All of our actions are parts of a single life, given to each of us. Our faith too cannot be one aspect of life. It must be something that permeates every aspect of our life, every choice we make.

Our goal to reach the faith of Abraham. Perhaps then too we will be fully convinced.

Return to the blog

As many have noted, in the last couple of years I have become very sporadic in writing this blog.  For me it has been a time of great prayer. I have struggled with my Church as I have watched our bishops, stumble like a child learning to walk, unable to find their footing. Some have continued to simply ignore the law of the Church, as if they are above it. Others have thrown priests, living and dead, under the bus with no due process, hoping to distract from their own failings. Some of my brother priests have been quite public in venting their spleen. 

But I write this today because I still believe.  I still believe that this Church, with all its failing, was established by Christ. I still believe that the head of the Church, Jesus, remains joined to the body. I still profess faith in the one holy catholic and apostolic church. I still believe that the Holy Spirit was the ultimate guide in the selection of Pope Francis. 

People think that the most difficult of the promises we make at ordination is celibacy. Perhaps that is because we live in a world obsessed with sex. But in truth I believe that the most difficult of the promises is obedience. When we are ordained, we kneel down and promise respect and obedience not only to that bishop but to his successors. At that moment we have no idea who the successors will be.  It is an absolute leap of faith. And news flash, none of them are perfect. And each is imperfect in his own way, just as each of us is imperfect in our own way. 

Sunday mass attendance in many places has dropped. Every cleric knows that at any moment he can be accused of anything by anyone and he will be presumed guilty. But those of us who remain cannot surrender. We must dig deep and find our faith and our hope. 

Today’s gospel tells us that 

the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. 

To give up hope would be that blasphemy. We may in fact be a smaller church. We may be a poorer church. And these may be good things. In the RCIA process we refer to the Lenten Season as a time of “Purification and Enlightenment.”  The Church is made up of individual members. The Church can only be purified and enlightened if we the individual members pray for that same purification and enlightenment.

Anything can be forgiven. Anything can be healed. The only unforgivable is to give up on the power of the Holy Spirit. 

The polar opposites

Today we celebrate two opposites: Mary and Jonah. 

Mary is called by God and give the perfect total yes. Let it be done to me according to your Word. 

Jonah gives the opposite response. When God calls Jonah and gives him his mission, he runs. God says go to Nineveh and Jonah hops a boat in the opposite direction, Tarshish. 

 Both Mary and Jonah are afraid, and for good reason. Jonah allowed his fear to control him, Mary did not. 

The good news for Jonah is that if we are people of faith, even when we are slow to listen God remains faithful. As the first reading ends today, the large fish has spit him up and Jonah is back at the start.  Tomorrow God we give him a second chance to listen and get it right. 

The overseer

In the first reading today we hear the qualifications for the role of episkopos, literally the overseer. The word has made its way into English as bishop. The things that are connected to the bishop we describe the the adjective, episcopal. St. Paul provides quite a length list of qualifications.

a bishop must be irreproachable, married only once, temperate, self-controlled, decent, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not aggressive, but gentle, not contentious, not a lover of money.

Of all these, it is perhaps the last one that provides the greatest challenge. 

On the one hand, a Church must have money to operate. As so, every bishop, like every other minister, must engage in fund-raising. We continue to come up with new euphemisms for it. We call it “development” or “advancement”, but at the end of the day it is about convincing people to give money. 

And for a good cause. 

On the other hand, the money must never become the thing to which we are attached. How far will we go to obtain the money? How far will we go to protect the money?

How many Christian Churches have over the years sold the best seats to those who give the most money? How many priests were in the old system named Monsignor, not because of the holiness of their lives, but because they could raise money? Sadly, our churches are covered with the names of wealthy patrons. Where are the names of the poor but holy, those who worked hard and gave good example, but had no money to donate?

Worse by far, were the crimes covered up by bishops in order to protect the money. And today, how many dead innocent priests have had their reputations ruined, because of an accusation that had no proof? We used to believe in the presumption of innocence. We used to believe in due process. We used to believe that a person had a right to face their accuser. Now we seem willing to throw it all aside to protect the money, to avoid a potential lawsuit. 

The lure of money is seductive and on a practical level we all need it to survive. But St. Paul reminds us today that we should never place protecting money over the protection of people. As individuals and as a Church, caring our brother and sisters must always come first, especially the most vulnerable, and the most broken among us. 

Choosing Leaders

We tend to act as if the first 12 Jesus called were the Apostles. In fact, today’s gospel would suggest something a more complex.

What Jesus has word disciples, students apprentices. And the according to St. Luke.,

Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles

How many disciples there were by this point in Jesus’s ministry? We have no idea.  What we are told, in the very same reading, is that after the selection of the 12 he gathered with a “great crowd of disciples”.  Do we ever stop to think about the ones who were no chosen? How much grumbling and jealousy was going on in that crowd as they saw who got chosen? We humans are fragile creatures; our insecurities easily provoked. And certainly by this time there were other disciples who could name all the defects in the 12 that were chosen. 

That fact that Jesus spent all night praying over the decision says that it was not an easy one.  When was the last time any of us stayed up all night praying over a decision?

In the last few years we have gone from anger over abusive priests to anger over, not only abusive bishops, but bishops who knew about and participated in the cover up of abuse by others. Even now there appears to be a great inequality in the way cases are handled. A priest is accused and instantly suspended. A Bishop is accused and he cuts back on his public appearances. 

Some people seek facile solutions. Do any of us think elections would guarantee better candidates? Just look at our top politicians. 

But perhaps today’s gospel is a call for prayerful discernment by the entire body of Christ, a time for us to pray with the intensity that Jesus prayed that He will pour out on the Church a Spirit of Wisdom so that we might know how we can transform our present system into one that will produce, not perfect, but better leadership. Presently, bishops are nominated by bishops and so the system itself all but guarantees more of the same.  

We will never know precisely what criteria Jesus used in choosing His twelve. St. Paul provides us with his thoughts but they are pretty basic. What we do know is that the process cannot simply be a step by step climbing of the ladder. Pope Francis has for quite some time decried that system. It must include prolonged prayer. 

Let us pray for a system that will provide the leadership that God knows will be best for the Church in the 21st century. 

Embracing Mystery

Today in our reading we arrive what may be one of the most perplexing statements in all of St. Paul.

I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, which is the Church.

It would seem like heresy to say that the suffering of Christ was somehow “lacking”. And yet, St. Paul says it in know uncertain terms. But what does he mean?

As Christians, we believe that Christ suffered and died for the salvation of all. But the salvation of each of us is a two step process. We must be incorporated into the Passion, Death and Ressurection of Jesus Christ. This is achieved sacramenally through baptism but in the mystery of God human suffering also unites us to Christ.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes in 1984, St. John Paul issued an encyclical on the meaning of human suffering called Salvifici Dolores 

Salvifici Dolores . In it he addresses the challenges we face when confronted with the experience of suffering and how we can reconcile the existence of suffering with our belief in a God who is Love.

In a world where we want all through to come in less than 2 minutes, the letter can seem long. But complex questions require thoughtful responses.  The words of St. John Paul are made even more powerful because as they say, he not only talked the talk but he walked the walk. He showed any of us who have ever had to deals with chronic pain how to unite it to the suffering of Christ and transform it into a source of strength and a font of God’s grace.  When he wrote these words in 1984, no one would have imagined that the athletic pope would become the pope who struggled to raise his head or speak. And yet, he continued the work of Jesus. 

Both his words and example should give us the courage to repeat the words of St. Paul when we are confronted with suffering in any of its forms. 

Theological Virtue

Today we begin our reading of the letter of St. Paul to the church in Colossae. After greeting the people. He says

We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the holy ones because of the hope reserved for you in heaven.

If we look carefully we see St Paul beginning with what we call the three theological virtues: faith, love, and hope. 

The term “theological virtues” can sound daunting but it is a simple idea. 

A virtue is a habit. Athletes and others train by repetition. They  do something over and over and over again to develop what is called “muscle memory” so that, when needed,  the person repeats the action almost as a reflex. That way when they are in a stressful situation they don’t have to stop and think, they can act. 

Virtue is that good behavior that has become moral muscle memory, behavior that we have practiced until it become our way of being, our immediate response.  If it is bad habitual behavior we call it vice. 

Some virtues we can develop on our own simply my practice. If we practice moderation enough we will over time develop the virtue called termperance. 

There are however three virtues that you cannot achieve by your own power. They require God’s intervention. They require grace. Those are faith, hope, and love. You may be thinking as you read this that people who are not religious love others. The Christian response is simple. Any real love that any of us has, we have becaus it was poured into our hearts by God, whether we know it or not. 

Faith, hope and love are gifts from God. But they are like seeds. They must be carefully tended on a daily basis, if they are to grow and bear fruit. 

The five commands

In today’s gospel we have the well known story of the rich young man whose walks away sad because he apparently can’t give up his possesions. But if we look closely we see more. There are actually five commands that Jesus gives him as the way to perfection, the way to reach his goal.

GO - the first thing Jesus commands him to do is go away. That in itself can be very difficult for us. The idea of retreat, quiet, alone time with God can be too difficult. But if we are to be truly human, to be the people God created us to be, we must from time to time step away from what we know, step away from our routine, from the busyness that we call life.

SELL - It is interesting that Jesus does not tell him to give his possessions away. Jesus does not say,”Give what you have to the poor,” He commands him to sell it. To sell something I first of all have to know that it is valuable. I have to know the value of a thing, and set a price. Jesus is not telling him that possesions are valueless. On the contrary, to sell all he has means that he knows precisely how valuable the things are and the freely chooses to part with them. Bu at this pint in the process he would still have a safety net, the money from the sale.  He can still provide for himself.

GIVE - The third step is to let go of the safety net and simultaneously fulfill the second of the two great commands, love your neighbor. Again he must stretch. In a class driven society, he would not personally know any poor people. He would only see them as we see street people, from a certain distance.  To reach perfection, he cannot give the money to family and friends, he must give it to the poor.  Now he is truly free. And ready for the next command. 

COME - The fourth command is the opppsite of the first. He was told to go away, now he is commanded to draw near to Christ. No money, no possesions and therefore totally dependent on God and others for the needs of life. And yet, it is then that he is truly free. 

FOLOW - The last step may in fact be the most difficult. He is told to follow. The Greek literally means “to be on the same path”. The true disciple must walk the same road as Jesus, to walk with Jesus, day in and day out. It is not something you do once, it must become a way of life, all day every day. That is the hard part. 

In this simple story we are given the path to Christian perfect (go, sell, give, come, follow). Each of us must look into our hearts and discover how we are called to do each and f these things if we wish to reach our telos, our goal, our perfection. 

Why not Mary?

For many of our non-Catholic brothers and sisters the role of Mary can be difficult to understand. Unfortunately, we Catholics have, at times, contributed to the confusion by not being able to explain this aspect of our faith. We have all heard the crazy ideas, the most common being, “Catholics worship Mary.”

To explain our faith we need to reach back in the scriptures,

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. (Eph. 1:4)

Before God ever created the first atom of the universe, He knew his entire plan.  We see this most fully in the many ways that the Old Testament foreshadows the events in the New Testament. God prepares, not days or weeks ahead, but centuries ahead.  He prepares individuals for their unique missions. 

Secondly, we must remember the commandment,

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.(Ex.  20:12)

We believe that in all of human history God became incarnate one time, in Jesus Christ. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were unique events.  If we can agree that the events of Jesus were unique, should we not also agree that the role of Mary, as the one through whom he took on our humanity, was unique? And worthy of remembrance and celebration ?

And if we believe that we are brothers and sisters in and of Jesus and she is his mother, how could we possible say that she is not our mother?

And are we not commanded to honor our mother?

Today we celebrate God bringing his plan for Mary to its logical conclusion. Her role in history was unique and so the completion of that role was unique. What son would not do likewise for his mother?

The gift of Life

Today as I celebrate the gift of another year of life that has past, I must always spend time reflecting on the supernatural courage displayed by today’s saint, Maximilian Kolbe.

There is no more deeply rooted instinct in the human person than the drive to hold on to life.  And yet, St. Maximillian was willing to follow Christ in the  fullest way, surrending his own life to save another. His group of prisoners were sentenced to be starved to death, in an attempt to deter any other escape attempts.  When he did not die after two weeks, he was given an injection of carbolic acid. 

It is easy to imagine a parent who gives their life to save a child. But which of us would so simply surrender our life to save a stranger?

How did he do it?

If we look to his spiritual life we find a deep devotion to Mary.  Perhaps if we follow the example of his spiritual life, we may find ourselves more able to follow his example of self-sacrifice, not only for our friends and those we love. 

Fatal Memory

In Roman Law there is the principle, “One witness is no witness.” Police investigators will tell you how unreliable “eyewitness” testimony is. Human memory is not computer memory: store and recall. Human memory is fluid. Memories form and constantly transform. Often the transformation of the memory is driven by our emotions. We improve things we like. We make things we dislike even worse than they were. And some things we simply forget. It seems to be a bit of a circle. Our emotions shape our memories, and our memories (no matter how erroneous) shape our emotions. 

We see this played out perfectly in today’s first reading. The Israelites only two months into the journey and already they “grumble” or perhaps better “murmur.” It’s that low rumble you get among the discontent.  But the source of the murmur is collective erroneous memory. They look back on their time in Egypt and they, perhaps unconsciously, cherry pick the memory or the life. They remember the food (better than it was). They remember shelter. But that have forgotten the slavery. And you can bet that in the group there were those who encouraged the erroroneous memory. There are always those who wish to paint the past as somehow better than the present. 

While it is good for us to learn from the past, we must be very careful not to dwell there. Every moment spent dwelling in the past is a moment lost in the present. Our short lives march on, continuously moving forward, like the people of Israel in the Exodus. 

Our brains were designed by God not to store but to process information: to learn, to evaluate, to choose. It’s what our brains do best. It is the choosing that makes us human. It is the choosing that makes us moral. Each day is filled with choices, and signs of the presence of God. If we spend our time making the right choices today, we have no time to yearn for a yesterday that never was. 

The First Witness

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony told us, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” And sadly what lives after is not the evil someone actually did,  but errors that have simply been passed from person to person, generation to generation. 

Today the Church celebrates the saint who scripture tells us was the first first to witness the empty tomb, the first to see the risen Christ (Jn. 20). And yet when we say the name that is not the first thing we think. For far too many Christians the first thought is prostitute. The saint is Mary Magdalene. 

There is NOTHING in the Bible that says she was a prostitute. 

As best we can find, somewhere in the Middle Ages people began to mix up the story of Mary Magdalene and the sinful woman of Luke 7. What is even more interesting is that the Bible never says what the sin of the woman in Luke 7 was. Perhaps it says more about us than her that in our minds we turn “sinful woman” into “prostitute.” Greek had plenty of words for sexual sin but that is not what St. Luke says. The word he uses is much more generic it literally means someone who has missed the mark. Why do we jump to the conclusion that if a woman committed a sin it had to be fornication or prostitution? Is that the only sin a woman could commit?

This past week I traveled back to my home town and was reminded of how flawed human memory is. Many things were not as I remembered – not because they had changed but because I did not remember accurately. 

A part of the human condition is the falability of human memory, and as Shakespeare reminds us, another part of the human condition is our fascination with sin. Whether it is the temptations we personally experience or stories of the sins of us, we find ourselves drawn in. Good is boring but sin is interesting, even if it’s made up.

In 1969 the Church did what it could to try and uncouple Mary Magdalene from the woman in Luke 7, but like many good things, that news never made it to the world at large. Today let us remember and acclaim St. Mary Magdalene for what scripture says she actually did, and not for what we think she did. 

Christian Hospitality

Both the first reading and the gospel today stories of hospitality. In the first reading the LORD is said to appear to Abraham as three men.For us Christians this has been interpreted as the Holy Trinity. In the gospel, it is clearly God, Jesus Christ, who is the guest. 

In the first reading Abraham sees three men and runs to greet them, not waiting for them to come and ask for help. This theme is further developed in the book of Exodus when God commands the people,

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

The word for stranger has a variety of meanings: stranger, foreigner, alien.  It refers to a person on the road who turns off, in need of assistance. 

The word “wrong” here is a broad term covering a wide variety of ways a person can be mistreated. It may remind us of the golden rule, to treat others as we wish to be treated, not so to anyone else what we would not want done to ourselves. 

The word oppress presents the image of literally pressing the person down. We are forbidden from doing anything that makes the alien feel any way lower than us, less than us..

In the resigns today Abraham and Martha are the models with which each of us must mesure our own behavior. 

We live in a time when there are many voices who would encourage us to fear. They feed our fear of the stranger, the unknown. As Christians, we are called to be guided, not by the natural, but by the supernatural. We are called to rise above our gut reactions.

Does a country have a right to secure its borders? Yes. But can we use any and all means to do so? No. 

As Christians, we should call on our leaders to use only those means which are moral, those means which do not violate the natural rights and basic human dignity of the person. Yes, that complicates the matter and reasonable people can disagree about what is moral and what is immoral.  That does not mean that which should not strive for the truth. The truth is that we are required to treat every human being with exactly the same dignity we wish to receive from others. We cannot place a person in conditions we would not find acceptable for ourselves. 

At the end of the day, at the end of this life, our attitude toward the stranger, the alien, the foreigner will be one of the many things on which we will be judged. These readings encourgsre us to judge ourselves now, and make changes as needed 

There is always a yoke

We perceive freedom as the ability to do whatever we wish, to not be controlled. 

The readings today remind us that we are always wearing some yoke. 

In the first reading God is preparing to rescue the people of Israel from the yoke of slavery to the Egyptians. 

If we look honestly at ourselves, the slavery we often experience is the slavery to our “feelings.” Our feelings that are in turn tossed around by the news and social media that we consume. We read or hear, and we react. All someone has to do is use the right buzzwords and we jump, at least inwardly. Even our bodies can jerk us around. Our blood sugar drops; our mood shifts. Our backs ache; we become short tempered. We are yoked. 

In the Gospel Jesus tells us that there is a path to true freedom. To be truly free we put on His yoke. True peace is found not by responding to our feelings but by being yoked, and guided by the person of Jesus Christ. 

When we wake up in the morning, before we do anything else, can we choose to put on the yoke of Jesus? As we walk though the day, when we feel the tug of old yokes pulling towards the unchristian word or action, we should feel the always stronger pull of the yoke of Jesus, turning us toward the right path. 

We will be tempted to take it off. The old yoke is familiar and in some way more comfortable. The yoke of Christ will feel awkward,,  but only at first. Over time it can become, as Jesus describes it, “easy.” As easy to wear as our favorite pair of shoes. 

The difference is that the shoes over time mold themselves to us. With the yoke of Christ, we are molded to it. 

Before you take another step, stop now and put on the yoke of Christ. 

Where we focus

If you attend a mass in Spanish, you are likely to hear some people say an acclamation where the host and the chalice are shown:

Señor. Mío, y Dios Mio My Lord, and My God

This is how one culture chooses to remeber St. Thomas.

As English speakers, if I say “Thomas”, you probably think “doubting.” This is how we think of him. 

Without even realizing it, each of us absorbs or culture, the good and the bad. We copy, often without thought. 

As Christians we are called to think. We are called to question. We are called to evaluate. We are called to choose. 

We can be more than our culture. We can choose what we focus on. We can focus on the bad or we can focus on the food. We can continue to focus on St. Thomas’s doubt. Or we can remember St. Thomas for his faith and for his evangelization of what we now call India and the surrounding area. 

By our choices, we show who we really are. 

How small is our faith?

The two readings today from Genesis and the Gospel of St. Matthew were not chosen to go together. In Ordiinary time we read through the books of the Bible in what is called lectio continuo. 

But by providence the two readings do carry one common theme – small faith. 

In the Gospel we have the disciples in the boat with Jesus during the storm. Jesus responds to them with a question and a statement, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith.” In the first reading we have Lot who is paralyzed by fear. We are told that he and is family have to be “seized by the hand” and led our of Sodom. He is then told to do two things. We tend to remeber the first and forget the second. 

Don’t look back or stop anywhere on the Plain.

He willingly accepts the first “don’t look back.” But he is too frightened to obey the second “don’t stop anywhere on the plain.”  Instead he begs to be allowed to go to a nearby place. Twice we are told that it is “small.” Instead of being able to trust and go far. Lot prefers small and close by. His fear limits him. 

How often, even when we are in a bad place and know we need to change, are we like Lot? We fear to really venture out. We are willing to change, willing to move, but only as far as absolutely necessary. We are afraid to dream big. We are afraid to really step away from what we know. 

We call faith a theological virtue, because we believe it is not the result of what we do, but is a gift from God. The first action is His. He pours the gift of faith into our hearts and it is never small. It becomes small when we allow it to be covered over and pressed down by our fear. That fear can take many shapes but it is always fear. 

The readings today invite us to look inside ourselves and examine our faith. Are we allowing it to unfold and fill us? Or are we allowing our fears (our fears of the new, the unknown) to compress our faith to make it small, to lock it away in a tiny corner of our soul?

Unleash the faith that God has planted in you, and you will be amazed at where it can lead.

How a Christian takes control?

Who would have ever guessed that we would live in a time when we could simply speak and Alexa would turn on our lights or play our favorite song. When we were children you had to be in front of the TV on a certain night at a specific time to watch your favorite shows. Now we can watch almost anything whenever we choose. With pod coffee makers we can each have exactly the coffee we want when we want it. And fruits and vegetables are available regardless of season. We are apparently in control like never before. 

But there is one thing over which we appear to have no more control than we had a century ago — the self. If anything, we have less self control. 

Recently we have begun to recognize the negative effects of absence of self-control and “mindfulness” has become the latest popular solution. 

As Christians, we know that real control has nothing to do with controlling our environment. The control that leads to peace starts inside. It begins with a single relationship, the relationship of the individual with Jesus. It begins when we accept the idea that there is a God and that God loves us so much that he came down and lived a truly human life to be with us, to walk with us. The hard part is how we are supposed to walk with him. 

Many people love images of Jesus walking along beside us. That, however, is not the gospel. In the gospel we are told that our place is not in front or beside but behind. Jesus says, “Follow me.” And this is where we start to react, to rebel.  In the abstract, we are ok with being followers. But in reality, we want him to help with our projects. The idea of us being the assistants who walk behind him and help with his projects is not very attractive.

Following is exhausting. If you’ve ever had to do it, either on foot or in a car, you know that it is hard work - constantly making sure that you keep an eye on the person you are following. 

In today’s gospel the disciple says to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.”  The gospel teaches us that, if we want true peace, the path is simple but not easy. We stay behind Him. Wherever he leads, we follow. In a world filled with distractions, it is easy for us to loose sight of Him. This is the only control that really matters. The self-control to let Him be in control. Luckily, for those of us who are baptized, we have a GPS, the Holy Spirit, to always help find our way. 

Today let us constantly follow wherever He goes. 

Testing our motives

The political commentator George Will once wrote that the largest growth industry in America was the manufacture of “synthetic indignation”, people acting as if they are upset and concerned about a particular issue. 

In today’s gospel we see an example of synthetic indignation on the part of Judas. Jesus goes to the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Mary anoints Jesus’s feet with an expensive oil. 

Judas the Iscariot, one of his disciples, and the one who would betray him, said, “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?” 

Suddenly, Judas is acting like the head of the parish social justice committee. 

But so there is no confusion, the gospel goes on to explain.

He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions.

While hopefully no one reading this is embezzling like Judas, it does remind us that we need to examine our motives. All of us can look for an excuse to justify our behavior. 

We humans are funny creatures. When we don’t want to do something, we can always find an excuse.  When we do want to do something, we can always find a way. 

What excuses do we use for not taking time to actually pray or read the Word of God?

What excuses will we come up with for not going to the Holy Week liturgies?

What excuse do we use for not contributing to the work of our local parish?

Like Judas, we always ground our excuse in some truth. Should we be concerned for the poor? Absolutely. Was that really Judas’s motivation? Not really. 

In these last days of Lent, there is still time for us to take the hard look at ourselves, and test our motives for the choices we make or the attitudes we hold. 

Nine more days

We are coming down the homestretch of Lent. 

In the gospel today we are reminded once again that everything is a matter of perspective.

Jesus says a very simple declarative sentence. 

When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM

What is the lifting up? Crucifixion. That’s right Jesus refers to his murder as a lifting up.  Jesus turns it all upside down.

- Jesus is I AM, that is, God.

- the Cross is His thrown.

- the. Crucifixion is his Exaltation, his lifting up over the people. 

Some people will ask why we Catholics wear crucifixes, why we have them hanging everywhere.

Blame St. John.  It is his Gospel above all that transforms the image of death into an image of healing and life. 

 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up,

We should be very careful before we judge some event in our lives as good or bad, blessing or curse.  Truth is, we can never be sure. 

Perhaps rather than labeling a situation, the best thing we can do is hold on tight to our faith, trust that Jesus is with us in every moment, and know that with him we will not only get through but come out better. 

Ten more days

Perhaps you are looking back on Lent and thinking how it didn’t go as you had planned. On Ash Wednesday we all have the best of intentions. We make decisions about prayer, fasting, and charity. We take home our Operation Rice Bowl boxes and there they sit. It’s not too late. 

Lent ends on Holy Thursday. With the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, we begin the Easter Triduum. That means that, as of today, there are 10 more days left in Lent. There is still time to dig in and make this a fruitful Lent. 

The readings for this last full week of Lent move away from the usual pattern. Each day we read from a different book. 

Today we hear the story of Sussana, a woman who some could call a victim of her culture and the legal system of the time. 

In the story a group of men decide to trap her into having sex with them. 

the garden doors are shut, and no one can see us; give in to our desire, and lie with us. If you refuse, we will testify against you that you dismissed your maids because a young man was here with you.

The Jewish law requires a minimum of two witnesses. Roman law would follow the custom, with the dictum, “One witness is no witness.” 

More problematic was the list of people who could not be witnesses. Maimonides lists ten classes of persons who are not competent to attest or testify, namely: women, slaves, minors, lunatics, the deaf, the blind, the wicked, the contemptible, relatives, and the interested parties.  

The reason for the exclusion of women was grammatical. The noun for witnesses in the Old Testament is always masculine. This placed a woman at the absolute mercy of two men or more. 

Sussana decides that the only real judge that matters is God. 

In the short run this means great pain and humiliation for her. She is accused and forced to go to trial, with all the public scandal that would have accompanied this. We can imagine the chattering of the people, particularly because she was beautiful. She will get the death penalty if convicted. 

God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel, and he cried aloud: “I will have no part in the death of this woman.” All the people turned and asked him, “What is this you are saying?” He stood in their midst and continued, “Are you such fools, O children of Israel! To condemn a woman of Israel without examination and without clear evidence? Return to court, for they have testified falsely against her.

Because of this boy who himself cannot be a witness under the law, the men are separated and questioned. One says they were under a mastic tree, the other says under an oak. The men are therefore convicted of perjury. Under the law of the time, if you were convicted of perjury, the penalty you attempted to inflict on another was inflicted on you. The men were put to death. 

Unfortunately in our modern legal systems things do not always work out so neat and tidy. And then we have the court of the Internet.

More than ever the examp,e of Sussana is worth our attention. She chose to focus not on the court or on what people would say. She focused solely on the judgement of God. The only truly just Judge. The judge who unfailingly sees the truth. 

In these last ten days of Lent, perhaps it is time for each of us to look deep inside and ask how we would stand before the judgement seat of Christ. Of what would we stand convicted?

Th good news is that Christ has given us a way, even when we are guilty of sin, to have it expunged. We call it the Sacrament of Penance, confession. Through Pennace and yes Indulgence, God washes us clean and restores us. 

Let us fearlessly face our sin and in trust embrace the mercy of God. 

What do we want?

Today we reach chapter 5  in the Gospel of St. John.  Jesus has gone to Jerusalem and there, at the pool called Bethesda, Jesus encounters a man who has been disabled for a very long time. The precise nature of his condition we do not know. Nor do we know how long he has been this way. Whatsoever the case, Jesus asks what would appear to be a very strange question,

Do you want to be well?

What is stranger is the fact that we never get the answer to that question. Instead of answering, the man changes the subject. 

Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.

For any of us it is easy to get comfortable with where we are, even when it is a very uncomfortable place. In our present culture, being a victim can be a badge of honor. 

The good news is that Jesus heals the man in spite of himself.  

He doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t make magic mud. He simply gives him three commands. 

Rise. Take up your mat. Walk. 

The man doesn’t answer the question. He never expresses faith. He doesn’t even know who healed him. He is as ignorant as he can be. And Jesus healed him anyway. 

It is easy for us to think that it is about us. That we need to be the subject of the sentence – I need to have faith –I need to ask God. We forget that it is always God’s work, God’s plan.  We are at best lowly cooperators. 

The man in the story didn’t know much. But he did have sense enough to obey. He got up, took his mat, and walked. He didn’t just wallow in his condition. 

Can we hear the voice of Jesus commanding us? Will we obey? Do we want to be healed?

The one humanity

We know that it is through faith that we are saved.  But we make the mistake of confusing faith with individual professions of faith. 

The Bible begins by telling us that God created a single humanity (adam) of which we are all a part. It was only sin that fractured that humanity. 

In our culture, we tend to worship the fracture. We focus on the individual. Everything can be customized to meet your individual needs. 

Today’s gospel reminds us that while sin may have fractured the common humanity, it could not be broken. 

In the gospel it is the son who is in need of healing. But we hear nothing about his faith. As is often the case with us human beings, the ones most in need of help are the ones least willing or able to ask for it. 

It is the father who goes for help. It is worth noting that even this father’s faith is seriously flawed. He thinks that Jesus needs to go and do something. He thinks there needs to be some spectacle. He forgets that in the beginning God merely spoke and it all came into being. 

Jesus finds the people’s desire for spectacles frustrating. 

Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.

But despite that, the faith of the man is enough. 

“You may go; your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus said to him and left. 

The faith of the man saved the son. 

How easily we forget.  Faith itself is a gift from God. He gives it as we need it. 

What do we do? As with all gifts, we merely accept it and are grateful. 

On this Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent. Can I look inside and find my faith?  Perhaps for some it is right at hand. Perhaps for others it has fallen into some dusty corner of your soul. Wherever it is, pick it up and embrace. Show it to the people around you. And most of all say thank you. Be grateful for the gift of faith. Your faith may also heal someone in need. 

Week 4

As we begin week 4, we are told to be glad. The symbol of that joy is the rose color that we use in vestments and decorations. But isn’t it strange to rejoice in the middle of Lent? Not at all.

Hopefully, since Ash Wednesday, every day we have done some penitential act. Hopefully, we have increased our daily prayer time. We have looked for extra ways that we can be charitable. And if you have not, we still have two and a half weeks of Lent. It’s never too late to start. 

If your parish is using cycle A, you are hearing today about the man born blind. He is all of us. Because of original sin, we were all born blind. Only faith, which is itself a gift from God, and the grace of baptism can heal our blindness. 

But truth be told, it never heals completely in this life. Only in dheaven Willy be have spiritual 20/20 vision. Part of our problem is that we think we see, we think we know, and we judge.  We judge based on our partial vision. 

Even for us who are baptized believers, St. Paul tells us, 

Now we see dimly as in a mirror, then [in heaven] we will see face to face.

It is our partial blindness that can often lead us to sin. We think see. We think we know. We think we know what we need. We think we know what is best for us. We don’t.  We need to keep the limits of our vision in mind. 

Firstly, to remind us that we need a guide.  We need to pray every day for the Holy Spirit to help us to see, to help us to know, to help us choose wisely. 

Also, we need to remeber our partial vision whenever we judge another person. We need to remind ourselves that we never see the whole picture. Only God sees that. 

As we age our physical eyesight fails just a bit more.  Let us pray that as our physical eyesight fail, God may increase our spiritual eyesight. 

At the end of week one

Perhaps you have had a great first week of Lent; perhaps you have already “failed” at the Lenten tasks you set for yourself. Whichever the case, today that week comes to an end and we look forward to tomorrow, the Second Sunday of Lent. 

On this last day of the first week, the gospel could make us throw up our hands and give up, as Jesus tells us to be “perfect.” It’s seems impossible until we remeber that the text uses teleios, and not anamartetos.  We are commanded to be perfect not sinless. 

Perfect in the Greek or Latin sense means complete. It grows out of the understanding that when each of us was created by God, he already had in mind the person we were meant to be, there is a goal (Greek-telos). For each of us that goal is both unique and identical.   We each fit into God’s plan in a unique way. On the other hand, the goal is the same for all of us, oneness with Him. 

In this season of Lent, we use bodily discipline, fasting. We use prayer. We use charity. All of these serve a double purpose. 

In the first place, we look back. We do them as Penance for sins committed. 

In the second place, we look forward. We use the discipline of Lent to help us focus, so that we might adhere more closely each day to path that God has marked out for us, the path on which we walk with Christ. There is no discipleship without discipline. 

Tomorrow we begin week two. Take some time today to plan how it will be even better than week one. 

Simplicity of prayer

When I was a child, we would tense up if grandma Bess was the one to say grace. My family we your average Baptists. We used “God is great.God is good...” grandma would pray spontaneously. She would go on and on, as the mashed potatoes got cold. 

Fifty years later I now hear Catholics who, in a grass is always greener mindset, think they now need to abandon rote prayers, as if something they make up on the fly is more “real” prayer. They forget what Jesus himself tells us,

In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. 

Even more Jesus tells us why.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 

God does not need me to tell him what to do. He does not need to see me beg like a child desperate to have his way.

Some will claim that they are praying in the spirit.  St. Cyprian in writing about the Our Father says

What prayer could be more a prayer in the spirit than the one given us by Christ, by whom the Holy Spirit was sent upon us? 

In this Lenten Season, let us spend more time in prayer,  but let us also keep our prayer simple. Prayer is not us telling God what we want; it is the lifting of our mind and heart to him. 

The same struggles

In yesterday’s gospel we heard about temptation. Today we pick up with an interesting list of commands, interesting for the specific subjects they address. It is a basic principle, that laws are given to address problems. If there is a law forbidding something, then you can bet it was a problem in the community. 

Stealing, lying, theft– these are reaffirmations of things already addressed in the 10 commandments. But then Leviticus veers into what we think of as more modern territory, the treatment of the disabled, the rights of workers, the ways we are to judge others, the spreading of slander. Today’s passage from Leviticus even dives into what we call “sins of omission”. We are reminded that we cannot stand idly by when our neighbor ‘s life is in danger. 

Then we are reminded that there are sins that reside in the inmost parts of our heart: hatred and grudges. 

In a short reading today we are reminded that we must look at all four categories of sin we confess at Mass: thoughts, words, what we have done, and what we have failed to do. 

On this Monday of the first full week of Lent, perhaps it is a good take to find some quiet time and place to do a thorough examination of conscience looking at all four kinds of sin. 

A world without sin

More and more our culture has moved away from the language of religion. Some of this is being done based on particular reading of the non-establishment clause in the constitution. Much of it – as a flight from the guilt that churches are accused of heaping on people in the past. In this flight from religion one of the words we have thrown out is the word “sin.”  There is just one problem. People continue to do bad things. 

Without the word sin, we paint ourselves into a corner. How do we deal with wrongdoing? The only word, the only lens we have left for viewing bad behavior is “crime.” We then move to criminalize it. We ask the law to do what law was never meant to do. And when that fails we then move to public shaming (the online world which inflicts the life sentence). 

Perhaps we would be better off calling sin “sin.” Sin names to quality of the behavior. It identifies the violation of the moral law.  The advantage is that the word sin also admits of contrition, repentance, and forgiveness. 

Today’s first reading begins with the words, 

To the penitent God provides a way back.

Imagine if, here in Vrginia, we called the recent “blackface” scandal sin. 

The offender woud express contrition, do some appropriate penance, and receive forgiveness. The offense is not ignored. Nor is it simply left hanging out there, hanging over the person’s head forever. It is punished for what it is. There would be a way back.

St Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans that,

all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. 

When we forget this truth, we become judgmental, unforgiving.  Wednesday we begin Lent, 40 days in which we are called to judge no one but ourselves. 

Fill in the plank

In the gospels Jesus uses examples from ordinary life as metaphors for much deeper spiritual realties. In today’s gospel he goes to an example which not on carpenters but anyone who had ever worked with wood would know, the splinter on the eye. 

Our eyes are incredibly sensitive, even the smallest particles can be unbelievably painful. Our reflexive reaction is to close our eye the second we perceive anything getting near it. For some of us, even trying to put eye drops in becomes a challenge. The eye just wont stay open. 

Let something get in our eye and, no matter how small, it feels enormous. Our eyes start to water and we can’t see. Jesus takes this painful common experience and expands on it. 

In the parabole, the tiny speck is not in our own eye, but in the eye of our brother or sister. In our own eye is a dokos, a support beam, the kind one uses in construction. 

It is interesting how Jesus plays with  “charity”. Except it is not real charity, it is that fake charity which is really judgement. We claim to be concerned for our brother or sister because they (not we) are  on the wrong path. We claim to want to help them.

Jesus once again reminds us that we have to start with ourselves. We must remove the beam from our own eye. Our vision must be healed before we can presume to see and remove the speck from the eye of our brother or sister. 

The process requires several steps:

     First, we must feel the pain of the plank in our own eye. 

    Then we must get it removed. Often this will require the help of others. 

    But then there will be a hole and much damage to our vison. The hole must be healed which can only be done by the grace of God. 

    Then having lived the experience of conversion, we can lead other. 

In the upcoming season of Lent. We are each called to examine our lives, to find the plank, the beam, in our eye. If you think you don’t have one pray harder for God to reveal it or ask a loved one who will tell you the truth. 

We all have them.our tendency is to reverse the story. We put the beam in the other person’s eye and the speck in our own. Lent is a time for honesty. 

Prayer, fasting, and charity. Those are the tools we need to pry the board loose. And then God can fill the space created with love giving Grace. 

    

Who is consecrated

In the Catholic Church we use the phrase “consecrated life” to talk about those who are professed to a life of poverty, chasity and obedience. While it is a useful designation, it can too easily let the rest of us off the hook.

In today’s first reading from Hebrews we hear,

He who consecrates and those who are being consecrated all have one origin. Therefore, he is not ashamed to call them “brothers” 

It is a reminder that while men and women religious are “consecrated” to Christ in a particular way. All Christians are “consecrated” at our baptism. We are washed clean in the water. We are filled with the Holy Spirit. We are anointed with Chrism. That anointing is renewed at confirmation. 

We are all consecrated, call into oneness with the sacred, with the Holy. This is why a daily prayer life is essential for the Christian. In prayer we are drawn deeper into that oneness. 

Our prayer needs to be routine, in the best sense of that word. Daily prayer cannot be something we do when we feel like it. All of have rituals, routines that we do every single day without even thinking about it. We shower, we dress, we brush our teeth, we drink coffee. We get in the car we turn on the radio. Look at the routines of your life and ask, is prayer on the list?  If it isn’t, it should be, it can be. 

Every habit begins the same way, repetition. We repeat something long enough it becomes a habit. The habit over time finds its place in the routine. 

On the day of our baptism, we were consecrated to the Lord. We love the idea of being brothers and sisters of Jesus. We can forget that the title comes with demands.  In this first week of ordinary time, let us look at the place of prayer in the ordinary part of our lives. 

Living the ordinary faith

Today we begin the first week in ordinary time. There is not first Sunday in Ordinary Time, it was replaced by the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. For the next month, we will be carefully reading our way through the Letter to the Hebrews. 

For me it is one of the more interesting books of the New Testament because its origins are obscure. It is not called “The Letter from St. Paul to the Hebrews,” because we don’t know who wrote it. Nor do we know when or to what “Hebrews.” And yet, despite the lack of such information, the early Christians considered it canonical, official, part of the revealed word of God. The human author was of little importance. 

In some ways it is the perfect letter to read as we move into ordinary time. It is easier to live our faith on the great solemnities like Christmas or Easter, or even during seasons like Lent. It is much harder to live our faith day in and day our in the ordinary progress of life. As we read our way through the Letter to the Hebrews we will discover that the main problem it deals with is exactly this.

The Letter to the Hebrews is not primarily about holding on to the faith during persecution.  It is primarily dealing with the challenge of perservence when the demands of being a Christian seem to be too much. Striving for holiness can be exhausting. It is much easier to simply go with the flow, live like everybody around you.  

The letter opens by reminding us precisely who Jesus is. It reminds us that Jesus was not one more prophet. Jesus is not one more spokesperson for God. Jesus is God. 

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through the Son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe

In our creed we repeat God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; and yet, at times we still don’t seem to get it. Yesterday’s gospel was not Jesus listening to the voice of God; it was the Son listening to the Father and the descent of the Holy Spirit, all three equally God. 

In Jesus humanity has a direct, immediate encounter with God. In Jesus we are not only told but shown directly by God wha we are required to do, if we want to have eternal life. And we cannot grow tired of it. We cannot give up. Daily we must continue to strive for holiness. 

Constant binary choices

From the time we wake up until the time we fall asleep, life is a constant series of choices. What we can overlook is that every choice has a moral component. 

In the first reading today, St. John in his usual, direct fashion continues to discribe that act of choosing in the starkest possible lainguage. As he describes it, we are either children of God who do not sin, or children of the Evil One who sin. What distinguishes us are our actions. They are either evil or righteous. For St. John, there is no third, middle category. All our actions are one or the other. 

Perhaps we need to be forced to sort our actions this way.  

In the book Ther magical art of tidying up, the author uses this same methodology. She forces clients to take, for example, all of their shirt and put them in a pile on the floor. Then, one by one, they have to pick them up and decide, keep or don’t keep.  You keep only the ones you will actually wear. 

There is no third option of shoving it in the back of the closet or basement. 

St. John wants to us look at all of our choices in that same fashion,  In every choice, I choose evil or just. 

The word he uses for evil is poneros. It comes from the word for pain. Is the action hurtful, to self or other? All our actions have consequences. What we say, what we eat, how we spend our free time – all things have some lasting impact on ourselves or others. Even a smal injury is an injury or in the words of St. John, evil.

Our other choice is dikaios, righteous, in accord with God’s law.  

All day every day each of us must decide, through our actions, whose child we are: child of God or child of the Evil One.  

The language sounds stark or even extreme, but perhaps we need that kind of language to keep us on the right path. 

Retreat Day Four

Today is the fourth day of a retreat by the bishops of the US called for by Pope Francis. The very fact that they are beginning with a retreat is a great sign that this time they are on the right path. The other great sign is the letter a Pope Francis sent to them as they begin the retreat. 

In the letter he addresses, with his usual directness, “the crisis of credibility” and the “culture of abuse.”  He addresses the all to common church as “evangelization business”model that we often see in the U.S. We have too often fallen into what he calls the “trap of functionalism and efficiency that govern the business world.” He is blunt about the seeking places of honor, jealousy, envy and machinations that are present in the Church. 

But he also reminds us that these things are not new.  We have only to read our Bibles and we will find that these issues have been with the Church from its beginning — James and John seeking to sit at His left and right. 

As Pope Francis reminds us, our current crisis will not be solved by creating more committees or redoing the org chart. Many people cried out when “Rome wouldn’t let the bishops” (that’s how it was portrayed) pass new rules. Pope Francis understood that binders filled with regulations will not solve the problem, unless there is first a true conversion of heart, a change in mind-set (metanoia). It is not a problem of “self-preservation, defensiveness” (the diocesan attorneys) or “marketing or strategizing to regain lost prestige” (the PR consultant); it requires pastors, shepherds whose first concern is the flock and a “collegial awareness of our being sinners in constant need of conversion.”

Will our bishops emerge from this retreat ready to remove the plank from their own eyes?  On a human level, it is completely understandable that every bishop is afraid of being sued, afraid of having to join the list of those who have filed for bankruptcy. Of course it will be embarrassing to admit what they knew and when they knew it and no one wants to be the one to “rat out” a brother bishop.  But sins of omission, when we fail to act, can often be the worst. 

Let us pray for our bishops. From those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. May they be given the courage to look inward. 

The AntiChrist

Of those of us old enough to remember the Omen, few of us will ever forget the child that turned out to be ''the AntiChrist."  Unfortunately, too many of us never moved beyond the sci-fi version to actually reading The First Letter of St. John that explains who the antichrist really is. 
Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist. 

As St. John explains it, the antichrist is not a supernatural being with powers like one of the x-men.  It is a regular human being like you or me. In Monday's reading, he even used the term in the plural, 

so now many antichrists have appeared. 
Thus we know this is the last hour. 
They went out from us, but they were not really of our number;
if they had been, they would have remained with us. 

Clearly they were members of the community, but members who, as St. John describes it, never really bought into the message of Jesus Christ, and ultimately ended up leaving the Church.  

While the supernatural movie version is more entertaining and, perhaps, more interesting, what St. John is talking about is much more applicable to our daily lives.  If we're not careful any one of us could become the antichrist.  While we may not come right out and deny Jesus Christ, we can if we are not careful deny Christ by our actions. We can become complacent and accept sin as if it were not sin.  This is what gives scandal, when people see Christians apparently not even trying to be better. 

The Pope addressed this when he quite directly said, 

How many times have we witnessed the scandal of those who go to church and spend all day there or attend every day, and later go on hating others or speaking ill of people. This is a scandal,...It would be better to not go to church. Live like an atheist. 

If you go to church, then live like a son, like a brother, like an authentic witness, not a counter-witness.

All of us fall short of living the fullness of the gospel. We give into the passions and temptations of earthly life.  But when we do, we must acknowledge our sin, go to the Sacrament of Penance, and strive each day to more fully live the gospel. Tomorrow should always be better than today.