Does anyone go on dates anymore?

I was talking with a group of young men at church the other day and was given astonishing insight into the current dating scene. As I sat down with them to talk about life, I found something concerning: none of them were asking women out. 

Does anyone go on dates anymore?

All the guys were living a very dynamic social media life, where everyone knows a lot about each other – their favorite restaurant, what they did on their last vacation, and if they are in a relationship – but very few of them were “dating.” When I asked “Why?” Most of the men said they were fearful of “messing up” or “ending up with the wrong one”. This fear caused them to seldom date and keep female relationships plutonic and confusing.  Wow I was shocked.  And I kept thinking - that's just not right! 

I’m not even sure Christian men know how to ask a girl out and go on a date. This explains to me, why so many great Christian women at our parish are frustrated - despite our parish having one of the best young adult ministries in the country.  They are frustrated because guys aren't stepping up and asking them out. So listen up guys. Stop being afraid and take a girl to coffee. It’s not a marriage proposal. It’s just coffee.

In looking for “The One”, Christian men can easily get caught in the trap of never asking women out at all because: "She might not be 'The One'".  That’s just crazy.  The only way you will ever find “The One” is if you date enough great women to know when the right one comes along.  So stop hiding behind prayers, vague intentions, group hangouts, and TEXT MESSAGES! Great Christian women are just waiting for real Christian men who are willing to step up and date.

It seems that you men are such good guys that you obsess over questions like: “What if I’m not going to marry her?” “What if I hurt her?” “What if I don’t like her after we date for a few weeks?” Men, listen up! Stop over praying and over-analyzing and start asking! Stop the group hangouts and text messages with no clear direction. If you are clearly leading her on step up and ask her out, or stop leading her on. Group hangouts are great, but find time for one-on-one where your intentions are clear.

So here is some advice from a old Baby Boomer who dated lots of great women back in the day: Find a girl who you think is interesting and attractive and ask her out in person or over the phone (no texting). When you are on the date, put away the electronics and talk.  After you go out, call her again and ask her out again. This may sound a bit crazy to you guys – but that’s how it’s done.  And then, if you decide that it just isn't there, be straightforward. Tell her kindly you won’t be calling anymore because you aren't interested in a romantic relationship. Don’t waste her time.  Don’t tie her up in her best dating years, if you don’t intend to move forward, free her to find someone else. If you tell her you don’t want to date any more.  It will sting a little for her, but it’s better than leading her on for months and her having hundreds of discussions with her friends about what’s up with you. Be a man and don’t hide behind vague intentions and confusing relationships.

And ladies, the truth is we guys are a bit dense most of the time. If you are confused about a man’s intentions—just ask him to clarify. It’s your responsibility not to let him lead you on.  I know that’s harsh, but it is your responsibility. And come-on guys, it’s time to be a man and take girls out on dates.  Try a little “Prince Charming” and see if it isn't a better way to find “The One”. Rather than relying exclusively on prayer asking if she’s the one for you—talk to her and ask her to go somewhere with you. And then sweep her off her feet.

Stop praying, start asking. 

Parables - Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time cycle A - Matthew 13:24-43

It’s fascinating how Jesus taught.  How he used these simple parables to teach us. The parable is a story where Jesus draws comparisons between one thing and another. In the parable of the mustard seed, the primary point of comparison is the contrast between the smallness of the seed – the smallness of the start – and the greatness of the result.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed.  

Jesus is telling us how God chose to build his kingdom. He chose to do it in a small way. A baby born in a stable, who grew up and at the appointed time recruited 12 very ordinary men, in a remote providence of the Roman Empire. Jesus doesn't tell us why God chose this way; as the old saying goes: “God works in mysterious ways!”  And God’s way of building the kingdom is in the small things of life.

So his message for us today is don’t wait for some big thing, some great call or mission. God works in the small things. The qualities Jesus taught us to seek were not the ones that made us feel important; just the opposite – humility, love, patience and mercy – were the virtues he valued. He said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” – “Blessed are the meek” – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Which means that none of us can say: "Well, I am a nobody, too small to matter.” because God says it’s all about small things.  

At the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus speaks again about the final judgment. And he says what will matter to God is not material success, great accomplishments, or the great missions we take on. The only things that will matter to God will be our little acts of kindness. This passage tells us “The King will say:  ‘I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least important of these followers of mine you did it for me!’” (Matthew 25:31-46) The kingdom of heaven is built on each kind word, each small act of compassion. Those are the seeds of the kingdom.

We don’t think much about these daily little actions. But each is a seed that has the potential to change a life, and the lives of all who know them. Jesus is saying that’s how the Kingdom grows – slowly; one branch at a time, one leaf at a time, one person, one life changed by some small kindness at a time. Our call as Christians is to let go of the need for something big.

When we talk about faith, what we are saying is we accept God’s kingship in our life. We let Him rule. And this faith is like a seed that we need to nurture, to grow.  

What are the weeds that choke out our faith?  We know what they are! We know those things that choke our spirits.  For some of us it’s excessive partying. For others it’s making money our God.  For some of us it’s pessimism, hopelessness and fear. Many of us are unwilling to forgive someone, and that hatred is choking our spirit. A few of us have become paralyzed by grief. Jesus is asking us today to root out these weeds; to root out attitudes and ideas that have taken hold which have no place in the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ parables are designed to tease our mind to startle our imagination to make us think.

The mustard seed story challenges us to think small; to see that even though we are one small person, if we grow our little faith, it can be a blessing and to those around us.

The story about the leaven – the yeast – challenges us to ask: “Do I have patience with God’s work, His slow and seemingly hidden building of the Kingdom, or will I be impatient and always seek something around the next corner.

The story of the Wheat and Weeds challenges us to ask: “Can I leave final judgment to God?  Can I let go of judging others? Can I live a good productive life, a life that bares good fruit, even in a world full of weeds – full of sin.”

Jesus used these simple, mundane things – seeds – yeast – weeds – to present to us life-altering challenges. His use of these small, common things is a lesson for us by itself. The message is that the most important lessons in our life can come from the small moments, the mundane moments, from the  small challenges we face each day.  In each of the small moments of our lives we fashion parables too; little stories and events that build the kingdom of God.

• When the woman next door, who has been unpleasant – even mean for years – falls ill and her neighbor brings over a meal made with love and stays for a visit — a parable is taking place.

• When a mother loves her teenage daughter, even though she just screamed “I hate you!” and slammed the bedroom door – a parable is being lived.

• When a husband and wife stop in the middle of a stupid fight and forgive each other – a parable is happening.

• When an infertile couple conceives then goes ahead with the planned adoption anyway, because that child needs a home — a parable appears before our eyes.

So what will it be in your life?  That’s really the question Jesus is asking today. 
What parable of the kingdom will be made visible in your life?

When you give it over to God;  when you live in the power of the Holy Spirit in all the little mundane things and moments, then the Kingdom comes alive in your life.  

And Jesus says … then … you will be a light to the world …                          

Then … you will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father.

God you don't scare me anymore.

I was raised in a religion of fear.  I pray that our preachers never again brandish threats of hell fire is they did in my youth.  I’m not afraid of God any longer.  What I learned is that following God in fear and trembling became a burden too great.  So I left, as so many of my generation did.  It’s not my fault – our fault – we were told so many wrong things; things that dismayed and disheartened us.  

We were constantly told it was wrong to do this or that because it was a sin and punishment was the result.  They perverted the Lord's message.  To speak of nothing but the ills and never of the healing was simply wrong.  

I learned the truth after the great Church council of my youth. Like so many councils before it, it corrected errant teaching. I learned that Jesus, came to tell us – and prove to us – that God’s love is infinite and free. Rather than the rule dominated faith of childhood, I learned to live a life worthy of Jesus Christ’s loving sacrifice for my life.  I know now he came in love to save me, and I try to respond to that love with love. 

You came to love us Lord … you came to forgive us Lord … 

you came to save us Lord … I know that now.   

How can one believe that heaven is earned?  As if love can be earned, as if love were for sale.  Jesus taught us the opposite, he taught us love is freely given!

Our call as Christians is to receive God's love … and then give it away.

The church of my childhood was a place where a decent life consisted of the regular practice of religion; we thought that keeping the rules was all that was required.  But that wasn't true … it wasn't enough … and deep in our hearts we knew it.  I now know that our call is to a loving relationship with the Lord, which then begets loving relationships with our neighbor.  

Jesus came to reveal that God is LOVE … and only love.  He even told us to call God Abba - our dear Father. Jesus came to tell us we were God's well-loved children.  He came to tell us there is only one commandment – to love like God.  

Despite Peter’s sin - his denials of Jesus - Jesus only asked him one question – 

“Do you love me, Peter?”   He asks us the exact same question today.  

Substitute your name for Peter and hear Jesus' voice asking you - 

"Do you love me, _________?" 

My only fear now Lord is the fear of 

failing to love enough – to love like you – unconditionally.  

Jesus was a rebel. What's the message for us?

Jesus broke the rules so often that the government and even the church wanted Him dead.  Where is that energy seen in the Church today?  The energy of compassion overriding the rule. 

Over and over in scripture we hear that Jesus chose to associate with people whom the rest of his contemporaries found reprehensible. According to the rule of the day, associating with known sinners or the sick or the unclean rendered a person ritually unclean and therefore unfit to participate in communal rituals, like liturgy, common meals or conversations. Fully aware of this rule, Jesus purposely moved among those with whom others would not associate. He went to their homes. He ate with them. He talked with them. He touched them and welcomed them to himself. Compassion always overruled the law.  Jesus touched lepers when the law forbade it.  He healed people on the Sabbath.  Is that spirit alive in the Church today?

His treatment of women was outrageous in his culture. He consistently treated women and men as equals. He violated numerous Old Testament regulations, which specified gender inequality.  Here are just a few examples:

• He ignored ritual impurity laws: Jesus cured a woman who suffered from menstrual bleeding for 12 years. In Judean society of the day, it was a major transgression for a man to talk to a woman other than his wife or children.
• He even talked to foreign women: John describes Jesus' conversation with a woman of Samaria. She was doubly ritually unclean since she was both a foreigner and a woman. Again he speaks to a woman in public when men were not allowed to talk to women, except within their own families.
• He taught women students: Jewish tradition at the time was to not allow women to be taught.
• He accepted women in his inner circle. You have to wonder if Jesus were here today would he call Mary Magdalene an apostle.
• Mostly women were present at Jesus' execution, the men had fled from the scene.
• He appeared first to one or more women after his resurrection 

So where is that spirit today of confronting rules and traditions that are unkind and unjust? 

In my quite prayer times I wonder: How do we show compassion to the young impoverished mother who has more children that she can feed?  How would Jesus treat the divorced Catholic.  The homosexual?  What kind of assistance would he give to those dealing with today's demons - alcohol, drug, and sex addiction?  It’s difficult to imagine that Jesus would not treat women as equal to men in every way in the twenty first century.  How would Jesus want us to relate to the Islamist?

I don’t have the answers. And my call in life is simply to follow faithfully, and to practice the most radical love I can muster. I know without a doubt that God’s love extends to all people; and His "unconditional" love is what my Church should epitomize. 

Homily - The Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Reading:

Gospel of John - Chapter 6 – verses 51-58

Homily: 

ª   “… unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,                   you do not have life within you."  

ª  “… Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,”

These statements are dramatic to say the least.  Think what it must have been like to be there that day and hear them. The day that Jesus made these shocking statements, the Gospel tells us that the Jews started arguing saying: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 

This teaching rocked his followers!

   

Regrettably, we don’t hear the conclusion of this story from John’s Gospel.  The story goes on and it says: “Many of his followers heard this and said, ‘This teaching is too hard. Who can listen to it?’” And it tells us that because of this teaching many of Jesus' followers turned away, and would not go with him anymore.  This moment was actually so bad that he turned to the twelve Apostles and the passage says: “… he asked the twelve disciples, ‘And you—would you also like to leave?’”

Think about that … His whole mission hung on this moment.

He looked at his closest followers – the 12 apostles – and said: Do you want to leave too? You have to wonder what history would look like if they too rejected this teaching.

 

Eating his flesh drinking his blood – who wouldn’t be confused?!

It’s interesting that even though it looked like this teaching might cause him to lose all his followers, Jesus didn’t retract these statements.  He didn’t say he was only speaking symbolically.  He stood there that day and basically said, believe this teaching or walk away.

Did his closest apostles stop being confused by this teaching?

                  

Of course not, but they trusted him.  They had enough faith in Him to continue on. I am sure they thought, at some point, it would all make sense.  And it did! It made sense the night before He died. As Jesus sat with his disciples at the Last Supper, he picked up a loaf of bread. He broke it; prayed over it and said: THIS is my body. Then he picked up the cup and said: THIS is my blood.

That night was an A-ha moment for the Apostles, a moment of sudden insight about this whole incredible teaching.  Finally it made sense for them – in the Eucharist.

Scott Hahn had that same A-ha moment when he went to daily Mass one day.  Scott Hahn is a theologian and one of the most prolific writers in the Catholic Church today. Scott’s books are some of the best read Catholic books ever written.  But when Scott was young he was militantly anti-Catholic. For example, he gave out anti-Catholic literature in front of Churches.  He ripped apart a rosary in anger, and tore up a Catholic prayer book. So what changed this man from a Catholic hater to one of the most important Catholic authors of all time?

As a young man, after his seminary training, Scott became pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia. He also became a part-time instructor at a local Presbyterian seminary. The first course he was assigned to teach was the “Gospel According to John.”  While preparing for chapter 6 from which we just read something happened to him. He began to question what he’d been taught, and was now teaching others, about the Eucharist – that it was only a symbol of Christ’s body, not the real body of Christ.

This questioning started a journey that led him into the Catholic Church. He began studying Catholic teaching. And the more he learned, the more convinced he became that Christ was present in the Eucharist – body and blood, humanity and divinity. Then one weekday he decided to do something that he never dreamed he would ever do. He decided to attend a daily Mass. He writes in his book which is called Rome Sweet Home, “All of a sudden I realized this was the setting in which the Bible was meant to be read – in the Mass. Then came the Liturgy of the Eucharist.” Hahn said that when the priest held up the Host, after the words of consecration, all doubt about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist vanished.     

              

He wrote:  “With all my heart I whispered 'My Lord and my God.'”

He concludes saying: “I left the chapel not telling a soul where I had been or what I had done. But the next day I was back, and the next, and the next. I don’t know how to say it other than to say, I had fallen in love with our Lord in the Eucharist!”

Like so many converts Scott gained an enthusiastic love of for the Eucharist.  This reminds us of the tragic fact that we who are cradle Catholics tend to take the Eucharist for granted. This is not due to irreverence on our part, or a lack of faith in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.  It is simply due to something that happens to every human being with the passage of time, namely we tend to take things and people for granted.

This is exactly why the Church sets aside this Sunday, to remind us of the great gift we have in the Eucharist.  Today as you walk down the aisle to receive Communion in a few minutes, focus your thoughts in a special way on who it is you will receive – the Body of Christ.

ª   You will receive the Body of the same Christ who was born in a stable. 

ª  You will receive the Body of the same Christ who died on the cross.

ª  You will receive the Body of the same Christ who rose on Easter.

This is the message of today’s readings.

This is the mystery we celebrate in this liturgy.

My friends this is what unites us !

This is what makes us the Body of Christ alive in the world. 

Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

The wisdom of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., 

Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

Consider asking yourself these questions:

•           Who do I spend my time with?

•           What do I spend my time doing?

•           Where do I feel pulled or drawn in in my life?

•           Where do I feel expectations pushing me, 

             like I “should” rather than “want” to do?

•           How do I see God active in my everyday life?

What if we looked at our lives as one big unfolding endeavor of love, where what we chose to be and do was out of a place of love?  Imagine how generative we would be with our talents, skills, and pursuits if we could intentionally listen how to God (Love) is calling us to become our true selves. 

One great tool for listening to God is to examine our lives at the end of each day.  

Saint Ignatius taught a technique known as Examen to accomplish this 

– go ahead, give it a try!

1. Become aware of God’s presence. 

    Pause for a few moments to be quiet and still.

2. Review the day with gratitude. 

    Take a moment to give thanks for all that you experienced as gift.

3. Pay attention to your emotions. 

    Scan the day and see where your energy was life-giving or life-draining.

4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it. 

    Identify where you would like to grow and change.

5. Look toward tomorrow. 

    Ask for the light or grace needed to live more fully next time.

Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

The parable of the Two Wolves.

The parable of the Two Wolves.

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on

 inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

“One is Evil - It is … anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, 

self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good - It is … joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness,  benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, confidence, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather:

           “Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied:

          “The one you feed."

The choice is yours …

Which wolf will you feed?