Homilies & Thoughts

A grain of wheat looks almost weightless in the hand. It is small enough to be overlooked and dismissed. Yet inside that small thing, God has hidden a path from from human hunger to eternal life.

One of the great tragedies of modern life is that we have learned to see creation as flat. A tree is wood and leaves. Water is a chemical substance. Useful things, perhaps beautiful things, but sealed off from any deeper purpose or meaning. The world becomes a collection of facts, and we become people who know how to use things without knowing how to see them truly and experience them.

N.B. I will not ordinarilly post my letters to the parish I serve because they are focused on local matters. However, I think this letter addresses an issue of broader importance.

This week our parish was shaken. ICE came into our community and people were taken away. Fear was left behind. Many of our parishioners are now afraid to go to work, to go to the store, and even to come to mass. Attendance at mass in Spanish dropped. Our trained liturgical ministers were absent. When civil enforcement creates fear that keeps the faithful from the Eucharist and prevents ministers from serving at the altar, it injures the worship owed to God. We must face this as Christians before anything else.

To forget a face is to lose more than a memory. The face mediates relationship. It puts flesh on the spirit. To forget a face is to lose a relationship. It is to lose love.

When sin entered the human story, the face of God grew dim in us. We had been made in his image, made to reflect the living communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The image remained, because God does not abandon his own work, but the likeness became blurred. Choosing our own will over the will of God, we lost sight of the One we were made to resemble. Once God’s face became harder to see, humanity itself became harder to understand.