-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 8:00am and 11:00am
Are We Making a Costly Mistake?
No video prep this week. I just could not get it together.
Nonetheless, I am concerned with the temptation in our current secular culture to focus on blessing, blessedness, presence of Angels, spiritual wholeness, tranquility, compassion. All the wonderful stuff that I hear out of public officials, young people, and utopian-thinking "hippies".
Everyone, from our doctors, psychologists, television hosts, healthy living experts, is telling us that we simply need to focus on the blessing of life, multiply the blessing, promote the blessing, and celebrate the blessing. As if there is such a thing as "free-floating blessing" out there (that's a thinly veiled reference to "free-floating anxiety" of the 1970s).
What the Scriptures make clear to me today and this weekend is that there is (like "free-floating anxiety") no such thing as "free-floating blessing". Every blessing, goodness, miracle, Angel, has a "Blessor" = God. Our secularized world refuses to acknowledge God. And even our religious world can become fixated upon the Blessing, getting the fix, being pleased in this life apart from the source of blessing, goodness, beauty, life = God.
The gift of the Samaritan in today's Gospel story is not that he realized he was healed, "all 10 realized they were healed". The blessing of the one, the unexpected one, the Samaritan, was that he recognized the God of his blessing.
Is it possible that we, in our pragmatism, have separated the purpose of our lives from the God of our purpose? Isn't it possible that we have become fixated on living the blessing (even in this present moment) while we fail to recognize the God of who blesses? As if the blessing is about us rather than about God and God's kingdom, God's purpose, God's will.
What are you thinking? Does this connect with your faith life in anyway?
