R. (2) I love you, Lord, my strength. I love you, O LORD, my strength,
O LORD, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer. R. I love you, Lord, my strength. My God, my rock of refuge,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!
Praised be the LORD, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies. R. I love you, Lord, my strength. The LORD lives! And blessed be my rock!
Extolled be God my savior.
You who gave great victories to your king
and showed kindness to your anointed. R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What
is THE commandment? There are Ten Commandments. The Jews had over 600
other laws and regulations and Jesus was asked a simple question,
“What’s THE commandment, the most important one?” Jesus said, “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul,
with all your mind, and with all your strength.” I looked on our church
web site. We have a record of the homilies given in the last couple of
years. I looked at the last time that I preached on loving God;
exclusively on that or primarily on that subject and I couldn’t find
one. Most of the themes, Sunday after Sunday, we talk about serving one
another, loving your neighbor, repentance, submission to God and His
holy will, humility and mercy. Of course, we love God by loving our
neighbor. First John says, “How can you love the God you do not see if
you do not love the neighbor you do see?” Having said that, Jesus said
the first commandment is to love God. The second commandment, He said
is like it: To love your neighbor as yourself for the love of God.
I think God gets the short straw oftentimes when it comes to
following the great commandment. It is obvious, if you love someone,
you need to spend time with them and in our busy lives, God often is
shuffled out. That is true even for priests and religious. You know, in
the last several decades, many, many priests and religious have left
the service of the church. I remember when I was a kid, we had three
priests, Father Cunningham, Father Dundun, and Father Powers in our
parish of about five hundred families and we had probably twenty nuns.
Today, I know there’s one guy named George something. He’s been there
about twenty years, St. Anne’s parish in Flushing, NY. Poor George is
all alone and he’s grouchy, and there are no nuns to help, or maybe one.
The reason that many of them left, I think, was that they
began to become social workers. Although the work they did was holy and
good and really was ministry work, they were so busy doing the good,
they lost contact with the source of the good, God. I am sure, almost
every bishop in the United States, throughout the world, the first
thing he asks when a priest tells him, “I’m going to quit,” -- the
bishop says, “Father, when did you stop praying?” That personal
relationship with Christ, that one on one relationship is essential to
the life of priests, religious, and no less, in your life. Regardless
of your vocation, whatever you are doing, you need to have that
one-on-one relationship with Jesus Christ.
What I am leading into and what I want to talk about is
Perpetual Adoration. We hope to begin that in our parish, on the first
Sunday of Advent, the third of December. Now, Perpetual Adoration is
when we expose the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance, twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Of course, we have an
ideal location for that in our chapel. Two people are scheduled to be
in attendance with the Holy Eucharist at all times. Yes, at one in the
morning and at three in the morning, etc. We are going to try to do
that.
There are about seven or eight parishes out of the 93
parishes in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe that have Eucharistic Adoration
or Perpetual Adoration. I spoke to several of the pastors and they all
tell the same story, especially those pastors that were there when the
Adoration was introduced. They say things happen in the parish and in
people’s lives when the parish makes this commitment. They report many
blessings and many vocations. When I was vocations director, I would
say most of the seminarians would report part of their reason for
making the decision to be a priest was that they spent time with Jesus
in the Blessed Sacrament at adoration.
Those who are partners in this, who make the commitment to
spend time in adoration, report a greater peace in their hearts and a
greater unity in their families. That is true, especially of teenagers.
More and more youth, throughout our country, are in Perpetual
Adoration. Teenagers are making this commitment and they report having
more courage to say “no” to the peer pressures of the day, and boy,
there are peer pressures today for young people, things that I
certainly never had to face. If I did, I would have been, never mind.
I’d have been sitting out there, in the back with you.
Good things happen. The question is, “Why make this
commitment to spend an hour a week?” The reason is that Jesus asks us
to. The famous line, of course, regarding this is from the Passion of
Christ. After the last supper, He goes into the garden and He says,
“Can you pray with me for one hour?” His apostles keep falling asleep.
Finally, He says to Peter, “So you could not keep watch with me for one
hour?”
Really, the reason we need to do it is that we need to do
this, this one-on-one time with God. It’s the time, in my experience
and I’m sure yours as well, when one of the problems we have is
distraction in our own minds. I’m not the only one who suffers from
this, even in our dreams. I cannot tell you how many times I wake up
and go, “What was that about?” These crazy dreams and throughout the
day, it’s hard to concentrate, isn’t it? Thoughts in your head, out of
your head, “What was I doing?” You go into the next room and you forgot
what you picked up or what you intended to pick up. I know that with
the gray hairs, it is even worse and there are constant distractions.
This is an hour that you can put aside for quiet. Although the
distractions are still there, after a few moments, it settles down and
you can actually say the whole Our Father without thinking of something
else. I’m not talking about just me, I don’t think or maybe I am. Isn’t
it hard just to say the Our Father without thinking about what you are
going to have for lunch or . . . right?
“What will I do in that hour?” Well, you can pray the
scriptures, especially the Psalms. You know when Jesus walked the
earth, He carried a prayer book with Him and it was called a Psalter.
This book contained 150 Psalms of King David and we don’t understand
the Psalms but they are so important to our life in worship. They’re
important because we pray the Psalms in the spirit to the Father with
Christ or through him. In the liturgy, more and more of the lay people
are praying that as well. We pray the Psalms with Christ, the Father
hears the Psalm, and He sees His son in you and me praying together.
There are many different kinds of Psalms. There are Psalms for peace,
Psalms for war. There are Psalms for when you are ill, when you are
afraid, when someone you love has died. They are all in there and they
are very Jewish. In fact, the Psalm that we heard today, after mass, I
want to read the whole Psalm because it’s, “I love you, Lord my
strength.” Usually, the psalms go something like, “Oh I love you, what
a God you are. There is no other nation has a God like we’ve got a God.
You’re some God. By the way, I need something.” There is a structure.
They butter-up God and then they ask for some favor. God can’t say no.
He can’t because He loves us.
Pray the Psalms through Christ. You can just say the Jesus
prayer.
Jesus
Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
Just
say that over and over again and you’ll be washed with His mercy.
You can read the life of a saint. Try to know that saint as
your sister or as your brother and then together with that saint, pray
before the Blessed Sacrament because that’s what they’re doing. They’re
praying before the face of Christ that same Christ that is truly
present in the Eucharist.
You can speak to Jesus heart to heart, pray the rosary with
Our Lady, you can intercede for others. There’s nobody here today, if I
ask you the question, “Write the names of three people that you’re
concerned about, that you would like a favor from God for those three
people.” No one would have any trouble with those three names, would
they? Or five or ten names? Intercessory prayer is powerful. In fact,
if I have a need and you have a need, I think the best way that we can
pray is say, “Don, I’ll pray for you and you pray for me.” Oftentimes,
intercessory prayer is greater than our own personal prayer.
Also, you can just be there in Adoration. I tell a story
about an old man, who used to come by in Tijeras at Holy Child parish.
About every day, he would come by and spend an hour in front of the
Eucharist and he wouldn’t read anything. He would just sit there. One
time I said to this old Spanish fellow, I asked him. “What do you do?”
He looked at me as if I was crazy, “Well, I don’t know. I just sit
there. I look at Him and He looks at me and then I go home and I feel
better. Father, you should try it.” He was a holy old man and he spent
that hour with the Lord.
Throughout the New Testament and the Old Testament, marriage
is used to describe God’s relationship with his people, and that we are
the bride of Christ. In Hebrew Scriptures it is that we are the brides
of Yahweh, of the Father. The simple question is, “What happens in a
marriage when the husband and wife stop spending time with each other?”
Most of you know what happens. Do you need to spend time with your
beloved, with your spouse? Yes. You need also to spend time with your
God and this is an ideal way to do that.
I use the word commitment intentionally. We don’t like that
word. It kind of restricts us but I think it’s necessary to use it
because I think God loves commitment. Even sometimes, when we don’t
have all of our heart in what we are doing, we’re committed to it and
we’re obedient to our commitment. I know God delights in that. Of
course, there is some flexibility. If you could commit to one hour a
week at a scheduled hour and day there’s times when obviously you can’t
make it and there’s ways to get a replacement, etc. This is a very well
organized program that we are adopting and we have some wonderful
volunteers who will implement it.
Many people have said, “You know, I don’t think this will
work. We tried it once before and it didn’t work.” Someone said, “You
know sometimes, we have trouble filling just the 24-hour a month. We
have adoration from 1:00 on first Friday to 1:00 on first Saturday,
it’s sometimes challenging just to fill that up. So, how are we going
to do 168 hours a week if we have trouble with just one day?” Someone
else said, “We have many older parishioners who just can’t make those
kinds of commitments. People travel a lot and they’re out of town.” I
know that is true. I travel a lot too. In fact, I’ll be at a priest
meeting next week in Phoenix with Father Ray and Father Mike O’Neal at
a golf course.
I have heard our young people are too busy with school and
athletics. Maybe all these things are right, maybe this is not going to
work but I hope it will and I think you hope it will as well. We need
over 350 people to say yes to an hour a week. It is a big, big task.
Yesterday, I looked at, if you’ve ever seen this on the Internet, its
called An Interview With God. If you have not, just “Google” that up,
An Interview with God, and it will take you to a place. It’s a
beautiful meditation. They show various western scenes of our country
and there’s no words spoken. There’s nice soft music, and then there’s
just little quotes. It says:
“I dreamed I had an interview with God.” and then the screen changes
and it says, “so God says, ‘So you would like to have an interview with
me?’” The person says, “If you have time.” Then it says, “And God
smiled.” God has all of eternity. The question is not if God has time.
The question is, “Do you have time and do I have time?”
I hope you are able to say “yes.” After mass today, there’ll
be an opportunity to make a commitment. We have some volunteers who
will take your name. There’s also a sign-up on the Internet. You can
fill out the box and put your time in there as well. Please,
prayerfully consider this because I hope we can do it. I know if we do
that, our parish will grow in love of God and of each other.