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January 20th Reflection

     The last class I took as a seminarian, forty-seven years ago, was a counseling internship through a local hospital. Specifically, I was interning if family therapy as part of the inpatient drug and alcohol treatment program. Each weekly session lasted about four hours and was intense and heart-wrenching. Family members and loved ones routinely confronted those in treatment, with the suffering their addiction had caused.

     Our staff supervisor often spoke to family members about the “tough love” that is needed in the face of addiction. For example, not enabling the person with the addiction and not sugarcoating the harm that was done to them and the pain they were feeling. He would often remind those in treatment: “You cannot just talk the talk; you have to walk your talk.” Talking about remorse is different from being remorseful. Talking about making amends is not the same as making them.

     St. John was saying the same thing centuries ago: “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”

     Our tradition teaches that love is not so much a feeling, as it is an act of the will. Love is to will the good of the other person, whoever he or she is. That, it seems to me, is the hinge upon everything turns.

True love is counter-cultural because it is the conscious choice to love and to will the good for those who are deemed unlovable. True love is cross-cultural because no one of any race, creed, color sexual orientation, ability or disability can be excluded from it. True love is having the wide, embracing, redeeming, and merciful love of Jesus.

 

 

Hear our prayer, O Lord: Bless, protect and sanctify all those who bow their heads before You.

Blessings. M+

January 5th Reflection

     A fresh span of twelve months stretches out before us now, like a blank canvas daring us to create something new. But we know all too well that the fresh hope of a new year can get dragged down by old habits that feel as comfortable as a well-worn sweater. This is the time when many of us get down to the business of making resolutions: pounds to shed, diets to clean up, social media to pare down. If we were honest, the resolutions probably sound a lot like the ones that we made last year.

     Why is that? Because surface-level changes do not feed our souls; true transformation requires us to dive deep and work toward an inner revolution instead. That requires prayer, complete surrender, and absolute trust that what God has in store for us is better than we can conjure up on a vision board.

     Even when we turn to God to help us take this monumental step, however, we often do so with a laundry list of expectations. We want transformation, but we want it on our terms. Maybe that is because we will not expect anything too grueling of ourselves.

     Once we put is in God’s hands, all bets are off. The path we are meant to walk, the person we are called to be, may require a freefall into a new of living. If you want proof of that, just look at some of the feasts we mark this month.

     We begin the year celebrating the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the ultimate example of surrender and trust in the face of the seemingly impossible. From there we mark the Epiphany, showcasing the Magi who came from afar trusting a star to lead them to the Messiah. Later this month we celebrate the Conversion of St. Paul, transformed from persecutor to true believer through a blinding flash an unlikely vision, and an even more unlikely baptism.

     Which is to say that nothing is unlikely or impossible once we get God involved, or, more accurately, once we open our hearts to God already in our midst just waiting to be invited and involved.

     To begin our revolutionary journey, we must ask ourselves “Why do we confuse ourselves by worrying?” We need to learn to leave the cares of our affairs to God and we shall find everything will be peaceful. We have God’s promise to us - that in every act of true, blind, complete surrender to Him – we will find the effects of we desire and the resolution to all difficult situations.

     True, blind, complete surrender, and faith – this is what God seeks from us. Like Mary, like the Magi, like St. Paul, and like so many others over the course of our faith history who have shown us with their very lives that the transformation that we seek cannot be found in a number on a scale or in a bank account: but only, by a message of hope that is written on our hearts, by the One who offers us the only real path to peace and joy.

     What if the only thing we need to do this year – is to surrender?

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Hear our prayer, O Lord: Bless, protect and sanctify all those who bow their heads before You.

​

Blessings. M+

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Christmas Reflections

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:


It is very difficult for us, if not impossible, to have a relationship that is intimate and binding, with an idea or a concept no matter how noble it might be. God understood this when He revealed Himself to us as a person and allowed us to see Him in the person of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. By sending Him to earth in the form of mankind, our heavenly Father fully revealed Himself to us. Jesus is, as St. Paul wrote, God "in human form" (I Timothy 316).


Jesus Christ made this point clear when He said to Philip, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 149). This is exactly what the good news of Christmas is - that God has shown us what He is like, in the person of His Son, and has invited us to establish a personal relationship with Him. The tiny infant that Mary cradled, in a Bethlehem manger, was the "visible likeness" of our invisible God (Colossians1:15).


As the day of Christmas approaches, let us be mindful of the words of the angel who told the shepherds, "This very day in David's town your Savior was born -- Christ the Lord!" (Luke 2:11). As we prepare to celebrate this Holy Day, let us not forget who Christ is. Looking into the face of our Savior we can see and meet the holiness, the grace and the love of our eternal and heavenly Father.


But if this is to happen; we must abandon, if even for a short time, the mindless and consuming pursuit of our worldly goals and follow the example of the shepherds who "hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and saw the baby lying in the manger" (Luke 2:16). And having come and met the child, they realized that they were gazing at God who came to this earth for our sake. That is why "the shepherds went back, singing praises to God for all they had heard and seen" (Luke 2:20).


Let us resolve to make this Christmas the day, in which we come to meet God in the person of Jesus Christ and prove to ourselves that Jesus Christ is Emmanuel - "God is with us" (Matthew 1:23). When the shepherds came, they discovered that "It had been just as the angels had told them" (Luke 2:20). This is the greatest gift that we may receive.


Faithfully Yours,

In Our Blessed Lord. M+

Advent IV

“Sometimes the mere sight of a holy image is enough to move and convert us.” St. John Vianney (1786-1859) “Curé d’Ars” –Priest and Confessor


“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” writes St. Paul, “and the greatest of these is love.”

I sometimes wonder if Paul had a hard time choosing the “greatest” among these three gifts from God. Certainly, I am a big fan of Love! But, after all, without faith we have no foundation. And to that end, without hope we would have no future.

Over forty-five years ago, as A young Deacon, I read something that upended my notion of hope, which until then I had taken for optimism – as in, “Do not worry! It will all work out!” The comment that I read was from Pedro Arrupe, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 -1983. He Said: “I am quite happy to be called an optimist, but my optimism is not of the utopian variety. It is based on hope. What is an optimist? I can answer for myself in a very simple fashion: He or she is a person who has the conviction that God knows, can do, and will do what is best.”

In other words, hope is grounded in God. It is not simply having a good attitude, as important as it is. It is based on a relationship with the Source of All Being, who comes to us the Savior whose birth we await during this season of Advent.

Hope is also a gift, something we must pray for. Even in our darkest moments, when it seems like God has forgotten us (which God never does) we are invited to pray for hope. And in that very prayer, we deepen our relationship with God, and again find hope.

- Fr. Michael Costanzo

Advent III

“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” writes St. Paul, “and the greatest of these is love.”

I sometimes wonder if Paul had a hard time choosing the “greatest” among these three gifts from God. Certainly, I am a big fan of Love! But, after all, without faith we have no foundation. And to that end, without hope we would have no future.

Over forty-five years ago, as A young Deacon, I read something that upended my notion of hope, which until then I had taken for optimism – as in, “Do not worry! It will all work out!” The comment that I read was from Pedro Arrupe, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 -1983. He Said: “I am quite happy to be called an optimist, but my optimism is not of the utopian variety. It is based on hope. What is an optimist? I can answer for myself in a very simple fashion: He or she is a person who has the conviction that God knows, can do, and will do what is best.”

In other words, hope is grounded in God. It is not simply having a good attitude, as important as it is. It is based on a relationship with the Source of All Being, who comes to us the Savior whose birth we await during this season of Advent.

Hope is also a gift, something we must pray for. Even in our darkest moments, when it seems like God has forgotten us (which God never does) we are invited to pray for hope. And in that very prayer, we deepen our relationship with God, and again find hope.

Fr. Michael Costanzo

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