Making a Joyful Noise through Lent 04/12/2014

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent – 04/12/2014

“Jesus’ whole life, his way of dealing with the poor, his actions, his integrity, his simple daily acts of generosity, and finally his complete self-giving, is precious and reveals the mystery of his divine life….Sometimes we lose our enthusiasm for mission because we forget that the Gospel responds to our deepest needs, since we were created for what the Gospel offers us: friendship with Jesus and love of our brothers and sisters. If we succeed in expressing adequately and with beauty the essential content of the Gospel, surely this message will speak to the deepest yearnings of people’s hearts.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel)

The words of Pope Francis today remind us of why we are faith filled people. They remind us of what Jesus has done for us and why. They remind us of the great gift we have as friends of God. But they also remind us of what we absent from the life of the religious leaders at the time of Jesus and why we now journey through this most Holy of Weeks. Let us not make the same mistakes as some made in failing to recognize God in their midst.

The stage is set today for Holy Week. All the characters are taking their places for the drama that will unfold throughout the coming week. The religious leadership has made its choice. They are afraid of Jesus, their comfortable life has been disturbed. Caiaphas has given the justification for the rest of their actions. He has put their social problems squarely on the shoulders of Jesus. He has put their leadership problems squarely on the shoulders of Jesus. He has put their fear and faithlessness squarely on the shoulders of Jesus.

With today’s Gospel (John 11: 45-56) we have a clear understanding of why all that we are about to reflect upon as we go through Holy Week has taken place. In many ways the ideal kingdom that Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37: 21-28) images in the first reading for today has not come about. There still is not just one God, one land, one people and one everlasting covenant of peace. We humans get in the way. We often fail to recognize God in our midst. We struggle to trust God’s presence in our life. We find it difficult to believe, to stake our lives on the promises of God. We are always looking for someone to blame, someone to sacrifice in the hope that things will get better.

As we prepare to begin this most holy of weeks let us take the time, not to plot against God, but to hear God’s word. Let us take the time to have faith in our relationship with God, to be joyful people of faith on the journey, to be hopeful in the promises of God and to allow the love of God to embrace us and live within us as we journey through life!

Saturday blessing to everyone and don’t forget to give God a little time this weekend and to make a joyful noise with your life!

Daily Lenten Prayer: Loving God, open our hearts to the hope of your promises. Give us faith filled hearts that recognize your presence in our life today and always. Grace our hearts so that they may be filled with your love and that we will share your love with all we meet. Deepen our faith, hope and love this day and always so that we will never reject you, so that we will always have faith, see with hope filled eyes, live your love and proclaim the joy of the Gospel with our lives! Amen!

A Runner’s Thoughts: Breath is usually expressed in Greek as pneuma, which can also mean air, wind, or spirit. In Hebrew ruah is translated as breath, but it can also mean creative energy or life-giving force. As we run let us have an awareness of our breath as spirit, as our capacity to bring God into our being as we take in oxygen into our lungs. If we see each breath this way we will begin to allow our runs to become prayer! (Adapted from Running the Spiritual Path by Roger Joslin)

Daily Blessing: Saturday Blessings to all! I pray that God will bless you with a restful and peaceful Saturday surrounded by friends and family, if not I pray your day will not be too busy.

As I said yesterday I head out again this noon time for some time with a group of Passionist Associates and then later this afternoon it is on to Cedar Knolls, NJ and Notre Dame of Mount Carmel Parish where I will begin a mission this evening. Holy Week is a wonderful week and I pray you will make some time this week to join the universal Church as we celebrate this profound journey of faith. Yes, I know life is busy but please try to make some time on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. You will not regret it. Remember a little time spent with God can make all the difference.

My prayers will be with all of you in a special way throughout this most Holy of Weeks. My prayer will be that God touches you with a special blessing that will enliven your faith, strength your hope, embrace you with love and fill your heart with the joy of the Gospel that you will proclaim by the living of your life.

I also ask your prayers for this humble preacher of God’s Joyful Word! It will be a very busy week for me but a good busy but I can use your prayers so that the Good Word which I will proclaim as a friend of God will always be a Joyful Word. Be well and safe this weekend and always. Peace in Christ’s Passion…Fr. Paul

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent 04/11/2014

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent – 04/11/2014

“The Christian ideal will always be a summons to overcome suspicion, habitual mistrust, fear of losing our privacy, all the defensive attitudes which today’s world imposes on us. Many try to escape from others and take refuge in the comfort of their privacy or in a small circle of close friends, renouncing the realism of the social aspect of the Gospel. For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel)

Pope Francis’ words today speak to the struggles that Jesus and Jeremiah have in our readings (Jeremiah 20: 10-13 and John 10: 31-42) today. Hopefully like Jesus and Jeremiah we will find comfort and strength in knowing that we are not alone that God is always with us!

Both Jesus and Jeremiah find themselves in difficult situations today. For Jeremiah it is the reality of begin a prophet, the people do not like what God is calling them to and so they are going to take it out on the prophet. For Jesus it is the reality that people just will not accept him. He has done many good things but people focus in on what they see as a problem, they look passed all the good, they only see the negative.

Isn’t that often the case, wonderful things can be happening yet people only focus on the negative. Whether we are talking about faith, church, religion, culture or society there can be many signs of hope, many actions that are good yet for some reason what is wrong, the negative, becomes the focus. We tend to look for what is wrong with a person, an experience or situation rather than what is right and good. At times it seems like we can make every positive story, situation, experience or person negative just give us time.

How can we overcome this? How can we be a positive life giving person today? How can we find the good and the hope in life? Well I think Jeremiah and Jesus give us the answer.

Jeremiah in the midst of his struggle says, “But the Lord is with me….” Yes, life isn’t exactly the best at this moment, things are not going so well, but God is with me! Jeremiah turns a negative into a positive. Jeremiah finds hope in a struggling moment.

Jesus reminds the crowd to look for and believe in good works. In other words find the goodness in the actions and works of yourself and others. Find what is right with the world, not what is wrong!

This is certainly a different way to live life and living this way will be challenged every day. The media and I realize that it is not just the media or all the media’s fault, but with its twenty four hour a day focus, its need to create news, it has helped us to constantly look for the negative. Let’s face it we like negative, we like seeing people’s faults and failings, negative stories that sell. The stories that most often seem to capture the attention of the viewers are those that focus of the negatives of life. We search and hunt for all that is wrong. We seem to take delight in pointing the finger, in bringing a person down rather than finding the good and building up.

Perhaps our challenge today is to look for the good work in ourselves and others and to believe that God is always with us!

Have a blessed Friday everyone and don’t forget to make a joyful noise with your life today!

Daily Lenten Prayer: Loving God, we thank you for this holy season of grace. Help us through your grace to see the goodness in ourselves and in others. Give us the strength to believe that you are always with us even when we struggle. Enliven our hearts with the gift of hope, a gift that we through the living of life can bring to the world. May your spirit of life, love, joy and hope always be within our hearts and help us to celebrate each and every day of our lives! Amen!

A Runner’s Thoughts: If we become meditative runners, prayerful runners, then we will be fortunate enough to find ways that refresh our bodies, our minds and renew our spirits, thus we might say we will be born again with every new run!

Daily Blessing: TGIF everyone! I hope you have had a good week. I am sure you are ready for the weekend. We enter the most sacred of all weeks in the Christian tradition this coming week. We call it Holy Week and it brings to a close this long journey of Lent. We begin with Palm Sunday and we make the journey through the week celebrating Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and we end with Easter Sunday. I hope you will give some time to God during these high holy days. This is a great week times to slow down a bit and allow the church to help you focus on your relationship with God. As the very least make some special time for prayer this week!

I will keep you in my prayer this week, which will be a busy one for me. Frist I head to St. Eugene’s Parish in Yonkers to give a talk at noon to a group of Passionist Associate and then I head to Notre Dame Parish of Mount Carmel, in Cedar Knolls, NJ tomorrow afternoon to begin a Holy Week Mission. I will be there from Saturday to Tuesday. The mission will be Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at 7:30 pm each day. Then then it will be on the St Barnabas Parish in the Bronx for the Triduum, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. I will preach the three Triduum Liturgies and celebrate and preach one of the 11:30 am Easter Sunday Mass. Yes, it will be a busy week but I love this week and I am so looking forward to it! Also I will be heading out Easter Monday for Jamaica, West Indies to give a retreat to the Passionist Volunteers International which will begin Easter Monday Evening and end the 2^nd Sunday of Easter.  So with the coming of Easter my work is still not done, in fact it is never done!

I pray today that God will bless all of you in a special way not just today but throughout the coming week. That is time will be rich in the presence of God and that you will find time to make today and the coming holy in your life. May you be blessed today with the joy, faith, hope and peace of our God who so loved the world that he gave us his only Son and if we believe God will give us the gift of eternal life. Blessings upon all today!

Be well everyone, have a great Friday and a restful and peaceful weekend. If you are in the area of Notre Dame of Mount Carmel Parish or St. Barnabas, come and join me in prayer. If not join me in prayer anyway as we journey through this most Holy of Weeks. If you are beginning Passover on Tuesday my prayers are with you also! Peace in Christ’s Passion…Fr. Paul

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent 04/10/2014

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent – 04/10/2014

“I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction”.

Thanks solely to this encounter – or renewed encounter – with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel)

The words of Pope Francis and Pope Benedict today touch on the theme of our scriptures. Who are we? What are we about? Seems to be the question asked in our readings (Genesis 17: 3-9 and John 8: 51-59). Abram is to become the father of a host of nations, his name is even changed from Abram to Abraham. He is redefined as a person because of his personal encounter with God. Abraham is now a friend of God.

Jesus does not make himself out to be just anybody, Jesus is “I AM” and if we believe we have the gift of eternal life. It is a hard pill for the religious leadership to swallow. Jesus is not able to break through their stony heart with this personal encounter, in fact they pick up stones to do away with him. They cannot be liberated from their narrowness or self-absorption.

Perhaps our challenge today is to renew ourselves in light of our personal encounter with Christ, to have faith in the covenant, to believe in Jesus as “I AM,” to trust in our friendship with God. We are challenged today to let God bring us beyond ourselves to attain the fullest truth of who we are so that we can live this day a God’s joy filled friends who share our joy with everyone we meet!

Have a blessed Thursday everyone and Don’t forget to make a joyful noise with your life!

Daily Lenten Prayer: Jesus, My Faithful Companion, As we live in your hope,

we commit ourselves today: to live deeply, with purpose, to live freely, with detachment, to live wisely, with humility, to live justly, with compassion, to live lovingly, with fidelity, to live mindfully, with awareness, to live gratefully, with generosity, to live  hopefully, with enthusiasm and joy, to live fully, in Your Love.

Help us to hold this vision and to renew it each day in our hearts, becoming ever more one with you, Our truest Self.  Amen.

A Runner’s Thoughts: “Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up.” (Dean Karnazes)

Daily Blessing: Happy Thursday everyone! I hope this finds you well and enjoying the beginning of a new day. If that is too optimistic for you, I hope this finds you well and beginning a new day with the hope of a good day or at least a day that will get better than this moment!

Our mission here at St. Mary’s had a great end last evening. As the days before it our closing day was spirit filled and energizing. As I have said earlier the faith community here at St. Mary’s is small but very faith filled!

I am feeling a little under the weather today, I think the winter and the busyness of life has caught up to me. I pray that whatever this is that I have is short lived as my schedule does not slow down any over the next two plus weeks. I cannot afford to be sick and today I am trying to tell myself that I am not. I will make the journey back to Pelham and get a little rest and hope that this too will pass!

Even though being under the weather I still have the strength to offer a prayer of blessing for all of you today. May God bless you with a day rich in faith, alive with hope and one that will embrace you throughout the day with God’s love. May God bless you with safe travels, with life-giving encounters, with an abundance of energy and with the richness of people who love you! Have a great Thursday everyone! Peace in Christ’s Passion…Fr. Paul

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent 04/09/2014

Making a Joyful Noise through Lent – 04/09/2014

“Sometimes we lose our enthusiasm for mission because we forget that the Gospel responds to our deepest needs, since we were created for what the Gospel offers us: friendship with Jesus and love of our brothers and sisters. If we succeed in expressing adequately and with beauty the essential content of the Gospel, surely this message will speak to the deepest yearnings of people’s hearts: “The missionary is convinced that, through the working of the Spirit, there already exists in individuals and peoples an expectation, even if an unconscious one, of knowing the truth about God, about man, and about how we are to be set free from sin and death. The missionary’s enthusiasm in proclaiming Christ comes from the conviction that he is responding to that expectation”. Enthusiasm for evangelization is based on this conviction. We have a treasure of life and love which cannot deceive, and a message which cannot mislead or disappoint. It penetrates to the depths of our hearts, sustaining and ennobling us. It is a truth which is never out of date because it reaches that part of us which nothing else can reach. Our infinite sadness can only be cured by an infinite love.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel)

Pope Francis’ words today remind us of what our life is about, the truth! It is Jesus’ message in the Gospel today and we see it lived out in our first reading from the Book of the Prophet Daniel. As Pope Francis says, the Word, the truth, speaks to the deepest yearning of our hearts, it is a treasure that we possess, a treasure of life and love. It is never out of date because it reaches us when nothing else can.

“If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Simple words of Jesus in today Gospel (John 8: 31-42) if only we could follow them. Sometimes the truth is the last thing we choose to speak. We think it complicates life. We think it causes more problems. We think it often hurts more than it helps. We think it should only be used as a last resort only when there are no other options. The truth seems anything but free at times to us!

Yet throughout his life and ministry Jesus only spoke the truth and every time we walk into a church or a Catholic home and see a crucifix on the wall we are reminded of where the truth got Jesus. We are reminded of the price he paid for coming into this world to speak the truth. We are reminded just how much God loves us.

Perhaps a different way of thinking about Jesus’ words in the Gospel today is that the truth has set us free. If only we would embrace it. If only we would follow the example of the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace (Daniel 3:14-20, 91-92, 95). If only we would realize the freedom that living by the truth means for our lives, the gift that it can be to ourselves and the world and the hope that it brings to life.

May we have the courage to speak and live the truth like the three young men and may the truth truly set us free to be the people God has created us to be!

Have a blessed Wednesday everyone and don’t forget to make a joyful noise with your life today!

Daily Lenten Prayer: O God of compassion, touch our hearts this day with the spirit of your truth. Grace us with strength so that we might stand in the midst of the fire of life with a faith ground in your Word, a hope enlivened by your truth and freedom grounded in your love. Amen!

A Runner’s Thoughts: When we run in a spiritual way, we are brought into the process of God-ing. Meaning as we run we are not moving toward God but interacting with God along the way. Our run becomes a direct physical, emotional and spiritual way of becoming who we are, our authentic selves. In the process we open up vast and unlimited opportunities to connect with God in new, life giving ways!

Daily Blessing: Happy Wednesday everyone! Yes, it is “hump day” once again. I have to say when I am on the road the weeks seem to go rather fast! We will be finishing up the mission here at St. Mary’s today both in the morning and evening. it has been a good mission, as one person last night, “We are not a big community but we are a faithful one!” I might say it a little differently, what we had this week was quality not quantity! I think as a preacher sometimes missions like this one are good for my soul, they humble me and keep me connected with what my ministry is really about, making a joyful noise! As we bring the mission to a close please keep the faith community here at St. Mary’s in your prayers and if you have a little extra time please add a prayer for their preacher.

I hope and pray your day will not be too busy and that you get a little chance to enjoy the sun and warmer temperatures that is if you are lucky enough to have both of them where you are. I really think that spring is upon us but I hesitate because you just never know if the cold is done for good!

I will be missing the taping of the Sunday Mass today. I hope all goes well for everyone gathered at St. Malachy’s in Manhattan today. May there time go smoothly and without too many re-takes! Sorry I am not with you.

My prayer of blessing this morning is that we may all encounter many good people today and have may good experiences that will be rich in the presence of God. I pray that God will bless us all with the grace to see, feel and experience the goodness and joy of life in what we do today, in who we meet today and perhaps most importantly in ourselves as we live this day.. May our day be rich in God’s blessings! Peace in Christ’s Passion…Fr. Paul