BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) God asked Abraham to leave his land, take everything and everyone with him and move to a new land. Later God asked Moses to take the Hebrews from Egypt into a promised new land. And Jesus? Well, He too had to leave Joseph and Mary back in Nazareth and begin his mission out on the road. Jesus once remarked: “The foxes have their dens and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” And when He was crucified and died, He didn’t even have a tomb of His own. One of the hardest things I face as a priest is not having my own home, a place I can call my own. My only home is the Church. My only family is all of you… along with all of the other members of Christ’s family throughout the world. Many people today experience homelessness. Lots of people, even young kids, live out in the streets. Many members of gangs belong to gangs because they are looking for family, for so...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) All of us know people of good character, people who have a reputation of being decent, respectful of others, law-abiders who lead good lives, or so they appear. We also know of some who, even though they enjoy a good reputation, turn out to be a whole lot less than we thought, some of them going on to bring terrible hurt to others and inflict real damage upon them. As the old saying goes, appearances are deceiving. Looking good does not mean that our hearts are filled with goodness. The scribes and Pharisees had a certain kind of goodness, even holiness. Jesus did not condemn them for the goodness they sought, rather He condemned them for what they did not have in their hearts. They had no depth. They governed their thoughts and actions by their external observance of the Jewish laws and how they appeared in the eyes of others. The love of God and the love of others that flows from our love of God nev...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) To be successful in achieving a goal we must take care at the beginning to determine the correct route, which of course, is obvious. What is not so obvious is to ask the right questions, the questions that will accurately focus us upon the right path. If we do not ask the right questions, we will not obtain the correct answers. When it comes to spirituality, we must ask some first questions. One is “Do we find God, or does God seek us out and then present Himself to us?” Another such question is “Do I construct the way to God, or do I accept the way God has given me?” Surrounding us is a huge array of spiritualties — Tibetan prayer wheels, sacred crystals, Tarot cards, Foursquare Christian Fellowship churches, mainline Protestant churches, Confucianism, and many others, not to mention numberless spiritualties presented in a wide range of Christian churches. We find ourselves in a gigantic Wall Mar...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) A critic once challenged me by declaring that my homilies were preaching a message of failure to a bunch of losers. He was suggesting that the Good News of Jesus Christ is directed at losers, not at winners. Today’s Gospel account in which we find Jesus giving us the Beatitudes provides us with a good background to take a look at winners and losers. As in so many things, a lot depends upon your viewpoint, the angle from which you are looking at things. St. Paul puts that issue into sharp perspective in today’s second reading which was taken from his letter written to very cosmopolitan and sophisticated Greeks living in Corinth: "Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters,” writes St. Paul, “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to sha...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left His hometown of Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that the prophecy of Isaiah might be fulfilled: "Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen. From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." In our times, what forms of darkness do we live in? The theme of light and darkness runs through the entirety of the Bible starting with the Book of Genesis all the way to the crucifixion and death of Jesus on His Cross. What is God’s word calling us to see in His light, not only in the history of our salvation that is presented to us in the ...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) If you go out into the North African desert with its rolling and shifting hills of sand, you will likely come upon quicksand. You can also encounter quicksand in our North American swamps, in our Florida Everglades, and even in some of our own inland lakes. Nearer to us you’ll find it in the marshy, reed-filled edges of Michigan’s inland lakes. Sometimes these spots are called sinkholes. They are pockets of loosely packed sand that has collected in a hole with a really deep bottom. There’s nothing solid at the bottom of these sinkholes. When you step into one you immediately begin to sink down and the more you thrash around the more it sucks you down until you are under the sand and then die of suffocation. Many people find themselves in spiritual sinkholes. They are being sucked down into alcoholism, drugs, sex, mistreatment of others, and other sorts of addictions. They are caught in behavior patter...