BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) What’s the one of the big things that has preoccupied you since you were a child and throughout all of the years that have followed? Isn’t it fear of rejection ? Recall your early days as a child. Even as a tiny baby you screamed, shrieked, and cried if you were not held, cuddled, and loved by your mother and your father. As a child you craved to play with playmates and you were miserable if they didn’t want to play with you. And when you were a teenager? Well, words can’t begin to describe the pain and fear teenager experiences when faced with rejection. When parents divorce isn’t a child’s primal fear and first thought that one or the other parent is rejecting him, particularly the parent who because of the divorce is forced to leave the child’s home? In divorce kids imagine they’re being rejected even though that isn’t the case. Sometimes we’re so obsessed with the fear of rejection that we trea...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) I want to begin today by putting in front of us some phrases I am sure you have all heard. “Talk is cheap, it’s actions that count.” “You have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.” “Actions speak louder than words.” There are those who will haughtily dismiss these thoughts as mere truisms. It is probable that those who dismiss them want to avoid paying attention to how these thoughts apply to their relationships with others. You and I have all been hurt by promises given and then broken. Some of us have been given sweet talk and words of love only to later discover that we were, in the name of love, only used. On other occasions we have been given words that have hurt us, really hurt us, not because they were nasty but because we relied on them and were later betrayed. What was the setting for today’s Gospel account about the two sons? Jesus had the day before thrown the moneychangers out of the...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) How often do you hear the cry “It isn’t fair?” It is, of course, a complaint you hear many times from children and teens. Students complain their teachers aren’t fair with their exams. Some adults and parents complain that giving grades on performance isn’t fair. How often do parents tell us that teachers aren’t fair? And what about university admissions policies, are they fair or unfair? The Hurricane Katrina disaster brought forth a host of concerns about fairness. So, too, in follow-ups from other natural disasters. Capitalism, we are told, isn’t fair. In the name of fairness, socialism and communism were tried and found not to be fair. The Church, we are often told, isn’t fair. The way it treats women isn’t fair, we are told. The way it appoints bishops isn’t fair. The way it treats victims of abuse isn’t fair, nor is the way it deals with priests who have broken the law and grievously sinned...

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) The classic format for writing a drama is to present it in three acts. So let’s look at today’s Gospel account in that format. Act I – Balancing the Books. We have here a debtor who owes his master ten thousand talents. Now a talent was an amount of money equal to one thousand denarii, and a denarius was a Roman silver coin equal to one day’s labor. Doing the arithmetic, the amount of the debt equaled ten million days’ wages. Responding to the debtor’s request the king, in an act of subtle sensitivity, changes the obligation from a debt to a loan. Did you notice that in the reading? It tells us: “Moved with compassion the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan.” What is striking is that the debtor didn’t ask for forgiveness, he asked only for time to pay it back. Was he nuts? He must have been! How could he possibly think he could pay back the huge obligation he owed his master? S...