BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) As we prepare for the Nativity of our Lord the issues that surround us this Advent season are enormous. Once more this year we struggle to find peace – peace among the nations and among ethnic groups, peace in our own homeland, and peace between two civilizations, Muslim and Western. The now forty-year-old drug problem still plagues us here in our country. On the one side there are those who grow drugs along with those who market them for vast sums of money, and on the other hand there are those who buy and use drugs. How can we put an end to the mutual addiction, this gigantic co-dependency, involving both greed for money and need for drugs? There are other problems too – the decline of the nuclear family, lack of housing for many, abuse of children, dysfunctional families, the control of gun sales, and on, and on, and on. These problems are many and are seemingly so intractable that we’re tempted to th

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) There is a hidden theme in today’s Liturgy that reverberates deep within us, a quality to the readings in this Mass that speaks to things at work deep within our hearts and souls. It is, I think, the vision that in a world filled with chaotic and terrible things there still exists the possibility of a good life, a life filled with justice, peace, goodness, wholesomeness, beauty and the things of God. Godliness is possible in a world where it seems to be almost impossible. At a time when the Jews were being held in captivity far distant from their homeland and Jerusalem we hear in today’s first reading the Prophet Baruch proclaim: "Up, Jerusalem! Stand upon the heights; look to the east and see your children gathered from the east and West at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be leveled. The windings shall

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) We spend enormous amounts of our resources, time, and energy on things that give us a sense of security. We buy expensive insurance policies to protect ourselves from any and every sort of disaster. We have high-tech alarm systems in our businesses, homes, and automobiles. Some of us work and even live in buildings surrounded with security fences. Closed circuit television eyes balefully stare at every living thing from the nooks and crannies of our habitats continually recording every movement. And still we are not secure. Moreover, no amount of money, protection systems, medical effort, or bodyguards can protect us from the ultimate confrontation we each will individually face. For each one of us, you along with me, will one day stand face to face before Christ at the end of our earthly existence. Yet we live our lives awash in distractions, busily engaged in a whole lot that’s seemingly very important to

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) It is no secret that there is widespread distrust of authority these days, a distrust of our basic institutions and their leaders that, in many cases, arises from understandable reasons. In reaction, personal individualism has been advocated to such an extreme that for many people the only acceptable authority is the individual self. The only authority that I will allow to tell me what is right and what is wrong is myself. Many are therefore uncomfortable with idea of Christ as ruler. With the exception of a fascination with England’s royal family we balk at the idea of kings and queens, believing them to be either oppressive or no longer relevant. The titles of “lord” and “king” for Christ are unsettling for some folks because they believe that such titles are borrowed from oppressive and irrelevant systems of government. I am troubled by all of this hesitancy because it casts Christ as being a threat. But

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) "My world has come crashing down." You’ve heard those words spoken by others around you who have faced calamities, real or imagined. Many of you have, I am sure, in the midst of your own tears uttered those words. Every year at this time the Church has us deal with the apocalyptic, those terrible endings we face in our own personal lives, as well as cataclysmic endings of our collective civilizations and our human epochs and eras. History is replete with them. Questions and concerns about the end of the world abound in our day as they have throughout past. Is there an asteroid headed directly at us? Will the sun burn out? Will we all be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust? Concern about the end of the world and the coming of God’s Messiah was very intense when Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene. The wise men who came from the east following the star were concerned with that question. Many thought J

Fr. Charles Irvin 1 Kings 17:10-16; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44 Some time ago I learned of a woman who as a child was crippled by polio. She became angry with God and was mean, nasty, and angry with everyone around her. She became a miserable human being. By chance one day she came into contact with members of a parish who gave her a whole lot of love. She returned to that parish every Sunday and eventually joined it because there she found a lot of love from a lot of people. Her frozen heart warmed up. She found the freedom to “walk the spiritual walk” even though her body remained crippled. As time went by, the parish entered into a campaign to raise funds. The woman surprised her family at that year’s family Thanksgiving Dinner by announcing that she was giving $45,000 to the parish in their building campaign. Her family was stunned. When they asked her where she was going to get all that money, she told them that throughout all her years since childhood she had been savin

Fr. Charles Irvin Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28-34 HEAR O ISRAEL, THE LORD IS OUR GOD, THE LORD ALONE! This cry struck a deep chord in the true sons and daughters of Israel. Throughout their long and turbulent history this cry always forced the Jewish people back to a consciousness of their origins and their national purpose. This was the cry of Moses when God first formed the Israelites into a nation. It is the First Commandment… the re-forming commandment when every restoration of Judaism was needed. There came a time when ideas and concepts about God and about who He was were attempted to be concretized. All such attempts, both long ago, and even now, fail. They fail because God is free to be who He is in His mystery and cannot be restricted by our human and limited conceptualizations. For instance, there came a time when the Jewish people saw God as exclusively identified with the Promised Land, with the land flowing with milk and honey. Only those living

Fr. Charles Irvin ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Back in the late 1700’s a man named John Newton, an alcoholic libertine and a man committed to destroy the Christian faith, was by the grace of God, rescued, restored, healed, and given the sight to see what he was and what God wanted him to be. He wrote a hymn with words you will recognize: "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see." We could spend the rest of this day discussing the various types and forms of blindness along with answering the question “Who is really blind, and who really sees?” From my perspective, the most debilitating form of blindness is that found in folks who think they see the truth when they really don’t. There’s no more pitiable form of blindness than one who thinks he or she has all of the right answers, who thinks he or she knows all that one needs to know about God, about Jesus Christ, about the Chu

Fr. Charles Irvin Today’s readings present us with the question “Why is there suffering?” For those of us who believe there is a God, the question then becomes “Why does God permit suffering? Does God inflict suffering upon us, as some scripture passages suggest, or is suffering permitted by God due to the nature of the world He has created? Given the fact that I have only ten or fifteen minutes in which to address those questions, I will not even attempt to answer them here. Any answers I might give you in this short period of time would be simplistic at best, thus inviting simplistic responses, all of which would not be helpful us and would only expose us to ridicule from those who do not believe in God at all. I will therefore deal today with the question “How do we respond to the fact of suffering?” Do we respond passively and simply stoically accept suffering when it comes our way, or do we actively face it and even enter into it so as to come out on the other side as better

Fr. Charles Irvin Wisdom 7:7-11; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30 We have all heard the phrase: “Money is the root of all evil.” But scripture never calls money inherently evil. In fact, wealth is often portrayed throughout God’s Word as a blessing from the Lord. Think of Abraham or Solomon or other biblical figures. Matthew was a rich man. So was Zacchaeus. In today’s gospel reading about the rich young man we find St. Mark reporting: Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ The bible reports several people whom Jesus especially loved. One was Lazarus, the man He raised from the dead. Jesus, the gospels tell us, loved him along with his sisters, Martha and Mary. St. John the Apostle was another Jesus especially loved. Several times he is referred to as “the one Jesus loved”, or the Beloved Disciple. And there was of course His own mothe

Fr. Charles Irvin Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-12 Jewish sages wrote the Book of Genesis as a series of meditations on the origin of the universe and the genesis of humankind. A popular form of Jewish writing was employed setting forth very profound ideas in simple forms of storytelling. Everything happened, they told us, because a caring and loving Creator in the beginning willed it so. All that has happened comes from His personal love and inner drive to share Himself. All lovers know of that inner drive. God did not create anything by chance – everything is purpose made, especially man and woman who are created in God’s own image and likeness so that He can share Himself with them as He does with no other creatures. He breathed His life, Genesis tells us, only into man and woman, not into His other creatures. Note that the creation of man was prior to the creation of any other form of life. Into man God breathed His Spirit, His very life and love. Then God creat

Fr. Charles Irvin Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48 Who’s in, and who’s out? That’s a question that cuts through so many areas in our lives these days especially in this political season. Here are a few for instance: What do the opinion polls tell us about the standings of those who are running for the presidency of the United States? Who’s in, and who’s out? How should we treat undocumented aliens? What benefits of U.S. citizenship should they enjoy, and what should they not be entitled to in our legal system and governmental social service programs? Who’s in, and who’s out? Which student applicants should be admitted and which should not be admitted to our public universities and what criteria should be applied to them? Some Catholics are busily concerned with “Who is a real Catholic and who is not?” Some Fundamentalist Christians are busily concerned with “Who is going to hell and who’s going to be saved?” Who’s “in” and who’s “out”? We hear si