BIG C CATHOLICS

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 Revelation 7:2-4; 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12 They didn’t set out each day to change the world. They didn’t think of themselves as persons of power, people who could influence our culture and the powerful media elite or the shapers of public opinion. They didn’t want to do anything more than simply go to work, do their jobs, care for their families and maybe help a few other people besides. Most, if not all of them, would wince if anyone called them saints. Most if not all of them would rather be thought of as ordinary folks, people who just wanted to do their job and do it with caring concern for people other than themselves. So, then, what is holiness? And who are saints? Perhaps we need to change our mental pictures of who they are and how they behave. And perhaps, too, we should examine what we think God wants of us. These Beatitudes we just heard. Did we hear them or did we just listen to them without hearing? Note that these Beatitudes speak of

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

Msgr. Bernard Bourgeois Americans like things summed up easily and in few words. We like short news bytes and easy to understand directions that pop up on our phones. Simple, quick, and easy are words we live by. At first glance, today’s Gospel from Mark offers such a summary for today’s Catholic. A scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Here is Jesus’ answer: " You shall love the Lord, your God , with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: " You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments." Simple, quick, and easy—love God and love neighbor. It sums up everything Jesus teaches and is thus the center of the law of Christ. As anyone who takes faith seriously knows, these two commands of Christ are anything but simple, quick, and easy. They’re easy to say and even to believe; they are some

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