BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Plans. All of us are familiar with plans. There are family plans, school plans, plans at work, travel plans, game plans, and all sorts of other plans. Our days are lived out in them. Even our fun times are planned… sometimes over-planned. Some people can’t stand plans. They want things to be spontaneous and enjoy the surprises that can come when things are unplanned. Others can’t stand to do anything, and I mean anything, without a plan. They need structure; they go nuts without structures. The world in which we live these days, with all of its many demands, requires us to plan ahead. Few of us have the luxury of unplanned holidays and vacations. Most of us cannot get away unless we plan time for getting away from all the tasks that face us in our everyday weeks, months, and years. In today’s Gospel we heard about the apostles who had been out preaching and had come back to Jesus to report about a

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Today’s readings prompt me to share some thoughts with you about choices, decisions, and commitments. Each and every day we consider choices presented to us, and then make our decisions. There comes a moment when our consideration ends and we raise a choice to the level of our wills, and thereby make it a freely chosen decision. A decision can be of a short-term sort, or one intended to last over a long period of time, perhaps a lifetime decision carrying a permanent quality – a “forever” decision. Some of those permanent decisions are raised to the level of vows. They are given and placed in the hands of God; they are made and given in God’s presence, power, and love. Being human we all suffer from a weakness imbedded deep within us, namely the original sin depicted in the story of our first parents, Adam and Eve. Their resolve was weakened, their choices and decisions were corrupted, their willpower

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) When you love someone, you want to be a part of the life of the one you love. Love seeks union, a union of heart, mind, soul, and life with your beloved. You want to belong. So much of life, perhaps all of life, is about belonging, the belonging that takes us to family reunions, weddings, anniversaries, and all those other special moments when once again we experience and share in each other’s lives. Texting, twittering, e-mailing, cell phone chatting, and all manner of other modern methods of being a part of the lives of others now abound. But they do not bring real belonging. That impetus to belong is ancient, as old as humankind. We hear those ancient echoes in today’s first reading: Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven columns; she has dressed her meat, mixed her wine, yes, she has spread her table. She has sent out her maidens; she calls from the heights out over the city:” Let w

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Recently I received an e-mail telling me about cactus plants, a topic that had not in the past provoked much interest on my part. After all, I pictured them to be gawkish and unattractive, although I have seen some cacti that appeared to have surrealistic heads and arms resembling human forms that exercised my imagination. Nevertheless, I read on. Pictures came as attachments to that e-mail, and when I opened them up and viewed those pictures, I was delighted to find that cacti produce stunningly beautiful blossoms, all of which brought me to reassess my judgments about cactus plants. Evidently there was a whole lot more to them than I thought. My “know-it-all” previous judgments about cacti completely blocked me from seeing the beauty that lay hidden within them. That lesson can be applied to the way we see people, especially people about whom we have a “know-it-all” attitude. All of us are familiar

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

Sermon on the Mount , Henrik Olrik, c. 1880. 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 ch

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 shame t