BIG C CATHOLICS

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 ) Shortly after He began His public ministry, Jesus went back to His hometown of Nazareth. What happened there was very sad. All of the familiar things and people were there — but it was far from being a happy homecoming. They gave Him the cold shoulder and He ended up leaving Nazareth forever. As St. Luke gives the account, the people there in Nazareth froze Him out and then tried to throw Him over a cliff. Why? The whole episode seems terribly strange to you and me. How could an entire town treat Him that way? They were not incredibly mean spirited. St. Mark didn’t give us this account in order to vilify the people of Nazareth. His reason for reporting this event was probably to show us that they were not so very different from you and me. Here we find them standing face to face with God’s very Truth made flesh and blood for us. Here was God offering himself in His only-begotten Son to people just li

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

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 bible but i

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