Are You Alive? Do You Love?

Two homilies for the celebration of Ash Wednesday

Are You Alive?

Delivered to the students and faculty of Calvert Hall College

I spent more than three quarters of my life not understanding Lent. When I was much younger, I thought Lent was about making myself miserable for six weeks so that I could make grown-ups happy. When I got a little older, I remember thinking that Lent was some kind of competition with my friends organized by the Catholic Olympic committee to see who could make themselves the most miserable for 40 days. And then—for a few, more mature years—I thought Lent was about making myself miserable so that I could grow closer to Christ . . . and that’s a better formulation, maybe, but still off the mark. 

Here is what I finally figured out a few years ago: Lent isn’t about misery at all. Lent is not about Roman Catholics becoming skilled in the ways of human sadness; not at all. St. Benedict tells his monks “to look forward to Easter with the joy of spiritual longing” during Lent. What a thought: That Lent has something to do with the experience of joy. Here is the truth I wish I had known for myself all those years ago: The season of Lent is all about joy. And the season of Lent is about freedom. So, here is my claim: The season of Lent is about the freedom to experience joy in our lives. 

Imagine the joy of Christ’s closest friends on Easter morning. Have you ever lost a friend? Or has someone whom you loved ever died? Has anyone ever suddenly and dramatically departed from your life? We all know something of the pain and sorrow of Christ’s closest friends when they thought their friend was dead. We really do. But do we know their joy? The joy of being united with their friend again. The joy of realizing that their teacher—their messiah—had conquered death. The joy that comes from the conviction that life somehow, in some way, would never be the same again because God has demonstrated the power of his love. Easter morning is a moment of the most profound joy. 

We can have that joy for ourselves. We really can. St. Thomas teaches that we experience joy in two ways: First, by being with someone whom we love, and second, by knowing that someone whom we love is doing well. Christian joy is all about relationship—not chasing down fun experiences for ourselves or escaping from the tedium and hardship of life in whatever way we think will make us “happy.” Those experiences, those escapes, they never last. Christian joy is all about relationship, and the very height of Christian joy comes by way of a relationship with God. The promise of Christ is that in these lives of ours we can love God and be with God, and we can trust absolutely in his love for us and know, experience, that he is with us. The promise of Christ is that we can have real, authentic joy in our lives. We can love God, and we can be with the one we love. 

But here is where freedom comes into play: We need the freedom to experience joy in our lives. There is another way of saying that: We can’t give ourselves over completely to a relationship when there are places in our lives in which we are not free to give. And we all have those places in our lives. What are the chains that bind you? What holds you back from giving yourself away wholeheartedly? What are your vices? What kinds of addictions have you in their grip? What about worry and anxiety? Or loneliness and despair? The stress of trying to do well, or the stress of not doing well enough. Tension and discord and brokenness with family or friends. What are the chains that bind you? How are you not free? What will keep you from experiencing the joy of Easter morning? Because there is your Lenten project. There are your next 40 days. The promise of Christ is that when we get invested in our own good, we can work toward freedom—the freedom to experience the joy that comes from being with God.

Now, there was another version of this homily. And I sent it to a friend to get some feedback. My friend told me that if I’m going to tell you all about the freedom to experience joy in your lives, then I need to give you a way to find that kind of freedom for yourselves. I can’t just tell you that something is possible. I need to tell you how it’s possible. That’s pretty great advice. 

Here is what I came up with: Real, authentic freedom is good. And we’re told that evil is the absence of good. Evil shows up in spaces where there is not good in our lives. Now, death is evil. We know that too. And we also know that life is the opposite of death. So, it seems to me that if freedom is good . . . and evil shows up in spaces where there is an absence of good in our lives . . . and death is evil and is the opposite of life and so life is good . . . then the key to authentic Christian freedom is to live. There’s a chance that some of that makes sense. And maybe you don’t find it helpful yet. 

But let me ask you a question: Are you really alive? Are you really living? Are you completely and wholeheartedly invested in the best parts of life? Do you fill your life with the very best kinds of relationships? The kinds of relationships that form you and raise you up and make you a better person? Do you fill your life with the pursuit of the kinds of excellences that are worth having? The kinds of excellences that open you up to the world, and that open you up to yourself, and that open you up to God. The kind of excellences that draw you out of yourselves and make demands on you and require you to sacrifice and give and stumble and fall and pick yourself back up again. Do you fill your life with the adventure and the beauty that is out there in the world? The kind of beauty and adventure that can overwhelm you and fill your hearts with passion and longing for everything that is good and true and worth having in your life. Are you alive? Are you really living? 

Those are fair questions. Because we human beings are proficient at not-living. We let ourselves stay bored. We get disengaged. We form bad, sometimes destructive, relationships. We get casual with the pursuit of excellence. We grow numb to beauty and reduce adventure to cheap thrill seeking. And these days if you so desire you can jump onto social media and live in a space that isn’t real and become practiced in the art of not-being-alive. We human beings are proficient at not-living.

But here is the Gospel truth: If we aren’t really living, and life is good, then there is an absence of good in our lives. And in that dead space we become less free. And if we aren’t free, then we won’t experience the joy of being with God the way Christ’s closest friends did on Easter morning. So, here is another way of talking about Lent: Go live. Go be alive for 40 days and cut out the dead space and discover for yourself the freedom to experience joy in your life. 

Do You Love?

Delivered to the students and faculty of Mount de Sales Academy

The world is a very large place, but sometimes we do all that we can to make the world very small. The world becomes small, it seems to me, whenever our lives—our problems, our desires, our hopes, our passions—become the focus of our attention. We make the world small by placing ourselves in the center of a new world we have created, and then, all the sudden, we find ourselves trapped in a space from which we cannot escape. The world we build for ourselves becomes a prison—the walls of our problems and desires and hopes and passions become too tall to climb over and too thick to tear down. And so, life becomes very hard for us.

There was a time when I lived in a very small world. Maybe for most of my life, my problems and my desires and my hopes and my passions consumed me. Sometimes my world was small because of good old-fashioned selfishness: My desires simply mattered to me more than the desires of other people. Sometimes my world was small because in our world today we too often use the language of pursuing excellence to justify our self-regard. Work hard, study, get the grades, train for the big competition, practice your instrument, get to adoration, pray a rosary, fix your problems, do everything you can not to sin—spend enough time pursuing those kinds of excellences without the proper perspective in life and suddenly the world becomes very small. You become the focus of most of your attention.

Let me give you a good example of what I mean. When I started at seminary, my classmates and I were told that continued vocational discernment through prayer mattered a great deal. We needed to keep praying that God would make clear his desires for our lives. We needed God to make clear to us that we were called to a life of simplicity and celibacy and obedience. We needed God to reveal to us our weaknesses and ask for the grace to overcome these weaknesses so that we might serve the Church, the people of God. I did what I was told. And maybe halfway through the year, I realized that my prayer life had become stagnant—it was dry, dead, I couldn’t pray. I no longer wanted to pray. I took my problem with prayer to my spiritual director at the time, Fr. Michael Roach, who in time really became more of a spiritual father to me. I described my problem with prayer. Fr. Roach asked me: When is the last time you prayed for other people? There in that moment I realized that I had not prayed for another person in weeks. My vocation and my discernment had become the center of my prayer, and slowly but surely the world of my spiritual life had become very small. My pursuit of excellence cut me off from the world around me.

The world became a very large place for me again because of charity: Good old-fashioned love. The Archdiocese sent me to live in South America for half a year, and the experience of living as a stranger in a strange land forced me to invest in the lives of other people in a new way. Maybe there was some self-regard—a little selfishness—there at the start (I really was just trying to survive during those first weeks), but in time my life became inextricably bound up with the lives of other people. The problems of other people mattered to me more than my own problems, and in time I learned that the answer to most of my problems was more love, more charity.

I met a young woman named Natalia at the local parish where I lived. Natalia had three young children from three different fathers, lived in the worst kind of poverty, and desperately wanted conversion for herself and for her family. And how did Natalia go about the work of conversion? Natalia loved deeply. Her own children, sure, but week after week, this woman who worked countless hours to provide for her children and seemed to just be hanging on in life found the time to serve the Church. She taught children about Jesus on Saturday mornings; she cared for the sick when she could, or helped other families in need who belonged to the parish; she gave countless hours to help us organize important parish events for Advent and Christmas. And what I came to realize was that Natalia mirrored her Christian life on the lives of the priests who served the parish, priests who genuinely lived alongside the people entrusted to them, priests who mirrored their lives on Christ better than any I had met before in my life. What was there for me to do but to try and live like those who seemed to genuinely want to live like Christ? Most days, I don’t think I get it right, the life of love and charity. But the world now seems very large to me—the world seems enormous to me, honestly, a reality far greater than I can understand and deeply good and remarkably beautiful—and my life seems like a very, very small part of it.

Many of you might live in a world that is too small because your problems and your desires and your hopes and your passions are the focus of your attention. And sometimes your self-focus comes with the very best of intentions: You are pursuing excellences, virtues, and talents and skills and accomplishments that you must possess to live a good life. But the pursuit of excellence in life, severed from the work of love and charity, will leave you trapped in a space from which you cannot escape. The walls of your prison will be too tall to climb over and too thick to tear down. And let me tell you something important: When your world is too small, your problems seem very large. You can’t ignore them. Getting the right perspective allows your problems to be smaller. You gain a better grip on them as a result. And you begin to see that yes, you can resolve many of the problems that confront you.

The season of Lent, I think, is given to you so that you might tear down those walls of self-regard and self-focus. We talk about Lent as six-weeks for prayer and fasting and almsgiving. Fair enough. My challenge to you is that for the next 40 days you let your prayer focus on the lives of other people—their needs and their well-being. My challenge to you is that for the next 40 days you let your fasting be for the good of other people—offer it up, your penance, and not for yourself but for someone who needs grace. My challenge to you is that for the next 40 days you get serious about your almsgiving—no simple promises to do something nice for a parent or a friend once a day. Go find someone to love who genuinely needs your charity, someone whom you otherwise would never love, and love them. Give of your time. Change your routine. Make a choice to live differently for these next six weeks.

Use these 40 days to break free from the walls of your prison of self-regard and self-focus. A few years ago, I found myself at a monastery for Ash Wednesday, the Abbey of Gethsemane. The Abbot of the monastery told a story in his homily, an ancient story that goes back to the first centuries of the Church, about the general of an army who wanted to capture a fortified city. The walls of the city seemed too tall to climb over and too thick to tear down from the outside. So, the general surrounded the city. He laid siege to the city. He cut-off the city from its food and water supplies. The citizens of the city starved and grew thirsty, and in time there was no need to tear down walls or climb over them. The gates of the city opened, and the city was conquered. The Abbot gave us the metaphor we needed: The city is our own will—our problems and our desires and our passions and our hopes—and prayer and fasting and almsgiving are the tools by which the city of our selfishness is conquered.

The world is a very large place, but sometimes we do all that we can to make the world very small. Love, it seems to me, real Christian charity, is the only way for us to discover the enormity and the goodness and the beauty of the world. Go lay siege to the prisons of your hearts for the next 40 days and maybe after Easter, let me know if the world seems larger to you.