Homily: Tuesday, 17th Week in Ordinary Time (Sts. Joachim and Anne)

Sometimes, although I intend to preach, things change and a homily gets set aside. That's what happened on Tuesday.  I thought I'd go ahead and post my Tuesday homily, anyway. It follows...

Readings: Jer 14:17-22 • Ps 79 • Mt 13:36-43

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Today we celebrate the memorial of our Blessed Mother’s parents, Joachim and Anne. Their names appear nowhere in Scripture. Indeed, everything we know about them, including their names, comes from tradition. But based on what we know of Mary – her courage, her decisiveness, her deep faith, her goodness – comes not only from the grace of her immaculate conception, but also from the example and love of her parents.

When I think of Joachim and Anne, I can’t help but think also of my ancestors over many generations – men and women, parents, who in far more difficult times than we face today, managed to raise faithful children, who went on to do the same. And so, we honor this couple today who raised the Mother of our Lord.

Speaking of difficult, challenging times, the prophet Jeremiah describes a time of famine and death before the Babylonian captivity in 587 B.C. As a prophet chosen by God, Jeremiah was heartbroken. He had warned the people about what was coming, warning them also not to listen to the false prophets and priests. We can sense Jeremiah’s distress, and hear his call and the cry of the people:  

“We were hoping for peace – no good came of it! We wait for a time of healing – but terror comes instead!” [Jer 14:19]

And yet, at the same time, Jeremiah doesn’t hide the cause of it all, and admits the sinfulness of generations:

“We recognize, O LORD, our wickedness, the guilt of our fathers; that we have sinned against you.” [Jer 14:20]

Yes, “Why have you struck us a blow that cannot be healed?” [Jer 14:19]

Have you ever felt like that? Wondering, during difficult times, if God really hears your prayer. But it’s precisely in such times that we need to sense God’s closeness and His love. It’s in such times, when life seems to hang by a thread, that we turn to our God, lacking words, but trusting in the Spirit’s inexpressible groanings…it’s in such times that God’s Presence is almost overwhelming. It's then, too, we gaze up at the Cross and begin, once again, to realize the depth of God’s love for us.

Yes, our lives are complicated, aren’t they? Wheat and weeds growing together, each seeking to overwhelm the other. I have a neighbor, a master gardener, whose yard and gardens are absolutely, beautifully perfect. Everything’s in its proper place. It’s a showcase, the envy of the neighborhood…unless, like me, you have better things to do. His garden might be beautiful, but it’s so very different from God’s garden.

In God’s yard and garden, in His fields, He lets everything, weeds and wheat, entangle. The rows are uneven, a seemingly careless and unplanned mixture of diverse plants and weeds, all swaying in the breeze. God’s garden is basically a mess. It’s a chaotic, apparently disorganized collection of plants, some nice, some not so nice.

It’s really very much like our lives, a confusing mixture of the good and the not-so-good. Oh, we’d like it to be perfect, and as time passes, we struggle to make things better, trying to pull the weeds, but some always remain, don’t they?

Grain ripens and bends toward the sun. And then our merciful Sower stretches out the growing season. He gives us, well, some of us, anyway, a little more time. Allowing us to prepare for the harvest, when judgment unfolds.

Now, as I contemplate today’s Word of God, I simply ask Him not to weigh our failings. For Your sake, Lord, send help quickly. We need it.

Saints Joachim and Anne…Pray for us.

 

More thoughts…

Just some more spontaneous thoughts that come to me as I sit for four hours in a very uncomfortable chair waiting for dentists to finish their work on Dear Diane. These dentists at the University of Florida are a wonderful, competent team of professionals, and the long sessions have taught me how to deal with what promises to be hours of near fatal boredom. Interestingly — and why it’s interesting will become evident shortly — Diane’s dentists earned their undergraduate degrees abroad.

My subject today probably came about because I’m sitting in a building in Gainesville, Florida surrounded by other buildings of this major university. Perhaps these thoughts penetrated my aging brain through a kind of osmosis. Anyway, here goes…

Parents today, who pay huge amounts of money for their child to attend an Ivy League college, or really almost any college or university, are throwing their money away. Our colleges and universities, sadly with only a few exceptions, have completely abandoned their role as institutions of higher education. Not too many years ago colleges and universities actually educated their undergraduate students, providing them with a firm foundation in the “liberal arts.” Students learned to express themselves orally and in writing, to understand our place in the history of humanity, to become acquainted with the philosophies that formed that history, to recognize the greatness and the weakness in the lives and work of those who came before, to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics and science, and to appreciate the world’s great literature and art. This liberal education provided students with the knowledge and skills needed to live productive lives in a free society and prepared them for further professional education or specialized training in a variety of fields. In other words, they learned to think and to reason, and to do so with discernment.

Russell Kirk (1918-1994), the great conservative thinker, wrote that liberal education “defends order against disorder…works for order in the soul and order in the republic. Liberal learning enables those who benefit from its discipline to achieve some degree of harmony within themselves.” And St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) stated that through a liberal intellectual discipline “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom, of what…I have ventured to call the philosophical habit of mind.” 

But today, many of our colleges and universities have completely abandoned liberal education and instead have devolved into mere indoctrination centers where young minds, already preconditioned by the ideological garbage they’ve been force fed in many high schools, become thoroughly radicalized. Lacking a real education, college students instead become Lenin’s “useful idiots” who can easily be led and controlled by those who seek power. With breathless adoration too many of today’s students unquestioningly accept whatever their radical professors tell them, and zombie-like they follow their handlers into the streets. By the time they graduate, useless degrees in hand, they despise the civilization that allows them to express the hatred they’ve been taught. 

Most parents, however, don’t have a clue and will continue to fund this first phase of societal suicide. Their children may be “woke,” but parents are the ones who need to wake up. Unfortunately too many have been willing to abdicate their responsibility for the education of their children and willingly allow others to teach their children to hate not only their nation and Western Civilization, but also the parents who foot the bill for all this.

What other options do parents and their children have? Maybe I’ll offer a few off-the-wall ideas about this soon in a future post…assuming I remember to do so.