A day I will never forget is when I walked in on my parents watching a movie about St. Thérèse of Lisieux. That movie begins with a simple line, taken from Thérèse’s writings: “I want to be a saint.” I didn’t know that you could want that, but now that I knew, I wanted it! The problem was that I had unusual ways of pursuing that desire. For example, St. Thérèse died at the age of twenty-four of tuberculosis. As a result, every time I left a physical, I would leave disappointed because my tuberculosis test would come back negative. Long before I turned twenty-four, I realized that my life would look different, but that did not mean that I gave up my desire to become a saint.

In the Second Reading, St. Paul writes, “And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers.” We are called to imitate the saints and Jesus so that we can become a model for others.

It does not mean we have to imitate the concrete details of every saint’s life. As we approach the Solemnity of All Saints on November 1st, we have different opportunities to enter into the lives of the saints, such as the Saints Around the World event on October 28th. As we look at all these saints, we see how different their lives are, but also how they all have one thing in common: love of God and love of neighbor.

In each of the saints, this love shone out in ways as unique as each one of them, and that is what we are called to imitate. Just as they made Jesus’ commandment to love take flesh amid the concrete details of their lives, so are we called to love amid the concrete details of our lives. But we can’t keep this to ourselves.

In the Gospel, Jesus says the greatest commandment of the law is to love God and to love our neighbors. At the Last Supper, Jesus takes this even further by giving us a new commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Because we have received the love of Jesus that led Him to the Cross, we are called to love others with that same love. This might seem daunting, but when we look at the saints, we see that it has been done thousands of times and thousands of different ways.

Loving as Christ loves does not necessarily mean dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, but it means taking the love we have received from Christ and making it present to others. Pope Francis wrote in C’est la Confiance, his Apostolic Exhortation on St. Thérèse, “In the heart of Therese, the grace of baptism became this impetuous torrent flowing into the ocean of Christ’s love and dragging in its wake a multitude of brothers and sisters.”

Father Frank

We are not as cunning as we think we are!  When I was little, there were two punishments I received: soap in the mouth or spanking. However, as a 5 year old, I had a brilliant idea to get around this form of punishment. Of course, I had to test my theory, so I went into the doorway of the kitchen where my mom was and said a curse word. This triggered the consequence of a punishment, but I ran to the couch where I sat down and covered my mouth thinking I had beaten the system! Little did I know the strength of my mom, and I came to realize that my plan had failed.

In our Gospel this weekend, the Pharisees think that they are cunning and can entrap Jesus by asking him a simple question about paying taxes to Caesar, “Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” (Mt 22:17) If Jesus would say yes to paying taxes he would be implicit with a foreign power and the people would revolt. If he said no, the Roman Empire would punish him for encouraging dissidence among the people. 

Jesus, however, asks to see a coin.  When the Pharisees present the coin, it shows the hypocrisy of Caesar by carrying an image of the Emperor who claimed to be a god. Then Jesus bypasses their entire trap by replying with the simple phrase, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”(Mt 22:22)

This is a challenge to us too. We know that the coins belong to Caesar, and in our daily lives this means being a responsible citizen and giving respect to the proper authorities. What is God’s?  It is our very selves. We all bear the image of God within our souls, and are called to give our very lives back to God!  This may seem like an impossible task, but God reveals through Christ that he is willing to model what he is asking of us; Jesus Christ offers us his very self!

Let us reject any ways of trying to outsmart God by avoiding that which he is asking of us. God calls each of us to know him and love him, even if we are not aware of it or if we try to ignore or outsmart him. He says this same thing to the Persian King Cyrus in the first reading: “I have called you by your name, giving you a title, though you knew me not” (Isaiah 45:4). Everything we have we owe to the goodness of God, and he desires that we put him at the center of our lives. Let us turn away from those things that prevent us from giving ourselves over to the Lord.

Father Michael

Hello! I am so grateful to have gotten the chance to meet many of you at the parish. For those that I have not gotten the chance to meet, my name is Jonathan Hernandez. I am the seminarian assigned to Our Lady of Mercy by the Diocese. Perhaps you may have noticed that during the summer months this year I was absent. I was asked by my vocations director to stay at our cathedral and do a program called CPE (Clinical Pastoral Experience). This program was extremely helpful for my vocation. Through that experience I received the opportunity to serve at a hospice center, a homeless shelter, and bring communion to the sick on a consistent basis. I was able to encounter others’ sufferings in different forms and was in a privileged place where I was often let into places of deep suffering. Often faced with a loss of words this summer, I felt the Holy Spirit guiding me in how he wanted me to minister to each person I was with. I felt Christ wanting to heal his sons and daughters.

This summer experience made me realize that I too was suffering in ways that I didn’t acknowledge. As a seminarian, I experience a constantly shifting environment. Often, I am bombarded with activities, homework, and responsibilities. This can all be very tiring. While praying with the suffering of Christ, I realized at a heartfelt level that suffering should point outwards. Suffering is part of the human experience, and we weren’t meant to take it on all by ourselves. At the minimum, it should be given to Christ. Furthermore, it is when our suffering points outwards that we realize our suffering has a greater meaning. For example, we are called to love our neighbor even though this isn’t the easiest thing to do. Our neighbors often hurt us in words and deeds. Scarred by their actions, we can wallow in the injustice, or we can allow ourselves to feel the hurt, bring it to Christ, and try our best to treat them with the love and respect they deserve as people made in the image of God. Even if they do not reciprocate, we are loving as Christ loved.

What I have just described, is made possible only through a life anchored in Christ. It is his grace and his strength that allow us to abide in his vineyard. We hear St. Paul affirm this in the second reading: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13). When we refuse to give our sufferings to God, we are pointed inwards, and this can become a truly dangerous place to be. In the Gospel reading today Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. As the King came in to meet the guests, there was one who was not dressed properly: “…how is that you came in here without a wedding garment?” (Mt 22:12) May this remind us to put on the life of Christ, configure and unite our thoughts, words, and actions to him. Give him your sufferings, and live for others, so that you might not be caught without a wedding garment!

God bless you, Jonathan

As soon as I was old enough, my parents would put me in charge of watching my two younger siblings when they would go out. If they didn’t listen to me, I would put them in time-out, which meant they were pretty much in time-out every time my parents went out. One day they decided that they wouldn’t listen to me anymore, so I called my parents because they were ganging up on me!

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a vineyard owner, who at harvest-time sends servants, and ultimately his son, to collect his produce from his tenants. The tenants did not accept them as representatives of the vineyard owner, and in disrespecting them, ultimately disrespected the vineyard owner, showing that they would rather be their own master.

Because my siblings did not respect my authority as the one my parents put in charge when they were gone, they did not respect my parents. They wanted to be in charge of themselves. The only problem was that my parents had not asked me to discipline my siblings; they had only asked me to keep an eye on them. In my own way, I was taking advantage of being put in charge, and trying just as much as my siblings to be a law unto myself.

Do we also reject the authority of God? Maybe we do this in outright ways by choosing to sin, but very often this happens in more subtle ways. We might feel a tug to pray but choose to watch TV instead. We might know that we need to reach out to that one person who really annoys us, but we instead choose to ignore them and talk to our friends. Or maybe there is one part of our life that we don’t want to surrender to Jesus yet because we don’t want to give that thing up yet.

Jesus ends the parable by saying, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” He doesn’t do this as a master over a servant, but as a loving Father.

In John 15, Jesus calls Himself the True Vine, and us the branches. We can bear fruit if we abide in Him. Instead of desiring to be in charge of ourselves, we become so united with Jesus, the Vine, that our wills become one. We are no longer hired servants working for wages, but we simply want to do His will because we know this is what will make us truly happy, and because, as beloved children of the Father, we desire to return that love He has given us.

Unlike my siblings’ desire to do whatever they wanted when my parents were gone, or my desire to take over when they put me in charge, we are called to surrender to God. By doing this, we are able to bear fruit because we have united ourselves to the True Vine, Jesus Christ.

Father Frank

As someone who studied math, when I come across this Gospel, I think of the other possible sons that the man in the Gospel could have had. The first son says he will not work in the vineyard but changes his mind and works, while the second son says he will work but never actually does. Couldn’t the man have had a son that said yes to the father’s task and actually completed it? Wouldn’t that be a perfect son, like me? Or couldn’t the man have had a son that said no, and then didn’t complete his task? Wouldn’t that be a son who was completely depraved and separated? 

Of course, you could make up those possibilities, but Christ only puts two options in the story for a reason. Why? Well, none of us are perfect and none of us are completely depraved from God’s grace!  And yet, don’t we put ourselves and others in those categories all the time? 

How often do we try to pursue perfection, not only in our work and relationships, but also in our spiritual life? How many of us walk around thinking that nothing is wrong, and that everything is just fine?  It’s an allusion that usually moves from indifference to despair. Usually those who believe they are perfect eventually see their allusion crumble and end up falling into despair! It confirms what the prophet Ezekiel shares with us in our first reading: “Thus says the Lord: You say, ‘The LORD’s way is not fair!’ Hear now, house of Israel: Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?” (Ezekiel 18:25) 

The Lord is not expecting us to be perfect, but to seek his mercy and love and to turn back to him when we fall. To live a life of conversion means that we can never stop turning back to him.  Let us not fall into this unfair way of thinking: where we feel either too perfect for the Lord, or too far from calling out to him in our failures.  Let us always trust that it is never too late to be redeemed by him. When we call out to him, the Lord will always respond!   

Father Michael