Fr. Stephen

Good morning! I hope you had a wonderful weekend!! Here is what you may have missed this week...

From Father Stephen 

  My brothers and sisters in Christ, Suffering is a part of life. Understanding that fact I be lieve allows us to function and flourish within this world. But the truth is, most people try to ignore that fact-understandably so. Who wants to believe that a key part of existence is losing good things (I type this, inci dentally as I struggle with an illness right now-with every hope of a return to health, but deprived of energy and physical comfort-its very much at the forefront of my mind). So we try to manage pain, stress, and anxie ty. We try to contain or limit them, and mask them if we are experiencing them. Very rarely do we embrace the loss. Sometimes it is simply unavoidable (you really are losing something of your child when they go off and become married, even if you truly do gain a new child in their spouse), and so we are more accepting of it. However, the bigger the loss, the more world-shattering the con sequences and the more we seem to lose our very selves. Too often then we compromise for immediate gratification: "Having any good, right now, is far better than aiming at some long term good," is the lie we tell ourselves when we put off suffering, we should be doing for another day. This is often how sin tempts us. Eating and drink ing too much (sin of gluttony), or the threat of losing a relationship so you compromise a greater principle (saying, not living together before marriage), for fear of losing someone (and because of the immediate pleasure offered right now). Obviously, the biggest suffering is death. The loss of the entire world, and our very self (so it seems). What wouldn't you do to cheat death? Too put it off as long as you could? And if you can't, to what depths would you sink so as not to deal with/contemplate the fact that your life is finite. But when you give into these fears, or attempt to drown in pleasures, that is where we really go wrong-that is when sin rears its ugly head, and hell becomes a certainty.  The ultimate suffering isn't death, you see-it's the suffering that never ends. We find it, when we fail to accept the first premise-that suffering is unavoidable. The lie that leads us to flee this truth is this :suffering is mean ingless. But the cross proves that to be untrue. An innocent man is betrayed by His friends, the leadership of His social structure conspire to have Him tortured to death, and He dies in front of His mother in a shameful way. But unified to the supernatural, the suffering was not pointless, it was sacrifice! The greatest of goods is bought, and brought through the pain! And so even now, in suffering, I can offer it up in union with Jesus Christ's Cross! No matter what I lose, I know it only gains me more than I ever have had! So rejoice and be glad when you must lose things, even the most precious. Don't throw them away, and don't say they never mattered. It's precisely because they do matter that God treasures your willingness to part from them. Trade everything for the sake of God's glory, and even as you struggle and are miserable, even if you lose the ability to enjoy the greatest goods in this life-know that in the next, God has waiting a world where sacrifice has its fulfillment! Thus the Kingdom of God comes about.  

 

In Christ,

Fr. Stephen