Faith
Immaculate Conception
The Church holds that there is no further revelation after Christ. Christ is the fulfillment of revelation, closing the loop on everything, and tying together the myriad threads of theology woven in the history of Israel. While there is nothing new to be revealed, what has occurred over the centuries of Church history is a more in-depth understanding of what has already been shared. A reaffirming principle of theology is that simple ideas and words have a depth to them that unpacking them can take centuries.
No place is the more true than Mariology. Mary’s place of honor in the Church is a natural and logical outflow of her place in Jesus’ life. What man doesn’t love his mother? If Christ bears this love for His mother, shouldn’t the Church, His body, do the same? But understanding her uniqueness in human history, and the philosophical properties attributable to this status requires deep thought and clarification.
When you look at the list of Vatican-approved Marian apparitions, the circumstances of them is astounding. These approved apparitions were studied and scrutinized, and their effects observed before receiving the seal of approval. These sixteen or so apparitions have similar threads. From France and Belgium, to Japan, Ireland, Venezuela, Rwanda, and Mexico, Mary appears dressed in a culturally appropriate attire and speaks the language of the people. This is the style of a mother looking to connect with her child, not a regent arriving to condescend. Our understanding of her role as mother not just to Jesus, but to His Body, is furthered by this subtle communication.
The same is true for the theological dogma that is not just proclaimed, but solemnly celebrated today: the Immaculate Conception. Although Mary lived in the first century, it wasn’t until the 1854 that the Church proclaimed the dogma that Mary was conceived without original sin. That’s a long time to contemplate the idea, but it’s a conclusion that is not only logical, but imperative.
Original sin is the stain passed from parent to child that is at the root of our fallen nature, but its remedy is often obtained by those same parents: Baptism. Each time we receive the Eucharist, we bring the completeness of Christ within our physical selves. Though it lasts only a moment, that interaction changes us. How can we not be changed when imperfection comes into concrete contact with perfection? But when we receive the Eucharist, He only physically dwells in us for a few minutes before the digestive process is complete.
Christ’s human gestation was entirely normal, nine months in utero of growth and development. How could it be that perfection would physically dwell in imperfection for that long of a time? Further, how could Mary be prepared for the weight of her vocation if there was even the smallest idea of disobedience somewhere in her conscience? That is why the Immaculate Conception is so theologically significant, and necessary. At the moment Mary was created, she was spared the stain of sin. This was not to pigeonhole her into fiat, but so that if she chose to entrust herself fully to God, that when the magnificent and imposing presence of an archangel appeared to her, she would be totally free to respond.
The layers of Mariology are still being explored and unpacked, but today is a little reminder of just how incredible she is, and how lucky we are to call her Mom.
Prepare
Be Prepared is the motto that many of us memorized growing up, later turning into a marketing tagline of “Prepare. For Life.” Preparation is the prudent act of an adult, foreseeing some future event and taking positive steps to be ready for when they arrive. That is Advent, the changing of our physical environments and interior selves to be ready for the arrival of the foretold Savior.
Jesus’ arrival was not a surprise. For hundreds of years, the place of His arrival was told and retold in Israel. This promised Savior would be the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in the story, reaching back to Abraham in the desert of the Nineveh plains. Long waiting, long-suffering, Israel pined for this arrival and the new era that it would begin.
We enter the Christmas season each year with a sense of time compression and busyness. The Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year sequence in rapid succession seems to speed us up. All the things we hoped to accomplish in 2025 take on new urgency and, while most of those things will be pushed into 2026, we still try to get it all done.
This compression is the opposite of the intent of Thanksgiving and Christmas. These two holidays ask us, instead, to pause. In Thanksgiving, we partake in the national pastime of practicing gratitude. This is a uniquely American trait in our national DNA that acknowledges that our successes and blessings find their source in others and in God. It’s a day to reflect on how good our lives are, and though life is never easy, there is much to be grateful for.
Christmas marks the arrival of Christ, and the dawn of an era. Reaching its fulfillment at Easter when we are truly set free, His birth is a concrete event that tells us that it was all real. Every story, every poem, every song, it all pointed to this moment, to this event, and now it is happening.
There are many preparations ahead in the short four weeks before Christmas. We need to decorate our homes; a change in the physical space that we inhabit gives us frequent reminders of the importance of these days. We need to clean our conscience by going to Reconciliation so that we are ready to participate in the celebrations to the fullest without being attached to our failings. Finally, we should contemplate the depth and beauty of this mystery. The great I AM arrives in the form that we ourselves entered into this world, and with Him comes everything we’ve hoped for and everything that was promised.
It all was true, it is all real, and we are a part of it.
Yes, Kings
Human government has always been a tricky balance. Incentives are powerful forces in politics, religion, and markets; misalignment leads to wild instability. The kings we tend to remember were ruthless, self-indulgent, selfish individuals who wielded power for their benefit. They were the living embodiment of Lord Acton’s commentary, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It would be wrong, historically and otherwise, to paint with such a broad brush. A centralized political leader who holds the vast majority of political and military power in a jurisdiction is inherently dangerous. A few good men in history performed admirably in the role, most failed miserably. Still, it’s easy to see that the Greek notion of the philosopher king would be an excellent fit, even in the modern world, were the role to be fulfilled faithfully.
The king is not meant to be a tyrant; just the opposite. The king is to have compassion for the health, safety, and welfare of his people. He is somewhat of a father figure, tending to the domestic and foreign affairs of the state so that his people can do the same for their families and communities. He should be thoughtful, deliberative, and, in the truest sense, humble. This great responsibility for so many placed on his shoulders will dictate the lives of many.
This is why it is so easy to ascribe kingship to Christ. Jesus is King of Kings, the leader of all dominions and principalities, and the true embodiment of kingly responsibility. He is focused and attentive to the needs of His people, provides what they need, and took upon Himself the sacrifice that they could never perform. This is a King.
Power dynamics and cultural pressures can distort in our minds our perception of relationships. Who wants to be a citizen when they can be a king? The truth is, kingship’s responsibility is a burden of strength and responsibility that few can manage. After all, who else but Christ could take upon Himself every sin of every person in every age? Being the beloved is a gift unto itself, and to belong to the King is a great blessing.
Kingship is not a problem, corruption is. How good is it to belong to the King whom corruption cannot touch.
End of Days
As the liturgical year winds down, the readings at the Sunday Mass focus on the end times, something called eschatology. The early Catholic Church believed that Jesus was coming back relatively immediately. All these years later, we’re still waiting. There are many times throughout the year that the liturgical flow reminds us of our pilgrimage on earth and its conclusion. It focuses our minds, and then we drift.
Imagination is one of our most powerful human creative functions. The ability to conjure and construct things in our mind, without seeing it in the physical world, is deeply beneficial. But with all of our distractions, once we are no longer children, it doesn’t get used as much.
The end times are not meant to be a scary event, but a hopeful fulfillment of all that God has promised. If we truly accept His love, and live within the bounds of the law, we should start each day with a sense of hope that today will finally be the day that all promises will be kept. After all, we were not made for earth, but for heaven.
We fear the end of our life, rightfully for the people we’ll leave behind and the things left undone. At that moment, we will have to truly let go of those we hold closest. Will our estates be a burden to our family? But we also fear it because we are not prepared. Death comes for us all, but catches most unaware.
Fulton Sheen, in his book Remade for Happiness, flips the script and reorients our attention. It is not just that we are hopeful for the return of Christ or our reunion with Him, but that in being prepared, we sneak up on death and catch it by surprise. He likened it to the homeowner who knew the thief was coming, laid in wait, and pounced.
It is challenging to choose the things of God rather than the things of man, and these weeks are a helpful cue for us of the importance of doing so. More than that, it’s a nudge to use our imagination to think about the depth, intricacy, and beauty of God’s promises, and live our life in alignment with those promises. What is more appealing: a sharp quip to take your coworker down a few notches, or a perpetual existence in a place of true peace where there are no tears?
The Church doesn’t exist as a stick to force into submission the unwilling, but the tender shepherds crook guiding us to the safety of our true home.
Faithful Departed
With All Saints Day, and All Souls Day behind us, we are entering into the end of the liturgical year. Soon the Sunday Gospel readings will focus on eschatology, the end times. It’s our annual confirmation, more specific than Lent and Advent, that this world is passing away.
There is a view that the Church uses evil as a stick, a means of scaring people into belief. This contradictory argument ignores many truths, all of which dovetail with our focus at the end of the year. We know that God is goodness and love itself, having no lack within Him. Does it not make sense, then, with our own knowledge of evil in the world, that there should be some single-point source that contains all evil? It would have to be so, because our understanding of Satan is that he exists with no connection to God; his existence is the complete absence of goodness and love. If there were any presence in the universe worthy of dread and fear, that sounds like a good candidate. But this is just one dimension where the stick argument falls down. What kind of love can be foisted upon an unwilling recipient? Love cannot impose itself; it’s a gift freely given that must meet an equally free acceptance. Evil is real, as we have all experienced, and though we have cause to fear it, it is not enough to run from evil. We must run to love.
With the celebration of All Saints Day, we raise our minds to the stories of those whom the Church has declared their holiness. These are men and women, children and the elderly, who have risen above their human frailties to embrace and live heroic virtue. They were cut down by the sword, died of every disease, or simply expired at the end of their lives; the common thread is that in life and in their death, they perfectly mirrored Christ’s love to the world.
All Souls Day is for the Faithful Departed. This is a special day of prayer for those who died knowing God, but the state of their souls is not known to us. It’s an opportunity for us to pray for them in hope that if they have not yet merited heaven, the grace of our prayer will bring them closer to their final goal.
Life has a way of quickly getting busy, and these regular check-ins are the Chruch’s gentle way of helping us stay focused. Prayer for the deceased should be a regular part of our prayer routine, and we should ever be mindful that Jesus is coming back. Are we prepared?
Genealogy
The Old Testament, in particular, contains several long and confusing lineages. Whether conducting a census of the nation of Israel, or establishing connections between figures, these long lists of difficult-to-pronounce names glaze over our eyes, but carry an important message.
Family genealogy tends to be the purview of one or two people in each family, but the difficult work of mapping out family connections is significant. It not only connects us with our past, but shows the long and winding road that brings us to where we stand. In the Bible, these genealogies are designed to establish authority. By showing that Abram comes from Noah’s ancient family, we can be confident in other details of his story. By tracing Jesus’ roots back to David, we see this kingly line finally fulfilled.
Reading these long lists of names, both known and unknown, may take a lot of time, but it’s not just about connecting Jesus and Abram to their forefathers. These genealogies are our genealogies; they’re how we are connected into the largest, most famous family in human history.
Though the work has not been done, it is possible, as with the apostolic succession of our bishops, to trace our family back to the earliest Christian communities. Making that connection is likely impossible, but were we able to do have historical records to complete the work, it would unlock a much deeper truth. With that connection established, we are truly plugged into God’s family, and our authority as priest, prophet, and king is very real.
The Bible is not just a collection of stories, and the Church is not just a written chapter in history. These are our stories and our history, how our family came to be, and how we can carry its mission forward.
I Will Serve
Our core identity is as children of God, in an intimate relationship with our Creator and bearing His image and likeness. When we reject, or choose to ignore, our identity, chaos steps in to fill the void. How much more lost can you be in the world than not even knowing who you are?
Our identity is also a paradox. The things that we naturally desire, for the most part, are the things that are injurious to us. I used to believe that animals were rational in that they could only act in their self-interest. My theory went out the window when our family dog ate a towel.
The Baltimore Catechism beautifully articulates the purpose of our lives: to know, love and serve God in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. The first two parts of that proposition are easy to accept. The natural law confers a right to a child to know their parents, if God is our father, we ought to have knowledge of and be in relationship with Him. We do not exist in a vacuum; our identity exists within the context of the human family. We are relational beings, solitude is one of the gravest threats to our emotional and mental wellbeing.
Next, we are to love God. This, too, is easy to accept when considered in broader terms. The Creator of the universe, source of truth, king of kings, love itself offers us His love and invites us to accept the gift. The proposal is not derived from our merits or because of anything we’ve done, but because of who we are. Accepting and returning that love, as a child does for their parent, is also good and holy.
The third purpose, however, can be a stumbling block. As we know from Angelology, service was the purpose that made St. Michael the most powerful warrior and cast untold numbers of angels into Hell. This is no small principle.
The word, serve, carries with it a negative, but undeserved, negative connotation. It’s the right word to express this role, but a wrongful interpretation could equate it with enslavement. We are bound to God by the nature of our existence, but God’s nature does not allow Him to impose His love upon us. How can true love come only on the point of the sword? To serve God is not to have our free will stolen from us, but rather our willing donation of it to His greater purpose. Our lives and our actions are intended to be an extension of His saving work. Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep. This meant to bring the Gospel to a world starving to know who they were, but it also meant for me to make my kids breakfast. The corporal works of mercy are daily expressed within the family, even in the little things.
Service is a noble purpose that pulls us out of our orbit and obsession with the things that draw us inward and turns us into an extension of Love. There’s a reason people always feel better after some act of volunteerism, why we oddly feel better after an hour of picking up trash on the side of the road than we do after an hour of watching TV. We give of ourselves for the sake of others. When we serve, we become part of something greater.
The paradox of surrender, of service, is that we give up that which hurts us in exchange for that which heals. It is easy to know and to love God, the right and natural next step is to serve Him by serving those around us.
Given Up for You
The prayers of the Church are always with us. In our private and communal prayer, the words we pray find their origin in Scripture and tradition, echoing through our lives. It’s not uncommon for a word or phrase so familiar to us to strike us, at a particular time and place, in an entirely new way.
During the Eucharistic Prayer at every Mass, the formula that Jesus spoke at the first Mass is prayed by the priest. Before the host is elevated, after the Holy Spirit has been called down, the words are spoken: “This is My Body, given up for you.”
The Eucharist is offered for the whole Church and for all people throughout time and space, but the word that Jesus chose was “you.” It is a sacrifice given for all generally, yet at the same time given specifically for “you.”
God, the author of life and source of true love and joy, designed a plan of salvation centered on saving me; it was all done not for me as part of the general population, but for me as an individual. It was not done for who I am, but because of whose I am. His body was given up so that I might live.
In many ways, God is an enigma, a mystery of unimaginable depth and complexity. What mind can truly comprehend pure love? Yet in His magnificent intricacy, enough was revealed for me to know in my heart that I am His, that I am loved, and that my greatest end is to know, love, and serve Him. In the moments when I feel faint, I can always reach back to those words I hear every week: “This is My Body, given up for you.”
Inspire
Life was never simple; it was never easy. Our parents, grandparents, and great parents endured generational struggles. The American revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two global conflicts, social unrest, they endured it all. We live in dark times, but darkness and evil are two threads that have run through human history.
What’s different now, what makes this period so dangerous, is that we’re trying to white-knuckle our way through it without God. When brother fought against brother, public leaders regularly appealed to Heaven for help. When our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy and raised the flag over Iwo Jima, they did so with a gun, rations, and a rosary in their kit. When John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were gunned down, it happened in a nation that disagreed profoundly, but shared a common understanding of the divine.
Today, we don’t have that. The rectangles on our walls, in our rooms, on our desks, and in our pockets can connect us to the worst people, the worst ideas, and the deepest darkness. Without God, without prayer, without grace, how can we ever hope to overcome as our forefathers did?
At Mass this weekend, I looked around the pews. There were the elderly, parents with adult children, young families, and a shocking number of single adults. I normally sit towards the front with my children, so they are perhaps always there, just unseen behind me. What inspires is that these single adults live in a world that proclaims the uselessness of religion, and they chose different. Their parents didn’t tell them to go to Mass, their friends likely didn’t, they decided to be there.
We just celebrated the canonization of Pier Giorgio and Carlo Acutis, two saints who remind us that life is never to be taken for granted. We are not promised anything more than here and now, and we can choose sainthood.
Attack upon attack, violence upon violence, the cadence is increasing with frightening speed. But we do not have to go into this world without help or protection. God’s got our back, He already won and promised us a place in His victory. Never cower in fear; choose to be inspired.
Choice
Pain is a warning system of the body; it’s a signal to our brains that there’s a problem somewhere in the system. Although discomforting, it aims to protect us from worse outcomes by getting our attention — now. We can feel physical pain or emotional pain, but its objective is the same.
Sainthood is something that feels so far beyond us. We know the stories of the saints, and how easy it is to sin in our golden age of ease. How could our story ever compare to the heroic virtue of theirs? The truth is, the path of each saint is different, and it doesn’t require much effort to find someone in circumstances like us who reached that noble goal.
Our objective is not Purgatory, it’s Heaven. Purgatory is like when an outfielder jumps up on the wall and catches a ball before it flies out of the park. It’s the final opportunity for us to make good on our intention to love and serve God. No one said that it would be pleasant. In fact, everything that we’ve heard about Purgatory is unpleasant. It’s pain with hope, but pain nonetheless. An added grace to the reality of Purgatory is how the living and the saints can transfer grace through Christ across time and space for those poor souls in Purgatory.
We have concupiscence, our tendency to act against what we ought to do. That predisposition makes choosing sin easier, but it’s not a given. We entered into this world with a stain on us that was wiped away by our Baptism. The decisions we made brought it back. Our Christian life is hard, but if we are successful, we are promised the merits of Heaven.
We must be truly perfect to enter into God’s presence. The great gift of life is not that it is a test to which we already have the answers. It’s that we are provided the opportunity to say yes to Love within the relative comfort of our lives. We are surrounded by blessings and covered in grace.
Our options are to strive for holiness in this life today and enjoy the blessings throughout my lifetime, or undergo purification in the refinery of Purgatory. Maybe I should just try a little harder.