Citing church documents

Handy for beginning a new school year

4th Theology

It has come!

After seven years of seminary formation, I am now in the infamous 4th Theology year of seminary. I am a transitional deacon and only a matter of months away from the priesthood.

When you are young and starting out in the seminary, you look at the 4th year men, the deacons, and view them as little less that immortal and privileged to be where they are. Being in their shoes was unimaginable reality, but now it is!

This semester I am taking courses geared heavily towards the practical and ministerial aspects of both the diaconate and the priesthood. Going back to the parish every weekend will be an invaluable lesson and enriching experience. I will be able to bring my experiences from my ministry in the parish back to class and synthesize everything and hear the experiences of my classmates.

I have a mixture of feelings and emotions. I am very anxious for this new seminary experince and being able to get back to the parish which I have come to love and feel at home at. It also excites me to think that this is my last year of school and seminary. It is rather intimidating though to think that within a matter of months, I will be assuming the role and responsibilities of the priesthood - it is getting real!

I was very anxious and antsy to be ordained a deacon. You wait years for it and you desire to do all that the deacon can do. Now that it is here, I am very content and peaceful in that I am now a deacon. I now have been entrusted with a lot and I am comfortable with waiting one more academic year for priesthood. I really want to take full advantage of what the diaconate can offer for me and how I can grow in this role.

Also, I see how awesome the responsibilities of being a deacon are and I appreciate the reminder prep time to get ready for the even more surmounting tasks and responsibilities entailed in the priesthood.

Let's crack open those books...for one last year!

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

(title of a sermon by an American Colonial minister, Jonathan Edwards)

I am slacking in regularly posting on here. It has been an irregular past several weeks and I have not had a lot of time to devote to my blog, sorry. I would like to pick back up with some thoughts on some aspects of being ordained.

It was a great summer, my first summer ordained. Having been ordained a transitional deacon on April 30, I have had continual encounters that have been new, exciting, scary and challenging.

My parish I was at for the summer, and all school year, has a lot of masses so I was able to preach almost everyday and a couple of the Sunday masses. Preaching is something that I have been wanting for so many years. I have envisioned being up at the pulpit (or ambo) and giving fiery and inspirational homilies for many years. Now, it is a reality, sort of. At ordination, you are entrusted with the awesome task of being the caretaker and voice of the Sacred Scripture. It is I, the ordained deacon (or priest) that proclaims, teaches and preaches the Word of God - I am who the Church has bestowed this responsibility upon - this is REAL. What I learned quickly is that the Church did not entrust me because of any intelligence, savviness, eloquence or persuasiveness I could apply, no, the church has entrusted me with this responsibilty because God has chosen me to do it. I have done nothing and am nothing that deserves or qualifies me to do it - I have been called by God and answered the call. God has given me graces, graces that no one can truly understand unless they are themselves ordained and in need of relying on them.

What I quickly learned is that I know very little. I really am not an expert in any particular field of theology. I know the foundations and I understand how the Church thinks, but I am not endowed with any special knowledge that allows me to do this task. I have the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit speaks through my words, fills in my gaps, rests in the hearts of those who hear me and is the one who truly decides what I say.

This is why I say my desire to be an amazing homilist is sort of realized. I can now preach and do all the preparatory work involved like prayer, meditation and study to prepare for it, but it is God who is the one preaching. If someone says "nice homily, deacon", take it as a compliment and it is encouraging, but I know that I was only an aspect of that homily, God was the other and larger one speaking.

This is something that I probably had a head knowledge of prior to ordination, but now my heart has truly assented to that truth.

I have also come to see that preaching is a challenging task. The Holy Spirit is my guide and inspiration, but I still need to be knowledgeable in the ways of God, of Scripture, of humanity and of how they all interact. I need to continually learn and all my learning needs to have as its aim "How does this relate to the relationship of God and man?" and "How can I teach this to those entrusted to my care?". My existence is and has to be that of a person who has been entrusted with much, as a person of whom much is expected and of a person truly in love with God and all he does and creates in the world.

This is what I have come to learn, so far, from my task and ministry of preaching.

19th Sunday Ordinary Time, A

Well, we’ve made it through another successful Shark Week on The Discovery Channel and, my personal favorite, Mob Week on AMC. Just when the country thought another week was going to be hijacked by Washington and the 24/7 “news” channels, we, Americans, were able to find solace and joy in Al Pacino and Great White Sharks! I hope you did tune in to either or both.

I think many to all of you would agree that our lives are punctuated and often times augmented by the unexpected. The unexpected in various degrees: good, bad and neutral. Sometimes what is unexpected can have profound effects on us, while some are just so ordinary and insignificant, that we don’t bat an eye at them; but unexpected events occur quite often in our lives. Some fun, some sad.

Consider for a moment things that have happened unexpectedly that had a significant effect on your life. Lose a job, Get a divorce, Death, Lost money in the markets, or won some money, you were proposed to, a relationship turned sour; you fill in the blanks. We each can tell unique stories of our own experiences of situations that we found ourselves in that we had not planned on and were not prepared to handle and take on. When these occurrences happen, what does our view of/relationship with/understanding of/desire for God go through? It changes, it takes on new meaning, it grows and matures as we do.

Elijah went up the mountain, the same one Moses went up to converse with God, for that very purpose, to talk to Him, to encounter and experience Him. Elijah knows the ordinary circumstances: some great force of nature or spectacular event will happen and God will be present there to talk to. Except this time, it didn’t happen that way. The loud forces of nature take place and Elijah expected God in anyone of them, but God wasn’t there. But then, silence. A quiet whisper, a deafening silence fell over Elijah, and there God was; absolutely not what Elijah had anticipated.

Jesus, after having multiplied the loaves, asks the disciples to go off ahead of him and he wants to stay behind and pray for a while. During the fourth watch, between 3-6 am, they are caught in the midst of a storm on the lake. While these men, some experienced fishermen, were navigating to boat in the storm, Jesus comes walking towards them on the water! Out of nowhere with no real warning, Jesus is walking on water and coming towards them. Naturally, they thought it was a ghost and call out to it to identify itself. Christ answers I Am – the name of God. Peter, after seeing its Christ asks Him to let him do the same that He does. Jesus calls him out. The extraordinariness of the event was too much for him and he began to sink. Those twelve men received and encounter and revelation of God that they certainly never expected to be part of, yet it changed them and supplied them with a new and changed faith and relationship with their friend and Lord.

The unexpected can happen in our lives, and It does, expect it. God also reveals himself in unexpected ways and through unexpected people. We need to release some of our expectations and soften our rigidness in living life. We cannot put up expectations and unfair demands on others, ourselves, the world and God and have those be the only parameters for what is right and good. We have to accept that life will be what life will be and we have to deal with how it is dealt to, not what we construct it and force it to be. If something bad happens to us, it is not a sign that God hates us or that we are no good; it is merely an opportunity and occasion for us to rise up and be what we need to be. If we don’t see or hear God as we think we ought to, we need to let go of how we think God should be and realize how he truly is. If you think you are going to have only depressing news to watch and there is shark week and mob week on, are you going to watch it? If someone doesn’t seem to love you like they should; be it a mom or dad, child, spouse or friend, remember, just because someone doesn’t love the way you want them to, does not mean they don’t love you with everything they are. The unexpected, in an unexpected way, not the way I wanted it to happen – these synonymous expressions are part of the rhythm of life. They are going to occur. The real question arises, how you are going to respond to it.

Elijah, Peter and the other disciples accepted the unexpected with faith. They trusted that in the end, God was on their side and would not abandon them, that was and still is the only expected!