Cultivating the Habit of Welcoming, 15th Monday (I), July 12, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. Louis and Zelie Martin
July 12, 2021
Ex 1:8-14.22, Ps 124, Mt 10:24-11:1

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus concludes his instructions to the Twelve about the mission he was entrusting to them and to us. We’ve already covered what they were to say; how they were supposed to accompany those word with deeds of healing, exorcism, and resurrection that would manifest God’s kingdom; how they were to package that message in word and witness by the way they themselves gave evidence to God’s providence through traveling without money sack or extra tunics, to his peace, love and joy by the way they would respond to each other, to his mercy by not holding grudges and taking them with them to the next town. Today, among several final points he makes, he focuses on one that has pervaded all of these instructions and on which we really should stop to ponder. It’s the theme of welcome and rejection.
• As Jesus is preparing to send out the twelve, he gets them ready to identify those who are open to the Gospel by those who welcome them. He tells them to stay in the houses where they are welcomed not just as a courtesy, not just so that it wouldn’t be bad form to be looking for a better deal, but precisely to learn from those who welcome them one of the crucial aspects of the Gospel: the welcome necessary to embrace God and his word. Jesus goes on to say that there is a far deeper dynamic happening in their being welcomed: in welcoming them, they’re welcoming God himself:  “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is righteous will receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because he is a disciple – amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” That’s why one of the most important habits we need to cultivate in ourselves, and form in others, is this habit of welcoming, because in welcoming others, including strangers, not to mention in welcoming those sent out by the Church in Jesus’ name, we’re welcoming the Lord who has sent them as his emissaries.
• When Pope Francis went to Paraguay in 2015, Pope Francis preached on yesterday’s Gospel of Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve from the Gospel according to St. Mark. He focused on the importance of a double-welcoming. He said, “We could concentrate on the words, ‘bread,’ ‘money,’ ‘bag,’ ‘staff,’ ‘sandals’ and ‘tunic.’ … But it strikes me that one key word can easily pass unnoticed. It is a word at the heart of Christian spirituality, of our experience of discipleship: ‘welcome.’ Jesus as the good master, the good teacher, sends them out to be welcomed, to experience hospitality. He says to them: ‘Where you enter a house, stay there.’ He sends them out to learn one of the  hallmarks of the community of believers. We might say that a Christian is someone who has learned to welcome others, to show hospitality.” He stressed that the whole nature of the conversion that Jesus sends them out to try to solicit is to change from a mentality that seeks to lord, or to control, to stifle or manipulate to one that “welcomes, accepts and cares.” The Lord, he adds, states to us quite clearly: “In the mentality of the Gospel, you do not convince people with arguments, strategies or tactics. You convince them by learning how to welcome them. The Church is a mother with an open heart. She knows how to welcome and accept, especially those in need of greater care, those in greater difficulty. The Church is the home of hospitality. How much good we can do, if only we try to speak the language of hospitality, of welcome! How much pain can be soothed, how much despair can be allayed in a place where we feel at home! Welcoming the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner (Mt 25:34-37), the leper and the paralytic. Welcoming those who do not think as we do, who do not have faith or who have lost it. Welcoming the persecuted, the unemployed. Welcoming the different cultures, of which our earth is so richly blessed. Welcoming sinners.” He concluded, “The real work of the Church, our mother, is not mainly to manage works and projects, but to learn how to live in fraternity with others. A welcome-filled fraternity is the best witness that God is our Father, for ‘by this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (Jn 13:35). In this way, Jesus teaches us a new way of thinking.”
• But not everyone will receive Christ’s missionaries with a welcoming heart and Jesus wants us to be prepared for that. He’s already told us that some strangers won’t welcome us and if they don’t, we are to leave wiping the dust off our feet and moving on. But he describes today a more difficult type of rejection. He says that even when we go to our very family members, they might not welcome us in Christ’s name, because they might reject that we have now made Christ first in our life, loving him above parents, above children, above siblings and friends, and embracing the Cross he gives above a life of comfort. He wanted us to be ready for that. He says something shocking: He whom Isaiah prophesied would be the “Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5), who was heralded by the angels at his birth as the one who would bring “peace on earth to men of good will,” who during the Last Supper would leave us his peace, and who in these very instructions to the Twelve told them to say to a household, “Peace be to his house!,” said at the end of these instructions, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.” This is not because Jesus came to divide: he came to gather and to save. But he was saying that not everyone would welcome him and if we were clinging to him more than to them, we would experience his rejection. We see this in families often when one member starts to go to Eucharistic Adoration or daily Mass or starts getting involved in charitable work: often the other family members can get jealous of where the person is spending his or her time and, rather than supporting these changes for the better, they can begin to tease or oppose. These rejections from family members, these divisions that come when some (often sinfully) refuse to welcome God, including in their family members, are the toughest of all. How do we prepare for this? By welcoming Christ within and by being welcomed by Him, by experiencing the profound peace that comes from the tranquillity of order in the Bethany of our souls from loving him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and loving others as he has loved us and them, being willing to die for them (even when they are treating him and us as enemies). Jesus, as he has been explaining throughout these instructions, will give us all the grace we need to be “worthy of him” by embracing this Cross and following him, offering up the pain of rejection for the conversion of our beloved family members so that they, too, will welcome Jesus, welcome us and the other members of Christ’s body, and come to experience the peace Christ gives and wishes on the world.
• The whole theme of welcoming and the sin of unwelcoming is featured prominently in today’s first reading. Pharaoh’s sins can be summarized all under this theme of the lack of hospitality to God and others. The passage from Exodus begins by saying, “A new king [pharoah], who knew nothing of Jesus, came to power in Egypt.” How is it possible that he knew nothing of Joseph? Joseph had helped to save the Egyptian people. He would have been one of the more famous servants of any pharaoh at any time. But the new pharaoh knew nothing of him, almost assuredly because he was so self-centered that he had lost his memory, lost a sense of roots, lost a welcoming for all that his ancestors had done and accomplished. And that self-centered lack of hospitality would worsen. Even though Joseph was a Jew and so pharaoh should have been extra generous to Joseph’s fellow Jews including some of his descendants, even though the Jews with their extraordinary diligence were building up Pharoah’s kingdom in a trustworthy way, he, paranoid, began to fear their growth. So he first treated them like slaves and then, when that wasn’t enough, started genocidally killing their male babies. His heart was closed and disintegrating through sin. And he murdered, rather than welcoming, fellow human beings. When Moses would be sent to him, he would not even welcome the Lord who had commissioned him, or the Lord’s request. His heart was indeed hardened because there was no room in it for God or others.
• Sisters, it goes without saying that you are on the front lines of the battle against this type of inhospitality, when many in our culture are celebrating the lack of welcoming, are structuring their sexuality with a firm “no” to welcoming the children who are naturally supposed to flow from the one-flesh union of a man and a woman and then, when a baby is conceived, they are tempted to continue that rejection by ending the life of that growing child. Many, like Pharaoh, can forget where they came from, that they were once the same size. Many, like Pharaoh, can be so self-centered that they can think that if they don’t want a child or haven’t chosen that child that it’s find for the child to be discarded. Such a culture of exclusion leads to a culture of death. Saint John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae focused time and again on this theme of welcoming and rejection. He said that the culture of death is based on a a false view of freedom that leads “to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself” (20), something seen in the rejection of the possibility of children in contraception, in the further rejection of abortion, in the rejection of suffering in euthanasia and many other rejections of others’ dignity. The response is a culture of welcoming, something shown in mothers who make the choice of life, by “centers of assistance … where new life receives a welcome” in welcoming mothers and their unborn or newly born children (88), and particularly in the family and the Church. John Paul II writes that the family is “truly the sanctuary of life: the place in which life-the gift of God-can be properly welcomed and protected against the many attacks to which it is exposed, and can develop in accordance with what constitutes authentic human growth” (92). Mothers in a particular way are meant to teach everyone the beauty of welcoming. “A mother,” John Paul II says, “welcomes and carries in herself another human being, enabling it to grow inside her, giving it room, respecting it in its otherness. Women first learn and then teach others that human relations are authentic if they are open to accepting the other person: a person who is recognized and loved because of the dignity which comes from being a person and not from other considerations, such as usefulness, strength, intelligence, beauty or health” (99). As part of the trust in God’s mercy and conversion to which he compassionately calls women who have had abortions, he urges them to open up to welcoming in the pro-life apostolate: “Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life” (99). Mary is, he says, the  incomparable model of how life should be welcomed and cared for” (102) and that’s why your vocation is so important, Sisters. In the midst of the diabolical temptations toward behaving like Pharaoh, you are there, like Mary, welcoming women in all types of situations and trying to help them show the same type of welcoming to the children growing within them. You give far more than a cup of cold water. And in receiving them, not only are you receiving Christ and the Father who sent him, but you’re also receiving a tremendous reward, here in this life in terms of the growth in love that you experience, and forever, as Jesus promised.
• Today the Church rejoices to celebrate a couple that models for everyone how the family is the sanctuary of life and welcome. SS. Louis and Zelie Martin, parents of St. Therese Lisieux, both sought in life to welcome God and his holy will, even when it brought the pain of rejection. At the age of 22, Louis had sought to become a monk at the famous Grand Saint Bernard Monastery in the French Alps. He was initially accepted, but when they discovered that he knew no Latin, he was sent home to study the humanities privately. He assiduously began, but a succession of illnesses forced him to give up his studies. After some travels, he returned to Alençon, where he earned a good living as a watchmaker and sought to please the Lord of time and eternity. His mother, however, was not satisfied with his being a bachelor, no matter how pious. One day in 1858 a 26-year-old lace-maker, Zélie Guérin, came to her notice as someone who would make an excellent wife for her then 35-year-old son. She began to work with various celestial matchmakers to try to bring them together. Like Louis, Zélie was a very pious young woman who had sought religious life. After years of suffering from migraines and receiving scant consolation from her mother, she tried to follow her older sister Marie, a Visitation sister, into religious life, expecting to find there understanding and support than she received at home. She was drawn by the work of the Daughters of Charity and applied for entrance. The superior informed her, however, that she did not have a vocation to the religious life. Zélie took this rejection as a clear sign from God and responded with faith. “Since I am not worthy to become your spouse like my sister,” she prayed, “I will enter the married state so as to fulfill your holy will, O God. I beg you, however, to send me many children, and grant that they may all be consecrated to you!” Their fateful first encounter happened on St. Leonard’s Bridge in Alençon. As Zélie was passing Louis in the opposite direction, she heard an interior voice saying, “This is the husband I have destined for you.” She stopped and they became acquainted. Three months later they were married. Louis’ original hope was to live as brother and sister in a “Josephite marriage,” where they could dedicate themselves to prayer and charity. Although Zélie was willing to make this sacrifice for her husband and lived this way for ten months, she was hoping instead to have many children and raise them up for God. Eventually a confessor helped them to see that God was asking them to demonstrate that sanctity could be obtained in a holy marriage, through mutually self-giving sexual love according to God’s designs. They needed to be opened to welcoming God through welcoming whatever children he might give them. They followed his advice without reservation and, over the span of 19 years of marriage, welcomed seven girls and two boys. Zélie’s prayer that her children all be consecrated to God was fulfilled in several ways. They were all first consecrated to the Lord in baptism almost immediately after birth. The Lord saw fit to call four of them home soon thereafter, still in their baptismal graces. The five girls who survived childhood all were consecrated to the Lord in religious life, four in the Lisieux Carmel and the fifth as a Visitation sister. The Martin’s home was a school of holiness with the parents as model students and teachers. The whole family attended Mass each day at 5:30 in the morning. They recited daily prayers as a family in front of the statue of our Lady in their home. They all took responsibility for serving each other in the home and for doing their schoolwork. As a family they made pilgrimages to various shrines in France. Louis made retreats with the Trappists, Zélie with the Poor Clares. Louis was a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and was very generous to the poor and needy. Zélie ministered to the sick and the dying, making sure they were prepared by the sacraments to meet the Lord. Both parents formed their children in the faith, in life, and in virtue. St. Thérèse said that in whatever plans her parents made, they looked toward eternity, oft-repeating the phrase that “true happiness is not of this world.” Zélie died at the age of 45, having battled breast cancer for a decade and migraines for even longer. Until the end, she overcame her pain to attend daily Mass, where she would unite her sufferings to Christ on the altar. At her death, her husband and the priests of Alençon in unison said there was one more saint in heaven. Louis would die 17 years later, spending the last seven years of his life mainly in institutions as a result of severe strokes that caused hemorrhaging, memory and speech loss, hallucinations, and partial paralysis. He welcomed it all with resignation to the will of God and looked at all these events as a means by which he could live as a hermit in this world in anticipation of the communion of the saints in the next. The Church teaches that the two-fold end of the sacrament of marriage is the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children to be saints. Louis and Zélie Martin, in welcoming each other and the children that flowed from their one-flesh union,  fulfilled this vocation with distinction and joy. And they surely did not lose their reward.
• Today as we prepare to welcome the Lord Jesus, we ask him to help us embrace his word, to embrace each other, and to embrace him in his Real Presence, so that having received that peace, joy and love we may go out to the world and create a culture of welcome even if in doing so we will experience rejection and even martyrdom. Our help is indeed in the name of the Lord who comes to strengthen us for this mission. May our welcoming of him today here at Mass help us to recognize and welcome him in all we will meet and, like SS. Louis and Zelie, help us to be generous and courageous in giving witness to him until the end!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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