Longing to See the Lord’s Face, Follow Him, and Help Others to See and Follow Him, 34th Monday (II), November 26, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life
Monday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed James Alberione
November 26, 2018
Rev 14:1-5, Ps 24, Lk 21:1-4

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we celebrated the Solemnity of Christ the King and had the opportunity to ponder how that Kingdom is both “now and not yet.” It’s something that is already among us — because the King has already come — while at the same time being something we await in all its fullness at the end of time. The Kingdom of God is, as Cardinal Ratzinger famously said to Catechists in 2000, ” is not a thing, a social or political structure, a utopia. The Kingdom of God is God. Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our—in my life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it—on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” To pray, “Thy kingdom come,” is essentially to pray for the grace to enter into relationship with God, to respond to his help to make him God in our life. Today’s readings and memorial help us to understand this reality much more profoundly.
• Jesus had said at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To enter into the kingdom we must be poor in spirit, which means we must treasure God and his kingdom above all other things. In the Gospel, we meet a someone who did. After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to continue to instruct his apostles about how to put what he taught into action. They saw the stream of people putting money in the temple treasury, which was a tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coin would resonate as it rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Luke tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury trumpet. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins which together were worth less than a penny and likely barely made a sound. Then Jesus gave a surprising lesson that obviously the disciples never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all them, for they “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have easily chosen to drop into the trumpet only one of the coins and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain until the end of time. What could have moved her to give to the temple even what she needed to survive? There’s only one reason: her deep faith. She believed not simply that God exists, or that he worked various miracles in the past to help her people. She believed so much in him and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding that work of salvation. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that work even more than her own life.  That’s living for the kingdom. That’s living with God. This woman sacrificed her entire livelihood, spending herself and what she had in the service of the Lord. We should always seek to give in such a way that Christ the King would be tempted to pull the saints aside in heaven and point out the way we are spending ourselves in his service, seeking to build up his Kingdom.
• Today in the first reading from the Book of Revelation we see a glimpse of the eternal destiny of those who, like the widow in today’s Gospel, give all to the God who has given all to us. We also see how to live this life well in a continuous act of self-giving. The 144,000 dressed in white, whose garments were washed in the blood of the Lamb, are a snapshot of the redeemed. The number 144,000 is a symbolic, not a literal one (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some fundamentalist Protestants claim). 12 is one of the magic numbers in Hebrew, flowing from the 12 tribes. 144 is a sign of the multiplication of the descendants of the 12 tribes and the spiritual progeny of the 12 apostles times 1,000, meaning to describe a vast multitude. We see about them that first they had the Lamb’s and the Father’s name written on their foreheads. They were thinking as God the Father and God the Son think; they were filled with God’s wisdom; and they also weren’t ashamed to live by that wisdom publicly. They were singing before the rhone what seemed to St. John to be a “new hymn,” a hymn only they could sing, because doubtless that knowledge came from the experience of their life of love for the God, from their suffering for him, from their being “ransomed from the earth.” Revelation says that these are the ones who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” which is a beautiful description for how every Christian is meant to behave. To live in the kingdom means to respond to Jesus’ call to follow him through life all the way to heaven. St. John adds that “no deceit was found on their lips” and that they were “unblemished.” They were living and speaking the truth, which is the way to live in the Kingdom of Truth with Christ the Truth incarnate. In the Responsorial Psalm, we ponder this reality of the type of life consistent with the Kingdom. We ask, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? Or who may stand in his holy place?” And the answer to that question is, “He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, a reward from God his savior. Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.” Those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes are those who seek God, who desire to see him face-to-face. That desire leads them to keep their hands sinless of all bribes but to use their hands to pray, for generosity toward God and charity toward other, for honest work, for embracing and helping others; it leads them to keep their heart clean of all that can lead it to become hardened toward God and toward others; and it keeps them from desiring what is vain, and mammon is certainly among a vanity of vanities. For us to enter into the Lord’s holy place here on earth and in the celestial Jerusalem we must align our desires, hearts and hands to the Kingdom, we must set our eyes on the Lord’s face and seek to follow him wherever he leaves, free of deceit, free of moral blemish.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who lived this way, who not only longed to see God’s face but longed for others to see him, who sought to give God all and inspire others to the same total generosity, who followed the Lamb wherever he led and tried to guided so many others to that same divine, living GPS. It’s Blessed James Alberione. He’s the founder (or co-founder) of ten different religious congregations, institutes and movements of lay cooperators, all geared toward promoting the Catholic faith through various forms of modern media, through the liturgy, through catechetical instruction: the Society of St. Paul, the Daughters of St. Paul, the Pious Disciples of the Divine Master, the Sisters of Jesus the Good Shepherd, the Sisters of Mary Queen of Apostles, The Institute of St. Gabriel the Archangel, The Institute of Mary of the Annunciation, The Institute of Jesus the Priest, The Institute of the Holy Family and the Association of Pauline Cooperators. He passed on his zeal for God and for others to so many of his spiritual children. St. John Paul II said of him at his beatification, “Blessed James Alberione felt the need to make Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, known ‘to all people of our time with the means of our time,’  as he liked to say. He was inspired by the Apostle Paul, whom he described as a ‘theologian and architect of the Church,’ remaining ever docile and faithful to the Magisterium of the Successor of Peter, a ‘beacon’ of truth in a world that is so often devoid of sound spiritual references. ‘May there be a group of saints to use these means,’  this apostle of the new times was in the habit of repeating. What a formidable heritage he left his religious family! May his spiritual sons and daughters keep intact the spirit of their origins, to respond adequately to the needs of evangelization in the contemporary world.” The official biography printed by the Vatican for his beatification said that he was “one of the most creative apostles of the 20th century,” and talked about how he discovered his vocation. He was 16. It was the night of December 31, 1900, and he spent four hours in prayer as we changed from the 19th to the 20th century. A “particular light” seemed to come from the Host and roused in him a sense of obligation “to do something for the Lord and for the people of the new century”: he felt “obliged to serve the Church” with the new instruments provided by human ingenuity. After priestly ordination when he was 23 and service in a parish, he became a spiritual director to seminarians in Albaa where he also taught, helped out with preaching, gave catechesis and conferences in various parishes of the diocese. He came to understand that the Lord was guiding him toward a new mission: to preach the Gospel to all peoples, in the spirit of the Apostle Paul, using the modern instruments of communication. On August 20, 1914, Fr. Alberione initiated the Pauline Family in Alba by founding the Pious Society of St. Paul. After founding the Pious Society of St. Paul and the Daughters of St. Paul, he fell gravely ill and doctors thought he would die, but he says he was healed by St. Paul directly and had a dream in which Jesus told him not to be afraid and to enlighten. He founded the Pious Disciples of the Divine Master and everything began to grow. The spirituality he imparted was one of the kingdom: to follow Jesus as Master and Shepherd, “Way, Truth and Life,” to live in the kingdom like Mary, Mother, Teacher and Queen of Apostles, and to imitate as much as possible St. Paul as disciple and apostle. The goal that Fr. Alberione wanted his sons and daughters in the “Pauline family” to pursue above all was complete conformation to Christ: to embrace the whole Christ Way, Truth and Life with one’s entire being: mind, will, heart and physical energies. He was an expert during Vatican Council II. An hour before he died on November 26, 1971, St. Pope Paul VI visited him and blessed him. Two years earlier, in an audience, he had said about him in his presence, “There he is: humble, silent, tireless, always vigilant, recollected in his thoughts, which run from prayer to action; always intent on scrutinizing the ‘signs of the times,’ that is, the most creative ways to reach souls. Our Fr. Alberione has given the Church new instruments with which to express herself, new means to give vigor and breadth to her apostolate, new capacities and a new awareness of the validity and possibilities of his mission in the modern world with modern means. Dear Fr. Alberione, allow the Pope to rejoice in your long, faithful and tireless work and in the fruits it has produced for the glory of God and the good of the Church.” Today the whole Church rejoices in that work of bringing so many to glorify God.
• Today we turn to God through his intercession and ask the Lord to grant us the grace to follow him wherever he leads, to seek his face in all circumstances, and to try to use all our life to bring others to seek his face with us. We ask him to help us, like he helped Blessed Giacomo Alberione to learn how to sing that “new song” of the kingdom here on earth with honest lips, raised hands, and lifted hearts, so that we might join them in the chorus of the “144,000” singing forever to God’s glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: