Not Ashamed of the Gospel, like St. Teresa of Avila, 28th Tuesday (I), October 15, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila
October 15, 2019
Rom 1:16-25, Ps 19, Lk 11:37-41

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

The following points were attempted during the homily:

• “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” St. Paul emphatically tells the Romans at the beginning of today’s epistle. Those are very strong words for someone who, at a human level, might have had many reasons to be shamefaced and silent about the Gospel. After all he was scourged, beaten with rods stoned, shipwrecked, ambushed, hunted down and imprisoned on account of the Gospel. He was crisscrossing the globe to preach preposterously that a publicly executed carpenter from an obscure village not only had risen the dead and was alive but was also the Lord and Son of God. Jesus’ crucifixion, he knew, was a laughing stock for Greeks and an embarrassing scandal for Jews. But despite it all he stressed that he was not ashamed of the Gospel, in all its paradoxical details, because he knew that, however improbable it might seem to human wisdom, it was in fact the power and wisdom of God.
• It’s important that we confront and with God’s grace overcome any embarrassment we have over our faith. There are many in the Church who are ashamed of the Gospel. In the context of an aggressive secularism that is pushing hedonism, materialism, individualism, and rationalistic empiricism, and often mocks Church teaching as the morality of unenlightened, antediluvian cavemen, many feel somewhat humiliated to give witness to their Catholic faith. Many Catholics have been made to feel that the Gospel is not only “bad news,” but on occasion even ridiculous. Catholics after all believe that we adore and eat God himself in Holy Communion, even though to the world all we’re doing is consuming cheap bread and wine. We believe, according to Jesus’ own words, that the path of happiness is spiritual poverty instead of riches, purity instead of sexual profligacy, spiritual hunger instead of satiety, meekness instead of strength, and persecution instead of popularity. We believe in praying for persecutors, forgiving those who hate us seventy times seven times, and turning the other cheek. We believe that we shouldn’t commit even the slightest sin even if we were able to win the whole world. And then we get to the really controversial issues for people today! We believe that the Pope is infallible — he cannot make a mistake, ever — on something that he teaches to be definitively held by all the faithful on something we need to believe (faith) or do (morals) to please God and enter into his life. We believe that even though men and women are equal in dignity before God, only men are capable of being ordained priests.We believe that not even rape and incest victims should morally be able to take the lives of the unwanted children growing within them through abortion. We believe that everyone should remain chaste and sexually abstinent until marriage, and that all sex outside of marriage is sinful. We believe that even though almost everyone, including Catholic married couples, use some form of contraception at some point in their marriages, it is still wrong. We profess to love those with same-sex attractions while at the same time saying that they should never, ever be able to act on those attractions by engaging in same-sex sexual activity. These are among the issues that make many members of Christ’s flock sheepish with regard to living and sharing the faith. It’s often some priests, religious and Catholics professionally involved in education that are among the most ashamed. One of the great dramas taking place in the Church today, I’m convinced, is about whether we’re ashamed of Jesus’ teaching about the indissolubility of marriage or whether we think it’s part of the truth that sets people free, part of the Gospel that, although hard to live in circumstances, is meant to bring us to God and fill us with joy.
• St. Paul was not ashamed of the Gospel and his example is an inspiration to all Catholics. After describing his holy pride and confidence in the Gospel that is the “power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes,” he went on to tackle straight on many of the contemporary ideas that made those in Rome consider the faith farcical. He dissected the “impiety and wickedness” found in those who deny God even though creation would make no sense without a creator anymore than a wooden chair would make sense without a carpenter. He described the foolishness of pagan worship, which exchanges God’s glory to adore statues of birds, snakes or savage quadrupeds. He mentioned the slavery of those who gave in through the lust of their hearts for the “mutual degradation of their bodies,” worshipping the creature instead of the Creator. In all of these cases, as G.K. Chesterton once quipped, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
• Jesus himself sought to teach us by his own example how not to be ashamed of the Gospel. In the midst of an encounter in which his Pharisaical host wanted to make him feel guilty for not having washed his hands, Jesus used it as an example to teach us about how to cleanse our insides, by giving of ourselves totally to living the Gospel as generously as Jesus did. He says that we become pure on the inside by almsgiving, which means not just giving a quarter to a poor person or a quarter of a million to the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, but by giving of ourselves in love to God and others. It means like St. Paul giving ourselves together with the Gospel and not being ashamed of doing either, even if no one else is doing so. The path to purity of heart, to cleaning our insides, is a truly Eucharistic life in which we receive Jesus’ total self-gift and say, in return, this is my body, my blood, my sweat, my flesh given out of love for you.
• Today we celebrate a saint who was not ashamed of the Gospel either. She lived at a time in which, because of the Renaissance of greco-roman literature not to mention ways of living, many in the Church had become ashamed of living the faith in all of its detail. She entered the Convent, but the Convent, in some ways, was like a Christian sorority. The rules of Carmelite conventual life, not to mention the Gospel, were constantly being watered down due to laxity and lukewarmness. There was no need, after all, to be “fanatical” about living the Christian life, some thought. She suffered a lot trying to reform Carmelite monasteries. She sought in particular to bring these houses back into shape so that they might serve as real schools of sanctity. She sought to lead them, as the opening prayer of the Mass attests, on the way of perfection.  As Jesus pointed to in the Gospel in reminding the Pharisees that it wasn’t enough to clean the outward appearance of a cup but that they needed to clean the insides as well, so St. Teresa taught that it wasn’t enough to wear the habit of a religious, but one needed to pray, to obey, and to have the heart of a religious. She was ashamed, not of the Gospel, but of her and others’ failure to live the Gospel. She knew, as St. Paul tells us today, that the “righteous will live by faith” and that the faithful will live righteously. This righteous way of living, this way of perfection, is the path of loving God with all we have and loving others as God has loved us first.
• If we realize we haven’t lived a life sufficiently celebrating and sharing the Good News of life in Christ, if we haven’t fully plugged into its power, St. Teresa’s life can give us inspiration, because she needed to convert to it later in life. She started off with great desires. When she was seven, she took great pleasure in the lives of the saints, making a little hermitage in her back yard where she could read and pray. One day her younger brother Rodrigo was in the back yard with her and they began to think about the happiness of the saints in heaven and got caught up in the thought of living “forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.” Rodrigo asked how they could get to heaven fastest, and Teresa replied that that would be through martyrdom, because the sufferings of the martyrs were nothing compared with the glory they received immediately upon death. Rodrigo asked how they could become martyrs and she said that they would need to go where the Muslims were in order to be killed by them for the faith. Rodrigo asked where the Muslims were and she told him in Morocco. And so off they went walking toward Morocco, forgetting — we can excuse 7 and 5 year olds! — the small geographical complication that there was the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and northern Africa! They got outside the city walls and as far as the ancient Roman Adaja Bridge when they were met by their Uncle Francisco coming back on his horse from hunting who asked them where they were headed. When informed they were heading to Africa to be martyred by the Moors, he told them he would give them a ride on his horse. After they hopped on, he took them back to their home! The episode shows the faith and courage of Teresa from an early age, how she was unashamed of the Gospel:  she was willing to suffer even earthly tortures — like the stories of the martyrs she read with her brother — for the sake of the Gospel. That deep desire never left her, but over the course of time, it attenuated. She entered the Carmelite monastery when she was 20, but the house was in a spiritual malaise. Some nuns had suites of rooms, with servants and pets. Eventually she succumbed to it herself, spending vast amounts of time entertaining visitors and friends in the parlor, giving herself over to various compromises with worldliness and vanity. It was only two decades later, when she was 39, that God reawakened her from her life according to the flesh, from her spiritual worldliness, from tolerating venial sins, trusting in herself, not valuing God’s grace, to a truly fervent life. She gave herself over to God and allowed herself to be led to reform Carmelite life as a whole. The Holy Spirit revivified her desire for holiness, for happiness, for heaven and he guided her through all the stages necessary to give her a foretaste of heavenly union here on earth through prayer.
• St. Teresa drew her strength from the Eucharist. She advised us in the Way of Perfection, “After having received the Lord, since you have the Person Himself present, strive to close the eyes of the body and open those of the soul and look into your heart. For I tell you again, and would like to tell you many times that you should acquire the habit of doing this every time. … Though He comes disguised, the disguise, as I have said, does not prevent Him from being recognized in many ways, in conformity with the desire we have to see Him. And you can desire to see Him so much that He will reveal Himself to you entirely” (34:12). The devil ultimately wants to make us ashamed of our faith and ashamed of the reality of the Eucharist, such that we treat Jesus in the Sacrament of his Love with indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and the scorn of shame. Jesus wants us to be humbly proud of it, to see it as an incredible gift, to live it as she did and spread love of him. St. Teresa stressed both the treasure of the Eucharist as well as the danger of routinization. She wrote in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, “I think that if we were to approach the Most Blessed Sacrament with great faith and love, once would be enough to make us rich. How much richer from approaching so many times as we do. The trouble is we do so out of routine, and it shows” (M 3.13).
• Today we we prepare to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we ask through St. Teresa’s intercession and St. Paul’s that, like them, we may unabashedly always view the entirety of the Gospel Jesus has announced to us as the truth that will set us free, as the Good News that the world always needs, even if it doesn’t realize it, and follow them on the path of giving of ourselves entirely to this Gospel, “fired,”  as we prayed at the beginning of this Mass, like St. Teresa “with longing for true holiness.” This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. How proud we are to profess it, in Christ Jesus our Lord!

The readings for today’s Mass were: