Seeing with Fresh Eyes of Love, 33rd Monday (II), November 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
November 18, 2024
Rev 1:1-4.2:1-5, Ps 1, Lk 18:35-43

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• On Saturday Jesus gave us the parable of the importune woman bothering the unjust judge in order to convey to us the necessity of “praying always without losing heart.” Immediately thereafter is the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican — which the Church strangely doesn’t give us to ponder today, perhaps we meditate upon it on Saturday of third week of Lent each year — which shows us of the importance of humbly begging the Lord for mercy. Today we encounter the living illustration of what Jesus was teaching about persevering, faithful, humble prayer for mercy in the blind man by the side of the road whom St. Mark in his version of the same scene identifies as Bartimaeus.
• As rabbis were accustomed to do on their three-times-per-year pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon being informed that “Jesus of Nazareth was passing by,” he immediately began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles in Galilee to the north and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. But his cries for Jesus were annoying those who were trying to hear Jesus’ teaching. So the first people in the group rebuked him and told him to shut his trap. But that only led him to cry out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” The word St. Luke uses means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness.
• Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever else he was teaching at that moment. Likely, it was also a “coincidental” opportunity for him put flesh on his parables by showing how God responds to persistent, faithful, humble prayer for compassion. Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” and Bartimaeus said, “Lord, please let me see!” To some degree, Bartimaeus was already seeing by faith but he wanted to see Jesus with physical eyes so that he would be able to do exactly what he did once cured, to “follow him, giving glory to God.” He saw something with inner eyes, but was asking to see more. Jesus replied, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
• This cry of Bartimaeus is one of the most beautiful and frequent Christian aspirations: Domine, ut videam!, “Lord, I want to see.” It’s a beautiful response to Jesus’ perennial question to us in prayer, “What do you want me to do for you?” If Jesus were to ask many of us that question, many might waste his attention on lesser things, asking for him to return us to the shape we were in at 21, or to resolve a particular issue, or other relatively small stuff. Every day, however, we should ask the Lord for the gift to see, for the grace to see what we don’t see, to see things as they really are, the way he sees them. We should beseech the grace to see him and to see ourselves aright. We should ask for the grace to recognize him in the Holy Eucharist, in Confession, in prayer, in others, in the various events of the day, and especially in the beatific vision. He won’t allow us to see everything, because then we wouldn’t have the grace to live by faith, believing in things unseen, but he does want us to see things more and more in his light and more and more deeply. Today we ask him with Bartimaeus to give us the grace of real vision.
• In the first reading today, from the beginning of the Book of Revelation which will guide us until the end of this liturgical year a week from Saturday, the Lord seeks to “un-veil” or “reveal” the way things really are behind the scenes so that we can see them. St. John tells us that in this book he was “reporting what he saw” as Jesus allowed him to glimpse various of the things of heaven and various of the ways which which Jesus was looking on the Christians of that time and every time. The book of Revelation is a response of God to the Church’s constant cry, “Lord, we want to see.” In today’s passage and tomorrow’s, we get what the Lord was seeing in the seven Churches of the diaspora for whom St. John was writing the book. Today we get the first of the seven Churches, Ephesus, the one that was in the best condition. Tomorrow, we’ll get the last two Churches, Sardis and Laodicea, the two that were in the worst condition. I would encourage you to read Jesus’ words to the other four Churches in the middle — Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira and Philadelphia — on your own. As we see what Jesus sees in these Churches, it would also be very good for us to ask what Jesus would see in this Archdiocese, or more specifically in Columbia Catholic Ministry, and in each of us, whether he would be praising us or reproving us for what he says to these ancient Churches during a time of persecution.
• Jesus says that he sees in the Church of Ephesus much deserving of praise. “I know your works, your labor and your endurance,” he says. They were bearing fruit for the Gospel, they were striving to live the faith, and they were enduring faithfully the trials of many persecutions. He said, “You cannot tolerate the wicked.” We’re called to love even our enemies and pray for our persecutors, but we’re not asked to “tolerate the wicked” but to reject their wickedness and pray for their conversion, something that would do all of us good to remember during this time in which people proclaim “tolerance” and mean by it that we look the other way on their sinfulness, something that Jesus himself never did and we as his followers can’t do either. One wickedness they couldn’t tolerate concerned false prophets. Jesus said, “You have tested those who call themselves Apostles but are not, and discovered that they are impostors.” They knew the faith well enough that they were able to recognize and reject those who were preaching another Gospel than the one that they had received. Today that, too, is a very important skill, to be able to discriminate between those who are really announcing God’s word and those preachers who are saying what people want to hear for their own aggrandizement. Jesus finishes the praise by saying, “You have endurance and have suffered for my name and have not grown weary.” This was a Church of martyrs, full of those who were seeking to keep their eyes on Christ even in the midst of tears. But Jesus had one fraternal correction. “I hold this against you: you have lost the love you had at first.” Yes, they were enduring. Yes, they were discerning. Yes, they were working. But they were no longer doing it with the passion, with the love, with which they had begun. Their sufferings had hardened them. Now they were living by fidelity, by loyalty, by duty, but not by love to the same degree. “Realize how far you have fallen,” Jesus said. St. Paul had told the Corinthians that if they were to hand over their body to the torturers as martyrs but didn’t do so out of love, they would gain nothing. Jesus was essentially saying that despite all their works and good deeds, they had fallen very far because they were no longer living by that first love, that love at the beginning, that prior love, which had characterized and ought always to characterize the Christian faith. They were lacking that love for God and that love for others that had distinguished them. “Repent and do the works you did at first,” Jesus said, calling them to works of piety and works of charity done with passion. Jesus was saying that it’s not enough for us to be faithful. He wants faith working through love for God and neighbor. To lose that is to lose much! Jesus was calling them to conversion, to recover that first love. He was helping them to see who they really are so that they, like Bartimaeus, might cry out “Son of David, have mercy!,” and begin to see him more in the midst of their afflictions and to see him more in the needy and begin to love him with that passionate love they had at the start.
• Jesus’ curing of the Ephesians’ sight is also a salve for the eyes of our own heart. It’s a chance for us to examine whether we still have the love we had at first, the love for God when we first became aware of his presence, the love we had for him at our first holy Communion, the love we had for him when we first became conscious of his call to be saints and sought to respond with all we are and have, the love we had for him on our retreats, the love we had for him in the moments in which our perception of divine love was most intense. God wants to renew us in that love, to bring us not back to the level of love we had at first, but to bring us beyond it, while making sure it remains “virginal,” pristine, through having had it intensified by the power of his mercy. He wants that love to inundate all our actions, our “works, labor, endurance,” our discernment, our suffering. He wants our love never to grow weary and even if we have fallen, to help us get up to where we were and keep climbing with him.
• To help us to do that, Jesus doesn’t just pass us by but seeks to ground us in his own love. In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we see that the blessed person who does not follow the counsel of the wicked or walk in the way of sinners or sit in the company of the insolent, but who delights in and meditates upon the law of the Lord in day and night in order to see things with the light of God “is like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” Jesus implants us not just “near” the water but in Him, who is the Living Water, constantly cleansing and purifying our motivations, our desires, our love, so that attached as branches to the Vine, we might bear fruit at all times. He wants to help us to see this love with the eyes of our heart and be so transformed that like the healed Bartimaeus, we may follow Jesus, giving glory to God and praising him not just here at Mass but in all our work, labors and endurance.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who shows us what persistent and humble prayer, and a life that sees by faith, looks like. She was one who loved to the end, whose love seemed to grow over time and whose leaves never seemed to fade. St. Rose Philippine Duchesne was born to a wealthy family in France; her father was a banker and businessman and her mother part of a family that eventually produced a French president. After having been educated by the Visitation nuns, she wanted to join them, but her father wanted her to enter into a fitting marriage. So she needed to run away. The French Revolution closed her convent and after trying to reestablish it, she joined St. Madeleine Sophie Barat in the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and eventually accepted a mission to come to the United States to teach Americans how to pray and see the world by faith. At the age of 49, with five other sisters, she embarked on a grueling 20-week journey across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. Rose was sick the entire voyage and twice was near death, but she soldiered on until they arrived in St. Louis. The bishop established them in St. Charles and gave them a one-room log cabin, which they used to found a school for poor children, the first free school west of the Mississippi. Thus began 34 years of missionary toil in brutal conditions. The sisters needed to battle cold, hunger, sickness and deprivation, not to mention opposition to their French teaching methods, ingratitude and even calumny. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here,” she wrote succinctly back to the motherhouse, “and trials are the riches in this land.” About the calumny, she joked, “They say everything about us, except that we poison the children.” All of these crosses, however, served merely to prove and magnify her Christian virtue, and to spur her to share with children and fellow sisters the sweetness of a life in conformity with God’s word. Vocations from among her students started to come in large numbers and she was able to establish new houses, schools and orphanages in Florissant, Grand Côteau, New Orleans, St. Louis and St. Michael. As hard as she was working among the settlers in the frontier, she longed to bring the Gospel to the Indians, so that they could learn to see by faith as well. She got her wish when she was 72. By this point, she had become ill enough that she had asked to step down as superior. When a request came in from the famous Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet to help establish a school for the Patawatomi in Sugar Creek, Kansas, she volunteered to go. Her fellow sisters wanted to prevent her from the difficult work in her frail condition, but not only did she insist on going but so did Fr. De Smet. “She must come,” the black-robed apostle demanded. “She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work.” That’s precisely what she did and what happened. It had been hard enough for her to learn English upon coming to America at about the age of 50. It was near impossible for her to learn the Indian dialect, but she did the best she could to teach the young Indian girls about Jesus. What she couldn’t convey in words, she conveyed in action. She spent most of her days and nights on her knees in prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist, which taught the Indians more about the real presence of Christ and the love we’re supposed to have for God, at first and always, than hundreds of catechism classes. Once, young squaws placed small pieces of paper on the back of her habit to see if she’d move during the night and go to bed. They came back in the morning and the pieces of paper were exactly where they had placed them. So moved were they by her example that they gave her a precise nickname: Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “the woman who always prays.” Her prayers led to many conversions and great fruitfulness. The Lord in prayer was asking what she wanted and she said souls. If you visit the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (in St. Louis), which I believe is the country’s most beautiful Church, you will find in the Garden area outside the Cathedral a grotto with a statue of St. Rose Philippine sitting, listening, with two benches for people to sit and talk with her. There’s a sign encouraging such conversation. What she is saying in response might be as unintelligible as what she would try to say to the Patawatomi but doubtless she would be praying that each of us, in our own way, might become “Quah-hak-ka-num-ad,” people who pray insistently that we may have faith and understanding so that we might follow Jesus always, glorify him as he deserves, and love with the ever fresh love.
• Today we ask the Lord with Bartimaeus for the grace to see, so that, looking at things with the eyes of faith, we may recognize and revere Him with that love we had at first. Christ is passing by today just like he did in Jericho. He is passing by in the Sacred Host and then in our sacred neighbor. May we prepare to receive him with pristine love, the love we would if we would receive him only this time, the love we hope to receive Him with our last time, the love we hope to give him forever!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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