The Church’s Pattern of Growth, as seen in Blessed Solanus Casey, 17th Monday (II), July 30, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Solanus Casey, Religious
July 30, 2018
Jer 13:1-11, Dt 32:18-21, Mt 13:31-35

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

The allowing points were attempted in the homily: 

• There is a huge contrast in today’s readings between the organic growth of God’s kingdom in and through those who cooperate with God in faith and the corruption that occurs when people fail to listen.
• We begin with the growth. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us two parables to describe the growth of the Kingdom in us and through us among others. In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, we see that the kingdom can begin very small, in the heart of one faithful person, but then over time, it can grow huge. This is, of course, what we see in how the Kingdom began in the Annunciation, when out of Mary’s yes, the Seed conceived within her by the power of the Holy Spirit, began to grow and eventually all nations would be embraced in the branches of his arms on the Cross. We saw that this is what happened on Pentecost, when out of this small band of apostles, the Church started and experienced great growth. We’ve seen this happen in the founding of parishes out of a few committed families, of religious movements and orders that only began with the founder, and in families when one person’s conversion led to the conversion of so many others.
• This type of organic growth is contrasted with the prophet ôt, the symbolic action, that God asked the Prophet Jeremiah to carry out in today’s first reading. God told him to get a brand new linen loincloth, basically the ancient underwear worn by the priestly class, and after wearing it for a while, take it off and place it unlaundered in the soily cleft of a rock in Parath, a place a short distance from his home. A long interval later, God had him retrieve the loincloth and he discovered that it had been rotted in contact with the earth and other elements. That was an image, God communicated to him so that he could communicate it to others, to show the rotting of the people of Judah and Jerusalem. God wanted the whole houses of Israel and Judah to cling to him intimately like the linen underwear. He wanted them to be his people, his renown, his praise, his beauty. He wanted to see them grow in relationship with them. “But they did not listen,” God said. They refused to obey his words, they walked in the stubbornness of their hearts, they followed and adored false gods, and that special priestly garment rotted. In the Responsory, the Church has us return to the Book of Deuteronomy detailing the infidelity of the Israelites 700 years before because history was repeating itself: they were unmindful of the God who gave them birth, they were fickle with no sense of loyalty, they treated God as if he didn’t exist, angering him with their idols. And they would bring demise on themselves. God wouldn’t so much punish them as allow them to experience the punishment of their own actions when they turned their back on him, when they allowed the intimate relationship in the Covenant he formed with them to rot like the loincloth.
• It behooves us to examine which of these two vectors we are on personally and communally. We’re either on a path of growth in the kingdom, like the Parables of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed indicate, or we are on the path of corruption. Our relationship with God is even more intimate than that of the Jews, but is that a source of growth for us or are we forsaking that incredible treasure? We can begin communally. Are we growing as a Church, as an Archdiocese, as a religious institute, are we lifting up all of society, or are we recapitulating what we saw in Moses’ and Jeremiah’s times? We can of course point to certain places where the Church really is growing and thriving and others where it’s contracting and being eaten alive by corruption. In our part of the vineyard — we have to be honest about it — the vast majority of the people of the New and Eternal Covenant aren’t living by that Covenant. They’re not coming to Jesus in the intimate Sacraments where he forgives and feeds us. They’re not living by the Word of God. In many cases, Catholics are even champions of the culture that celebrates the destruction of unborn children, the redefinition of marriage, the neglect of the poor and vulnerable and other offenses that cry out to heaven. We do ourselves no favors by trying to sugarcoat what’s happening. And the reason why that’s happening communally is because there’s not growth happening personally in the vast majority of persons. Rather than growing in faith, many allow their faith to atrophy. They are living more by the standards of the world than by the standards of Christ. They know less now than they knew when they were confirmed.
• But it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus in today’s parables shows us the path of real reform and gives us a guarantee for our hope when we begin to take our growth in faith seriously. Like the history of the people of Israel, the history of the Church is a chronicle of growth and decline — growth when people are faithful, decline when people become worldly and corrupt — but God who is faithful always gives the graces of a renewal. When people respond, renewal occurs. Now is one of those times in the Church in the northeast when we need to begin again, like a mustard seed, that process of growth. We need to be leaven even within the communities we inhabit. There are so many opportunities for us to grow in faith, especially with the multitude of resources — video, audio, books, websites, blogs — so easily accessible today. But we need to avail ourselves of those gifts. Even the downsizing of the Church in the northeast is a powerful personal summons for us to grow in faith. When the Church gets smaller, it’s an opportunity for many others to grow in faith. When the Church is a tree, an enormous institution, many people can stay on the peripheries and neither share in nor contribute to the growth God wants to bring about. They can convince themselves that there are thousands of potential volunteers so that they don’t need to step forward; that there are dozens of big benefactors, so they can keep contributing what they always have; that there are multitudes of catechists to pass on the faith to newer generations, so they can keep their Sunday mornings for errands; that there are scores of beautiful voices to sing in choirs, so they can keep their God-given talents for themselves; that there are hundreds of boys to serve at Mass, so their kids can continue to prioritize sports; that there are huge quantities of those to spread the faith to others, so they don’t need to work at spreading the faith as leaven in their workplaces, schools, hobbies, neighborhoods and elsewhere. But when we become closer to the size of a mustard seed, we can’t pass the spiritual buck in the same way. We need to step forward. All hands must be on deck. This is a grace. But it’s also a challenge. Many of those who, for example, grew up when parishes and Dioceses and communities were the size of a full trees need to make the transition of greater commitment required when their churches, communities, institutes have become closer to the size of a mustard seed. It’s not possible to be a spectator and somehow expect that everyone else will provide the necessary resources for those entities to grow. Today’s parable is a promise and image of hope: if we begin really to live in the kingdom, to allow what God wants to do in us fully to happen, the growth that happened before will happen again. After all, if the Lord could take his mother, a few women and twelve relative nobodies — eleven of whom cowardly abandoned him in his moment of great need — and transform the entire world, then he can clearly do the same with us here in New York, if we but have similar faith. The Lord Jesus wants us to be the living 21st century illustration of this parable.
• We see multiple 20th century  illustrations of this parable in the life of Blessed Solanus Casey, whom the Church rejoices to celebrate today for the first time. First we see it in his home. Fr. Solanus came from a humble, large, hard-working Irish farming family, and worked as a logger, electric street car operator, prison guard and hospital orderly before entering high school seminary at the old age of 21. They weren’t famous, but they prayed and they worked, and their immigrant faith was like a mustard seed and leaven that grew to be quite large, with three sons as priests, with the rest having big families. We see what the Lord did overall with Bernard (Solanus), who was not exceptionally gifted in terms of academic talents — he struggled to learn German — but it was from his smallness, his humility, that the Lord eventually had grow a tree in which so many could find their rest. For most of his religious life, he was a porter, welcoming people to the Capuchin monasteries — in Yonkers, lower East Manhattan, Harlem, Brooklyn, Huntington (Indiana) and for many years in Detroit —  listening to their problems, answering their questions and needs, praying for and with them. Huge numbers of people would come to see him and leave changed. Welcoming them, he helped them similarly to welcome with faith in divine providence whatever God sent. “O what God must have ahead of us,” he would say, “if we only leave all to his planning.” That’s living in the kingdom, leaving the planning to the one who makes trees grow from tiniest of seeds. As he got older and frailer, his fellow Capuchins tried to protect him, by sending him to monasteries far from the mobs, but people always found him and he always answered the call. “I look on my whole life as giving,” he said, “and I want to give and give until there is nothing left of me.” As he lay dying, 53 years to the hour of his first Mass, his last words were a Eucharistic oblation, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ,” a fitting valedictory for someone who his whole life had been giving everything he had to the Bridegroom of every Christian soul. That’s one of the reasons why the Lord was able to bear so much fruit through him. He once wrote about the three things that mark “saintly characters.” They are “eagerness for the glory of God, touchiness about the interests of Jesus, and anxiety for the salvation of souls.”All three are related to the Kingdom, because that is God’s glory, what Jesus was interested in establishing and how souls would be saved.  Such eagerness, attentiveness, and holy anxiety were what people always recognized in him. And those are three things that from heaven he is doubtless praying will characterize us, so that together with all the angels and saints, this holy porter will be able in heaven to do what gave him so much joy on earth — and welcome us forever to the monastery of the heavenly Jerusalem.
• Blessed Solanus so loved the Mass. It was his great glory to celebrate it with devotion. This is the place where the growth that Jesus talks about in the Gospel  is meant to begin, as Jesus seeks to plant himself within us as a seed, as a “grain of wheat” (Jn 12:24) on good soil that together with him can bear abundant growth. It’s here at Mass that Jesus does something far more significant than a prophetic ôt symbolizing the type of intimacy he wants to have with us. He actually implants himself on our insides and allows us to enter through Holy Communion into the inner life of God. This is where all growth in the Church begins. This is where all growth in the Church is directed. As we prepare to receive Jesus now, we acknowledge that we are receiving within the Leaven that is meant to help us rise in faith and then, together with him, like with Blessed Solanus, to be leaven for the whole world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: