The Way of Wisdom and Growth in Faith, 32nd Monday (I), November 8, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
November 8, 2021
Wis 1:1-7, Ps 139, Lk 17:1-6

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

•  “Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way!,” we pray in today’s Psalm, and the Lord responds by giving us guidance in the first reading and in the Gospel. We begin the Book of Wisdom, which we will ponder throughout this week. The first chapter sets the tone for the entire book and describes for us the everlasting way of divine wisdom. Through the sacred author, God calls us to “love justice,” “think of the Lord in goodness,” and “seek the Lord in integrity of heart.” These are all expressions that say that our hearts, our minds, and our actions, respectively, should be aligned with God and his holy wisdom, that we should be right with him, right with others, and whole. The greatest criticisms Jesus would give in the Gospel were for those “hypocrites” or “actors” who said one thing, but did another, who on the outside were beautiful in terms of their religious practice but who on the inside were sepulchers full of dead men’s bones. Some of the scribes and Pharisees, for example,  to use the words of the Book of Wisdom, had souls that plotted evil, regardless of what their lips claimed.  Jesus calls us, rather, to genuine integrity. That’s what the everlasting way is all about. God probes us, he understands our thoughts from afar, he scrutinizes us and is familiar with all our ways. We recognize that he is everywhere around us, wants to guide us, and hold us fast with his right hand. He wants to help us to grow.
• In the Gospel, Jesus specifically talks about growth in faith. After the apostles cry out audage nobis fidem! — “Lord, increase our faith!,” Jesus responds by saying that if they had the faith of a mustard seed they could uproot and transplant trees. Faith has the power to transform and do the seemingly impossible. The apostles ask for increased faith immediately after Jesus talks about two things: the evil of scandal; and the need constantly to ask for forgiveness of God and others and to give it when someone asks it of us. One of the most important parts of our life of faith — if we love justice, think of the Lord in goodness, and seek the Lord in integrity of heart — is our recognition that just as God never tires of forgiving us, we should never tire of asking him for forgiveness and of sharing a similar mercy with others. This is hard. It requires great humility to ask for forgiveness and greater humility to give it. Jesus is calling us not merely to give people a second chance, but an eighth chance (and in another part of the Gospel he says, depending upon the translation, that we need to give a 78th chance or a 491st chance, meaning, since seven was a number signifying infinity, to forgive infinitely). In order to be capable of doing this, we need the strength that comes from faith. That’s why we humbly beg, “Increase our faith!”
• With regard to the situation of scandal, we also need increased faith. In response to a scandalizer, Jesus says not that we should forgive seven times a day but that the scandalizer should have a millstone tied around his neck and thrown into the sea. There’s a huge difference between the way we treat a sinner in need of forgiveness and a scandalizer. Several years ago Pope Francis said in a homily on this passage spoke about this. A sinner repents and comes to say to God and others from the heart, “I’m sorry.” A scandalizer doesn’t repent. He just goes on with the sinful behavior, settling an example of sin for others. Jesus says, “Woe” to him. Pope Francis said that the one who causes scandal has become corrupt. He’s no longer sinning because of weakness, but because of choice. He no longer is humbly coming to ask for mercy, because he has begun to think that his sinful conduct doesn’t need to be forgiven, that it’s precisely the right thing to do. A scandalizer sins proudly, with an air of self-righteous defiance of God and others. We see it, for example, in those politicians who support abortion and claim that they’re just following their conscience. We see it in those people who relate to illegal immigrants with hearts full of stone, calling for policies in their regard that they would never ask for if they were dealing with people whom they looked at as brothers and sisters whom they should love. We see it in those people who proudly make excuses for not coming to Church or to Confession. To this circumstance as well, the disciples cry out, “Lord, increase our faith!,” lest we, too, can be in a situation of setting scandal for others — not just setting bad example by weakness, but setting it with supposed justification. As we ask the Lord for an increase in faith, we are asking him for the light that comes from faith so that we may examine our consciences appropriately, see our spiritual blind spots and look at our behavior from God’s perspective, and come, seven times a day or more, to say, “Lord, have mercy on me!”
• Someone who journeyed along the everlasting way, who loved justice, thought of the Lord in goodness,, who sought him in integrity of heart, who grew in faith through the reception of the Lord’s mercy and who sought to help others grow in faith through a holy example is the holy woman we celebrate today, the great Carmelite St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. One of the most inspirational things about her is that she clearly wasn’t born a saint. She needed God’s help, strength and mercy to overcome a ferocious temper. Her mother and a confessor told her that, because of her strong personality, she would either become a terror or a saint. A big change took place with her first Confession at the age of seven. It brought her what she called her “conversion” and from that point forward she vowed, despite ongoing struggles, to become a “sweet, patient and obedient daughter.” As she was preparing for her first Holy Communion four years later, when she was 11, a religious sister told her that her name, Elizabeth, meant “House of God” — actually it means “oath of God,” but the sister thought that the combination of “El” (God) and “beth” (house) was determinative despite the intervening letters (omnia in bonum!) — and that thought arrested her. She thought that she could not have such beautiful a name and not live as a house of God. Such a house could not abide someone who was prone to explosions and a source of trouble to others. She asked for the Lord’s help who came to dwell within and whose presence she grew more aware of and treasured. A great pianist and award winner at the Dijon Conservatory, she started to use her musical abilities for God’s glory rather than her own, by singing in two Church choirs. She would eventually say that she wanted to do all things for the praise of God’s glory. She began teaching Catechism so that others would share the same holy desire. She lived just 250 yards from a Discalced Carmelite Monastery and she wanted to enter there in order to serve God with everything she had, a response to a calling she discerned God had given her. She visited the convent when she was 17 and the superior there gave her a copy of a circular manuscript of a French Carmelite who had died just months before, and that first version of what would become St. Therese’s Story of a Soul had a big impact on her and her desire to grow in prayer. Her widowed mother resisted her vocation for several years in the hope that Elizabeth would finally fall for one of her many suitors, but finally relented enough to say that she would need to wait until 21. Elizabeth did and entered at 21, where she would come to know God and serve him in others for five years, until she would die of Addison’s disease at the age of 26. She recognized she could find him in the little things of each day, saying, “I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying.” She became known as the “prophet of the presence of God.” She sought to unite everything to God, knowing that in grace God was dwelling within her. Saint Elizabeth’s beautiful prayer about God’s dwelling within us in grace is contained for us in paragraph 260 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describing how not only is God’s plan for us to enter into the perfect unity of the Trinity in heaven, but — consistent with the name Elizabeth — to become a dwelling place of God now, following through on Jesus’ promise that if we love him and keep his word, the Father will love us and the Trinity will come to us and make a dwelling place within us. “O my God,” she wrote, “Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.” That’s what the everlasting way looks like. That’s what it means to think of the Lord in goodness, to seek him in integrity of heart and to love being in right relationship with him and others. She accepted her own immense sufferings as a gift from God to bring about a union with Christ on the Cross and to allow her to join Christ in the salvation of souls, making up what was lacking in his sufferings for the sake of his body the Church. She wasn’t afraid to die, saying, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life,” because in this world, within her, she was regularly communing with that same Light, Love and Life. Before Saint Elizabeth died, she said, “I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them to go out of themselves in order to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement, and to keep them in this great silence within which will allow God to communicate Himself to them and to transform them into Himself.” Her work is to pray that we will be kept by God in the silence of prayerful union — prayerful mutual knowing — that will transform us progressively into communion with God, so that we will by the power of the Holy Spirit and following the command of Jesus go out of ourselves to bring others into that same communion with God and with us. She’s praying for us and the whole Church now.
• Inspired by her example and faith, we turn to God and ask, echoing the apostles, “Lord, increase our faith!” We ask for the grace to seek him better in integrity of heart, to think of him in goodness, to love holiness and justice, so that we, like her, might truly become houses of God’s presence where he can transform us into himself. The greatest way to grow in faith along the everlasting way of divine transformation is through the Mass. Listening to God and his holy wisdom here, we are able better to know justice so as to live it, to seek the Lord in integrity, and to think of him in goodness. Recognizing him here we’re able more easily to recognize him in the needy people in our midst. As we prepare to behold the Lamb of God, we ask him to help us to recognize him more easily in others, so that together with them, we may journey, with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, along the everlasting way, setting good example, and forgiving as God forgives. What the Lord does here is a greater miracle than moving a mulberry tree into the sea!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
WIS 1:1-7

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