Saint Monica Catholic Church

A few of you have asked for a copy of this so here it is. I usually don’t write homilies with publishing in mind so please forgive poor spelling and gramatical errors.

Appreciate everyone’s prayers over the past few weeks!

God Bless,

Fr Todd

Today’s Gospel has a good deal to do with detachment and our ability to remain detached.

I would like to lead you in a small reflection. Close your eyes if you wish but I am going invite you to reflect on some persons and possessions that are in your life:

Think for a minute of your family and who is in that family. Recall faces and names. Think about all the friends and acquaintances you have, again try to recall faces and names.

Think now about all your material possessions and what you own, what you keep in your home or apartment. What do you have in your home? How many televisions? How many cell phones? Do you have beds? Clean sheets? How many beauty products are there or items for personal grooming? Appliances? Do you have a washer a dryer? Sinks? Showers? light fixtures? Do you have a stove? A refrigerator?  What about a gardens? Nice landscaping? Do you have cable tv? Satellite? Computers? Internet? Do you have carpet or linoleum flooring? Air conditioning in both the car and house? Heat? Do you have sports equipment? Golf clubs? Footballs, basketballs, Soccer balls? a goal in the driveway? Cleats? Uniforms? Do you have fishing poles? A boat or boats? How many cars do you have? How often do you use them? Do you travel? Go on Vacation? What schools have you attended? What type and how much education have you been able to receive in your life? How is your health? Are you currently alive because you are able to obtain good solid medical care? Do you have another precious day with your loved ones? 

Finally, how busy are you with all of these things? How much of your time to they consume?

As many of you know, I had a rather unexpected 3 days in the hospital last weekend. I am very grateful for all your prayers and concern; I am doing fine, and pretty eager to get back to work (I think Fr. Jeremy is also eager for me to begin working). I would like to share with you a couple of things I learned being in the hospital that I think relate to the message of today’s gospel.

One of the things you can do in the hospital is watch and order movies for free using a little button connected to your bed. For those of you who have never been in the hospital, it is not always the most exciting place in the world yet often there is not enough energy to use the time productively. TV can be a welcome diversion.

On either Friday or Saturday afternoon I decided to watch the new Star Trek movie that had a new cast and was supposed to be much more action packed and exciting. I felt that it certainly delivered and really enjoyed the movie. However an interesting thing happened in the middle of it that caused me to reflect a little on my attachment to material goods. In the middle of the movie, during one of the more exciting sequences, I received a knock on the door and one of the hospital chaplain’s came to visit. He sat down we had a nice little chat. I told him I was a priest and we talked a little longer about parish life, family, careers, and the usual chit chat. He eventually went one his way and I went back to watching the movie. Here was potentially the problem: The way the movies are set up in the hospital you can’t pause, stop or rewind them, so I missed a huge chunk of the movie, almost ten minutes. However here was the actual problem:  I was almost tempted to ask a person created by God, sent to me to minister God’s presence, to come back later because a mechanical device of entertainment almost seemed more important. How many times have we all done this? How many times have you or I let this happen in our relationship with God? How many times have our many possessions and activities distracted us from a perfectly good opportunity to pray or be in communion with God?

A second thing I learned was this. As pastor of St. Monica I am pastor of one of the largest communities in the Archdiocese with a huge demographic of people that we serve. We have multiple activities going on at any given time and they all begin right about now, the fall.  I am an incredibly important person. Next weekend, begins Christ Renews his parish retreats, we are starting all of our Adult formation classes, great programs like Just Faith, Catholicism 101. We are inviting people to consider becoming a part of the Catholic Church, We have Youth ministry, children’s religious education, our school, that have begun or are about to begin. We are continuing our strategic planning, looking at our future and how we can at deepen our spirituality, our understanding of stewardship, continue school improvement, and our understanding of ourselves as a diverse community with a common mission. Additionally, I have a budget to be concerned about, a large staff, and any number of decisions large or small that need to be made on an almost daily basis. Along with Fr Jeremy I am responsible for seeing that the Gospel is proclaimed, that Sacraments are administered, and that we our serving our local community effectively. Did I mention that I am in incredibly important person?

Here’s what I learned in the hospital: that I was gone for three days, on a very busy weekend, and everything went just fine without me. In fact, an argument could be made that things went much more smoothly. While I have responsibility to serve St. Monica to the best of my ability, I am not indispensible. I can check out if the Lord needs me too and for the most part everybody’s lives will go on just fine. How many times have we done this? How many times have we not taken advantage of opportunities to grow closer to God because we are too busy, we are too important, because we think the world will fall apart without our presence?

I think we have something very important to learn from today’s challenging Gospel:

1)  We need to recognize that everything we have is a gift from God, everything. This includes your material possessions, your life, and the lives of the people around you. You do not own these things you care for them. Everything we thought of in our reflection is gift received. God can add God can take away.

2) The Gospel reminds that our possessions are not who we worship, God is. We should be able to detach from them at anytime in order to be in relationship with God. If our material possessions distract us from spending time with God, they are a problem. I invite you to practice “detaching”…Turn off the TV for a day, sleep on the floor, don’t text for a week, take the bus one day instead of driving, offer these up as forms of prayer and as way of being aware of the many gifts you have.

3) The Gospel reminds us also that we are not God. We should always be able to trust our activities to God. I recognize that we have to work at home and away in order to provide and care for our families, but most of us still make time for many other things. I invite you to consider a retreat this year, a time away from all the many distractions. Give a God a chance to be a part of your life in a special way, away from the hustle and bustle. I would recommend any of the CRHP weekends coming, but there are multiple other places as well. Our local Fatima retreat house offers a wide variety of retreats, Get involved in some of our local formation programs here at the parish, Go pray at one of the local monasteries in the area, or just take a day and spend it by yourself with you and God.

Today’s Gospel reminds us in a very challenging way that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is the most important person in the world and we should, at a moment’s notice, be ready to follow him wherever he leads us.

Greetings St. Monica!

Summer is beginning to wind down and we are busy preparing for some new activities here in the parish in addition to our usual projects of prayer, school, youth ministry and religious education. Look for a busy fall, with lots of opportunities for participation.

We have numerous occasions for spiritual growth and formation. I just recently finished a weeklong workshop on the subject of prayer. Look for more presentations and workshops on Catholic Social Teaching, Ignatian Spirituality and the Theology of the Body. There will also be several bible studies and Small Church Communities, available in English and Spanish. If you or someone you know has some interest in joining the Catholic Church or just learning more, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults is also available in English and Spanish. A new program that is increasing in popularity is called “Just Faith”. It has been received positively and has helped deepen our understanding of proclaiming the Gospel. If you have any questions or wish to sign up for any of these opportunities please contact Ann Corcoran @ 253-2193 ext 5 or email her at acorcoran@stmonicaindy.org. Like many of our ministries, Adult Faith Formation is developing their website which has some (not all) of their information located here: http://www.stmonicaindy.org/ministries/adultfaithformation

We continue to move forward with our Strategic Planning process. We have developed some focus areas (8) and will be soon holding input sessions in September. If you are randomly contacted to share your thoughts about St. Monica, please do so. Your ideas are important and help us focus on good directions as we plan for the future. More information about our process can be found here: http://www.stmonicaindy.org/parish/strategic-planning

I would ask that you are particularly attentive to the workshop on August 31^st entitled “Become a More Welcoming, Engaging and Affirming Catholic Parish”. I think this will be a great time for many of us to gather and discuss an important topic for our parish in the future.

As I write this I am preparing to leave for a vacation before school starts, which begins in a just a couple of weeks! I will be gone from August 2^nd until August 19^th. When I get back I’ll be ready to join with all of you in a busy fall season of sharing and spreading the Gospel message in St. Monica Parish!

God Bless,

Fr Todd

I had somebody ask about this homily and for once I had actually written it out. Enjoy.

Fr Todd

“Go and Do Likewise”

At the time of this Gospel there had been a long history of tension between Samaritans and Jews. The tension was religious, ethnic, and political for all sorts of reasons, some clear some not. A formal break occurred between Jews and Samaritans in the 4^th century B.C. with the Samaritans taking their own Scriptures and moving to another sacred mountain, Gerezim instead of Zion. This 400 year tension is very much alive in the four Gospels. The Sons of Thunder, James and John, were ready to call down fire on the Samaritan people and kill them all. A man was considered ritually impure if he had contact with a Samaritan woman. When traveling, Jews often took an alternate route around Samaria rather than passing through. In John chapter 8, Jesus is insulted by the Jews when they suggest that he is possessed by the devil and possibly a Samaritan. Even our scholar of the law in today’s Gospel cannot bring himself to use the word “Samaritan” to describe the central character, he is simply referred to as the “one who treated him with mercy”. It is important to understand this tension to fully appreciate how radical Jesus application of “Love of God and neighbor” was in his story of a Samaritan helping a Jew who was overlooked by his own kinsmen.

If you were to list the three main books that attempt to define who we are as Catholic Christian people I think it would be the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Code of Canon Law. These three alone number in total probably close to 2000 pages in English. For most of us these texts are very academic, difficult to understand, and not very easy to digest and use on a regular basis. A priest may devote his entire life to the study of Canon Law.  A scholar or professor may study the Scriptures for years and still not understand the multiple nuances that the Scripture can have, or they may disagree on the meaning of the exact same text.

The brilliance of the two great commandments is that it sums up all of these texts into, well, two commandments. The foundation, everything you need to know to make the kingdom of God present here in the world and to get to heaven yourself is summed up in the two great commandments to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself”. If you think about it, if you were to pray these two commandments everyday and dedicate your entire life to living them as best as possible, you have everything you need to live the Christian life. These two commandments alone could change the world and bring about the Kingdom of God.

In my parish ministry experience I continue to gaze in wonder at the different backgrounds that people come from. Everyone has a unique upbringing and understanding of who they are. An African-American is not an African, A Mexican is not a Guatemalan, and not all those people who claim to be Latino have a devotion or even know about Our Lady of Guadalupe. An Anglo is not a Hispanic and a Black English speaker is not Anglo. Even if we don’t take race and culture into account, we are still very different. A person from Kentucky is different than Indiana, A person from the East side grew up different from the West, and a “South-sider’ is definitely not a “North-sider” in Indianapolis. If you think about it there are well over 2000 things that make us unique both as individuals and as cultures of people. These can be celebrated if there is something that we can unite around or, as we see all too often, these differences seem to mostly divide us, to the point of conflict, violence and death.

When we speak of parish ministry it is crucially important that we look for points of unity, for things we have in common. Differences are fine but these always need unifying principles which hold it all together. One of these points of unity that we have is our lived faith, the two great commandments. When we love God with our whole heart mind and soul and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, we begin the process of seeing ourselves as God sees us: his precious creations, saved by Jesus Christ, equal in status, dignity, and recognition. God created Samaritans and Jews, Africans and Europeans, North and South Americans, Asians and Middle Easterners. The human beggar on the street is equal in dignity to the President of the United States, and God sees Pope Benedict XVI as he sees you and me, as his precious creation equally in need receiving his love and sharing it with others.

These two commandments lived daily help us to see ourselves as we are, a Catholic, a universal, Church. Being a Church of many peoples is inseparable from how we see ourselves. Our whole identity is wrapped up in seeing ourselves as part of a Church that is intended for a lot of other people. We talk a lot about multicultural ministry; I think it should just be called what it is: Catholic ministry. We certainly wouldn’t be the Church of Jesus Christ if we had simply one race, culture, or language. Living the two great commandments helps us understand what being a parish really means for us. When we Love God with our whole heart, mind and soul, and love our neighbor as ourself it means, quite simply to be the Catholic Church to be a Catholic community.

Today we are commanded to see ourselves as Jews and Samaritans, who have been asked to apply the two great commandments to our lives. St. Monica has received the call to treat each other with mercy, love, and care and to receive it from unexpected people.

We do this hoping that, by our example, the world will go and do likewise.