ÿþ<HEAD> <meta name="description" content="Homilies and scholarly articles of a Catholic Priest."> <meta name="keywords" content="Catholic, Byzantine, Orthodox, Religion, Pope, Homilies, Sermons, Bible, Orthdox, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, OTR, Radio"> <TITLE>FatherMichael.com: Homilies according to the Roman & Byzantine Calendars</TITLE> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="linkicon.ico"> <BODY BACKGROUND="back.jpg" TEXT=#000000 LINK=#7c6262 VLINK=#7c6262 alink=#7c6262> <FONT FACE="Maiandra GD"> <STYLE TYPE="text/css"> <!-- /* $WEFT -- Created by: Michael Venditti (admin@fathervenditti.com) on 7/20/2016 -- */ @font-face { font-family: Maiandra GD; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; src: url(MAIANDR2.eot); } @font-face { font-family: Maiandra GD; font-style: oblique; font-weight: normal; src: url(MAIANDR3.eot); } --> </STYLE> </HEAD> <p align=center><img src="header_sower.jpg"> <table align=center border=0 cellpadding=10 cellspacing=0 rules=none width=95% cols=2> <tr> <td align=left valign=top width=20%><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=+1><i>There's No Such Thing as Spirituality without Faith.</i> <p><hr noshade align=center color=#7c6262><p>The Sixteenth Friday of Ordinary Time; or, the Memorial of Saint Sharbel Makhlkf, Priest.<small><br><br>Lessons from the primary feria, according to the ordinary form of the Roman Rite:<br><br>" Exodus 20: 1-17.<br>" Psalm 19: 8-11.<br>" Matthew 13: 18-23.</small> <p><hr noshade align=center color=#7c6262><p>The Eighth Friday after Pentecost; and, the Commemoration of Saint Christina, Virgin & Martyr.<small><br><br>Lessons from the dominica,* according to the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite:<br><br>" Romans 8: 12-17.<br>" Psalm 30: 3.<br>" Luke 16: 1-9.</small> <p><hr noshade align=center color=#7c6262><p>The Eighth Friday after Pentecost; the Feast of the Holy Great Martyr Christine; and, the Feast of the Holy Martyrs Boris & Gleb.<small><br><br>First & fourth lessons from the pentecostarion, remaining lessons from the menaion, according to the Ruthenian recension of the Byzantine Rite:**<br><br>" I Corinthians 14: 26-40.<br>" II Corinthians 6: 1-10.<br>" Romans 8: 28-39.<br>" Matthew 21: 12-14, 17-20.<br>" Luke 7: 36-50.<br>" John 15: 17 16: 2.</small> </font><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=-1><a href="index.htm">FatherVenditti.com</a></font><br><br><br> </td> <td valign=top width-80%><font face="Maiandra GD"><p align=justify><img src="sower.jpg" align=right hspace=15 vspace=5>9:19 AM 7/24/2015  You may recall that we referenced the parable of the sower just last Sunday when we were speaking of all the different things that can distract us from prayer and the things of God; and, today that parable serves as our Gospel lesson, giving us the opportunity to look at it in more detail. That should be easy, especially since our Lord explains the parable for us. The sower is Himself, the seed he sows is the word of God, and the earth into which the seed falls is us; the message of the parable being that the word of God will only take root and bare fruit in us if we are prepared to receive it with a generous and well disposed heart. And our Lord even enumerates some of the things that can prevent that from happening: greed, lust, preoccupation with worldly things, and so forth. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;A lot of us, sometimes, tend to view the Sacraments of the Church as some kind of magic, forgetting that grace needs a fertile soil in which to grow even the grace of the Sacraments. Take, baptism, for example. We all know someone who was turned away by a priest when they went to have a baby baptized because the parents were not practicing their faith. And what is it we always say when we hear of that? We say,  Why punish the baby for the sins of the parents? And why do we think the baby is being punished when the priest refuses to do the baptism? Because we think the sacraments are magic: that when you go to heaven you ve got a tattoo or something on your head that says you re baptized so they let you in. As powerful as they are in their ability to give grace, the Sacraments are powerless where there is no faith. That s why it is the duty of the priest to baptize only those who give evidence of either living the faith or being raised in it. To baptize someone who doesn t believe, or someone who will not be taught to believe, does nothing. There is no grace, because grace can only live in faith. A sacrament given to someone without faith is like a seed which is given no water or sunlight. It doesn t grow just because you put it in the dirt; without these other necessary conditions, it just sits there and rots. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The same is true of the Blessed Eucharist. You can drag someone into church and make them march up to receive Communion, but if they don t believe, they receive no grace. The Eucharist is real, certainly; but, the grace the Eucharist promises us does not activate, because there is no faith to feed it. The same is true for someone who is not in the state of grace or free from serious sin; someone who is in an invalid marriage for example, or some other situation which excludes them from the sacraments these people are not being excluded from the sacraments because they re being punished for something, but because the state of their souls makes it impossible for the grace contained in those sacraments to have any effect. And such people will sometimes go to a church where they re not known to receive Communion, because they think the Eucharist is a magic charm which will do something for them, or because they are focused simply on the social aspect of  fellowship to which they have reduced the Eucharist in their minds; but, the condition of their souls makes the transmission of grace from the Blessed Sacrament impossible. Holy Communion, then, becomes a purely symbolic act with nothing but therapeutic effects, not really a sacrament at all. The only thing that can bring such a person closer to God is to resolve the state of his soul, so that the grace of the sacraments can become active again. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Every day the Lord sows His seed in our lives. When we come to Holy Mass, He sows the seed of his grace in His word and in the Holy Mystery of his Body and Blood. Whether that grace does us any good depends entirely on what kind of soil we have provided in our hearts and in our lives. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;But what is true regarding our relationship to the Sacraments of the Church is also true regarding our relationship to God in prayer. Back when I was working as a hospital chaplain in a large, secular medical center here in New Jersey, there was a movement going on at the time that claimed to be  spiritual"; and, there were a lot of articles in the medical journals announcing that even the secular hospitals were now realizing the need to care for the  spiritual needs of the patient; but, what these articles meant by  spiritual had nothing to do with faith. And, unfortunately, this idea is becoming alarmingly popular: there are more and more people who don t even believe in God who are claiming that they are  spiritual . Well, excuse me, but I have no need for a spirituality that has nothing to do with faith, and neither should you. We are not here, after all, to contemplate our navels and get in touch with our inner child; we are here to worship God. And we worship God not because it satisfies us or heals us emotionally to do so, but because it is our duty to do so: because God deserves our worship whether we feel like it or not. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;As popular as this secular notion of spirituality is today (and I don t pretend to know a lot about it), the fact is that spirituality without religion is not spirituality at all. Spirituality without religion is nothing more than mysticism, and mysticism is just one step shy of circus side show magic. True spirituality has less to do with mysticism and more to do with asceticism. Asceticism does not deal with things like meditation, breathing techniques, getting in touch with our inner child, inventorying our emotions, or anything like that; it has to do with morality: how we live our lives, how we purge from our lives all the things that can and do distract us from God, how we nourish our relationship with God through authentic forms of prayer, like the Holy Rosary, and frequent recourse to the sacraments of the Church. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;And this is exactly what our Lord is talking about in the parable. The seed is good. The soil is us. And the seed, in order to grow, not only has to fall into good soil, but must then be watered and cultivated with care every day. Growing in our relationship with God is a daily effort. The seed must be watered with prayer and grace, and the plant that grows must be frequently pruned and trimmed with sacrifice and mortification so that it will grow strong and tall. <p align=center><img src="signature.jpg"> <blockquote> <font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262><p align=justify><small>* On ferias outside of privileged seasons, the lessons are always taken from the preceding Sunday.</small></font> <font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262><p align=justify><small>** First & fourth lessons for the feria, second & fifth lessons for the martyr Christine, third & sixth lessons for the martyrs Boris & Gleb, sung in the order given, with only the first Epistle and first Gospel being announced; in other words, the cantor sings, "A reading from the First Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Paul to the Corinthians," then sings the readings from I Corinthians, II Corinthians and Romans all strung together as one without pause and without announcing the title of the second or third. The priest or deacon does the same with the three Gospels. This manner of singing the Scriptures is used whenever multiple feasts require multiple sets of readings. <br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;On some days, the typicon of the Ruthenian Metropolia in the United States sometimes allows the priest to choose from among the various celebrations which coincide on a given day, but this is considered an aberration and "Latinization" by most other Byzantine Catholic Churches, and is certainly viewed as such by the Orthodox. During my years as a pastor in the Ruthenian Church, I never took advantage of this option.</small></font> </blockquote> <br><br> </tr> </table>