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		<td align=right valign=top width=20%><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=+1><p align=right>Don't Let Your Religion Become a Side Show.<br><br><small>Lessons from cycle II of the feria, according to the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite:<br><br>I Corinthians 15: 35-37, 42-49.<br>Psalm 56: 10-14.<br>Luke 8: 4-15.</small><br><br>The Memorial of the Martyrs Saint Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, Priest, Paul Chŏng Ha-sang & Their Companions.*<br><br><small>The Twenty-Fourth Saturday of Ordinary Time.</small></font><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=-1><p align=right>Return to <a href="index.htm">ByzantineCatholicPriest.com</a>.</font></td>		

		<td align=right valign=top width-80%><font face="Maiandra GD"><p align=justify><img src="kim.jpg" align=right hspace=15 vspace=5>9:46 AM 9/20/2014 — Today's Gospel lesson shouldn’t require much of an explanation, 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 are not known to receive Communion, because they either 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 Blessed Sacrament 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 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.

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<blockquote><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262><p align=justify>* <small>Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, the son of Korean converts, was the first native-born Catholic priest in Korea and is the patron saint of that country.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;His father, Ignatius Kim, was martyred during the persecution of 1839 and was beatified in 1925. After Baptism at the age of 15, Andrew travelled 1,300 miles to the seminary in Macao, China, returning to his own country six years later through Manchuria; but, later that same year, he crossed the Yellow Sea back into China, to Shanghai, where he was ordained to the Holy Priesthood.  Returning home again, he was given the difficult assignment of arranging for more missionaries to enter Korea from China by a water route that would elude the border patrol.  He was one of several thousand Christians who were executed during this time.  In 1846, at the age of 25, he was tortured and beheaded near Seoul on the Han River. His last words were:

<blockquote><p align=justify>This is my last hour of life, listen to me attentively: if I have held communication with foreigners, it has been for my religion and for my God. It is for Him that I die. My immortal life is on the point of beginning. Become Christians if you wish to be happy after death, because God has eternal chastisements in store for those who have refused to know Him.</blockquote>

<p align=justify>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The beginning of Catholicism in Korea is actually traced to the Japanese invasion of 1592; though often overlooked by historians, Catholicism was a significant presence in Japan at the time, and the first Korean Catholics were baptized by invading Japenese soldiers.  Even so, evangelization was difficult in Korea due to the country's extreme isolationism.  The only regular contact the country had with the outside world was on the annual occasion of transporting tax revenue to Beijing; and, it was during one of these journeys—believed to be around 1777—that religious literature provided by the Jesuits in China was smuggled into the country; this became the basis of a home-church initiative of which Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, a married lay apostle, was a leading figure.  When a Chinese priest managed to enter the country secretly twelve years later, he found four thousand Catholics, none of whom had ever seen a priest.  Seven years later, there were over ten thousand.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Between 1839 and 1867, a number of Korean Catholics won the crown of martyrdom, among them Paul Chŏng Ha-sang.  When Pope Saint John Paul II visited Korea in 1984 he canonized, besides Father Andrew and Paul, ninety-eight Koreans and three French missionaries who had been martyred between 1839 and 1867.  Among them were bishops and priests, but for the most part they were lay people: forty-seven women and forty-five men.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Religious freedom came to Korea in 1883.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;I purposely avoided using for this post the popular image of Saint Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn wearing traditional Korean costume, as this is nothing more than a revisionist image meant to cater to today's inculturation sensativities.  It is clear that the saint would never have dressed in this fashion.</small></blockquote>

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