ST. VALENTINE - THE MAN, THE MYTH AND THE MYSTERY

 

THERE IS NO RESCUE PARTY OUT LOOKING FOR US

 

GIVEN AT ST. MARY MAGDALEN (Payneville) and ST. THERESA (Rhodelia)

Before us are life and death, good and evil,

whichever we choose shall be given to us.

Sirach 15:15-20

In retirement, there are two major things consuming my attention these days. They are connected.

First, as most of you know by now, I am involved in a new project down in my home parish, founded in 1818. I am trying to turn the grade school that I attended, closed for 28 years now, into a new Family Life Center which I hope will serve both St. Theresa and St. Mary Magdalen parishes. Behind the physical renovation of the building is a desire to stop more and more young adults and young families in the community from drifting away from the church while re-energizing the faith life of our older members who are working so hard to keep these two parishes going.

As I research our parish histories (St. Theresa founded in 1818 and St. Mary Magdalen, founded off of St. Theresa, in 1872 by Fr. Jule Pierre Raoux), I am realizing some of what our ancestors had to endure to pass the Catholic faith on to us. In his lifetime our first pastor, Father Elisha Durbin, rode 500,000 miles through the wilderness of Kentucky on horseback establishing and ministering to small frontier parishes like Saint Theresa in western Kentucky, north Tennessee and southern Illinois. Under his guidance, our Saint Theresa ancestors built two log cabin churches in the early 1800s and his successors built the present brick church between 1855-1856 and St. Mary's in 1872. At the end of the Civil War, they opened Saint Theresa Academy in 1868 for boarders and day students and operated an attached farm to support it. Some of St. Mary's parishioners attended the old St. Theresa Academy. I went to the first and second grade in that old Academy building before it was torn down, as well as the much smaller 1952 school that many of both parishes attended, that I am trying to reopen as a family life center. Our ancestors did all that with very little money, but they did it with faith and determination, as well as with their blood, sweat and tears. The 97 Sisters of Charity served our area heroically and unselfishly for 123 years from 1870 – 1993. They even used an outhouse and had no running water for 82 of those 123 years!

The second thing that is consuming my attention these days is this. After all the sacrifices that our ancestors made in passing on the Catholic faith to us, I am running into their descendants, some of them family members, who have come to believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and are deciding to leave the Roman Catholic Church for those greener pastures. Others have just dropped out and are going nowhere! I am being asked all the time to meet with people who are trying to decide whether to stay with us or leave and go after the latest best offer in one of those new churches that are springing up. I know for a fact that some of you here in these small towns are struggling with the same question – should we stay or should we go - and some of you are sitting here looking at me right now.

Today’s first reading gives me a chance to talk about the second thing that is consuming my attention these days - the question of whether one should choose to stay or whether to leave!

In the Book of Joshua, we have the story of Joshua, who succeeded Moses, leading the people of God into the Promised Land after a long arduous journey through the desert from Egypt. After all they had been through, he notices them looking around at all the new religions around them. Many were tempted to give up their old-time religion and embrace one of those new religions they see around them. Joshua tells them that they need to make a decision and tells them of his own decision.

Decide today whom you will serve, the god of your fathers

or the gods of the country you are now dwelling.

As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

Joshua 24

In the gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to choose – to choose between staying and leaving. He had just taught them that he himself was the Bread of Life that they were invited to “feed on.” The crowds started to murmur because his teaching on that subject was hard to accept. Here is what Scripture says:

As a result of his teaching about being the Bread of Life,

many of his disciples returned to their former way of life

and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then asks the Twelve,

“Do you want to leave too?”

John 6

My brothers and sisters, Jesus asks us the same question today that he asked his apostles: “Will you stay or will you leave?” So many of our fellow Catholics “no longer accompany us.” Some just drifted away all together and went nowhere. Others have walked away to join some other church.

I do not condemn them. In fact, I can understand why they leave. Even if they are now members of another church, they are still our brothers and sisters in the faith. In fact, I believe that when people leave us, their leaving is sometimes partly our fault. Many have told me that, while they were with us, they felt that they were not being fed spiritually. Churches that offer uplifting preaching and spend money on vibrant music programs are leaving those of us who don't in the dust! In the news a couple of weeks ago, in an article about churches of all denominations losing members, it said this: "The closure of churches are often due to a failure to adapt. Maybe they stopped reaching out to young families. Oftentimes, closed churches didn't figure out how to change when the community changed until it was too late!"

My friends, offering the same old stuff in the same old way is not working! That's why I have been working so hard to build a Family Life Center to serve both parishes. A transformed old closed grade school is one way adapt to the many changes facing these two communities. We have young families who need some support and encouragement, before and after marriage. We have older people, who are living longer, who also need some support and encouragement. Our Family Life Center will offer a place where we can have programs that help us adapt to the many changes facing these two communities. I was thrilled to hear that the Programming Committee for the new St. Theresa Family Life Center will have members from both parishes. In giving you this new resource, it is now up to the Programming Committee to use it well. Now that we have a nice comfortable adult space to offer such programs for all ages, I will be there, as well as Father Ray, to offer some educational programs along with many others,

So why do I care and why do I stay? I stay because of the Eucharist – the very thing that divided the followers of Jesus. I am not about to go off and leave that, no matter how boring the homily or how tedious the music! I know there are churches with highly paid preachers, big orchestras and huge choirs, but they don’t have the Eucharist! As boring and tedious as our services can be on occasion, Christ the Bread of Life, is still being made present on our altars at our celebrations of the Eucharist! For that reason, I won’t leave for the latest best offer!

I am not about to leave a church that assembled the New Testament as we know it – whether that New Testament is a Catholic or Protestant translation! I am not about to leave a church with a mile-long list of martyrs like the 26 Japanese Catholics who were crucified in 1587 or Father Stanley Rother of Oklahoma who was assassinated in 1981, saints like Saint Francis of Italy, Saint John Paul II of Poland and Mother Theresa of India. I am not about to leave a church that is gathering in every part of the world this morning for one that started up somewhere in in the US a few years ago, no matter how popular their services might be for some people! I am not going to leave a church that my mother went to as a girl wrapped in a blanket with my uncles and aunts, bouncing around in the back of a horse drawn farm wagon for miles each way, to get to Mass while fasting from midnight! I cannot leave our church once I became aware of eight St. Theresa’s early pastors buried in Saint Louis Cemetery in Louisville right behind my condo – priests who said Mass for our ancestors, huddled together with their parishioners in freezing log cabins and who went out to anoint and pray with the sick and dying after riding on horseback through snow, sleet and rain for 100 plus miles at a pop! I am not going to leave a church connected to the 20 young men who had their throats slit, all at the same time, on a beach in Libya in 2018, rather than renounce their Catholic faith. I am not going to leave a church where priests and bishops in Hitler’s prison camps risked their lives to clandestinely say Mass with a precious pinch of bread and a secret thimble of wine! I am not going to leave a church that is world-wide, made up of people who are very poor and very rich, well-educated and illiterate, people who are black, yellow. red, white people and every shade in-between, people from every nation on earth. With all that variety under our tent, surely I can forgive our church for being a mess sometime!

Yes, we can be messy, boring and tedious sometimes. Yes, we might fight, argue over silly differences and find ourselves disappointed with our cowardly leadership sometimes, but I choose to stay in spite of all that! I stay, not because we are “relevant,” “trendy” and “popular,” but because I believe that we are part of that messy “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” that has been handed down to us in an unbroken line across generations of believers!

As I said at the dedication of our new Family Life Center with Archbishop Shelton sitting right there, "My friends, there is no rescue party out looking for us! If you want to get on the parish closing list, all you have to do is to do nothing!" He smiled and looked down! We are going to have to wake up, step up to the plate and do something to help make sure these two parishes stay healthy. We owe it to our ancestors who invested so much in building these two parishes! We owe it to the next generation - your children and grandchildren. After all, the very word "tradition" means "to hand on!" Let's not let them down by "doing nothing!" I have no children myself, but I am doing all that I can to give you a nice new platform for family-building programs and parish gatherings so that you can continue to "hand on" what was given to us! Help me out! Step up to the plate and do a small part at least, because if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem! Let me repeat that! If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem!

As the first reading today put it, "Before you are life and death. Whichever you choose shall be given to you." At Saint Mary's and Saint Theresa's, let's reject death and choose life! Let's choose to creatively adapt to the societal changes that are overwhelming these two communities and other rural communities like them! Let's choose to imagine steady improvement and revitalization, not steady decline, disintegration and finally closures! Let's choose to stay Catholic! Let's choose to go to church, encourage each other to go to church and choose to be an active part of the church! Let's choose not to just sit around "shrinking" and "doing nothing" until we get a death sentence from the Chancery! Let's all choose to do our individual parts to secure a prosperous future and let's choose to fight like hell for that future! "Before us are life and death. Whichever we choose shall be given to us." Let’s choose life! There are no plans at this point to close either one of them, but let’s make these two parishes so vibrant and active that the diocese would not even think about closing either of them! However, as old idiom puts it, “Once the horse has bolted, it is too late to lock the barn door.”

T.M.I -----TOO MUCH INFORMATION

 

Too Much News and Social Media?

As an introvert, I suspect this innocent children's song was written by an extreme extrovert. Sure, "getting together" periodically is a good thing, but is "getting together more and more" always more healthy? Aren't there times when being alone and being quiet, "being together less and less," also healthy? As an introvert, I think so!

For this reason, I now restrict how much news I watch on TV. To me, the 24 hour-a-day news cycle is producing a great deal of anxiety mainly because its producers have to find enough bad news (because it sells) to fill up all that space over a 24 hour period. They almost always keep repeating their bad "headline news" over and over again! I agree with Charles Kuralt when he said, "It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals." To me, too much bad news repeated over and over and over again, is a cancer on my emotional health.

I do not use Facebook. Oh, I had it for a few weeks several years ago when I was leading a priest retreat in Ireland and someone wanted to send me pictures, but when I got home I tried to cancel my account. It took forever! They want you as an ongoing money source and they do not want to give you up that easily. I am convinced there are times when Facebook is useful and even good, but I also know that it can be a cesspool of gossip, hatred, cruelty, infidelity, bullying and vengeance! I cancelled my account mainly because I got tired of all the "cutest dogs in the world," "cutest grandbabies" and "what I just ate for lunch" pictures - often from people I barely knew or did not know at all! In the end, I am happier without it than I was when I had it for just a few weeks!

Yes, I have a blog, but you have to want to read it to access it. It's title, An Encouraging Word,  is intentional. I "post" almost every other day because I want to offer readers some encouragement and support. I try to look for "goodness to affirm" rather than "sins to condemn." If I knew it was causing damage, I would stop "posting" right away! My aim in this "post" is not to condemn social media in general, but to encourage people to look at it with a critical eye as to whether it is helping or hurting them. 

Here is a short essay I discovered on-line about some of the damages that social media overuse is causing. It seems to offer some warnings to those who overuse social media. I don't know if every word of it is true or not, so take it or leave it! 

   

  The Damages of Social Media Overuse

Social media is a part of the lives of nearly three billion people worldwide. Social media consists of "apps" on almost any electronic device including smartphones, computers and tablets. The most common forms of social media include Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many more. These "apps" are used for sharing daily activities and other communications and hey are a source of comfort for many. People are attracted to  social media because they have a basic human desire to communicate. Despite the comfort provided by social media, its overuse can actually cause psychological damage to some individuals.

Social media is also a major source, if not the largest source, of bullying. This type of bullying is called cyberbullying. Cyberbullying can be an extreme problem for many reasons, but mainly because a bully can harass his or her victim anonymously. Obviously, there are issues with this ability. Because the victim cannot identify his or her bully, the consequences on the perpetrator are miniscule. The most common mental disorders derived from social media overuse include depression, stress and lack of sleep.

Because of these stated disorders, as well as additional negative impacts of social media, it is clear that the negatives of social media overuse often outweigh the positives. Using social media, for some people, is a way to relax and release stress. However, data collected in 2015 proves otherwise. The level of stress from browsing through social media can be far greater than the level of stress released. People who think they are releasing stress by browsing social media could actually be increasing their stress levels. The human brain becomes tired from constant social media use because of the constant switching from one task to another and trying to comprehend too much information at once.

This action puts an immense amount of stress on a user's brain and can be mentally dangerous. It is strongly advised to take a break from browsing through social media to allow the brain time for cooling down. Th stress of brain fatigue can lead to physical fatigue and the lack of concentration can make living a normal everyday life a challenge. Coping with stress often leads to bad habits like smoking, aggressiveness, alcohol and drug dependency, self criticism and more. 

An experiment has been conducted which consisted of Michigan State students being instructed to browse Facebook for 10 minutes and another group of students being assigned to post and talk to friends for 10 minutes. The mood of the socially interactive group was significantly better than the group that browsed Facebook for 10 minutes. 

Stress from social media overuse is also derived from self-comparison. Most users of social media subconsciously compare themselves to others leading to poor self-esteem and more stress. The feeling of worthlessness and hopelessness can both be derived from online interactions. Depression affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. It can also make an individual lose interest in an activity once enjoyed. Depression can be serious enough to stop the functioning of a normal life.

An over-user of social media can be observed as acting gloomy and negative. In some cases, their depression can be easily hidden which prevents them for getting help from others. Depression, like stress, can lead to self-comparison to others. Appetite can also be altered as a result of depression. If an individual sees someone online with a physique they desire, appetite can be altered which can lead to anorexia.

Loss of energy is another effect of depression. The desire to participate in an active life can be lost. The major negative effect of depression is thoughts of suicide. Social media allows for anyone to see posts from almost anyone else. If someone is always comparing himself or herself regularly to everyone and everything they see on social media, that could produce negative thoughts including suicide.

Sadie Riggs, 15-year old girl from Bedford, Pennsylvania was harassed on social media throughout her freshman year in high school. The cyberbullying took place through Facebook, Instagram, and Kik. Sadie had previously gone though challenges in her life including her mother leaving her when she was little. Despite getting through this tough personal experience, cyberbullying was too much for her. She committed suicide because of depression coming directly from social media overuse. Depression can be a direct effect of too much exposure to social media which can lead to a dysfunctional life and even suicidal thoughts.

Lack of sleep can be another negative effect on the human body derived from too much social media use. Social media can actually become a consuming activity for many people. Hours upon hours can be spent browsing through other people’s posts. Artificial light coming from smartphone screens, as well as tablets, can inhibit the production of melatonin which facilitates sleep. Blue light is also emitted from computer screens and can be one reason for lack of melatonin production.

Getting the right amount of sleep every night is crucial to functioning properly the following day. The main effects of lack of sleep include fatigue, lack of focus and even a short temper. After many sleepless nights, the brain will begin to fog making concentration nearly impossible. Continued lack of sleep can make an individual more prone to illnesses. These resultant illnesses can include obesity, heart diseases, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Lack of sleep can also disrupt the immune system, making an individual more prone to illnesses that are “going around.” Lack of sleep can clearly be one of the harmful effects of too much social media use. 

Overall, the negatives of using social media too much can obviously outweigh the positives. Depression, lack of sleep, and stress can all be direct results of the overuse of social media. Each negative effect can branch off into more negative effects from the overuse of online interaction apps. For example, social media can lead to depression which leads to feelings of being worthless which can then lead to thoughts of self harm. Social media over-use is a dangerous habit to acquire and the negative impacts are sometimes not worth the positives. 

LEARNING TO BE MORE PATIENT

January 16, 2019 

7 Tips for Better Patience: Yes, You’ll Need to Practice!

Work on keeping your cool when facing daily hassle. FACEBOTWITTERLINKEDINPINTERESTEmai

Your daughter takes forever to put on her shoes. The person in front of you in the drive-thru apparently is ordering everything on the menu. As a deadline approaches, your work computer chooses that moment for a software update. Oh yeah, and the copier is jammed.

Do life’s small and large annoyances make you feel like blowing your top? OK, you know the annoyances aren’t going away. So maybe it’s time to cultivate more patience.

Contrary to what you may believe, patience isn’t solely the domain of kindergarten teachers and saints. It’s a skill that everyone can develop and strengthen.

“It’s kind of like dancing,” explains clinical psychologist Scott Bea, PsyD. “Some people are naturally better at it than others, but everyone can improve with practice.”

The pitfalls of instant gratification

If you feel like you’re becoming less patient in recent years, you’re not alone. Cultural shifts — particularly when it comes to technology — have primed us to expect immediate gratification.

When we want to read a particular book, listen to a certain song or watch a popular TV show, most of the time those things are only a few clicks away.

An evening’s dinner — or a week’s groceries — can appear at our door in a flash.

“So many things are available to us instantly,” Dr. Bea says. “It’s increasingly common that we get things delivered to us quickly.”

And that’s bad news when it comes to our ability to wait patiently.

“Our expectations go up and then our level of patience goes down,” he says.

7 tips for practicing patience

So how can you strengthen your patience muscles? The first step? Let’s just admit up front that it won’t be much fun at first.

“If we’re going to grow patience, it’s going to come from doing slightly uncomfortable things,” says Dr. Bea.

Ready to work on it? Here’s what he suggests if you want to become a more patient person:

1. Practice mindfulness. Be in the present moment, without judging. Simply sit quietly and notice your breath. Notice what distracts you from your breath, then ease yourself back into awareness of your breath.
2. Practice accepting your current circumstances. This may mean being stuck in traffic or stuck in a job you hate. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change things if you need to. It only means accepting your experience in the moment for exactly what it is — even if it’s unpleasant.
3. Actively build a tolerance for being a bit uncomfortable. Let other people go ahead of you in line or in traffic. Resist the urge to scratch an itch. Don’t act on every impulse to check your phone.
4. When you’re feeling rushed, consciously slow down. You don’t have to feel like a hamster on a wheel all of the time. Know that you can choose slow. In our culture that prizes speed, know that there is value to be had in slow too.
5. Be playful. Practice acting like a kid sometimes. Sing around the house, be silly, laugh. Actively try to take yourself less seriously.
6. Let it feel broken. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a work project that’s gone off the rails, a problem in your relationship or something in your home that’s literally broken. Resist the urge to immediately fix everything.
7. Practice being a good listener. Listen carefully to what family members or other conversation partners are saying. Focus on understanding, rather than on formulating your response.

No one says increasing your patience is easy. But, with daily practice, you may find you’re more calm, less frazzled and more willing to give others the benefit of the doubt — and maybe even give yourself a break once in awhile, as well.

FROM THE CLEVELAND CLINIC

COMING SOON, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH!

 

March 20th is the first day of spring 2023! 

That day can't come fast enough for me! 

SENT TO SHINE

 

You are the light of the world. Let your light shine before men in such

a way that they may see your good works and give God the glory.

Matthew 5:14,16

My fellow Catholic Christians, do you realize who you are? Did you catch those words from today's gospel reminding us of who we are? “You are the light of the world! Let your light shine! Let your good works be seen so God can be glorified!” The Scriptures tell us in other places that “from your mother’s womb, God gave you your name!” “You are God’s servant through whom God’s glory shines!” “From your mother’s womb God formed you for that task, the task of letting God’s glory shine through you!” “You are made glorious in his sight!” “He made you a light to the nations so that his salvation may reach to the ends of the earth!” Jesus tells us in the gospel reading today that “You are the salt of the earth! You are the light of the world! You are a city built on a hill! Your light must shine before others! Your good deeds must be out there to be noticed!” Yes, we are “the light of the world!” However, we are like the moon and God is like the sun. The moon has no light of its own, the moon merely reflects the light of the sun. Just so, when people see our light and observe our good deeds, we must make sure that God, the true source of our light, indeed all light, gets the glory! 

My fellow Catholic Christians may we want to be who we are! May we want to be who we are! I am here to remind you who we are and what our mission is in this life! We were sent to shine! We were sent to shine so that God will look good in the eyes of the world and receive its praise! We should never put ourselves down! We should never underestimate our worth! We should never belittle ourselves nor play small! We should never let others put us down! We were sent to shine! To keep our lamps burning, we have to keep putting oil in them! Therefore, we need to take care of ourselves – take care of ourselves enough to do hard things for our own good so that our light will shine as brightly as possible! We should always resist the temptation to give into the biggest human temptation and that is to settle for too little! Our families, indeed the world, need us to be who we are and all that we can be!

I came across a Bruce Barton quote recently that has been rolling around inside my head for some time now. Others credit Benjamin Franklin.  It is not a new idea, but a life script that I adopted a long time ago. It goes like this! “When we are through changing, we are through.” We old people, when we were young, might remember Bob Dylan singing another version of this same idea. “He not busy being born is busy dying.” In other words, if you are not growing, you are not just standing still, you are dying!  If you are “sent to shine,” you absolutely need to keep putting oil into your lamp! You must keep stoking your own fire! 

Winston Churchill said, “Nothing gets better by leaving it alone.” In fact, when we “leave things alone” the natural process of entropy sets in – we start coming unglued, we start declining, we begin to rot!  Entropy is that spontaneous and unremitting tendency in the universe toward disorder unless there is an opposing force working against it. People, like homes, when they are left alone fall into decay. Even fruits and vegetables, unless something is done to “preserve” them, begin to rot! When we “leave ourselves alone,” we commit what I call “personal and spiritual suicide.” Personal and spiritual suicide is the result of constantly saying “no” to opportunities to grow and change.” 

As one who bought into this idea of “self-formation” a long time ago, I have concluded that there are two secret ingredients to becoming all that we can be as ‘the light of the world.” (1) The first ingredient in really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to personal excellence – to loving who we really are – loving ourselves enough to care about becoming our best selves. Really loving oneself does not mean papering oneself. Rather, it means doing hard things for one’s own good. One of the most critical needs here is the need for a capacity for critical and constructive self-awareness.  We must be able to know and understand what makes us tick. We must own my own personal histories and heal them if necessary. In short, we must be dedicated to becoming our best as quality human persons first. Let me put that another way. You cannot take a loser and ordain him and expect to have an effective priest! If he is not a quality human being to begin with, all you will end up with is a loser priest who can’t relate to people or inspire them to hunger for holiness. You cannot take two losers and put them through a wedding and expect to end up with a happy marriage and effective parents! If they are not quality human beings to begin with, all you will end up with is a miserable marriage and disastrous parents! 

(2) After a passionate commitment to who one is, being the best version of ourselves, the second ingredient in really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to vocational excellence – a passionate commitment to what we do! In other words, if you are parents, commit yourself to being the very best parent you can be! If you are married, commit yourself to being the best husband or wife you can be! If you are a priest, commit yourself to be the best priest you can possibly be! Whatever you are, be good at it! If you strive to be the best at what you do, you will get better at it. If you choose the “good enough to get by” path, you will become known for your mediocrity. Tom Peters put it this way, “The idea of mediocrity scares the hell out of me!” Without a passionate commitment to vocational excellence, you will no doubt end up being a half-assed priest, a half-assed marriage partner or half-assed parent! The world is already overcrowded with mediocrity – people with no passion for personal or vocational excellence!  My mother used to call them “people who merely go through the motions,” “people whose hearts are not in it.” God says to us in Revelations 3:15-16, “Would that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” May God spare you from such "half-assedness!” May you become the very best version of yourself! May you become who you are! You are the light of the world! Let your light shine! Yes, let it shine! Let it shine!

Brothers and sisters! One of my biggest fears as a priest is not natural death, but spiritual and emotional death, being here and being not here at the same time – “dead on my feet,” if you will! My biggest fear is gradually turning into a priest whose heart is no longer in it! Chaucer’s Parson described such a priest as “a man annoyed at his own life.”

The word used by fourth century monks for this state was acedia. Acedia is not a disease, it’s a temptation – the temptation to disconnect, the temptation to stop caring, the temptation to stop making an effort. It is a temptation that can grow and harden into a persistent attitude of apathy and cynicism which is deadly to any kind of personal or spiritual growth. I find it fascinating that acedia, in its root, means negligence - a negligence that leads to a state of listlessness, a lack of attention to daily tasks and an overall dissatisfaction with life, of not caring or not being concerned with one’s self-care or position or condition in the world. In other words, unlike clinical depression, it can be resisted. The sooner it is confronted the more success one has in turning it around.

We all know priests and married couples who woke up one day and found themselves in precisely that spot – with feelings of being stuck, with few options and little hope. Maybe we are, or have been, one of them! If we were to be honest with ourselves we would have to admit that we didn’t get there overnight. It happened because of extended neglect. We didn’t take the time to nourish our individual selves. Many marriages and religious vocations do not die of "natural causes." Too often, they simply die of "starvation!" Too many of us do not take the time to nurture our vocations. We just “let things go!”

Whether we are priests, marriage partners, parents, professionals, widows or widowers, we are all called to resist the temptation toward acedia, the neglect of our personal and spiritual growth. We are the light of the world and there is responsibility that goes with reflecting that light! As Mother Theresa put it. “To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.” Again, Bob Dylan put it this way. “If we are not busy being born, we are busy dying.”

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