Vineyard of Love

In the Gospel of John we hear about a vineyard and how so much of keeping up with that vineyard, maintaining it, requires attention. It requires pruning, cultivation, sacrifice, and connection. All of these things have come to life for me in a very real way and it also helped me understand a little more of what Christ speaks of in John 15

                “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” John 15:1-5

The image of the vine and branches becomes a very beautiful way of understanding God’s love and the different gifts and graces He can provide to us throughout our lives. The vineyard in the gospel is symbolic of our spiritual life and our relationship with Christ. How we maintain our “vineyard” will determine how successful the fruit of our own harvest will be. Cultivating the ground requires water, turning and clearing from weeds that prevent a strong healthy vine. Pruning, in our lives as we all know, is a very painful thing to do and so often requires sacrifice. But Christ calls us to prune, and he’s there to help. In an unpruned vineyard, the water, the life-giving nutrient is being divided among so many branches and vines that the grapes become small, with little or no chance of growing. That concept, is having our focus on so many things that there is never really a full, concentrated attention on one thing, our fruit becomes virtually small and therefore useless after harvest. The invitation is to place all our trust and focus on Christ being the living water, providing for us all that we need. Christ says that the Father prunes so that the vine bears more fruit, and much bigger fruit. God being the vine-grower, knows exactly what parts of us to keep, and those parts to throw away. So what might the challenges be for us? 

Pruning away those extra things in our own lives so that we become liberated from the distractions and divisions that keep us from a fruitful and complete relationship with God the Father. Having so much trust in God that, upon pruning those things out of our lives, we are able to enter into a greater, fulfilling and life-giving connection with God. 

"Remain in my love."

 

As we were harvesting our year’s grapes, I found a prayer rising out of my own heart. To let God be the vine-grower in my own life, pruning away things that so often get in the way, distract or prevent me from being all that I can be. To help me place a complete trust in Him so much that within me there is always a desire to remain in His vineyard, and in His love.

St. Conrad of Parzham: the Holy Porter

On the edge of the Rott Valley in Lower Bavarria was a German-Christian family, fourteen strong.  Of the twelve is John Birndorfer, the second youngest of the bunch.  John, now known as Saint Conrad of Parzham, was born on December 22, 1818 and was the first German saint to be canonized after the reformation.  At a young age he experienced his share of trials and sufferings within his family and the Catholic Church. Both his parents suffered from the Napoleonic Wars, his mother died at the age of fourteen and the Church at that time was becoming more and more secularized. Germany was losing its Catholic identity, seventeen Catholic Universities had been shut down and twenty-two dioceses in the country were reduced to just five. 

                Still in the midst of all this chaos, John remembered the strong teachings handed down from his mother. He prayed rosaries, attended confession and received communion as often as possible. Soon there came a point when he was discerning religious life. To his surprise, his confessor told him to visit the Capuchins saying, “That’s where you belong.” Thirty-one years into his life, John taking the name Conrad, went through the same doors that he would be opening for the rest of his life. On October 4, 1852, the feast of Saint Francis, Conrad professed and consecrated his whole life to God and the Capuchin Order, thus entering fully into the Order. Saint Conrad was assigned Porter for the friary. For forty-one years Saint Conrad was faithful to his duty as a Capuchin brother, he remained calm and patient with everyone he received.  He opened not only the door of the friary, but also the door of his heart to everyone he met. Saint Conrad came into contact with so many people that he was able to experience the glory and misery of the world. Often getting up early, sometimes two or three in the morning, he would open the door to children and mothers, the poor and the homeless, the hungry, the sick and even the unemployed. He was opening the door to Christ in his own eyes and because of that he gave his heart with compassion to everyone.

As we celebrate the life of Saint Conrad of Parzham, I think we can gather a few things when it comes to being a doorkeeper of our own hearts in relationship with Christ our Savior. As Conrad was faithful to his work, he opened the door for many; he opened the door for the weak. We hear in the gospels that Christ himself dwells in those people! 

"Truly I tell you, Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Matt 25:40

The call for us is to open the door of our hearts, to let Christ enter for a dwelling but also, so that He can change and renew us from the inside. The effect of this is that we remain always with the Father and the Father in us.  

The call for us is also to greet the Lord, to give him our attention and undivided hearts. Just like Saint Conrad, always listening and never growing tired of his ministry, when we greet the Lord we are turning our hearts to Him with a desire to listen to what might be said and of course, with a willingness to speak! Let us greet the Lord.

I think that lastly, the final message from the holy porter is to see the Lord. See the Lord in the world despite the violence and chaos. Find glory in the weaknesses of the world.  Saint Conrad found Christ in each and every person he opened the door to. He sought the Lord in Heart, mind and soul by opening the door of his heart. 

Saint Conrad of Parzham, Pray for us

The Abandonment

In today's gospel, there's a reminder for us to leave what we truly desire so that we can follow Christ. It's called the abandonment, and its not easy. We hear in the gospel, a young man who asks the Lord what he has to do to obtain the Kingdom of God. Right away the Lord tells him to follow the commandments, but what is interesting his Jesus' focus on the those commandments that have to do with our neighbor. The young man said to the Lord, "I have observed all of these, what else do I lack?" Jesus tells him to sell what he has and give to the poor. The interesting part for me is at once, the young man walked away sad because he knew he had many possessions. The sense of abandonment can be hard for us and as we read, even for the young man. Jesus tell us that it is not so much of leaving the things we love, but recognizing what it is that keeps us from Him. What consumes you in your life, your phone, computer, relationships, these things can keep us from God in terms of time and so Jesus calls us in the gospel to abandon those things and let go of what really keeps us from Him.The joy is that in this abandoment of possessions, there is true happiness because we learn and train our hearts that God is worthy of all our time and all our possession.   

Jesus, help me to recognize those things that keep me from you, and give me strength so that I can look past those possessions and seek the cross. I give you permission to take away those things that keep me from knowing.

Crucifying the Flesh

Ever since man was created by God in the beginning, man has a direct calling and destiny to be one with God. This means that we are called to know and love God in his fullness. Before the fall of man, Adam and Eve knew God in his fullness, they were in a perfect and holy relationship with God. The consequence of sin was a rift between man and God. Man can no longer know God in a perfect and complete way all because of sin. Today, we are baptized by water and made members of the Catholic Church. It is at that very moment of baptism that we are given a holy, perfect and sacred relationship with God. However, just like Adam our sin hinders our relationship with God and it prevents us having that intimate relationship with God the Father. Now in order to know how sin keeps us from God, it is important to understand what Sin really is. Sin is a action or an offense against God and his divine love for us. When we sin, we are acting against God in disobedience to his love. We in our hearts are professing that we don't need God in our lives therefore we are rejecting his love for us. The thing with sin is that it doesn't place anything within us, but rather it strips out everything that is already in us. We are hurt by sin and our personalty becomes dull. We have no energy, depression, we might feel weak, lost, confused and even tired of our own lives. In sin, man is supplying to his passions and his desires. I want this, I want that and when we want it we give in to ourselves and usually follow through. The problem is that we are always looking for things that don't make us happy and if they do it's only for a moment. When we talk about crucifying the flesh, it's important to understand that we should do this daily and not just for a couple days. Avoid sin and even the near occasion of sin! That means know your weakness and your own struggles. We have to know the affects of sin and what they can do to us. More importantly sin can separate us from God for eternity. Second, sin puts a blockade between us and God so know we can't ever know him fully on earth, and Third, we can't ever know ourselves and who we are if we are trapped by sin. If I don't know myself and who I am, then how can I try to understand someone else in a relationship, boyfriend or girlfriend even in marriage? So we should know the effects of sin and avoid it everyday. I shared a story of some Alaskan wolves:

If the owner of the land spots a wolf, his primary objective becomes to kill that wolf because now that wolf is a predator and a threat to his home, his family and his livestock. So what he does is kill a goat, takes it's blood, places it on the blade of a knife and allows it to freeze. He does it about 7-8 times before there is a thick shell of frozen blood. So he walks out to the forest and places the knife in the snow with the blade up and walks away. The wolf smell the blood from miles out and approaches slowly at first because he's a little curious. He takes his first lick of the blood and likes it. So he licks it more and more until his tongue becomes numb by the frost. As the wolf licks more he slices his tongue, and enjoys fresh blood not realizing its his own. Soon enough the wolf will leave and die of blood loss. The fact is that sin, kills us without us even know it. It harms us without us even knowing the damage we are placing on ourselves, our hearts, our bodies, our spirits and our souls. So the message is to crucify the flesh, abandon all sin, live in the spirit and not the flesh. Don't give into your passions or your desires but give into the spirit of God. Saint Paul tell us in Romans that we shouldn't live in the sins of the flesh, but rather the fruits of the Spirit. By our creation and baptism, we are called to live in the spirit not the flesh.

Called to be Saints

A Saint in the church is someone who is holy, and venerated by the communion of people that make up the Church. Saint, literally means 'to be Holy', these holy people, these holy saints are worthy of our prayers and worthy of our intercessions. They are not perfect people, they are just like us but faithful and obedient to the will of God. Many people speculate about the saints in the church, often asking why we pray to the Saints, why should we pray to them when I can just pray straight to God. The answer is that we need help. The church venerates the saints as intercessors. I like to use the example of a mail-carrier. The Saints for us, are those who hear our intentions and pray for us since they are declared Holy and with Christ in heaven. If I am suffering, lost, broken or in chaos, then I would want all the help I can get. That means from my family here on earth, my friends and even the Saints who are models of faith. All of these people can pray for us in our suffering and God can offer us His mercy and grace. The fact is that we are all called to sainthood, by our baptism as infants, we share in the goodness of God's love and therefore have an initial invitation to holiness. In our call to holiness not only do we need to know God and love God, but we also should know 5 key principles that can help us obtain true holiness. These I explained during the Junior Rally workshop I gave this past weekend:

The First is HUMILITY:
We should be humble in life and know that we are creatures of God and we need his mercy more then our pride. We should be humble when we do things, we should not let our pride get to us. Humility is about abandoning our pride and understanding our weaknesses. I just graduated with my Bachelors in Theology so it would be weird for me to go into a career of teaching mathematics. One, because I'm not good at it, and two, because that is not my field. Humility is about not thinking of ourselves less, but thinking less of ourselves, as G.K Chesterton once put it. When we are humble, we know and understand that it is not all about ourselves, but about God who sustains and holds everything about us in place.

The second is FAITHFULNESS:
Faithfulness is about trust. Sure, it's good to trust in ourselves having confidence in what we can do. But faithfulness in this case is about trusting in God it is about having confidence in the character of God. Sometimes it is rejecting that notion of 'I am the center of attention' and the problem with the common notionof faithfulness is that the focus many times is on me. Faith is realizing that God is good, deserving of our trust and knowing that God sees what we can't. Faithfulness is recognizing that God is the better driver and he is able to control our lives toward the greater good better then we can because that is what he wants after all! We see in the Old Testament when God commissioned Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses in his fear, was not faithful or trusting in God's divine promise. He gave God five excuses and said he couldn't do, I am not fit for this job, he said, pick somebody else. After placing his trust in God, Moses succeeded and led God's people out of Egypt just before he would die. Prior to his death, God would commission Joshua as the successor to Moses. I will touch on him more later. So, we can see that faithfulness requires a trust in God and faith in his divine will.

The third is PRAYER:
Prayer is the most fundamental aspect in the lives of the Saints. What prayer is, is the communication and the bond they had between the Father and themselves. Without prayer there can be no relationship. Think about a common relationship, dating or marriage, in that relationship that has to be a fundamental level of communication, without communication then the relationship either won't exist or if it does already, goes haywire all because of a lack of communication. It is the same with a relationship with God, if we don't have that prayer and communication with God then how can God reveal himself to us, and how can we learn to know and love God. God made us to be holy, He made us so that we can be happy with him. This means that He wants us to pray to him, because He wants that relationship and He wants to reward us because of it. If we look in the New Testament with Jesus and his Father, Jesus was made known the will of the Father because of his Prayer to him. Yes, the Church teaches that Jesus and God are one in the same, however, Jesus still had that human nature and by his prayers to the Father He set an example that we should pray to God so that our will can be made in union with the will of the Father; this is exactly what Jesus did when he said "Let your will be done, not mine" So prayer to the Father, is a fundamental part in our call to holiness.

The fourth is COURAGE:
Going back to the commissioning of Joshua after Moses' death, God told Joshua to be strong and courageous more then any other person in the bible. He instilled in Joshua and reminded him to be strong and be courageous, because I will be with you wherever you go. So I think there is a message even for us, that we should be courageous, we should be bold. This means strong and courageous in our faith, in our prayer lives, we should stand up for what is right and against what is wrong. Who cares if we are young, who cares if we are weak, we should be strong and courageous in everything we do. One message from Saint John Paul II that I see alot is "Do not be afraid" There is a message that we should be strong and remember that God will accompany us always. Many times we might feel like were sent with no direction on where to go, but God is not a clockmaker where he creates us and lets us run on our own. Rather, he creates us, sends us out and accompanies us even after he sends us. So we should be strong and remember Joshua 1:9, "be strong and courageous".

The final is OBEDIENCE:
Obedience being our offering and our giving in to the reality that God is King and Ruler of our lives, yet still allows us to do our own thing. Obedience is us just listening and paying attention. How can we listen to what is going on if we are loud in our lives. Loud with sin and loud with our actions. We are called to obey God, be obedient to him and mindful of who He is. So many times listening is about shutting up and just staying still, even for me I have a hard time just being quiet that I miss what is going on. Psalm 46:10 tells us "be still and know that I am God." When we obey God that is us professing in our hearts that we are trusting and surrendering to the very goodness of God's will. The perfect example of obedience is the Blessed Mother, in her youth she obeyed God, placed her trust in him and surrendered her body as the vessel that would bring Jesus into the world. She is a model for us all and we should pray through her for the same obedience, humility, faith and courage as she. One thing I touched on during my presentation is that obedience starts now, in our homes and with our families. If we cannot be obedient to our families on earth then how can we be obedient to God who is in Heaven. So it starts now.

By our baptism, we are all called to sainthood, we are all called to holiness and to achieve true holiness we should be mindful of God in humility, trusting in him with faith, we should call upon him in prayer, stand up with him in Courage and surrender to him with obedience.

Joy: a New Motive

Whoever said life was a roller coaster was not lying. There are so many up and downs in our lives that sometimes it might be so hard to keep up and even "hang on". There might be stages of having no motivation to do anything, no desire to speak or even get out of bed. It's like we want joy an we want peace but there's a distraction before all of it. For a college campus like this its everywhere and it leads us to depression and sadness. All of this and it seems like your in a rut with no way out, its like a hole that we dug underneath our feet and we forget to jump out. The tool being used to dig is in fact our very sin. Since sin is a distraction and hinders our relationship with Christ, it also separates us and breaks that natural link of sanctifying grace that is placed within us constantly. It makes perfect sense that in this break between man and God, sin can also break our relationship between man and creation, therefore keeping us from what we can fully be! Even Saint Irenaeus said it himself when he said that glory of God is man is fully alive. We are called to be fully alive, enduring sin, and resisting what hurts. If this is you, unable to move with no desire to get anything done, no motivation to get up out of bed I think the answer is very simple. For me its the people and the very creation of God. Besides prayer with a desire to rebuild that relationship with Christ, just talking to people and enjoying what they have to give you can be a relief. In my experience it gives joy and true happiness. The joy that is found, comes from the people and from God indirectly. Talk to your friends and peers talk to your co-workers, jump outside the box an forget the childhood rule that says "don't talk to strangers". Lent is the season of our joy an it can help bring you up an give you peace. Since we as a humanity have an obligation to each other, to build each other up and be a light for others, we are our brother's keeper and we should rely not only on our friends and peers to bring us up in speech, but also God who sustains all of us while granting a never-ending grace that unites us all together as one.

#Catholicsoup #JoyRide #JoyInThePeople

From Catholic Soup...

I would like to share my posts from my previous blog called Catholic Soup. I have about 20 posts that are posted on it, so I thought I would share the ones I like with you:

From Catholic Soup:

An Act of Love

Knowing that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself only for me to gain eternal life is one of those things that really gets to my heart. He suffered what he suffered only for us to gain a better relationship with him. He endured all that he could endure only for us. He was nailed to the cross by us, and still had the courage to die for us. That my friends, is Love.

Imagine that your just a bystander, you hear all of this commotion out in the street people shouting and harassing a man that you don't know, but you have seen him before. You go over to the crowds trying to see over the shoulders from the person in front of you. You have no idea what is going on, all you know is that right now people really hate this man. As you and the crowds follow this man up the mountain, you feel what seems to be this man's heart beating inside of you. The only thing you can do is watch as this man suffers and falls not once, not twice, but three times. Sweat forms around your neck, making you feel more useless by the minute because now, the sound of cold hard nails are breaking the wood and penetrating the skin. This heartbeat that you feel is even stronger and feels that its keeping you alive making you fall on your knees because suddenly you know that this is an Act of Love. Not choice or what somebody planned.


Christ wants us to be like him, live for him. He wants us to experience all that we have so that we can experience him. We can never know God completely, but for him to die for us means that he most certainly wants us to be one with him. Loving as Christ did is what we are called to do, to love everyone we meet unconditionally just as he did. Christ is with us where ever we go, we may not be able to heal the blind and cure the sick, but we can do it spiritually. The phrase dying not only means what it is, but also a chance to rise and raise a whole other Act. An Act of Love