Feb 16, 2020

Post date: Feb 18, 2020 4:3:49 PM

February 16, 2020 Homily by Fr. Karl Schray

A parish priest was expecting the Bishop for Confirmation.

Flowers were scarce in the vicinity of the Church.

The flowerbeds had not been touched for years.

The evening before the Bishop’s arrival, the gardeners were called in.

It seemed a superfluous exercise. The holiest of holy water

would hardly produce a miraculous crop overnight.

Yet the blaze of floral color on Confirmation Day delighted the

Bishop and astonished the parishioners. Had there been a miracle?

There had indeed. A miracle of ingenuity on the part of the parish priest.

Early that morning, he had ‘planted’ bunches of freshly cut flowers

in every bed. (PAUSE…) By nightfall, they had all begun to die.

Today’s Gospel is not aimed at that wily pastor, but it does not exclude him.

It is all about the roots—the roots of virtue that should be in our lives,

if love, purity, faithfulness and truth are not to die.

Avoidance of impure action, though essential, is not enough

if the lustful seeds of action are allowed to germinate.

If murder is reprehensible, then its nurturing-root, bitterness, is equally so.

To refrain from murder, while nurturing bitterness is merely

to crop the head and leave the ugly roots and stem.

It is impossible to live without getting angry. Anger is not the sin—

it is what you do with your angry feelings, e.g. hostility, violence and wrath.

Hostility, rather than anger, is the real deadly sin.

It leads to deep resentments directed at the object of our anger.

Some people are volcanoes. One minute you are going about your

business. The next minute the mountain goes up and spews deadly lava.

When the eruption is over, the mountain becomes its benign self again.

But you will continue to smolder—for hours, maybe days.

You ask yourself— ‘What did I do to cause this eruption?’

Hence you can never relax and meanwhile,

you become a cauldron of hurt and anger.

We can’t avoid getting angry, but we can avoid acting out our anger.

If we find ourselves getting angry often, we should look

at the cause of our anger. The cause may lie with us.

We may be hypersensitive, impatient, or full of hurt

that we have not dealt with.

Remember Jesus’ scary words we just heard:

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.”

Surely Jesus does not want us to take these words literally.

What he means is that we cannot allow ourselves to be

spiritually derailed by sins in our heart.

Many of us have learned that we cannot live a compromised life.

It is only when we tear it out and throw it away

that we finally get our spiritual life on track.

Recovering alcoholics cannot afford a single drink.

Compulsive gamblers cannot go back to the casino-

even just to enjoy the buffet.

Those who are enslaved to fantasy, like pornography,

cannot allow that fantasy to become their addiction, their god.

If our heart is filled with frustration or anger,

there is no room in it for love or positive emotions.

What Jesus wants is deep-rooting, the virtue that flowers in action,

precisely because its roots run deep.

Virtuous action is not the freshly cut flowers,

but that part of the plant that grows and then shows above the soil.

Our chief concern must be to get the heart right.

If the heart is right, then our deeds will be genuine.

They will flow from what we are, as naturally as good fruit from a good tree.

You can’t go any deeper than that.

A man had a fight with his wife before going to work in the morning.

Halfway through the morning,

he called his wife and apologized for his part in it.

Later he said to a friend, ‘I didn’t want her to carry that all day.’

He didn’t do himself any harm either.