Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Homily on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin

Today, as you well know, we celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady. This feast commemorates the end of her life here on earth, and the start of her life in heaven. It is on this interaction between the earthly and the heavenly, the natural and the supernatural, that I would like to preach on today, since I have been invited to preach on celebrating the sacraments and liturgy worthily for our spiritual growth. The liturgy is that part of our earthly, or natural life, which – if done worthily – can help us not only for our eventual supernatural lives, but, more importantly, help us to experience the supernatural even here on earth. But more about this later.

It is doubly appropriate that we celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, during the feast of her father, St. Joaquim. Appropriate because there is a pious tradition that along with his wife, Saint Anne, St. Joaquim dedicated Our Lady to service in the Jewish Temple as a child, and she spent her youth weaving garments necessary for the temple liturgies.

In other words, the liturgy is so important, that we should dedicate not just our lives, but also the lives of our children, to ensure that the liturgy is noble, dignified and composed of only the best. Remember, that as per tradition, St. Joaquim and St. Anne, were childless until their old age. Despite this, when they eventually obtained a child, they dedicated their child to service in the Temple. What a great lesson this dedication offers parents who dissuade their children from religious, or priestly, life. And they do so, knowing that we have a crisis in vocations, knowing that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the transmission of the sacraments are impossible without priests. To those of you who are parents, and those who – through the grace of God – will become parents, may St. Joaquim inspire you, and intercede for you, so that your hearts may be open to this grace.

But let me return to my promise to speak about the Our Lady, the earthly and the heavenly, the natural and the supernatural. Our Lady is an example of where these two, normally opposite, things meet. As we know, through the grace of God, Our Lady was prevented from contracting the stain of original sin. This is to say, she was immaculately conceived. In some way, therefore, she was always associated with the supernatural, she did not suffer from the stain of original sin which marks our nature. Nevertheless, just like our common ancestor Eve, who was also created without the stain of original sin, Our Lady continued to have free will, and could have sinned in the course of her life. And yet, she was always obedient to God, especially when she offered her “Fiat” to the annunciation – “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord, Be it done unto me according to Thy will.” From this moment onwards, and until the birth of Our Lord, she was the Temple, housing the presence of God on earth. In other words, Heaven and the Earth, the natural and the supernatural, met in her body for the first time. And because she continued to remain sinless through the rest of her life, her body did not suffer corruption, but was taken up into heaven when her time on earth was over. This is the feast we celebrate today, the Assumption of Our Lady.

My dear brothers and sisters, in Lumen Gentium, the fathers of the Vatican Council II hailed Our Lady as a "type", “figure”, or “model” of the Church. If heaven and earth, the natural and the supernatural met in her, and her actions allowed for the heavenly to descend to earth, for the natural to be elevated to the supernatural, then this is also what happens in the church, and through the liturgy.  Heaven and earth meet through the liturgy, and our natural selves and filled with supernatural grace. This bears repeating: at every Mass, and other liturgies of the church, heaven and earth meet, and our natural selves are filled with supernatural grace. This is all you need to go away with today, everything else I will now say is only an elaboration of this idea, and what we must do to be worthy of this encounter.

It is because the impossible happens, that the awesome takes place, that the liturgy of the Church must be solemn. Speaking soon after his election to the Pontificate to the Eastern Churches, Pope Leo said:

We need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!

Mystery, beauty, wonder, these are some of the constituents of solemnity. Unfortunately, in our churches in Goa, today, the concept of a solemn liturgy is practically unknown. We do not do in our liturgies anything that we do not do in regular life. We offer the Blessed Sacrament a casual bow instead of a genuflection. We take communion in our hands, and show it scant respect, and sometimes when there are other things in our hands – too often women come with handkerchiefs in their hands and think it acceptable to receive communion on their hands. A man once approached me with his child in his arms, and extended his hand casually to receive communion! After communion, rather than kneeling in prayer until the post-communion prayer, we sit down. When the Blessed Sacrament returns to the tabernacle we continue to sit, instead of standing in respect. Is this the behaviour of those who realise that heaven and earth have just met?

After years of prioritizing Concanim to the exclusion of other languages, and especially the exclusion of Latin; by trying to vernacularize as much as possible, our liturgies have become gaunti, not universal. They have become mediocre, not excellent. We have excluded Gregorian chant from our singing, and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish hymns sung in church from hymns sung at parties or dances. Instead of the dim lighting, that evokes the humble light of candles, that elevates the sense of mystery, we flood our churches and chapels with white light as if they were football stadiums!

My dear brothers and sisters, our encounter with the liturgy should elevate us, take us to a place beyond the natural. But too often, this is not our attitude to the liturgy. We have domesticated it so that it is just as ordinary as the rest of our lives. In other words, my dear brothers and sisters, our attitude to the liturgy is marked by the vice of sloth.

In one of his homilies, St. Anthony quoted from the book of Sirach (50:9) and suggested our Our Lady was

like a vessel of hammered gold
    studded with all kinds of precious stones;

Perhaps taking inspiration from such comparisons, and comparisons of Our Lady to the Ark of the Covenant which was made of incorruptible acacia wood and overlaid with gold, our ancestors ensured that the liturgy used only the best and most precious materials. The vestments of the priests, or the altar cloths were made of silks, cottons and linens, instead of cheap synthetic materials. The Body and Blood of God rested on gold and silver, instead of steel and other cheap metals.

My dear brothers and sisters, St. Joaquim dedicated his daughter to the service of the temple, and She dedicated her life so that we may have experience heaven here on earth. Let us, therefore, on this feast day of Our Lady dedicate ourselves, and our children, to granting to the liturgy, the dignity it demands so that we may grow spiritually.

Saint Joaquim, pray for us.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the chapel of St. Joaquim, Borda in the course of the novena prior to the his feast.)

(Image reference: The Disputation of the Blessed Sacrament, Raphael, 1509-1510, Vatican Museums, Rome.)

Know Your Master: Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

On previous Sundays I have preached differently from the conventional focus on loving our neighbours. Too often this love has been erroneously elevated to a supreme objective of Catholics. However, one simply cannot love one’s neighbours properly, if one does not first love God. It is only after we love God, and love him properly, that we can then love our neighbour as we should. Indeed, it is the love for God that overflow from our hearts that is then directed towards our neighbours.

Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.  

My dear brothers and sisters, our relationship between Our Lord and ourselves is clear and explicit from this verse from today's Gospel. We are his servants and we are here to do his work. Recollect the words from the first letter of St. Peter (1:18):             

Do not forget that you were purchased from the foolish ways of your ancestors … with the precious blood of the Lamb

My dear brothers and sisters, it is important to remember that we were redeemed, or purchased, or liberated, from two associated masters. The first, is the Devil who is the Prince of this world, the other is the way of our ancestors. To be liberated from the foolish ways of our ancestors is to understand that it refers to our ancestors who were not Catholic, immured in practices that did not recognize the truth of God, and consequently the dignity of the human person. In other words, prior to their baptism, our ancestors were in the thrall of the Devil.

And in some way, our families may continue to be so. Which is why, at baptism, we are also liberated from following the narrow agendas and petty battles of our natal families – the families we were born into.  We belong first to Christ, who redeemed us, to His Holy Mother whose care he gave us to, and to His Saints who intercede for us, night and day before His Throne. It is only after this that we belong to the mothers who birthed us, and the families, and communities that raise us.

Too often one is witness to the way in which we are forced to follow not the agenda of Christ, but the petty battles of our families; emotionally blackmailed through our families and friends to commit to the Prince of the World, rather than to Christ. “Remember the fourth commandment,” our parents and elders threaten us! Recall, however, my dear brothers and sisters, the words of our Lord:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. (Mt 10: 34-36)

In other words, love God first! It is not our neighbour – whether family, or friends – that we are called to worship, but God, and God alone! Let us not make family and friendships our gods instead of God.

My dear brothers and sisters, if, for the sake of Christ you leave your “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands”, then I have no doubt that you are a martyr and will receive the promised reward. For listen to the words of Our Lord this Sunday:

Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.  
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.

The rewards of heaven, my dear brothers and sisters, the communion with the saints, will be our reward.

My dear brothers and sisters, we should bear in mind the words of Our Lord this Sunday, when we contemplate the scenario I have laid before you:

Much will be required of the person entrusted with much,
and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.

We have been entrusted with just one task, and that is to preach the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Woe to us, if we do not fulfill that task. Let us pray, therefore, in the words of the Collect this morning:

Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa.)

(image reference: Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples, Paolo Veronese, 1580s, National Gallery, Prague.)

Opus Dei: Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Just a few weeks ago, in the episode from the Gospel where He was in the holy house of Bethany, the home of his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus, Our Lord chastised Martha, and by extension he chastised us, not to be obsessed with work. The better part of our life, he taught, lay in listening toHim.

Today, in the lectionary that She provides to us, our Holy Mother Church, seeks to deepen that lesson. Every single reading offers us a lesson about the true worth, or value, of work. Vanity, or pointless, is the work that we put in through the entirety of our lives, only to hand over to another – very often our children – who have not laboured. And do we not know the script? Bereft of values, but flush with possessions, rather than build on the wealth their parents leave behind, all too often children squander away the resources they have inherited. All our sorrow, our grief, our anxiety and toil, turn out, in the end, to be pointless.

In the Gospel Our Lord warns us that all the plans we have, the plans towards which we may work, may all in one shot come to nothing, because the angel of death visits us, or some misfortune levels all our plans to the ground – revealing them to be merely castles built on sandy soil, or indeed the quicksand of worldly desire!

So, then, what are we to do?

I do not believe that Our Lord is asking us not to work, not to strive for excellence, or not to build up surplus that we can save away for a rainy day, or indeed for future generations. All of these are good things. However, Our Lord is asking us to ensure that all these activities are motivated by a poverty of spirit – i.e. a recognition that we are poor and we need God, and Godliness. In other words, recognize that all the work we do ought to be motivated only by a desire to inherit the kingdom of heaven, for otherwise we will be consigned the fire of hell for all eternity.

As Our Lord teaches:

Do not work for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life (Jn 6:27)

Echoing his Master, Saint Paul cautions us in his letter to the Colossians that we read today,

              If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above

              Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.

He continues,

            Put to death…the part of you that are earthly:

Immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire,

And perhaps the most important lesson we should take away:

              And the greed that is idolatry

My dear brothers and sisters, work is good, and profit is good, but only if this work, this profit, is directed towards the heavenly, and not towards the earthly.

Let me reframe this for you in terms that may perhaps be more comprehensible. Let everything that you do, be for the glory of God, even when it is making profit. In other words, there is such a thing as a just profit. The rightful reward for your hard work and innovation. A profit wrung by squeezing those who work for you, or cheating your clients or customers, through the giving or taking of bribes, is not the work of God. As Our Lord teaches us:

let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven (Mt 5:16).

St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast we celebrated a few days ago, instructs us to do everything for the greater glory of God. And St. José Maria Escriva teaches us that our work should sanctify the world. In other words, we should walk the path of holiness even as we do our daily work and indeed lay up some resources for our children to get a head start in life.

My dear brothers and sisters, the path of holiness is not necessarily a difficult path. On the contrary, the path of holiness is within the grasp of every single Catholic. Holiness is possible in our daily lives, if only we do not commit the sin of worshiping money and work – sins that are all too common in contemporary life.

But do not fear! The teaching of our Holy Mother Church is the voice of Christ. Listen to it carefully, so that you can educate your conscience, and let the conscience guide your actions. When you swerve from the path of holiness, confess and get right back on that royal road. As the response to the psalm this Sunday teaches us;

              If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

May Our Lord bless and keep you this week on the straight and narrow path of holiness.

(This homily was written to be preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 3 Aug 2025.)

(Image reference: “St. Joseph the worker,” Pietro Annigoni, 1964, Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence.)