The Lord Among His Saints: Homily for the Solemnity of All the Saints

            See what love the Father has bestowed on us

Brother and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the world will agree with us when we say, love makes the world go round. Where the world will probably disagree with us is the understanding of the kind of love that makes this movement happen. To them, love will be what the Greeks would call eros, a physical, sexual, desire. For Christians, this love in Greek terms, would be agape the self-sacrificing love that found its truest expression on the Cross of Our Lord; “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15: 13.)

Today, on the Solemnity of All Saints, we celebrate this agapic love, for this is what marks the saints, their self-sacrificing love for God, a love that drove their entire lives and has ensured that they are now in heaven. Following the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbour, they now spend their time in heaven, in the divine presence, ready to respond to those who petition them for their prayers.

The saints are ready to respond to our prayers, for the reason contained in the formula of the Creed: “the communion of saints.” As §948 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us:

the term “communion of saints” …. has two closely linked meanings: communion in holy things (sancta) and among holy persons (sancti).”

Through baptism, we all share in the promises of heaven, and through baptism, we too are made one in nature with the saints who are in heaven. As the first letter of St. John teaches us today:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.

By virtue of this sharing in holy things, therefore, the saints are ever ready to respond to our cries for help, to aid us on the path to heaven. As the Gospel from last Friday taught us:

Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern,
would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?

Like parents, they respond to our prayers, and offer up prayers of their own, so that we may be pulled out from the cisterns (of sin) that we fall into.

If we are already, in principle, in communion with the saints, it behooves us, to be holy ourselves, because we too are part of God’s holy ones. Listen, again, to the words of St. John in his first letter:

Beloved, we are God's children now

And what does it take to become holy?

In his book The Spiritual Combat – prized by a number of saints – Lorenzo Scupoli (1530-1610) indicates that the genuine spiritual life, i.e. the life of holiness, consists in: firstly, “the knowledge of the goodness and the greatness of God, and of our nothingness and inclination to all evil;” secondly, “the love of him and the hatred of ourselves;” third, “subjection, not to him alone, but, for love of him, to all his creatures;” fourth, “entire renunciation of all will of our own, and absolute resignation to all his divine pleasure;” and finally, “willing and doing all this purely for the glory of God and solely to please him, and because he so wills and merits thus to be loved and served.”

Too often, and principally among us who dare to presume our holiness, we think of ourselves as perfect. The first step on the road to holiness, Scupoli therefore warns us, is to grow in appreciation of our own capacity for wickedness. Having grown in this knowledge, we must reject our very selves, and our own desires, until we can live, not for ourselves, but for others. In this task, that great line from the Lord’s prayers bears repeating, over and over again:

              Your will be done.

And then, live our lives, not for our own pleasure, but for the pleasure of God, taking delight in serving Him, and Him alone.

In his presentation of Scupoli’s book, the late Fr. Jonathon Robinson of the Toronto Oratory, points out that “The Spiritual Combat is a work directed toward the practice of the ascetical life.” The ascetical life, he points out, can be said to represent:

All those elements of the spiritual life that involve an organized campaign against the sinful aspects of the self, and against exterior temptation, as well as positive efforts directed towards the perfection of our own spiritual activities.

In this way he points out that asceticism is broader than the external and physical austerities that we take up. Austerity is about the ordered effort to imitation Him, who gave His life on the cross so that we might live. It is also about following in the royal path of the cloud of witnesses, the saints, who imitated Him before us, and even now are at ready to help us if only we call them by name.

Too rarely, however, do we call them by name, my dear brothers and sisters, and if we do, it is for temporary and material benefits. The saints can relied on for greater aid and support and we must hasten to this task.

All God’s holy angels and saints, pray for us!

(A version of this homily was first preached to the Catholic residents at Aaji Care Home for Assisted Living, Old Goa.)

Image reference: The Saints in Procession (detail from The Triumph of the Sacred Heart), Luc-Olivier Merson, 1911 (?), Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, Paris.)

Love of the Neighbour: Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; this Sunday, through the lectionary, Our Lord places before us the commandment of love for our neighbour. Building on this injunction, a commandment that we have an obligation to comply with, Holy Mother Church teaches us in the Catechism:

Even if it does not contradict the provisions of civil law, any form of unjustly taking and keeping the property of others is against the seventh commandment: thus, deliberate retention of goods lent or of objects lost; business fraud; paying unjust wages; forcing up prices by taking advantage of the ignorance or hardship of another. (CCC no. 2409)

These teachings help us to engage with a scenario that played out in the shadow of the venerable Sé of Goa some weeks ago. After playing football all day long with other members of the Cathedral parish, two blue-collared migrant men borrowed the bike of a friend, another migrant worker. Slightly inebriated these two men charged down the wrong side of a one-way street and rammed into the recently purchased vehicle of another parishioner, a local. Outraged, and because he had not purchased an insurance, the violated man, snatched the key of the scooter that the two errant men were on, and indicated that only after they coughed up a substantial sum - arbitrarily arrived at – to repair the damage to his new vehicle, would he return the key to them.

This scenario is an apt description of situations encountered in many parts of the world. As law and order breaks down – more so in Goa than any other part of the world, I imagine – one can understand the frustration of people, who can no longer rely on the state agents of law enforcement – in this case the police. And so, they take the law into their own hands.

But what does the morality of Our Lord teach us? Already, before His incarnation, he spoke of this through the words of the Prophet Isaiah which we hear in the first reading:

You shall not molest or oppress an alien

The (not only) trouble with the Goan parishioner’s action was that the bike, whose key he had illegally and illegitimately impounded, did not belong to these two men, but to a third person, who was now deprived of his property for no reason other than the fact that he had loaned his bike to his friends. As Our Lord says, through the prophet Isaiah:

If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. 
What else has he to sleep in?

There are pressures in the life of a migrant that those who have the privilege of not having to migrate, or the opportunity to live as expats, may never understand. It is for this reason that we must take care that we never molest or oppress the alien, whether through the law, or outside of it.

There is, however, a parallel obligation on the migrant: to follow the law, and to love the community that accepts them.

Speaking at the Autumn Plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference in September this year, Bishop Erik Varden had some veryilluminating words to deal with the complex scenario that accompanies the overwhelming wave of migration that has overtaken so many parts of the developed world – and it not unknown in in India either. Bishop Varden pointed out that as Christians “it is our duty to extend a helping hand to those in need, to open our doors to the homeless, to share our material wealth with the poor.” However, he went on to elaborate, the Catechism also teaches us that immigrants are:

obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens (CCC no. 2241).

Creatively drawing on the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict, he pointed out that:

St Benedict sets a radical standard. He decrees that all guests — who will chiefly be paupers and homeless folk — must be received as if they were Christ himself. As soon as they knock on the door, the porter is to exclaim ‘Deo gratias!’ and ask for their blessing. The abbot is to wash their hands and feet. Every kindness is to be shown them. The community must exert itself to meet their needs. Such is the law of Christian hospitality (RB 53, 66).  

But this is for guests; for those who wish to stay, St. Benedict’s approach is different. They are to be kept waiting for a while, and are to be read the rule, repeatedly, to not only indicate the norms of the community to which they wish to belong, but to internalise their importance. As Bishop Varden puts it:

to belong to a community is a trying, demanding business. It requires generosity and determination. It calls for a will to nurture fellowship of intent.

And so we have it; one has an obligation to love the alien, but one has also the obligation to respect the community one belongs to and to which one wishes to join.

The words from St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians offer us the ideal to which we are all – natives and aliens – are called to live:

in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything. 
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.

May Our Lord grant us the wisdom to discern the way of love.

(Image reference: Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples (detail), Nicolas Bertin, c. 1720 and 1730, Art Institute of Chicago.)

Come and Worship! Homily for the Twentynineth Sunday in Ordinary Time

repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God.

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, following from the words of Our Lord today, what is it that we owe to God? To answer this question, we could have recourse to the powerful words from the book of Revelation (4:11):

Worthy art thou, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for thou didst create all things,
and by thy will they existed and were created.

In other words, God is owed our worship, and if we refer to the first of the commandments, contained also in our first reading from the prophet Isaiah,

I am the LORD and there is no other,
there is no God besides me,

we recognize that this worship is due to Him alone and to no one else. To offer to anyone, or anything, else the worship – in Latin latria – that is due to God, is to commit idolatry (from the Greek eidolon-latreia), a very serious and grave offence indeed. And so, we cannot, and may not, offer to Caesar – i.e. the powers and principalities of this world – what is due to God alone.

The primacy of the commandment to love God first is not some idle commandment because God wishes to be adored. As the fourth common preface to the Eucharistic canon teaches us:

although you have no need of our praise,
yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift,
since our praises add nothing to your greatness
but profit us for salvation.

Man is a creature in need of God, and worship helps him to order his life, so that he may then be able to fulfill the second commandment: love thy neighbour. It is a truism, that one cannot love one’s neighbour appropriately, if one does not (appropriately) love God first.

And how is one to worship God appropriately? The words of the psalm this Sunday have something to teach us:

Worship the LORD, in holy attire;
tremble before him, all the earth;

To worship the Lord in holy attire must refer not only to the requirement that we must be appropriately dressed, this is, of course, essential, but – as we learned last Sunday – that our hearts must be vested in caritas, i.e. the attire of love. We cannot worship appropriately if our hearts are dark with anger and upset, lacking in trust in the Lord.

A few words also on the appropriateness of the dress that we wear to church. It has become commonplace, especially ever since the seventies, to suggest that the externals are unimportant, that what matters is our heart. As such, what we wear to church does not matter, it is how our heart beats that really matters.

This is all very well, except the false prophets of the seventies, and thereafter, forgot that we are not pure mind, but embodied beings, a blended unity of mind and body. Our body helps us shape our mind, our will and our soul. It is through the disciplining of our tangible bodies that we can discipline the intangible mind, will, and soul.

How we dress to church, therefore, matters. It matters HUGELY!

We can move on to understand the second line from the psalm:

tremble before him, all the earth

The behaviour of most people in church in our times is demonstrative that they do not realise that the church is not simply a meeting place, but the place where heaven and earth meet; not simply on the altar, but in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament present in the tabernacle. This tabernacle is not dissimilar to the Ark of the Covenant that the Israelites carried with them through their journey in the desert. The presence of God is not dissimilar to what Moses saw on Mount Sinai when he was told:

Take off the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground (Ex 3:5).

It was so that we appreciate this fact, and approach the Lord with fear and trembling, that the Catholic tradition has taught us to genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament when we enter the church, subsequently kneel in prayer as we compose ourselves for the sacrifice of the Mass, and then, if we wish to sit, remain in silence until the Mass begins.

A fellow priest recently pointed out the five sins that are committed when one talks unnecessarily in a church. The first is immodesty in relation to decorum, disregarding the solemn and holy atmosphere of the sanctuary, one lowers the respect due to the house of worship. The second sin is that of admiratio, attracting, or causing, undue attention to oneself, through the speech or noise, in the process distracting the community from focusing on God. The third sin is being incircumspect, disregarding and disrupting the prayerful focus of the worshippers. The fourth sin is of injustice, to God and others, depriving God of reverence, and our neighbors of quiet. In so doing, we breach the charity and respect, the caritas, owed to the body of believers. The fifth sin, is that of loquaciousness, indulging in unnecessary or idle chatter, replacing sacred silence with worldly conversation.

Five sins, before we have even begun the Mass! And no doubt, these sinful seeds will yield their worldy fruit while we are attending the holy sacrifice. Think, therefore, dear brothers and sisters, of how important confession before Mass is, or how important discernment of our behaviour, so that the web of the world is taken from us, so that we may be vested in holy attire and appropriately render to God the worship that we owe Him.

My dear brothers and sisters, man is not just homo sapiens, the wise or knowing man, but also homo adorans, the worshiping man. Indeed, one could say that one becomes sapiential, i.e. wise or knowing, after, and only after, worshipping appropriately. With these words, I make my own those of the Gospel acclamation:

Shine like lights in the world
as you hold on to the word of life.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at Aaji Care Assisted Living Centre, Old Goa on 18 October 2026.)

(Image reference: Moses and the Burning Bush, Raphael, circa 1519, Raphael Loggias of the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.)