Feast of the Apostles Philip and James
[Scripture Readings: 1 Cor 15:1-8; Jn 14:6-14 ]
Jesus said, “I am going to the Father.” In the monastery, after the death of a monk like Br. Felix, we keep a crucifix at his place in the dining room for thirty days. It's a reminder to pray for him, in case he needs our prayers, that he may go as quickly as possible with Jesus to the Father. And during the liturgical year we remember the feasts of apostles, like Philip and James, who gave their lives for Christ, not to pray for them, because martyrs go straight to heaven, but to ask them to pray for us.
But is it only the martyrs and great saints who can skip purgatory? Could a monk like Br. Felix go straight to heaven? In Archbishop Sheen's book, The Moral Universe, he writes, “Who would dare assert themselves spotless enough to stand before God? 
The martyrs who sprinkled the sands of the Coliseum with their blood? Most certainly! The missionaries like Paul, who spend themselves and are spent for the spread of the Gospel? Most assuredly! The cloistered saints who in the quiet calm of a voluntary Calvary become martyrs without recognition? Most truly!”1
In St. Bernard's Sermon on Perseverance we also read these encouraging words: “Let me tell you something for your fuller consolation. Receive it as my most solemn assurance that … there have flown to the everlasting joys above, the souls of choir religious, lay brothers, and novices without the least hindrance once they were set free from the chains of our mortality. And if you desire to know how I can be so certain of this, let me inform you that it has been declared and revealed to me with the clearest and most indubitable evidence.”2 Imagine, even novices!
Can anyone else go straight to heaven? St. Therese of Lisieux thinks so. She said, “You do a great injury to God in believing you have to go to purgatory. When we love, we can't go there.”3 And like St. Bernard, she's a Doctor of the Church!
Receiving the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick out of love for Jesus prepares us to go straight to heaven. So, did Br. Felix who faithfully received the Eucharist every day for sixty-six years, and the Anointing of the Sick several times during his last illness, did he go straight to heaven? Of course he did.
May we persevere in following the example of Br. Felix and all the saints who received the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick out of love for Jesus so that when we die we will also hear Jesus saying, “Come, I am going to the Father.”
1. The Moral Universe, by Fulton J. Sheen, Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1936, 130.
2. St. Bernard's Sermons, vol. 3, translated by a Priest of Mount Melleray, The Carroll Press, Westminster, 1950, On the Motives for Fervor and Perseverance in the Service of God, 543.
3. St.Therese of Lisieux, Her Last Conversations, translated by John Clarke, ICS Publications, Washington DC, 1977, 273.
Feast of the Apostles Philip and James
[Scripture Readings: 1 Cor 15:1-8; Jn 14:6-14]
Sts. Philip and James represent a blending of the practical and the meaningful that is emphasized in the gospel when Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Philip represents the practical: when Jesus asked how they were going to feed the five thousand, Philip responded in terms of the money it would cost. When Jesus said no one comes to the Father except through Him, Philip wanted Him to produce the Father then and there.
James represents the meaningful. His letter is a beautiful piece of wisdom literature in which he shows how the meaningful guides the practical. He counsels us that “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger” (1:19). The remainder of the letter shows how these lead us to God’s way of life.
We saw this same interplay between the practical and the meaningful during the Triduum. Pilate, representing the practical with its need for power and authority leading to dictatorship, confronted Jesus representing—indeed, incarnating—Truth leading to freedom. Truth is conformity between intellect and reality. It is incredibly difficult for us as humans. If our minds did consistently conform to reality we would be free of unfounded fears and enjoy all things for what they truly are. To thus conform to reality our minds must know God, the ultimate reality, the creative logic, the eternal reason that brought us and our world into being. To thus know God we must be in a relationship with Him and this obligates us. We have to live the Truth. This is where the meaningful guides the practical. It is in the answer we give to the two questions: “What is my good?” and “How do I achieve it?” The gospel tells us God is our good. To help us know God—to know Truth and to be free—we have been given two long-standing characteristics.
The first is that we take ourselves seriously. Taking ourselves seriously means we are not prepared to take ourselves just as we come. We critique ourselves because we want our thoughts, feelings, choices, and behavior to make sense. We put a lot of work into this!
The second characteristic is that we long to get it right. We need to direct ourselves -or believe we are directing ourselves—in thoughtful conformity to some norm, some way of life. We want to know what goals to pursue, what limits to respect. We want to be clear about what counts as good reasons to make particular choices. It is important to us to know what is important to us! This is why St. Benedict gave us a Rule of Life. God gave us this ability to take ourselves seriously and to want to get it right so that we will see the importance of what we care about.
Then, He gave us Jesus Christ, “The Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The conformity between self and reality that is Truth is found in the heart, in what we care about most. Jesus, the Sacred Heart, shows us what about ourselves to take seriously: It is that we are made in the likeness of God. As the Way and the Life, He shows us how to get it right; how to recover that likeness.
The Way is Love. Love is a Life that is ordered by two desires: a desire for the good of the beloved and a desire for union with the beloved. These distinguish our Trinitarian God. If we are to take our likeness to Him seriously, these desires must distinguish us. To “get it right” both desires must drive us and truth must guide us.
But there is a hitch: As I recall, it is one of the marks of bad character that, as it develops, one becomes progressively less able to understand where he went wrong. It is important, then, to have resources for making right judgments and taking right actions; resources for explaining how we fail and how we can do better. We need practically usable answers to the questions, “What is my good?” and “How can I achieve it?” In short, we need a story that tells us the truth. The gospel story we have tells us that Truth is outwardly powerless in the world just as Christ was before Pilate. Truth’s power comes from our recognition of it and from our consent to it.
Feast of the Apostles Philip and James
[Scripture Readings: 1 Cor 15:1-8; Jn 14:6-14 ]
Today we remember two of Jesus’ apostles, Philip and James. Of the two, James is the most anonymous. All we’re told of him is that he was the son of Alphaeus, that he was an apostle and that he was known as James the Lesser so as not to be confused with James the Greater.
More is known of Philip. I admire his response to Jesus when they were confronted with five thousand hungry people. When Jesus asked him where they should buy bread for all of them, Philip told Him what he knew: “Two hundred days wages would not be enough for each to have even a little.” Philip’s reply is true, and limited to the practical. At the level of the meaningful, though, it emphasizes a very important point that Jesus wanted us to get: left to our own resources we are powerless even to do good for others. We can, however, become bearers of divine power, bread from heaven, as a gift from God through Jesus.
The experience of powerlessness is portrayed as hunger that for two hundred days of effort one cannot satisfy. The failure of effort to satisfy is always a sign that the practical needs the meaningful to guide it. We often experience this as an uneasiness that, despite our lives being what is commonly regarded as successful, leaves us feeling empty. We find ourselves daydreaming about something new and exciting happening that would at once identify and satisfy this hunger, this emptiness. Then something happens. The uneasiness becomes a Call.
This Call is when the fish and loaves arrive and Who they come from. How one receives these, the food or the Call, is proportionate to the hunger or unease one felt before. We receive one way if it’s five o’clock and we haven’t eaten since seven; we receive it another way if it’s Friday and we haven’t eaten since Monday. The contrast between the unease and the Call is very significant. It is significant because it affects the gratitude and thus the enthusiasm with which the Call is received.
I remember when the Call happened to me; it happened in a movie theater! On a Saturday. This Call beckons one to set out, to find that “something” that beckons. The search reveals that it is not “something.” If it were merely “something,” it would just be another instance of the practical, of something found, grown accustomed to, and discarded. No, the search reveals Someone. Someone, a person, is always meaningful. That Someone is God. The wide-ranging search now has boundaries: We are the people who believe in the God definitively revealed by Jesus Christ. With Philip we plead with Jesus, “Show us the Father!”
Jesus, for the umpteenth time, reminds Philip and the others that to see Him is to see the Father. A lifetime of pursuing what is commonly accepted as “good”—money, property, and prestige— has obscured their vision of the true and enduring Good. The Call requires that we acknowledge and organize our lives around this True Good. Jesus calls us to this when He says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” St. Benedict says this when he directs us to “prefer nothing whatever to Christ.” To know the good is to desire it. To obtain it, to taste it, is to want to give ourselves entirely to it.
When Jesus asks us to believe, He points to His works, all of which were for the benefit of others. Jesus says He will take this urge to give and add divine power to it, bread from heaven, and we will “do greater works than these.”
The powerlessness Philip described was not powerlessness to satisfy himself, but to help the hungry five thousand. Jesus tells us that if we ask Him for anything that will make us useful to God and our fellows, He will grant it. He knows our hearts and He knows what will truly satisfy: We desire to get, but we long to give.
Feast of the Apostles Philip and James
[Scripture Readings: 1 Cor 15:1-8; Jn 14:6-14]
Jesus said, “I am going to the Father.” In the monastery, after the death of a monk like Fr. Thomas McCarty, we keep a crucifix at his place in the dining room for thirty days. It is a reminder to pray for him that he may go as quickly as possible with Jesus to the Father. And during the liturgical year we remember the feasts of apostles, like Philip and James, who gave their lives for Christ, not to pray for them, because martyrs go straight to heaven, but to ask them to pray for us. Is it only the great saints and martyrs who can skip past purgatory? Could a monk like Fr. Thomas go straight to heaven? In one of Archbishop Fulton J Sheen’s books, The Moral Universe, he writes, “Who would dare assert themselves spotless enough to stand before God? The martyrs who sprinkled the sands of the Coliseum with their blood? Most certainly! The missionaries like Paul, who spend themselves and are spent for the spread of the Gospel? Most assuredly! The cloistered saints who in the quiet calm of a voluntary Calvary become martyrs without recognition? Most truly!”1 Well, that’s Archbishop Sheen.
But one day St. Therese of Lisieux heard a nun talk about going to purgatory. Therese said to her, “Oh, how you grieve me! You do a great injury to God in believing you’re going to go to purgatory. When we love, we can’t go there.“2 And she’s a doctor of the Church! There’s another great doctor of the Church who agrees with her, our own St. Bernard.
In his sermon on perseverance he writes, “Let me tell you something for your fuller consolation. Receive it as my most solemn assurance that … there have flown to the everlasting joys above the souls of choir religious, lay brothers, and novices without the least hindrance once they were set free from the chains of our mortality. And if you desire to know how I can be so certain of this, let me inform you that it has been declared to and revealed to me with the clearest and most indubitable evidence.“3 Imagine, even novices!
Did Fr. Thomas McCarty, who died on Good Friday, a month ago, go straight to heaven like the martyred apostles Philip and James? He lived the life of a monk, a man of prayer, for sixty years. Never during that time did I ever hear him speak an unkind word about another person, or even lose his temper. That’s pretty amazing. But, I’m not sure he went straight to heaven. You see, he had a problem. He was always so slow to go anywhere, and so painstakingly thorough in all he did.
That was his strength and his weakness. As the monastery check writer he meticulously examined every invoice for errors, and tracked down every expense. In novitiate classes during the time he was novice master, this same quality made him excessively repetitious. He used to draw an hour glass lying on its side on the black board to illustrate salvation history. At the center, the narrowest point represented the life of Christ towards which the whole old testament history pointed, and from which the whole new testament history flowed. Going back in time he marked the Babylonian Exile on the hour glass, and further back the founding of King David’s dynasty, and before that the exodus from Egypt, and far back in time, Abraham and the other Patriarchs. Going in the other direction after Christ, he put marks on the hour glass for the life of St. Benedict in 500 AD, the founding of the Cistercian Order in 1098, the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and the expansion of the Trappists around the world in modern times. Each time he drew the hour glass on the board he said he saw something new in it. Br. Deogratias, one of his novices at the time, raised his hand and said that it looked exactly the same to him as it did two years earlier. Fr. Tom stared at the hour glass in silence for a little while and then put a new mark way back on the hour glass for the age of the dinosaurs. It took years for him to get there!
One day when he was living as a hermit in the woods, he experienced chest pains. He had no telephone, no way to call for help. So he slowly walked a mile back to the Abbey. When he arrived and saw Fr, Daniel he asked in a quiet, unhurried voice, “Would you take me to the emergency room?” “Yes,” he said, “is something wrong?” Fr. Tom replied, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
After his recovery he walked even slower than before. If you were caught behind him in the cloister you had to slow down, or risk running over him. Many a time I wanted to give him a little push, and say, “Move!” In an unguarded moment, the abbot remarked that Fr. Thomas really died after his heart attack, but he just doesn’t know it yet.”
In the last several months of his life, Fr. Thomas suffered seizures that slowed him down even more. One day Fr. Brendan stopped by his room in the infirmary when Fr. Tom was brushing his teeth. The abbot said he would come back later. But Fr. Tom replied, “I’ll still be brushing my teeth.” Yes, he was slow doing anything and going anywhere, maybe even to heaven.
During the hours in Church when we kept watch next to Fr. Thomas in his coffin, he looked so peaceful and contented I could almost hear him saying, “I think I’ll just lie here and rest for a while.” At least until he heard St. Peter cry out, “Come on! Move! I can’t hold this gate open all day long!” Yes, I believe Fr. Thomas went straight to heaven one little step at a time all his life, and just two or three short steps after his death. Since the doctors of the church teach that those who love and follow Jesus may also hope to go straight to heaven let us all take courage. For Jesus said, “I am going to the Father,” and he wants us to go with him straightaway, like the apostles, the martyrs, and Fr. Thomas.
Feast of the Apostles Philip and James
[Scripture Readings: 1 Cor 15:1-8; Jn 14:6-14 ]
To say a few words about the Apostles Philip and James: if Pope Benedict were to ask them, to express his concern about the need for help, they would say: “We only had twelve.” Now to take you back to 1945: a soldier was sleeping on the top bunk in a ship returning from the war…
Now we go to New Melleray and the fiftieth anniversary of my ordination. Ordination Day! Gratitude wells up in my heart, gratitude to God who says, “I no longer call you servants but my friends.” What grace and mercy! What gratitude to all my Brother Monks, Priests and Priestly Brothers. What gratitude to those Priests and Monk Brothers, Priestly Brothers of course! Gratitude to all our monks both Priests and Brothers who have gone before us and for whom we pray, and who would have us all remember the Abbots of our Abbey now lying in their graves.
Also, Fr. Ignatius Weber in Venezuela Abbey, Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, and Assumption Abbey in Ava, MO. Ordination Day: I dare say that no Priest can share the intimacy of that overwhelming action of the Holy Spirit — it is indescribable! The Priest, the Priestly brother; and yes the Priestly people. And I think especially of all those who participate many times a week in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass here. What blessings are showered upon them. How often in those moments when God visits our souls, we feel the love of God and the weight of life and we desire to remain forever like Peter on Mount Tabor—”Lord it is well that we should be here.” And we understand why and how Mary chose the better part and we should like to live as she did at the feet of Christ, doing nothing else but looking at, and being with Him, loving Him. “Blessed are they who live in the house of the Lord.”
You know that if we were only heart, our lives could be only love. But one does not love with the heart alone. Reach back in time to the days we learned the beginnings of catechism, “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with the love of thy whole heart, and thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and thy whole strength.”
Getting back to Ordination Day again: what did I mean when I said, “I Love Thee, I am Thine; I belong to Thee, (get this) without reserve”? And in this giving is my joy, my rest, my happiness. When the word love is pronounced, nothing remains, as Lacordaire says, but to continue it always. I love Thee, I have surrendered myself in the one I love. I have died that I may live. Oh, if I loved God like that, my life would be one living and indestructible, “I love Thee.” And my death would only add to this word two others to perpetuate and consummate it: “perfectly” and “forever.” Isn’t this the way of life where He is—in heaven?
We return to 1945 and the sleeping soldier: a soldier is shaking him and saying, “Hey soldier you’ve been dreaming and we are approaching New York you had better get out.” And I am still dreaming!