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Bishop with Father Justin Cormie |
First Solemn Mass of Father Justin Cormie
June 2, 2019
St. Theresa’s Catholic Church
Sugar Land, Texas
Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9
Hebrews 9:24-28, 10:19-23
Luke 24:46-53
Several years ago, I was seated in an airport lounge waiting to board a flight that had been delayed for several hours, a flight that I thought would never get off the ground because of weather and mechanical problems. Judging by the weather I was half hopeful that it would never get off the ground for the simple point of avoiding turbulence. While seated, I was engrossed in an article in a theological journal, when I felt the feeling of being stared at as I tried to focus on my reading.
Soon a young woman seated across from me asked me a question. “Are you a priest?”
I glanced up from my Sports Illustrated and looked at her face that was filled with intensity and sincerity. I was very tempted to respond to her with a fearful question of my own — “Who wants to know?” as if my being dressed in a black suit and Roman collar was not enough of a dead giveaway. Instead, I smiled and answered her with a simple “yes.”
So much of our priestly life and ministry begins and ends with the simple “yes.” I said “yes” to the woman’s question because I first said “yes” to Christ’s call to the priesthood and before that to His call to service. Father Cormie, our relative and friend, said “yes” yesterday as he has said “yes” to Christ throughout his life.
The woman’s next question surprised me. She asked me with a plaintive desperation, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
I paused for a moment. If I were to be completely truthful, I would have to answer that question by saying, “No, I don’t believe in an afterlife.” Trying to remain positive, I answered her by stating, “Yes, I believe in eternal life.” We are often asked about the “afterlife” by the culture of today, but we Christians don’t believe in an afterlife. We believe in eternal life. Eternal life is Christ Himself who said “yes” to the Father’s will. Eternal life is our “yes” enveloped in the here and now of Communion with God. The term “afterlife” points to the unknown of the future in time. It is contained in the question of the young woman and entrapped by the intellectual walls of our culture today. It asks, “What does the future hold?” The communion of eternal life reveals to us intimately that “it is God who holds the future.”
Eternal life in the Kingdom of God begins here and now in the selflessness of love. As the theologian Joseph Ratzinger once observed, “Present and eternity are not like, present and future, located side by side and separated; rather, they are interwoven.” Even more beautifully stated by a close and personal friend of Father Cormie, Saint Therese of Lisieux: “I do not well see what more I shall have in Heaven than now. I shall see the good God, it is true; but as to being with Him, I am wholly with Him already upon earth.” The Eucharist is the means instituted by Christ for us to be with Him now. It is the taste of eternal life.
We read in the Gospel just proclaimed, “Jesus raised His hands and blessed them. As He blessed them, He parted from them and was taken up to heaven.” These words reveal to us the significance of the Solemnity of the Ascension that we celebrate today. They are words of blessing and of promise. We are attuned to the significance of these words even more so because of our great joy in the celebration of the priestly ordination and first Solemn Mass of Father Justin Cormie — two joyful events that are filled with the Lord’s blessing and promise: the first blessings of a priest and the ordination promises of a priest, the blessing of Jesus Ascending and the promise that He will be with us always: Emmanuel.
The blessing of Jesus and the promise of the Holy Spirit prepare us for the revelation at Pentecost that Christ’s Ascension is not His abandonment of His disciples nor of His Church. It is not an event for us to grieve. The period between the Ascension and Pentecost is a threshold that prepares us for entry into the Kingdom of God, not an escape from reality into a faraway utopia. It is not unlike a priest’s life and ministry for preparing the Lord’s flock for entry into eternal life.
The priest blesses, he does not remain aloof and he does not abandon those whom he blesses. The priest blesses not with empty words or gestures. He blesses with his heart and the selflessness of the Gospel. The priest blesses with the confidence of one who has been offered the pearl of great price and has laid down his life in love for the eternal life that begins today.
The most essential way that Jesus does not abandon us but remains with us in His love is in the blessing of His gift of Himself in the Eucharist, that is to say the Eucharist as both the Sacrifice of the Mass and His real presence in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the tabernacle and adored by the faithful. Jesus Christ is always present; He is present to us in this way that is made easier for us to understand by His Ascension where our humanity in Christ is embraced in eternal and Divine power.
As Pope Benedict XVI once said, “Heaven: this word Heaven does not indicate a place above the stars but something far more daring and sublime: it indicates Christ Himself, the divine Person who welcomes humanity fully and forever, the One in whom God and man are inseparably united forever. Man’s being in God, this is Heaven. And we draw close to Heaven, indeed, we enter Heaven to the extent that we draw close to Jesus and enter into communion with Him. For this reason, today’s Solemnity of the Ascension invites us to be in profound communion with the dead and Risen Jesus, invisibly present in the life of each one of us.”
The priesthood, as Christ intended, is required for us to enter into this Communion. Jesus remains present to us, even as we await His return to us from Heaven, in the presence of His priesthood and in the ordained life and ministry of His priests. In each priest, including our friend and relative, Father Justin Cormie, ordained into the priesthood of Jesus Christ yesterday, Christ remains always present to us as Head and Shepherd of His Church. Through the priest’s life and ministry, Christ gathers us around the altar as His body with Him as the head. Through the priest’s life and ministry, Christ brings order into our lives of chaos and defends us from the sneaky attack of the wolf. The priest’s life and ministry bring us hope in part because of the fortitude of the priest to rely on the merits of Christ alone and not upon his own virtues. This notion of fortitude is beautifully described by Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face when she says, “I can depend on nothing, on no works of my own in order to have confidence. We experience such peace when we’re totally poor, when we depend upon no one but God.”
This confidence and fortitude is described in our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, “Therefore, brothers and sisters, since through the blood of Jesus we have confidence of entrance into the sanctuary by the new and living way He opened for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a sincere heart and in absolute trust, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water.” Confidence. The priest is confident because of the Blood of Christ. It is the Blood of Christ that a priest pours out in sacrificial and loving union that opens eternal life now and not simply in the far away future.
It is this strong confidence that the men in white summon the disciples to live in today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles when they say, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen Him going into heaven.” Father Cormie, you and your classmates, along with me and every other priest, have not been ordained to gaze dreamingly into the sky and to get lost in the clouds. The priest’s mission and responsibility are not to gaze into the world of the abstract and to ignore the concrete. The priest is ordained to look into the faces of those who suffer real problems and are set adrift on the sea of meaninglessness. You are ordained to teach the Gospel as Christ intended it to be taught as He taught it. As Saint Thomas Aquinas describes the ministry of teaching, “The teacher looks not only at the Truth of things; at the same time, He looks at the faces of living men and women who desire to know this truth. Love of truth and love of people — only the two together constitute a teacher.” I would underscore that they even more so constitute a priest.
The Ascension means that eternal life enters the present any time we come face-to-face with God. The priest’s life and ministry offer that face to people in his compassionate ministry as a pastor configured to Christ, the Head and Shepherd of the Church. A priest makes present eternal life in his anointing of the sick. A priest makes present eternal life in his absolution of sinners in the confessional. A priest makes present eternal life in his preaching a homily at Mass. A priest makes present eternal life in his baptizing and confirming candidates. A priest makes present eternal life in his visiting the sick and administering viaticum and in his offering solace to the grieving. A priest most especially makes present eternal life in his offering of the eternal and unbloodied sacrifice of the Mass. In so doing and being, a priest opens the door that provides the full vision that our destiny is not in this life, not in an afterlife, but in Christ who is eternal life---love and truth itself.