Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said to his apostles, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
And whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Whoever receives you receives me.
And whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward.
And whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive
[00:01:26] Speaker C: a righteous man's reward.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little
[00:01:33] Speaker C: ones to drink, because the little one is a disciple.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Amen. I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.
[00:01:44] Speaker C: The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
I found out within about a week
[00:01:52] Speaker C: or two after I was ordained a priest that all of that education I received did one thing.
It basically laid a footing of the foundation, but that I didn't know anything and I had no clue how to live out priesthood.
And my guess is virtually all priests have had that same experience that you think you know everything and find out you know nothing.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: And so what I did was start
[00:02:23] Speaker C: observing priests that were around for a while. And I was blessed with being associated with some truly good mentors who taught me a lot.
And even when we would have gatherings together, I would watch the older priests to hopefully learn and grow from their wisdom.
I could even go to our Deer Camp. And when we would sit around in the evenings, the conversations were always helpful.
Unfortunately, there were times where some of the things I learned were probably the ones I should have put aside a little bit.
One of them was the first time I was assigned as a pastor. We were up at Deer Camp, and one of the priests said to me, you need to learn this right away.
If you're not making somebody mad, you're not doing your job. I seem to have learned that one fairly well.
But one of the other bits of advice that actually came to me third hand was from Father Iggy Walesic. And Iggy was one of those kind of old Polish country priests that had a lot of wisdom.
And while I never really got to know him well. We did correspond a little bit. He wrote me some very nice letters when I was in seminary.
And one of the things that is attributed to him was, when you go into a parish, there's two things you need to do right away.
Be nice to the little children and to the elderly.
And everything else will fall into place.
And there's a real wisdom in that. Because if you're nice to someone's children, parents usually will like you right off the bat.
And in the same way, if you are nice to their elderly parents, they will be grateful and like you no matter what.
And that is pretty much the same thing. Jesus is trying to let us know in the Gospel when he said, whoever welcomes you welcomes not only you, but me.
He's reminding us that the way we truly love God is by the way we welcome and love one another.
And it doesn't matter how pious we are, it doesn't matter how much time we spend in prayer or how many days we spend in church.
If we treat one another poorly, if we dismiss one another, if we fail to listen to one another, if we fail to be merciful and generous to one another, all of it is just useless.
Because all of those things, the prayer, the gathering together for Eucharist, all of it is meant to transform our hearts so that we can, in turn, love God fully by loving those around us.
Everything else is just theory. It's kind of locked between our ears when we say we love God but don't love his people.
And he wanted us to understand that fully. You want to really love me? You want to welcome me, welcome one another.
