Bishop Kevin Farrell

The Chief Shepherd of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas

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Becoming missionaries of Hope

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Becoming missionaries of Hope

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13

Pope Francis warns us to not let ourselves be robbed of hope. Despair is the thief of hope. It is a time of desolation when we have lost sight of God. He has not abandoned us, but the scales of self-pity have covered our eyes.” Without hope, we are sucked deeper and deeper into the quicksand of despair.

Desmond Tutu wrote, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Hope strips the scales from our eyes. The quicksand becomes a rock. As the Holy Father reminds us, “Our hope rests upon an immovable rock: God’s love, revealed and given in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Hope is much more than optimism, it is confidence in the Lord and his promises, as St. Paul writes, it is a virtue of ardent expectation (Rom 5:5) based on the Resurrection.

In April of 2013, Pope Francis charged young people to become missionaries of hope. His words speak to all of us: “I say to you: carry this certainty ahead: the Lord is alive and walks beside you through life. This is your mission! Carry this hope onward. May you be anchored to this hope: this anchor which is in heaven; hold the rope firmly, be anchored and carry hope forward. You, witnesses of Jesus, pass on the witness that Jesus is alive and this will give us hope, it will give hope to this world, which has aged somewhat, because of wars, because of evil and because of sin.

To sow hope where there is despair, answer the Holy Father’s challenge. Become  missionaries of hope, proclaiming that Christ is alive and will come again.

Yearning for the light of faith

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Yearning for the light of faith

Doubt is darkness, an emptiness yearning for the light of faith. Jesus said, “I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness” (Jn 12:46).

Faith is born of an encounter with Jesus; an encounter which he initiates.

Faith is God’s gift, freely given, mediated through the faith community. Pope Francis reminds us that, “It is impossible to believe on our own. Faith is not simply an individual decision which takes place in the depths of the believer’s heart.” (Lumen Fidei 39) It is communal by its very nature.

We cannot sow faith where there is doubt, but we can allow ourselves to become a channel through which the Holy Spirit can implant the mustard seed of faith in the heart of another.

Ours is a world that worships certainty, permeated by the belief that science is capable of explaining everything. Yet, there is the inevitable point, the threshold of faith, beyond which science cannot penetrate.

At that point we share the thought of St. Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote: “I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.”

So we return to the crux of the prayer of St. Francis, not that we ask for wisdom, but that we ask to be God’s instrument.

Bringing pardon where there is injury

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Bringing pardon where there is injury

The teaching of Christ requires that we forgive injuries, and extends the law of love to include every enemy, (Matt. 5:43-44) yet to forgive for many of us is both difficult and onerous. I suspect our emotional struggle with a bruised ego is the principal reason

On the other hand forgiveness is liberating for both the forgiver and the forgiven. It is a double blessing. Shakespeare put it well: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” (Merchant of Venice)

Forgiveness is an action that flows from the virtue of mercy which St. Thomas Aquinas deemed the greatest of virtues because the others revolve around it. Jesus commands us to be merciful as the Father is merciful. (Luke 6:36)

Of course, it is often as difficult to ask forgiveness as to give it. Once again our egos are involved, as well as guilt and shame. Beyond that is the often seeming inability to forgive ourselves.

We are reminded at the consecration at every Mass that Jesus shed his blood for the forgiveness of our sins. (Matt. 26:28) To deny forgiveness is an affront to God the great reconciler.

In one of his first homilies after being elected, Pope Francis said, “The joy of God is the joy of forgiveness.”

To bring pardon where there is injury is to spread the joy of God.

Sowing the love of God

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Sowing the love of God

In the Peace Prayer of St. Francis the various couplets following our request to be made God’s instrument as we discussed in our last blog, are a litany of those elements necessary for peace; love, pardon, faith, hope, light and joy—”but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13)

Our verse this week is on love because it is the cornerstone of peace. It is also the antithesis of hatred to which it is closely related as is true of antithetical terms, which are defined by each other. For example, darkness is the absence of light.

Poetess Etla Wheeler Wilcox penned the line, “Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.” Hate destroys, love gives life. Hatred and love cannot co-exist. Jesus commands us that we are to “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). One who loves unconditionally, as God loves us, cannot hate.

Hatred has many faces. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel professes that “the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference,” which he characterizes as, “the epitome of evil.” Indeed, Pope Francis has been an outspoken critic of the “globalization of indifference,” which has replaced love and mercy with “an economic system that has removed the person from the centre and replaced him with the god of money; an economic system that excludes, and creates the throwaway culture in which we live.”

We sow love by our witness, acts of kindness, compassion, mercy, consideration shown to others. Love is contagious. The Holy Father observed that “Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others. As it expands, goodness takes root and develops. If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good” (EG 9). Just as “the love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14), our acts of love impel others, for God is love and those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them. (1 John 4:16)

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Image Credit: USDA on Flickr