A priest was teaching his weekly Bible class, and he asked the members how they’d introduce themselves to the Lord when they got to heaven.  The first one said, “Lord, I’m Joan.  I was married for 47 years; I raised three wonderful children, and I always baked the cupcakes for school.  That’s who I am.”

Another said, “Lord, I’m George.  I was the biggest contractor in the county.  Almost all of my buildings were good; and I tried to watch out for the little guys.  That’s who I am.”

And another said, “I’m Harry.  I was the school janitor all my life.  Kept the place real clean, and was never mean to the kids either.  That’s who I am, Lord.”

And so it went till finally it was the turn of the oldest man in the group.  He spoke very softly: “I won’t need to introduce myself,” he said.  “The Lord already knows who I am.”

The Lord already knows who we are from the inside out, and he looks at you and me with the same love that he had for his dear friend Lazarus.  He knows out successes and our triumphs.  He knows how much they cost us.  And he’s very proud of us.

But he also sees what’s dead in us, just as clearly as when he looked at the dead Lazarus.  He smells the smell.  He sees the parts of us that are locked up behind solid rock, as Lazarus was.  He sees the parts of us that are so tied up that we can’t move. And he calls out to us by name, just as he called Lazarus.   “Come out!” he says.  “Don’t stay in that place of death any longer.  Come out into the fresh air and the light; and be released from your bonds, whatever they are.  Come out, and live, and share our friendship.  Come out!”

That is Jesus’ call to each of us this day.  “Leave behind what cannot give you life, and come into deeper friendship with those who can give you life: the Lord and his good people.”  That is Jesus’ call.

If we are to answer his call, we must name the parts of ourselves  that are wounded or dead, imprisoned or in darkness, and then give those parts of ourselves to him to be healed, resurrected, and set free.  That is what he’ll do for us, if we let Him.

So let us spend a little while with him in the quiet of our heart.  Let us name our darkness, our prison, our woundedness — whatever it may be — and give it all to him.  We can count on him and trust him, because he loves us even more than we love ourselves.  Thanks be to God!

Joseph, being a descendant of David, SOMEWHERE down the line, had the right to ascend to the throne. Did he think it anywhere near a possibility for him?  Probably not.  Yet, as he lived with Mary and Jesus, he had to have some idea that this is what God intended.

Can you imagine the feeling inside of him? He was establishing the new line of the Kingdom of David. Who could he share that with? How can he go to the corner and say to his friends, “Hey guys, guess what?”

To have to hold in the truth of what the angel had revealed to him and Mary must have been one of Joseph’s greatest burdens. Imagine: Your son, the King! I have no doubt Joseph would have turned his thoughts to the statements of Nathan to David that we hear from the first reading today. Now Joseph is in the same kind of position, but who can he tell?

Many times Joseph must have recited the psalm that we have in our responsorial today. He would have known and had been waiting for the new covenant to break into the world. Now here, this Son that he had adopted was the One who was going to bring that to us all.

What kind of joy and sweet pain he must have had, knowing what he knew about Who this young child was. Yet, in silence he protected Mary and Jesus until the time that he was called to give that up for the sake of the Kingdom of God. How hard would it have been for him to leave when God called him out of this world into the next, before all that had been promised had come to pass.

How many parents today wish they could stay around to see the success — and the trials — of their own children? It’s a natural thing to want to see your children succeed. Yet the witness of Joseph is to put all that in the hands of God: to proclaim the psalm as David did knowing that Solomon was to become the King and he would have the job of building the temple; to proclaim the psalm as Joseph did, knowing that Jesus would become the King, but Joseph would not see it, just as David did not see Solomon succeed.

Joseph had to wait for the redemption that Jesus was to bring. And I believe it was probably the most painful waiting of his life. Since we believe that Joseph died before Jesus, what would that reunion have been like? There, in Sheol, father and Son embrace, and all the dreams of a lifetime are fulfilled!

We can only imagine that moment of joy, but how sweet it must have been.

Today, on this feast of Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I urge all of you parents, especially you fathers, to ask, through the intercession of Saint Joseph, for the good of your children: for their success — that they will hold to the faith — and that they will reveal the glory of God to a world that does not understand His glory.

Then, in the Kingdom of God, you too can embrace your children and rejoice in the glory of God that they helped to bring to the earth. Today, give thanks to the Lord that He has been faithful and that He has filled your children, and you, with a faith in Him.

There’s a fair amount of gentle jesting among older people about their “senior moments” when memory temporarily fails them.  But if truth were told, it isn’t only our senior citizens who have problems with remembering; it’s all of us.  And it’s not just a matter of forgetting where we put the car keys or what time we’re due at the dentist.  We forget the big stuff, like what our lives are supposed to be about, what matters and what doesn’t.

We get a good look at that very thing in today’s reading from the book of Exodus.  Moses had been away communing with God for only a few days, when the Israelites got restless, forgot all the Lord had done for them across many years, liberating them from Egypt and guiding them through the desert ever since.  They forgot it all and instead crafted for themselves a golden calf to worship.  Talk about “losing it”!

Moses was astonished at their foolishness and their affront to God, but he knew something about God that they ought to have known but didn’t.  He knew that God loved them and loves every one of us, not just on our good days, but on our bad days as well.  And unlike us, God never forgets his loves.

Trust that, and when, inevitably, you make mistakes, don’t be afraid to turn to him.  He’s waiting for you as he waited for them.

In the days of King David and his son King Solomon, the Israelites were supremely confident that they were indeed God’s chosen people. Anyone who doubted it need only look at the splendid temple that Solomon built and the elaborate ceremonies and sacrifices that went on there from dawn to dusk, year after year. And then after Solomon’s death came the division of the kingdom, north and south, and later the destruction of both kingdoms, with their populations carried off as captives in strange lands.

How far they had fallen, and how thoroughly alone they felt as they wept at night so far away from home. And worst of all, they knew that their sins had put them there. They deserved their misery, and it seemed as if it would never end. ”The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me,” was their lament. But it wasn’t true.

The Lord spoke to them, “Could a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you.” And indeed, the Lord brought them home to their own land, and helped them rebuild their lives.

Sometimes we feel alone and forgotten, and sometimes we deserve it. Whatever the case, the Lord never forgets us and never withdraws from us. Turn your eyes inward to where he lives and where he never leaves. And you will see: You are not alone.

Let’s look at Ezekiel’s vision of the temple and its river.  A few simple points to draw your attention:

• Jesus is the temple;

• The water flowing from the temple is from the open side of Jesus from the cross;

• The trickle of water becoming a river is the growth of the Church;

• This river flows into what was the Dead Sea making it now very much alive, and is the renewal of the world by the Church;

• The trees growing with fruit along the side of the river are also the wood of the cross and the fruit of Christians;

• These trees are also the tree of life mentioned in the Garden of Eden;

• This fruit is available to us because of Christ;

• And nothing of these trees goes to waste: even the leaves which do not fade bring life.

So come to the Tree of Life, the Temple of God’s Glory, the Joy of Christians, the Life of the world.

Jesus said “Come to me all you are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.”

No matter how young and healthy we are, there are times when we feel mighty old.  It’s a feeling that comes from deep inside, a feeling that we’ve ‘been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.’  Our routines and the ordinariness of life can back us into that frame of mind, and even more so our perceived lack of progress and advancement: After all this time and all this effort, what have I got to show?  Why am I still just running around the same old track again and again, like an over-the-hill racehorse?

Those feelings can be messages from God, sometimes warning us that we have indeed lost our way and are wasting our time, and sometimes warning us that we’ve forgotten the very good reasons why we’re doing some of the things we need to do every day.  In either case, as Isaiah says in today’s first reading, God wants ‘to create new heavens and a new earth.’  He wants to teach us ‘the words of a new song,’ and give us a fresh and hopeful vision of what our present can mean and what our future can be.

Let the Lord refresh your drooping spirit.  Let him show you how the world looks through his eyes.  You have a wonderful destiny.  Don’t ever forget it, and don’t ever betray it.

There was a great boat race between a Japanese company and an American company. The Japanese won by a mile. So the Americans hired an analyst to figure out what went wrong. He reported that the Japanese had one person managing and seven rowing, while the Americans had seven managing and only one rowing.

“Aha,” said the Americans who immediately restructured their team: Now they had one senior manager, six management consultants, and … one rower. In the rematch, the Japanese won by two miles!

After further intensive consultations, the Americans fired their rower! Reality was staring them in the face, but they just couldn’t see it.

We are all blind to many things, and we’re much the poorer for it. We rarely see how much people love us, and how much God loves us; we see only a fragment of our gifts and only a few of the possibilities God lays out for us; we catch only glimpses of the marvels that surround us, especially the marvelous people we take for granted. So much joy, so much comfort, so much excitement, missed because we’re blind to half the goodness around us.

And just as sad, we don’t see half the things in our lives that are broken and need fixing: the relationships, the marriages, the children, the lifestyles. We don’t see them; so we can’t fix them. And so our sadness continues on and on.

Why are we blind to so much? In part, it’s fear. Very often we’re afraid to look at what may be broken or what may be a dead end because we fear it can’t be fixed, we fear we have no alternatives. That’s why battered women stick around and tell themselves, “It’s not so bad.” It IS bad, but they won’t look, and sometimes we won’t look — for fear.

But there’s more than fear here. Our values can keep us blind. Our culture tells us it’s a waste of time to take time every day to remember who we are, to look at ourselves, one another, and our world — the good parts and the not so good — and see a little more clearly. “Don’t waste your time,” says the culture. So we stay blind and busy, and we wonder why life doesn’t get any better.

Jesus reached out to the man born blind and helped him see for the first time. In just the same way, he reaches out to us, calling us out of the dark and into the light.  Listen to what he’s saying: “You have no reason to be afraid of anything you may ever see.  Our Father loves you dearly, and has already given you everything you need to become your complete self.

Open your eyes and give thanks for what already is, and for what can be.

Open your eyes and take his hand which has always been right there.

Open your eyes and take heart, for you are truly blessed!  You’ll see that, if you look!

So much of our lives we run on ‘radar,’ the daily routines of getting up and going off to wherever we go off to, the routines in the household, at the office, in the supermarket, on the freeway.  Our ‘radar’ works very well and keeps us moving at a remarkable and efficient pace.

But ‘radar’ makes itself felt at other levels as well, in our relationships, in our patterns of thinking, even in our choices of political candidates.  We pretend to think and pretend to reason, and then we make our blind leap and defend our ‘decisions’ and ‘choices’ to the death.

For too much of life, we just go through the motions, with all the action on the outside and nothing on the inside, which is where the choices are supposed to come from.

Jesus is challenging us to do more than just go through the motions, and instead to live from the inside out.  To live wholeheartedly from the inside is Jesus’ formula for success and for joy: Love the Lord with your whole heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

As a way of life, there’s no doubt that it costs the most, but it always pays off.  And that makes it life’s best bargain!

Where do you stand?  It’s a pointed question that gets asked a million times every day, in the corporate board room, at the city council, in the White House, at the PTA meeting, and over and over inside our homes.  Where do you stand?  What are you really about?  Are you with me or against me?

Often our answer would confuse and amaze even the Oracle of Delphi.  What did that platitude mean? Anything? Very often, nothing at all — just a stall and filler.  But for those of honest heart, the question persists and demands an answer: What are we really for? Are we with the Lord or not.  The ‘vanilla’ comfortableness of our culture, where to go along is to get along, is not enough.  For this is God asking the question, the one who gave us life and who sustains it day by day.

It’s a fair question and we have to choose.  After a certain point, treading water is no longer an option.  And so our answer comes from the only place that counts, not fine words from the lips but silent words from the innermost heart: I am yours, Lord, and all I have is yours.  Speak, Lord, for I am listening.

The moment we speak those words from deep within will be the first moment of true freedom in all our lives.  So waste no more time, speak the words from within, and be free.

One of the most common complaints between husbands and wives is that they take each other for granted.  And how predictable that is!  Two people live in the same house, share the same life, follow the same daily routines, doing what needs to be done, keeping things afloat.  It takes conscious effort not to settle into seeing one another’s goodness and caring as no more than one’s right and no great gift.  What an illusion that is and what an extraordinary presumption.

If we do that to one another, what surprise is there that we regularly do the same to the Lord.  We take for granted His wonderful gifts, and we so easily call them our own.  And some of us persist in that illusion until the very moment when we’re called to give them back.  What a stark and dreadful awakening that can be.

Thankfulness for life and for all of God’s gifts is the starting point for anyone who seeks to be truly wise.  But it’s no burden.  To see the truth of how undeservedly beloved we are is to find some sense of how valuable and important we tiny, mortal creatures are to the Creator of this grand universe.

“Tell it to your children,” says today’s Old Testament reading.  And so we must.  But tell it to yourself first, over and over again: The dear Lord Who made me loves me with an everlasting love, and He will never let me go, never let me perish.

Thank you, dear Lord!