Have you ever wondered if God was trying to tell you something?  You don’t have to worry too much because God is always trying to tell us something; usually something good and always something that will challenge us to open our eyes, ears and hearts to the greater presence of God in our life.  That’s a little scary.  Why am I asking this question?  Well very simply because after Christmas as I was looking for a book I realized that God had shared with me a great coincidence as a gift and was definitely asking me a tough question.

First, let’s begin with this St. Lucy, my parish, shared Matthew Kelly’s book “Resisting Happiness” with our parishioners this Christmas.  Second, I was the looking for a book and while on the search finding and remembering two books, Fr. Jonathan Morris’s book “God Wants You Happy” and another by Eric G. Wilson “Against Happiness”.    All books I have read over the past 18 months or so and as you can see by the photo all books dealing the theme of happiness and each jacketed in a bright yellow cover.  And that got me thinking…was this just a coincidence or a God-incidence.

Each of the three books looks at the goal of happiness in a different way…but all with the ultimate goal of life is the union with something greater than ourselves and for Christian’s the union with God as the ultimate goal. And while the word “happiness” occurs and is the goal, each of the books reminds us that the happiness we seek isn’t the transitory but the permanent and eternal joy that is foundation of the often used quote from St. Augustine of Hippo, “Our hearts our restless, until they find rest in you.”  Wilson’s book, in fact, argues that it is through melancholy and sadness, when embraced in life, are the pathways that discover the deeper happiness and joy of life.  It is an understanding where temporary and frivolous “happinesses” destroy the deeper need for a connection of lasting love in our lives.

It is in choosing happiness that moves beyond the self and focuses on the greater good and enters into a relationship of love and blessing where we are able find peace within our relationships through the God’s generous gift of life.  Fr. Morris writes, “Every day holds out to us a choice between shallowness and living faith, between fear and living hope, between self-centeredness and living love.” (p 194) It is in this choice that we ultimately are called to live in the joyfulness of life.

The goal is to look for and embrace the greater not the lesser this is how and where we find contentment; not in the transitory and worldly but in the find of the eternal through our choosing to embrace the world in joy.  During this Christmas season we have great opportunities to do this.  We as Christians celebrate the birth of our Lord for the 12 days that follow Christmas where we enter into the timelessness of God’s glory in holding the child Jesus gently in our hands.  Matthew Kelly reminds us that this opportunity to embrace the joy of God’s blessings begins anew each day as we awake to God’s many blessings.  It is the spiritual battle that is fought for and against happiness each day when we choose other gods in place of the one God who is our source of holy happiness.

I would invite you to take time to begin reading Resisting Happiness this week.  It is not a novel that needs to be finished, rather it is a spiritual meditation that invites us to the daily practice of embracing the joy of God’s presence in life.  I would also invite you to hear my own thoughts on the book as I will (hopefully) post daily tidbits at, www.frmarkcarnzen.com beginning January 2, 2017.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

We all know the first lines of so many Christmas carols, poems and movies that it is often mindboggling when we sit back and wonder at how our brain has absorbed so many of the classic and not so classic Christmas phrases.  Whether it is “Dreaming of the White Christmas” or wondering if “you will shoot our eye out,” this time of year brings about wonder and joy to so many people.

As a priest in a parish the first lines of the great Clement Clarke More poem, The Night Before Christmas where, “Not a creature was stirring; not even a mouse,” is not my experience nor would I want it to be.   The joy and activity of the closing days, hours and moments before the first Mass, the joyous songs and the blessing of many people coming to share in the blessing of the birth of Jesus is always a time of hope and life.

It is also a time when we are called to a deeper understanding.  Why?  Because so many of us know the first lines or even the first verse of our Christian faith but have never taken the time to learn the second, third or fourth verses.  I was at the year-end Christmas gather with the teachers from our parish school and the music teacher, Mrs. Fernandez, invited us to sing carols together.  We were all amazed at her ability to remember those second and third verses as I quickly googled the song lyrics to even remember many of the first verse words.  Certainly she has a wonderful gift of music and I know many people who can and do remember all sorts of lyrics that I am forever unable to do in my life…but that is getting off the point.

In the carols of Christmas we hear many of the deeper mysteries of our Christmas faith.  These songs written in joy and love help us to delve deeper into who we are as members of the family of God.  They are songs that unite us across boundaries as we share our faith in God’s divine and infinite Love, Jesus the Christ. This takes time and effort.  Time that is so precious and the effort to open our hearts and minds to the wonder of love surrounding us.

Hear these prayerful words from the 4^th verse of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”

Now to the Lord sing praises, All you within this place, And with true love and charity Each other now embrace, This holy tide of Christmas is filled with heav’nly grace. O tidings of comfort and joy, Comfort and joy; O tidings of comfort and joy.

The call to love is an invitation to seek God in others as we embrace our willingness to bear God to others in wonder and yes tidings of comfort and joy.   But we also recognize the cost of this true love and charity.  The sad and tragic reality is the violence and terror under which many of our brothers and sisters live and celebrate Christmas in the world.  We pray and work for the justice and peace given to us in our faith through God’s mercy.  It is also through these same carols that we seek the conversion of heart and mind that each and every person is offered in the blessing of grace through God our Father.  This truth of conversion is found in the last verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”

O holy Child of Bethlehem! Descend to us, we pray; Cast out our sin and enter in; Be born in us today.  We hear the Christmas angels, The great glad tidings tell; O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord Emmanuel.

May we all allow our Savior to “enter in and be born in us” this Christmas day. Have a Merry and Holy Christmas

God Bless, Fr. Mark

One of my favorite scenes in the movie The Avengers is when Tony Stark (Ironman) arrives on the control deck of the flying aircraft carrier and as he is talking points out a sailor who is playing a video game on his screen instead of doing his work.  This scene is powerful because as they leave the control deck you get a quick glimpse of the sailor going back to playing the game.

Why do I like this scene?  I think it gives us an insight into the troubles that can happen in our lives as we get distracted from what we should be doing.  If you think about it, the sailor, was on duty and had a very important job as part of the greater team and clearly at this moment of the movie, he knows as does everyone else, they are in a life or death struggle.  And yet, he was distracted and even when called to task quickly went back to the distraction of the moment and once more left the duty he was assigned to do neglected and undone.

While it gave a moment of levity during the movie, it also showed forth how we can let the distractions of life divert our hearts, minds and souls from our true purpose and goals in life.  Which gets us to Advent and preparation for Christmas.  It’s an easy transition to understand how the two moments, the scene for The Avengers and our Advent journey, can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  I focus, as Christians, must always be on the Incarnation of Jesus and how this changes and transforms our view and understanding of the world.  It is also easy to see how distractions of the “season” and of life can un-focus us from our true purpose and ultimate goal in life.

A conversation I have with couples preparing for marriage involves the goal and purpose of married life.  When we discuss the promise of the forever-ness of the vows of marriage I like to use this example in understanding the goal of marriage, which is heaven of course, but heaven with the beloved at our side. The forever of our vows allows us to see the goal as present and attainable.  If we look at marriage as just a non-permanent state then the problems and hurts of relationships can seem large like trying to climb Mount Everest, possible by some but usually only once, whereas the forever purpose and goal of married vows allows us to see the problems as hills, perhaps steep and difficult, but as we practice the climbs they become easier and are able to be traversed many times in life.

Our Advent journey becomes a vow of love where the purpose and goal aren’t to survive the four weeks coming out the other end exhausted and battered rather it is to see the Advent journey as the continuing mystery of life and love where we recognize how we can and do deepen and grow in our relationship with God and each other in faith, hope and love.  The star beckoning us nearer to the Nativity of Our Lord is constantly drawing us into the presence of Jesus each and every day of our life, and ultimately to the Cross of Salvation.

We are just a week away from the day of celebration and the pace of preparation, parties and tasks moves ever quicker in our lives.  Don’t forget to reach out in blessing towards those whom we love and meet throughout the days.  Speak words of joy and peace looking towards the true goal and purpose of our Christian vocation.  A vocation to seek and live holiness with our Lord Jesus today and all days.

God Bless, Fr. Mark.

Two things happened on Twitter this past week that got my brain working. (and yes, I am on Twitter, and Facebook and Instagram) First was a tweet from the youth ministers who were attending the #NCCYM, which came in part, “Doubt is not toxic to faith—Silence is toxic to faith.”  (thanks Deepu, John, Row, Steve et al) The second was on St. Nicholas Day (Dec 6^th) in which there were many Memes with jolly old St. Nicholas punching Arius for denying the divinity of Jesus but the one tweet that asked us to reflect and not retweet something of legend instead of fact. In other words we don’t know if the Bishop Nicholas was at the Council of Nicea and should we be happy about the punch?

A long introduction that is hopefully worth the thoughts that follow.  The youth ministers that gathered from around the nation in San Jose last week at the #NCCYM are vital and essential to the life of the Catholic Church.  It was fascinating following the tweets they placed into the twitterverse that were thought provoking, funny, sometimes irreverent but always a challenge to see how we serve our young people, both teens and young adults, not as objects but as “who” each one is and their unique experience of God in the world.  The above quote and been in my prayer over and over again because I like to talk through the doubts of the young men and women who often come to talk, flooding them with my pearls of wisdom and fail to hear them as who they are…or in other words, silence them into the toxic wasteland of not being heard. It is a challenge that our ministers to the young also face as they seek to listen and hear God’s voice in our young people.

This is the difficulty we often confront. We want to fix it right now rather than let the Holy Spirit move in the life.  We want our advice and experiences to help others when often times it is only the quietness of listening that allows the breath of the Spirit to truly animate the soul of life.  Now I don’t know the full context of the tweet, but it is a thought worth pondering because the silence can flow both ways as we leave unspoken the true words of grace and blessing that others might need…or the words of hard truth…or the gentle nudging of holy presence that speaks loudly and clears the air with the gale force winds of life and love. So…#1 Thank God for our youth and young adult ministers…and #2 pray for them.

Second we get to good ole St. Nick.  I have a great love for the Bishop Nicholas for a variety of reasons, the greatest of which is he is my Confirmation patron saint.  When I was in my High School Confirmation class we were asked to choose a saint name for Confirmation.  I remember that the teacher also challenged us to choose a saint with a virtue with which we wished to strengthen in our own lives and then ask the help of our saint to grow in this virtue.  Strangely enough and I believe with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and perhaps my guardian Angel, I choose Nicholas.  The virtue that I saw and believed I needed to strengthen was that of generosity.  How a 14 year old boy comes up with this I will forever be puzzled at…but there it is.

So, when I saw all the tweets with the Memes of St. Nicholas punching Arius I was truly saddened because, while I know that St. Nicholas had his sins, I like to remember his blessing of generosity and his prayers for me.  Nicholas is a saint, not because of a punch, but because of his choosing to say yes over and over again to God in seeking mercy, reconciliation and living within the generous charity of God’s love for him and all people.  St. Nicholas generosity shows us the face of God as we acknowledge our need to grow in holiness and avoid the sins of the world.

Just some thoughts.

God Bless

Fr. Mark

“It could very well be that the goodness of God in my behalf has been manifested not only in the gift of Christian parents, unusual opportunities for education and on and on; the greatest gift of all may have been His summons to the Cross, where I found His continuing self-disclosure.” (p. 372 Treasure in Clay)

The words quoted above come from the last sentence of Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s autobiography.  I have been reflecting these past days on these word, most especially on “His summons to the Cross,” after I learned of the death of my classmate and brother priest, Fr. Andres Parra.  God has blessed us with his goodness in so many ways but it is in the gift of life that we begin the journey, the summons to the ultimate unity with God.

It seems we are always surround by life and death in our world.  It is a temptation that we seek to cheapen and degrade life so that death does not define how we live our lives.  Fr. Andres was two years my senior and we shared many things.  We shared the call of a later vocation in life.  We spent a summer together in San Antonio, he working on his English and me on my Spanish, neither too much success during those six weeks. We also shared the reality of a heart attack, and the understanding of how this changes the outlook we have on life.  Most of all we shared the gift of serving God in the gift of priesthood as we sat next to each other on the day of our ordination.

It is often at the time of death that we are able to best look back and see the many blessings given and shared, even the blessings of the crosses we bore in life, that make our relationships with one another such precious and holy gifts.  This too is part of our Advent journey where we are entering into the mystery of new life in the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, yet we are also looking towards the Cross and how it is ultimately the greatest of all gifts given and shared.

The question of how God is involved in all of this is stuff is the journey that we all share.  We share this journey because ultimately it is about life and the life that we live in the love and service of each other.  This is the joy of our Advent journey to Jesus.  It is the seeing and knowing of Jesus in the stuff and life that surrounds us.  How do we respond daily to this great adventure? As many of you know my beard has become a little grey and quite long over this past year.  On my day off I often take a morning walk in the neighborhood and enjoy a breakfast out during the walk.  The other morning, as I came and sat down, a young boy sitting with his grandmother looked at me with great big eyes and stared and stared and I could see (and hear) him whisper this to his grandmother, “Santa Claus just sat down.”  Apparently my belly is growing too. I think his grandmother assured him that in fact I wasn’t Santa Claus but it gave me a chuckle all through my breakfast to be scrutinized and wondered at by this young child.

This moment reminded me, as I seek to remember always, the “who I am” should shine through in “how I am” in the eyes of friend and stranger.  Did I eat my meal and drink my coffee with a little more grace under the watchful of the child…you bet I did…but also the question is always…do I seek to be more grace-filled and hope-filled always…even when I am not under the eye?

That is how we complete the circle of God’s grace in our lives as we prepare for the ultimate summons to the Cross.

God bless

Fr. Mark

1. Fr. Andres’ heart disease was compounded by his addiction to smoking, as with my Dad’s own death, please pray for those with this addiction and for the health of your parish priests.