This weekend is a long one according to the calendar. Our country will celebrate Memorial Day to honor those who sacrificed their lives in service of our nation. What originally began as a day honoring those who had died in The Civil War sadly has been expanded as the number of the fallen has continued to grow through many other conflicts and wars. Today we offer prayers and blessings to those families who have been touched by the death of a member of our military knowing the loss of a son or daughter, husband or wife and father or mother forever changes the life of the family and of every community.
As a young child I don’t remember putting that great of thought into the celebration of Memorial Day. It was only during my years in the Marine Corps where I began to understand the true impact and the reason behind the day. I remember one day listening to a discussion of two older Marines as they recounted their time serving in Viet Nam and the quietness of their conversations as they began to talk about their fellow Marines who had died and in their conversation was hanging in the air was something I could not truly understand. It was as I remembered these conversations later in life I began to realized these “older Marines” were in their early 30’s and the friends they were speaking about were young men in their teens and early 20’s. And perhaps this was what I could not understand, the youth and life sacrificed and lost.
It is this perspective that we place into our hearts as we celebrate this weekend. Because while we remember those who have died we also place our hope in a future that is free from these tragedies and violence against our brothers and sisters, families and friends. The Christian hope is always found in the cross where God confronts evil and death with the gift of love and hope.
Cardinal Robert Sarah in his book “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise” reaffirms this hope and love,” I think but it is always necessary to cry out to God. It is good to ask for help and aid from heaven… when I travel in countries that are going through violent, profound crises, I observed how much prayer can help those who no longer have anything. Silence was the last trench that no one could enter, the only room in which to remain in peace… silence arms us with patience. Silence in God restores our courage… the poison of war comes to an end in the silence of prayer, in the silence of trust, in the silence of hope. At the heart of all the barbarities, it is necessary to plant the mystery of the Cross.” (#312)
Silence in prayer is not passivity but as Cardinal Sarah notes, it is an active life on entering into the work of God through the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is choosing to speak words of gentleness and kindness towards others rather than ridicule and slander. It is seeking works of compassion and mercy rather than violence and retribution. It is offering service and sacrifice in the face of greed and lust for power. It is not being naive but rather courageous in choosing to love in the face of hatred.
As we celebrate this weekend, let us seek to reach out in joyful hope as we remember those who have died serving our nation and in the silence of prayer offer the hope of a world that is brought into the peace and blessing of Jesus Christ. Let us take up our Cross and follow Him in love.
God Bless
Fr. Mark

“Do not be afraid of holiness. It will take away none of your energy, vitality or joy. On the contrary, you will become what the Father had in mind when he created you, and you will be faithful to your deepest self. To depend on God sets us free from every form of enslavement and leads us to recognize our great dignity.” (from Gaudete et Exsultate [On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World] # 32)
Pope Francis recently wrote an Apostolic Exhortation on holiness. The above quote coming at the end of chapter 1 helps us to begin to understand why the call to holiness is such an important and necessary path of the Christian life. We may ask the question, where does holiness begin? The Second Vatican Council reminded all people the primary vocation of each woman and man, each boy and girl, each person was a vocation of holiness. We understand this the call to being in communion and part of the Body of Christ.
This weekend I will be helping to present a Worldwide Marriage Encounter (WWME) weekend with a team of three couples. One of the reminders we share with each other is this call to holiness; to be especially attentive to our sacramental love and life in the months, weeks and days leading up to the weekend. The reason for this is quite simple if we think about it carefully. We must be able as married couples and priest to show forth the love of God. Of course this does not mean we have lived perfectly in the time leading to our WWME weekend but rather we have continually placed our Sacrament into the light and love of God…most importantly in forgiveness and mercy.
“To the extent that each Christian grows in holiness, he or she will bear greater fruit for our world.” (#33)
This is true and has been proven over and over again. When I was teaching at St. Lawrence the Martyr Middle School one of my practices was to take 15 minutes before the beginning of school to pray and spend time listening to God. This didn’t mean my day wouldn’t be filled with the trials of Sixth Grade life and the families they were part of and it certainly didn’t mean my colleagues would be perfect and positively it wasn’t the fix to all my teaching foibles but in the mysterious work of God’s mercy and love I dealt with it better as the moments of stress and friction rose to the top. When I practiced prayer and chose to listen to God in love the holiness tank seemed a bit fuller and the temptation to fall deeper into sin was a little easier to resist…at least most of the time.
When we enter into the grace of prayer we discover our true and authentic self and vocation. When we seek to be attentive to our sacramental life; our vocational sacrament and those of Eucharist and Reconciliation we become grace filled vessels of love. This is the hope of our WWME ministry and the wonder of God’s call to holiness…to not just be good but to be great in our love for each other.
Pope Francis ends the First Chapter of the Exhortation with this quote about daring to be great, to be love and to be Sacraments of encounter.
“Do not be afraid to set your sights higher, to allow yourself to be loved and liberated by God. Do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Holiness does not make you less human, since it is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God’s grace. For in the words of León Bloy, when all is said and done, “the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint””(#34)

God Bless
Fr. Mark

This weekend of May we celebrate Mother’s Day. Many of us will visit, call and celebrate with our moms and others will pray heavenly blessings for their mother’s who have gone before us. It is always a moment to reflect and rejoice in the blessings of God’s love shown through the love of our mothers.
My mom was widowed at a fairly young age. I was already out of the house along with many of my brothers and sisters (there are nine of us) but she still had several of us at home and in school. During my junior year of college I was studying at the University of Constance in Germany (West Germany at the time) and my mom came to visit for several weeks during the winter break. This moment of time was when I really got to know my mom well and she was able to know her grown son a little better. There were several things I remember well about mom’s visit. First were the visits to our German cousins and the second was the unplanned excursions that happened by accident. I am not a planner by nature. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and a very loose time line on how it would get done but the details to these things are always a little iffy in my work of planning. The great blessing I received from my mom on this visit is she just went along and allowed the sometimes haphazard planning of the trip to take its course. I know this was not easy for her to do but it was a blessing.
I tell this story because, I believe, it is one of the most difficult gifts mothers give to their children, not matter what the age, the gift of allowing them to be who they are and grow in the talents and blessings God has created them to share.
This is where mothers (and fathers) participate in a special way with the work of God. God allows us, through the gift of free will, to choose: to glorify or fall, to move forward or stumble, to create or destroy. God allows us to become always inviting in to glory, the creative and holy movement forward. It is often painful, our spiritual, moral, and physical growth as sons and daughters of God but we also are reminded of the suffering that often accompanies this growth and how no matter what God does not abandon us rather God invites us to come home and to be forgiven. This is the message of the Cross of Jesus Christ.
I know, in my own life especially, we as children will often disappoint and try the hearts of our mothers with our choices and our mothers through love will often cry in suffering over our choices and sins trusting through love and forgiveness we will grow and hoping in faith we will be safe in all we do. It is in these often silent trials of our mothers they become united more closely with our Blessed Mother in her many titles she shares as the Mother of God. As St. Pope John Paul II notes in “Rosarium Virginis Mariae”, Mary “offers us the incomparable example of her own “pilgrimage of faith”. As we contemplate each mystery of her Son’s life, she invites us to do as she did at he Annunciation: to ask humbly the questions which open us to the light, in order to end with the obedience of faith: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38)” (#14)
As we celebrate and give thanks for our mothers, let us also pray in true blessing for the gift of their patience, gentleness and love shared. While none of our mothers is perfect, each bears the gift of life shared and forgiveness offered in the image of God’s perfect love.
Happy Mother’s Day!!!
God Bless
Fr. Mark

Where did the time go? It’s May already and each May 1st I get to celebrate the greatest gift of all: another year of life. Where did the time go? This year was #57 on the old ticker of life and it seems just like yesterday that it was #56 or a few days ago that my family and I celebrated #50 at Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park or like a week ago when I celebrated #44 and was ordained a priest. The gift of this greatest blessing is the memories I have accumulated, the life experiences I have shared and perhaps the small amount of wisdom I have gained. It is hard to count them all, because of computer crashes and lost documents, but this is around Friday post #460. Some of them are lost to history but the 407 reflections that live on facebook are a good reminder of where I have been and hopefully point to where I will be going.
In that post from November 2010 I wrote about my first Worldwide Marriage Encounter Weekend (WWME) and shared this quote: “Venerable Concepcion Cabrera Armida a twentieth century Mexican mystic writes this beautiful image, “To open the heart is to surrender what is most intimate and personal. We all can enter into that open and empty space.”” One of the great blessings of looking back over the ### of life (and these are numbers not hashtags) is the blessings that they stir in our souls. In truth some of the reflections are hard to read, they talk about hurt, death, brokenness and sin. Sometimes they remind me that my heart may have been to hard to see the fullness of what I was writing about and at other times to delicate in skirting the hard truths about our Catholic faith. Maybe this is one of the reasons I don’t reread my reflections too often…but it is a good act of humility.
And some things don’t change much. In a couple of weeks I will begin my 8th year of presenting weekends for WWME as I will join couples from many parishes in the Bay Area for a weekend of growth and joy in the sacramental love of the God’s grace and blessing. It was something I looked forward to in November of 2010 and blessing that has grown ever greater as the years have gone by and my relationships with the community has grown deeper and stronger.
And speaking of marriage; I had the wonderful privilege of celebrating the wedding of my niece Sarah and her (now) husband John. It was a joyful reminder to me of how the Sacraments, but most especially Holy Matrimony, are gifts from God in uniting the world into a place of blessing and hope. I spoke to them about how marriage is founded on the virtues of faith, hope and love. Faith: something greater than you is being created and becoming in the world. Hope: that the future is filled with more than is realized than what is alone and apart. And Love: faith and hope will only survive in the sacrificial offering of one to the other in the continual act of sacramental love. As Venerable Concepcion says (and it’s true) “To open the heart is to surrender what is most intimate and personal. We all can enter into that open and empty space.”
God Bless
Fr. Mark