Love Covers a Multitude of Sins...and Shortcomings!

     Last night I was invited to speak to a group of high school students who gather at a local Church each week to discuss life.  I was invited so that they could be exposed to another seminarian to see that we are normal people (I'm still trying to figure out why I was picked to show them we are normal!).  One of the questions that I was asked after I gave a brief story of my life was "do you still get scared of not knowing how to answer people?"  Have these people been reading my journal?  That is probably the number one fear I have had recently in approaching the altar of God to be ordained a priest.  What will I say when people ask me about x, y, or z?
     The answer I gave surprised me, sort of.  I said that it is important to be vulnerable.  It is important to show people that you love them and that you are willing to stand there and not know what to say...but that you are willing to stand there anyway.  We must be willing to journey with people.  That means that we won't always know the answers, but we are willing to seek the answers together with them.
     This approach will require a lot of time and effort on our part, but it takes away a great burden.  We don't need to know all of the answers.  Of course we can't use this as an excuse not to learn as much as we can about our Catholic faith, but we must come to the point where we are humble enough to admit when we don't know...and that will happen a lot!
     The key is love. We have to love people enough to tell them the truth and to stand there when they have questions, especially "why?".  We must love them enough to stand there and take whatever may come our way when they don't agree with us or when we don't know answers, and we must love them enough to agree to journey with them in finding those answers however difficult and painful it might be.  So in the end St. Paul was right (shocking, I know), "love covers a multitude of sins," and it can also cover a multitude of our shortcomings, if we are willing to give of ourselves.

Why Am I Doing This?

     In a recent holy hour, the question came to mind "why am I doing this?"  The question was not related to the holy hour, but to my vocation; Why am I becoming a priest?  Almost immediately, the answer came to mind; "You are doing this because you have encountered the love of Christ and you want to help others to experience that same love."  This may seem like a great epiphany, but it is actually nothing new.  In fact, it is a new spin on something I have prayed on many times.  I once heard it said that we should take our lead from the Blessed Mother (duh!) in the first two mysteries of the Joyful mysteries of the Holy Rosary.  In the first mystery, the Annunciation, the angel comes to Mary and announces that she will conceive the Son of God in her womb.  God comes to Mary, she has an encounter with Him.  What is Mary's immediate response after God comes to her?  She goes in haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  Moved by the love of God Mary must share that love with others, with those that she loves.

     Pope Francis spoke on this phenomenon in his first encyclical saying, "Those who have opened their hearts to God’s love, heard his voice and received his light, cannot keep this gift to themselves" (Lumen Fidei 37).  God's love is so amazing, makes us so happy that we cannot keep it to ourselves once we experience it.  We must go out and bring that love to others.  We experience this with things that have no lasting value too.  When I eat at a good restaurant, I want to share it with people so they can have good food too.  When I like a brand of electronics, I tell my friends about it so that they can have a better experience with their phone, tv, radio, etc.  If we are moved to share such mundane things with our friends, it only makes sense that we would share the good news of salvation and love with them too.