When man became his own god and started fabricating rules the rules he made destroyed love. And this is the constant challenge that Jesus runs into with the Pharisees and lawyers. Their rules are tyrannous and love depleting. God’s rules are life giving and love building. It is not a matter of rules or no rules. Of law being bad and lawlessness being good. The problem is the source and the inner meaning and motivation.

We honor the great warrior Archangel this day and celebrate his mighty defeat of Satan, if we want St. Michael to be our friend and defender we must become like a child seated on the lap of Christ. This is how we will make his victory our own and the angels will fight for us and bring us to Christ through all the dangers and snares of this world.

There is only one way, one door, to finding life, to becoming truly human and that is to be willingly joined to Jesus Christ upon His cross. God has shown us how to live, how to be a human being, we have seen it with our eyes when we have seen him hanging upon that cross. When we see how God has chosen to die we have seen what it means to live.

What are you going to do? You- no one else, you what will YOU do? Will you become a human being? Will you turn yourself toward the light of your being and fulfill that deep hunger and longing to be the fullness of what you were given in your creation?

Our Lords passion, his suffering and sorrow is his embrace of us in our grief- and thus his embrace of our grief- this is His love for us. He first love us in this way so that we might be able to Love Him in the same way. He enters our grief so that we might enter Gethsemane and pray with Him, so that we might stand at the foot of the cross and die with him, this is how we will also live with him. When we embrace his grief and passion then we will be lifted up on high and know the joy of His immortality.

Mary is not a doctrine to be figured out or explicated. She is not a conundrum, she is not a concept or abstract philosophical theory to resolve. The Blessed Mary is the Woman who bore the God Man, she is His Mother, she is our Mother- she is a person- She is a person we can know, you don’t solve a person, you know and love a person.

Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

God’s Almighty power is displayed chiefly in showing mercy and pity. The power of God which transforms all, which brings something out of nothing, which brings the world into existence and your little life into existence, which creates light out of darkness, which brings beauty and goodness out of your own darkness, your own ugliness and sin, which goes into death and thru His embrace of our suffering and death subjecting himself to it he overcomes it’s power and destroys it, all of this is accomplished not by a sheer overwhelming force of raw power, a simple strength which is stronger than the one opposing Him, no his power is Love, is humility, is his own sacrifice for us. His power is shown chiefly in His mercy and pity for us.

The God of the Old Testament is the Same God who hangs upon the Cross. We were made for Him and He comes to claim us for Himself and to give us everything He has for our own enjoyment but He is fire and light and the darkness has no fellowship with the light and that is absolute and cannot be otherwise. We are in great danger when we dispense with all fear and trembling in the Christian life. How many have adopted a presumptuous devil may care attitude and perished along with it. The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.