Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, C.S.P.
Follow Father Hecker
  • Home
  • Life and Cause
  • Hecker Reflections and Blog
  • Prayers
  • Paulist Fathers
  • Contact
  • Links

PAULIST REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS: JOHN J. BURKE, CSP

12/20/2013

0 Comments

 
PictureRev. John J. Burke, CSP (1875-1936)
The following is the first Christmas sermon of Father John J. Burke CSP preached on Christmas Eve 1899.  It is published without commentary.  Just twenty-four years old and ordained only five months, this was Burke’s first Christmas as a Paulist priest.  He had spent much of the fall on the mission band where he apprenticed with two great Paulist missionaries, Alexander P. Doyle and Bertrand Conway. This sermon was delivered at a church in Grassy Point, New York just south of West Point.  Burke would go on to become editor of “The Catholic World” and Secretary General of the U.S. Catholic War Council during the First World War.  The Council would serve as the beginning of what would become the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.   The theme of Burke’s Christmas message was to emphasize the poverty of Christ’s birth.  His concern for the poor was an important theme for him personally and also reflects Pope Francis’s present emphasis on the poor among us.  Here is a shortened version of Burke.

- Rev. Paul Robichaud, CSP (Christmas 2013)
 
The Spirit of Christmas; a Sermon by John J. Burke CSP, 1899
 
Some two thousand years ago a carpenter and his young wife left the village of Nazareth to journey to Bethlehem.  They journeyed the whole distance by foot and as Mary’s time was near they traveled slowly.  The growing cold, the weariness of their long journey and Mary’s delicate condition urged them to find shelter as soon as possible.    There was no room for them at the inn at Bethlehem.  Around the hillside were rough place occupied by and ox and an ass.  There amid the straw intended for the beasts, far from assistance, in the darkness of the cold winter’s night, Jesus Christ was born into this world.
 
Here with the eyes of faith we can see a truth more sublime, more elevating than anyone could ever think to wish for.  Let us learn of Jesus Christ and the manner of his coming into the world.  Let us inquire at Nazareth in the home of the carpenter, of the Virgin and the answer comes back, “Poverty.”  Let us seek to journey on foot over the cold hills of Galilee and of Judea, from Nazareth to Bethlehem and again we hear, “Poverty.  God was born on that cold night in poverty and neglect in order to show us how to be born into His Sonship with the Father.  As the great Saint Paul says in Corinthians, “You know the grace of Jesus Christ, that being rich He became poor, so that through his poverty you might be rich.”  Jesus Christ took what the world spurned and made it the means by which we come to Him.
 
This does not mean that we must renounce all our earthly possessions or give up everything that we have.  Rather in fulfillment of the beatitude we must be poor in spirit so that the kingdom of heaven may be ours.  “Poor in Spirit” is not some good intention that we promise God and then lead our usual everyday lives.  No it is something difficult to attain, something that belongs to the zealous earnest Christian.  It means first of all, accepting our particular lot in life.  Many of us do not abound in this world’s goods, yet we are not in possession of the spirit of Christmas for we constantly yearn for the riches and wealth which others enjoy.  Wealth may be possessed without sin, let those who are rich be blessed and not cursed with their riches.
 
For rich and poor alike, only one thing is necessary; the spirit of poverty.  The spirit enable those who have wealth to not be a slave of their wealth but to be aware that it comes with dangers and needs to be used for the love of God.  Poverty of spirit means a love for the poor.  Nor is this spirit confined to money or material wealth.  ‘Holy poverty is that virtue by which all things are transitory,’ says Saint Francis of Assisi.  When you consider our present age with its love of wealth and its desire for show which rejects the hidden spirit of self-sacrifice, there is a great need for the spirit of Christmas, the Spirit of Poverty.
 
Poverty shrinks from recognition, from honor, from any sort of prominence.  Poverty accepts the humble home, the daily toll of work.  The soul of the poor man strips the world of its tinsel and show and shows it up as worthless.  How does this happen.  Faith in the truth of Christmas; faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ and faith in the call to be the sons and daughters of God.
 
Although the manger and all the things of the first Christmas night are remembered by the Church with a halo that knows no want of brightness, let us not forget what it actually cost the Holy Family.  As we kneel before the crib on this Christmas day let us remember the cold and the neglect, let us learn from the spirit of poverty into which the God-man came.  The song of the angels, Glory to God, Peace on Earth was meant for us.  Let us be content and happy in winning the glory of the sons of God and our Christmas joy will be full.  “Unto us this day is born a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.”

0 Comments

HECKER REFLECTION: ASCETICISM

12/20/2013

0 Comments

 
The following are unpublished thoughts of Servant of God Isaac Hecker. This text is drawn from Hecker’s personal papers under the title, Notes on the Spiritual Life. It was written in July 1860, just before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the coming of the Civil War. These reflections are drawn from his  personal notes and contain a great deal of practical advice on developing the spiritual dimension of your life. He begins by talking about finding God in the very nature of the work you do.

Asceticism

God does not despise what He created:
 
Calvinistic views have crept into asceticism and exaggerate human depravity. Renounce the world!  Abandon your Reason! Uproot your passions! Our Lord does not tell us to close our eyes to the beauty of the world rather he invites us to the contrary. “Behold the lilies of the field.”  God does not despise what He created.  True devotion does not despise the beauties of nature.  The object of asceticism is not the destruction of our nature but the restitution of its relationship to all things.   
 
There are persons who imagine that you cannot have holiness without destroying something, whether it is the impulses, instincts, the propensities of our nature. Someone cannot be a saint unless they neither eat or drink or sleep or shut their eyes to the beauty and the glories of God’s creation.
 
It is true that these practices may be found among the lives of the saints, but these are exceptions.  Sanctity by no means requires these extraordinary things and many of the saints who did these were the most natural people in the world. You will not find a soul more alive to the beauties of nature than Saint Francis of Assisi who like the psalmist, composed a song calling on all nature to praise and bless its maker; who called on the elements of nature in affectionate terms such as brother and sister, and when near death sent to a message to a lady in Rome to make him some cakes as she had when he visited her home.
RESPONSE: FR. PAUL ROBICHAUD, CSP

Servant of God Isaac Hecker challenged the influence of Calvinism in American thought; for it was a dominant element in the Protestant Christianity of his time. For Hecker human rights derived from the idea that people were basically good and would grow to be even better through the exercise of freedom.  Yet John Calvin held that humankind was depraved and sinful. Father Hecker taught that in Catholic thought people were considered good; for they had been born again in baptism and made new. Unlike Calvin, baptism was open to all in Catholic thought and therefore made Catholicism a better choice to be the principal religion of the American people. People were free because they were basically good and their goodness grew in the exercise of their freedom. This was both American and Catholic.

In this Christmas season we celebrate the good news that God had become human in Jesus Christ so that humankind could be like God. This message of Christmas is at the heart of the Catholic faith and at the heart of Catholic spirituality. Father Hecker reminds us in today’s reflection that holiness is found all around us; for grace is present in the things that God has made. God has made us and we can find in ourselves that same grace present in creation. God does not seek to destroy our nature but to restore it.  Let us take this message of Christmas into the new year.

Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.
0 Comments

HECKER REFLECTION: LIVIING IN THE WORLD

12/10/2013

0 Comments

 
The following are unpublished thoughts of Servant of God Isaac Hecker.   This text is drawn from Hecker’s personal papers under the title, Notes on the Spiritual Life.  It was written in July 1860, just before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the coming of the Civil War.  These reflections are drawn from his  personal notes and contain a great deal of practical advice on developing the spiritual dimension of your life.  He begins by talking about finding God in the very nature of the work you do.
 

On Living in the World:

 
Wealth of itself is not an evil but the abuse of it is.  Wealth can be used to great merit, equal to the virtue of poverty.  The mission of those who live in this world is to do good rather than to live a strict religious life.  Doing good with one’s wealth lights a candle in our world.  It can be more believable to people than the witness of religious or priests.  Why?  Because when priests do good, they are doing their job.  Their witness is their profession, their bread and butter, not so with people who live in the world, no selfish motive can be attributed to them. 
 
What we need in our society is upright merchants, high minded lawyers, Christian statesmen, people with high Christian moral standards in every state of life.  They are as necessary to our society no less than holy learned priests are necessary to religion.  Let it not be said that there is no room to practice heroic virtue in the world.  No room?  Here are aims worthy of the noblest ambition of men.  We want men who will spurn bribes in our legislative halls, who will not violate by their votes the sacred laws of religion, who have the courage to practice their religion in every station in life, who will be seen in the Church on Sundays, who frequent the sacraments. 
 
We enjoy the privileges of the Church, of our society, and of our political government and we forget how much labor, how much sacrifice and how much blood these great institutions cost.  Nor do we often think of what these require for their continuance.   Few see it as a matter of duty to aid in sustaining the Church, to defend the virtues on which our society is based, or to make it a matter of conscience as to how they cast their ballot.  Yet these are the essential duties of every living man and woman.

RESPONSE: FR.  PAUL ROBICHAUD, CSP

The late Nelson Mandela had every reason to be resentful.  From the age of forty until he was seventy, he lived in a small cell on a prison island off the coast of Capetown.  Trained as a lawyer, he had originally been an advocate for non-violence against the state sponsored system of apartheid.  A horrific attack on non-violent protestors in Sharpsville, South Africa in 1960 by a government police squad had hardened his heart.  He began to advocate for violence and was arrested and tried for treason in 1961.  When he came out of prison twenty-seven years later, he could have continued the cycle of violence.  Instead he became a symbol of reconciliation, forgiving those who had imprisoned him.  In this process he became the “father” of a multi-racial South Africa and led his people towards a democratic and peaceful future.  One life can make a difference.

Servant of God Isaac Hecker reminds us in today’s reflection that one life can make a difference.   Hecker tells us that if we seek to deepen our spiritual lives, the starting point is found in what we do.  Spirituality is not divorced from our day to day lives but emerges out of the actions, decisions and attitudes that we bring to the events of our lives.  The very act of getting out of bed and beginning our day, going to work, caring for the people and things around us is a spiritual activity.  To act responsibly, to nurture others, to make ethical decisions, to be generous and to forgive is the basis from which we develop our spiritual lives.   As Father Hecker says, money and its use can be a spiritual act if we spend it to do good and make out world a better place.

I am sure they were days when Nelson Mandela living in an eight foot by eight foot cell for twenty-seven years, felt that what he did, was of little consequence to the outside world of Robben Island prison.  His story reminds us that all of our actions when directed to make a better world matter greatly.   

Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.
0 Comments
    Picture

    Categories

    All
    Hecker History
    Hecker Reflections
    Hecker Reflections
    Hecker Writings
    Hecker Writings
    Paulist Fathers
    Paulist Fathers

    Archives

    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    February 2012

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.