Homily

Carl had a nice piece in Catholic World Report this past week, writing about an article on the actress Julianne Moore. Miss Moore says that she feels lucky that she has completely created her own life. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds pretty confident. She believes the world is chaotic, crazy, without order or purpose. So, she states that, "We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise there is nothing but chaos." She has decided how to create meaning in her life.

I can just see her taking her car into a repair shop and asking the mechanic, "Have you been trained to understand the way a car works, or do you impose your own order and narrative to the process of auto repair? I sure hope it's #2!" It probably won't surprise you to learn that Miss Moore believes in therapy, but not in God.

Carl goes on to write about singer/songwriter Alicia Keys who had just released a song entitled, "We are here." Here's what she said: "The day I wrote this song, I was sitting in a circle of people of all ages and we were asked, 'Why are you here?' Why am I here? This really hit me on a deep level. I realized that no one had ever asked me that question before." She was 35 years old. Now in the article, Carl expresses some surprise or perhaps surprising dismay that this woman never thought seriously about the meaning of her life. But for me it seems that many people in our nation, especially younger people, do not have a definite, thought-out understanding of the purpose of their lives. They may have some thoughts, some ideas and a certain set of values, but to answer the question, "Why are you here?" I think plenty of people would not be able to answer that question, certainly not in a convincing way. Indeed, I think there are many who would answer that it is a stupid question to ask.

Alicia Keys says she believes in God in her own way. I am not surprised. Why would she want to tie herself down to a revelation that somebody else would teach her. I did a little research. She believes that all life is God, and all love is God. "For me it's definitely spirituality in the sense of having integrity and certain morals I stand by." But I would love to know what kind of integrity she's talking about and what that means, and I'd like to know what those morals are and how she chose them. Why does she think her morals are moral? How does her belief that God is in everything have an influence on her life? Granted, I only read a short piece on her beliefs, but I'm thinking they are not very critical to the way she lives. So again, and again we can find people, and not just a few, who truly have no definite opinion of the purpose and meaning of their lives.

My dear friends, we are living among zombies! Not in the sense of monsters who wish to eat our brains (although there was a woman at Albertson's last week who was looking at me very strangely.) Not monsters, but nonetheless people shuffling through life without knowing why they live. And that is very sad, not only for them, but also for us who live with them.

People reject God, like Julianne Moore, or they neglect God, or they devise their own God, like Alicia Keys. How would we answer these people if they asked us about our faith? Today's Gospel gives us some help. Our faith is about God, Who is One and yet three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Our faith is all about our relationship to these persons—not first about morals, or personal opinions, or a recipe of what we would like God to be. It's about our relationship to the Father, to Jesus Christ and to the Holy Spirit. This is our faith.

One way to talk about faith is to answer the question, "Who's your daddy?" That's what happened in the parable. The son thought he knew who his daddy was, but he truly didn't because he wasn't close to him, didn't care about being close to him, much preferred being close to money and good times. And he took off to live according to values of money and good times. And he took off to live according to values of money and good times, leaving his dad behind without much care. Money and good times—they vanished. But now, and let's be clear about this, he has a conversion about his father. I surely don't think it's first of all about hunger—or at least not hunger over food. He was all alone and he realized that what he truly lost was not cash and an easy lifestyle. He had lost his father. He wants him back, he wants to be back with him; this is now his only real goal. And he'll live and work as a hired hand, if he can just be nearby. When he gets home, he sees his father in a very different way than he ever had before. It was not because his father had changed, but he had changed and so did what he valued in life. That changed. I think it is strongly implied that now this is all he wants, this is all he needs, to be with his father, and the father is overjoyed to have his son back home with him.

Lent is a time for us to do a similar thing. By altering our moral routines through fasting, extra prayer and church service, by almsgiving and a focus on our spiritual lives we get away a little bit from our regular lives, imitating the prodigal, and we give ourselves the chance to re-evaluate our relationship with our Heavenly Father. Using this time, we can consider Who He is, what He has done for us, what He desires for us, and ask Him to take us home, to be at home with Him. The prodigal son had to travel to get back to his dad, but we don't need to go anywhere. We just need to open our minds and our hearts to Him, we simply need to learn to see Him more clearly as He really is, and in that we will grow to love Him more.

There are things that stand in the way of growing closer to our Father—our sins, our self-centeredness, our little idolatries, and sometimes just our lack of desire, or our fear of committing ourselves more closely to Him. Yet, if we can get any sense of the prodigal's happiness to be back with his father again, maybe we can lean on that to prod us into action. He made a plan to get back with his dad. We should make a Lenten plan to get back with ours.

There are those people who describe themselves as religious, and those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. But we should always describe ourselves as sons and daughters of God our Father, who seek to do as He tells us, live as He desires for us, love as He loves us, and to be at home with Him today and for all eternity. No zombie shuffle—traveling through life not knowing or caring where we are or where we're gong. We just need to be home—our true real home.