Homily for Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time - March 3, 2019

Homily for Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

March 3, 2019

I Am What’s Wrong With the World

            The London Times newspaper once invited readers to answer the question, “What is wrong with the world today?” The great Catholic thinker GK Chesterton responded to the newspaper with a very simple answer: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, GK Chesterton.”

            What is wrong with the world today? I’m sure in GK Chesterton’s time, he could have pointed to any number of problems – even more so in our own age. But the answer is still the same. What is wrong with the world? I am.

            In other words, the battleground between good and evil isn’t just “out there” but “in here”, in every human soul. After all, St. Maximilian Kolbe said, “The battleground between God and Satan is the human soul.” It is because of evil in the soul that we have evil in the world.

            A lot of good Catholics can easily fall into the trap of complaining about the state of our culture. And not without reason – our culture is a mess! Lust, greed, violence, bad media, corrupt politicians, the breakdown of the family…every sin seems to be growing in our culture. But what can we do about it?

            We can vote, yes. We can protest, we can pray, we can witness, we can write letters. But the main thing we can do is to become holier ourselves. We cannot change any other soul – we can influence others, pray for others, pressure others…but we cannot change others. We can only change ourselves, and yield more and more of our hearts to God.

            So although our culture is indeed in bad shape, and while all of us are called to bring the light of Christ to our own unique spheres of influence, it is first necessary for us to be changed by God’s grace before we can change the world. As Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia once wrote, “The only people to truly change the world are saints!”

            And this, I think, is the heart of Jesus’ famous injunction in the Gospel to focus on the log in your own eye rather than the speck in the other’s. He is trying to make the point that we should be more concerned about our own spiritual life and our own salvation than on fixing the world’s problems, because if we become as holy as we should be, then the world’s problems will begin to fix themselves, because there will be saints walking around Stamford and influencing the world!

            It’s much like the tide. As I go down to the Long Island Sound, I see that the tides go in and out. When a tide is coming in, it affects everything in the harbor – all the boats rise. They can’t resist it, because they are completely surrounded by water. Likewise, if we become holier, then the culture will begin to rise up by itself.

            This is especially true in the Church. We have experienced some devastating scandals recently, and many Catholics have asked me, “What can I do about these awful scandals?” The answer is to become a saint. Mother Teresa was once asked by a reporter, “What do you think needs to change in the Church?” She replied, “You and I.”

            Of course this is not to say that we shouldn’t try to correct what we can in the culture or in the Church – we certainly must. And if we see our family member falling into sin, we certainly have the duty, out of genuine charity, to correct them in love. But as we correct them – and as we bemoan the problems in society – we must first and foremost work on our own conversion. As St. Catherine of Siena said, “If you are who you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!”