God Hounds Us

The Fourth Sunday of Lent
Today’s Readings: 2 Ch. 36:14-16,19-23; Ps. 137; Eph. 2:4-10; Jn. 3:14-21


Elvis used to sing “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” and the song complained that “you ain’t never caught a rabbit.” Not a very good hunter, I guess.

Have you ever seen a hound dog going after… well, hounding… its prey? Back in the days before Maggie, my family used to have coon dogs — mostly bluetick hounds — and they’d work a trail all night if you’d let them. And when their “music” changed — their special baying — you knew they had a raccoon treed. In fact, those dogs would wrap their paws around the tree and try to shimmy up to get to the coon. Coon hunters call that “swallowing the tree,” and you want that in a dog.

Then we had Martina, the basset hound. She broke into the chicken coop one day, grabbed a poor bird and strutted through the yard while a couple of us humans tried to catch her. No way was she going to let it go.

If you know hounds, then you probably won’t be surprised to hear that one of the best known religious poems in the English language is called “The Hound of Heaven.” It was written by Francis Thompson, who tried to run away from God. He compares God to a hound dog tracking and chasing a soul. The poem is the story of Thompson’s own life.

As a boy, Francis wanted to become a priest, but he was thrown out of seminary for laziness. His father, who was a doctor, managed to get him into medical school, but he flunked out there, too. Along the way, he became an opium addict, and the drug just about ruined his life. He became a beggar, wandering through the slums. He eked out a miserable living by shining shoes, selling matches, and doing other odd jobs. Through the kindness of a poor girl, Thompson met Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Meynell, who recognized his talent and inner goodness. They helped him get caught by God’s love.

How he tried to run away from God… how God “hounded” him… how divine love finally caught him — these are the themes of his moving poem.

In today’s very beautiful gospel, St. John gives us outstanding proof of God’s love for us in the 27 well-known words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Our heavenly Father demonstrated his love for each of us by sending his precious Son to win us back. Like Francis Thompson, souls run away from God. Like a hound pursuing a rabbit or a fox or a coon or even a chicken, God runs after every soul. But unlike the hound thinking of his dinner, God wants to save that soul, not destroy it.

How can we get some inkling of how much The Hound of Heaven loves us? St. Paul tells the Ephesians to think about “the breadth and length and height and depth” of God’s love for man (Eph 3:18).

God’s love for us is broad. It reaches to every human being in creation: people of every race, nationality, class, gender and state in life, sexual orientation, ability or disability, age, culture, economic status, religious preference… to people of every faith and belief, including those with no faith or those who reject God… to saints and the worst sinners… to the fervent, the lukewarm and even the ice-cold. God wants everyone to share in his goodness and experience his love.

God’s love for us is long. As Jeremiah the prophet writes, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer 21:3). Before the world began, God knew you and loved you. His love stretches from eternity to eternity. He knew all about you and wanted you even before Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden… and his love will never end.

God’s love for us is high. It reaches from the throne of Almighty God in the highest heavens. We see the height of his love in his gifts to us. What could be more magnificent than God sharing his very life with us in the sacraments? What love could be higher than giving his own all-good, all-loving, all-holy Son to us as food in Holy Communion?

And finally, God’s love for us is deep. He humbled himself by coming down from the heights of heaven to the lowly stable at Bethlehem… to the slums and jungles and deserts… to the least of men… to the shame of a cross… to the depths of a tomb. How far would God go to win us over? An infinite distance…

Hopefully we will realize, as Nicodemus did — as Francis Thompson did — and as all the saints did — that God will gladly and eagerly hound us and chase our souls to the ends of the earth. And once we do realize this, then confidently we will try to return that love and grow in love.

So many of us carry terrible burdens and pain in this life. Some of us try to run away or dull the senses — but somehow, the misery always seems to tag along. It often takes a long time for God’s love to penetrate our thick skulls, because we tend to fight him and dodge him every step of the way.

But how wonderful to let our holy desires come out, so we can live as children of God, trusting Jesus every step of the way. With Jesus, we can begin taking baby steps of faith towards spiritual adulthood and maturity. No matter what our age, when we believe in the message of Jesus, we will always find Jesus nearby, giving us guidance and strength for each day.

During this holy and privileged season of Lent, may we all remember that we are being pursued by God — hounded by him — by the One who loves us freely and unconditionally and beyond our wildest imagining. Let’s stop running away! Instead, pray that he catches us and makes us his own.

God’s Love in 5 Minutes a Day

The Third Sunday in Lent
Today’s Readings: Ex. 20:1-17; Ps. 19; 1 Cor. 1:22-25; Jn. 2:13-25

The second chapter of John’s gospel opens with the story of the wedding at Cana. This marked the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and was the setting for the Lord’s first sign: turning water into wine. Jesus was now openly a miracle-worker.

Just two verses later, we come to today’s reading. Now we meet a rather outraged Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem, snapping his whip, overturning tables and driving people away.

Who were these people? We read that they were sellers of oxen and sheep and doves, and moneychangers, too. The animals, of course, were being sold for sacrificial offerings. If you were coming from a great distance, for many people it made sense to buy an animal for sacrifice at the temple rather than to bring your own from back home. You can be sure the vendors charged a premium for their service—much like buying a Coke or a bag of popcorn at the movies instead of bringing your own—but such is the price of convenience.

As for the moneychangers, they were running a kind of banking operation. Remember, the pilgrims came from many different countries. The temple bankers exchanged foreign currencies for the local silver coins required for the annual temple tax or for liturgical offerings. And yes, they too charged a hefty fee for their service.

I don’t suppose the Lord had a real problem with the fact that animals or currency exchange was available at the temple. Maybe it was kind of tacky and maybe even unnecessary—but not per se outrageous. No, what Jesus objected to was that these were just crass business enterprises intended to gouge pilgrims—and to add insult to injury, it all took place on holy ground. It would be like setting up a souvenir shop in a cemetery to “guilt” people into buying overpriced mementoes of the dead.

Christ reminds us that the temple—or today, the Church—is supposed to be just the opposite. It is first and foremost our heavenly Father’s house… a place of prayer and worship. As the gospel says, quoting Psalm 69, Zeal for your house consumes me. That zeal for God and his house should consume all of us.

Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the rituals and “things” of our religious practices that we lose sight of what our faith is really all about. Jesus poignantly tells us today: Don’t do that. Pure and simple, our faith is about loving God and letting him love us. Our devotions and rituals and offerings—and even our fish fries or chicken dinners—are simply the tools we use to stir up our hearts. They are merely instruments to help us on our faith journey. If the things we’re doing or focusing on have an object other than God, then something’s wrong.

I’m afraid most of us have at some time or another been guilty of putting our religious emphasis on things other than the real substance of our relationship with God. Maybe we’ve looked down on someone who didn’t dress for church up to our standards. Perhaps you’ve been to a larger church and seen people switch communion lines to receive from a priest or to avoid a particular communion minister. Or maybe the lessons we’ve heard on Sunday about love, tolerance, patience, compassion are all but forgotten by Monday…

Fortunately for us, God is extremely patient with our weaknesses and our sinfulness. He continues to reach out to us in the hope that we will make the decision to love him above all else—and live our lives like we really mean it!

A good Lenten word for this process of being refilled with zeal is “repentance.” It’s a strong and formal-sounding word—maybe one we don’t like too much. One meaning of “repentance” is turning around and changing the path that you’re on. That’s great if you’ve headed in the wrong direction… but what if you are on the right path? By the grace of God, many of us have not messed things up that badly. We should thank God for that, but do we still have to repent?

Repentance also means feeling remorse or regret for what you’ve done. We have all made mistakes—sometimes knowing full well at the time that we were wrong. But here again, with the benefit of hindsight, many of us can see that we have not only gotten better, but we’ve also been forgiven. Our prayers, communions and good deeds help take away our venial sins—and a good confession, of course, takes away the mortal ones, too.

Nobody’s life is perfect, but I know that many of us have been blessed enough to have made pretty steady progress. In a way it’s ironic that we’re called to give thanks and repent at the same time. Yet that is precisely what we’re supposed to do.

Repentance, then, isn’t so much of a radical reversal as it is a gentle and ongoing process to take away the things in your life that go against God’s love, and add the things that honor and lift up that love. Repentance calls for vigilance and constancy, but not fanaticism.

I like to illustrate this by pointing out that we priests wear black clothes. My shirt and pants may look pretty clean, but if I walk over to a window with sunlight streaming in, I’ll discover all kinds of lint and specks on my clothing. The closer I get to the light, the more flecks I’ll see. So it is with our lives and souls. As we get closer to the Light—to God—the more imperfection we’re bound to see in ourselves. What do I do about the lint? I gently brush it off. And what about the spiritual lint? Do exactly the same.

There was a newspaper article in the Chicago Tribune business section last Sunday about how people should plan for their future. The story stressed how important it is to have a plan rather than just drifting along hoping for the best. It said we should take concrete, little steps every day to put our plan in motion and keep it moving in the right direction. They applied their recommendations for all the categories of your life: spiritual, family, health and fitness, education, career, financial and legacy.

So, for instance, if you want to build up favorable relationships with lots of people so you can network, the article says: write one thank-you note every day. What will that take? Five or ten minutes, tops? But even in a month’s time, you’ll have sent much-appreciated notes thirty times—and will no doubt have made many people kindly disposed towards you… and it will have changed your way of thinking to be on the lookout for things to be grateful for so you can thank people!

In the same way, we should all have a simple spiritual plan like that to help us love God more and keep us focused on what matters. If we realized: wow, I only need to spend five minutes a day! I might resolve to pray for someone who’s sick or in need… to smile genuinely at store clerks… to say a special thank you when someone does even a little favor for me… to hug my spouse and kids every day and say “May God bless you today!”… or any other little things like that that I can do easily and faithfully. Before long, you’ll find yourself looking for little opportunities to be an instrument of God’s love. What could be simpler?

In our opening prayer today, we asked God: Give us confidence in your love. We pray that God will inspire us all and continue to draw us to himself—with confidence, with zeal and with faith.

Will You Trust God?

Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac

c. 1601-02
Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The Second Sunday of Lent

Today’s Readings: Gen. 22:1-2,9,10-13,15-18; Ps. 116; Rom. 8:31-34; Mk. 9:2-10


In Abraham’s world, having a son was everything. It was prestige and it was survival. Whatever you did for your livelihood, your son would be your trusted helper and eventually your partner. And of course, a son was a man’s assurance that his family line would continue.

The bible is full of stories of people who were miserable because they didn’t have a son. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were childless and quite old—in their late 90s. They probably had been praying for 80 years for a son! Then miracle of miracles, along came Isaac.

Today’s first reading starts out, “God put Abraham to the test.” How’s that for an understatement? God told Abraham to take his precious and beloved son—the one he was waiting for for 80 years—and sacrifice him! And Abraham, that man of great faith, was fully prepared to do it.

I can’t even begin to imagine having to make a choice like that to obey or disobey God. I wouldn’t be able to conceive in my mind that God would ask something like that of me. And even if I did understand, I’d probably try to convince myself that I didn’t really understand what God was asking, because surely he must have meant something else… something that made more sense… something that better fit into the way I pictured the scheme of things. Certainly not to make me wait 80 years for a blessing, give it to me, and then ask me to give it all up.

But wait a minute.

Is it God who is being unreasonable in what he’s asking… or is it me? I think you know the answer to that one!

What we often forget is that God sees the bigger picture—and like it or not, his ways are not our ways. If God wants something to happen, no surprise: it’s going to happen—whether his approach makes sense to our limited way of thinking or not.

Even though I have no doubt that Abraham was heartbroken that the Lord asked him to offer up the life of his little boy, still, Abraham was blessed with a faith that just wouldn’t quit. He knew that God’s love and providence were absolute. He knew that God had promised to make his offspring more numerous than the stars in the heavens or the grains of sand in the desert. What he didn’t do was second-guess God’s way to make it happen. If God said to do something, what’s to think about? Surely blessings would follow.

The gospel today has one of the accounts of the Transfiguration. Jesus went up the mountain with perhaps his closest friends: Peter, James and John. These disciples were understandably shaken by what they saw: Jesus becoming radiant and glowing before their very eyes… Moses and Elijah appearing and speaking and then vanishing… God the Father’s voice emanating from the sky: This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.

Like Abraham, the apostles got a peek at the divine, and the reality of God left them quaking. It was one of those defining moments where they had to stop and try to figure out what in the world was going on. What were they supposed to make of all this?

When all was said and done, the apostles realized that they had to do exactly what Abraham did: they knew that God loved them, and so they figured it was safe to do as he asked. They accepted that Jesus was his beloved Son, and they listened to him—despite the heavy cost of that discipleship. Why? Because they knew that this was the path to blessing, to the kingdom of heaven.

Maybe you think that things for us are different from the way they were with Abraham or Christ’s apostles. But not all that different. If we hung out with God as closely and devotedly and faithfully as our fathers in the faith did, I have no doubt that our experiences might be just as remarkable as theirs.

Be that as it may, God inserts himself into our lives all the time. We may just not realize it because we tend to crowd him out with a lot of noise, a lot of activity, and a lot of doing things our own way.

The lucky ones among us catch a glimpse of the Lord now and then, and his presence registers. Maybe it’s simple inspiration. Maybe he gets our attention in a more radical way like a heart attack.

Either way, we realize in those graced moments that it’s OK to trust God because he loves us as he promised… because he’ll keep us safe no matter what. That means it’s also OK to do what he says—even if it seems like he’s asking us for something off the wall:

I want you to quit your job and sell your house and go and be missionaries in Africa… I want you to become a nun and be my bride… I want you to give up your career and home-school your children… I want you to go be an activist and fight against injustice or discrimination or poverty or hunger or war… I want you to serve me as a deacon or a priest…

I’ve met people who have heeded the Lord’s promptings and gone off to do all those things. And if you think it’s easy to step out of your safe, snug world, think again. Discipleship takes guts.

I think it’s great that we hear today’s lesson in early Lent. Giving up our preconceived notions about God, ourselves, the world, and even the Church, is the perfect Lenten devotion. We don’t do it blindly, but with profound trust and faith and love. This is my beloved Son. Listen to him. How can we possibly go wrong if we do as he asks?

God’s Rainbow

The First Sunday in Lent

Today’s Readings: Gen. 9:8–15; Ps. 25; 1 Pet. 3:18–22; Mk. 1:12–15

There are times in life when the best approach to things is simply to start over. To a large extent, that’s exactly what this season of Lent is all about: we have a special chance to make a fresh start in our relationship with the Lord and with our neighbor. In fact, God himself shows us the way.

Our readings today start with the story of Noah. The human race wasn’t doing too well. Adam and Eve had been ousted from the Garden of Eden. Their son, Cain, murdered their other son, Abel. Cain’s great-great-great grandson, Lamech, also murdered a fellow for striking him. And as the Scriptures recount, human evil continued to multiply in many directions.

God decided that he had had enough. He saw that the wickedness of man was great. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them” (Gen. 6:6–7).

God’s plan was to start over. So he recruited Noah—who, by the way, was the son of the murderer, Lamech—to build the ark. We all know the story. Noah brought aboard his family and pairs of every kind of animal, and then God sent torrential rains for forty days and forty nights. The waters completely flooded the earth, wiping out every living creature. When the floodwaters subsided, it was a new beginning on earth. This is where today’s passage picks up. God promised that out of love for his people, never again would he send a flood to destroy all life. And as a covenant to seal and symbolize his promise, God put a rainbow in the sky.

The rainbow is an extraordinary symbol. In nature, it occurs when sunlight is refracted through water drops in the air. Like light passing through a prism, the white sunlight splits before our eyes into a spectrum of colors. In fact, the number of colors in a rainbow can’t even be counted. The infinite colors blend imperceptibly from one shade into the next: from the violets to the blues into the greens and yellows and oranges right through the reds.

What a wonderful representation of humankind! No matter how alike or different we may appear on the outside, the fact of the matter is, our race is pure variety. We are not clones. We differ in our physical traits, experiences, tastes, emotional make-up, and in countless other ways. But we are all some shade, some color, of light. And God loves us in all our variety.

One of the ironies of physics is that the sunlight that is the basis of a rainbow appears to be white. But science teaches us, of course, that sunlight is not white. Rather, it is made up of the whole gamut of colors that the eye can detect. This range of sunlight colors, when combined, just looks white to the eye.

What that means, of course, is that all of the diversity and variety in us is also in God—and in fact, originates with God. Jesus hints at this at the Last Supper when he tells the apostles: In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you (Jn 14:19–20).

It is a tremendous challenge for us mortals to comprehend and live in a world in which every person is different. The temptation is to like and associate with our own kind—the people we’re most comfortable with—and avoid or condemn or maybe even try to convert the rest. Jesus himself must have felt this kind of temptation. Don’t you think he would have preferred to be with people who loved him and appreciated him? Who wants to be laughed at, plotted against, bashed and crucified? Certainly not one who, except for sin, is exactly like us!

So we hear in the gospel that the Holy Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert—where he could be tempted by Satan, but also where he could get his bearings and fortify himself.

And that is precisely the way we should approach this holy season of Lent. That is how we can learn to make a fresh start in the Lord.

You probably remember that the three basic disciplines of Lent are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Today, let’s focus on prayer. I recommend some prayer of holy silence—just what you might experience in the desert. With the help of the Spirit, look inside yourself and see which people in God’s rainbow you have no love or even tolerance for. Can you overcome the temptation to hate or condemn? Can’t you find something lovable in them—even if it’s nothing more than to realize that God loves them and therefore I should, too? This might seem like a tiny step, but it isn’t. It is a major step! It is repentance. It is belief in the gospel. It is the very change of heart, the fulfillment, that Jesus commands today.

If you’re uncommitted, think back to the flood: all those dead people and creatures buried and rotting in the mud. Both Noah and God saw that this was not a pretty sight. Destruction and condemnation don’t lead to a better, happier world.

Instead, this Lent, remember the rainbow, and don’t be afraid to make a fresh start.