Homily

HOMILY NOTES
FR. TERRY RYAN, CSP
MATTHEW 22: 34-40
OCTOBER 23, 2011

When I was a little boy and we got our first television set, a 13" screen, my favorite show was "The Lone Ranger" which was on for a half hour at 7:30 PM Thursdays. Mom would let me stay up past my bedtime and watch it. I focused on that show. Nothing else mattered for that half hour.

I ask myself now why is not God as interesting as "The Lone Ranger" was then, for me? I think it is because we have lost the sense of Mystery about God, the sense of awe in the Presence. We think that we know God. We have our catechism and our creed that seems to box God into definitions. We even box God into a place, in the Tabernacle where the consecrated hosts are kept. God has a place in our life, but not much of a focused place that has lots of interest. God has become too familiar

People seem more interested in my five finger shoes and what I say about them, then in what I say about God. The shoes have a sense of mystery and newness about them. People don't know about these shoes. They know about God, so they think.

When someone says that they have "fallen in love," they want to devote all their attention to the object of their love. Interest is at a peek. The same person might say, "I love you Mom/Dad," but the interest to spend time with the parent is not so acute. Parents become boring or an embarrassment to children at some point. There is a familiarity that dulls interest. Maybe we have made God too familiar?

I go out at night or before dawn and look up at the sky and recognize the cosmos, the universe that God created. It is all so vast, and yet this same God has created little me and thinks about me all the time. This same God would and did die for me. I may know God only a little, but I can experience Divine Love when I recover the Mystery and awe of the Creator. Each of us has to find some way to do this on daily basis. Otherwise, we will miss out on Transforming Love. No catechism or dogma, on their own, can give us this.