Living your Faith

There’s a particular sting in watching someone get the same reward you’ve been working toward for years, in a fraction of the time like a neighbor’s garden outproducing yours in its first summer, after five seasons of your own trial and error. 

It doesn’t feel good, and often starts an inner narrative of injustice, which is the same math the workers in this week’s Gospel were doing.

A landowner pays a worker hired an hour before quitting time the exact same wage as the one who’d been in the field since sunrise. The ones who worked longest realize the imbalance doesn’t add up in their favor. The landowner’s response isn’t an apology. Instead he questions whether they’re upset over what they were owed, or over what someone else was given.

This question shows up in variations all the time in our everyday lives.

…A new coworker gets praised for an idea you’d been pitching well before they got there.

…Or a new volunteer gets thanked from the altar the same week you quietly mark ten years of never missing a Sunday.

The sting comes from someone else receiving the same grace on a shorter timeline, rather than you actually being cheated, doesn’t it? The neighbor’s garden didn’t take anything from yours, nor did the coworker’s praise erase the years you’d already put in. Whatever you’ve built is still standing, whether or not someone else gets there faster. 

The fact that someone else got the same thing sooner has nothing to do with what’s actually yours.  

I invite you this week to notice the next time that resentment shows up, and say something genuinely glad, out loud, instead of stewing in mild resentment. Most of us are carrying at least one thing we’re refusing to celebrate (someone else’s garden, someone else’s praise, someone else’s turn). Keeping score of what everyone else got and when, is its own kind of work and nobody’s checking that ledger but you.

God Bless.

FF

We can sometimes feel the weight of an imaginary ledger of injustices. 

…The elevator door closes right as you reach it, and they clearly saw you coming.

…A text you sent to a friend sits unanswered for three days.

…Someone merges in front of you without so much as a wave.

…Your sibling repeats a story back to you—the same story you told them last week.

…Someone at work mentions your idea in a meeting like it was theirs.

…The neighbor’s dog barks every morning at you as you leave your house.

On their own, none are a big deal. They get filed away, one at a time because they’re small enough to shrug off…

But big enough to add up.

It’s the same instinct Peter is working from when he asks Jesus how many times he’s actually required to forgive someone, and offers 7 as a number that already sounds generous to him—he’s still counting, the way we count, keeping some rough sense of what’s owed and what’s been paid. Jesus answers with ‘77,’ and the specific number matters less than what it does to the counting itself: there’s no ledger anymore, because the debt he’s really describing was never something you could tally in the first place, the way a servant in his next story gets forgiven an amount that would take several lifetimes to earn back, only to walk out and grab another man by the collar over what amounts to pocket change.

This is the gap we tend to miss: our debt ‘drawer” we’re keeping is full of real things. Every item, every sting, in it happened to us but none of it is near the size of what’s already been forgiven us long before.

So this week, open the drawer and take out the smallest thing in it and let it go before Sunday because you’ve already been forgiven something bigger. Remember, 77.

God Bless.

FF

People who grade themselves against an internal accountability that they’d never apply to someone they love often don’t realize how much they’re carrying: the running tab of every way they fell short today, every version of the gap between who they are and who they thought they’d be by now. 

You may know it in yourself, or you may be watching someone you love carry it in silence.

Jesus tells a parable about a field where weeds grow up alongside the wheat, and when the workers want to pull the weeds immediately, clean everything up and get it right, the farmer says to let them grow together, because the sorting belongs to the harvest.

The more I’ve sat with this parable, the more I think Jesus is describing something closer to home than the world out there. 

The field is you, or it might be a person you worry about.

My biggest takeaway is something that gets skipped: this farmer’s posture. He already knows what’s growing and that it’s not ideal in that it’s a mix of both weeds and wheat, and he tends the field as it is.

The farmer can afford to wait because he knows what we tend to forget: something is already working in there. Then Jesus adds one more image, yeast already working through the dough long before anything shows on the surface.

Hm. 

This week, whether you’re carrying this yourself or watching someone you love carry it, put down the accounting for a little while and trust that the farmer is already tending the field.

God Bless. 

FF

When faith dissipates, it rarely goes all at once. It gets crowded out, one reasonable compromise at a time, until the space that used to belong to God has been filled by something else, and you can’t name exactly when that became the way things are.

The routine morning prayer getting replaced by phone scrolling is rarely a conscious choice; it’s just the path of least resistance, taken once and then again, until the resistance disappears and so does the prayer. The ambition that fills the calendar leaves no visible wound, but rather steals the hours that used to hold something else.

Jesus names this in the parable of the sower as a specific kind of displacement: the seed that falls among thorns, where worry and the pull of ambition do their work slowly and almost without notice, until what was trying to grow is choked out and has no room left.

Many of us recognize this soil.

A faithful farmer, though, scatters seed everywhere without first evaluating which ground is ready, which means the word is still being offered to the version of us that has let other things move in.

The seed has been scattered. The question is whether we can clear a little space.

This week’s invitation: Name one thing that has been crowding out your faith. Just naming it is the first step, then decide whether it’s worth the space it’s taking and what it’s costing you.

At some point, most people who’ve drifted from their faith community can name the moment it happened, and more often than not, it’s usually about the way someone made them feel on an ordinary Sunday–as opposed to a dissonance in theology. 

Jesus doesn’t let us off the hook on this. To acknowledge him here on earth is to live in a way that makes him visible in the people around us. This shows up most clearly in ordinary moments: when someone we don’t particularly care for gets something wrong, and we have to decide whether to help them anyway or make sure everyone in the room knows who got it right.

The person distributing that judgment rarely saw themselves as pushing anyone away. 

Most of us don’t.

The decision for “un-grace”, made consistently in this less hospitable direction, is part of why pews grow sparse. We tend to look outward for explanations, but the harder question is whether the people who stopped coming were pushed out by the way we–the ones in the pews–treated them.

Faith is what people experience when they’re around us, as much as what we hold privately.

This week’s invitation: Think of one person who’s drifted from the Church. Live your faith well enough this week that, if they were watching, they’d find something worth coming back to.

Most of us will never see the host change. We walk up, receive it, return to our pew, and life continues exactly as it was. 

Nothing looks different. 

This is how Faith is supposed to work most of the time.

But Jesus knew us well enough to know we’d need more sometimes, so at specific moments throughout history, in places he chose, God made the invisible visible. 

The Eucharist became undeniable.

We call these Eucharistic miracles, and they’re exactly what happens at every Mass: bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ, except that in these moments, you could see it. Scientists who examined consecrated hosts with no prior knowledge of what they were looking at kept arriving at the same findings across different centuries, different countries, different laboratories: living human cardiac tissue, blood type AB, evidence of physical trauma. The most recent confirmed miracle was in Poland in 2013, which means this isn’t something the Church filed away in the Middle Ages.

Roughly half of Catholics today believe the Eucharist is symbolic, a meaningful remembrance of Christ rather than his living presence. Our Protestant brothers and sisters hold that same belief sincerely, and we respect that. 

However, it isn’t what Jesus said. 

Before he ascended, he promised to remain with us until the end of time, and the Eucharist is where he kept that promise. Every Mass, every communion, he is here.

The miracles don’t create that faith. They confirm what was always true.

This week: If you’ve ever wondered to yourself whether it’s really him in that host, search the internet for “Eucharistic miracles Vatican” and you’ll find the Vatican’s official page wi: the full list of miracles, the locations, the dates, and the scientific findings behind each one. 

Start with one story and see what happens.

God Bless. 

FF

If you asked most people to name the person who shaped their faith, they wouldn’t name a priest or a theologian, but rather someone close to them, a parent or a friend, who just lived in a way that made them want to pay attention.

That’s discipleship. 

Most of us have been doing it all along, without realizing it has a name.

The way you show up when something’s hard or the way you treat someone when nothing’s in it for you, is already teaching someone something about what integrity and faith look like in practice. 

The question is whether you’re being intentional about it.

Jesus called it making disciples. As His final instructions before he left, most people figured He was meaning this for someone else. 

It wasn’t. The mission–should you choose to accept it–is your life, with the people already in it.

The promise that comes with the commission: “I am with you always” holds in the meeting room as much as it does at Mass, and on the days when you’re not sure you’re getting it right. You don’t have to have it figured out because the person who shaped your faith probably didn’t either.

This week’s invitation: Think of one person in your life you have more influence on than you realize and show up a little more intentionally this week.

Year after year, some of the people in this parish show up to care for a parent who no longer knows their face or whose hand they’re holding, offering love across a silence that gives nothing back.

Once the feeling is no longer enough on its own, what remains is something harder and more deliberate: the choice to keep showing up.

Jesus had a name for this: keeping his commandments, which sounds like a rule until you realize it’s a description of how love matures, from something you feel into something you choose.

That choice comes with a promise, one Jesus calls the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, dwelling inside the people who love this way and sustaining what feeling alone can’t carry, invisible to the world but recognized by the people living it.

Maybe you’ve felt this already, even if you didn’t have a name for it: the moment you acted well when you had every reason not to, and something in you resolved, with an assurance that wasn’t yours to manufacture.

That was the Spirit at work in you.

This week’s invitation: Find one small act of love this week that costs you something and do it anyway. Over time, that’s how faith becomes something you live rather than something you talk about.

She had a lot going on.

The idea of spending a Saturday hauling tables and running a ring toss booth felt like one more thing piled onto a month that was already feeling heavy.

She signed up anyway.

By noon, something in her felt a little more settled. She was too busy counting tickets and handing out stuffed animals and laughing with kids she’d never met. She kind of forgot about her daily friction for the afternoon. And it was kind of nice.

This is close to what Jesus was talking about in this week’s gospel where He tells His disciples not to let their hearts be troubled. He promises something better than the absence of trouble: a place for them, a path forward, and that the work they do in His name will matter more than they can imagine. “You will do greater works than these,” He says.

Every year, this parish pulls off something that takes months of planning, dozens of volunteers, and more behind-the-scenes effort than most people ever see. The public sees the rides showing up, the big setup, the games with a smiling aproned staffer handing out stuffed animal prizes and a massive cleanup that happens after most of us leave.

That’s our community deciding, year after year, that showing up for each other is worth it.

Something miraculous happens when ordinary people do ordinary things together for something bigger than themselves. I’ve seen it first hand.

This week: If you helped make the fair happen, in any way, take a moment to recognize what you did. You are part of something special. If you didn’t get involved this year, consider it an open invitation–there’s always next year and there’s always something between now and then.

God Bless

FF

Some of the most grounded people of faith I know went through a period of serious doubt.

Most people just never say it out loud. They show up, go through the motions, and assume everyone else in the pew has it figured out.

They don’t.

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. In my years as a priest, I find that it is the precursor to a deeper one. The person who has never questioned what they believe probably hasn’t needed to yet. The person who has come out the other side of real uncertainty is someone whose faith has some weight to it.

What I find so fascinating about Thomas is that he stayed. He kept showing up, even empty. He didn’t have answers and he didn’t pretend to. Most of us know that feeling (even me), sitting in a pew, going through the motions, not sure we believe anymore. Thomas did too. And what he was looking for found him.

It can find you too.

This week’s invitation: If you’re carrying a doubt or a question you’ve never said out loud, write it down. Just getting it out of your head and onto paper is sometimes enough to start working through it honestly.

God Bless.

FF