Living your Faith

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

I’ve sat with a lot of people in the hours after something has changed, whether it’s being laid off, getting a diagnosis, or watching a relationship go sideways.

These people are floating. The facts are right in front of them, but they just can’t read them yet, but the hardest part isn’t the uncertainty itself–it’s not knowing whether what they’re looking at is an ending or a beginning.

That moment of not-yet-understanding is not a failure of faith. I am suggesting it might actually be where faith starts.

Most of us want the full picture before we take a step. But some of the most significant moments in a person’s life begin with staying present to what’s in front of you, even when you can’t explain it, and trusting that something is happening.

You don’t have to understand it to let it change you. History’s greatest surprise looked, at first, like a loss.

This week, think of one situation where you’re sitting with unease or uncertainty. Instead of running through everything you don’t know, write down two or three things you can see. Sometimes that’s exactly how new life begins.

God Bless.

FF

When a friend was going through something hard, I meant to call him to be a good friend.

I had his number in my hand.

I put the phone down and told myself I’d call tomorrow.

Tomorrow came and went. A week or two passed and then it felt like it was too late.

I never made the call.

Most of us have made those small choices, like a silence when we could have spoken, closing a door instead of walking through it. This weight leads to suffering through years of carrying it steadily, the way you carry something you’ve stopped noticing but never actually put down.

And we are carrying a lot right now–the news, the bills, the relationships that have frayed. Most of us are holding more than we let on to anyone, including ourselves. We tell ourselves we’ll deal with it when the time is right, when we have the words, when things settle down a little.

But we both know things don’t settle down. We just get better at carrying.

Holy Week is a special time in our religion and especially meaningful for people who are tired of managing, tired of waiting for the right time, tired of pretending the weight isn’t there. Whatever you’ve been postponing, whether it’s a conversation, an apology, an honest reckoning with yourself, you were never meant to figure it out alone.

I invite you to join us this week/- and every week. The door is open and you are welcome.

Easter is coming. You don’t have it all your burdens resolved by then. You just have to be willing to put it down.

God Bless.
FF

A parishioner shared with me her story about the two years she and her husband spent trying to have a baby. Through the treatments, monthly disappointment, and baby showers she smiled through, she said she prayed every night, the same prayer, and when nothing changed she started to wonder if God thought she wouldn’t be a good mother.

She has a daughter now, adopted, but she said she still confused (angry?) about why God didn’t grant her a child. She’s grateful for how things turned out, but the pain was intense. “It still hurts,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ll ever understand why.”

This conversation comes to mind when I talk about this gospel. Martha was also angry that Jesus took his time coming to help. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” She’s saying what she feels: you could have helped, and you didn’t.

Jesus doesn’t correct her or explain himself. He weeps with her! Then he calls her dead brother out of the tomb and he comes.

This week, someone in your life is probably in the middle of their own impossible wait. They may not be handling it gracefully–maybe they’re angry, short-tempered, or hard to be around.

Resist the urge to explain God’s timing to them or remind them it will all work out. What if you just stayed and “wept with them.” Let them be where they are. When Jesus did that on the road with Martha, it was the thing she needed most before the miracle.

 God Bless

FF

I was setting up chairs for a funeral reception last month when the deceased’s brother found me in the parish hall.

He’d flown in from Arizona but they hadn’t spoken in four years.

“Father, can I ask you something?” He was holding a coffee cup he hadn’t touched. “Did she ever mention me?”
I told him the truth. She had, and more than once.

He sat down on one of the folding chairs, the weight of this truth landing on him. “I kept waiting for the right time to call. I had this whole thing I was going to say.” He looked at the cup. “I thought I had more time.”

“The thing is, she knew me. She knew my worst parts, why I stayed away, what I was ashamed of, and I think she would have answered my call anyway.”

Being known, fully known, and realizing he would have been welcomed back was hard to deal with now that she was gone. The door had been open the whole time but he just never walked through it.

Four years of rehearsing the perfect apology, waiting until he was fixed enough to be worth calling.

Boy, did he regret it now.

Someone in your life might be doing the same thing right now–circling, rehearsing, convinced they need to be different before they can come back to you.

This week’s invitation: Send the message that says you don’t need the speech. You don’t need them fixed. You just need them. Let them know the door is open.

God Bless.
FF

A woman I know found out her husband had six months to live on the same day her youngest left for college. She told me she spent that first night sitting in her car in the driveway, just sitting there. “I couldn’t figure out how to walk into that house,” she said. “How do you start a road like that?”

One night 3 weeks later, she and her husband were sitting on the porch, not talking about anything important, the light hit his face a certain way, and she saw him the way she had when they were 23 and nothing was complicated yet. Just for a moment, then it passed, and they went inside and dealt with the insurance paperwork.

“That moment centered me,” she said later. “When things got bad—and they got bad—I’d go back to that porch in my mind to remember what was true.”

I think about her when Lent rolls around and we hear about the Transfiguration because the timing of that story is similar to when Jesus takes his closest friends up a mountain, and for one impossible moment, they see who he really is, and then they come back down, and he tells them: Don’t talk about this. Not yet. You’ll understand later.

He knows what’s coming, and he gives them a glimpse, something to hold onto when the road gets impossible.

We do this for each other all the time, when someone we love is about to start something hard—a deployment, a chemo regimen, a difficult undertaking—we try to fill their bucket up first. We’re packing provisions for their journey.

My father did this the weekend before I started a job I was terrified about. He drove four hours to take me to dinner and didn’t say anything profound. He just told me stories from his own career like the disasters, the near-misses, the times he’d felt completely out of his depth and by the end of the night, I wasn’t less scared per se but I felt less alone.

The glimpse is meant to be fuel. You still come back down from that mountain and walk into whatever’s waiting for you, but you’re carrying something now that you weren’t carrying before.

The good moments aren’t separate from the hard ones. They’re how you survive them and maybe that’s what this season is for–to receive whatever glimpse we’re given, whether in prayer, an unexpected kindness, or a moment of real presence with someone we love for the road ahead.

This week, maybe we could be that glimpse for someone else. Someone in your life is staring down a hard road. Show up and pack their provisions.

God Bless.

FF