 In addition to the great welcome that I trust most of our staff and student workers have given you upon your arrival on campus this year for this conference, I, one of the friars here wish to also welcome you to Francisca University. It's great to have you here. Jokes about another person's mother are offensive because they ridicule the person themselves whether or not she had a world's best mom glass or not because it ridicules the very person who brought us into this world. However, we have these words here from Jeremiah to start the reading, the first reading, woe to me mother that you gave me birth. I mean, he's insulting his own mother for having brought him into the world. And he goes on to explain that that he is cursing her because of the strife and contention that he's struggling with and the fact that everybody is cursing him and he's passing that along. Things have to be pretty bad for Jeremiah to be able to say this, to be able to wish this curse upon his own mom. But then what is Jeremiah's response in the very next sentence we hear it. When I found your words, oh Lord, I devoured them. They became my joy and the happiness of my heart because I bore your name, oh Lord, God of hosts. He in spite of his struggle in spite of his being cursed in spite of his persecution, he finds joy in the words of the Lord. The words that God has given to him in the Hebrew scriptures. And you know, he's basically saying that this word of God has permeated his soul and his being so much that he in fact has become a new creation. He in fact has. Now he's not living, of course, yet in the New Covenant. We don't yet have the concept of a living word. Nevertheless, the word matters to him and he is recognizing that it's changing his whole outlook. I just got back yesterday from a pilgrimage and retreat that I took at Laverna in Italy. Laverna is the mountain where St. Francis of Assisi received the sacred stigmata. And it was a profound experience. And one of the things that I received, you know, received through prayer with the Lord is that this event, which is well documented, it's not one of the hagiographical legends that we might see in other later biographies of Francis, but was reported by his own friars with whom he lived and who witnessed the event itself. This actual event that happened in 1224, two years before he died, was I came to understand in a deeper way that it was Francis receiving from the Lord not only those wounds of Jesus Christ to be more united with his passion, but in fact, it was God giving him this sense of the living word within his person, the living word of Christ within his person. And it changed everything for France. Of course, he had many conversions and he had many transformations through the course of his life. But this singular event was almost, you might say, with the exception for his death and passage into eternal life, this was the singular, most profound and intense experience of the Word of God possessing him, possession in a good way. The Word of God possessing him, entering him and transforming him. We want the Word of God to inflesh us. We want the Word of God to inflesh us so much that it's not merely an intellectual exercise that remains in our brains. Of course, this Applied Biblical Studies conference that we are here for these next few days is one of which we will receive a lot of information, cognitive information about the Holy Scriptures. But that for St. Francis, for Jeremiah, it's about infleshing the Word of God into our being so much that it changes us. It changes our attitudes. It changes our behavior. The Word of God is visible in us, so it's not merely an intellectual exercise in which we can then enter the words of the Gospel today about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven notice is not the treasure in the field and it is not the pearl of great price. Those are nouns. The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus says, is when the treasure is buried in the field and a person goes and sells all he has to buy that whole field. It's an action. It's a person's action for what matters the most to him or her. And similarly, it's not the pearl of great price, the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather the action of selling all that he has and buying that pearl. And so I put the challenge for you now as you're here at this Traveler's Mass for these next few days as you receive the wealth of information at Applied Biblical Studies conference that our speakers have to offer on the sacred scripture and the Word that you recognize this is not merely to be contained within your brain or necessarily to be taught to others, although that's a necessary part, outlet of evangelization, but that it must be influshed within us and must change us like Jeremiah, like St. Francis of Assisi. So as you go through these talks, listen, but listen in a retreat mode, in a conversion mode, such that you may ask, how is this applicable to me that I may be more of the living Word of God and hence helping to build up the Kingdom of Heaven?