 Say, Teresa of Calcutta once spoke on the relationship between holiness and sacrifice. She said, for a sacrifice to be real, it must cost. It must hurt. It must make us empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness. This is what it means to be a saint in response to our baptismal call to holiness, or as our Lord says, to be perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect. Tilios in Greek, in Hebrew, which means mature, whole, and complete. To be the person who God created us to be. The key to understanding the rich blessings of the Beatitudes is acknowledging our dependence on God, who is our life. Living the Beatitudes in faith and trust is our response to God's divine grace that gives us hope and joy. So rather than go through each of the Beatitudes, I'm going to pick a select few which I believe really speak to the virtue of hope and do a deep dive on those. So blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor in spirit are those who acknowledge their spiritual poverty and human frailty and know how much they need the help and support of God. A basic moral test of how our most vulnerable members are faring is how we treat them in the eyes of God, how we treat the poor and the vulnerable. Now a few years ago some Notre Dame friends of mine were pregnant with their fifth child and my joy turned to sorrow when I read the first line of a subsequent email. That said, it started as a routine ultrasound. They quickly learned that their daughter had anencephaly, a neural tube disorder in which much of the brain is missing or not properly formed. And they started a blog and posted updates on how things were going. After a month, after the ultrasound, they wrote, a question that comes up is, how do you deal with a situation like this? How many times have we been asked already if we would like to terminate? It is not an option for us at all. This is our child that we're going to love and nurture for as long as we can. Actually, she isn't even our child. Ultimately, she's God's child, like all of our children. Our deep faith in God and our hope in heaven keeps us going, opening their hearts wide to allow God's truth to live in them. They took the words of our Lord seriously, I am divine and you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I and him will bear much fruit because without me, you can do nothing. They allow God the Father to prune away the dead branches of the culture of death, a culture that adulates individuals like Princeton University professor Peter Singer, often called the most influential philosopher alive, who says that it would be ethically okay to kill one-year-old children with physical and mental disabilities, although ideally the question of killing these children should be raised as soon as possible after birth. They named their daughter Angela because they knew she was going to be their little angel in heaven. They have been praying for a miracle and in a subsequent blog, they wrote, Dear Lord, if not a miracle healing, then please let her be born alive so we can shower our love on her. A child first learns to love in his mother's womb, where he knows that the relationship of love and life is intensely personal. Like the vine attached to the branch, the child is literally attached to his mother depending on her love for his very life. Jesus says to us, just as a branch cannot bear fruit unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. We depend on the love of God for our very life, and he invites us to live according to his will so that we can bear much fruit and become worthy of the name disciple. When Angela was born, she weighed six pounds and seven ounces. There was a priest there at the birth that immediately she was baptized and confirmed. They thought they would only have a few minutes with her, but she lived for three days. And during that time, Angela learned the meaning of love from her mother's gentle touch as she attempted to nurse from her mother's breast. Angela experienced the love of God through a unique and special bond with her mother, a bond that no man, no man can fully understand or appreciate. The woman's motherhood constitutes a special and most demanding part of the loving-parenting relationship. And as John Paul II says, in many ways, the man has to learn his own fatherhood from the mother. Children learn the meaning of love first from their mothers because the woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons first takes root. The order of love, John Paul II says, belongs to the intimate life of God himself and in this intimate life of God, love becomes a gift. On the third day, Angela's breathing became labored and she started to turn purple. Surrounded by family and friends, Angela took her last breath, opening her eyes briefly as she slipped away. The only time they remember her opening her eyes her whole life. A parent's primary responsibility is to get their children to heaven and God blessed them for a job well done by allowing Angela's parents to gaze on the faces of that beautiful child and she looking back at them who sacrificed so much and who remain firmly joined to the vine of Christ. St. Angela Marie prayed for us. The recent scientific advances show that medical treatments that researchers hope to develop from experimentation or embryonic stem cells can often be developed by using adult stem cells instead. Just a few years ago in the state of California handed out $230 million to 14 research teams with the task of developing new stem cell therapies and 10 of the 14 are working with adult stem cells only. You may be saying to yourself, wait a minute, everyone's saying the future is embryonic stem cells. Well, why did 10 of the 14 labs do adult stem cells research only? In fact, where did those stem cells come from? Umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, and skin cells. In fact, Oprah's favorite doctor, Dr. Mehmet Oz, once said this on her show. The stem cell debate is dead. The problem with embryonic stem cells is that it's very hard to control them and they can become cancer. In the last year, we've made 10 years of advancement. Here's what the deal is. I could take a little bit of your skin and take those cells and get them to go back in time like they were when you were first made. Those cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, because they won't be as prone to cancer because they're from your own genes, will be the ones that ultimately cure Parkinson's. They're single digit years away from making a big impact on the lives of those with Parkinson's and also heart attack victims and diabetics. It's gonna be in our lifetime. So I did a little research and I found that there are currently 73 diseases being treated right now with adult stem cells, 73. I can even pronounce half of them. I got the whole list here. Now here's the thing. How many disease are being treated with fetal stem cells right now? Zero diseases do they expect in the next 10 years to be treated by embryonic stem cells. Zero. The score is 73 to nothing. Why are we still destroying children? Blessed are those who mourn. Those who are in grief and sorrow will be assured of comfort and consolation from a loving, faith-filled community that forms the body of Christ. What saint can better teach us about the meaning of suffering than our blessed mother? In Luke's Gospel, Simeon says to Mary, Behold, this child is destined for the fall and the rise of many and the sign to be spoken against and a sword shall pierce your own soul. So the thoughts of many hearts may be laid there. The scriptures are clear. It is through the immaculate heart of Mary, through the new Eve, that complete and perfect opposition to sin is established. It is through the queen of heaven who is clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, with a crown of 12 stars, who possesses a genuinely feminine heart of love and is the perfect example of what it means to be fully human, in whom we find true hope, comfort, and peace. You know, 19 years ago, my best friend, whom I'd known since I was 10 years old, died of cancer, 38. He had come back, he was a computer consultant, had just come back from a trip overseas, and it sounded like he had, like, pneumonia. So I said, hey, you better get that checked out. He goes, no, nowhere, I'm on it. And he did go to the doctor and get examined. And it turns out he did not have pneumonia. He had a very aggressive form of small cell lung cancer. He was diagnosed on a Sunday with the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City for a cancer treatment plan that Thursday and died the next day. When I got that call, I was sitting outside the rectory of my spiritual director, when I got a call from another friend of ours who said, I hate to be the bearer of incredibly devastating news, but Craig died. So what are you talking about? I just talked to him this week. He didn't just go to Sloan yesterday? He was dead. The same group of us who were groomsmen in his wedding, and me as the best man, were now pole bearers at his funeral in the same church. I will never forget the look on his wife's face when they closed that casket for the last time. And I'm thinking to myself, how do you trust God at a moment like this? We said, well, God is loving and God is this, but he's 38. He left behind not only his wife, but two small children who were three and less than one year old. What is she supposed to do now? How is she gonna get past this? Now I'm a guy who loves to pray. I love praying the office. I love the Psalms, I love everything. But in that, during that time, I kept praying, but I felt nothing. I felt completely dead inside. Words were coming out of my mouth when I was praying the office every day, but I felt nothing. I felt empty. I was angry with God. And we've all been there. How do you even begin to get through something like that? I remember going to adoration. And as I was praying through all of this, three little phrases came to mind, which I still use to this day. Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I trust you. Jesus, I give my life to you. So when you can't pray anything else, Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I trust you. Jesus, I give my life to you because he is the source of our hope. And then I started as I continued to pray the Psalms. I got the Psalm 22. And I realized, of course, written by David, it's a messianic Psalm of fulfillment. And why was Jesus praying that particular Psalm on the cross? He prayed a number of his 34. But why did he was praying that particular Psalm? Well, two reasons. One, first I gotta read the rest of the Psalm. The Gospel Chorus, the first line, we all know that, right? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And some people think, well, when he was praying that, see, the father took all his wrath and all his rays and he dumped all of that onto his son on the cross as a punishment for, I said, wait a minute, what loving father would ever do that to their child? Why was he praying that Psalm? Read the rest of the Psalm. What else does it say? Parched as burnt clay is my throat. My tongue cleaves to my jaws. You lay me in the dust of death for dogs have surrounded me. A band of the wicked besets me. They tear holes in my hands and my feet. I can count every one of my bones. These people stare at me and gloat. They divide my clothing among them. They cast lots for my robe. Written 700 years before Jesus was even born. He was praying that Psalm because he was tongue to people at the cross. This Psalm is being fulfilled in your hearing. Second reason, in his human nature, Jesus was to allow, allow to experience the emptiness, the isolation, the desolation that I felt when my best friend died. That we've all felt when we're going through something really hard and we're wondering, God, where are you right now? Jesus was allowed to experience that feeling in his human nature. Why? So that he could redeem it. So that he could redeem it. The worst effect of original sin was death. Mavet in Hebrew, a Thanatos in Greek. That's where, by the way, Marvel got the name Thanos from. Remember that dude that snaps your finger, everything dead? Thanatos means death or Mavet. Mavet just doesn't mean physical death. It means to cut yourself off from the life of God. Let that sink in for a second. Death means to cut yourself off from God's life. That's worse than death. Because after death, you still have two choices. Smoking and non-smoking, right? Let's go, let's go. So Jesus wanted to show that not even death is more powerful than God's love. Then is more powerful than God's divine mercy. You know, a Protestant asked me once, because you know, as a permanent deacon, we typically can't wear clerics, like some of the priests are wearing their collars and stuff. In my diocese, we can only wear them when we're doing official ministry. Most of the time I just dress in regular clothes, but I always wear my crucifix and miraculous metal everywhere because I ain't embarrassed or ashamed of my faith. Now, a Protestant minister once asked me, how can you guys keep Jesus on the cross? You know that Jesus is no longer on the cross, he's at the right hand of the Father. And I said, amen, we know that, of course we know that. But my friend, most of life is the cross. Psalm 90, the one Psalm written by Moses, our span is 70 years or 80 for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone. We only got one shot at this thing. And the cross, seeing Jesus on the cross, gives us hope. Last thing about Psalm 22. Who was at the foot of the cross? Mary, Mary, Mary and John, right? But of course, the Mary we all know and love the most is the Blessed Mary. His mother was at the foot of the cross. Now, you gotta remember, if you study crucifixion, right, the cross was the stipe. The piece that goes up and down vertically to the ground and the petibulum was the horizontal cross beam. And when they crucified you, you were crucified naked. Because the Romans not only wanted to maximize the pain, they wanted to maximize the embarrassment. They wanted to strip you of every ounce of human dignity that you had left. So imagine Jesus on the cross. His mother is at the foot of the cross. This is a part of Psalm 22 that doesn't get much attention. But I want you to think about that. Jesus at the foot of the cross and who's standing there. Yes, it was you who took me from the womb, entrusted me to my mother's breast. To you, I was committed from birth. From my mother's womb, you have been my God. Stay not far from me, for trouble is near. And there is no one to help. He's crying out for his mother. How many, and that's what we should be doing in our culture today. Instead of, no, instead of watching all that political talk, radio and all that crap. You know, I can't stand to be around people like that because they're angry all the time. What we should be doing is crying out to our blessed mother in this crooked and depraved generation of St. Paul says, or as our Lord says, this adulterous and sinful generation in Mark's Gospel. Mary is a beautiful sign of hope. Blessed are the meek. These are the people who reach out to others in care, compassion and tenderness, who sacrifice their own needs and are constantly aware of the needs of others. This spirit lives in parents and caretakers who willingly and lovingly sacrifice themselves for the well-being of an infirm spouse or a disabled child or an elderly parent. Mother Teresa said we sometimes think that poverty is being hungry or naked or homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. No, a few years back I had a great honor of privilege of traveling to South Africa and I had a wonderful time. I went to Joburg, Johannesburg and spoke at a lot of the suburbs around Johannesburg, Ramburg Park, Alexandria. Then went to Durban, Cape Town and then to Soweto. Now the mass that I deacon and preach that was two hours and 20 minutes long. It felt like five minutes. It was awesome. Then after Mass, Father says, we must bring Jesus to the people. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. He grabbed the saboreum and we're driving and we get to this squatter camp. Now this is worse than anything you've ever seen on television. As we're making our way to where we're going, I was almost vomiting from the stench. No running water, no sewage, no proper restroom facilities, dirt floors. Now I'm noticing I don't see any adults. So I'm thinking, oh, they must be gathered to wherever we're going for Mass and we're gonna go meet them there. So we get to where we're going and I say a ton of kids. The only adults I see are nuns. Now this is South Africa in summer. It is hot and these beautiful nuns are full habit. And I'm thinking, what's going on here? Come to find out that this particular squatter camp is for AIDS orphans. So what happened is this. The men would go out and be promiscuous and then they would catch AIDS. And the witch doctors told them that the way you get rid of the disease is to have sex with a virgin. So they would rape their own daughters or little girls thinking that that's how to get rid of the disease. Of course, when that didn't happen, they threw those girls away like they were trash. The nuns told me they found some of these young people where their parents drove them out in the middle of nowhere, left them there and drove home. Some were found in garbage cans at the side of the road. And these nuns took these children and cared for them. And I was never more proud to be Catholic than in that moment. When everybody else abandoned those children, they saw hope in the Catholic church. They saw hope and a vision of God's intimate personal loving and life-giving communion in the face of those beautiful sisters. Jesus spent his life among the poor so that he could make them rich, not rich in the worldly way. But he wanted to fill them with the treasure of the world to come. To be rich like Jesus doesn't mean giving up anything valuable. On the contrary, to be rich like Christ is to unlock the secret of true happiness, hope and fulfillment. Blessed are the pure of heart. What does pure of heart mean? Now remember, we all know 1 Samuel 16. This is where we see David for the first time. Samuel goes, the prophet goes to the house of Jesse. Jesse lives in Bethlehem, right? Bethlehem, the house of bread, right? Remember in John 6, Jesus said, I am the bread that came down from heaven. Where did he come down from heaven? In Bethlehem, right? Awesome, Catholic boy, tell you. So he goes, Samuel goes to the house of Jesse. Jesse has eight sons, but he only lines up seven of the sons. Eliab, Abinadab, Shema, four other sons. What son was not included? David, why? He's out there with the sheep. He's just a kid. If you're gonna anoint the new king, that's man stuff. So Samuel goes to the first son, Eliab. It doesn't describe him, but he's probably tall and handsome, good-looking guy. So Samuel says to himself, this dude looks like a king. He goes to pour the oil of anointing. The lawyer says, nope, not him. Samuel's confused. He's like, I'm in the right house. There's Jesse back there. I got the oil. What's the problem? Who does the Lord say to him? Do not look on his height or his statue or his appearance because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees, not as man sees. Man looks at the outward appearance. The Lord looks on the heart. Leb in Hebrew. Leb, the heart is not just an organ that pumps blood through the body. The heart is the seat of the will. The heart is the place where your desire for God lives inside of you. How do we get a heart like that? A heart rooted in hope. We all heard Genesis 127 that were made in the image and likeness of God. Have we ever stopped to think about what those words actually mean? The word image, selen in Hebrew is a masculine now. It literally means a shadow that's the outline or representation of the original. So if I'm standing in the light, I'm casting a shadow. Is the shadow me? No, it's the image. It's the outline. It's the representation of me. But yet if I move, the shadow moves with me. What does that mean spiritually? Are we God? Oh, come on, that better be known as we, we gotta get Dr. Hahn up here or something. Of course not. But 2 Peter chapter one verse four says we are partakers in the divine nature. First Corinthians 619, Paul says our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit that we have within us from God. Genesis 2 9, God breathing to our nostrils the breath of life. Nishmatruakkaim, gorgeous phrase. If for God taking the very breath of his divine life and pouring that life into us. No, we're not God, but we have God's image. God's outline, God's shadow, if you will, imprinted onto our souls. So what does that mean? That we mirror God. It's like an image in the mirror, we mirror God. So in other words, when we speak, we're reflecting the speech of God. When we think, we're reflecting the mind of God. And when we love, we're reflecting the heart of God. That's image, likeness, demuths, a feminine noun in Hebrew, which means similar. What does that mean spiritually? Let's just say that there was a statue of me. You put the statue of me on one side and my son Benjamin on the other side. You would say they're both in my likeness because they both look like me. In fact, the statue looks more like me than my son. But what does my son have that the statue doesn't have? Right? In essence, a nature being Uziah in Greek, my stuff and God's stuff is in my son. So even though the statue looks more like me, my son is much more in my likeness. When we start to see each other that way, that's how we end racism. When I, what's that for example? When I look out here, when I look out here, I say for example, when I look at this gentleman, I don't want to see white. I want to see you. What does that mean? You deny your heritage, look. If once I see you the way God sees you, now I'm able to appreciate all the other gifts that you bring to the table. Your culture, ethnicity, all of that. But I first want me to see you to look on your heart to see you the way God sees you. That's how we end racism. We have, that's the first brick that has to come out of the wall of breaking down the racial divide. Seeing what God sees in the person standing in front of you. That's what Mother Teresa did. I remember she was, I'm like I said, I'm not a big television watcher. I call television the idiot box. Except for EW10, watch that, watch that. But I was curious, I was curious of how the secular culture was gonna portray Mother Teresa. So I watched this little BBC show from the 1990s and this reporter went around following Mother Teresa for half a day. And so he's following her around. No, Mother Teresa gets up, hour of adoration, mass, very simple breakfast and bam, they're out on the street. And this guy's fine. And you see the people at the side of the road, like trash, they have leprosy and pleurisy and AIDS, all kinds of horrible diseases. And those nuns where they're picking up these people and caring for them, brought them back to the hostel and took care of them. And I saw these people are not gonna have to die alone or afraid or in their own urine. They're gonna die knowing that somebody loved them and cared for them. They're gonna know the love of Jesus before they actually go to meet Jesus. That's what I saw. The reporter, all he could focus on was the stench and how people looked. And he finally got frustrated and went to Mother Teresa and said, how could you stand and be around people that look like this? And little Mother Teresa looked up at him and said, is that what they look like? Because when she saw someone, she saw Jesus. And this is how this beatitude gives us hope to get past all of the racial animosity that we're experiencing right now. I can show you a quick story. So here I am. Now, when I was a freshman in college, back in the 80s, there's no internet. There's no social media. When you got your assignment, I lived in a triple. So you got a letter that said, here's your roommate. Here's your dorm assignment. Here's your roommates. Just had name and city and state. You couldn't Google them. There's no Google. So I get to the room and I got there first. So I'm just in the room milling around. I didn't want to unpack anything, because I wanted to wait for the other two guys to figure out how we're going to set the room up. So I got bored, so I pulled out my guitar, and that was 1984. And Van Halen's 1984 album came out, and I have been practicing Panama. And so I plugged my guitar in, and I'm, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And as I'm playing, one of my roommates walks in. He looks at me and says, which one are you? Because remember, just had a piece of paper with your name, I'm Harold. He said, you're black. I'm like, oh no. And he said, what are you playing? I said, Van Halen. Black people listen to Van Halen? This is not good. So I'm thinking this is going to be a long year. Now come to find out that my roommate Ed was from an affluent suburb of New York City. He only had one black person in his high school. And he didn't even know who the person was. They didn't even meet them. So now, he has to live with me from the hood, okay? So what happened during that year? Ed got to know me. And I got to know him. One of the turning points was this. Back then it was called the Black Cultural Arts Club, BCAC, it's probably got some politically correct name now. I don't know what it, right? But, you know, we used to have these dances because a lot of the kids, you never go out and drink to the bars and drink and get drunk and pass out. You know, that's not my idea of a good time. So we rented out space on campus and had like a DJ. We were playing New Jack, huh, huh, huh, right? Oh, it's not right. So I invited Ed to come with me. He said, I'm going to be the only white person there. I said, Ed, don't worry about it. It's good, man. Just come on and have a good time. Don't go out and drink with those guys. Come with me tonight, man. He was reluctant. I said, now what's your Notre Dame? So he goes, there's going to be, I said, there's going to be football players there. He said, oh, okay. So Ed came with me, okay? So we get there and everybody's dancing, all right? And so Ed's kind of standing there a little nervous. And so I don't know why I remember her. Lois, her name was Lois, she comes off the floor, grabs Ed and pulls him onto the floor. He said, come on, Ed. And Ed was doing like his, first he's standing there shocked. These guys doing like his white robot thing, right? You know, but then he was getting into everybody's like, go, Ed, go, Ed. He, now we're walking back to the dorm at 2.30 in the morning and he was on a high goes. That was so much fun. And I wasn't even drunk. And it was just, it opened up a whole new level of our relationship. We ended up rooming again the next year. After graduation, I was at his wedding and he was in my wedding. My daughter, she just transferred schools now but she spent her first two years at NYU. And so when I dropped her off to the dorm, Ed was there. And I said, honey, you are gonna have your new roommate. This was my roommate when I was a freshman in college. I said, Ed, keep your mouth shut because I wasn't always Deacon Harold, you know what I'm saying? Ah-ha! But as we're walking away, as we're walking away, Ed turns to me and says, he puts his hand, he grabs my arm and goes, don't worry, I've got her. I've got her. Right? So think about it. We went from he's black, right? You're black too, I've got her, huh? That's how we fix things. And I think with all my, and I mean this sincerely, I believe with all my heart that the Catholic church can take the lead in this issue of breaking down racial divide. Because so, look, here's why I say this. I am sick and tired of us always coming from behind. Whenever an issue comes up, let's be honest, we don't really do very much. Like with gender and marriage, because why? Because the sex abuse cost us moral credibility. So we're afraid to talk about hard things. Let's talk about the environment and immigrants and migrants. I mean, I'm an immigrant, okay? Those are important issues. But young people aren't leaving the church because of the sun. They're leaving because they don't know the son of God. That's the problem. Bless are you and men, oh, wait, one more for it. Bless are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Blessed indeed are those who have the fortitude and strength to put the value of truth, love, and justice for all above their own survival. Remember, for example, all our brothers and sisters who are dying for the faith in India and China and many countries on the continent of Africa like today are literally dying because they refuse to deny Jesus. And yesterday we heard of those beautiful saints, Felicity, Puppetua, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and Dr. Aquilina's talk. Those women died rather than deny Jesus. And we're not being asked to die yet. You know, here's what I noticed. I grew up in Jersey. Now I live in Oregon, the land of the fruits and the nuts. So now I'm surrounded by nature and rivers and mountains. It's pretty cool actually. And I noticed this during the spring runoff when the snow and Mount Hood and the mountains melt and it runs into the Columbia River. And I noticed that dead things go down screen like logs and huge branches, sometimes deer and elk and the dead floating down the river. And we're told in our culture that we need to go with the flow. Here's the other thing I noticed. Salmon fight upstream against the current to do what? To lay their eggs, to give life. My brothers and sisters, in our culture today, we need to be the salmon, all of us. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Now I was having lunch with a brother Deacon. He used to be in Portland. He moved out of the area and I was doing a parish mission near him. So we got together and caught up a little bit, had some lunch. And as we got to the restaurant, he ordered some coffee and I have some water we're talking. He's talking about music in his new parish. And as we're talking, a waitress, not our waitress, another waitress comes over and says, excuse me, I hear you guys talking about music. Are you musicians? And Deacon Jack says, well, no, we're Deacons of the Catholic Church. And I was just telling my brother here about my new parish, but this waitress is wearing a wooden cross. Not a crucifix, but a wooden cross. And it was pretty big. So Deacon Jack, I think Paul to say, I noticed you're wearing a cross. Are you Catholic? She said, oh, no. Said I used to be Catholic. But when my parents got divorced, I was living with my mother and that wasn't working out. So now I moved here to be with my dad and my dad doesn't go to church. So I don't go to church. So Deacon Jack said, well, you are most welcome in my parish. It's actually not too far from here. And she was like, oh, thank you. Thank you. Be nice. She's paused. And then she said, can I ask you guys a question? What do you think about gay marriage? At this point, Deacon Jack takes a sip of his coffee and looks at me like, your turn? Because up until that point, he was doing all the talking, right? So I said to this young lady in a very calm, very conversational tone, I said, what is marriage? Like, what actually is it? It comes from the word matrimonium. Matrimonium matri is the derivative of the word mater, which means mother. Ammonium is a suffix ending in Latin, which means the state or condition of something. So literally matrimony means the state or condition of motherhood. So if you want to so-called read the fine marriage, you actually have to change what words actually mean. Who has a right to change what words actually mean? Like my name, Deacon Harold. Deacon, Diaconia in Greek means servant. Harold is Old English. Haribald means mighty in battle. So my name is the servant who is mighty in battle. What if someone said, no, your name means parked across the street? Who are you to tell me that the objective words of what my name means all of a sudden means something else? But that's what we're doing in our culture today. I said that marriage has always been understood to be a relationship between a man and a woman and any children they have together, which is the heart, the soul, the center, the foundation, the nucleus of civilization, culture and society. Marriage is about building community and incorporates a common desire for every person to know and be cared for by their own mother and father. I said, what's happening in our culture today? We're moving to an adult centric model where marriage is simply a public recognition of a relationship. Now, notice in that definition, no mothers, no fathers, no children. I said, so marriage now because whatever you decided to be. For example, just north of where I live in Portland, just north of Seattle, a woman attempted to so-called marry her apartment building. A Japanese gentleman spent 18,000 US dollars attempting to marry a hologram that called him Lord and Master. Yeah, I saw you women call your husband's Lord and Master too, right? I said, look, matrimony and family are of a public interest. And so-called same-sex relationships, those are just benefits that those individual people, it doesn't benefit all of culture and society. I said, so the government should be interested in the common good, what's best for all of us and not just focus on what's best for certain individuals. And she said, well, there are a number of families that don't have mothers and fathers raising their children because of divorce or death or domestic violence. I said, that's true. My families, my parents are divorced, I get it. But those situations are sad and tragic circumstances, not by design. They said, well, they have a right to have children. I said, ooh, hold on. First of all, they can't have children. And I said, children are not bargaining chips in anybody's personal vendetta. I said, children have a right to be raised by their own mother and father, that's the right. I said, well, they can do in vitro. I said, ooh, ouch. Do you even know what that is? It's like when you create a baby in a tube or something. So in vitro 101, when a woman is born, she's born with all the eggs in her ovaries she will have for her entire life. Her body does not create any more eggs. But in in vitro, they give her a hormone which stimulates, because you know what happens, right? When she reaches puberty, one egg is released every month. If the egg is not fertilized, it washes out with the next menstrual cycle. That happens until menopause. But what they do in vitro, they give her a hormone that stimulates multiple egg production. They take those eggs, put them in a dish, they take a sample from a man which may or may not be her husband. And I'll just leave it to your imagination how they get that sample. They mix them together and they create children. Now, zygote, blastocysts, embryo, doesn't matter what you call them. They're human beings at an early stage of development. We have names for human beings at all stages of development, right? Infant, toddler, what's the new one now? tween, teen, young adult, middle-aged, old. Okay? So, they also have names for human beings before they're born. That doesn't change their humanity. And I said, they allow those embryos to go to an eight to 10 cell division. Then they take, let's say they create 20 of them. They take some of them, let's say five, and implant them in the years of the woman. What did they do with the other 15? They either crygetically freeze them for stem cell or they dump them down the drain because human beings don't even rise to the level of medical waste. Five are implanted in the womb, three of them take. They're having triplets. Oh, but they only wanted one child. Now, I have to bring in another doctor to talk about selective reduction. Because they only have, I said, so 19 children die so you can get the one that you think you have a right to? That's not fair right or just. And she said, you're black. I said, wow. I said, she must know Ed. And your people fought for their rights and these people are just fighting for their rights. I said, oh, apples and oranges. I said, being black is not a personal lifestyle choice decision. Being black doesn't change the definition of marriage to apples and oranges. She said, well, Pope Francis said, who am I to judge? People are just born that way. I said, oh, hold on. Then why did Jesus do any miracles? What? Well, the man born blind, he was blind from birth. Why didn't Jesus come in and say, oh, dude, sorry, it's nothing I could do for you. You just made that way. Sorry. No, what did Jesus do? He restored his sight. He restored it to the nature from which God intended for the beginning. Now, we love all of our brothers and sisters. No matter what situation they're born in, it doesn't matter. Transgender, saying that we love, the Catholic person, we love everyone. We always love their actions. We judge actions. We never judge people. We love all of our brothers and sisters unconditionally with the love and the heart of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But we don't always love decisions that they make. I said, so Jesus restored it to nature. I said, people weren't meant to be born with anencephalia or trisomy 13. But we love and accept everyone, no matter how they came into the world. And she said, well, your arguments from nature make no sense. I said, actually, they do. So for example, we take all of our same-sex-tracted brothers. We put them on an island. And 50,000 miles away, we get our same-sex-tracted sisters put them on an island. Then we get the rest of the 98% of the population put them on an island, 50,000 miles away. If we come back in 200 years, who's still going to be here? I said, so it actually does matter. So we're going back and forth. Now, remember, I'm doing this on the fly. I got no notes. I'm doing this on the fly. And after our conversation, we agreed to disagree. And she left. And Deacon Jack said, whoa, that was kind of intense. I said, well, it's just the gospel. You know, this is our faith. So we have lunch. We finish. And as we're paying, I said, let me go talk to her one more time. So I went and found I said, look, usually when I have this conversation with people, they get really angry at me and call me all kinds of nasty names. You didn't do that. I said, I want to thank you for not disrespecting me. And I stuck my hand out, hand to God. She shook my hand. She goes, you know what? You are the first Catholic I spoke to about this who didn't go ballistic. Then she turned to Deacon Jack and said, can I get directions to your parish? So my friends, to conclude, we are called to preach the gospel in its fullness, not just the parts we like. This means that when we live our faith every day through the witness of our life, we will be persecuted, amok, and ridiculed, and scorned, just as Jesus was and He made His way to the cross. Life is too short for us to worry about what other people think. We are called by God to be saints, to live our faith with courage and conviction in this time and in this place, and to put all of our trust in God. To be attitudes form a foundation for holiness and make clear what is expected of a follower of Jesus. The scriptures encourage us. And God alone be at rest my soul. My hope comes from Him. He alone is my rock, my stronghold, my fortress. I stand firm. Amen. God bless you. Thank you.