 The first thing that I would like to get straight with you is that a yoke has nothing to do with an egg. Somebody just told me Tuesday night that they were working with an exchange student who was studying in the U.S. Catechetics and read that passage, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. She said, I know because I always break those yolks in the egg when I try to flip them, but it just makes me so happy that Jesus is going to make it easy for me. It has nothing to do with that. Jesus' methodology in this is to first ask people to think about the heaviness of the yoke that they might be carrying. It made me remember my college roommate, Scott. We were both in architecture school together. Scott's about 6'3", all muscle. Great guy. I was in our architecture lab on time. He was late. So he's got this big backpack that he always carried on himself, heavy, like a heavy yoke. And he was running from the physics building to the architecture building. And as he's running, he's trying to take his backpack off his shoulders. And when the straps are right down around his elbows, he kicks the curb and launches into the air, arms flailing like a chicken, head first into the dirt. And Scott felt the heaviness of his yoke that day, his backpack. And I think he actually stopped carrying it. Spiritually speaking, though, this passage might be a little harder to assimilate. It was easier for me to assimilate this kind of a passage when I was actually carrying the heavy yoke of sin, which was all my life, but really it came to a really bad place when I was in college. Same time I was roommates with Scott. And that's when it was very easy to appeal to me to say, don't you feel the heaviness of your life? And certain people when they're in a certain place in their life, you can say, aren't you tired of waking up with a hangover every day, ashamed of what you did last night? Aren't you tired yet of disappointing your family and everybody? Aren't you tired? That's sort of one of the things Jesus was appealing to in this gospel today. And it's easy to appeal to people when they're obviously feeling the heaviness of their sin. One summer, that heaviness came to a place where I had to make a decision when I was somewhere around 1985. And you know, I was out of the church at the time. Now I'm receiving the sacraments, not hardly ever attending Mass unless I was home with my parents. So one summer they were away on a trip and I was home and I started watching TV. And I also want to tell you that I want to also give a shout out to all you youth ministers out there. When I was 13, I think it was, at a youth ministry meeting at our local parish, I heard the gospel. I heard a charismatic catechesis. I heard that I was being invited to give my whole life to him who had given his whole life for me and loved me infinitely. And I'd heard it, but all the way from 13 until 21, I didn't know how to receive it. Nobody had really shown me how to repent, believe, experience the redemption of Christ and start to walk in a new life. And so here I was in my parents' house and I turned on the TV and I wasn't looking for religious programming. At this point in my life, not looking for religious programming. I was searching through the channels, smoking a cig. And here comes Pastor Marvin Gorman at the Believer's Bible Hour, something like that, a Pentecostal preacher. And he says, some of you are feeling the heavy weight of your sin. You want to be a Christian. You've heard the message, but you don't know how to make it work. Many of you have never asked for a personal Pentecost in your life. And I'm like, yeah, I guess not. I was confirmed, but I had a tie on when I was confirmed and I had four cigarettes in the lining of my tie. Had I ever asked for a personal Pentecost and I thought, I guess maybe I hadn't. He said, tune in tomorrow and we'll lead you in prayer to receive a personal Pentecost. And I did. I tuned in the next day. I made sure I was there. Everyone was gone from my house, so I wasn't embarrassed. And I turned on the TV and reached out my hand towards the TV set. But the truth is, I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I knew in that moment that I was God's beloved Son through Jesus Christ and that He was pleased with me. Flooded me with grace that never has gone away. Oh, yes, like Melanie and Damon had told us, it ebbs and flows, doesn't it? But it's never gone away. A revelation was made from the heart of God through the Holy Spirit to my spirit, that Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, co-eternal, co-essential with the God, the Father, and the Spirit. And I wasn't even thinking about being a priest. I was going to be a Pentecostal. I think that was the first time that Jesus helped me to wake up to the idea that my yoke was heavy and I was weary and I could trade my yoke for His light and easy yoke. And that's the easy way to do it. But the passage gets harder when the heavy yoke is not just overt, terrible sins. For example, for church people, sometimes the heavy yoke is those elements of my life and ministry that are good, but they've really been fashioned by my own plans, my own ideas, and my own ingenuity, rather than built by the Spirit of God. And we invest so much time and energy in them, gosh, we would never let them go or loosen them up a little bit because I've given so much of myself. And you might say, well, aren't you weary? Yeah, I am a little weary, but I'm not going to let go of it. That's the harder when the Lord is asking us to give Him our own programs and our plans. And when we feel God, when we feel the Lord Jesus calling us to try something new, when we feel the Lord Jesus saying, you know, I appreciate your hard work, but can you open yourself up to an easier way? I mean, this is the call for lazy people. It's really, but you know, we get scared of it and so we say, Lord, I've got an idea. What if we just not have a yoke? What if we just have no yoke at all? But now did you notice that that was not given as an option? He didn't say you can have the heavy yoke of sin and shame or your own self-will and the light easy yoke of me, or you can have perfect freedom and no yoke at all. Did you notice that's not an option? Jesus says, take my yoke or live the heavy yoke. There's only two choices. Well, there's really only one choice between two things. That's un-American, really, because we're Americans. Well, you're not all Americans. Some of you are Canadians, but Canadians the same. It's all about our choices, you know, and you know, I can choose my reality, right? I can even choose to say to Jesus, I don't believe in yokes. There's something from the past that you put across two animals to do some work or two human beings to do some work. I don't even believe in yokes. I don't believe they exist. I identify as a yoke-less person. And I'm free to identify and I don't have to accept what you're proposing to me. So how do you deal with that person? How do you bring the reality that they have to make a choice between the heavy, weary-some yoke or the easy light yoke? You know, I've asked many of my friends, most of them are priests, you know, tell me about how do you evangelize and cataclyse the guy who's not a bad person? He's a really good agnostic. And he has like everything. You know, he wakes up on Sunday morning and his beautiful wife is by his side and he's very dedicated to her and the coffee smell is wafting through the house and the dog is at the foot of the bed and the well-behaved children are all in their rooms doing their thing and he makes a lot of money but he's philanthropic and he gives money to lots of organizations and really helps the poor. He's just a good guy. How do you make that guy feel the heaviness and the weariness of the yoke of the world and the lightness and the beauty of the yoke of Jesus? And I've gotten three answers. One is really bad. The other one is almost really bad. And the third one was re-emphasized to me right here at this conference. And the first one is if you don't choose Jesus you're going to go to hell because then he could just go, I don't believe in hell. Have a nice day. The second one is a little more interesting but I've heard a lot of people and I've even tried to do this is you try to make the person who's the happy good agnostic feel that it's going to come down the pike that they're going to start feeling bad about where they are in life. So one of my friends who I was friends with in the seminary is now married to a man. And they have a very wonderful happy life. So my role is to convince them that they both have deep father wounds and it's one day going to really show them that they're not happy even though they think they are. Have you ever tried to convince a happy pagan that they're not happy? It doesn't really work too good. The third answer was re-emphasized to me here but I sort of knew it because of having heard the gospel when I was young and really having to go through all of this fighting until I'm in my 20s and start to receive it and walk in it and walk in a new and a divinely inspired way. I really relate to this. And I was at a workshop this weekend, this week by Mark Cardonella and he talked about that we present before people a hero's journey. And we're on this journey and we can start out at home just chilling with ourselves and not really wanting to go anywhere but when the catechist proposes this journey to us basically by saying you are made for more than this. That's when we start going, oh really? And that's what I say to the good atheist lying in the bed and he's all happy with his wife and his family and everything. I'm saying you are made for more than this because even though most of Damon and Melanie's talk was about how their life is always in chaos. Well that wouldn't really it but the reason they were telling it is that their marriage is a sacrament and it's actually filled with divine grace and it's actually pouring out divine grace on really all the world because they're all over the internet. I've listened to their talks and seen their ministry and their wisdom and their marriage is a vehicle for grace to move into the world. That's the hero's journey right there. It's not just an individual hero. It could be a couple hero in marriage. It could be a priest hero or a deacon hero or a sister hero. It could be a young person. We're starting to see more and more of these saints who are just young people and they like computers and they all of a sudden become a saint. And I think that's what one of the things that's been mentioned over and over in this conference is we have a new invitation to a heroic journey and it's represented by this new catechetical directory. I'll tell you honestly my whole life as a priest I've been a priest now for 28 years but even before that I've been trying to propose to people that if we do not situate the charisma as the very foundation of all catechesis we're going to go nowhere. And it's not just recently that I've been themed all my life. So when I open this directory and it's got like a whole chapter on charismatic catechesis my heart flipped. I started buying copies because it's an invitation. And it's an invitation that for the first time I think even though some people have told me this weekend that this idea has been around for a long time it's the first time I've seen it in a document that it's so prominent. It's the first time that I've seen it as an invitation that's going to be widely diffused in the church so that I don't have to say it all the time. Just read the directory and then try to do what it says. I think that's the Lord's call and I think we're going to see amazingly beautiful things if we accept that easy light yoke of the Lord and follow it. Amen. Now let me just give you a little encouragement from St. Bonaventure since this is his memorial and he wrote about an epic heroic journey called the journey of the mind into God or the journey of us into the mind of God or something like that. And he said this if you ask how such things can occur seek the answer in God's grace not in doctrine in the longing of the will not in the understanding in the size of prayer not in research seek the bridegroom not the teacher God not man darkness not daylight and look not to the light but rather the raging fire that carries the soul to God with an intense fervor and glowing love. Jesus is beside you right now because a yoke means that you're on one side and he's on the other and he's looking at you right now and he's saying come to me especially if you're laboring and heavily burdened take my yoke upon your shoulders and I will give you rest. Amen.