 what a joy it is not only to be together all weekend for defending the faith, but to be here for the 30th time. Now I realize there are a lot of first timers, but I sure hope that you plan on coming back for the next 30 years. I'm serious. I tell you, this place is flourishing more and more in the power of the Holy Spirit. And I wanna thank Father Dave Ivanka, our president also for his faithfulness to the calling of the Lord and to the power of the Holy Spirit. I'd like to focus my remarks this evening on the idea of holiness, but not just the idea. What I wanna do is to take that notion of holiness and make it something that we deeply desire. What is the one thing you want more than any other thing? What is the one thing that is most important to you? Now, we know that people around us would say, well, good health, lots of wealth, popularity, but we all know how transitory and superficial those things are. And so the obvious answer to all of us is holiness. But how do we go about attaining it? That's what I'd like to talk about. But the way I wanna address this is by situating it within your own life story, as well as mine. One of my own personal heroes is a Scottish-American philosopher by the name of Alistair McIntyre. Back in the 60s, he was one of the world's most influential atheist Marxist philosophers. He had been teaching at Brandeis and Vanderbilt, but he was intellectually honest and open to the pursuit of truth. And so in the 70s, when I was an undergraduate, gradually he came to believe in God. And then in the 80s, when I was making my way into the Catholic Church, he was too, much to the shock of many of his colleagues at Vanderbilt and Duke and wherever else he taught. He wrote a book called After Virtue. And I know that all of you here got to hear Dr. Edward Sree last night speak about virtue. And what Dr. Sree was doing was distilling the breakthrough wisdom that you find in Alistair McIntyre's classic work, After Virtue, that came out in 1981. There are so many quotable quotes in there, but there was one thing that really stood out over the years for me. And that is the single most important question is what is the purpose of my life? What am I to do? The problem is we can't answer that, as McIntyre points out, until we address another question of what story do I find myself apart? And so we've got to figure out where we fit in the story that goes beyond my own biography, that goes beyond my own family, that goes beyond our own country. McIntyre also points out after decades of research and study of human nature, human philosophy, he says that I quote, man is essentially a story telling animal. And that builds on what Curtis Martin was talking about last night. And so what we've got to do is we've got to find our story because in a certain sense we've lost it, or very nearly. And the next generation of Catholics coming up have got to be reminded of the story of salvation history. McIntyre clarifies this though, it's not just like the Wizard of Oz. It really is a teller of stories that aspire to truth. And so this is what points us back to Sacred Scripture. Without embarrassment, this is the word of God. And even though it isn't impolished Greek or refined Latin, but in a kind of primitive Hebrew and Coine Greek, nevertheless, when the word who created the universe became flesh, he was in a manger and he wound up on a cross. And so get ready for our pride to be snubbed as we discovered that God has scripted a story that only makes sense in the light of Jesus Christ, crucified, risen and ascended into heaven. Sacred Scripture is central, valuable, important. What else do you expect to hear from me? But if you think I slightly overvalue the importance of Scripture, let me remind you of what Jesus did on his first day back from the dead. I won't go into this at length like I would love to do, but here is Jesus abandoned, betrayed, denied, tortured, crucified on Good Friday, in the tomb on Holy Saturday, and finally on Easter Sunday, he gets back from the dead. And if you were going to decide what to do on your first day back from the dead, what would you do? I would drop in on Pontius Pilate. I would stop by Caiaphas and hover over the Sanhedrin. I would probably pay a house call to my tortures, my executioners, and give them a chance to repent. I might gather my disciples and divide Jerusalem up into neighborhood districts, and just say, okay, let's go on a tour. But there is one thing that I know I wouldn't put on my list. And that was what was at the top of Jesus' list. And what was it? To spend most of Easter Sunday morning and afternoon walking on that long road that leads from Jerusalem to Emmaus with two apparent nobodies, Clovis and his companion, leading this amazing Bible study to two guys who don't even recognize the rabbi. We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. And only when they arrive at Emmaus, when he's there at the table, when he takes blesses, breaks, and gives them this sacred mystery that we call the Eucharist are their eyes open. And just as suddenly he vanishes. And not because he's playing hard to get or hide and go seek, but because that is what is meant to be the object of our faith. And so when they turned around and walked all the way back, by the time they got to the upper room Easter Sunday late afternoon, who was there to meet them besides the 11? Our Lord himself. For what purpose? To have a brief meal with them, but also to have an extensive scripture study. So if the Lord of Lords raised from the dead on his first day back from his descendant to Hades, decides to do that, either we must conclude that he has misplaced priorities or else we ought to be open to the possibility that we do. But Clovis and his companion and the 11 apostles were not ignorant of sacred scripture. They knew the law and the prophets or at least they thought they did. But apart from Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, it's just not the case that you understand it right. As I like to say the Old Testament read on its own is like a story in search of an ending. Whereas for most Christians, they read the New Testament which is practically unintelligible apart from the old because you're hearing all about the fulfillment of promises and prophecies and covenants about which we don't know very much. And so in order to address this question, what is the purpose of my life? We need to also answer the question of what story do I find myself apart? And as much as I love Tolkien's trilogy or the Narnia Chronicles, those stories aspire to truth but this is salvation history and sacred scripture gives us the truth into which our own lives now fit and not just in different scripts. By the time we get home to heaven and we see the face of the father and we look around in our resurrected bodies and see each other with resurrected eyes, we're going to recognize brothers and sisters in Christ in this heavenly homecoming that will surpass the best siblings we ever had on earth. And we're gonna realize that, okay, we've got some time on our hands couple million years to start with. So I think the father will encourage us to share our stories and we'll realize that there weren't all these different stories, there's only one. And it was divinely scripted from a father on high who sent his son as the word made flesh to give us the Holy Spirit. This is the story of our lives and this is what makes holiness possible. And ultimately this is the purpose of who we were created to be. Now last century, a book was written that's become something of a favorite of mine, Dom Chautard has written a book called The Soul of the Apostolate. And if you haven't read it, I strongly encourage you to do so. It's described as a spiritual classic by many for good reasons. He describes something that is like the spiritual law of causality. And what is that? To quote from him, if the priest is a saint, then his people will be fervent. Whereas if the priest is fervent, then his people will be pious. Whereas if the priest is pious, then the people will be decent and upright. Whereas if the priest is merely decent and upright, then his people will be godless. And that's the truth. And that is why we need to pray not only for our priests, but also for more young men here at Franciscan and everywhere else to respond to the calling of holy orders. And this is also why we give thanks for what happened 15 months ago when our son Jeremiah became our sacramental father, Father Jeremiah. And we're grateful to God for the prodigy of his priesthood, but even more for how he has become the instrument of sanctification for others. And why? Because we were made for the purpose of becoming saints, to be holy. But saints don't happen by chance. They happen by choice. And not just one choice, but a lifetime of choices made every day saying yes from the heart. And I think back 50 years ago when I was 14, coming off a retreat for a whole weekend like this one. And I found Christ. He found me and I was basking in the afterglow of grace. And then when I got back home, reality struck. And my friends began to figure out what had happened. And I wonder went a rejection. In the first week, I thought it was temporary. A month later, I had not been invited to a party which was probably not a bad thing. But that fear of rejection that I had to confront was also a passage through which I had to go in order to follow Jesus. And I should say too that 40 years ago since Kimberly already referred to our courtship and our marriage and our discovery of the Catholic Church's teaching and openness to life, it was 40 years ago that I became a father for the first time. And suddenly I began to look upon God in a different way. Without going into the details of the story, Kimberly's labor was over 30 hours. She was 10 days late. I was fighting sleep while she was fighting intense pain. It was four days later after she was recovering from surgery that we came home together. And I think it was the first or second night that I decided that I would try to burp our baby boy for the first time around 3 a.m. After she had nursed him, she handed him off and she fell into bed and fell fast asleep. I'm walking down the hall into the moonlit baby room burping him and I hear him burp and I'm like, yes. And then I heard something else and then I felt something warm and suddenly I realized that baby vomit was going down my back. That was a little awkward and I pulled him off my shoulder. I looked into his eyes and he obviously felt much better. And at that moment, that's all that mattered. And instead of just laying him down, I sat in the rocking chair beside his crib and just began to rock him. Looking into the eyes of the only person on the planet who's ever vomited on me. And if you had asked me a year earlier, as someone who wants to be holy, has anybody ever thrown up on you? No, how do you think you'll feel the first time? Well, I'll fight anger, maybe frustration, perhaps even rage, but that night I'm looking into the eyes of the only person who's ever done such a thing, feeling such love welling up within me. I don't know how to describe it except that it was a grace of conversion. And so 15, 20 minutes later, his eyes are drooping. He's fast asleep, but I'm not ready to lay him down just yet. Why? Because I am not just the proud father of this big bundle of baby boy, but I have found the love of my life, the fruit of our love. The two became one and the one we became was so real that we had to come up with a name, Michael Scott Hahn. And he was the incarnation of our communion and I just was thinking about all of this when suddenly I felt the presence of God in that room. And I didn't see a face or hear a voice, but if I had it, it wouldn't have made it more real, but I felt like he was trying to get something across to me and I wasn't picking up on it until finally I realized it was just a simple question. Do you see how much you love your child? And I'm like, God, words don't begin to describe the love that I have for this baby boy. Thank you, but there was something else and I didn't pick up on it. And then after about a minute or so, I began to realize that the follow-up question that our Lord was really asking me was, do you think it's possible that you love your child more than I love my children? And I'm like, well, no, I mean, theologically that's inept, that's absurd. I'm a first-time dad, you're the eternal father. And then I realized that it wasn't a pop quiz at 3.30 a.m., he was speaking to my heart. And I'm like, wait a second, you don't mean to say that you love me like I love him only more? But of course that's exactly what he was trying to say and all I could think of was the countless occasions when I had vomited on our Lord by sitting and acting selfishly in my marriage and with other people, just assuming that thereby I caused him to love me less and less when in fact, I'm looking at the only person who's ever thrown up on me and I cannot express in words the love that was still welling up. That was a conversion, that was a transformation, not just finding Christ, but finding the Father. And I discovered that Jesus has this passionate desire today as he did back in the first century to show us the face of God, the Father that we will no longer be afraid Well, I mean the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and perfect love casts out all fear and our love isn't perfect yet, it's being perfected but at the same time God wants to reveal himself to us as the only perfect Father there ever was and will be. And this is why we're here, this is who we are. And this is why we have to kind of blow off the dust from the doctrine that we believe, we profess when we say I believe in God, the Father almighty or else these will become just Catholic talking points when in fact when we blow off the dust we can see what amazing graces all of these sacred mysteries are. But what I'd like to do is point out the fact that if your priest is not a saint, if he's not fervent, if he's not pious, if he's only decent you don't have an excuse not to become a saint. And so we can't point our fingers at the clergy or at our own parents or at our own teachers and catechists for how they might have failed us because the fact is holiness for us is still a choice that we can make to pursue the Lord. Now, in case you haven't noticed, the sacraments are essential for becoming holy but the sacraments don't make it easy, much less automatic. We're not robots. We're prodigal sons and daughters who've got to make it all the way home. But in the process we're gonna discover that God is love but it's not spelled L-U-V like it was when I was a kid back in the early 70s as a new convert. I mean, the Beatles, all you need is love and it was love, like peace, love and wood stock. And I'll be honest, I just began to tune that kind of message out. And as a new convert in high school reading through the Bible from beginning to end I discovered in the writings and the teachings of a local theologian by the name of Dr. R. C. Sproul the holiness of God, the holiness of God, his awe, his majesty, that would inspire us but it would also cause us to tremble. And that was for me something essential and I would propose that it is still something essential. But what do we mean by holiness? Well, when you look at the book of Genesis the foundation for the Bible you can see that in the opening chapters God creates in six days in order to consecrate the seventh day which of course is the Sabbath, the sign of the covenant which he hallows. Literally, Kodesh in Hebrew, he sanctifies it's the only time the word Kodesh holiness occurs in all 50 chapters of Genesis. And so it's set apart. And what we have to see is that God has already written a code into creation to give us a clue as to why he made us, what the real goal is. It's not just a work a day lifestyle for six days it's to enter into the holiness of the Sabbath which our first parents failed to do just turn the page and you'll see them fall and forfeit sanctifying grace so that the word holiness doesn't occur anywhere else in the rest of Genesis not until the Exodus event not until the book of Exodus where suddenly there's an explosion of that Hebrew term Kodesh in all of its variants 98 times in the book of Exodus which is only 40 chapters long and in the opening chapters it starts with Moses tending the flock and he sees a bush that is consumed now a bush is something flammable but a bush is not something that will continue to burn without being consumed and yet this one was and then the divine voice that came with it Moses, Moses, here am I take off your shoes for the ground that you stand on is holy ground and he turns away the great professor Rudolf Otto wrote a book called the idea of the holy and he describes this mysterious tremendous fashinans which is this mystery that causes us to tremble and yet we find ourselves fascinated and enthralled it's like wanting to look and then wanting to look away the holiness of God and so this is where God announces his purpose to renew the covenant to bring them out through the Passover to liberate them from bondage which he then proceeds to do and he brings them out to Sinai and you have the holy tent you've got the Ark of the Covenant you've got that term holiness being applied to the vestments to the altar to the feasts to the sacrifices but as you finish off the book of Exodus you find that holiness is applied to everything but it's never applied to anyone no one is called a saint or a holy one in all of Exodus not even Moses and as you continue reading of course you discover why the golden calf the transgression the rebellion and then you read Leviticus and it's all about be holy for the Lord your God is holy but it's a call it's an invitation it's a challenge but it always implies be holy as opposed to what you've been now for the last few years for 40 years it was a friend of mine Rabbi Berman who pointed out to me years ago and other readers too that as you read the law and the prophets as you read the Hebrew Bible you discover holiness just used all over the place but it's used with respect to God primarily for you alone are holy and then when certain created objects are consecrated they are holy too but nowhere in the law and the prophets and the writings that to knock this Hebrew rabbi pointed out is anybody ever referred to as a saint and I had read through the Old Testament many times I just never noticed but when you do you begin to realize okay so salvation history is taking place in a very gradual way and no wonder because God is eternal and for the Lord God a thousand years or as a day and a day like a thousand years and so in order to understand the real purpose you've got to understand well I mean with the great philosopher Aristotle once observed that what is first in intention is what? Last in execution so the first thing that you intend to accomplish is generally the last thing that you do you accomplished it and so if you're building a mansion for months there might be a pile of lumber there might be all kinds of mounds of dirt like we're building here Jesus the teacher center or if an artist wants to paint a masterpiece you'll look at that canvas and just see all of these collars and not until the end do you see what was really intended from the beginning so the end is already there in the beginning so what is first in intention is last in execution but even when you finish the mansion you expect to move in you want to live there you want to enjoy it you want to have people over likewise when you finish your masterpiece you want people to contemplate it and appreciate that so what is the goal of creation well that's the purpose of the narrative to show us that the Sabbath the seventh day the only time holiness occurs this is the sign that is why this whole weekend has been devoted to what topic what theme the jubilee so you have the seventh day and then you have the seven feasts in the liturgical calendar of Leviticus 23 and then in Leviticus 23 you have the sabbatical year and then in Leviticus 25 you have the series of the Shemitah the seven sabbaticals the 50th year is the great jubilee debts are forgiven slaves are set free and everybody gets to go back to their ancestral inheritance this is what God has commanded our fulfillment, our happiness and not just our workload and yet at the same time you recognize that it takes place gradually in stages the catechism is especially clear and helpful on this in paragraph 684 we hear about how it was that God's fatherhood was being revealed in the patriarchal period through the patriarchs but ultimately then the revelation of the son is what occurs in the incarnation anticipated in the law and the prophets but the spirit the Holy Spirit is the last of the persons of the Holy Trinity to be revealed quoting the great Cappadocian St. Gregory he explains this in terms of God's fatherly plan his pedagogy the way he teaches through stooping down to the level of his children in order to raise them up and make them saints and make them holy St. Gregory writes the Old Testament proclaimed the father clearly but the son more obscurely the New Testament revealed the son and gave us a glimpse of the Holy Spirit by advancing and progressing from glory to glory the light of the Trinity will shine in us forever more brilliant rays so you know I think back to 50 years and what is that going all the way back to creation 50 years ago I found Christ 40 years ago I discovered the face of God the Father 30 years ago almost exactly I kissed the face of my earthly father I was alone with him in his last hour with labored breathing slipping into a coma and when he breathed his last I was alone with him I closed his eyes I knelt down I thanked the Lord God Almighty for the gift of a father who for most of his life never found faith until he was suffering in the final months from this terminal illness and we had gotten to pray together he'd asked me to read the Psalms with him and so I knelt down and thanked God for the gift of a natural father who became like a little brother in Christ and I realized in the silence that for the first time in my life I had no other father but God and I asked him to continue fathering me as his son as a husband as a father and now as a grandfather Papa, that's the term that melts my heart like butter on a skillet in fact during the first verse of holy, holy, holy I slipped out just to send a video to Joseph Pio for his eighth birthday and Maggie who we hope comes here for her 14th birthday 21 grandkids how good can it get and yet at the same time what God is doing is fathering a family that is so much more immense than my own or yours and so this is who we are this is why we're gathered this is what we are to discover again and again and allow it to convert our hearts so Jesus really has two passionate desires he longs to show us the face of God the father but he also longs every bit as much to send us the power and the gifts of the Holy Spirit what's troubling you right now what is it that is weighing on your heart like a burden you don't have to speak up but I think you can speak to our Lord and you'll discover that he already knows that and as you open up your heart and ask him to prove his fatherly love and if you open up your heart even more and just ask Christ to come in and to let his fullness fill your emptiness let his perfection make up for all of our imperfections he's not going to hear that prayer and say I'll think about it he'll answer that prayer and then he'll show you where that prayer originated and it wasn't my heart or yours it was his he loves us more than we love ourselves and he wants us to get home and so we've got to beware of when it is we find ourselves our hands are so full and our hearts are so full of things that we can't really receive what it is that God the Father has to give us and as we've been hearing in different ways all weekend what displeases God the Father the most is when we don't trust him when we settle for the appetizers when we settle for the pocket change the finite goods that he has lavished upon us when in fact the only thing he really longs to give is the gift of himself to us this is what explains this is the only thing explains why a God who loves us will allow us to lose all of the finite goods even the finite life that we have in our bodies so what is first in intention is last in execution and this is the paradox of holiness for each and every one of us because as you'll discover in the lives of the saints there are all kinds of different personalities the irascible Saint Jerome who had a temper that puts mind to shame and yet it takes all kinds to make a heaven and you'll also find other saints too with all kinds of temperaments and personalities and yet you're gonna discover that God is calling us to bring ourselves with all of our weaknesses and that this is gonna be gradual none of these saints were canonizable before the hour of their death but the paradox of holiness is that those who have holiness are the ones who can't see it think of Saint Francis of Assisi he was the one who became more and more aware of his own weakness, his own waywardness as he became holier manifestly so in front of his friars it's also true for Saint Paul in his earliest epistles he describes himself as the least of the apostles in his final writings he describes himself as the chief of sinners not that he was but that he is and so the paradox is that the more you have it the less you see it or know it and so if you see it and you think you know you're a saint chances are you're not but the fact is nobody is until the hour of death did you ever wonder why Catholics have this morbid fascination with that moment in time I can't tell you but I suspect it's at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times I have spoken of the hour of our death, amen and why because that is the moment that matters more than all of the others but it's also the moment that makes all of the other matters all of the other moments matter more than we can imagine and so what is first an intention in God's heart is less than execution in our lives and in history but it's a curious thing because what is first in importance is often the last thing that we discover we've been talking about virtue we've been talking about how it is that we're not just keeping commandments we are really striving to achieve virtue when Ted Street was talking about that last night I was reminded of what Alistair McIntyre taught me years ago that what muscles are to the body virtues are to the soul and so when we might identify the four cardinal virtues that he spoke of last night we realized that there were three theological virtues the seven gifts of the spirit but there's a whole lot more just like we have three primary muscle groups the simple the cardiac and the skeletal muscle groups but there are over 600 muscles in your body and mine and I daresay most of us couldn't name 95% of them and so it isn't the case that each day we've got to work out with one muscle then another and get to 600 no the life of health is nutrition, exercise and all of the rest but what's true of the body is every bit is true for the soul and so we have to do the good over and again until it becomes a habit I think she did it first then I did it so if we do the good it inhabits our soul it becomes a habit so that we can do it more consistently more easily, more joyfully as Dr. Sree was saying and you know muscles are interesting because doctors speak about muscle memory what is muscle memory? Well a couple of nights ago Bob Rice was in the room where we have our team dinners and he was putting down his Taylor guitar and so I picked it up it's been probably 30 years since I played Van Morrison's Domino on the guitar but there I see my fingers doing it and then tower of power this time is real and then the Doobie brothers listen to the music it's like my hand, my fingers remember the chords there's a kind of muscle memory in our bodies but there's also a moral muscle memory that's what virtue instills faith, hope, love and prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice but when you look closely at Saint Thomas just as there are three muscle groups there are three virtue groups but there are literally over a hundred different virtues our soul has all of these muscles that need to be exercised but for that purpose we need to recognize the fact that memory, a kind of moral muscle memory is necessary and so remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy not only is the Sabbath command the longest of the 10 commandments it's the only one where the term holiness occurs and it occurs twice looking back on how God created in six days and then sanctified he made holy the seventh day and so you are to make it holy by what? Remembering, what does it mean to remember? It means a car, an amnesis it means more than just recalling it means commemorating, it means celebrating it's what happened to me just before I got up while we were singing holy, holy, holy I remember it's Joseph Pio's birthday so I cut out and sent him a video and likewise it was Maggie's birthday and so I sent her a video got back here in time for the last two verses I almost forgot but it's not just recalling it's celebrating, it's commemorating and so this is true for us as infants and children this is true for us as youth, as adolescents it's also true for us as adults there are certain things that have happened to us in our lives, momentous occasions and you might not necessarily have a conscious memory how many of you remember what it was like to be born? Well doesn't that make you wonder whether you were not? Obviously not, but I remember it was really crushing I mean, it was slow, it was so painful and I had been breathing amniotic fluid for months and then suddenly I'm gasping for what? I don't even know am I the only one? No, do I remember? Of course not, we've all done it and as you think about teaching your children to walk you realize that you took your first steps what a fearful thing it is you might just fall flat in your face and then when you do your parents just freak out and celebrate, one step it was so much easier just to kind of lie there crawl around, you overcome your fear you take that step, you remember that? No? So maybe you didn't, of course you did but this is mortal muscle memory for little infants likewise at four and a half months our firstborn spoke his first words trained by his mother and she was like da-da, da-da, da-da I know it should have been mama but that's how selfless Kimberly is all six of our kids first word was da-da, da-da God bless Kimberly it melted my heart, oh my goodness it still does by just remembering it but you melted your parents' hearts, don't you recall? No, so maybe you haven't learned to talk but of course we have and don't even get rid of it with potty training you remember that? You don't? Well, I hope I can assume that all of you have been and so it is that all of these events that cause us to grow life is what's happening to us it's not simply reducible to the choices that we make but we still have to make choices we've gotta confront our fears we've gotta recognize that just as the body grows naturally from infancy through childhood to young adulthood through adolescence when all of a sudden these hormones are surging through us and we can no longer just act like children on the basis of impulse or imagination we've gotta use our reason to do what is true we've gotta choose with our wills what is good and it's hard and we make mistakes and the moral muscle memories are not only the virtues but the vices as well and so we've got to be honest and admit our failings because those can linger as well and stand in need of God's mercy but what is true of the body as we pass through adolescence into adulthood is also true for the soul as we mature and as we grow in knowledge as we grow in goodness as we also become aware that we're made for something more than what this world offers and what is it? We don't know yet. We're breathing air but it might as well be amniotic fluid because on the other side of the veil is something that is very different than what we have here but all we can remember all that we think about is what is here and so God the Father sent His Son for the purpose of giving us the Holy Spirit but not just giving you the Spirit giving me the Spirit, giving each and every one of us but all of us, this mystical body of Christ shows us that the body of Christ was not just resuscitated it was transfigured, His humanity was divinized it didn't add anything to the glory that He already had as the eternal Son but it's the means by which He downloads all of that glory and gives us holiness because in the Old Testament God alone is holy there's the holy tent, the holy tablets, the holy vestments the holy sacrifices but nobody's called holy there is one exception to that for in the writings in Daniel chapter seven you actually do find somewhere in the Hebrew Bible people being referred to as saints and who are they? We don't know yet because they're not named because in Daniel chapter seven verse 13 we read about this figure by the name of the Son of Man and how He's coming to the ancient of days riding in this heavenly cloud of glory so that to Him the Father can present to the Son of Man all of the kingdoms and dominions of all of the nations so that all people shall serve Him did you ever wonder why Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man more than all of the other titles put together? Nobody else calls Him the Son of Man it's Daniel 713 after enduring the suffering of the cross after His resurrection and ascension He is coming to the Father on the clouds of glory but wait, keep reading because the second half of Daniel's vision is what is so often forgotten or overlooked because the Son of Man doesn't get any more glory than He had in eternity so why does He go to all of the trouble? In order to entrust the kingdom to the quote, saints of the most high the saints of the most high, yeah who are they? Well, they're not here yet and they won't arrive until the Son of Man suffers, dies and rises and ascends into heaven and suddenly there is this breakthrough as we move from the Old Testament to the new where you alone are holy and then the power of the most high shall overshadow you and the child that will be born shall be called the Holy One of God so the incarnation brings about an explosion of holiness such that the Blessed Virgin Mary is Holy Mary and then when you discover at Pentecost the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the 120 and then the 3000 who are baptized and then the numbers keep growing as the church keeps expanding this is called the mystical body of Christ it's not just a figure of speech it is an invisible mystical reality it is the single largest spiritual organism on the planet it's living, it's breathing but it's not just on the planet, it's also in heaven it's a lot like what Professor Burton Barnes discovered back in the 60s when he laid claim to finding the single largest physical organism and the single largest, the oldest physical organism have you ever been out to Colorado to see the aspen groves? They're beautiful, sometimes you have thousands of trees but in Utah you have the pando grove and what is that? Well pando comes from the Latin I spread because the pando grove curiously has turned out to be a single root system that stretches from the end to end and when they tabulated in the 80s the length of the root system it was 12,427 miles or roughly half the earth's circumference 47,000 aspen trees but actually the 47,000 aspen trees in these 106 acres are not separate trees they're one organism and when they have done the research what they have concluded is that this organism is at least 14,000 years old at the least and possibly as old as 80,000 years old and I would propose to you that who we are as members of the mystical body of Christ which is not a metaphor or a figure of speech it is a reality that is not yet manifest but just because it's invisible doesn't make it less real and so what I would propose to you is that we should look around and realize that in our mortal bodies we have been united through the sacraments by the Holy Spirit to become something that we were made to be but something that we cannot make ourselves apart from the Holy Spirit so the Father patiently waited until the fullness of time when the Son was sent and then the Son tells the apostles it is to your advantage that I go back to the Father for unless I do the paraclete the spirit of truth, the spirit of power won't come but if he comes, guess what? You'll not only be led into all truth but all holiness and so what you never find in the Old Testament is what you find on practically every page of the new and yet I never noticed it because it was hiding in plain view Paul is continually referring to the saints at Corinth in Ephesus and Galatia and elsewhere because we have something of the Holy Spirit and so just as that pando grove subsisted for thousands of years almost exclusively underground where the root system was so the souls of the faithful departed of the Old Testament were there until the death, the resurrection and the ascension remember that odd passage in Matthew 27 that when Jesus was raised from the dead all of these tombs in Jerusalem were open and people saw the bodies of the saints where'd they go? He took them up with him to heaven and all the visions of heaven that you read about in the Old Testament who do you see surrounding the throne of God? Angels, the seraphim, the cherubim like in Isaiah 6 holy, holy, holy, sing the seraphim. Are there any humans? Not a single one but in Revelation chapter 4 when John has his vision of heaven you have the 24 elders, you have the martyrs you have the vast multitude of the saints surrounding the throne of the Lamb singing what? Holy, holy, holy alongside of the angels because with the ascension of Christ heaven has been repopulated by the saints this isn't pious fiction this isn't religious rhetoric this is a reality that we profess by faith because we haven't seen it yet but this is the only thing for which we were made this weekend is an awesome reunion for me and for many of you but it's a garbage dump compared to the reunion that awaits us when we get home to see the face of God the Father and realize that the whole purpose of the incarnation was that the son of man would give him the saints of the most high a kingdom that will go on for billions and trillions of years 10 trillion years from now you look at your watch it'll be the first minute of eternity and we'll wonder why it seems so long in the anodic sack of earthly life these sacred mysteries are not something that will ever master with our intellects but this is what is the food for the heart this is what we need to not only profess but meditate upon to move from spiritual childhood into spiritual adolescence into holiness so that we are children greatly loved by God though we want to be younger brothers and sisters with Christ but ultimately only through the power of the Holy Spirit not by chance but by our choice but even more by his choice shall we become not just children not just brothers and sisters but saints of the most high and nothing less this is who we are this is why he came this is why you came in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Almighty God our Father in heaven we thank you for the good news we ask you in the name of Jesus for you to pour out the Holy Spirit upon us that we will begin to see just how good it is that we will not take this grace for granted any longer that we will lay hold of it for ourselves and for our loved ones for spouses for our children for our siblings for our God children and our grandchildren as well we ask you now to make us living members of the mystical body that we will continue to grow and spread as the single largest spiritual organism that fills the heavens and the earth hear us then as we pray our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen