 the father son of the Holy Spirit. So today we speak and we hear about two holy women. So first of all Hannah, like who was Hannah? She was the mother of the first prophet of Israel, Samuel. Hannah was barren. He greatly grieved her. Her husband had two wives. She was the first and the favored but she couldn't give him a son. So he married a second woman and the second wife mocked Hannah. It was embarrassing to her. At the time it was considered a curse to not be able to bear children. So Hannah on one occasion goes to the temple in Shiloh and she's crying and wailing and she's so besides herself that Eli, always the compassionate priest, thinks that she's drunk. Right? And he says, hey, get out of here. You know, come in here drunk. I love Hannah's response. We see her humility. I'm paraphrasing. She basically says, look, I've got issues, okay? But drinking isn't one of them, right? I'm not drunk. I'm just really sad. This is why are you sad? Because I don't have a son. He blessed her there at the temple of Shiloh. Our scripture reading today is Hannah returning because she promised God if you give me a son I will consecrate him to your service. You know, often times it's wonderful. Samuel didn't agree with that. It doesn't matter. You listen to your mama, right? So she said, I'll bring him back. Today she fulfills her promise. Imagine the heartache and she brings that little boy to the temple. She will honor the promise she made to God. She will fulfill her vow and she leaves her son in the temple in order to be trained in the ways of the Levites, the free way of the priests. Powerful. Look at this holy woman. Our reading today, our psalm was not actually a psalm. It was actually her hymn because Hannah also sang. You can imagine the fullness of her heart and she has to fulfill her vow and she starts to sing to God and she's thinking about his majesty, how he cast down the mighty, but he lifts up the lowly, how he makes the poor rich and the rich poor. We call it the paradoxical inverse. The God takes what we think and he makes it the opposite and back and forth and Hannah praises God and she sings because her heart is so broken and so sorrowful, but she knows that she has done the right thing, the righteous thing. Now compare Hannah to our lady. Look at our lady today. Our reading was her Magnificat. She's gone to Elizabeth. She's obeyed. She herself was going to be quietly divorced, which would have been humiliating, but she was willing to accept anything that came in order to follow what God had asked. She would fulfill her vow. She would accomplish the mission given to her. And today as Elizabeth greets her and wants to praise her, who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Our lady doesn't say, Yeah, I'm pretty great. Keep a comment, right? Our lady immediately turns and says, My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior. She sings the praises of God. She turns and our lady also gives that paradoxical inverse. He will cast down the mighty, but he will lift up the lowly. He will bring the wayward back and those who are comfortable, he will make wayward. We see again the ways of God. God cannot be controlled. God simply has to be followed and trusted. His ways are not always safe, but they are always good and they are the path to holiness. So look at these two holy women. What do we see their emphasis on fulfilling God's will, their willingness to do it, to put their heart where their words are and their ability to sing, to lift their hearts even in sorrowful or uncertain moments? Can we not learn so much from these holy women? How many vows have we made to God? Our baptismal vows, first and foremost, are we as adamant as these holy women to fulfill our vows? I think it's powerful that the psalmist asks, How can I repay the favor given to me by God? I will fulfill my vows. I will lift the chalice in the midst of His people. These holy women, Hannah and our lady, they do that and they sing. They don't let anything get them down. You can imagine Hannah going back saying, Oh no, I got to deal with the other wife because my son's not with me. It starts wallowing in self pity. I can't believe I did that. No, I really didn't mean that vow. I changed my mind. I didn't know it was going to be this way. We find none of that. We find nothing that is so common in the hearts of believers today. Self pity, entitlement, bitterness, anger, compromise, accommodation. What has happened to the hearts of the people of God? Can we not learn from Hannah and our lady to reorder ourselves to put our emotions in their place? Our emotions have no moral identity other than the one we give them. Our emotions, they move. They're part of our lower portions of our human nature. We use our intellect and our will to order our emotions. I don't feel like doing it. Well, look, if this was about us feeling like doing it, this would have been over a long time ago because the Lord didn't feel like hanging on the cross, right? The apostles didn't feel like dying like martyr as martyrs. Someone says, Well, I don't want to do that. I don't feel like it. It makes me uncomfortable. I didn't know that was an option, right? Because it's not an option of the Christian faith. It's not an option of Christian discipleship. We order our emotions. We fulfill our vows. We complete our mission and we sing. We lift our hearts by the grace of God, as we saw these two holy women do today. You know, isn't it powerful to think that Hannah, when she did this, she made news in heaven. Imagine the angels rejoicing over the obedience of Hannah, right? Give me each other high fives. She did it. All right. All right. We weren't sure. Awesome. This is great, right? And imagine the angelic hosts rejoicing over the obedience of our lady who is their lady and their queen and they rejoice. Dear friends, what are we doing? Are we making news in heaven today? You know, our parish is, we got the devil scared. He's so scared. Do you guys how many confessions we've heard just in the last week, the last month? My goodness, Father again had to go on vacation, okay? Right? He heard so many confessions, right? Father Cooper started the 530 mass late because there were so many confessions. We have the devil scared because he realized that this parish, this community, we are willing to fight. We want to make some news in heaven. The angels give each other high fives and says, dang, look at that parish. Look at what that community is doing. They are unleashing the power of God's grace. They are doing, fulfilling their vows, fulfilling what God has given to them. And they themselves will marvel at what God will be able to do through us and what he has already accomplished to us. Never forget what our Lord said. If you think that I am accomplishing great works, our Lord said this. My followers will do far greater things, far greater things. We are the baptized, the spirit of God that raised Jesus from the dead dwells within each of us. We are a powerful force as individuals. We are an unstoppable spiritual force as a community. Our Lady of Grace, we have been making news in heaven. Massive conversions and outpouring of grace and confessions. The masses, I suspect and I pray that we have fewer sacrilegious communities at this altar than so many parishes in large part because we talk about them. If you're not prepared, if you have some problems in your heart, simply ask for a blessing. Do not sacrilege the body of our Lord at this altar. And we're working on that. And what about the anointings of the sick? My goodness, the other day, I almost ran out of Q-tips. You know what I mean? We got to order the special long ones, okay? So many people coming for the healing masses need to be anointing. Today, this afternoon, Mary Ann Mervek, she runs our homebound ministry. She and I, we're going to be all over this place anointing the sick. It's going to be like so biblical. Jesus went out and started to anoint the sick and pray over them. That's going to be Mary Ann and myself. I'm anointing not her, okay, right? With the only shame of grace. This is making news in heaven. We're making news in heaven because this parish, our hearts, we're preparing for the coming of the Lord and the angels are rejoicing and the holy ones are rejoicing. Imagine what your patron saints are doing in paradise. Your loved ones who are in paradise. They're like, yes, they get it. They're doing it, you know. And please God, one day when we join them, they'll give us high fives and say, it was so great what you were a part of. It was so great that you unleashed the power of God. You should have heard everyone talking about what was going on in India land. Our Lady of Grace. And I'm so glad that you were a part of it. This is what our loved ones will say to us. The holy ones will say to us. But that means we have to be a part of it. So receive the grace of God. Unleash the power. Make news in heaven in your life. I pray that when you get there they say, man, you were the front page. You were all what everyone was talking about. As opposed to yeah, you were kind of like on page 26 section G. Right, you know. And you would decide that. We decided as a community. I want to encourage you as we are inspired by Hannah and our Lady who made powerful news and paradise to make news in heaven today. Accept the grace of God. Fan it into flame and do the works of God in your life and among your loved ones in your neighborhood. And then be a part of this parish as we seek to fulfill our vows to do everything that God asks of us and to sing with all our hearts as we do it.