Perhaps, Father was paraphrasing the following messages in he readings.

1 Cor 2:1-5
When I came to you, brothers and sisters,
proclaiming the mystery of God,
I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you
except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,
and my message and my proclamation
were not with persuasive words of wisdom,
but with a demonstration of Spirit and power,
so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom
but on the power of God.

from Mt. 5
Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
it is set on a lampstand,
where it gives light to all in the house.
Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.

Our excitement and exuberance in our faith should be demonstrated in our Christian actions to be seen by others. Thus seasoned with the salt of our actions and if hearts have eyes to see, our task will be accomplished.

Peace

Salt and Light

Trust a Catholic to focus on the negative side of the "salt and light" gospel reading today. I don't think it's sound pastoral practice to warn against being "too salty" or "too bright"! That's hardly the problem of American Catholics (or American Christians in general). It may be something you could advise to some specific person, and I've known a few at Wheaton, but it's hardly something to preach to a complacent suburban American congregation. Would Father offer this advice to a St. Francis, a St. Ignatius Loyal, or any other number of saints I could cite that we would call "overzealous"? And to put down renewel movements like Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, etc., no matter how many caveats you throw in about how great they are, is uncool. A pastor should encourage his congregation to be MORE salt, MORE light. Unfortunately, this homily just encourages the Evangelical stereotypes of Catholics as being fundamentally unserious about their faith.

Zeal should never be discouraged; complacency should never be encouraged, no matter how unintentionally done.

A Little More Hart

I have posted in the past snippets of writings by the Orthodox theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart. Occasionally you run into written word that expresses an idea or thought that has been bouncing around in your head, but that you have not had the opportunity or the words to express it. It may be the case that you have made an attempt to verbalize an idea and then you come across that same idea as stated by someone else in a much more succinct expression. Such is the case with the following idea taken from an article in the February issue of First Things written by David Bentley Hart. The article is about the writings of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger.


Quoting the article:

Modernity, for Heidegger, is simply the time of realized nihilism, the age in which the will to power has become the ground of all our values; as a consequence it is all but impossible for humanity to dwell in the world as anything other than its master. As a cultural reality it is the perilous situation of a people that has thoroughly -- one might even say systematically -- forgotten the mystery of being, or forgotten the mystery of the difference between beings and being as such. Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited calculus of utility, or of the barest mechanical laws of cause and effect. It is a "rationality" of the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling truth that things are. It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that cannot truly think.