March 18, 2012: 4th Sunday of Lent

A few nights ago, I drove into Baton Rouge to make hospital visits to a couple of our parishioners. Many of you who have not spent time in the hospital with a loved one, may not realize just how valuable our presence is to the one who is ill. My first stop was to see a parishioner who was in automobile accident and is now at a long-term care facility after spending 3 weeks in an Intensive Care Unit. She is still in coma, but she is aware of the presence of her family members. Her husband was ecstatic when she showed small signs of response when he played their wedding song on a CD player. He said she shows a visible sign on her fingers when her favorite music is played, as if she is trying to tap her fingers and mouth out the words. Unfortunately, she also reacts to pain; most notably when they change her position or clean her there are big drops of tears in her eyes. That is when her husband or her mother then strokes her face to say, “It’s okay. It’s going to pass.” Over the past three weeks, this family has made many friends at the Intensive Care Unit. Watching other families struggle with hope and faith as their loved ones clung to survival, made previous strangers into something like an extended family who provided support and encouragement to each other.

How do you measure love? I suppose you can attempt to measure it with modern science’s equipment. Connected to our parishioner who is in a coma is a heart rate and blood pressure monitor with a large LCD screen. The screen displays the number of beats of her heart. Nurses came in and took note of the information, but they were interested only in the number. However, for her husband and for her children, the number on the screen is a miracle in the making. For them, those extra beats of her heart are God’s generous gift to them; God is allowing her to spend more time with her family here on earth. For doctors and nurses, the twitch in her eyes, reflexes of her head and limbs, are natural physical movements, but for the family, it is a sign of her showing appreciation for the love being poured out in that room.
If modern science cannot capture and measure human love, how can it possibly capture and measure Heavenly Father’s love? (For those of you who hunt deer, you use motion-sensing deer camera to photograph deer near the feeder. If we install it around in our house, can we capture God secretly going around and loving us?) I’m certain that we know many around us, even our own children who have been through Catholic school, who say to us that they don’t believe in God and that God doesn’t love them. They say to us, “show me a sign that God exists and that God loves, then I will believe.”

Our First Reading speaks about God showing His children signs and messages. It reads, “Early and often did the LORD, the God of their fathers,
send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets.” I wonder if that’s what our generation does—mocks and scoffs at God’s messengers because of hardness of their hearts. God rises up prophets and messengers in each generation in order to remind the disbelieving children. A few days ago, someone called for me to give Last Rites to a man who is dying, a man whom I worked with 10 years ago at a chemical plant where I was the operations engineer and he was the shift supervisor. I stood at his bedside and anointed him and prayed with his family. How more real can God be, when He can raise His messenger from a chemical plant!

I have to say that one of the unique things about being a messenger of God is that I’m sent to people of all walks of life. I’m sent to people who are dirt poor, to people who are in prison, to people who live a quiet, middle class life, to people who are CEO’s of billion dollar companies, and to people who have enormous wealth and political influence. But I have come to one conclusion: before the door of death, all of us are stripped of earthly privileges, and we stand before our Heavenly Father empty handed. Everything we have received, we cannot claim it as our own for He has provided all. With our hands open empty, Our Father asks us, “Have you loved those that I have entrusted to you? Have you loved Me and My Son with all your heart, all your strength, and understanding?”

Those who have had a near-death experience has sad that during the time that they were ‘dead’ that they became aware of what our Heavenly Father did for them throughout their entire life. They have said that standing before Our Heavenly Father at the last moment of our life that we suddenly become aware of His immeasurable love, and that we finally understand that His love was so great that He sent His Beloved Son into the world.

Jesus who was filled with enduring love was sent to bring all of us back to the Father. We, in this earthly life, cannot fully comprehend the Father’s love. Yet, we must share the gift of the Father’s love and we must not withhold this love from those we do not like or those who are different from us. We cannot know the Father’s love if we do not experience human love. We must learn to share the love the Father placed in our hearts with all His children. Then we will see and know that love transforms the heart. The Father made a great sacrifice of love for all His children, for His Son suffered for all His children.

Before I left from visiting our parishioner who is in coma, I asked her husband and son to look up on their iPhone the lyrics for the song “Be Not Afraid.” With her mother, her sister, her daughter, her husband, and her son, we all sang the song “Be Not Afraid” with all our hearts. How beautiful it is to sing of Heavenly Father’s love for us. All of us are called to give and share this love.