CLICK HERE to read my latest article in The Priest Magazine. My new column appears every other month in The Priest Magazine.

“Saint Andre Bessette” Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC originally published by World Library Publications, Chicago, IL. Original art from Sacred Heart Church, Colorado Springs, CO. 

Third Sunday of Advent

December 15, 2019

Let us pray for the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the poor to have good news proclaimed to them by God’s fidelity and tenderness. May patience abound and may Christ save us.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us rejoice in the beauty of God’s plan and God’s voice of peace in our world and Universal Church. May we be instruments of justice in every land and nation.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray for patience within our families, among those aching for forgiveness, and those who wait for healing in mind and spirit.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray that our hearts remain strong and fearless as we await the coming of our Savior. May Advent lead us to fidelity and service in Christ’s name.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray in rejoicing song for God’s mercy toward the sinner, and his kindness toward those most in need. May we serve the Gospel in peace.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray for our parishioners, benefactors and strangers who have died recently, those who await the glory and beauty of God’s Kingdom. In this Mass…

We pray to the Lord.

“The Blind Regain Their Sight” Pastel: Ronald Raab, CSC 2016

December 15, 2019

Third Sunday of Advent

Dear People of Holy Longing,

Today is “Gaudete” Sunday, which means “rejoicing.” We are more than halfway to Christmas. The pink candle on our Advent wreaths are lit this day. We rejoice since we know where we are going, ultimately to the promise of Jesus-made-flesh in our world. The liturgy expands our sense of time. We celebrate Christ’s coming in the past. We wait for his second coming at the end of time. We also open our hearts to receive his love in our hearts in our day and age.

Our New Testament scripture for today’s Mass, James 5: 7-10, invites us into deep patience. Advent creates within our hearts a profound longing. This text challenges us to be patient. This season seems to bring to the surface all that we long for. We long for good health for a grandmother to live long enough to see her next grandchild. We long for reconciliation among our siblings in order to come to the Christmas table in peace. We long for an inner calm so that we may face our own hypocrisies. We long for peace in our divided world. We wait for the hungry to be fed and families to be housed. We ache in these Advent days to experience rejoicing when we know we are yet complete and whole. Patience is our posture for God to do the work of love within us. Patience is the birthing of love, God incarnate.

We long for our Church, our parish, and our families, to live our faith in peace. Living our faith is more than following a formula. We live our faith in the Church so that we may serve people’s basic needs. We hear this in today’s gospel, Matthew 11:2-11. Jesus reveals these miracles of the blind regaining their sight, the lame walk, and lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised. People’s real needs become ways in which faith is revealed and lived. We are to bring the miracle of Jesus’ real presence to the human longing of people.

I invite you in these remaining days of Advent to take your personal prayer more seriously. We are called to live close to the Sacred Mass. The new liturgical year and the scriptures offer us an opportunity to form our personal prayer. In other words, cultivate in your prayer a real desire for God. Sit quietly and sort through your life and offer to God all of the events, relationships, and things you just can’t control on earth. This is where Advent can take hold of us. We wait for Christ Jesus in the full redemption of our lives. We wait for God to be made flesh within our hearts. Advent offers us an opportunity to rely more fully on God’s tenderness toward our human needs.

Christmas becomes a radical awareness of God’s love imbedded within our human condition. This is where our hearts become ablaze with love, with hope for the desperate situations in which people find themselves. Let’s rejoice for the love that truly sets us free.

“Be patient, brothers and sister, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient.”

 Advent peace,

Fr. Ron

Our Lady of Guadalupe: Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2018

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Response: Pray for us

When our conflicts enrage violence…

When our borders become prisons…

When our children turn into enemies…

When our poor remain prisoners…

When our poverty overwhelms families…

When our diseases discourage the future…

When our ignorance keeps us separated…

When our social media insights hatred…

When our faith melts into politics…

When our ancestors no longer teach us…

When our insecurities become religion…

When our racism destroys relationships…

When our rich enslave the poor…

When our paths merge into fear…

When our sickness turns into abhorrence…

When our brows crease from worry…

When our children are silenced by terror…

When our future lacks education…

Reveal roses of your presence…

Reveal hope for the poor…

Reveal faith in your Son, Jesus…

Amen

“Your eyes bring me home” Pencil: Ronald Raab, CSC 2019

Based on Matthew 18:12-14

I am lost.

Fearful.

Resistant.

Hardened.

You chase me.

I push back.

You find me.

Weeping.

You call me your own.

Your eyes bring me home.

Second Sunday of Advent

December 8, 2019

Let us pray for courage in our Universal Church to seek Christ Jesus. May justice flourish in our time and the fullness of peace forever.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray to wake up during these Advent days to the reality of people living in hatred, violence and hopelessness. May we hear the echoes of mercy for every person under heaven.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray that we may rouse awareness of Christ’s compassion among our lost and abandoned families and our friends and strangers alike. May Christ bring salvation to the lost, and hope for every human being.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray that our ears be attuned to the urgency of Christ’s coming in our time and world that was proclaimed by John the Baptist. May John the Baptist unite our search for hope and justice this Advent season.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray for families of soldiers overseas, for orphan and foster children, for parents without adequate employment, for siblings addicted to drugs and alcohol, for our elderly cramped in loneliness.

We pray to the Lord.

Let us pray for our departed brothers and sisters and all who await us in the glory of God’s Kingdom. In this Mass…

We pray to the Lord.

Saint John the Baptist, Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2016

December 8, 2019

Dear Caretakers of the Gospel,

John the Baptist’s voice cries out in high pitch in today’s gospel, Matthew 3:1-12. He shrieks across the desert and across our hearts to get our attention. He wants us to focus on his cousin, Jesus. In the desert he knows who the Messiah is and he desires that we all understand who he is as well. He points, yells, and stands firm that the one whom we all wait for is Jesus. The sand of the desert becomes firm ground on which to make his claim. The voice of the prophet Isaiah echoes in the heart of John and is heard even today in our hearts and lives.

John the Baptist in this Second Sunday of Advent struggles to get our attention. With his locust breath, he shouts out that salvation is not just about a prim and proper piety. Salvation for us is also not just a private or individualized faith. Salvation is a radical understanding that repentance is the way in which we will all become followers of the Messiah. John invigorates our search for the Christ in every nation and time. Justice becomes a home in which the Messiah will be made known.

John’s conviction echoes across our generations. His finger points to Christ and his heart knows that we must give up our apathy, intolerance, injustice and put our lives on the line to receive the Word-Made-Flesh. John baptizes with water, but Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit and water.

There is warning here of fire and so often the blaze of conviction has grown dim in our time. Advent’s claim is for us to restore the conviction, the fire, the hope and the love that Christ Jesus offers us salvation. We need during the Advent season to stir the embers of justice, of peace and the radical conviction that God is involved in our lives.

We have diminished Advent into a rather wimpy and domestic understanding that we are waiting for a cozy Christmas. However, we need to listen to this adult John and the adult Jesus to discover our true vocation of our baptism and the conviction that Jesus offers us a truly different way of life. We must be able to take our cue from John that there is fruit to bear in the world on our part. This fruit is the conviction that God is present and that faith matters. Our needs will be met if we wake up to the destruction of violence, war, poverty and hunger. John views this desert as the birthplace of a new Garden of Eve. The desert will bloom with justice and hope when we receive him in our repentance for Jesus Christ will make all this whole and rich, all things complete and beautiful.

I love John the Baptist. I know he points to me in my own sinfulness. I feel John’s frustrations that we just don’t realize what our faith is about. I also feel his integrity and his hope for a better world when we finally know fully his cousin, Jesus. John is not the normal illustration of Christmas. His smelly body and ripped camel’s hair wrapping, his screeching voice in the heat and his pointing without hesitation to Jesus and to our sin. However, it is exactly our hearts made clean that become the birthplace for Jesus to rest his salvation. Our heart hearts become the places in which Advent will make sense to us even this year. We desire forgiveness and the realization that hope is born in us. We are the caretakers of such a mystery.

Be ready for beauty and hope this Advent,

Fr. Ron

Today is the 19th anniversary of Dad’s death. This poem is from an experience of visiting the graves of Mom and Dad last June. 

The Clearing

I drove a rental car into the familiar cemetery

Rain and memory gently smearing the windshield

The curved maple that shaded the graves of

Mom and Dad had been cut down

Even the stump pulled from the dark Indiana soil

That old tree like an adopted sibling

Protected them from bitter winds and summer drought

Bending toward their memory with each visit

Revealing spring buds and a sparrow’s birth

The branches stood my stead

That sheltered my parents

As I become my past

The roots deep and sure

An unexpected emptiness in the clearing filled me

Sawdust illusions swept away

Leaving this child’s vulnerability on spring grass

Still a son of genuine loss

And love under raindrops

CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ON WORLD AIDS DAY 2019

This article was published in Ministry and Liturgy Magazine, November 2014. I have published several articles on my experiences.  This story is a lead-in to exploring the gospels in Ordinary Time.

I ministered among people suffering with HIV/AIDS for twenty years in the various cities in which I lived. On this World AIDS Day, I remember with pain and joy the families whom I met along the way. 

Ministering Beyond the Threshold

I ministered among people with HIV/AIDS for most of the first twenty years of my priesthood. My religious community never assigned me to such a ministry. I just happened to live at a point in history where I could not avoid being involved with people facing such a horrific illness. As I look back to those years, I would never have dreamed when I was ordained that a disease would become one of the major influences of my early priesthood.

I began sifting through people’s complications of HIV/AIDS in Colorado Springs, Colorado around 1985, and I have mentioned some of those experiences through the years in this column. I got involved because the director of the county health department was a parishioner. I gave him permission to put my name on a list of clergy who were willing to offer spiritual guidance. At that time, that list was very short.

I remember a young man who came to my office for the first time. He stood at my office door and said, “I have tried to speak to three other priests. Would you at least listen to me?” I still hold on to that question as one of the most formative questions of my priesthood.

There was much fear at the beginning of a disease that no one understood. One of the fears that brought me into the circle of care was that many religious people would not enter a hospital room to comfort a person who was sick. Clergy would stand outside the door of the patient’s room and just yell toward the person in bed.

I thought that if I promised to listen to a young man in my office, then I should also listen in a hospital room. I broke the barrier of the threshold many times. I cannot believe now how groundbreaking that gesture was at the time.

I was young and ignorant of the complications people faced from a diagnosis. However, I could struggle with the grief, the loss and the fear of dying. I learned quickly the gut-wrenching reality of people dying who were of my generation. I learned to listen for the first time in my life. I stood silently along bedsides with prayer in my soul, healing oil on my fingers and with much fear in my own heart.

I refer to this story again as I reflect on the gospels for the Second Week of Ordinary Time through the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time. I listen to these texts again with great amazement. I am struck how connected disease is to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry on earth. I find the connection startling and yet consoling.

Jesus asks his disciples and even every person in our day, “What are you looking for?” He then calls his disciples from their place of work as fisherman. Jesus tells them that he will make them fishers of men. He is saying that people will be our priority.

Immediately after Jesus calls his disciples, he encounters an unclean spirit. I am so intrigued that the unclean spirit is the one to name Jesus for who his is, “The Holy One of God.” This new teaching of authority radically identifies Jesus with the most marginalized people of his day. The people around Jesus were astonished.

Jesus is teaching us that weakness, vulnerability, and powerlessness will be our greatest teachers. In fact grief, fear and pain will begin to open us up to faith. In our suffering, we will find God.

Jesus continues by entering the house to see Simon’s mother-in-law. He reaches out his hand to her. This intimate encounter teaches us still how to live our ministry in the world. We need this personal touch, this intimate encounter to bring to people who are ill and marginalized, the love and healing of Christ Jesus. Jesus goes on to cure all the sick, the demonic and those whom people were forbidden to touch.

A leper then kneels in front of Jesus. “If you wish, you can make me clean.” I see before my eyes, the young man who came to the threshold of my office door. Jesus is moved with pity, “I do will it. Be made clean.” It was the leper who spread the word of who Jesus was and what he could do. The person filled with physical poison revealed to healthy people the miracles and presence of Christ Jesus.

People flocked to Jesus. Friends even brought friends to him by opening up a roof to lower the sick before the person of Jesus. Everyone knew what Jesus could do because the people who were sick were the teachers. Jesus even forgave sinners. Jesus still says, “I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.”

I learned so much about the healing power of Christ walking through the threshold of those hospital rooms. This is the risk for us all today as well, to bring our ministry and the Eucharist itself to the many rooms where people live in fear, doubt, isolation and pain. Jesus invites us to enter the threshold of suffering and to discover his love for every person in need.