Father Nick Blaha Homily Cast

Delivered at Blessed Sacrament Church

"While she lived at Jorundgaard, she had never thought otherwise than that her parents’ whole life and everything they did was for the sake of her and her sisters. Now she seemed to realize that great currents of both sorrow and joy had flowed between these two people, who had been given to each other in their youth by their fathers, without being asked. And she knew nothing of this except that they had departed from her life together. Now she understood that these lives of these two people had contained much more than love for their children. And yet that love had been strong and wide and unfathomably deep; while the love shegave them in return was weak and thoughtless and selfish, even back in her childhood when her parents were her whole world. She seemed to see herself standing far, far away—so small at that distance of time and place. She was standing in the flood of sunlight streaming in through the smoke vent in the old hearth house back home, the winter house of her childhood. Her parents were standing back in the shadows, and they seemed to tower over her, as tall as they had been when she was small. They were smiling at her, in the way she now knew one smiles at a little child who comes and pushes aside dark and burdensome thoughts. “I thought, Kristin, that once you had children of your own, then you would better understand . . . .” She remembered when her mother said those words. Sorrowfully, the daughter thought that she still didn’t understand her mother. But now she was beginning to realize how much she didn’t understand." --Sigred Undset, Kristen Lavransdatter

Delivered at Christ the King Church

"In all the teaching of Saint John of the Cross, despite the forbidding features of its radical demands, hides a poet of sanctity who has fallen in love with God, even helplessly so. The Church may call him the Mystical Doctor in recognition of the superlative teaching in his four major treatises; yet the weight of that title is not entirely helpful. He is not proposing a speculative doctrine of mystical ascent to be mastered by careful study and strict application. Abstraction has little place or purpose in his writing, even as he makes every effort to clarify in precise language what may often me impossible lessons to convey to a reader lacking experience of what he is elucidating. Simply reading once through his work will never disclose his teaching adequately. At some point, he has to become a very loved mentor to whom one turns with increasing need over the course of years, or else he slips away quietly and will be forgotten, as he was apparently forgotten by many in his own lifetime. But if he is embraced as a trusted guide, and his direction is accepted, he can become a companion who pushes and prods us to a mysterious, unsettling desire for God, which is only a start toward greater effects over time. If he remains a friend for many years, a hunger and fire in our soul for God far beyond any initial expectation of spiritual pursuit is bound to ignite within us." --Father Donald Haggerty

The Yes of Jesus Christ Composed as as retreat talks for priests of Communion and Liberation at the invitation of Don Giussani in 1986