Opening: The Solemnity of All Saints
Good morning, everyone.
Well, my dear brothers and sisters, today, November 1st, Solemnity of All the Saints.
And today is a day of hope, hope for all of us, because every saint had a past, every sinner has a future, right?
I hope you have heard that before.
Every saint has a past, just like me.
Every sinner has a future, just like me, just like us, like all of us.
So there's no reason for despair.
But we need to, once in a while, we need to recalibrate, regroup, reorient ourselves, so that we're doing what we should be doing, and we're going in the direction that we should be going in the direction.
In what direction we should be going in?
In the direction of God.
The Readings: Servants, Soldiers, and the Beatitudes
And here, in Revelations, in the first reading, it says, Do not damage the land, or the sea, or the trees, until we put, in other words, don't destroy the world, until we have identified on the foreheads of the servants of our God.
In the Bible, we use the word servant.
In the Catholic Church, we use the word servant, instead of the word soldier.
Because a servant is a soldier, who has a mission, a purpose, and is driven towards that from their leader.
So we are servants of our God.
We are soldiers of the Lord.
Lord, in the Responsorial Psalm, Lord, let this people that longs, this is the people that longs to see your face.
To see your face means we want to go in the direction.
I want to go in the right direction.
I want to see your face, Lord.
And in the church, the baptismal font is there.
That's the beginning of our journey, and at the very end, is Jesus here.
And it would be wonderful if it was just a straight path.
But many of us take some turns.
Someone once asked Pope Benedict, how many ways are there to heaven?
How many ways are there to heaven?
And Pope Benedict said, as many as there are people.
We're all on this journey, and all over the place.
But we all should be seeking the Lord's face.
And here, blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are they who mourn.
Blessed?
Blessed?
Blessed are the meek.
And then, now things start getting clearer.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
What does the word blessed mean?
What does this word mean?
It means, blessed means, you're on the right path.
You're on the right path.
That's what it means.
Blessed are they who are willing to be poor in spirit, who are willing to mourn, who are willing to be meek, who are willing to hunger for thirst and righteousness, because that's how everything begins, through pain and suffering.
So the question here.
OK, so now, here's the question.
What are you looking for in your life?
What are you looking for?
And if you don't know what you're looking for, that's OK. But you've got to start thinking about it.
Because some of us are getting old.
What are you looking for?
The Trip to New York: NASDAQ and St. Patrick's Cathedral
And sometimes, we forget.
We just took, two weeks ago, two weeks ago, was it two weeks ago?
We went to New York.
So we took 13 of our students to New York City, to the financial district.
And we went on a personal tour in the NASDAQ.
We rang the bell.
We rang the bell for the NASDAQ.
Some top dogs were there.
Some company was celebrating 20 years there.
Millions of dollars, trillions of dollars.
And I was telling the kids, trillions of dollars go through this building.
Trillions of dollars.
And you can have some of it.
And I want you to have some of it, so that you can give it back to the church.
We'll put your name.
We'll put your name.
OK. And then, we went to St. Patrick's Cathedral for Mass.
And the reading, beware of those who are greedy.
And the kids were looking at me.
Father.
And then, of course, the priest at St. Patrick's said, can you give the homily?
I'm like, oh my.
What am I going to say?
Why beware?
Beware not to be greedy.
Don't be greedy.
Why?
Because if that's what you think will make you happy, if you think that being happy means having more things, you are in for a big disappointment.
You will never be happy because of having more things.
This is the message of Christianity.
Things will not make you more happy.
Your heart wasn't made to be happy having more things.
Your heart was made to love, to love.
That's what your heart was made for, not to be made for having more things, to be in love.
And so, yeah, sometimes love is painful.
Sometimes love is challenging.
The Saints Who Figured It Out
All the saints finally figured it out at one moment in their life.
St. Francis, who was rich.
He came from a rich family.
What did he do?
He said to his father, I don't want any of it.
I don't want any of it.
And then his father said to him, remember the story?
His father said to him, even the clothes you're wearing belong to me.
You can have all these clothes.
And he took off his clothes right in front of his father.
And he said, you can take it all.
I don't care.
Would you follow a man like that today?
I think I would.
I'm looking for something that is challenging.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe I wouldn't.
But I don't know.
He was able to gather so many people who followed him.
And then St. Ignatius, another beautiful story.
Wounded in battle, convalescing in a hospital, he has only two books next to him, the Bible and the lives of the saints.
And he reads the lives of the saints.
And it converts his life, changes his life.
And instead of being worldly and superficial, he changed his life and became a great priest, a great founder of the Jesuits, and changed the course of history for the church.
The American Girl Doll and the Value of Challenge
Not too long ago, I went over to my sister's and I saw the American Girl doll, the one that I bought.
How many of you have an American Girl doll?
How many of you have an American?
Raise your hand if you have an American Girl doll.
I don't.
That thing was expensive.
And remember, there was a store, American Girl doll store at the Galleria.
And whenever it was my niece's birthday or Christmas, we went to that store.
And let me tell you something, Kristen, Addie, Josefina, Samantha, we got a lot of them.
And that thing was over $100.
I was like, let's go Barbie, $20.
We get a Barbie for $20, superficial Barbie.
No, we got an American Girl doll.
And not only that, but then we had to get the outfit, the two outfits, one for the doll and one for my niece.
And then we had to have the little tea party upstairs on the second floor.
And then for another $50, you could get her hair combed.
What a rat, what a business, what a business.
What a business.
But you know what?
The woman who started the American Girl doll, her name was Pleasant Rowland.
I looked her up.
She was a teacher.
She was a teacher, a school teacher.
And she was a textbook writer.
The reason why those dolls were so expensive is because she researched every piece of that period of history of that time.
The furniture, the little outfits, the books that talked about historical fiction, right?
They were historical in a certain sense, fictitious character, but they were meaningful.
Kristen, she was an immigrant from Sweden.
And her best friend died from cholera.
And Felicity, the 1770s, Revolutionary War.
Addie, she escaped from slavery.
She was an African-American.
Molly, her father, a doctor, was fighting in World War II in England.
Samantha, Victorian era, and was an orphan.
And the girls wanted to read more and more about these.
Why?
Because they were challenging.
They were challenging.
Like, these girls never knew about an orphanage, never knew about cholera, never knew about disease, never knew about losing your best friend, never learned about having to bring water from the river over to them.
And girls loved it.
And it became huge.
And then, in 1998, she sold the company to Mattel.
And you know what happened to the American Girl doll?
Now, instead of beautiful furnishings and stuff like that, now you have the American girl with the cell phone and with the Stanley cup, literally.
And nobody cares.
A Father's Lesson and the Danger of Comfort
Do you?
I realized one of the best things my father ever did was he used to tell me about his youth when he was younger.
I remember coming home crying because maybe one of my friends wasn't speaking to me anymore.
And I remember my dad said, why are you crying?
I'm like, Dad, I had a bad day.
A bad day.
Do you know what a bad day is?
Let me tell you what a bad day is.
When I was your age, the Americans, the English, were bombing our town.
In the 1940s, they were bombing.
We were running to the caves.
And you're crying because your friend won't talk to you?
You know?
But I'll tell you.
I'll tell you.
It kind of puts some muscle.
If you're looking for you or your children to have a comfortable life, you're sucking the life out of them.
And that sucks the life out of us.
What the Saints Did
The saints were like us, human beings.
And they did something about it.
They went after either changing something or making something better.
That's what they did.
They saw something that they didn't like, and they made it better, or they changed it.
And that's why they are saints.
Because they loved us so much, they thought that things could be better.
And that's why those dolls inspired so many young people.
Because they realized things can be better.
And things are better.
And when I think that my life is so bad, I have to remember what it really was like in the past.
And that there is hope.
There's hope.
Closing: Stick With Me
So my dear brothers and sisters, today, truly, we realize.
All in all, the lives of the saints means this.
Stick with me.
That's what it means.
Jesus says to people all the time, stick with me.
Stay with me.
Walk with me.
And we'll do great things together.
Amen?
Amen.
