"Homily of the Day" from Catholic Exchange: Required Reading

Monsignor Dennis Clark, Ph.D. should be on my required reading list every day. I'm not Foolish enough to make that happen. But I'm getting there.

Just apprehend what he offers all of us here:

I doubt that killing has ever occurred to us as a serious option, but a swift counterattack is all too common when an unwanted truth is spoken to us. Of course, not all truth-tellers have our best interests in mind, which makes it all the harder to receive their message. But the biggest barrier to our hearing the truth is always the same: Our old nemesis, ego, which has to defend its foolish pose as the center of the universe and the repository of all wisdom and competence. What a joke! Yet, how often we let ego trick us into defending the indefensible.

There's a cure for ego's power over us, and that is to give ourselves thoroughly into the hands of Our Lord, with the open-hearted admission that we're far from finished works and that we never will get put together if He doesn't help us. That's the real truth, and it will set us free from ego and all its tiresome pretensions.

I hear from a friend of Lois' once that ego is an acronym for Easing God Out. Or, as Fr. Tom of the Archdioces of NY's Parish Mission Team once said in another notable homily, far too often we affirm the first commandment as "I am the Lord, My God, I will have no Gods before me!"

Christ is the perfect antidote to ego. Far from asserting his importance, Christ willingly embraced humility by embracing humiliation. Far from demanding the best portion of life for himself, Christ gave the best of himself to his enemies--us! Far from commanding all as the center of the universe, Christ surrendered his will and his life over to his Father. In so doing, he won for us the right to call him our brother, and thus, to call God our Father. Fallen though we are, we are redeemed in his blood, and in communion with him we live in the life of the Trinity. Life in our God obliterates any need to ever Ease God Out.

Thank you, Monsignor Clark, for daring to speak the truth.