1st Sunday of Lent, C March 9, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
In 1925 in New York, a 27 year-old woman became pregnant. Normally, it’s not surprising for a woman in her 20s sharing her life with a man to experience that. Only, this woman thought it would never happen because of a choice she had made the last time she was with child, something she thought would leave her barren the rest of her life. But then it happened anyway.
This momentous event wasn’t entirely isolated. Shortly before finding herself pregnant, she had started to really pay attention to how much beauty there was in the world. Despite being agnostic up to that point, she started to wonder “how can there be no God when there are all these beautiful things?” Then with new life in her womb, she found herself feeling grateful, which raised a question, grateful to whom? Within two years, Dorothy Day answered that question by entering the Catholic Church along with her new baby, baptized Tamar Teresa. In her openness to beauty, this upswell of gratitude caused her to discover God as the one whom human beings ought to thank for all things. Now she’s called “Servant of God” and on the path to canonization.
Perhaps, then, we too should let gratitude guide us as we journey through this Lenten season and through life. While there is much to be said for penances and fasting, we cannot do these things well unless we know why. Gratitude is the why. Indeed, it is the very heart of worship: to give thanks to God for the good he has done in creating us, in sustaining us, in being patient with our sins and failings, in offering us mercy and grace to be healed of those same sins. Had Dorothy Day not experienced firsthand the terrible consequences of the choices made earlier in life, she may never have come to appreciate just how grand God’s love and mercy truly are. But, once she did, she spent the rest of her life giving thanks to God for it.
So, give yourself the chance to be grateful to God! Like Dorothy Day, see the beauty. Yes, there is mess and chaos and disease and sin. But also, there are always sunrises and clouds and stars and flowers and snow and laughing children and food and drink. There’s the incredible complex biological harmony required for the human body to take a single step. Like Dorothy Day, let the undeserved goodness of God, his mercy wash over you. Whatever your choices in the past, he offers you mercy right now. He keeps you alive right now. Seek forgiveness in confession and count the blessings given you every day despite your sin.
And when you do connect to that existential gratitude, learn to express it properly. How did Dorothy, how do we express this lifelong act of gratitude to God? Sacrifice, Service, and Trust.
Sacrifice is the most obvious expression of gratitude. God, you’ve given me so much, I want to give some of it back to you. That’s what we see in the first reading, Moses telling the Israelites to literally take food grown on the land given them by God and to put it on the altar. “Fruit of the earth and work of human hands…” Dorothy Day was known for her lifelong service to the poor and advocating for social justice, but she was an avid lover of the Eucharist, too. She told her brother, “by daily going to him for the gift of himself as daily bread, I am convinced of [God’s] love.” At a Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, she said “our Creator gave us life and the Eucharist to sustain our life.”
Eucharist means thanksgiving. It is also a sacrifice. Bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood, but not just his ordinary body and blood, it’s his crucified – sacrificed – and resurrected body and blood. That’s why Jesus starts his ministry with 40 days of fasting, of sacrificing in the form of not eating. “One does not live on bread alone” and by giving up “bread” – or whatever you’ve given up – we remind ourselves of the even greater gifts God gives us. Ignore the people online who tell you fasting is meaningless or hypocritical. Jesus did it and told us to do it. That’s enough reason all on it’s own. On top of that, we can literally unite our fasting to the eternal sacrifice of the Mass. Worth it! Do it for the right reason – gratitude and discipline – but please do it!
Service. When you are grateful to someone, what do you do? Look for a chance to do something kind in return. Often, we ask “what can I do for you? How can I express my gratitude?” Guess what? God has told us exactly what he wants. “As I have done for you, so should you do for one another.” And “whatsoever you do for one of these least ones, you do for me.” Charity to neighbor and to the poor is gratitude to God… if we’re willing to make it so. Dorothy Day’s unyielding love for the poor wasn’t disconnected from the Church’s theology, morality, and rituals like the sacraments. It was the result of those things.
If you’re all about confession, Mass, prayers, and fasting, but do not have an active love for the needy and your neighbor, a willingness to sacrifice for their benefit and to serve them… something is missing! This isn’t about political solutions, though it should definitely influence your politics! The devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and what does Jesus say? “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.” Why not “serve” God by taking over and running the world? Because that isn’t what God asked of him. Jesus served his father by caring for people personally and sacrificially. He “lost” politically because he was willing to stand by unpopular truths and pay more attention to the good of individuals right in front of him than to the ethereal power games played by the pharisees and Pontius Pilate. This sacrificial service, though, must remain connected to our last point: trust.
What’s the thing that most offends God? A lack of trust. I can’t tell you how many times saints had visions of Jesus or Mary telling them that God is deeply upset at people’s lack of trust. The entire Divine Mercy devotion? All about trust. It says, “Jesus I trust in you” right there on the image for a reason! All sin is ultimately a lack of trust in God’s goodness. Sin says to God, “I don’t want what you’re giving me, I want to take for myself what I think I want.” As the devil insinuated to Adam and Eve that God was holding out on them, so he tries to convince Jesus that God would do more for him if Jesus forced his hand. “You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” If you’re grateful to someone for doing something good for you, it means that, on some level, you trust them to be good! But if you’re constantly testing them, trying to make them prove they are good… maybe you aren’t really grateful after all.
Don’t get me wrong, Dorothy Day and all the saints often took risks based on faith, but that’s not the same thing as testing God. Trusting God is doing the right thing at whatever cost and trusting God to provide what is truly needed. Testing him is doing the wrong thing and expecting God to make it work anyway. There’s a difference between selling your house to join a religious order and jumping off a cliff so angels will catch you. So it is that, in seeking social justice and helping the poor, we have to trust God that doing the right thing is better even if the wrong thing looks like it might help more people. We have to help people in the right way, not just to get the most results. Trust him, not money, not power, not the government, not yourself. Trust Him.
God is good. God is good. God is good. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you. Be grateful for that! Then show him that gratitude the way he asks: sacrifice to him, serve each other, trust him, and you’ll find you never run out of reasons to be grateful.