The Newman University community came together on Feb. 21 to celebrate its namesake, St. John Henry Newman.
Campus Ministry hosted a Mass in honor of St. Newman’s 224th birthday during the university’s annual Heritage Month. Heritage Month features a series of academic and social events, student competitions and more to celebrate St. Newman, St. Maria De Mattias, foundress of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ who sponsor the university, and traditions of the school.
During his homily, Chaplain Father Ed Herzog shared the significance of the crucifix and reflected on how each of us is called to “pick up our cross and follow him” (Matthew 16:24-26).
Watch the video or continue reading to see Herzog’s homily word-for-word.
Herzog’s homily
It’s great to be with you here today as we continue our celebration of Heritage Month, and today we celebrate the birthday of St. John Henry Newman.
As I was preparing for this, and every single time we get to this Gospel story, the thing that strikes me is Christianity is strange. And there’s no way to get around it.
In fact, one of my biggest fears is the fact that Christianity has become something that is normal. We can read the Gospel that we just heard and then say, ‘Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,’ and sit down. That would have been something that to the early Christians would have been completely unthinkable.
The story of the monks
In the mid-1990s I read in a book that a number of Buddhist and Catholic monks got together at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and sat down to have this time of prayer together. They talked about the differences in their faiths. They came together, worshiped, prayed and then finally one of the Buddhist monks got up and he said, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ They looked around and they said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he said, ‘I don’t understand you people.’ He pointed and said, ‘Everywhere you look, you put that up there — a tortured innocent man — and you don’t think that this is strange?’
That actually opened up a more fruitful conversation than anything that had happened before because he pointed out to us what we so easily overlook. We just heard this story of Jesus looking at his apostles and telling them, ‘Look if you want to follow me, you need to take up your cross and then you can begin to be one of my disciples.’
The power of the crucifix
When we think about the cross, I think about it in the way that my grandmother told me or when one of my brothers gives me a hard time. I think about it in the way a neighbor or friend just continues to nag you. It’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s the cross that I have,’ whereas for the apostles that’s not what they would have thought of. They would have thought of Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ I remember when that came out, probably 20 years ago. What he was looking to do was shake us out of our complacency. I know no one who has seen that movie who has not been transformed by it because that right there is the cost of discipleship.
It’s the centerpiece of all of our churches. I’m wearing it as a piece of jewelry right now, yet right at the heart of Christianity is following the man who chose to give himself up to crucifixion. And this is one of the things that I’ve realized; that at the heart some of the most profound truths are paradoxes. Something that on surface seems to be completely illogical or self-defeating, but when experienced properly we come to see that it makes perfect sense.
What we hear today in the Gospel is, I think, the paradox at the center of all paradoxes: that the way we find life is by laying it down. The way we find ourselves is by freely giving ourselves away. The way that we possess ourselves is by offering ourselves as Christ did on the cross. And this is something that, again, on the face of it wouldn’t make sense. But the more that I verify it and come to know that it’s true, the more that I offer myself sacrificially and the more life I receive here and now.
Sacrifices transform our lives
This is one of the things we all know: When you decide to sacrificially offer up an evening to study when all of your friends go out, that leads to a new sense of life when you take the test. One of my favorites I heard is from a secular scientist. He gave the best defense of people having children and said, ‘If you want to have children, it will completely destroy your life, but it will be replaced with a better one. I think the deacon understands that here now, too, because he’s now a grandfather for the first time last night. I heard one of the greatest blessings of becoming a father is that you get to become a grandfather a little bit later. It’s another means by which we lay down our lives. It’s in whatever our vocational call may be.
Father Kapaun quite literally laid down in offering himself to the church. For me, it was on May 27, 2017, at the Church of the Magdalene laying down my life, embracing the cross, embracing that self-sacrificial lifestyle. It set me on the greatest adventure that I could ever be on. When couples come forward here before the altar, before the place of sacrifice, before the place where Calvary is represented, it’s there they say, ‘I am giving myself away so as to build the kingdom of God.’ That is what gives new life and that’s what we celebrate on the birthday of St. John Henry Newman.
He understood this entirely because his decision to leave the Anglican faith to enter into the Catholic faith was an embrace of the cross. He lost friends, family, a great position he had at Oxford. It was a demand but he knew that Christ was calling him to take up his cross and follow him up Calvary.
A transformative paradox
As we celebrate this holy sacrifice of the Mass that will be presented here on this altar, may we come to recognize that life — as paradoxically as it may seem — comes through freely, embracing death freely. We are called to take up the act of discipleship that Christ calls us to do: to pick up that cross to follow him.
May we ask for the intercession of St. John Henry Newman to live out that paradoxical life and may we find it and empty ourselves out by embracing the cross as Christ gives it to us even here and now.
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