¶ Welcome and St. John Vianney's Feast
Welcome to Slaking Thirst, a podcast that's all about bringing the thirst deep within our hearts for love and communion to the heart of Christ, a divine heart, who is seeking our love and communion in return. The hope is that the two thirsts would meet and both thirsts would be slaked. Today's the Feast of St. John Vianney. And there's just something hilarious and deliciously ironic and providential about the readings that the church's lectionary gives today for...
That I just imagining all these pastors and bishops and priests, you know, thinking about John Vianney, our patron. Right. And they look at the readings in the Magnificat for Mass today. And you've got Moses. saying, like, why do you treat your servant so badly? Moses asked the Lord, why are you so displeased with me that you burden me with all this people?
Was it I who gave them birth that you tell me to carry them in my bosom like a foster father carrying an infant to the land you have promised under oath to their fathers? And then he says, I love this line. If this is the way you will deal with me. then please do me the favor of killing me at once so that I need no longer face them. Hey, maybe just a parish priest can get that. I don't know.
It's just hilarious. It's just absolutely hilarious. Anyway, Feast of St. John Vianney. I absolutely love this saint, this patron of parish priests. He's one of the little ones that heaven plucked. Heaven seems to love to choose the most unlikely people, the most unlikely characters to work his greatest miracles. It's just true in the scriptures. It's true in the lives of the saints. He chooses Juan Diego. He chooses...
the children of Fatima, Jacinta, Francesco, Lucia, Dos Santos. He chooses Saint Bernadette, like these nobodies, right? Vianney was this nobody. He was a little guy and he almost flunked seminary, right? He was someone that the Lord picked and he was given a burden that was beyond him, a burden to transform.
¶ Pilgrimage to Ars: A Personal Account
Not just to perish, but to transform the world through his priestly heart. Anyway, I'm curious. Anybody been to ours? Has anybody been to... One, two. Okay. Okay. A few of us. Okay. So I got to go to ours back in 2009. That was the first time Pope Benedict. I think it was 2009. It was the year of the priest. And it was some anniversary of Vianney's life. It was, I don't know, the anniversary of his beatification or canonization. It was some anniversary, which was the coincidence of the year.
Anyway, so it was the year of the priest, and I was supposed to study in Rome that fall semester with a buddy of mine, Father Jeff Barnish, a priest from the Diocese of Cleveland. We were both seminarians at the time. We were both supposed to do a semester in Rome. But right before we were supposed to leave, I had this horrible eye issue flare up and I had to have a surgery and I couldn't go. And he still ended up going.
Well, it worked out for me really well at the end of the semester because I think all the faculty felt really badly that I could not go. And so I got exempt from all my finals. They're like, just go to Rome. I was like, okay, this is great. I'm going to have an eye problem next fall as well. And so myself and two other priests, we went to, we met up with Jeff in Rome and then we did some time in Paris and Lourdes and ended in ours. It was winter time.
in Ars in France, and it was really cold, and it meant that there was, like, no pilgrims there. It was, there was almost nobody there. And we go to Ars. We ended up staying at the seminary in Ars. And the next day we got up and went to the Basilica and just basically had a whole retreat day in the beautiful Basilica in ours. And we were able to celebrate Mass at the altar where Vianney's body is encased in glass. He's incorrupt. Do you know he's incorrupt?
His body's incorrupt, and it's in glass above the altar. And his body, it's a very itty-bitty body. He's a very small. He's a hobbit. He's a very small man. He is pint-sized. He is very, very miniature. And it's just amazing. So anyway, I love this saint. This saint who the Lord picked to...
¶ St. Vianney's Ministry of Beauty
Slip behind enemy lines in ours and to lead this explosive campaign. waging war on Christ's behalf against vice and lukewarmness and all these things. So how did it begin? How did he wage his battle as a pastor? He did it by unleashing beauty.
on his people. So much beauty. This priest, this priest who, you read any biography about him, they always mention his tattered cassock and his... like leather his shoes with holes in them and the guy basically starved to death for most of his life and ate rotten cold potatoes by the spoonful slept like two hours you know and spent the rest of the time in the confessional but
This priest who is so clearly in touch with poverty, living out the life of poverty, the very first thing he did was he adorned his parish that was in tatters with as much exorbitant beauty as possible. He bought new vessels, brand new vestments from Lyon, these incredible silk garments. He bought a new tabernacle for the parish. put gold everywhere. He did as much as he could to pack as much beauty into the parish church as possible. One biographer said this,
At the altar, no expense was spared to give the best to the Holy of Holies. Of course, every Mass was seen as an audience with royalty, a banquet with the King. We can learn an important lesson from this. Catholics willingly splurge on God, dowering the liturgy with extravagant beauty and generous raiment, exactly as the letters... as the Hebrews did in Leviticus and the Torah. The question is, why? Why did he do this? Why did he go about it this way?
¶ God's Prodigal and Excess Love
It's not because, it's not simply for the reason that, it's not simply because of beauty's evangelical power. I'm trying to figure out the best way to phrase this idea I have in my mind. So if this doesn't work, I don't know, stay with me. I'll try and make clear what I'm trying to say. So like this is these are the days before Bishop Robert Barron and Word on Fire and like this.
It's gotten in the bloodstream in the church in the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years, this Via Pulchritudinis, which is very much at the heart of the TOB Institute. It's what we're soaking and what we're studying. But this is we're talking about Vianney's days. We're talking about, you know, century and a half, two centuries ago before beauty became a domesticated churchy buzzword. OK, before beauty became a line item on a church's.
committee and strategy, right? We're talking about undomesticated beauty. Like when Vianney was purchasing his vestments, the church wasn't talking about Beauty under the category of a strategy like we do today. Again, we're talking about wild, undomesticated beauty. Today, in our church, in our culture, we have to argue for beauty's necessity against...
Against the forces of Isengard is really what it is. We have to argue for beauty's necessity against the forces of Isengard, who they now work for church architecture firms. They are our designers of... Church literature and books and pamphlets and banners and vestments and. That's who we have to argue against. They're often our music directors and sometimes our pastors and bishops. Like all of those...
Forces inside the church that want to strip all the beauty away. Like that instinct is madness. Why? Because beauty is the incarnation of God's prodigal love. Beauty is the incarnation of God's prodigal love. Beauty, beauty in all of her manifestations, everywhere she shows up, she is the manifestation, the incarnation of the father's prodigal. lavish, utterly gratuitous, so over the top love. It's a love, it's the kind of love that can only be grasped as...
Utter excess. That's what his love is. I was struck by this detail in the gospel that we just shared. We're all so familiar with this. I mean, every... Every one of the Synoptic Gospels has one of these multiplication stories that made such an impact on the early church. This memory of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fish. But there's a detail in here that struck me just different than I had ever experienced before. And here's the question that I was asking. Why didn't Jesus...
The omniscient, the omnipotent, the wonder worker God man who knew exactly how many hungry mouths there were. Like the all knowing God standing on the plane. He wasn't. He wasn't like, it looks to be about 8,000 people, right? 5,000 men, women, children, we'll round up, maybe 8,000.
He wasn't guesstimating. He knew the exact number of people. He knew the exact number of hungry mouths. He knew the exact number of loaves and fish that would be consumed. So why didn't he just make the exact right amount? to perfectly correspond to the amount that would be necessary.
Like that would have also been, arguably, that would have been just as wild of a miracle. Like imagine being the last apostle with the basket and you're handing him out. You've just gone through all the crowd. You're like, okay. 4,997, 4,998, 4,999, 5,000. Oh my God. He's like, it's empty. You know, like that would have been mind blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. So like, why didn't he do that? Because God's love doesn't correspond to our capacities.
or our needs. It's not a one-to-one correspondence. It's more than our capacities. We are kapox dei, but that does not mean that it's hand in glove. It does not mean... Like, oh, this makes sense. No, it is more than what we're capable of. It is beyond our needs. It's only experientiable as lavishness, as prodigal.
Like it's more than what we can handle. If you're not sure about that, again, I refer you to St. Teresa of Avila and ask her over there, does that seem like that corresponds to our capacities? That looks like a woman who's being overwhelmed, okay? Beauty, again, beauty is the incarnation of God's prodigal love, wasteful love, lavish love, utterly lavish. I want to end here with these words from then Joseph Ratzinger.
from his book, Introduction to Christianity. If you've not read that one, by the way, you need to read that one. Just add it to the list, okay? Put it in your Amazon card. Anyway, he writes this. Christ is the infinite... Self expenditure of God. When we turn our eyes to the creator, we glimpse the structural law of creation in which life squanders a million seeds in order to save.
one living one, in which a whole universe is squandered in order to prepare at one point a place for spirit, for man. Excess is God's trademark in his creation. God does not reckon his gifts by the measure.
At the same time, excess is also the real foundation and form of salvation history, which in the last analysis is nothing other than the truly breathtaking fact that God... in an incredible outpouring of himself, expends not only a universe, but his own self, in order to lead man a speck of dust to salvation. So excess or superfluity, let us repeat, this is the real definition or mark of the history of salvation.
The purely calculating mind will always find it absurd that for man, God himself should be expended. Only the lover can understand the folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient. Prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient. Lord.
¶ Responding to God's Lavish Grace
Grant us the grace of fear and trembling and awe and reverence and wonder as we approach your altar to receive you today. And let us respond with the generosity of our own lives in loving you and in serving others. Amen. To listen to more homilies, talks, and reflections from Father Ryan and Father Patrick, please check out slakingthirst.com and consider becoming a subscriber to the Slaking Thirst YouTube channel.