Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 11 of Season 6 for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Feb. 5, 2023. Our Gospel reading is from Matthew Chapter 5, verses 13-16. 

Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth.

But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father."

The Gospel of the Lord

“Bringing Light and Salt to a Broken and Hurting World,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

Jesus is the light of the world and the salt of the earth, and he wants you and I to also be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. Before we can ever hope to participate in that awesome call, that awesome task, we have to take the person of Jesus and the mission of Christianity from our minds and have it take root in our hearts. Jesus needs to become less of an idea, less of a person in history, and more of a living presence within the depth of my soul. In every sense of the word, Jesus needs to overtake the essence of my being, so I become more like him.

Now, the problem with light, it's a curious thing. We look for it. We crave it. If it's been gloomy and dark for a period of time, and all of a sudden, the sun shines, it's like that welcome guest we've been waiting for. But yet, if we gaze at it, it hurts our eyes. And so, as much as we are drawn to it, we turn away because we can only stay in that light for so long. 

We have a love-hate relationship with light because it illumines things, shows us things that maybe we don't want to see. Maybe things we're afraid to acknowledge. Maybe things we would rather leave under the carpet and out of, at least, your sight. Light illumines our path, shows us the way we ought to walk, where we must go, and where we're being led. But yet, we don't necessarily always want to walk that walk or follow that path. 

You see, as human beings, we wrestle and struggle with what we can call our ego demons, and this is the part of ourselves that has a tendency to replace God with myself. And we almost convince ourselves that we know better how to organize our life. We know better how to do things than God does. And so the world begins to revolve more around ourselves than God's, and these ego demons are what caused this to happen. And there's some of the usual characters. These ego demons are things like greed, excessive anger, apathy, lust, a need for power, envy, and jealousy, those kinds of things. And when they creep into our lives, they take our outward focus and turn it inward so that we become more important. We become what is necessary. And then we can add other things to those ego demons. Things like a fear of losing control, a fear of changing, a fear of taking responsibility, wanting to be God, thinking, my definition of happiness is better than God's definition of happiness. 

And so, to the extent that we struggle with these ego demons and the extent that we're focused more on ourselves, the less we are able to be used for anything else. And so our battle with these ego demons reduces our ability to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth and causes us, in essence, to go flat and for that light to dim because it can't shine and it can't freely be.

You know, Saint Augustine, one of the pivotal saints of the Church, struggled so greatly with his own ego demons. His story is eloquently recorded in his work, the Confessions of St. Augustine, and it basically shows us this journey from a focus on one's self and one's satisfaction and one's pleasure to a focus on God and what that does when a human being accepts the reality of God's presence in his soul. And St. Augustine had a mom who was very focused on the faith, and so he was very aware of faith. He was in the presence of faith. Just as you and I are in the presence of faith today in Word and in sacrament and in this testimony of community, and he came up with a profound observation. And he said it is no advantage to be near the light if eyes are closed. It is no advantage to be near the light if eyes are closed. And so we can put ourselves in the presence of God, in the presence of the Scriptures, in the presence of the tradition of our Faith, but if our eyes are closed, and we're still focused inward, looking at ourselves only, that light is useless. Because it can't penetrate our hearts, it can't change us. It can't renew us, and God can't use us. And so it's when he realized that he lived solely for God that things turned, and they changed. He became salt of the earth and light for the world, just as you and I are asked.

There's no shortage of suffering in the world. We all know that. And there's no shortage of people who struggle just to maintain their basic daily needs. God calls us to be light, to illuminate the world. To show others and ourselves who we're meant to be, not what others ask us to be, but who God says we are. To bring salt, to enliven, to lift up the brokenness, to be the face of God in the suffering of the world. A face of gentleness and compassion, of love and of mercy, a face of joy and of hope, of inspiration and justice and peace. We are called to be the face of Christ in a world that's lost, to be salt, and to be light.

Meister Eckhart, another spiritual master, says the light the word of Christ has to live within you. It has to live within you, and it needs to make its way into your thoughts, into your intellect, into your will, and then flow over into your deeds as well.

Over the next year, we're going to be offering opportunities and programs to help us understand more the struggle of humanity. Where people are falling through the cracks, and why. It's important to have our brains enlightened, to become more aware so that our actions can then follow in kind, and we can, as a community of faith, be salt and light for the world.

It is a tall order when Jesus asks us to do as he says, and it requires each one of us to bring the presence of Christ within as a living, real presence in our souls and then to step out of the way and allow God to be God, bringing light and salt to a broken and hurting world.

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.