"The Stranger in the Manger".... I saw that phrase somewhere recently, and I liked it because it's short and it rhymes. Stranger in the Manger, meaning, of course, Our Lord. And for the Magi, discovering this little baby, at first He was a stranger. But they knew. They had been led by a light, a star light. They knew there was more than just an infantile bundle of flesh. Stranger in the Manger.... For a lot of the world, still today, for a lot of Christians even, Our Lord, baby or grown up, is still pretty much the "Stranger in the Manger." Now, at the feast of the Epiphany, ever since I was a kid, for some reason I think of light, you know, the star, but light and how people treat the light, the light of faith, in this case, the light that brought you out here on a chilly, bleak, wet Sunday. As far as the light of faith goes, we can refuse it. We can sometimes lose it for awhile. And then, day after day, as you've done this morning, choose it. I choose the light. I choose to go to church. I choose to be with Christ. So He's not so much "The Stranger in the Manger" to you.

Refusing the light.... Many years ago...many, there was an American novelist named Ayn Rand. She wrote very popular novels and swept the country, bestsellers called "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." She was an athiest and she called herself an "objectivist." She sees things objectively. She used to give lectures in colleges... Ayn Rand. She was from Russia, and she was an athiest. Somebody told me at Columbia that once she gave a lecture and she said, "People tell you that they believe in the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." And she drew in the air a triangle, which was an early symbol of the Holy Trinity. She said, "I will show you the Trinity they really believe in if they said the truth. (She then drew a dollar sign in the air.) And the guy at Columbia who told me that story said he sat back and he said, "Yeah.... yeah."

Now nobody here despises money. I don't. I often tell you about Safeway. I go to Safeway, one old geezer priest and one medium sized dog. I buy food for the two of us. And the checkout lady, (They are always so courteous... and the checkout gentlemen.) but then they tell me how much it cost and I reel, one old man and one little dog. And I think of you. I mean, how do you do it? How do you.... I live rent free. How do you do it? Of course you don't despise money. (We ASK for it every Sunday!) But it's not ALL the light.

Now this fellow, Terry, (The only way I know how to give these things is by examples.) used to teach with me and then he went to work on Wall Street. And then when I was sent to the Wall Street parish, I would see Terry almost every day. He would duck into church. The church was crowded, every weekday, with confessions and Mass all day. And he'd sneak in. He'd cut his lunch hour. He'd cut his lunch or his coffee break. He'd duck into the church and he'd sit in the back. I once asked him, "Terry, why do you always duck in here in the middle of the day?" And he said, "I come here to breathe... and to escape the speed and the greed." You see, people talk in poetry to me cause they know I'll get it. "I come here to breathe..." and then on another day he said, "...to escape the speed and the greed." He wasn't against money.

And when I finally left, two years ago, to come here Terry was in the back. He had cut his lunch hour, just sitting in the back of the church quietly, and I said, "Got any final words for me, Terry?" And I wanted some big intellectual epigram to carry to California. And he said, "You once asked me why I duck into church every time I get a chance." He said, "....because you just... kind of... know... you... need... Christ." At first, I thought, "That's not an intellectual epigram." And it was he, who pointed out to me that the cross that is still standing even after the tragedy, in this church right around the corner from theWorld Trade Center, the cross on the top of St. Peter's Church, still casts its shadow all the way down the street, at different times of day because of the sunlight. It's another symbol. One. Two. Three. I've carried what Terry said to me right up til this morning. "You just kind of know that you need the Spirit. You need Christ. You just kind of know..." It's not an intellectual epigram, but it's IT. It's right.

The next kind of light is to lose it, as some of us do for awhile. We lose the light. I often invoke the example of the adolescents whom I taught for thirty years. On Monday morning, in homeroom, before the bell rang, many of the kids would come up and just chat, which was great. I loved that. They would say, "Oh, I went to Mass yesterday and I got nothing out of it." Not all the kids said that but enough that after thirty years.... And I'd find out that they would just kind of take inventory. You know, they would go to Mass but they would take inventory of all the other people...."That hypocrite.... that phoney.... that...." And there's a certain look that the adolescent gets at Mass, not all, but some. It's sort of like this... (bored face). It doesn't mean that they are not hungry for God. It doesn't mean that they are sinners and atheists. It just means that their minds and hearts are in such a whirligig! And when they said that they didn't get anything out of Mass, basically they meant they weren't entertained.... They weren't entertained. That's a perfectly human young reaction.

Alec Guinness is a great British actor. He died recently. He played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star War Trilogy. And he has written three little books of his life. He is a convert to the Catholic Church. And his books, the last one of which I got at Borders, and it is a delightful book.... He often refers to church and being a Catholic, and going to Mass. He wrote it in his eighties, but alert and alive.... He had just been to Mass on a Sunday. There was an adolescent visiting him in England, and the teenager said, "Have a nice Mass?" when he got back. "Same old thing." And Guinness writes in his book, "What I wanted to say to the young man was 'Oh, yeah. The same old thing, the Real Presence of Jesus Christ at the altar, the Body and the Blood and the Soul and the Divinity of Christ in the Eucharist.... Yeah, just the same old thing!" Guinness adds that he did not say it to the kid because he knew that the kid was just a kid. Same old thing....

In religious education, we tried everything with teenagers. When I was a kid, during the Trojan Wars, it was the Baltimore Catechism. And I do not despise the Catechism. There was great, great good in memorizing certain things. Example: "Why did God make you?.... God made me to know and love and serve Him in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next." That's not bad. That still holds up. That stands on its own feet. It doesn't need any "catch-up." But, later on, religious educators said, "Well, it's just memory. Now, we have to get away from the mere brain to the heart, get away from the cognitive to the affective, the intellectual to the emotional. So, when I entered religious education in 1960, it was banners and banjos and hugging and kissing at Mass, well, you know, kissing the cheek. Our school chapel in Poughkeepsie, was packed for morning Mass for two solid years. They didn't go to homeroom. They were excused. They didn't go to their lockers and flirt.... They came to Mass, and flirted! But it was entertaining. It was vibrant and it was alive!

And when I left again, when I left Wall Street, a classmate of mine, I was talking with about this same thing, religious education, how do we get the kids not to lose the light. And he said, "Oh, Mike. Give them Jesus Christ. They're grown up. The Jesus they remember as little kids... Give them the adult Christ." What he said, what he meant.... we know more about Christ and the meaning of His words now than we have for two thousand years. Give them the Gospels, the Bible and Jesus. But there are still so many for whom Our Lord is a "Stranger in a Manger" because it's not entertaining.

And the last is involving you, about choosing, day after day, a kind of dogged faith. But some of us, by temperament, want to choose the light, Christ, the Faith... FAST, especially we Americans! Immediately! Instant results to prayer... instant results to the Mass. In 1964, I believe it was around this time of year, in the little town where I was a parish priest, before I went to school to teach, a little town called Millbrook, and into this town there moved a man who later became world-famous. (I know I'm dropping names, but I really did meet this guy.) He moved to Millbrook. He had been a student at West Point and later, a professor at Harvard. And he moved into Millbrook with a whole bunch of people. They bought a big estate, and he invited all the clergymen of this small town to dinner one night. I couldn't go because I had Monday night devotions. So I was invited the next week by myself. And the place was lit with candles. His name was Timothy Leary. We sat down to dinner. In '64 he was very intelligent and very pleasant, and he said he absolutely was a believer in Jesus and the saints and he said... (I am boiling this down as quickly as I can. It was two hours of my listening to this man.) He said, "I am working on a chemical, lysergic acid diethylamide, which, if the person takes the chemical, will take the human brain and forge evolution ahead another billion years so that we shall indeed not just be clinging to faith because of dogged faith, but we shall in a sense see and hear Christ and religious realities tangibly. That's what this drug will be able to do.

Well, you and I know what happened. I think his intention then was good, but so many kids, you know, kill themselves, literally, with this. My brother who worked with drug addicts for almost thirty years, said he would rather work with a kid on a heroin habit than a kid whose skull was scrambled by LSD. I felt in those days, and on that day, that this man in Millbrook was choosing Christ in faith, but FAST, in a hurry.... Let's move it!! Now, that's not the word Our Lord used. Get back to Jesus. What did He say? ... a SEED... His word in teaching, His vision, is a SEED. And it's growing. And we've got to be so patient. And for many people, because of our culture, He's a "Stranger in tHe Manger" because it's not immediate. It's not right now! It's a seed.

I'm finally going to shut up with a little word that I learned from adults about Catholics coming back to Church. At Christmas time, when we hear confessions, sometimes someone has come back. All the years that I was a priest, they come back to church at Christmas, and many of them continue to go back to church, to Mass. Here are a couple of tips I learned from grownups who have done that. When you come back to church after a while away and you have found the light again, at Sunday Mass, sit up front. Sit up front. There is less distraction. There is less of a tendency to take the teenage inventory of the people at the church, which is a human tendency.... "Look at him! That smug self-assured jerk, cheats at business all week and then comes smugging, smiley, smuggley into church on Sunday. And look at her! Is that a dress for church or a Hollywood cocktail orgy?! What is going on?" There is less of a tendency to take inventory for a returnee, if you sit up close and talk to Christ. Complain to Him. Converse with Him. And be willing to wait for His response, and then He will be a "Stranger in a Manger" hardly anymore.