This week, a man standing in front of me, buying stamps, was talking
to his pal and he kept saying, “What are ya gonna to do?..... What
are ya gonna do?” I thought it was, in its own way, eloquent, simple
and eloquent..... What are ya gonna do? That’s our theme, for you and
me, this morning, for this Mass. What are ya gonna do?

The first thing we are going to do is take a quick look at today’s
gospel, a quick look because there is something else I want to think
about with you. The Scripture scholars say today’s gospel very simply
is Our Lord is telling his Jewish audience who are taking him
completely for granted, “Listen. My word, my mercy, my message is for
the whole world. They are going to come from the East and the West
and the North and the South, and they are going to sit down in the
Kingdom of Heaven.” (The goyim, you and me, the Gentiles...” “Not
just you Jewish people who are already much too complacent and taking
things for granted.... I am inviting everybody.” That’s the gist of
the learned scholars about the Gospel. And it’s very encouraging. OK.

Eight years ago, this week, I stood up for the first time, to
confront this congregation. I know it’s eight years because it was
1999. This is 2007. I worked it out on a pocket calculator. It’s
eight years. OK. And I’m so truly blessed, a lucky priest to be in
this parish, lucky.... lucky. I want to think about, with your help,
the head, the heart and the feet, and the Mass because, as you know,
I taught. Almost all my life as a priest, I taught. Teaching religion
and the head and the heart and the Mass, you and I. Head and heart
and feet.... head, heart and feet.

The head and the Mass.... I told some of you about my colleagues and
other priests. I got intense religious education, I and most of my
colleagues who became priests, intense religious education from the
age of six to twenty-six. I mean highly conservative in the best
sense of that word, but intense. From six to twenty-six is not a
boast. It is almost a statistic of mammoth neurosis. So intense and
so cerebral, it was about the head and the skull and cerebration and
cognition and learning and Thomas Aquinas and Greek and Latin and
Encyclicals and dogmas and doctines and sins, mortal, venial, and
gradations of both..... highly cognitive, up here in the head. I
heard later, when I moved out here, that the seminary I went to was
called “The West Point” of seminaries. How I wish I’d known before I
went there!! And it was. It was ferociously tough. Everyone meant so
well. But the faculty.... If you line the faculty up against that
wall, all facing you, their cumulative glare would intimidate
Godzilla! They were tough and their motivation was pure, but it was
all for the head, so we could have flip, sophisticated answers for
every atheist we met. Now, OK. I also told you that there were twenty-
eight of us ordained in 1960, twenty-eight. Within a decade, fourteen
were gone, to get married. Some of them don’t even go to church
anymore. Some of them joined Zen Buddhism. They are gone. Now, I
called one who is back, who came back. And he said, “What are ya
gonna do? The Church has got everything. The Church has got
everything. What are ya gonna do?” Then I said to him... (To keep it
fresh, I called these people this week. Keep it crisp.) “Listen, we
learned a ton of words, concepts, cognition, thoughts, abstractions.
What do you do with a ton of words that is still roiling in our
skulls?” He said, “ I go to Mass and I pick two words from the gospel
every Sunday.” The two he picked from today’s gospel are “strong
enough.” That’s all. A ton of words, he has narrowed it down to two.
Keep it simple. “Strong enough.” Our Lord says, “Be strong enough to
get through the narrow gate.” And he puts it on the mirror. He sees
it every day when he shaves. His head is full of words, but he has
narrowed down to two, just for Sunday, just for today. OK.

The second is the heart, the heart. After all of that intense
cognitive education, Catholic educators said, “Too much head stuff.
We’ve got to touch the heart.” Now I taught, as you know, for almost
forty years, as a priest. So, we want to reach the heart. In the
seventies, we touched the heart. We had chapel services that were
packed. The little school chapel that nobody darkened in the morning,
(They all went to homeroom.) for four years, it was packed. We
touched the heart. Kissy, feely, hugging and kissing, and kissing and
hugging, and hugging and kissing. I think the kissing was decorous
enough for the chapel, as far as I could tell. It was standing room
only. The morning Mass at the school chapel, we were touching the
heart. We were singing Kumbaya. We were floating balloons. They were
hugging and kissing. And we meant so well. We wanted to touch the
affections. OK. I kept in touch with them. That’s part of my job. And
they went off to college, so many of them would write back and say, “
Bor - ing... The local church next to the campus is boring. Boring
sermons, boring priests, bor-ing.” See, they weren’t being
entertained anymore. Now, some come back. Of course, some come back.
So, I told you this once before. One of the guys whom I taught in
that period had a baby. And we had the baptism in the Battery Park
Chapel, by World Trade Center. He hadn’t been to church in years, but
he had a new baby and his wife was a devout Catholic, and the
godparents. And we had the baptism. The godmother was a Vogue
magazine model. She was a knockout! She didn’t walk into the chapel.
She “shimmered” into the chapel, on a cloud of Chanel #5, with one of
those floating Hermes scarfs. Even my glazed eyes popped. She glided
in with a very respectful smile. We had the baptism in this little
chapel down by the World Trade Center. And there is a line in the
baptismal ceremony where the godparents answer for the baby. The
priest says, “Will you reject Satan and all his empty promises?” And
the godparents say, ‘We will reject Satan and all his empty
promises.” And this beautiful model said it, and then she said it
again. And this chapel was absolutely quiet. She said it a second
time, “....reject Satan and all his empty promises.” And a third
time, “.... and all his empty promises.” And, in that simple phrase,
she packed in so much experience, so much yearning, so much pain.
Now, this guy I called the next day, the Daddy who hadn’t been to
Mass. He says, “I’m coming. I’m coming back.” It narrowed down to the
fact that his heart was touched, by a simple phrase, said by a woman
of great beauty, but great wisdom at last. He’s back. He’s still
back. I called him this week. I said, “You’re still going to Church?”
He said, “What brings me back is suffering. Suffering brings me back.
Family and routine and bills and worried about the kids.” He said, “I
go to Mass to look at the crucifix.” Simple. He was here a year ago,
visiting. And he loves our crucifix because Christ is on a cross in
agony and death but he is resplendent in royal robes. The
Resurrection.... yours and His! “I’m back. What are ya gonna do?”

And the third is the feet. Have you ever been to a twelve-step
meeting? They have open meetings. Anybody is invited to an open
twelve-step meeting. They have such solid spirituality, it’s
dazzling. And they have a couple of key phrases. Someone is feeling
low, “Keep coming back. Keep coming back.” And some of them will say,
“I didn’t want to go to tonight’s meeting,” you know for booze or
drugs or overeating or gambling. “I didn’t want to go to tonight’s
meeting, but I got smart feet. My head said, ‘I’m tired.’ My heart
said, ‘Who needs it?’ But my feet are smart. My feet brought me
here.” Well, you all got smart feet. You’re here. Aren’t you, on a
lovely summer morning where you could still be sleeping in. And your
head might have said, “Forget it!” And your heart, “I don’t want it.
No way!” But smart feet brought you here. What are ya gonna do?

I asked one of these guys (He’s 57, back in New York. He’s
back.)..... He said, “You know, I grew up with the old company line.
The old company line was, in religious instruction, hell is yawning
at your feet. Sin is stretching its tentacles especially the horrors
of sex, not so much the blessings, the horrors of sex..... Mortal,
venial and all the different gradations...” He said, “I’m so glad the
company line is changed. That’s his phrase. By that, he means now,
with all the twenty years of fresh translations of the gospel, of the
words of Jesus Christ, the whole fresh new from the Greek and the new
flavoring.... In the gospels, it’s Christ of mercy and love. That’s
the new company line? You bet, because it’s based on the gospels,
which we pretty much neglected in our emphasis of other things. In
the Catholic Church, that’s true. He said, “I’m glad. I go to Mass
for the Eucharist.” So, of course, I, ever the stooge, said, “Well,
when you go to Holy Communion, what do you say to Our Lord?” He said,
“I yell at him. I’m complaining...” And I thought, “He’s talking...
He’s talking.” Now he and I once, when he was a student, a group of
us went to see a movie called “The Lonely Passion of Judith Herne,”
a wonderful movie with Maggie Smith, not famous but a great movie.
She’s a Irish Catholic living in Dublin and she’s wiped out and
miserable and poor and lonely, and one day, her feet bring her to a
church. It’s a weekday. It’s empty, the little church in Dublin. And
she comes down the aisle and she bangs on the tabernacle, “Are you
there, Jesus? Are you there? Do you ever hear me? Do you know what
I’m going through? Will you talk to me? Will you help me?” Now, one
person said that was a shocking scene. I didn’t think so. I thought
it was redolent of deep faith, maybe naive, but a deep faith. She
wasn’t banging on a box of Oreo cookies. “Are you there? Are you
listening?” ... So he goes to Mass on Sunday so he can yell at Jesus
when he receives Holy Communion. Head, Heart and Feet!

Now, this morning you came. Your head was weary. Your heart was
tired, but you came. What are ya gonna do? Sleep in! When I came up
the stairs this morning for the 7, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice
if, as we ascended the stairs, there were great background music like
a magnificent Mozart Mass with those beautiful melodies, all sweeping
us in, singing “Keep coming back. ... Keep coming back!” You got
smart feet. Here you are. What are ya gonna do? What better thing
could we do? Amen.