The Church has a beautiful tradition of adoring the Blessed Sacrament during the night. When I was in college, I would reluctantly sign up for a Holy Hour in the middle of the night, knowing that I would probably fall asleep. And sure enough, I would fall asleep almost every week at some point in the hour. One week, when my hour was up, my friend who was coming in for the next hour, found me sleeping, and I embarrassedly got up and went to bed.

In the Gospel, we have a similar situation. There are ten virgins who are waiting with lighted lamps for the Bridegroom to arrive. Because he is delayed, they fall asleep. The five wise virgins have enough oil to last them through the night, while the five foolish virgins need to go out to buy more, and so are absent when the bridegroom arrives.

Even when it wasn’t nighttime, I would periodically fall asleep during prayer, so I brought it up to my spiritual director. I was going to bed on time, and I was praying at a normal time during the day, but I still fell asleep. I said that at that point, I had done all I could, and I just had to leave it in God’s hands. The director said that that kind of dependence on God is the attitude that we need in order to receive the good gifts He desires to give us.

All ten of the virgins are living a life of virtue, walking the walk of being a Christian. However, only the five wise virgins have the oil of God’s love to help them to be ready to greet the Lord when He comes. We can do all the good works we want, but we need to have the love of God as the reason behind them. As we do this, no matter how well we do, we will come face to face with our human weakness, such as my falling asleep. In those moments, we have the choice whether to give up because our human efforts have failed or to surrender into the hands of God, and receive the oil of His love as a free gift. This is the only way to have enough oil so that our lamps can be lit to meet the Lord when He comes.

I still sometimes fall asleep during prayer time, but I don’t sweat it as much anymore. After all, even the wise virgins fell asleep. But we need to see it as an opportunity to rely on Jesus. When we do this, we can receive the oil of God’s love so that we are not holding empty lamps, but can meet Jesus with lamps brightly burning.

Father Frank

Hello! My name is Jared Beltz and I am a first year seminarian for the Diocese of Joliet. Our Lady of Mercy is my home parish, and I am very grateful to have the opportunity to come back home and share my faith journey with all of you at Mass this weekend.

I was born into a Catholic family, and we attended Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, participated in religious education, and were active at the parish. I served in many ministries at Our Lady of Mercy, ranging from altar serving and singing in the choir as a kid, to cantoring and serving as a Eucharistic Minister as an adult. Through these ministries, I gained perspective into the life of a priest, and formed personal relationships with the priests at OLM.

As I progressed through college, I began to feel more comfortable telling others about my faith in God, and found myself spending more time in prayer at church, helping at Vacation Bible School, and going on Mission Trips with OLM. I had been trying to decide what I wanted to do after college, and the thoughts of priesthood and serving the Church in this way were always in my mind. Multiple people started asking me some variation of “Have you ever considered the priesthood?” or “Have you ever thought about becoming a priest?” These encounters, along with my persistent thoughts, made me begin to seriously discern the priesthood. In addition, I felt that God was trying to speak to me last year as I listened to the readings on Holy Thursday when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and made the point of serving others before himself (John 13:1-15). I believe this was God working through the people in my life, as well as through his Word.

Since deciding to take the step to enter into seminary formation, I have had many graces come into my life. I am currently in the midst of a “Spirituality Year”, a stage in formation that allows men like me to dive deeper into our Catholic faith. I have been given the opportunity to grow in my faith through reading the Bible and Catechism in a year. I have also grown in service through ministering in impoverished neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. I am so blessed to have begun this journey to the priesthood. Please know that I keep all of you in my prayers, and I ask for your prayers as I continue my seminary formation.

God bless!

Jared Beltz

A day I will never forget is when I walked in on my parents watching a movie about St. Thérèse of Lisieux. That movie begins with a simple line, taken from Thérèse’s writings: “I want to be a saint.” I didn’t know that you could want that, but now that I knew, I wanted it! The problem was that I had unusual ways of pursuing that desire. For example, St. Thérèse died at the age of twenty-four of tuberculosis. As a result, every time I left a physical, I would leave disappointed because my tuberculosis test would come back negative. Long before I turned twenty-four, I realized that my life would look different, but that did not mean that I gave up my desire to become a saint.

In the Second Reading, St. Paul writes, “And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all the believers.” We are called to imitate the saints and Jesus so that we can become a model for others.

It does not mean we have to imitate the concrete details of every saint’s life. As we approach the Solemnity of All Saints on November 1st, we have different opportunities to enter into the lives of the saints, such as the Saints Around the World event on October 28th. As we look at all these saints, we see how different their lives are, but also how they all have one thing in common: love of God and love of neighbor.

In each of the saints, this love shone out in ways as unique as each one of them, and that is what we are called to imitate. Just as they made Jesus’ commandment to love take flesh amid the concrete details of their lives, so are we called to love amid the concrete details of our lives. But we can’t keep this to ourselves.

In the Gospel, Jesus says the greatest commandment of the law is to love God and to love our neighbors. At the Last Supper, Jesus takes this even further by giving us a new commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Because we have received the love of Jesus that led Him to the Cross, we are called to love others with that same love. This might seem daunting, but when we look at the saints, we see that it has been done thousands of times and thousands of different ways.

Loving as Christ loves does not necessarily mean dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, but it means taking the love we have received from Christ and making it present to others. Pope Francis wrote in C’est la Confiance, his Apostolic Exhortation on St. Thérèse, “In the heart of Therese, the grace of baptism became this impetuous torrent flowing into the ocean of Christ’s love and dragging in its wake a multitude of brothers and sisters.”

Father Frank

We are not as cunning as we think we are!  When I was little, there were two punishments I received: soap in the mouth or spanking. However, as a 5 year old, I had a brilliant idea to get around this form of punishment. Of course, I had to test my theory, so I went into the doorway of the kitchen where my mom was and said a curse word. This triggered the consequence of a punishment, but I ran to the couch where I sat down and covered my mouth thinking I had beaten the system! Little did I know the strength of my mom, and I came to realize that my plan had failed.

In our Gospel this weekend, the Pharisees think that they are cunning and can entrap Jesus by asking him a simple question about paying taxes to Caesar, “Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” (Mt 22:17) If Jesus would say yes to paying taxes he would be implicit with a foreign power and the people would revolt. If he said no, the Roman Empire would punish him for encouraging dissidence among the people. 

Jesus, however, asks to see a coin.  When the Pharisees present the coin, it shows the hypocrisy of Caesar by carrying an image of the Emperor who claimed to be a god. Then Jesus bypasses their entire trap by replying with the simple phrase, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”(Mt 22:22)

This is a challenge to us too. We know that the coins belong to Caesar, and in our daily lives this means being a responsible citizen and giving respect to the proper authorities. What is God’s?  It is our very selves. We all bear the image of God within our souls, and are called to give our very lives back to God!  This may seem like an impossible task, but God reveals through Christ that he is willing to model what he is asking of us; Jesus Christ offers us his very self!

Let us reject any ways of trying to outsmart God by avoiding that which he is asking of us. God calls each of us to know him and love him, even if we are not aware of it or if we try to ignore or outsmart him. He says this same thing to the Persian King Cyrus in the first reading: “I have called you by your name, giving you a title, though you knew me not” (Isaiah 45:4). Everything we have we owe to the goodness of God, and he desires that we put him at the center of our lives. Let us turn away from those things that prevent us from giving ourselves over to the Lord.

Father Michael

Hello! I am so grateful to have gotten the chance to meet many of you at the parish. For those that I have not gotten the chance to meet, my name is Jonathan Hernandez. I am the seminarian assigned to Our Lady of Mercy by the Diocese. Perhaps you may have noticed that during the summer months this year I was absent. I was asked by my vocations director to stay at our cathedral and do a program called CPE (Clinical Pastoral Experience). This program was extremely helpful for my vocation. Through that experience I received the opportunity to serve at a hospice center, a homeless shelter, and bring communion to the sick on a consistent basis. I was able to encounter others’ sufferings in different forms and was in a privileged place where I was often let into places of deep suffering. Often faced with a loss of words this summer, I felt the Holy Spirit guiding me in how he wanted me to minister to each person I was with. I felt Christ wanting to heal his sons and daughters.

This summer experience made me realize that I too was suffering in ways that I didn’t acknowledge. As a seminarian, I experience a constantly shifting environment. Often, I am bombarded with activities, homework, and responsibilities. This can all be very tiring. While praying with the suffering of Christ, I realized at a heartfelt level that suffering should point outwards. Suffering is part of the human experience, and we weren’t meant to take it on all by ourselves. At the minimum, it should be given to Christ. Furthermore, it is when our suffering points outwards that we realize our suffering has a greater meaning. For example, we are called to love our neighbor even though this isn’t the easiest thing to do. Our neighbors often hurt us in words and deeds. Scarred by their actions, we can wallow in the injustice, or we can allow ourselves to feel the hurt, bring it to Christ, and try our best to treat them with the love and respect they deserve as people made in the image of God. Even if they do not reciprocate, we are loving as Christ loved.

What I have just described, is made possible only through a life anchored in Christ. It is his grace and his strength that allow us to abide in his vineyard. We hear St. Paul affirm this in the second reading: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13). When we refuse to give our sufferings to God, we are pointed inwards, and this can become a truly dangerous place to be. In the Gospel reading today Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. As the King came in to meet the guests, there was one who was not dressed properly: “…how is that you came in here without a wedding garment?” (Mt 22:12) May this remind us to put on the life of Christ, configure and unite our thoughts, words, and actions to him. Give him your sufferings, and live for others, so that you might not be caught without a wedding garment!

God bless you, Jonathan