As some of you may know, I had the opportunity to travel in Ireland on a golf vacation for 10 days, arriving home this past Wednesday. Though there were a number of reasons why the trip was amazing, some of them actually having to do with golf, my best moment had nothing to do with the sport at all, and happened very early on. It was Monday night, and we were staying in the town of Ballybunion, South of Shannon airport. The hotel was called Cliff House. Perched high on a cliff, the Atlantic surf pounded a gentle refrain on the beaches 200 feet below. As I did my prayer walking that night, I was drawn back to another sea side shore, this too in Ireland, albiet on the north side, to a town called Ballycastle - and some volunteer work I had done years ago while I was still in the seminary.
I found myself remembering that time and that shore and the decisions that led in a major way to me standing before you as a priest today. I remember my choice, as I watched the bonfires blaze over Churchill housing estates, to live in such a way as to create a different world. Yet, as I remembered all that, I also found myself wondering: 'Have I lost some of the passion? Some of the flame? Some of the zeal that marked my life as a young man back then? Further walking that night made me look into the flame that is my faith, and realize that I have chosen at times to walk around the flame rather than into it. To avoid my baptism, rather than embrace it.
It is not what we hear from Jesus. "I have come to light a fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were blazing. I have a baptism to receive, and what anguish I feel until it is over." After a statement like that from a person like that, I still allow the fire of my life to be a simple glimmer, instead of a flame. Jesus wrestled with fire, but he didn't walk around the flames. He plunged into the fire, into the flames, into the death. What anguish he knew till he had immersed himself completely into the flames of self emptying love. And I looked at the flame of faith that I proudly held onto, and knew that night that the wind off the ocean would have blown it out simply and easily.
But I knew that Jesus wasn't done with my prayer that night. So as I kept praying, what I heard again, as I walked along that road, with the endless surf pounding below, was the whisper of the voice of God - inviting me to stir into flame the passion that I know is deepest down within me. The passion that God has put deepest in my heart. It was an invitation, no matter how small the flame, to begin anew in this walk that you and I call discipleship.
It is the same invitation that is before us all today, as we begin this new year of school, of life. Perhaps the flame has grown weak. Perhaps the fire seems almost out. Perhaps at one point in your life you had been very active in your faith, in a youth group, whatever, but now that you've hit college - you've run into the 'division' that Jesus warned us about. Your roommates make fun of your choice to attend mass. People in class challenge your ideas as quaint and useless, as unscientific, and out of touch. Your parents are no longer breathing down your neck to make you practice any sort of faith. Hear the invitation I knew at Ballybunion and Ballycastle and many other places along the way: Walk into the flame. Walk into the fire that is faith. Walk into the baptism into the living and dying of Jesus. For then, and only then, will you know what He knew in his life: the Father's love that raised Him from his suffering, from his cistern, to the glory of the resurrection.
Concretely: