Fr. Christopher O’Connor - Wednesday Morning Homily (2021 Priests, Deacons, Seminarian's Retreat)

[Music] [Music] for those of you guys who don't know me i'm father chris o'connor for the great diocese of brooklyn and this year just had to many of us we still have a very large presence here right frank there you go so i started good that was good there you go okay so hawaii week last year remember holy week last year we don't want another one like that right i was in my office writing a letter to the parish and i was sitting there i heard an ambulance now that might not seem unusual especially in new york city i mean we hear sirens all the time actually it's weird we don't hear the sirens but it sounded louder than usual and i have a severe hearing loss i'm completely deaf in my left ear and so for me to hear the sirens was kind of loud and then i heard another ambulance and was loud and i started realizing part of it maybe because there was no traffic because new york city just seen it never sleeps was pretty much dead at this moment nothing was happening and then i'm typing a letter i hear another ambulance and it's loud and then another one and then stop typing lord have mercy on them what's going on lord help us and i found out later the reason why the sirens sounded louder to me was that new york city did not have enough ambulances to take all the covert patients to the hospitals we had ambulances come from out of state and in new york city our sirens only use 100 watts but once the out of state reason 200 watts and the reason why i heard the ambulance is so loudly because less than a mile away from my parish was elmhurst hospital which was the epicenter of the entire country for clovid at that moment they ran out of beds then the messages started coming father can you go to the cemetery because we have no funerals we have no wake services so i go to a cemetery which is not one of ours and they get there and if you know there texts me and says you don't want you to get out of the car they want you to do the prayers from inside the car what how am i going to pray for these people inside the car do you want me to bless the coffin for instance on my car what the heck with that i got out of the car but they had the coffin they can build the driveway at a cemetery and the families in your car watching me and the cemetery workers are dressed in practically hazmat suits this is the very beginning no one ruined what was going on and i went i just shrugged at the family like my hands are hearts i'm sorry and this blessed the body and got in the car a couple days later my funeral home close by me says father we have two can you go visit the st john's cemetery i want to bring by my diocese that's sure we go and we get there and so i go and guys it was awful because there was a new section a cemetery it looked like france world war one was like trenches because in new york city at that moment it was a two-week waiting list to get buried three-week waiting lists to get cremated in new york city on average before clovid 110 people died a day at the height of clove it 580 people are dying every day if you wanted to get buried in new york city you had to wait two three weeks funeral homes are actually telling people we couldn't take you anymore so there i am at the cemetery and i bury my parishioners and they're going to follow we're going to go back and pick up the next one can you wait sure so i'm waiting and there's this other family sitting there and they're crying and they come up to me and i know what they're going to ask me and they say father we have nobody to pray with us can you pray with us absolutely so i'm glad there and i said i did three burials that day and then i got the point though like because they were so bad like i could go to the cemetery and wait two hours to do the five-minute service so the funeral home and i we talked and said we're going to do which is not a good term to use in new york city but we did drive bys where they would text me father we're on the way i'll be in the church ready invested the hearse will pull up in front of the church i read the funeral bells and then i would go out and the funeral director opened the back of the hearse pulled a coffin out a little bit the family would gather six feet distance everyone's wearing a mask i go to the family and i just apologize so i couldn't do a funeral mess my heart really hurt for them because my own father my grandparents friends we had the wakes we can mourn we could cry we can laugh we could tell stories the funeral mass like nobody does funerals nobody does death better than catholics i mean our funeral masses bring such healing for the family but also for the soul of the deceased and i told him i'm sorry we can't do this but once we can have mass again let me know we could do a memorial mass so then i would do the burial right in front of my church and sometimes it was like okay father the next one's coming and then there's this young lady from my last parish text me father i did found my dad dead and i can't see him her parents were separated his cousin went to pick him up to go to work he wouldn't answer the door he was fine the night before and he's dead so this poor girl couldn't see her dad one last time they did a direct cremation she closed me up what am i gonna do i didn't know what to do i went to the lord what do you want me to do lord he goes you zoom what zoom i never used zoom before that moment i had heard about it was start used for ccd so i went online and looked down on it so i told tatiana i said tatiana i said i'm going to do a zoom service for your family so i'm going to figure this out and then send a link we're going to do that so then i stopped the link and her parents were from ecuador so then we did it i was in my blessed sacrament chaplain directory i had some nuns staying with me we were musicians and i did a prayer service on zoom i did wake service and we had people from ecuador watching it people from california people from new york we have over 50 people in this zoom week service and as i said i was so sorry this is all i could do and the sister is saying some music and we did the wake service and at the end i said you know if you guys want to say anything about your brother or about your dad about your friend now it's the time and he'll start sharing stories and even though we're all sheltering a place at a moment the lord brought us all together in that moment and i share these stories with you because it's been a hard year for all of us and we're trying to figure out what to do to be with our people to reach out to them to love them glad to know they're not forgotten even though the doors are closed we couldn't have mass they couldn't have confessions sacraments but the lord took care of me in a certain way because before i cloved i heard about that book a consecration st joseph right so i pre-ordered that on amazon i couldn't wait i was going to do it i was going to consecrate myself on march 19 for 2020. but then amazon could never deliver the book so after christmas i'm getting worried i'm looking i'm still not available it's still not available because i want to get it so i could do it in time and i didn't get it in time to do the consecration march 19th eventually i had to cancel amazon i know a directly from the marion semeca conception then i got it but the lord knew what he was doing because i had to start that consecration in the middle of clovid and make my consecration on may 1st joseph worker and every day for those 33 days or so i was praying with saint joseph and seeing joseph has been a great example to me because his confirmation saint name and so forth but he had to handle such crazy situations i mean he had his whole life planned out he was married to this beautiful girl in nazareth there got a bunch of kids maybe expand the carpentry business and then boom mary comes says joseph i gotta tell you something he turned his world upside down and then they got to go to bed on him right for the census and they go there he thinks i'm going back to my ancestral home this would be great we're probably gonna have some great reception and all that and they get there you can't find anything they got to go to the stable and then they go to the temple and this is a great moment presenting the lord and then simeon says and you as sword of sorrow is going to pierce your heart and joseph are like what the heck is going on god and then they get back and then the angel comes and says oh by the way herod wants to kill the mother and the child tangled in egypt and his whole life is transformed again like that guy went for so much problems and so many things a life-changing event in that short period of nine months so how did saint joseph handle all of that he had the real presence of jesus he was the first human being to see the face of jesus when he was born he served first and then he gave him to mary and they can imagine seeing joseph when he's freaking out where he's worried i'm not good enough i'm not strong enough i'm not smart enough what am i going to do here's how to look at the christ child and find that peace he had constant adoration going on he had the lord so like imagine and of course he went to our lady and that's what we're supposed to do as priests right let's go to our lady and supposed to go to jesus truly present to us one of the great gifts of my diocese is our two last bishops virtually mandated we're highly encouraged that every record we have a blessed sacrament chapel and my two pastors my first decision each assignment was like okay we're right through church wait wait i'm going to find where is the chapel going if you don't have one already because it was drawing covered no i would go to the lord and he said lord i don't know lord i'm so tired lord i can't figure this out anymore what do you want me to do anybody's like just stay here you guys i love doing holy hours i'll go spend time for the blessed sacrament but sometimes i be in the chapel and i go in my room and i realize i've been here for two hours sometimes i realize i was there for three hours i'm not saying that to brag i'm saying that because like that's what got me through i couldn't see my friends i couldn't hug my mom for six months i couldn't go out with my buddies i couldn't see a lot of my parishioners so i just went to him hey joseph and then was able to make that consecration of me first and it was just so powerful it was so helpful because then i was like just like go just like joseph go see jesus go look at jesus imagine just growing up in nazareth right in egypt and nazareth and how joseph would struggle and then he would just look up jesus sleeping and he just remembered god trusted him god trusted him with jesus and guys especially the priest god trusted us with his son too like in our hands we get the whole god and sometimes we stay mad so often we might sometimes forget the mystery that we're doing but celebrate mass to go to adoration like if you wanted to hurt me more than anything else take away my faculties you want to destroy my heart destroy my soul tell me i can't say mass but joseph just helped me to remind myself sometimes you have to say anything sometimes you don't have to talk just look at the face of jesus so go to joseph and he'll help you see the eucharistic face of jesus you remember nothing else in this homily go to joseph i'm going to help you see the eucharistic face of jesus because great things happen before the blessed sacrament right i don't pray the same way every time sometimes i listen to music sometimes i like to lose music sometimes i listen over music sometimes i put a youtube video on to help me or something like that sometimes i just read something sometimes i read scripture sometimes i just sit there and look at them and then the lord does interesting things for what bless the sacrament does he not like sometimes i'm praying and then somebody i've not thought about my months would come to mind and i'm praying i'm like why am i thinking about monica why am i thinking about monaco i'm thinking about mike wait where's michael come on so i'll take my phone out i'll text monica and say hey hey i'm with jesus right now i'm praying for you and usually reply comes back how did you know something was wrong with me how do you know i was hurting right now he said i didn't know anything the lord does he loves you send another text to someone a friend of mine dominique praying for you right now for jesus he's put you in my heart how do you know i'm really struggling with work i'm pulling my hair out of my head how do you know i didn't know anything the lord did so lord the lord wants us to go and know him in the blessed sacrament and the sister miriam's been quoting from father jacques shaleep and i want to do the same thing in his little book on priestly fatherhood it's also at the feet of the blessed sacrament in daily faithfulness to the moment's eucharistic adoration that a priest truly becomes a father truly becomes a father this is where the father in heaven communicates his true fatherhood his compassion and his tenderness are all his children this is where in a large part requires the attention for others that one needs so friend of the blessed sacrament you're sure to learn how to be fathers because we bring our children and we're spiritual children we pray for them we love them we pray we love them like saint joseph loved baby jesus and the child of jesus and the teenage jesus and the young man jesus he loved him that way and i know what i'm saying is nothing new and i know it's been thousands of books written on this but guys sometimes it's so simple just go to jesus so invite you now just imagine saint joseph leading you and pointing to you to where he got his strength to the face of jesus

Channel: Steubenville Conferences

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Keywords: Steubenville Conferences, Catholic, Franciscan University, Catholic Ministry, New Evangelization, Youth

Id: JjnREL5B4JE

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021