Our parish pilgrims arrived safely in Athens on Wednesday, October 21, and celebrated the first Mass of the pilgrimage together that afternoon. Here is Fr. Wilson’s homily.
We are in Athens. We are in the footsteps of St. Paul. St. Paul came to Athens and preached one of his most famous sermons on the Areopagus, revealing the unknown God. He had found an altar “To an Unknown God,” and he wanted to reveal to the Athenians who that unknown God was: the true God, the God of Israel, who had revealed himself fully in the person of his Son, Jesus (Acts 17:22-31). We are literally now in the footsteps of St. Paul.
We sang the Kyrie. It’s something we’re all familiar with: Kyrie eleison. That’s not Latin, as you know; that’s Greek. These very words go back to the origins of Christianity, when the Gospel was first introduced into the Greek-speaking world. We still have this vestige of that time.
As we came through customs today, I saw icons. How interesting! This is a modern European state in the EU, and each of those offices had icons. I presume they were chosen by the people working there. That’s a sign of the effect of the ministry of St. Paul the Apostle, who first brought the Gospel to Europe, to Greece, to the Greek-speaking world. We are in the footsteps of St. Paul, and we can see the evidence of his work, of his ministry, of his preaching.
On this pilgrimage, we want to be open. That’s really my main encouragement today: be open to the Lord in your life. If we think of the different moments of St. Paul’s life, we can go back to his conversion on the road to Damascus, when he encountered the risen Lord. At the heart of our faith is encounter, encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
Recently I heard a beautiful talk by a bishop who was speaking to the teachers of our diocese. He spoke about conversion not as a one-time event, but about multiple conversions: his own conversions as a priest, the conversions he had experienced as a bishop, and the conversions he still hoped to experience.
I invite you to be open to deeper conversion. We all have a faith story, and the Lord has worked in our lives in marvelous ways. But consider that his work in our life is not merely something of the past. It’s something in the present. He wants more for us, and he’s inviting us into more. Have an open heart during our pilgrimage. Simply be where you are, because the Lord meets us where we are, and he always invites us to go deeper.
In the Gospel today we heard about the faithful servants. The Lord desires us to be faithful and vigilant servants (Luke 12:39-48). And so part of our prayer is, “Lord, what are you asking of me? Lord, where are you inviting me to say yes?”
You might have noticed that I’m wearing a chasuble that was a gift to all the priests who celebrated the beatification Mass of Blessed Fulton Sheen. There were a thousand of us, and we were all given one of these vestments. I’m so happy that I can wear it with you this week, because we saw in Blessed Fulton Sheen a kind of modern-day St. Paul. We saw the spirit of St. Paul in him. He went to new places: not new places in terms of geography, but radio and television, new spaces in the culture.
He is a modern example of someone truly inspired by St. Paul who continued to grow in his own journey of faith, and that journey was profound. After the high point of his “celebrity years,” when he had the number one television show in America, he experienced deep suffering and a deep cross, through conflict within the Church that was very painful for him. He carried much of that cross in the last decade of his life, and he died in 1979. I share that to say: the Lord is never done with us. He was not “done” with Fulton Sheen at the height of his celebrity, when he was so well known, preached the Gospel so effectively, and raised millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in today’s dollars, for the missions and for the poor.
So my main theme in this opening homily, as we walk literally in the footsteps of St. Paul, is to be open. Saul of Tarsus (Saul his Hebrew name, Paul his Roman name) was open to that encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and was willing to allow his life to be changed. Are we willing to allow our lives to be changed? Have we gotten comfortable in our pattern of faith? Have we settled in? Are we open to a new encounter with the Lord, to the Lord inviting us into something even deeper?
Inspired by St. Paul, I invite you to have hearts that are open to that encounter, and open to the Lord working in our lives in new ways.
Live from Athens
On arrival, Fr. Wilson went live on the parish Facebook page with the Acropolis behind him: “This is Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited capital. People have been living here for 5,000 years. This is the birthplace of Western democracy. Of course, we are here remembering Paul’s visit to Athens, as he tried to convert the Athenians.”