“The thoughts of His heart last through every generation” . . .

The entrance antiphon for the Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for this First Friday of November . . .

Thank you, members of the St. Thomas More Society, for your invitation to be with you for Mass today; thank you for your warm welcome; thank you for the inspiration you give in gathering for Mass, fellowship, and Christian Formation every First Friday; thank you for your leadership in the Church and in our community.

A word of appreciation to your chaplains, Father Paul Hartmann and Father Jim Connell …

And a word of apology that I have to leave right after Mass and cannot stay for breakfast with you. I’ll try to make the most of my time with you right now at Mass.

First Friday prompts us to consider the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “The thoughts of His heart last through every generation . . .” The everlasting scope of God’s plan, His wisdom, His mercy, His love - - it is eternal.

And I invite you to think of the eternal this morning.

First of all, that the wisdom, mercy, love, and law of God is eternal. There is, at the basis of creation, in the very nature of creatures, an eternal plan, an eternal law. Creation and creatures, at the core, are rooted in an eternal design. The English theologian P. T. Forsythe wrote, “If within us we have nothing above us we soon succumb to what is around us.” Is what guides us, what sustains us, what grounds us something eternal, - - in other words, do we have a transcendent point of reference in our lives? - - or is what guides us something constantly changing to suit the winds of the day? As the Old Testament Psalmist asks, is our life dominated by the wind or by the rock, who is God?

You know of course that this is a constant theme in the writings of Pope John Paul II. Is the foundation of our lives shifting sand or a solid rock? Yes, while our knowledge and technology is always in progress, and while we grow in our understanding and appreciation of life, at our core is an eternal, immutable design which comes from God is imprinted in creation, and in the very nature of every person. Thus do our laws on earth strive to reflect the law of God. Thus there is objective truth; thus, as St. Augustine says, are there certain things that are always right, even when the whole world says they are wrong, and certain things always wrong even when everybody claims they are right. For right and wrong are not decided by the fluctuations of the human heart, but by the eternal wisdom of the heart of God.

The people of Israel always held that idolatry was the greatest of all sins. The first of the Ten Commandments warns of it. And such is the temptation today: to create God in our own image rather than to re-create ourselves in His image. What becomes normative is then not His way but my way, not His eternal law but our ever-changing preferences, and the goal of religion becomes not to challenge ourselves and our society to conform to God’s will but to conform God to our’s.

Our God becomes an image of our society and culture. Gone is the notion of divine judgment; gone is the concept of conversion of life; gone is the idea of dying to self and rising to newness of life in conformity with God’s will. In place of the God revealed in the Heart of Christ, a God of both judgment and mercy, a God whose law is meant to govern human life, we have a God who simply affirms our preferences.

Not for us, for “the thoughts of His heart last through every generation.”

Secondly, at the root of creation, at the center of existence, is not a “black hole” but a heart; at the center of reality is everlasting love.

I think of your patron, St. Thomas More. We have all seen Robert Bolt’s play or film, A Man for All Seasons. In the preface to the play, Bolt writes that the world’s greatest need is for “a sense of selfhood without magic.” Thus, More was a hero for the author, because “Thomas More was a man with an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off, what areas of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved . . . Since he was a clever man and a great lawyer, he was able to retire from those areas in wonderfully good order, but at length he was asked to retreat from the final area where he located himself. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person set like metal was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigor, and could no more be budged than a cliff.”

Recall that wrenching last meeting between St. Thomas More and his family, sent to the Tower of London to persuade him to bend to the kings will? Remember the plea of his beloved daughter, Meg, “Haven’t you done as much as God can reasonably want?” To which her father, Thomas More, haltingly replied, “Well, finally, Meg, it isn’t a matter of reason; finally, it’s a matter of love.” According to the playwright, St. Thomas More “found something in himself without which life was valueless . . .” That was the eternal truth of God, not some psychological sense of “self.” Thomas More did not die for “self,” he died for love, and Christian love is self-giving, not self-asserting.

And the final aspect of eternity I ask you to think about this morning is our own eternal destiny. We owe it to the deceased members of the St. Thomas More Society to remember them with reverence and gratitude at our Mass today. And we owe it to ourselves to think about our own death.

The Church exhorts us to do so during November, as the darkness of night comes earlier, the leaves fall, the wind chills, winter lurks, and nature dies.

On the day I arrived here in the archdiocese for the announcement that the Holy Father had appointed me your tenth archbishop, I visited the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. There I asked to see the crypt where most of our archbishops are interred. “Certainly,” replied Father Carl Last, the pastor. “You can say a prayer for your predecessor.” To which I replied, “And I can also see where one day I will be buried.”

This is not morbid but life-giving; this is not oppressive but liberating; for those who ignore eternity live only for today, and those who prepare daily for death live each day to the fullest.

“The thoughts of His heart last through every generation.”