Archbishop’s Chrism Mass Homily

I am sincerely happy and grateful to be celebrating this Chrism Mass with you, especially with you, my brother priests. Up until this morning when I vested for our Mass, I was not sure I could make it. But the Lord is kind...and I stand here before you.

Sometime ago, I circularized my sincere gratitude to all of you. Everyday for more than fifty days in the hospital as a patient alongside other patients I felt in my pains to be carried on the wings of your prayers. I stands here as a concrete evidence of the power of your prayers especially to Ina.

During the long period of confinement in the hospital, I learned many lessons about life: that life becomes fruitful only when death is faced and folded into our lives. I experienced solitude which is the furnace of transformation and realized how we all need to fashion our own solitude; mine was imposed by sickness. I was excited to have long moments of reflection on the meaning of my journey here one earth. My journey, I realized is a humble return to the ground of who and what I am actually, and in that return, a discerning that I am greater, more mysterious, and more beloved that I thought. Something and some greater than myself shares and mirrors exactly what I am, enlarging and blessing me infinitely.

But I will be happy to share these reflections with you on another occasion. For now, I feel, given the solemn occasion which brought us together, I should rather share with you about the Mass.

The doctors were very good and kind, so with the many caregivers. But the most crucial, the most important in keeping me alive is the daily Mass that I celebrated at first standing and then seated. There was something in the Mass that continued to allow me to focus on the meaning of my life within the walls of the hospital room. The Mass did not take away the pain of my situation; it allowed me to befriend it by making me gradually understand and accept that my pain is the concrete way in which I participate in the pain of humanity.  So far from creating an abyss between Christ and myself, my trials, my weaknesses have become during those days in the hospital the privileged place of my encounter with Jesus, and not only with Him, but with the Father Himself.

Beyond this, I realized even more that the words of Eucharistic consecration, which we say every Mass in order to make present on our altars the sacrifice made once and for all on Calvary, are more than a formula of consecration; they must be a "formula of life" for us, priests. The formula of consecration becoming at the same time a formula of how to live the priestly life authentically. Bear with me as I explain how.

A life of gratitude