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| Dan Mattson and his book |
(Second
Sunday of Advent (B): This homily was given on December 10, 2017 at St. Pius X
Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.
Read Isaiah 40: 1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3: 8-14; Mark 1: 1-8.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Second Sunday of Advent 2017]
Daniel
Mattson is a 47-year-old man who has experienced same-sex attraction in varying
degrees since he was 6-years-old. He was
baptized a Catholic, but during his youth his family left the Catholic Church
and joined an evangelical Protestant community.
Not surprisingly, Dan eventually abandoned Christianity altogether. In his autobiography, which I’m currently
reading, he talks very candidly about how, over a number of years, he came to reject
God, identify himself as gay, and adopt the gay lifestyle. Clearly, he was looking for love and
happiness in his life—and that was great.
Everyone does that! However,
because of his woundedness (a woundedness rooted in his past experiences), he
was looking for that love and happiness in all the wrong places. As he said in his book:
In my life, the seeds of my same-sex attraction are all clear to me: seeds sown with my neighbor when I was a boy, seeds of teasing and alienation from other boys, seeds of envy stemming from doubts about my body, seeds from gruff men and a father who sometimes intimidated and scared me, and seeds from rejection from women, as well as a mother who had an unhealthy and controlling attachment to me because of her own wounds.
Throw
a large dose of pornography into the mix, and you have the formula for producing
a very misguided and mixed-up young man.
That
was Dan Mattson.
What
led him back to God—and ultimately back to the Catholic Church—interestingly
enough, was his experience of suffering: his experience of suffering after a
couple of broken relationships (one with a man, the other with a woman).
In an
attempt to help Dan deal with his pain, his Catholic godparents invited him to
attend the national conference of Courage,
which was being held that year on the campus of Villanova University. Courage
is a Catholic organization that provides pastoral care and support to men and
women who experience same-sex attraction, but who have made the choice to live
chaste lives by following the teachings of the Catholic Church.
His
participation in that conference—and specifically in the opening Mass—is what
changed his life. As he said in his
book, “Before
the Mass began, I wasn’t a practicing Catholic.
But somewhere during the hour-long Mass, I decided to be reconciled with
the Church.”
Of
course, that meant he had to go to confession, which he did. Listen now, to his description of that
experience and what it meant to him:
I saw a priest who was free and walked up to him nervously. “Father,” I said, “I haven’t been to confession in over 30 years. I’m not sure what to do.”He guided me through the process with fatherly love and compassion. I told him everything. Everything, from the very beginning—all my moments of shame, all of my moments of addiction, all the furtive search for happiness in the dead ends of sexual pleasure. I poured out a lifetime of sin and sorrow in one liberating moment of emancipation and release.And then he raised his hand above my head and said the most glorious words anyone has ever said to me [the words of absolution].I had never felt so free, so liberated in all my life. These weren’t empty words; I experienced joy—abundant, ebullient, and overpowering joy—as he said those words. The words of the priests have power, given to them from Christ while he was still among us, after he was raised from the dead, a power unimaginable: the power to forgive sins. …As I left the priest to go back to my pew I knew truly that all of my sins had been forgiven, through the grace of Christ and power of the priest to forgive sins. I knew this just as surely as the Roman centurion who, on the day of Christ’s last breath on the Cross, as St. Matthew tells us, said, “Truly this was the Son of God!” I knew that here, at last, my sins had been forgiven.I went to bed with joy and peace in my heart, looking forward to the next day when I would finally be able to partake of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
I tell
you this story today for a reason.
Notice who’s back with us this morning: John the Baptist—John the
Baptist, with his message of repentance.
John
makes an appearance every Advent and every Lent in at least one of our Sunday
gospel passages. It doesn’t matter which
cycle of readings we’re in—cycle A, cycle B or cycle C—John is always there
preparing the way for Jesus. That, of
course, was his role in salvation history, as prophesied by Isaiah in today’s
first reading, and reiterated by St. Mark in this gospel.
John was
sent to “prepare the way of the Lord” and to “make straight his paths.”
That
means, quite simply, that if you want the Lord to have a “straight path” into
your heart, if you want Jesus to be more fully present in your life, you need
to heed the words of John the Baptist and repent of your sins.
There’s
no other way.
That’s
what Dan Mattson came to understand at that Mass during the Courage conference.
It’s also
what St. Peter believed when he wrote today’s second reading. It’s what moved him in that text to urge us
to take advantage of God’s patience and to turn away from our sins now!
He wrote, “[The Lord] is patient with you, not wishing that any should
perish but that all should come to repentance.”
Later on he added, “Be eager to be found without spot or blemish before
him, at peace.”
As
eager as Dan Mattson was at that conference!
I
also told Dan’s story today because it says something important to us about
confession. Confession is the normal way
for Catholics to have their serious sins forgiven after Baptism. It’s a great gift from God, through which we
can respond to the call of John the Baptist to turn away from our sins.
And
yet we can so easily neglect the gift or take it for granted, can’t we? That’s the thought that came to me as I read
Dan’s story the other day.
Here’s
a guy—Dan Mattson—who did not take the
gift for granted! Here’s a guy who had
his life transformed because (unlike many Catholics today) he made an honest—and thorough—confession of his sins in
the sacrament. He didn’t make excuses
for what he had done; he didn’t hold anything back; he didn’t rationalize his
sins away; he didn’t fail to confess something that he knew deep down inside he
needed to confess.
He
put it all out there! He brought every
serious sin he could possibly remember to Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior, through
the priest—and Jesus took all those sins away, giving Dan a joy and a peace in
his heart that he had never known before.
John
the Baptist would love it! John the
Baptist would highly approve. John the
Baptist would be greatly pleased.
Which
brings us, at last, to the really important question of the day: Would he—would
John the Baptist—be just as pleased with us when we go to confession?