Will You Live in Christ’s Light or Die in the Darkness?

Michie · Mar 16, 2024

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a great battle for people’s souls.

Editor’s Note: Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair wrote the following homily for Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and delivered it March 10 at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. His homily begins at around the 20-minute mark in the video embedded below..

As a bishop, I have conferred the sacrament of Confirmation many times. As part of their preparation the candidates for this sacrament are expected to attend classes, go on retreats and do service projects.

This is all well and good, but I feel the need to tell them at the Confirmation liturgy that ultimately, Confirmation is not about what they have done or are doing — it’s about what God has done and is doing. Confirmation, like all the sacraments, is a gift freely and mightily conferred by God. It will be powerful in us to the extent that we open our hearts and put no obstacles in God’s way — to the extent that we dispose ourselves to receive what God wants to give.

Christianity is not at all a search for God, as people sometimes say about religion, especially today, when so many people, having abandoned the faith they were raised in, are looking for something to guide their lives. No, Christianity is a religion of Divine Revelation, of the God who first searches for us, who speaks to us — of the God who, as St. John says in one of his Epistles, “has first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Continued below.