On July 4^th, 1952, a young woman named Florence Chadwick waded into the water off Catalina Island.  The water was very cold that day.  It made her legs feel numb.  It was also very foggy.  In fact, it was so foggy that couldn’t see several boats that were very nearby.  But Florence Chadwick got into the water and started swimming, intending to swim the channel from Catalina Island to the California coast.  Long-distance swimming was not new to her; Florence was the first woman in history to swim the English Channel in both directions.  On this day, Florence was having a particularly difficult time.  She had trained for months.  But she hadn’t planned on the water being that cold.  The fog was a terrible distraction.  She couldn’t see where she was going.  A few hours into the swim and she encounter sharks, which had to be driven away by rifle fire, from those in the boats.  Florence swam for more than fifteen hours before asking to be pulled out of the water.  Her trainer tried to encourage her to swim on, since they were so close to land, but when Florence looked from down in the water, all she saw was fog.  So she quit only a half-a-mile from her goal.  Later on, Florence said “I’m not excusing myself, but if I could have just seen the land, I might have made it.”  It wasn’t the cold or the fear or the exhaustion that caused Florence Chadwick to fail.  It was the fog.   Many times, we too fail, not because we are afraid or because of the peer pressure or because of anything other than the fact that we can see our goal.  We lose sight of our objective.  Maybe that’s why St. Paul writes in the Letter to Philemon, “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”  Sometimes we’ve really got to keep in our sight our goal of what we’re after.  Two months after her failure, Florence Chadwick got back into the water at the same beach where she had tried on the 4^th of July, and she swam the distance, setting a new speed record, because this time, she could see the land.  She could see where she was going.

       Today our Gospel presents us with two very determined Apostles, who have their own goals.  James and John, the sons of Zebedee, have heard Jesus talk all about His Kingdom for several months now.  The brothers are very affected by Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom.  They had left everything to follow Him.  And now, while everybody else may be thinking it, James and his younger brother John don’t hesitate at all to ask Jesus, for the best seats in His eternal Kingdom.  You can’t be bashful when it comes to what you most want out of life.  And James and John aren’t bashful.  The other Apostles get upset at them for this, and the whole situation becomes the opportunity for Jesus to teach about service.  Jesus is re-defining greatness here.  He is saying that greatness isn’t about money, or power, or popularity, or being aggressive, or about where you sit.  True greatness, according to Jesus, comes from serving others.  Both James and John would go on to become great servants of God and of His Church.  They would both spend their lives in God’s service.  They would both drink of the same cup of suffering that Jesus would drink from.  And we don’t know where they sit in Heaven.  Maybe they are right there next to Jesus.  Maybe they will be sitting next to us when we get there, we don’t know.  What we do know now, thanks to Jesus, is the way to get there.  And today we are called to follow that same way.  It is simply not enough to just ask.  We’ve got to put our goals into action.  We can all sit around and say that we want to go to Heaven.  What Jesus is saying is that if that is true, then we’d better get busy doing God’s work.  It is time to get our hands dirty and get to work, building God’s Kingdom.  All of us can serve in some capacity.  Jesus wanted us all actively engaged in our salvation.  Are we?

       And through all of our efforts, all of our service, and all of our hard work, we’ve got to keep our eyes, our mind, and our hearts set on Jesus and His Kingdom.  We live in a world today that can also very foggy.  So much of the time we can’t see God, we can’t see the difference that we are making, we can’t tell how close we are, to the Kingdom that Jesus talked about all the time.  Today, Jesus assures us that He is there, He is close by, and if we serve Him, and trust Him, and give Him the chance, He will get us safely home.  There are lots of similarities between long-distance swimming and our Faith lives.   We must boldly persevere in our goal of reaching Heaven.  God will help us.  But let us not take our hearts off of Him!

May God bless us this Sunday,  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…AMEN !!!

   St. Maria Goretti…Pray for us !!!