Blog

Christmas and Easter are the high points of the liturgical year for Christians.  No doubt about it.  Yet, they are not stand-alone holidays.  Christmas and Easter are part of a pattern which looks like this: prepare-celebrate-savor.

In Advent, we prepare for the birth of Christ.  At Christmas we celebrate Jesus’ coming.  And since the coming of Christ into our world is so important, we need to savor it until the last day of the Christmas Season, …

There is a sentence spoken at the end of that long gospel reading that, in my mind, seems to be misplaced for a couple of reasons. After Jesus breathes his last on the cross, the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” It seems misplaced firstly because this profound truth was not spoken by one of Jesus’ closest followers, that is, by one of the Apostles or one of the women.  It was spoken by a soldier, who …

I mentioned last weekend how you could not become a member of the Early Church unless you had some knowledge of the story of the Woman at the Well (two Sundays ago), the story of the Man Born Blind (last Sunday), and the story of the Raising of Lazarus (today’s story). Catechists, those who were a little bit more adept, led those who were inept into these stories, led them out of these stories, and help them to apply …

Apparently, in the Early Church, you could not be welcomed into the Church, through baptism, unless you were guided into the spiritual insights of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well (last Sunday’s gospel), the story of the man born blind (today’s gospel), and the story of the raising of Lazarus (next Sunday’s gospel).  Sponsors or mentors guided you into these stories, guided you out of these stories, and helped you to apply these stories to your own …

For all their goodness, intelligence, and enthusiasm, many in the younger generation lack patience. For the most part, they see little or no value in “delayed gratification.” In time they will learn, what we all had to learn, that some things really are worth waiting for. Learning this lesson will be particularly painful and frustrating for the generation who grew up in a world of fast food, high-speed internet, and smart phones. With the invention of the credit card …

We spent the last four weeks on the mountain listening to Jesus deliver what we traditionally call the “Sermon on the Mount.” If you recall, it all began with Jesus ascending the mountain not to look down on us, but to get us to look up. He ascended the mountain to tell us the truth about who we are from God’s perspective. We are blessedness, salt and light, and we are challenged to let the blessedness, salt and light work in …

One of the most powerful rituals I ever experienced was not one of the Church’s sacraments nor did it happen in a church building. It was a ritual I experienced on a Men’s Rite of Passage Retreat. One entire day of the retreat was dedicated to the topic of grief and how we experience it or, to our own detriment, avoid it. The ritual involved lots and lots of ashes. We laid in them, we knelt in them, we poured them …

I remember, when my mother was still alive, she wouldn’t let us get away with anything. She was as they say, “honest as the day is long.” One time, when I was 17 years old, she was a passenger with me as I stopped to gas up the car. That was when you could drive all week on $20 dollars-worth of gas and still have money to spare. I did my best, on that particular fill up, to stop …

We continue, for the third week, to be on Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount. We started off by saying the Beatitude are ways of seeing. Jesus wants us to see and love in ourselves what God sees and loves in us. What God sees and loves in us is blessedness, salt, and light.  In the Beatitudes, Jesus says “blessed are you” eight times, and then he gives us two more truths about ourselves: “You are …

From time to time, a man, a woman, and occasionally a child, will emerge in the Church to remind us that prophets still walk among us.  Prophets, whether within the Church or beyond its boundaries, are often ahead of their time, misunderstood, and suffer ridicule and indifference.  More often than not, they are appreciated only after they are long dead.  Prophets point us to a larger reality where we can situate our lives and our decisions, both good and …