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I have not met this person, but I have read a small fraction of her work. Her name is Paula D’Arcy, and a few of her roles in life is that she is a mother, a widow, an author, a retreat leader, and a grief counselor. Back in 1975 when Paula was 27, police officers, out of the blue, came to her door to tell her that her husband and 21-month-old daughter had been tragically killed in a car …

As I see it, the problem with sin is not so much the sin itself, but it’s the remembering and identifying with the sin. That’s the problem. What does it mean to say Jesus is the sinless one? I think it means he never identifies with sin. He never holds himself to past mistakes. And because he never holds himself to the past he has no need to hold others to their past sins.

We can …

The great rabbi was dying, and as we all know, deathbed wisdom is the best. So, his students lined up, single file, to receive his last words. The most brilliant student was by his bedside, the second most brilliant immediately behind him, and so on till the line ended at a pleasant enough fellow who was a good room and a half away. The most brilliant student leaned over to the slowly slipping rabbi and asked, “Rabbi, what is …

Church year, the liturgical year, begins pretty much the way it ends–with readings that are not easy to interpret or apply to our lives. They are quite philosophical and full of end-time imagery that leaves you thinking, “What could this possibly mean for us in this place and in this time?” Or you might say in mid-life, “Where is this whole thing going?” Or again, for those of you well past mid-life, “Is the whole world going to hell …

You may have grown up thinking of the Season of Advent as that four-week sprint just before Christmas.  Or, maybe you thought of it as the appetizer whose sole purpose was to get you to the main course—Christmas!  When you’re a kid waiting for presents (present company included), four weeks of Advent can seem like an eternity.  To say that the Season of Advent is four weeks long is liturgically correct albeit a bit short-sighted.  The Reign of God …

We don’t use it in everyday language, but you may have heard the word “apocalypse”. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning “revelation”— something is being revealed. So, the Book of Revelation, that second reading we heard from, is considered apocalyptic writing. The first reading, from the Book of Daniel, is also considered apocalyptic writing. Apocalyptic writing has to do with the end time (and here we are at the end of the liturgical year) and what will be revealed …

Naïve story #1: As a young child, and listening to music coming from a transistor radio, I thought there was a shrunken jazz band actually inside the radio. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, even though I still have no idea how transmitters or receivers work. Naïve story #2: As a young child, when the collection basket was being passed around during Mass, I thought all of the money collected—100% of it–was going to help the poor. …

Only certain songs pass the test of time and are still sung or played on the radio decades after they first came out. One such song is Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” which made its debut in 1974.  If you’re not familiar with it, the song is centered on a little boy who absolutely adores his father. The child wants nothing more than his father’s attention, but his father is too busy with work and commitments. The father keeps …

This gospel passage was one of the most important scripture stories told to those seeking baptism in the Church in the first few centuries.  It has lots to teach us as well.  Remember, only adults were baptized during the first 350 years of the Church’s existence. Back then, what they called the Catechumenate–and what we call the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults–catechists told those seeking baptism the story of Bartimaeus, the blind beggar.  You could not become a Christian, unless a …

Many people read or listen to these gospel stories as simply stories from the past. When we do that, we easily dismiss them by convincing ourselves that the context of 2000 years ago was so different than our context today, these stories couldn’t possibly have anything to tell us, even if they are the words of Jesus. But I would say, the majority of you, since you come back week after week, are willing to go deeper. Without always …