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On
this Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, a strange thing is happening, both
in the readings and in our lives. As you get older and you grow in your
knowledge of who Christ is more and more, you simultaneously grow in
self-knowledge. This true self, who you are in God, and not who others want you
to be or some persona of who you would like to be, was given at conception and takes
a lifetime …

Worldwide,
the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity today. Theologians,
saints, and mystics have tried to describe the Trinity, three persons in one
God, in various ways. St. Patrick apparently used the cloverleaf as his
teaching tool. Others have used the comparison of H2O; water comes in the forms
of a gas, a liquid, and a solid. As helpful as descriptions are, they are not
what people really want in life. People do not want a …

It has been a week of hitting restart buttons and a
week of watching painful news stories. Last weekend, just when we thought we
had made all the necessary adjustments and satisfied all the essential
requirements to celebrate Eucharist with 50 of you, our plans were unexpectedly
scuttled.  So, we hit the restart button
for this weekend and get over the pain of disappointment. The bigger and more
difficult pain of this week was the pain watching George Floyd …

As you probably have
heard, our provincial health authorities, as well as Archbishop Valery, have
given us the green light to resume weekend Eucharist with a maximum of 50
parishioners. This is good news but comes with a list of protocols as long and
as twisty as the Petitcodiac River. As staff, we have been working diligently,
behind the scenes, trying to prepare our worship spaces and our worshippers for
the new, albeit temporary, way Eucharist will be celebrated. …

The
first reading came from a book within the Bible called the Acts of the Apostles
and written by the same author who wrote one of the four gospels, the Gospel of
Luke. The opening line in Acts, Luke writes, “In my first book,
Theophilus.” The first book refers to the Gospel of Luke. Acts of the
Apostles his second book. So, think of the Bible not as a book but as a
collection of books or a mini …

If you are
keeping track, you know that we have not gathered for Sunday Eucharist since
March 15th, the third Sunday of Lent. I half-jokingly suggested we
were celebrating our “Last Supper” not realizing then that my words would
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are all waiting, including Bishop
Vienneau, for the health authorities to open churches for limited gatherings
like we see in some sectors of society. Throwing the doors of the church wide
open, though, will probably …

Elie
Wiesel (1928-2016) authored 57 books during his lifetime, but perhaps his most
notable work was his book entitled Night. Read it if you have not already.
Wiesel was born in Transylvania which was annexed by Hungary in 1940 and
subsequently invaded by the Nazis in 1944. Although only about 100 pages long,
Night is a powerful telling of the horrors that he and his family went through
in the Nazi-run concentration camps. Elie’s mother and sister were murdered …

Back in the summer of
2001, five years after I had moved away from the Ottawa Valley, the City of
Ottawa hosted the Francophone Games. Immediately after the Games closed over
100 participants, from abroad, decided they were not going back home to their
country but instead were seeking refugee status in Canada. The next day, a
popular radio talk show host (akin to Rush Limbaugh) began his show with a
roar. He came out with guns firing. Calls …

I am not sure if this story is in any of Fr. Richard Rohr’s numerous books or not, but he does tell it on a C.D. retreat talk entitled “Fire from Heaven.” It goes like this.

“There is a
story that an artesian well had sprung up in the middle of the desert, and it
was a marvelous well with clear, nourishing, and copious water. People began to
come and to drink and to celebrate their …

We continue
the journey of living our faith amidst a pandemic. Provincial health officials
are loosening, ever so slowly, some of the restrictions we have all been living
under. Premier Higgs even suggested church services can resume outdoors albeit
with cars spaced a safe distance apart. Bishop Vienneau is not moving in that
direction, as we would still not be able to share in Communion and having a
“drive-thru” Mass would trivialize the sacrament.  I agree.