Bridging us from the great 50-day season of Easter to Ordinary Time, are a couple of significant feast days in the Church’s liturgical calendar. One of these is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity or Trinity Sunday, which we celebrate today. In the eyes of the Church, “a solemnity is a feast day of the highest rank, celebrating a mystery of faith.” In other words, a solemnity is kind of a big deal.
The Trinity is kind of a big ...
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Seven years ago, just a few days before we celebrated what we are celebrating today—Pentecost—we were very much like the disciples in today’s gospel. They locked themselves in the Upper Room out of fear. Similarly, we locked ourselves in our houses for the same reason—fear. A young man had killed three Mounties and was still on the loose. Thank goodness events of that magnitude are rare. What was not so rare in Jesus’ time, and still in our time, is ...
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In the Pentecost narrative, we hear of Jesus’ post-resurrection visit to his 12 BFFs, how they were infused with the Holy Spirit, and the instructions Jesus left them (and us) for sharing the Good News with the world. Jesus would have known his Apostles well enough to gauge their strengths and weaknesses and he would have understood how differently each of them would confront the task set out before them. I suspect the same was true then as now: We ...
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It is hard to talk about the Feast of the Ascension (that great departure of Jesus in his physical form) without also talking about next Sunday’s Feast of Pentecost (that great return of Jesus in his spiritual form). Let’s just stay with today’s feast, Ascension, because if we do Ascension well, Pentecost almost takes care of itself.
When I think of Ascension, I can’t help but think of words we often hear the priest pray during a funeral mass: “Life is ...
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This week’s readings are, in short, about the Ascension of our Lord to heaven where he takes his place at the right hand of our Father. As big as the event is, I feel like the most important part is what happens right before Jesus ascends. In all three readings, Jesus leaves his apostles with an especially important task, that of going out and spreading the good word and his love.
We are, and have been entrusted to be, Jesus’s hands, ...
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We have music, movies, books, and children’s books, puzzles and toys!
How Does it Work?
Every spring, bar none, I spend a good amount of time pulling out lots of seedlings from my garden and flower beds. They sprout up from the thousands of maple seeds that fell last fall from the maple trees on the church property. They are everywhere, and they require so little to get started. They are under the leaf litter. They are found in the smallest cracks. They are against the rectory foundation. And they are growing against the greatest ...
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Whenever a coach feels his/her team is not living up to their potential, he/she will always say something typical like, “We’ve got to get back to basics.” Without demoting anyone to the minor leagues, let’s look at some of the basics of liturgy that we would do well to return to. I’ll call them my seven deadly liturgical “sins”. The first four “sins” we have little control over due to COVID; the next three we are totally in control of. ...
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Faith is a very precarious thing isn’t it? The moment you think you have it, something will happen this very day to make you doubt that you had it at all. But don’t get discouraged because these scripture readings are telling you that you probably have more faith than you know and moreover, you never lose it entirely. Like learning how to ride a bicycle, you never lose it. Your faith will by tried and tested, no doubt. It will ...
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“Whoever abides in me and I in them bears much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
(John 15: 5); we hear these words from Jesus in our Gospel reading this week. This is a lesson that is taking me a lifetime to learn, and in fact, is still a work in progress. More the second part of the statement than the first, as I don’t think there is much to debate in the first part. Having said that, ...