Faith
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When my little girl became a teenager, I didn’t flinch. Raising a daughter who is so solidly grounded in her faith has made this journey (so far) a less stressful experience than those I’ve heard described by other parents. A very modest young lady, my daughter Vanessa and I don’t argue about short skirts and makeup, parties or boys. Our conversations seem more focused on her grades, goals, golf and God, and for that I am grateful.
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June 23-30, 2014Saints Peter and Paul (A), June 29, 2014
The question for the disciples came from Jesus himself, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” The problem for Christians today in answering this question might be how to make sense of Jesus’ humanity in the context of his true divinity. For Jesus’ apostles, standing face to face with the flesh and blood of their friend and teacher, the relevant issue seems not to have been was Jesus God, but what sort of man has God sent to us in Jesus.
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June 23-30, 2014Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), July 6, 2014
How quickly should we move from the literal to the allegorical, figurative or spiritual meaning of words in the Bible? There is no one answer, for in reading the Bible sometimes the literal meaning of a word or a passage is indeed the spiritual meaning itself; at other times, the literal reading grounds a separate spiritual or allegorical meaning; and at still other times, both a literal and figurative meaning exist together.
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June 23-30, 2014
My grandmother was one of the most faithful people I’ve ever met. In my fondest memory of her, she is walking through the house on a warm summer day, watering plants while singing spirituals—those Christian songs created by enslaved people in the United States as a form of prayer and worship. Whether Grandma was caring for her grandchildren, assisting people in the community or doing chores, she presented her faith through song.
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June 9-16, 2014Body and Blood of Christ (A), June 22, 2014
Bodies need nourishing, whether it is an individual body, a corporate body or a spiritual body. We need to be fed with the food that sustains, that is most appropriate to each body. Historically we see the corporate body of Israel fed by God in the wilderness with the material stuff of manna, necessary for life, and the subsequent entry of the people into a land of physical abundance.
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June 9-16, 2014Holy Trinity (A), June 15, 2014
The apostle Paul would not have been able to define the Trinity, yet he was able with ease to describe the activity and presence of the three persons of the Trinity. While propositions about God are significant, it is the experience of God that led to the nascent formulations of Trinitarian thought.
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June 9-16, 2014
It was the use of the third person that confused me utterly in third grade, when we began to discuss the Trinity. We understood, if vaguely, the first person, the original idea, the progenitor, the instigator of all things, that which spake from the burning bush.
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May 26-June 2, 2014Pentecost (A), June 8, 2014
The Acts of the Apostles presents a reverse Babel at Pentecost, when the confusion of tongues described in Gn 11:1–9 is transformed into understanding among the earliest disciples of Jesus, who find themselves speaking “other languages.” The confusion of tongues at Babel gives to us an ancient etiology for the separation of peoples into linguistic groups, but Acts twice says that bewildered onlookers heard Jesus’ disciples “speaking in the native language of...
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May 26-June 2, 2014Ascension (A), June 1, 2014
One of the overlooked aspects of Jesus’ ascension has to do not with the continuing materiality of the risen Lord or the “whereness” of Jesus’ glorified body but with the earthly implications of the ascension for the church.
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May 26-June 2, 2014
Several years ago, I spent five days on a silent retreat at the motherhouse of the Ursuline Sisters of Mount St. Joseph in Kentucky. While this wasn’t my first retreat, it was my first experience of extended silence. As the days went by, I had the sinking feeling that nothing was happening. After all, I was on retreat. I was doing my part, so where were all the heavenly graces and consolations that were supposed to be flooding my heart and soul?