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Love is a whisper, necessary even when it is insufficient. A couple of threads converged this week in a way that is unusual enough that I wanted to share them. Early this week, a good friend and committed advocate for justice sent me a quote from Sister Helen Prejean, the advocate for abolishing the death…
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It’s really easy to see the weeds and way too hard to buy the pearl. So the schedule of readings for the last couple weeks, as well as this Sunday, are a string of parables from Matthew 13, and the themes that come up for me as I sit with them are ones I feel…
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God is not so hard to find. I sometimes hear four different homilies on a Sunday, in addition to a couple of written reflections. Thanks to technology, in addition to the routinely excellent homilies at my home parish, I listen to podcasts featuring compelling American preachers with varying styles – one focuses on young people;…
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What would St. Francis say? A friend recently sent a “Reverse Prayer of St. Francis: Make Me a Channel of Disturbance”. It’s a good prayer. As is the “Peace Prayer of St. Francis,” to which it is a counterpoint. St. Francis didn’t pray either of these prayers, it’s worth saying at the outset. The “Make…
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Augustine was right, of course. One way of thinking about the essential brokenness of human nature from a Judeo-Christian perspective is that all of us are guilty of breaking the first of the Ten Commandments. All of us, at some level, worship gods we have created instead of the God who created us. In the…
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After a wonderful retreat, we did about 36 hours of tourist stuff in Rome, but we did go to mass in St. Peter’s, which remains a great way to skip the line and get in before the tour groups overrun it. The gospel reading that day (Thursday) really struck me. Not because I hadn’t heard…
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Look for the lepers. I mean, I get the value of Fred Rogers’ quote, “Look for the helpers,” as a way to soothe children in times of stress by encouraging them to focus on those who are doing good in times of tragedy. But if you want to find where God is, look to the…
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“Ted Lasso is my new religion.” Since I got hooked on the AppleTV+ series Ted Lasso after its first season, I’ve witnessed the tidal patterns of word-of-mouth promotion that I guess is how ideas spread these days. Every few months, a friend on social media will ask a variation of, “Is Ted Lasso worth watching?”…
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Not to sound all judgy, but I tend to think that there’s a right and wrong way to read. For those who were raised as Christians, there’s a tendency to read the Bible piecemeal, where we pull out a line or two from what is a diverse collection of writings cultivated over many generations, and…
