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Here’s what jumped out at me from the readings from yesterday’s Mass: encountering God is a lot more like a football game than a book group. One of the things that I struggle with is the degree to which many Christians talk about their faith in dispassionate, philosophical terms. In Catholicism, there’s a tendency to…
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Maybe the Church should shut up about sex for a while. Enough, already. Not because of hypocrisy, though there are deep layers of that. Not because sex isn’t important. Not because the Church has nothing worth saying about it. Not because I disagree with what it has to say. I think the Church should shut…
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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…
