Since Peter McGrath’s not here today it safe to let you in on a secret. In cynical circles, Jesuits are not known for their liturgical awareness. In fact, there’s a joke. How do you tell a good Jesuit liturgy? —No one gets hurt. Advent is a good example. In my house of 11 men, we …
Yearly Archives: 1996
Sunday Week 1 of Advent Year B
The first of December! No sooner are the turkeys all eaten than the Christmas trees are being sold. Why is it that December seems the shortest month? Once Thanksgiving hits and the dishes are all washed up you know that it’ll be no time at all before its January. However long November seems with its …
Sunday Week 33 Year A
Imagine something with me … What if the world were to end this afternoon, let’s say at 2:38? What if these next few hours the only ones left to you? Can you entertain the thought for a while, can you let it slap you in the face, can you believe it for a moment, can …
Sunday Week 31 Year A
I don’t know if you saw in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, amidst the murders and the political pundits, a little headline for a review of a new film about Cesar Chavez. It ran “Not a saint but human.” Not a saint but human. Where do we get the idea that holiness is not for …
Sunday Week 30 Year A
Two things happened to me this summer in England. I was ordained and I fell in love—more or less at the same time. Such is God’s comic timing! At just the moment I am reaffirming a public commitment to a celibate life my heart is soaring in an altogether different direction. “You shall love the …
Sunday Week 28 Year A
What a hope there is in the vision of Isaiah! Food for the hungry. Vintage wine for the parched spirit. An end to death for ever. No more war, no more shame, no more humiliation, no more violence, no more poverty. For every suffering of Isaiah’s exiled and defeated people he promises an opposite joy. …
Sunday Week 24 Year A
Is God good, merciful and forgiving or is God angry, vindictive and merciless? That’s the problem that the parable seems to be dropping us into. A God who has two faces. On the one hand a gentle ruler who is moved in the depths of his guts by the plea of the slave who somehow …
Sunday Week 23 Year A
I hate Ezekiel. He’s a prophet to give prophets a bad name: While Jeremiah is driven near mad with having doom to speak and Amos is overwhelmed by his passion for the poor and even Isaiah seems at least genuinely hurt by the word of exile he bears, the voice of Ezekiel always seems a …
Sunday Week 18 Year A
(At ambo) The missal says today’s readings are about food and feeding — but it seems to me that nothing links them — at least they are linked by nothing. So I have nothing to say and I want to say it three times! Confused? … Hands up all those who find the first reading …
Sunday Week 15 Year A (Mass of Thanksgiving))
I think we all know, in one way or another, what St. Paul means when he talks about being caught in the slavery of decay: we all know, at times, the feeling of being trapped, the sense of the slow downhill slide; we all know how the past can be a prison, the present packed …
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