The TV does it! The magazines do it! Even the Sunday liturgy does it! “Does what?” I hear you ask. Does this: goes all nostalgic. We’re all looking forward to Christmas by looking backward in memory. The adverts are full of warm hearths and ruddy-cheeked children and Victorian windows and period costumes and gently drifting …
Yearly Archives: 1997
Sunday Week 1 of Advent Year C
Isn’t it a strange time of year? I’ve always loved Advent and I’ve come in these years to love Thanksgiving yet I never know at this time of year which way to turn, which way to look. This year especially it’s been ambiguous. I’ve had two dear friends here to celebrate with and we’ve found …
Sunday Week 33 Year B
“Cheer up,” they tell you, “it’s not the end of the world.” When the horrible happens, when someone irreplaceable dies, when someone you love doesn’t love you, when illness strikes like lightning or wastes like acid. “Cheer up! It’s not the end of the world!” But what do they know? It should be the end …
Sunday Week 29 Year B
I’m looking at all your faces and I’m wondering what I can see … you’re a little on edge, you don’t know who I am, but besides that you really quite relaxed, quite calm. You’ve heard the same readings I’ve just heard and you’re calm! You call yourselves disciples and yet you’re relaxed, comfortable. You …
Sunday Week 21 Year B
The story so far … We started this series with the feeding of the five thousand and a crowd so impressed that Jesus has to run away so they won’t try and make him a rebel King on the spot. But the crowd find him the next day and Jesus challenges them that they aren’t …
Sunday Week 20 Year B
To live forever! It seems it might even be possible. You can indeed die but live forever … or at least twenty years … if you’re Elvis Presley that is. The King is dead. Long live the King! The TV this week’s been full of Elvis reanimated on celluloid and reincarnated in corpulent and impersonated …
Sunday Week 17 Year B
I have to admit that I was taken by surprise by today’s gospel. We’ve been following Mark’s story for so long that I, reading ahead, was all ready for the feeding of the five thousand. So homily in head, half-prepared, I opened the book and found not Mark but John. The church, in its wisdom, …
Sunday Week 15 Year B
Jefferson stands there, enormous in bronze, in his memorial in DC: caught in mid-stride, stepping boldly forward, eyes gazing into an horizon of promise. I gazed up at him with throngs of fellow tourists in his classical temple of Enlightenment virtues, chiselled round with words of hope and freedom — of life, liberty and the …
Sunday Week 12 Year B
Last Wednesday I made a pilgrimage. I climbed a hill called Revelation to visit the grave of Paul Monette, the author of “Borrowed Time,” a book I read last summer that moved me very deeply. Subtitled “An Aids Memoir,” it tells very honestly and with great feeling the story of the sickness and death of …
Trinity Sunday Year B
God? Are you there, God? Moses said to ask, so here I am asking. I want to ask you, God, about the dinosaurs. I guess it’s Steven Spielberg’s fault they’re on my mind, but they are. “Ask now about former ages, long before your own,” said Moses. Well, how about 65 million years ago? By …