Are you like me? Very well-protected against God. It’s not that I don’t want God to be close to me … it all happens beneath the threshold of want or desire. My body seems to have a frozen memory of some hurt or other that it won’t willingly repeat. So that though I say I …
Yearly Archives: 1999
Sunday Week 3 of Advent (Our Lady of Guadalupe)
Do I have to be honest? … I don’t want to rejoice heartily. Let alone rejoice always. I’m in no mood for it. Until yesterday there was the possibility—albeit only a slim possibility—that I might be in line for a job which would have kept me here in the Bay Area for the foreseeable future. …
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Tuesday Week 2 of Advent
I would not be a happy sheep. No matter how comforting and homely that shepherds voice, no matter the promise of protection from wolves, no matter the assurance of food in the belly and warmth at night. No matter—because I would know that in the end I would be the one on the block, on …
Wednesday Week 1 of Advent
Jesus is up in the hills of the Galilee, sitting there, and crowds flock to him with their needy, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the sick. They are placed at his feet and he heals them and the crowd erupts in praise of God. But not only are the people crippled and sick—he sees …
Sunday Week 32 Year A
Ten young people ready for a wedding party. Waiting for the bus to arrive to get them there. They are excited. They are ready. All dressed up. They all want the bus to hurry up. All ten are eager. But the bus takes longer and longer. They are getting tired. So all ten decide to …
All Saints of the Society of Jesus
Half a planet away right now in England I can guarantee that the cold night air stinks of sulphur and smoke and the ground is littered with the spent carcasses of fireworks large and small. As a kid we’d spend the weeks running up to bonfire night out in the freezing evenings scavenging wood to …
Sunday Week 30 Year A
I learned this week that I am to be an uncle. My brother and his wife are to be parents and my mother is to be a grandparent. Not just a new life coming to term, growing into being, but a whole web of new relationships being born. I’ve done nothing but wait, but who …
Sunday Week 29 Year A
I want everyone to take out a coin and have a look at it. Read it. Smell it. Feel it. And keep hold of it! I don’t know how many of you have seen a British pound coin… They are about the size of a nickel, but maybe three times as thick, and they are …
Sunday Week 28 Year A
We have no right to be here… any of us. But here we are. The last few weeks the gospel stories from Matthew have been putting the question over and over again: who is worthy to be in God’s kingdom? Remember the labourers in the vineyard who get paid a flat rate no matter how …
Wednesday Week 27 Year I
Sometimes God has no right to be merciful! If God wasn’t so damned merciful the world would be a much better place. Why does God let us get away with so much? How is that we can murder each other and nothing happens? That we can torture the innocent, deprive the poor, and defile the …