“What should we be doing?” I’ll say one thing for George W. Bush … he’s not afflicted by overwork. … A friend of mine, a teacher, was telling me how busy school kids are, going non-stop from dawn to dusk—from class to class, 2 or 3 meetings in the lunch break, then after school stuff, …
Yearly Archives: 2000
Sunday Week 1 of Advent Year C
As a kid something always happened to me once the autumn clocks changed. Something to do with my own personal checklist of fall: the smell of burning leaves; frost on the corpses of tall grass; headlights yellow in the early dark on the way home from school; the ache in the air as my nose …
Sunday Week 32 Year B
Can’t you just see that widow? She’s been haunting me half the week so I’ve given her a name. Mrs. Cohen. A little, old, Jewish lady, wrinkled by the years, and hardly able to make it where she’s going. Bent over, thin-wristed, shabbily dressed, among the well-to-do who seem to make an outing of this, …
Tuesday Week 31 Year II (Election Day)
Larry King was interviewing Jesus … “So, Jesus, you say this nation should be governed by God. Who are you going to vote for today?” In reply Jesus told him a story … Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a man who was running for election. And when election …
Sunday Week 29 Year B
God would not win the upcoming election—and not just for the fuzzy math. If my one-person focus group is anything to go by God comes over altogether too tough, too hard, in the first words out of his mouth today: “Adonai was pleased to crush him in infirmity.” Yikes! Pleased to crush? God needs better …
Wednesday Week 27 Year II
Once upon a time Jesus was praying and the guys who followed him around were watching him. They saw the look upon his face. They saw the something in his aching body. And they looked at each other and they wanted what he had. Peter spoke up, “I’ve read the best books but I still …
Sunday Week 26 Year B
Gehenna! … Gehenna! Like ourselves the citizens of Jerusalem were careful to dump their rubbish out of sight and out of mind. Do you know where your daily refuse goes? All those embarrassing reminders of consumption and packaging and waste? Rotting and un-rot-able alike. As far away as possible we hope. Out of nose range. …
Triumph of the Cross
I saw a film the other night. The main character, a photographer, is out of work, out of cash, and out of love and everyone keeps telling him to cheer up because obviously this puts him at his creative peak. And I guess it’s true—the creative peak is often a trough and the way to …
Beheading of John the Baptist
That reading from Jeremiah is so stirring: “I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar, a bronze wall, against the whole land—kings, princes, priests, people—they will fight against you but they shall not prevail, for I am with you, says God, I will deliver you.” Stirring… but a lie. Jeremiah gets to prophecy …
Sunday Week 19 Year B
There’s something about calamity that brings out the best in us. When disaster falls from the heavens we all rally round, pitch in, and do what we can with a focus and an energy that we look back on with amazement. Amazed at our own resources we didn’t know we had, or amazed at the …