“Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind!” Tall order! “Love your neighbour as you love yourself!” Fat chance! I don’t have to know myself very well to know how far short I fall in the love department. The longer I love God the deeper I know how …
Yearly Archives: 2004
Wednesday Week 19 Year II
I remember being at a morning mass once in a strange church. Everything happened normally until the time for the prayers. The first: ‘for a personal intention … lord hear us’. The second: ‘for a personal intention …’ The third … no prizes for guessing. The ten-person congregation managed at least a dozen ‘personal intentions’. …
Monday Week 18 Year II (Bl. Pierre Favre SJ)
Here’s an image I like. Paris. Ignatius 38 years old and struggling in studies, sharing a room with Pierre Favre just 23. Pierre wrote later: “That year Inigo entered the College of Sainte-Barbe and lived in the same room with us, with the intention of following the course in arts. And it was our master …
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St Ignatius
The gospel tirade we hear today comes right after a bad night out with a leading Pharisee. It all starts when Jesus cures a man of dropsy and gets the dinner guests upset—it being the Sabbath. Then, as he watches these guests jockeying for the best places at table, he launches into a series of …
Wednesday Week 16 Year II
Soil is funny stuff. After that gospel I feel the desire to be rich, productive soil but soil is funny stuff. Soil is dirt. Soil is muck. How do we get to be soil? Soil is humble, soil is humus. Humus is what gives real meaning to humility—not self-deprecation but an earthiness that recognises our …
Wednesday Week 14 Year II
A divided heart: I’ve been pondering that phrase and what it says to me and about me. A divided heart. For my heart is divided. I long for the moment when passion and hope and intellect unite and leave me whole to want, to desire, to do just the one thing, just the one simple, …
Thursday Week 9 Year II
The story goes that once, about a hundred years before Jesus’ time, a gentile wise-guy, put this proposition to Rabbi Shammai: ‘if you can teach me the Law, the Torah, while I stand on one leg I will become a Jew’. Rabbi Shammai, knowing a con when he hears one, sends him away with a …
Monday of Holy Week
I think he came back to us …out of embarrassment or a nagging need. Back to Bethany and Martha and Lazarus and me—looking to explain or be forgiven or something—at least at first. After opening the tomb and giving back our brother and then running off like that leaving us no room for thanks, no …
Monday Week 3 of Lent
There’s a very physical, down-to-earth tone about our readings today. Naaman has to travel, has to bathe in river water, to get his promised healing. And not just any river, this river, in this land, to be healed by this God. Naaman is so impressed that in the verses following he carts back two donkey …
Monday Week 2 of Lent
‘To us, Lord, the look of shame belongs …because we have sinned against you’. The look of shame is probably all too well known to us. Who among us is ignorant of failure and falsehood and the fear of being found out? The look of shame we know too well and the God who is …