First, something from a safe distance: I wrote the homily that follows as part of a class in Celebrational Style (that’s a course in leading worship) while I was at JSTB. The assignment was to create, preside at, and preach for a service of sacramental anointing outside a Eucharistic context. To do that I had …
Monthly Archives: April 2007
The Appealing of the Passion
I don’t know whether this will be a lone post, the first of a coherent series, or just the start of some jottings but I thought in the shower this morning that it is about time I tried to write about the experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as a person of faith and, indeed, an …
Homeboy
A friend sent me a newspaper cutting today–from the The Observer a few weeks back–about the work of Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ in LA with gang members. When I was in California I used to visit Greg’s community and he always impressed the hell out of me. Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of …
Someday…
In my prayer today I found myself remembering the song ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ as it was performed in the film Peter’s Friends. It always moves me.
Ordinary Beauty
I’ve just read (thanks to Matt) a superb piece of journalism from the Washington Post about a little experiment: put one of the world’s best violinists, with one of the world’s best violins, playing some of the world’s best violin music in a subway station and watch what happens. The article is fascinating. The accompanying …
WordPress Plugins
Coming soon … updates to the posts plugins. Quite a few changes have built up over the last few weeks that I haven’t had time to properly release. I hope I can make sure that the changes cover the whole set of plugins — that should teach me to keep better records rather than rushing …
Enough! the Resurrection
Happy Easter! With its dramatic transition from darkness to light and fire the Easter Vigil rather betrays by compression the grace of resurrection. In our living of it the joy of the resurrection often has to creep up on us. Ignatius says that the Risen Christ ‘comes in the office of consoler’ and that implies …
Holy Saturday: Nature and Grace
Von Balthasar’s insistence, which I wrote of yesterday, that the Paschal Mystery not be made natural reveals something of his approach to the perennial issue of the interrelationship of nature and grace. He has an absolute conviction of the chasm between the two, between infinite and finite, between Creator and creature, that is only bridged …
Spring
The Independent newspaper has celebrated Good Friday with a pullout of poetry about spring. There’s something very tempting about lining up the rebirth of nature as winter ends and the resurrection of Jesus at Easter. Tempting but, I think misleading. I was convinced by von Balthasar that naturalising the Paschal Mystery is a mistake. There’s …
Medical Update
Well my flirtation with new meds was brief. They were supposed to help with my sleep patterns, make the adrenaline anxiety easier to handle and help with the pain. I didn’t get past the first few days of restlessness, racing thoughts, agitation, and insomnia. The hardest part was trying to sit and pay attention in …