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 …
Category Archives: Berkeley
JSTB Baccalaureate Mass
“To live,” said John Henry Cardinal Newman, “is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Don’t you just hate him! Change, whether welcomed or dreaded, is always disturbing, always stirs us up, always sends us stepping over the edge into the unknown. Here we are on the brink of great changes: …
Ascension Sunday
Don’t you find Ascension to be a puzzle, a mystery? Just as Eastertime is ending it pulls us up short with a reminder of just how deep the mystery of Easter is and how shocked we ought to be by Resurrection. This is still Eastertime, Christ is still risen, but the strangeness of that is …
Sunday Week 6 of Easter Year B
Join me for a moment in thinking about the people in your life who you love. Parents, children, husbands or wives, companions or partners, friends, lovers… Remember your first love … remember your latest. When I do that, when I remember the people I love, I see their faces and I imagine their hands. It …
Sunday Week 3 of Easter Year B
I could have sworn when I read the gospel this week that that last line wasn’t in there — “penance for the remission of sins” — penance? In Eastertide? — hardly! So I looked it up — well it’s there in the New American Bible as large as life. Some other translations have “repentance.” I …
Sunday Week 2 of Easter Year B
Poor Thomas gets such a bad rap for being a doubter, for being a sceptic, for not having the faith to believe when all around him are believing. We remember Thomas for his doubt. It’s kind of comforting for the rest of us to think “Thank God I’m not like Thomas, I haven’t seen but …
Sunday Week 1 of Easter Year B
“Try to rest, Mary,” she’s been saying to me since it happened. “Try to rest—your only making it harder for yourself.” She means well—a mother now with no son, trying to be so strong for the daughters she taken under her wing. “If you don’t sleep, Magdalene, you’ll do yourself a damage.” But how can …
Sunday Week 5 of Lent Year B
I’m Andrew, Peter’s brother. We’ve met, remember? I’m with Jesus. I like to tell people that I was the first one to know him. You remember? I used to be with John, the Baptizer, until he sent us looking for someone greater, remember, someone to finally set things to rights, settle with our Roman friends …
Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year B
What’s worse than being ill? … being ill at night! You’re huddled there, sweating and shivering and aching. You feel like death—in fact you half wish that death would at least get it over with—you feel like death and there in the middle of it all you find yourself wishing the light would come, wishing …
Sunday Week 1 of Lent Year B
It’s all a question of knowing where we are going. The first two readings set it up very clearly—in Lent we are heading once more to the Baptismal waters of Easter—but, to paraphrase Eliot, do we go all that way for a birth or a death? … It’s all a question of knowing where we …