In the pagan calendars Candlemas is a halfway feast—halfway between solstice and equinox—halfway between winter and spring—halfway between darkness and light. The Celtic name for the feast, Imbolc—meaning “in the womb”—captures it perfectly. We are in the womb and celebrating it—not yet fully alive but by no means dead. So today we celebrate in-between-ness. Inbetweenness …
Category Archives: Berkeley
Sunday Week 4 Year B
My history with telling people to shut up has not been a good one! I remember saying it my grandmother … I can’t remember what on earth she was saying to annoy me but I, 7 or 8 years old, remember very well the look that crossed her face … but even today I can’t …
Sunday Week 3 Year B
Zebedee’s Story If he comes near me ever again I’ll give that boy Jesus a piece of my mind. Hell! I’ll give him piece of my fist. Trouble-maker! Home-breaker! Arrogant, self-centred, son-of-a-… —What do you mean, “who do I think I am?” I’ll tell you who I think I am. You all sit here so …
St Anthony, Abbott and Martin Luther King
Three images, three voices. Round about the year 270 The story goes that Anthony heard this gospel and did what it said: he sold what he had and gave the money to the poor. So began a trajectory that carried him further and further away from ordinary life, deeper and deeper into the desert, down …
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Wednesday after Epiphany
When Moses, high on Mount Sinai, asks to see God’s glory, God does indeed agree to pass by him and reveal the holy splendour. But there are conditions: First, Moses must hide in a cleft of the rock because God’s presence is so powerful it would roast him; and second, since no one can see …
Sunday of Epiphany Year B
Time for an informal millennium survey: hands up if you partied the night away; hands up if you celebrated quietly with friends or family; hands up if you met the New Millennium tucked safely in your bed! To be honest the whole day was a couch potato’s paradise, a channel surfer’s dream. I tuned in …
Sunday Week 4 of Advent Year B
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 …
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 …