Ten young people ready for a wedding party. Waiting for the bus to arrive to get them there. They are excited. They are ready. All dressed up. They all want the bus to hurry up. All ten are eager. But the bus takes longer and longer. They are getting tired. So all ten decide to …
Category Archives: Berkeley
All Saints of the Society of Jesus
Half a planet away right now in England I can guarantee that the cold night air stinks of sulphur and smoke and the ground is littered with the spent carcasses of fireworks large and small. As a kid we’d spend the weeks running up to bonfire night out in the freezing evenings scavenging wood to …
Sunday Week 30 Year A
I learned this week that I am to be an uncle. My brother and his wife are to be parents and my mother is to be a grandparent. Not just a new life coming to term, growing into being, but a whole web of new relationships being born. I’ve done nothing but wait, but who …
Sunday Week 29 Year A
I want everyone to take out a coin and have a look at it. Read it. Smell it. Feel it. And keep hold of it! I don’t know how many of you have seen a British pound coin… They are about the size of a nickel, but maybe three times as thick, and they are …
Sunday Week 28 Year A
We have no right to be here… any of us. But here we are. The last few weeks the gospel stories from Matthew have been putting the question over and over again: who is worthy to be in God’s kingdom? Remember the labourers in the vineyard who get paid a flat rate no matter how …
Wednesday Week 27 Year I
Sometimes God has no right to be merciful! If God wasn’t so damned merciful the world would be a much better place. Why does God let us get away with so much? How is that we can murder each other and nothing happens? That we can torture the innocent, deprive the poor, and defile the …
Feast of Michael, Gabriel, & Raphael, Archangels
Let Annie Dillard deliver the homily today. She knows more about angels than I ever will. This is from “A Field of Silence” in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “The farm! … I lived there once and I have seen, from behind the barn, the roadside pastures heaped with silence … silence heaped on the …
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Sunday Week 25 Year A
The reign of God is like an SAT examination: some worked night and day exhausting themselves in preparation; some paid thousands in coaching fees to learn the secret tricks; and some went out partying every night and guessed the answers. All got the same score. The reign of God is like a soccer game: one …
Sunday Week 24 Year A
Wrath and anger are hateful things yet we hug them tight. Why the hell do we do that? Any ideas? Cause it baffles me! We hug tight the things that hurt us, we rehearse our hurt in words, honing them to an edge, even when we know they’ll echo around inside us cutting us as …
Sunday Week 22 Year A
Well as they, “Denial isn’t just a big river in Egypt.” There are two Peters offered us throughout the gospel: there’s the rock of stability, the pillar of faith, who sees the truth about Jesus and speaks it boldly … and then there’s the stumbling block, the well-meaning, shortsighted buffoon who, again and again, stands …