It seems Christian apostolate is a team sport… and twelve-a-side at that! But thank God we don’t pick teams the same way the Eleven did when they were looking for one more to make up the number. I can feel myself standing there defiantly faking non-embarrassment as one after another gets picked and I get …
Category Archives: Berkeley
Sunday Week 6 of Easter Year A (Mothers’ Day & First Communions)
A friend of mine back in Britain has just been made head of the British Jesuits. I asked him yesterday what he was going to preach about this morning: “loneliness,” he said. …You may remember David since he’s been here to Mass a few times—big guy, blond hair, my age (you know, young). Anyway, it …
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Sunday Week 4 of Easter Year A
“When they heard this they were cut to the heart.” This morning’s New York Times magazine had me in tears. Ten years ago I spent just three months in Guyana, South America, from New Year to Holy Week. A country so poor its coinage had no value outside its borders and precious little within them. …
Friday Week 3 of Easter (St George)
George was a martyr. He faced terrible torture for years without giving in to his torturers. He lived with valour and died nobly. But of course that’s not why we remember him. We remember him because he killed that dragon. It’s the one thing everyone knows about St. George. And he didn’t just kill the …
Sunday Week 2 of Easter Year A
“You have never seen him, yet you love him, and without seeing you believe in him, and rejoice with inexpressible joy touched with glory.” Well, do you? … Do I? “You have never seen him, yet you love him, and without seeing you believe in him, and rejoice with inexpressible joy touched with glory.” That’s …
Easter Sunday Year A
“Christ is Risen!” … “Christ is Risen Indeed!” But what if he weren’t risen? Or what if he were risen from the dead and we never got to know about it? You see so much hangs on the events we hear about this morning. What if Mary Magdalene hadn’t been so grief- stricken, or hadn’t …
Annunciation
I’m not much of a biblical literalist—you won’t catch me worrying about empty tombs, or wine from water, or broken bread that never runs out—but somehow the annunciation always catches me and makes me wonder. What I wonder is what it was really like. Films and novels always struggle here: is there a voice? a …
Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year A
We only see by not seeing. We have been learning from birth not to see. Not to see the full spectrum. Not to see the chaos of light that pours into our eyes. The art of vision is exclusion. To learn not to see everything at once so that we can see anything at all. …
Sunday Week 3 of Lent Year A
When Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, is wandering in the wilderness thirsty he comes across a well and as he waits to quench his thirst he is met by a foreign woman come to draw water. She is Rebecca who will love him and be his wife. Many years later, Isaac’s son, Jacob, …
Thursday Week 2 of Lent
When I was a teenager I read a book that shaped my life. The book itself wasn’t much but it had a poem, a Shakespeare sonnet, right on its front page. And that poem seemed to capture an adolescent ideal that with an adolescent naivety I thought might save me: They that have power to …