Gormless, uncouth, inept and ruthless… we’ve lost their kinder, gentler opposites gormful, couth, ept, … and ruthful – full of ruth. What does ruth mean? You have to make a leap from ‘ruthless’ somewhere into the territory of care and concern. Ruth is that piercing sorrow you feel when you can’t dodge someone else’s distress. …
Category Archives: Loyola Hall
Thursday Week 19 Year I
Indiana Jones is the key. You’ll know all about the Ark of the Covenant if you’re a fan of Indy. And you’ll have a clue why the Israelites are carrying it around today. Not just a box with stones in, the Ark is the Hebrew nuclear power plant – altogether dangerous and altogether amazing. It’ll …
Tuesday Week 18 Year I
Be afraid! Be very afraid! Who needs a police state when you’ve got Miriam’s God eavesdropping on your grumbling, ready with a punishment swift and terrible? Not exactly good news as we begin a retreat. Get too close to God, it suggests, and be afraid. Jesus reverses that equation. Out in the sea the disciples …
Wednesday Week 17 Year I
To be honest, after a week or more of Matthew on the kingdom I still don’t know what or where or how it is. I’m sure I’ve learned something along the way with all those metaphors of sowing, planting, growing, reaping. From the people who nurture the crop or maliciously mess it up. From the …
Wednesday Week 15 Year I
Where should we look for our own epiphanies? Should we wander the far side of the wilderness waiting for a bush to burn for us? Should we shun learning and cleverness and strain to be mere children ripe for revelation? Elizabeth Barrett Browning sees God hidden in plain sight under every interested nose: Earth’s crammed …
Friday Week 14 Year I
Promises, promises… Both our readings promise a lot to those who do not fear but act boldly and decisively. To Jacob and his tiny tribe straggling into Egypt. To the Twelve and the little band who will come after them struggling in a hostile society. Do not worry—you have God on your side. Do not …
Thursday Week 13 Year I
There’s something very disturbing in that first line of our first reading: ‘It happened that God put Abraham to the test’. Especially when we discover the ‘test’ is: go and slaughter your son. Now although the story has a happy ending—if you discount the bills for Isaac’s lifelong therapy—I’m still left with a niggling doubt—maybe, …
Sunday Week 12 Year A
“I hear so many disparaging me, ‘Terror from every side!’”—so says Jeremiah. … Fear runs through the heart of today’s readings. Jeremiah sounds a little paranoid—they are all talking about me, plotting against me—but it seems he was right to be afraid. And the charge his enemies bring against him too is one of fear—they …
Wednesday Week 9 Year I
Listen to them pray. Listen to Tobit and to Sarah. They are both beyond the protocols of prayer. Tobit wants to die. His life is a misery. He is blind. He has to rely on charity to keep him, or—worse of all it seems to him—women’s work. And he’s going a little mad with it …
Sunday Week 9 Year A
Every year when the winds of winter blow we see TV footage of cliffs crumbling and some poor guy’s house falling into the hungry waves. Why do they build there? Every year we see homes ruined when rivers break their banks. Why do people live there? I was in California for a while: there it’s …