Thoughts
If you are looking for something new this Lent to help you pray your way to Easter look no further than Pray-As-You-Go. This site, the brainchild of Peter Scally, SJ, co-creator of SacredSpace, provides a daily 10-minute reflection in mp3 format to download to your iPod or play on your computer. Each day’s file includes music, scripture, and some other material to help your reflection.
The site also has some downloads to help you focus and become still or to guide you in prayerfully looking back at the end of the day.
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March 4th, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
I was hoping the missile launched by James today might whiz by me and skewer some other hapless target. After all who’s rich? Bill Gates. David Beckham. Queen Elizabeth. Not me. Not you.
But here’s James’ description of the rich: they have stuff enough to store; they have enough to live in comfort; they have enough economic clout to drive a hard bargain; they have blood on their hands.
The first three make me wriggle a little. The last shakes me to the core. Because globally speaking I know I am rich and I know I’m part of a world economy that coolly sacrifices the distant poor for my sake. I’m not bringing in the big bucks but I’m wound into the web of it all. And I don’t know a way out. I do have blood on my hands. And James sees that double tragedy: first the sacrificed poor and the world we ravage for profit and fear; and second we who buy our safety only to find we have bought a corrosive fire to eat at our souls.
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February 23rd, 2006
Thoughts
Brandon over at Siris has a bunch of Jesuit jokes today.
My own favourite joke at our expense is this one:
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February 22nd, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
There have been several cases of people blind from birth who in adulthood have been cured—or at least the physical impediment to their sight is removed. Sometimes it’s a tumour removed or cataracts, sometimes new corneas grafted in. But even though the cure is complete in one sense the person still has to learn to see for the first time.
That learning can be terrifying, the light painful, the chaos of colour disorientating, the formless field of light confusing. And nothing they had once imagined about the visual world seems to fit the unbelievable experience they are undergoing. They cannot believe their fingers or their ears. Before they could cross the road by ear alone and now the only way to do it is to close their new found eyes and let the familiar skills of darkness take care of them.
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February 16th, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
We’ve been talking about discernment today, about the way experience moves us and about the risk in that, the risk and the joy and the freedom and the cost. It’s all on show in the gospel too, in Jesus.
It’s all too easy to imagine a Jesus who is a little above it all, who knows a little too much to get upset by life, a Jesus who wears his compassion like pity. Shakespeare has a description of the ideal holy person: “Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow,” he says, “they rightly do inherit heaven’s graces and husband nature’s riches from expense. They are the Lords and owners of their faces.” … I used to think Shakespeare was serious, that he’d hit the nail on the head, and here was the way to be. I was wrong.
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February 12th, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
I wonder, after today’s piece from Mark’s gospel, what it would have been like if Jesus’ self-imposed secret had been kept? If the silence he asked for, and kept asking for, had, in fact, been respected? Could it all have turned out differently in the end? Would the crowds have been more loyal at the end? Might his message have found a deeper home among the faith of his fathers? Would his reception by the authorities have been somewhat warmer, somehow less confrontational, in some way less lethal? If his silence had been kept?
You can only wonder. And wonder for yourself too. How do I hear him—today, this evening, now—how do I hear him and do I keep his words the way he wants or do I run my own way with them, even in good faith, somewhere he doesn’t want them to go?
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February 10th, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
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 celebration says it perfectly, Imbolc, meaning something like “in the womb”. Today we are in the womb and celebrating it—we are not yet fully alive but by no means dead.
So today we celebrate in-between-ness. Inbetweenness as a place, a place of meeting, a place where life and death bump into each other: light and dark, old and new.
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February 2nd, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
Jesus has a wild streak – unruly and disturbing – and he seems to bring it out all about him. Especially when people are gathered for prayer.
I imagine every synagogue, every church, every gathering has its own hidden demons. I think we like them that way – hidden, silent, acceptable.
There are things we cannot talk about, issues that insist on silence, invisible line we won’t cross. And we limp along respectably because we couldn’t cope with the fire and the thunderstorm that might erupt if we did. It’s a compromise. A peaceful compromise Jesus disturbs. But look who actually breaks the silence! It takes an unclean spirit to speak for us – and what does it say? – ‘are you going to destroy us?’ The demon has more integrity than the congregation does – it tells it how it is – it sees the threat – the Holy One of God is here, here, and the silence cannot hold any longer – our hidden pact with silence is exposed and our dirty secrets are shrieking in our midst.
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January 29th, 2006
Thoughts
Here’s the photo to accompany my most recent homily. Click to see it full size.
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January 26th, 2006
Homilies |Loyola Hall
He might have blinding lights and inaudible voices to bring him to his knees but I have something Paul doesn’t have—a photograph of my conversion.Photo might follow if I can get the scanner to work! Here it is, just after dawn, in Venice, the summer of 1980, waiting to get into the Youth Hostel. I was desperate, at my lowest, loneliest ebb, an ardent atheist, sick to the stomach, feeling utterly alone in an empty universe, not seeing a way to get through the day. I knew I had to take the shot. A few minutes later I was sitting on cold marble at the back of a church, emptying from its morning mass, praying, turning to a God I didn’t believe in, for I’m not sure what… help surely, hope maybe, peace? I was undone when I found all three.
Now of course, once I was feeling better I forgot all about the embarrassing lapse and got on with the day, with life. And that might have been that, were it not for the photograph and the next ebbing of the inner tide, and the one after that…
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January 26th, 2006
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