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The Ascension of Our Lord
Today’s readings When I was on my pastoral internship in seminary, my supervisor and I talked about the fact that our Liturgy is very wordy. Think about it: all of the prayers and readings and songs – it’s a lot of words to take in in an hour or less, but we do it all…
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Saint Matthias, Apostle
We don’t really know much about St. Matthias. We have no idea the qualifications that led to his being nominated as one of two possibilities to take Judas’s position among the Twelve Apostles. But clearly, they would have nominated a holy and faithful man, and then they left the deciding up to the Holy Spirit.…
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The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Today’s readings I don’t know if you were counting or not, but between the second reading and the Gospel, the word “love” was used in one form or another eighteen times. So it’s pretty easy to see where the Church is leading us in today’s Liturgy of the Word. Love is a theme that runs…
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Saturday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Today’s readings Just in case we thought living the Christian life of discipleship was going to be a rosy celebration of joy every single day, our Lord gives us a dose of reality today. He points out that if we find ourselves hated by the world, we have to remember that the world hated him…
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Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Today’s readings In our first reading this morning, we have from the Acts of the Apostles a rather defining moment for the early Church. Jesus hadn’t given them a precise rule book of how to make the Church develop: he simply sent them out to baptize. But he also told them to make disciples of…
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The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Today’s readings Have you ever pruned a shrub? I have. I’ve done it many times on the shrubs that were on my parents’ property. When I did it, I often thought about the fact that this process could not be all that painless for the shrub. It involved cutting away branches, some of which were…
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Thursday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Today’s readings “Don’t shoot the messenger!” That’s our colloquial way of saying that the words we speak to someone come from someone else; they are not our ideas. Most of us have probably said that to someone at some time when giving them bad news. But that doesn’t work for we who are followers of…
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Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time
I don’t have to tell you, I am sure, that life on earth can be pretty uncertain on a daily basis. Wars being fought all over the globe, terrorism and natural disasters, disrespect for human life, antagonism toward Christ-like values, all of this makes us feel pretty uncertain, at best. Add to that the stuff…
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The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Jesus uses a very familiar image today to illustrate the significance of following one’s vocation in life. He talks about a shepherd, which in an agrarian culture like his own, would have immediately made sense to his hearers. In a suburban place in the modern world, it loses some of its immediacy, but I still…
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Friday of the Third Week of Easter
Today’s readings Saul is proof that God’s ways are not our ways. How is it that God would pick for one of his chief Apostles a man who imprisoned and murdered the followers of the Christian Way? That had to surprise even, and perhaps especially Saul, whose life was turned completely upside-down. Poor Ananias had…
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