Deep Calls to Deep 25th Sunday Ordinary Time – The Unfair Vineyard Owner…
OK, let’s all take a moment. Gather up your courage. Now, let’s reenter Sunday’s gospel. When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them […]
24th Sunday Ordinary Time – Breaking the Code…
In my 2 recent posts, I talked a lot about my experience of riches and emptiness. I’d like to share what I understand about my motives. “What is it to be a Jesuit? It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus as Ignatius was…” [Decree 2, […]
24th Sunday Ordinary Time – On Forgiving the Rich…
There are those who have more than me. For the longest time, I have envied them, put them down, and hated them – when ya come down to it. For example… Tim Manion has such an incredible voice, poetic soul, and finesse with his guitar. I still envy him and hate him and always have. […]
24th Sunday Ordinary Time – On Forgiving the Poor and Rich
Last Sunday’s gospel set the scene – another comes to me to ask forgiveness. How many times? Well, we heard the answer. Here’s a thought: Do we in mainstream America need to forgive the poor for needing so much? Which would be a better response than simply resenting the poor. Just sayin’. This is indeed […]
24th Sunday Ordinary Time – Forgiveness & Resentments…
I’m learning so much these days. And, as you probably know, learning is humiliating… I’m learning about forgiving/letting go of resentments. Ouch. So, what the heck is ‘resentment’? It comes from Latin re-sentire into Old and Middle French into English – “to re-feel or feel again.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives its first definition as: Sense of grievance; […]
24th Sunday Ordinary Time – Forgiving vs. Setting Boundaries…
First off… It seems right to add a bit of finesse to Jesus’ injunction of forgiving “seventy-seven times.” And it seems most applicable in the area of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Which raises the question: “Does forgiveness mean letting an abuser have total and on-going access to me, especially if he/she keeps apologizing and […]
23rd Sunday Ordinary Time – Grudges? How to pray…
Geez, if that doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what will!!! Mine, too. Many know the old joke about Irish Alzheimer’s – we forget everything but the grudge. Yep. I preached about what provokes us to anger (typically), what problem anger solves (any guesses?), and the grudges we create. How the heck do we […]
23rd Sunday Ordinary Time – Judas and “sinning against…”
So, here’s a conjecture, a thought, a theory, an hypothesis, a dang good guess. What if last Sunday’s gospel reflected the early community’s wound that they had not reached out to Judas? Watch this: The Greek, hamartano, “to sin against,” appears three times in Matthew. The first instance began the gospel. The second begins the gospel […]
23rd Sunday Ordinary Time – A Horse of a Different Color
This first reading from Sunday puts us in a bit of a fix. It seems to appoint Jews & Christians as ‘hall monitors’ whose primary job is to go around correcting people “lest we die!” Yikes! That’s one heavy burden. Thus says the LORD: You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the […]
9/11: We will never forget… but what will we remember?
It seems to me that dealing with weakness and vulnerability are essential to maturing. Sometimes the pain of life is so great, we can only deal with it through anger, rage, and vengeance. What do we remember now, these sixteen years later? I remember the revelation of the shame of our national impotence. We could […]
Deep Calls to Deep 