We are all immediately attracted to a story where it looks like there is a clear hero and a clear loser, someone who gets it and someone who doesn’t. There are plenty of great gospel stories that fit into that pattern, starting with the story of the good Samaritan we heard last week coming to the aid of the stranger at the side of the road. That wouldn’t be as good a story if we didn’t first see the priest and the levite walk right by not noticing and not caring, and then the Samaritan, the only one whose eyes and heart are actually open. It’s very tempting to see…
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Maybe you have heard about a theory that scientists have called the butterfly effect. It’s just a theory, but here is how it came into being. You’re going to have to use your imagination here, so pay attention. Let’s take something really complicated like what causes weather. And let’s say there are two situations where the weather conditions are identical, but in one situation a hurricane comes into being from these weather conditions and becomes a powerful storm, and in the second situation it turns out there’s no hurricane, even though there could have been, the conditions were the same. So, what scientists theorize is there is something that happened…
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I reach a point every year when I clearly start to lose it. By losing it, I mean that all the things that I do each week, week after week, really begin to wear me down. I get annoyed with everyone I work with, and with the whole idea of what I do for a living. Really, nothing’s working out right, there are just too many problems that come back repeatedly and can’t be solved, and I seem to see nothing but a series of bad decisions I’ve made leading right up to where I find myself. And come to think of it, I said that I start to lose…
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St. Paul says something disagreeable to us in that second reading: He says that we do not know how to pray. On the surface, it’s a harsh judgment, because many of us are here every week trying to pray, after all. But the fact is, it can be very hard to feel like we do know how. and many of us would find it hard to tell someone that we know how to pray, with the same confidence we would tell them we know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Prayer can be hard; everyone who prays struggles with distractions, everyone wonders if they are using the…
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We all know this is the age of multitasking, of trying to do many things at the same time. Many times, we look pretty funny doing it. I was once at a business meeting at a television network, where of course they have televisions in every conference room, and they’re on; and all through this so-called meeting, all the network guys kept darting their eyes over to the screen, checking whatever was on their network instead of looking at whoever was speaking in the room. I’m not sure what they were looking for, but the result of all that eye-shifting was to make people who were already reputed to be…
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I can’t hear the names Martha and Mary without thinking of my own family. I had an aunt Martha and an aunt Mary, and five other aunts besides, sisters all living in the same town. And while today’s gospel story clearly means to contrast Martha and Mary to make its point, in fact my aunts were pretty much all of a piece, and if we’re to be guided by today’s gospel, they might all just as well have been named Martha. My experience of them has always been from big family get-togethers that one or the other of them was hosting, and I don’t think I saw my aunt Martha…