I have never drunk wine out of a wineskin, and if anyone here has, I’d like to know the circumstances and your condition at the time, so please stop and tell me about it after mass. But here is what I have found out about traditional wineskins: When they’re new, they’re flexible and can hold anything. The point is that when they get older, as you might expect, they get dried out and brittle and inflexible. So that when you take an old skin and fill it with new wine, something that’s still fermenting and fizzing and bubbling, because it’s so new, an old, brittle container with a stopper in…
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You may have noticed that the most controversial ad on the Super Bowl this year wasn’t, as everyone was expecting, some incredibly gross ad from an internet company. The ad that shocked everybody was one involving a sort of miracle. The actor Christopher Reeve appeared in an ad where, through the miracles that they can work with computer graphics, they made it appear that he could stand up from the wheelchair in which he has been almost completely paralyzed for the past ten years. Some people thought it was creepy, partly, I think, because the ad was for a stockbroker, but also because they knew it wasn’t true, and couldn’t…
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Let’s all be honest here, and say right up front that there are probably some hymns we sing all the time here at St. David the King, that you don’t particularly care for. I checked with Carol Sullivan over there and she said it’s OK for me to talk about this — just this once. You know the feeling I’m talking about. When the cantor announces that song of yours, your shoulders slump, you might pick up the hymnal for the sake of appearances, but your heart’s not in it, and you might just be moving your lips. Here is my embarrassing confession. For me, that song is “They’ll Know…
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Those of you who experienced Catholic education as it was a number of years ago will be glad to know that many of its features are alive and well in the training program for deacons in our diocese. One of those features is that there are certain phrases and things they say that you hear so often that the words become a part of you, whether you want them to or not. One of those things I heard often over the past 3½ years is that deacons have the mission of doing their ministry “in the world,” that that is where their special work is to be done. But there…
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You may have noticed a large and dramatic photograph in the New York Times last week during the Pope’s visit. It was not a story about the Pope, but about the more than one million Catholics in the U.S. who have left to join Pentecostal churches, and in the photo, there are three members of one such church in New York, along with their pastor. They have their arms raised dramatically in the air, eyes closed, intense feeling on their faces. One man is clutching at the shoulders of another, and seems like he is about ready to fall down to the floor in tears. A picture like that is…
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Today’s readings put me in mind of a story, about a priest I knew once, and he wasn’t from around here, so don’t bother trying to figure out who he was. He was a very, very sincere person. Very sincere. So sincere, sometimes it’s fair to say that it was a little difficult to process, if you know what I mean. And it happened that one night I wound up sitting next to him at a table at a parish supper and I asked what I thought was an innocent question. He’d been away for a couple of weeks, and I said, “How was your trip?” And he looked me…
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Just to be fair, we should start any reflection on this gospel with a word in favor of rules. The fact is, rules are good. Moral laws are good. They’re good, because we need them, rules about what’s good and evil, about how we behave and how we must not. After all, God has told us clearly to live according to his law of love and justice, and that means rules. And not only that, we are asked to have confidence in our judgment. If we know something is wrong we are obligated to speak out, when we see sin, it’s sometimes necessary to come out and say so. But…
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It’s now been about four years since I stopped working inside a big company and started being self-employed. Sometimes people ask me if there’s anything I miss about my former life. And you know, there are some things. I liked how somehow, magically, every two weeks, like clockwork, money got deposited in my checking account. The same amount every time, no matter how hard I worked or didn’t work, or how bad a job I did. I liked that. I haven’t yet discovered any pattern whatsoever to the way money gets added to my checking account now, so there’s one thing I definitely miss. But if I think about it,…
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There is a real problem with any attempt to reflect on the word “obedience.” That problem can be summed up by the observation that all of the books on “obedience” over at Barnes & Noble seem to be in the Dog section. We generally look at obedience as putting aside our own identity, turning off the thought process, turning our will over to someone else entirely. Great for dogs. Not for humans. As Catholics, we also have a little history here, and we suspect that this idea of “obedience” can be a code word for turning off your brain and just accepting what you’re told. I know that when I…
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Today’s readings introduce two words that we all have difficulty with but that are part of what we need to confront as Lent draws to a close and all our preparation for Easter begins to reach a climax. The two words are suffering, and obedience. St. Paul’s second reading links the two in that mysterious phrase that we still puzzle over: “through suffering, he learned obedience.” And in this Gospel, from the Gospel of John just before Jesus faces his passion and death, which we face with him next weekend when Holy Week begins, we see Jesus himself struggling with this idea that suffering and obedience are a necessary part…