This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also…
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We know Jesus was a great teacher, but in one area at least he left his disciples and the early church very confused. And it’s this nagging question about the end of the world, when it would happen, and exactly what would happen when it did. That particular question is almost entirely off of our radar in real life today, because our view of the end of the world is entirely different from the one we heard in today’s gospel. For us, that end is something that’s so far off in the future it’s not worth planning for, it’s a misty future time when planetary forces we barely understand gradually…
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Most of us think we aren’t very good at praying, or at least, that we could do a lot better in both the frequency and the content departments. But no matter how little we know about prayer one thing we do all know, that in this gospel the Pharisee shows us exactly how not to do it. “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity.” In a way, it’s an encouragement for the rest of us to get back to prayer, since really, almost anything incoherent we might decide to blurt out has to be better than this. It’s easy to laugh at this caricature…
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Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve lived around Princeton Junction now for more than 30 years, and I’ve been part of this parish for almost all that time, almost 20 of them as a deacon. And on the one hand I wonder of course what’s happened to my life so quickly, it wasn’t at all what I had planned, at one point I was hoping for a lot more excitement than you get in West Windsor. But on the other hand the fact is that being around a place and a group of people for so long is a tremendous pleasure in life. No matter where I…
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I don’t know about you, but I am a careful and conservative person. And believe me, this has its pluses in life. Part of it comes from my careful and conservative German-American father, a wonderfully kind and patient man but who didn’t like risk-taking of any sort, and who saved everything for a rainy day. In fact even when that rainy day came, he was still saving everything for an even rainier one. My guess is that many of you were taught the same way, and you have absorbed some of the same life rules. Choose a safe career that you’ll never go wrong with; before you start a project…
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This long gospel with the three familiar characters that we all know so well almost doesn’t need a homily or an explanation. So today, we should take just a couple of minutes to turn one phrase over in our minds. It’s that wonderful cinematic moment at the real turning point in this story when we’re told that the prodigal son suddenly came to his senses. Came to his senses, a great phrase, as if he finally began to use his senses, after years of just indulging them, he opened his eyes and ears and noticed the unhappy world that he had surrounded himself with and in a moment, it looked…
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Last weekend, at the invitation of Brother Robert, I was on a panel for our 8th grade PREP students here about religious vocations. Of course they also had a priest, our friend Father Dave Farnum from the Paulists, and there was one of Brother Robert’s confreres in his religious order, and two incredibly friendly and appealing religious sisters. We all did the best we could to give an account of what we do. If you’ve never seen Father Dave at work recruiting for vocations, he is a real pro. He has a wad of $20 bills that he takes out and he offers one to any young man who’ll step…
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It’s the campaign season, and that means there are some time-honored rituals that are being re-enacted every day. One of them is the supposedly informal campaign meal, where the candidate, accompanied by plenty of cameras, eats and chats at a diner, or the food tent at a state fair, or even an ordinary home. It’s meant to show that the candidate is a regular person, like us, even though sometimes all this backfires just a little, like the candidate a few years ago whose staff told him that in Philadelphia he had better be seen eating a cheesesteak, even though in the pictures it was clear he had never seen…
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Psychologists have a video that they use in experiments to illustrate something about how humans observe things. They assemble a group of people to watch this video, but before they show it, they tell the group that the point of their watching is to notice people in the video throwing a ball to one another, and their assignment is to count the number of times this happens, the ball changing hands. After the video, they ask people what number they counted, and most people have a pretty accurate number. Then, the person showing the video asks everyone, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” People inevitably think he’s crazy —…
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Today is Trinity Sunday, early June, a day when everybody’s ready for something upbeat and short, and instead the homilist, and you, face the Trinity. Let’s take the issue head on. Pick up a first-class theological textbook, and you’ll find sentences like this, and this is from the idiot’s summary at the end of the chapter on the Trinity. There are four relations among the Persons of the Trinity: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. Ah, but then we are told, there are only three subsistent relations, since active spiration is not really distinct from paternity or from filiation. Again, I don’t mean to go over old ground, since…