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…
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In our day, and maybe, they say, since the good old days of Victorian England, the Christmas season has been all about being home. You know the imagery: with the fire ablaze in the living room, children gathered around, and everybody home for the holidays, right where they should be. But it’s striking sometimes to look at how different that image of family is from the stories we’ve heard over the past five weeks of Advent and Christmas about Jesus’s family, his parents, his cousin John the Baptist, all the people in Luke’s wonderful narrative of Christ’s birth and childhood. One of those differences that we can pay some attention…
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No matter how many times we hear this story, something in it grips us. We know how it ends, we know it is a tragedy, but something in us wants to hear it anyway, the familiar details of how Pilate was too cowardly to follow his better instincts, and all the sad details of this death that was so avoidable. The reason why this story draws us in like few other stories isn’t always clear to us, but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, after years of hearing it, we find out why. We see someone we love, suffering for days or weeks from a painful final illness, or someone dying too young…
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This year I have heard more people talk about Jesus’ death than I can ever remember, even people I previously couldn’t imagine giving much thought to Jesus at all. This familiar story of his trial and death still touches people so deeply, because more than any other part of Jesus’ life, we know the world works just this way. Random events, political jockeying, all seemingly preventable, all unreasonable, but no one can stop it. What happened to Jesus could happen to anyone. So many words to explain why this story moves us. And yet I heard one set of words that seemed wrong to me. I read in a local…
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Before this, everything was clear. God was God. People knew where to look to find God. It was a world of stark contrasts. The way you knew God was on your side was that you prospered in life, lived long and healthy, were free from oppression, got what you deserved. Your enemy, on the other hand, was vanquished. When this happened, it was a sign that God was present. When it didn’t, it was a sign that God’s favor had been withdrawn from you, until a time when it might suit God to relent — or perhaps, it just meant that God for some reason no longer cared. Think of…