Maybe it’s because I had a big birthday this past week, but I have been thinking a lot about the future. And I have to say that in a lot of ways, I found that except as a source of worry and anxiety I don’t think much about the future at all. Even if you haven’t been ragged on all week about age, as I have, maybe you feel the same way. We have a tendency to see the future in two ways. One is to hate the future, to regard the way the world is going as pretty much hostile and out of control, at best drifting, and probably…
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Sometimes the scripture readings we hear don’t seem very human to us. Just for one example, there is that second reading today from the book of Revelation, angels surrounding a throne, countless creatures singing and shouting, everything in the universe all making a joyful, ecstatic noise at the same time. Perhaps that’s what resurrection will really be like, but it’s not a picture in which it’s easy to see ourselves, there dressed in white yelling our heads off, and liberated from everything. But the gospel today that we just heard is an entirely different story, it’s another resurrection story, but one with human beings in it that we ought to…
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We all like the idea of people getting “second chances.” It seems only fair, and it’s deeply ingrained in us. America is a country of second chances, a lot of times you hear it said that it’s the place where everyone can invent themselves all over again. If things don’t work out for you in one career, then just pick another one. If you need to get away from the place where you grew up, then just go somewhere else, maybe to California or Alaska, where everyone gets to start over, no questions asked. Starting over takes guts, we tell one another, and those who can pull it off deserve…
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During Advent, John the Baptist seems like the guest you’re sorry you invited to your holiday party, who has the magic gift of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to everyone. Here we are, trying to find some peace and quiet during our holiday preparations, or maybe to get some inspiration or a little of the Christmas spirit. But John the Baptist is talking about fire. And we get the impression that the fire he’s talking about is not this peaceful fire at the top of the Advent wreath, or a nice Christmas fire in the fireplace. This is a forest fire kind of fire, a fire with…
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We are all very attracted to stories of people changing, maybe especially when they change dramatically. Even when these stories are pretty unlikely, like a well-known celebrity seen carrying a Bible into prison when previously it had seemed unlikely she had seen any book before in her life, much less a Bible, even those stories we’re suspicious about attract our attention. Because in our hearts we would like to believe that people can change, that people can find new directions and act on them. We might be cynical about it, but we want to believe. This gospel today is a story of Jesus suddenly changing, his transfiguration, we call it…
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There’s a wonderful novel that just came out called Lying Awake. It’s about a cloistered nun in California, who has visions, ecstatic religious visions, visions so intense that she has begun to write poetry about them. But she also has fierce headaches that attack her painfully, and seizures that leave her exhausted for days, and that are getting worse. She eventually consults a doctor, outside the cloister, who finds that she has temporal lobe epilepsy, and that an operation can cure her headaches and seizures, but it may also cure her of her visions. So she has a choice: She can stay in touch with what she believes is her…