Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Congratulations to our Elect! Congratulations to our Candidates! Congratulations to our fellow Catholics completing your initiation! Congratulations on the new Way! These past days of the Triduum we have celebrated this Way in a special manner. Thursday, we remembered that we are to remember. We remember so as to make real in our lives all that Christ is, was and will be. We remembered the service of Christ, and how we are called to serve. Friday, we celebrated Christ on the cross. This day was not about the mistakes of humanity, nor how horrible we are, because we are not the center of it all. No, it is, was and ever shall be about the love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Cross stands as the Sign of the love of God. So overwhelming huge, immense, infinite is the Father’s love for us. It cannot be contained, hindered, nor stopped. The Father created us with so much potential for good. The Father’s will is nothing less than that good be made real, be realized in this

Memories and Remembering...they can change us and the world...if we want. Remember the first Harry Potter movie/book, “The sorcerer’s stone”, and the mirror that showed the deepest of dreams. And the lure of that mirror was the people would get so entrapped by that dream, the fantasy, the memory, and they would forget reality and waste away. Have any of us ever returned to a place that long ago meant something to us? Like going back to our old elementary school and looking at those tiny desks? Or a favorite park, restaurant, someplace where some nice event or memory was formed? And it failed now to live up to that memory? Memory, scientists will tell us, will deceive us. Every time we remember something from the past, it gets altered in our conscious, so that the next time we remember it, it is slightly different. Memory is not true reality, it is really not objective, but subjective. Memory can deceive. The past is essentially gone. Yet, how much we want to believe what we thi

In the beginning God created the world, so that God, who is love, can be express that love. God created a world, a stage if you will, from which God’s very reality can be known, experienced, celebrated. God created humankind to know God, to experience God, to celebrate all that God is. And we chose to not do this. We chose rather to make the world our own stage. We condemned it and ourselves. This was/is our Original Sin. It is very much alive within us. It shows itself in the way we seek to assert ourselves over others and seek authority over others, we choose to assert our own worldview. It is shown in our desire to protect our own selves, even denying those we love; killing the unborn, the very sick and elderly; in broken marriages. It becomes real in our use of violence, whether with instruments, or with our gossip, lies, and slander. It is the way we place our total allegiance behind politicians and political philosophy and nationalistic attitudes. It’s in our racism and

While a seminarian and doing chaplaincy work in a California hospital, I was called to a room. There a mother and a young daughter, the daughter was ill, and the mother visibly upset. As we talked, I learned that they were new to the Christian faith (not Catholic) and they were told that once baptized nothing bad would happen to them. It did. And they were struggling to make sense of it. Faith must be nourished and grown, built upon, updated, rebooted Faith to remain alive within us requires our effort. Otherwise the first challenge to what we think we believe and know...could leave us struggling. Another story, a man who was raised protestant with a literal understanding of Scripture, became Catholic. Later discerned a calling to the priesthood. He takes his first scripture class with a NON-Literal understanding of Scripture...so shaken he needs to take a leave of absence. Faith can be tricky. We can feel so strong in it. So assured in what we believe and what we think is correc