Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Have to or Want to? A Subtle difference, but an amazing difference when it comes to understand freedom. How many “have to’s” are there in our lives? I have to do this or have to do that? How many of us like doing the “have to’s”?  I once asked a young dad, a new dad, about having to clean diapers. I told him “I don’t know how you can do it, because I get ill just thinking of it.” He said that it was his babies doodoo, and that made all the difference.  He didn’t have to, he wanted to. Way back in 1976, our Dad started us on a grand adventure. Our house, by the way was built during the civil war, so it was over 100 years old, had only a small basement underneath. With 7 kids and and other needs, we needed a bigger basement. So we ourselves, along with an uncle and a grandfather, during that summer dug by hand our basement. We kids helped to the best of our ability. We either dug or in a wheelbarrow, took to dirt to a dump site maybe 200 feet away. It was a lot of...

Several decades ago Bette Midler released a song called “From a Distance”. It’s a beautiful song with the idea that from a distance we lose the distinctions between us. We don’t see borders. We see only unity. Great!!! However there is a problematic phrase in it. “From a distance, God is watching us.” Two decades ago I was part of a group, along with Bishop Straling and some members of this parish, who went to the Holy Land. We did all the usual stops including the Jordan River. Now, I had pictured the Jordan as blue river, flowing; not unlike our Truckee.  Well to my dismay it was greenish from the algae, slow moving, and to be honest gross. I was not about to touch that messy water. Yet, there were people around us getting into the water and renewing baptismal promises and one of our group jumped right in. A great sadness for me is when people come to me with their lives in shambles, and they say God has abandoned them. They think God has rejected them. They feel dista...

Question for you...in the story of Adam and Eve, who or what is the snake?  What if the snake is not the devil? What if we learned the snake actually represented wisdom? The snake was a symbol for worldly wisdom. How would that change our understanding of the “Fall”? Another question for you. Who are the magi? What does this mean for our gospel and how it applies to our lives? One of the greatest crisis we face right now in our Church, especially the American church is that people are leaving us. It is the rise of the Nones and the Dones. People saying they are done with the institution of the church; not with God, but with the institution or at least their perception of the institution. I think if asked, the general perception of the Catholic Church, at least among the Anglo-Saxon-ish people, is that we are a rule-bound, regulated community.   This was for us of certain generations how we were raised. Go to mass every Sunday and on days of obligation, “...