In today’s gospel, we hear about the encounter between Jesus and a leper: “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” [Jesus] stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I will do it. Be made clean.” Clearly about a physical cleansing. But all week has been about “cleansing” of different varieties.
The first readings all week (except Wednesday’s Nativity of John the Baptist) have been about God making clean the people of God. Monday the Kingdom of Israel (the 10 northern tribes who broke away from the throne of King David) was conquered by Assyria (722 BCE) as either the kings nor the people remembered or cared about the Covenant with God. And it wasn’t for lack of prophets being sent to let them know, repent or God will “clean house.” Continue reading
For the first 70 days of the pandemic when the area church’s shutdown, my days were long and demanding for a whole variety of reasons. Eventually we hit the steady-state of a new normal. I took a breath and decided to take up reading. I had long had Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” on my “I want to get around to reading” list. The promo for the book is “Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.” In other words, why did some societies collapse while other survived. It is not a short read, not overly academic, but was an engaging narrative even if “slow” at times. 
The image is of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens (17th c.), “The Defeat of Sennacherib.” King Sennacherib was the King of Assyria who attempted to conquer Judah and capture Jerusalem in the 7th century BCE. You can read a summary of the encounter with King Hezekiah of Judah in the 
Next Sunday is the celebration of the 
Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, our parish namesake. We celebrate what St. Bonaventure identified as the source of the fountain fullness of love poured into our hearts. Our hearts, in Latin the word is “cor” from which is derived the English word, “core” as in the core, the center of being, the center of prayer and hope, the center of our moral compass, and center of the stories that matter to us.
This weekend we celebrate the patronal feast of our parish – The Sacred Heart of Jesus. There is an earlier post on the history of the feast day in which St. Bonaventure in his writing, “With You is the Source of Life” (which is the reading for the Divine Office on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart) described the heart as the fountain from which God’s love poured into our lives.
In 
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