Category Archives: Musings

Ash Wednesday and Sundays in Lent 2023

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lent-2-heartlargeAsh Wednesday, the first day of the penitential season of Lent in the Catholic Church, is always 46 days before Easter Sunday. It is a “movable” feast that is assigned a date in the calendar only after the date of Easter Sunday is calculated. How is it calculated? I’m glad you asked.

According to the norms established by the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and later adopted for Western Christianity at the Synod of Whitby, Easter Sunday falls each year on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year the vernal equinox falls on March 20, 2023 and the first full moon after that occurs on Thursday, April 6th. Therefore, Easter Sunday is celebrated this year on April 9th. If you want to know the date of Ash Wednesday, just count backwards 46 days and you get February 22nd. Continue reading →

Good News – Bad News

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We people of a certain age grew up watching “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau”, a documentary television series about the world beneath the waves. At some point we were introduced to the voice and calls of the humpback and other whales. You can listen to a sample here. To me the calls always sounded melancholy – and in a way, they were. By-in-large, the calls are done almost exclusively by males and are part of a mating ritual. Continue reading →

Listening and Being Present

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Earlier this week I presided at a burial interment at Quantico National Cemetery. An 86-old woman was being buried alongside her husband, an Army veteran, who has passed away in the mid-1990s. The woman was born in 1947 in Berlin amidst the destruction and occupation following the war. She met her GI husband and they fell in love. He wanted to remain in Germany, but she wanted to start their new life together in the United States. It is not an uncommon story. Continue reading →

The Flood

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From the city-states of ancient Greece to the tribes of the Amazon rainforest, cultures everywhere have preserved similar stories about heroes slaying monsters, talking animals playing tricks on each other, and jealous siblings fighting to the death. Especially common in world mythologies are stories about world-ending floods and the chosen individuals that managed to survive them, like the biblical Noah. Continue reading →

Something wicked this way comes

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In the first reading for today we encounter the well-known account of Noah as he is commissioned by God to gather all living creatures that would survive the Flood. (Just for the record, please note that Noah collected seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of unclean animals.) But the reading begins ominously: “When the LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved.” (Gen 6:5-7) Continue reading →

The First Murder

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The first reading today is from Genesis 4 and tells the well-known story of Cain and Abel. Did you notice that the whole idea of bringing an offering to God is Cain’s idea; Abel just follows along. Nonetheless, God’s reaction to Cain is unexpected, unexplained and negative: “The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not.” The most popular reason for God’s reaction is that Cain, even though he brought gifts first, brought just some of his harvest, whereas Abel “brought one of the best firstlings of his flock.” Given that other places in the Bible have expressions for bringing the best of the harvest, the assumption is that Cain held the best back for himself. Continue reading →

Human Trafficking

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Today is the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita. Born in Darfur-Sudan, she was kidnapped as a child at the age of 7 and was enslaved. She was bought and sold several times before arriving in the Sudanese slave market. Along the way, she forgot her family name, and was given a name by the Arab slave traders: bakhīta, Arabic for ‘lucky’ or ‘fortunate’. She was forcibly converted to Islam. Her life enslaved was horrific. Continue reading →

Order and Purpose

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The first readings from daily Mass for the first two days of this week are taken from Genesis, Chapter 1 into the opening verses of Genesis 2.  It is a familiar story to all from children to grandparents and everyone in between. Some Christians take it literally that in seven 24-hour periods, God created the world. Most Christians take it as an account of God’s role as the Creator of “all thing visible and invisible” as the Creed says, or as Scripture proclaims: “All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1:3). Continue reading →

Cattle and Aviators

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I received an email from someone who was able to access my Sunday homily in which I described the events of an air raid during the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 1944) when aviators returning in the pitch black, low on fuel, wondering how they could possibly find the fleet and safely land – were suddenly greeted with the “light of the world.”

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