Category Archives: Sunday Morning

Days when I don’t get it

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Ever been in a conversation with someone – usually not an easy conversation – when the other person, exasperated with you, the conversation, or whatever just blurts out, “You just don’t get it, do you?”  ….and there it is… the end of the conversation.  Just a few words, well delivered that can kill  conversations or end relationships.

I suspect that along with exasperation, it can often be delivered with the characteristics that St. Paul warns us about: “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, reviling [and] malice must be removed from you.” We might well add to his list: “You just don’t get it, do you?”  None of the above fulfills the proposal to “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” Continue reading →

The grace to persevere

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Several years ago, the Mars Chocolate North America company wanted to rejuvenate their product line of candy bars. Their creative partner, the global firm BBDO, helped them to launch a national campaign with the basic message: “you are not you when you’re hungry.” The television advertisements were wildly popular with stars such as Betty White and Aretha Franklin appearing in them. In all the tv spots the person just wasn’t themselves until a concerned fried offered them a candy bar. The Aretha Franklin spot always cracked me up. On a long cross-country drive one of the backseat passengers is complaining about everything – and while doing so appears to be Ms. Franklin. The backseat companion encourages the complainer to eat a candy bar because “When you’re hungry you turn into a diva.”  Continue reading →

Come and be changed

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The reading from Old Testament, 2 Kings, and the Gospel both described miraculous multiplications of bread that nourishes the people – such a small offering – a couple of barley loaves – yielding such tremendous results, feeding thousands upon thousands. Truly miraculous…but what effect did it have on the people who were fed? The gospel reading is just the first part of The Gospel According to John, Chapter 6 – over the following four weeks, we will read the remainder of that chapter in its entirety. We can actually take a peek ahead and answer the question. The recipients of that wondrous bread – well, they wanted more. They wanted to make Jesus king so they would always have bread. Jesus will keep trying to explain to them the meaning and the implications on what has just happened, but once they figure out that Jesus’ meaning is Eucharistic… well, they walk away. I guess it would be fair to say the whole thing did not have the effect Jesus wanted. Continue reading →

For a while….

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For a group of elite US athletes a moment is quickly arriving – the 2024 Olympic games. I think people have their favorite sport. In my case, no surprise, it is the swimming events. Every four years people are brought to a moment. And they don’t arrive unprepared. Years of preparation.

There is a threshold of practice that raises one’s level of performance to expert. And then a dedicated persistence and perseverance in that practice is needed to maintain that level of expertise. The number oft mentioned in 10,000 hours. Last century, when I was in college I had reached 10,000 hours and more. I competed at a national level, in the deep end so to speak, where lots of people competed in races that were resolved in tenths or hundredths of seconds. Continue reading →

Divine Disturbance

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My Aunt Mary – she was really just a family friend, but out of respect for her 86 years on earth we always called her Aunt Mary. She was the only person I ever met who used an ear trumpet – a tubular or funnel-shaped device which collects sound waves and leads them into the ear. It was an aid for hearing before there were hearing aids. It was necessary to speak directly into the trumpet if you wanted to carry on conversation. My dad discovered that a simple surgical procedure could restore a great deal of her hearing, but Aunt Mary was not interested. It wasn’t that she was afraid, she simply stated: “I’m 86 years old and I have heard it all – and I don’t want to hear it again.” She did want to be disturbed. Continue reading →

Working on it

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What’s as tall as a small office building, snaps large vessels in half and inspires a small tribe of surfers to launch themselves into an unholy maelstrom? Giant waves. The bigger the better — or worse — depending on who’s talking; better for extreme surfers, worse for seafarers. Until very recently giant waves lived only as lore. There was the story of the Tlingit Indian woman who returned from berry picking to find her entire village disappeared. The polar explorer Ernest Shackleton once reported narrowly surviving “a mighty upheaval of the ocean,” the biggest wave he’d seen in 26 years of seafaring. But witnesses of a 100-foot wave at close range rarely lived to tell, and experts dismissed stories about these waves because they seemingly violated basic principles of ocean physics. Continue reading →

Two Powers and a Kingdom

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In today’s readings, the first reading from Ezekiel and the gospel from Mark, we have “winged creatures” or “birds of the sky” are able to rest and find shade in an unexpected place. The readings are at least thematically connected. Jesus’s focus in the Gospel is clear as he asks: “To what shall we compare the kingdom of God” – the kingdom being a topic Jesus has proclaimed since the beginning of the gospel: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15). But what is Ezekiel talking about? Continue reading →

Rebellion

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“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” is a quote from the William Butler Yeats poem “The second coming.”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Continue reading →

A Masterclass in Faith

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Back in the day when I served in a slum parish on the edge of Nairobi. Over the course of several encounters I came to know a Mill Hill priest, Fr. John Kaiser. Fr. John was a missionary legend. Originally from Minnesota, he had a Paul Bunyan like quality to him – larger than life. By the time I met him he had been serving in Kenya for 30 plus years. One day he randomly showed up at the parish where I worked and asked me if I wanted to go with him on a trip “into the bush” to visit a group of semi-nomadic Maasai to whom he had been ministering for many years. By “into the bush” he meant the Transmara, the name for the Serengetti on the Kenyan side of the border. Instantly I imagined an exotic safari, an “Out of Africa” moment, … I mean, this was what it meant to be a missionary! Continue reading →