Salt is important. It has its own Wiki page and even has a history book (Mark Kurlansky: Salt: A World History.) Yup, you heard it correctly. A whole history of the world written in the context of salt. As the author writes, “from the beginning of civilization until about one hundred years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.” And you took salt for granted. Continue reading
The gospel for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) comes from Mark 4 which contains some very memorable parables:
This coming Sunday the Church returns to “Ordinary Time” – not ordinary as regular and everyday, but from the Latin meaning to count. We celebrate the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings, especially the first reading from the Prophet Ezekiel and the Gospel from Mark, each make use of parables. The New Testament scholar, Charles H. Dodd (d. 1973) gave the Church its most classic and enduring definition of a parable: “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”
The gospel for this Monday in the 10th week of Ordinary Time is the familiar Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. If you would like to read a commentary on the Sermon, you can find it here. But in this post I would like to place these passages in a larger flow of the Matthean narrative. If you could only choose one word to describe the Sacred Writer’s “project” the word “fulfillment” would be a good choice.
At the end of the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora” (1970 film about the Dec 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Admiral Isoroku Yamamato comments, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” It is a great line, prescient in nature, but… Although the quotation may well have encapsulated many of his real feelings about the attack, there is no printed evidence to prove Yamamoto made this statement or wrote it down. William Safire traces its origins to the phrase dubiously attributed to Napoleon, “China is a sickly, sleeping giant. But when she awakes the world will tremble”. But the metaphor of the awakened sleeping giant was apt – and may well have been in Yamamoto’s mind. The admiral had studied, served and traveled in the United States and was well aware of its extensive industrial capability – as were a number of key Japanese military leaders of the day. Continue reading
My favorite comic strip is “Calvin and Hobbes.” If you are not familiar, it features Calvin, a preternaturally bright six year-old, and Hobbes, his imaginary tiger friend. The comic strip manages to infuse wondering (and wandering) on a cosmic scale into an ageless world of lazy Sunday afternoons, space adventures, and tales of befuddled babysitters, teachers, and parents. What I most enjoy about Calvin and Hobbes is that it reminds me of our capacity to be surprised, to imagine, and enter into mystery and wonderment. Calvin’s openness to the mystery of it all allowed him entry to even the theological arts where he mused about the combination of predestination with procrastination, finally concluding, “God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.” Continue reading
In June 1944, war raged across the globe. Allied forces from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many other Commonwealth countries opened another front on the War against Nazi Germany. Allied forces had already recaptured Saharan Africa, Sicily, and liberated Rome on June 4, 1944. Meanwhile in the Pacific, allied forces were already underway for an amphibious landing in the Mariana Islands of Saipan and Guam to begin June 13th. In midst of all this came the most remembered of the days in this single month of June 1944. Today we remember the Allied landings on the beaches of France.
This weekend the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, a feast perhaps better known by the Latin Corpus Christi. At its core, the solemnity is a celebration of the Tradition and belief in the Eucharist as the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Many folks wonder why this celebration is not integral with Holy Thursday. It was, mixed in with other themes, e.g., institution of the priesthood. And, all this occurs in the shadow of Good Friday. The placement of the celebration was not one that necessarily lends itself to a joyful celebration. Continue reading
An earlier article had discussed the problems with the rapid growth of members within in the fledgling community friars. The period from 1213 to 1216 is the most obscure period in Francis’ life and also one of the periods of explosive growth in the movement as the brotherhood spread well beyond Assisi. How many friars joined the fraternity in those years? It is impossible to say, but we do know this: in 1217 the annual meeting (called a “chapter”) made the decision to send out missions across the Alps into northern Europe, the Baltic states, and to the Crusader States in the eastern Mediterranean. Within Italy, six provinces were established; outside of Italy, five provinces were established: Spain, northern and southern France, Germany, and Syria. Continue reading
Too many irons in the fire, so to speak. I have a whole folder of work-in-progress articles, posts, studies, musings, and a “digital attic” of things in the folder “Interesting ideas.” One of the items in the attic was an introduction to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians – or rather his on-going somewhat rocky relationship with the community at Corinth.
With the exception of The Letter to the Galatians and The Letter to the Romans, St. Paul’s epistles are pastoral letters, most often responding to some problem in the community – that is not to say they do not carry/imply a consistent theological unpinning – but the letters are pastoral in nature and most often corrective and encouraging. But we are not always sure of the problem that is being addressed. Continue reading
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