This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C. In yesterday’s post the point was made by Jesus that judgment comes to all people unless they repent. There is a universality of judgment. Then as now, the listener will easily call to mind a person considered worthy of divine judgment and punishment. There then lingers the unspoken question of timing. “As God will, can’t that divine punishment come now for this one?” Of course we are often reminded not to judge or regard others as more deserving of God’s judgment than ourselves. Continue reading
A time of Mercy
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We friars assist as Catholic chaplains at Tampa General. It is not my first time as a hospital chaplain. That was at Bethesda Naval Hospital. My time at Bethesda was at the beginning of the war in Iraq when the Marines were engaged in combat around Fallujah. Casualties were high. Every evening there was a chaplain assigned to the flight line to be there when marines, sailors, airmen and soldiers were medevac’d from the war zone. All of these service men and women were in grave medical conditions. I witnessed injuries that still left me amazed that the person was still alive. Alive with lives that would never be the same, never as they had planned. But the combat/trauma ICU and the flight line were not the hardest chaplain duty at Bethesda – at least not for me. For me, the hardest ward was the NICU; the neo-natal intensive care unit. 
This coming Sunday marks the 
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