Foot-washer

St. Agnes Catholic Church 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022325.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes. Among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, warriors would demonstrate their bravery through a practice called “counting coup.” This test of courage involved riding or running up to an enemy and touching or striking him with a hand and then retreating from danger. This act won prestige for a warrior, which could be recorded on a coup stick decorated with notches and feathers. It could also persuade and enemy to admit defeat without inflicting lasting violence on him besides injuring his pride. This form of ritual warfare was a creative way to resolve conflict among communities without engaging in devastating battles that ended in death and disability. I think about this practice when reading both our first reading and Jesus’ instruction in the Gospel to “love your enemies and do good to them.” In the first reading, David, the charismatic w...

St. Agnes Catholic Church Feast of the Holy Family https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122924.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes, Merry Christmas and happy Feast of the Holy Family.  My maternal grandmother, Barbara Emrich, grew up in the Highlands.  She and her family lived in a little house on Princeton Dr. not far from where Bellarmine University is now.  Her father, Joe Emrich, was a railroad man, working for the old Louisville & Nashville or L&N company.  Her mother, Nona, stayed at home and raised 9 children.   There were five boys and four girls in the Emrich family.  They were a deeply Catholic German family; two of the sons became priests and one of the daughters an Ursuline nun.  They embodied, in a way, an old model of what a Catholic family looked like.   In that little house, the boys had one bedroom and the girls another and they  shared one, solitary bathroom.  My grandmother was the baby of the fam...

  Bellarmine University Our Lady of the Woods  Christmas Eve Vigil Mass  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122524-Night.cfm  Pray for Peace, People Everywhere  Merry Christmas, Bellarmine, to you and your families.   If you’re like my family you’ve been hearing and listening to Christmas songs for about a month nonstop.  We’ve heard them on our smart speaker, the radio, at Christmas concerts, piano recitals, and St. Agnes’ Christmas pageant.   Miriam, Max, and Petra, who are all five years old, have been really into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Something about the repetition in the song really appeals to their age … while also driving adults a little crazy.  When EJ, our oldest, was three, he sang “Jingle Bells” for a solid year.  The next year, he started up on “We Three Kings.”  Again for a whole year, we were hearing  ”Woah … hoh....  Star of wonder…!” Christmas songs can be overwhelming and ines...

  Holy Family Catholic Church Gold Mass (Feast of St. Albert) Wis 13:1-9  Mk 9:2-10 How many of you have heard of “Tiktaalik?”  Do you know what a “Tiktaalik” is?  I’ll say the word again: Tiktaalik.  Tiktaalik is the name of an animal that lived 375 million years ago.  It was a fishlike aquatic creature that was among the first to evolve the ability to crawl out onto dry land. Tiktaalik’s fossils were found by paleontologists Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin twenty years ago in the arctic on Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, northern Canada.   Tiktaalik is called a “transitional fossil,” which embodies a transition from one major evolutionary stage to another. A second example of this is archaeopteryx, which embodies the transition of dinosaurs to birds.  Tiktaalik is sometimes referred to as “a fish with wrists” having fish-like qualities, but limbs that could support its weight as it crawled onto land, as an early ancestor of the amphibians....

  St. Agnes Catholic Church 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102724.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes.  I want to begin with a bit of Catholic trivia.  Ancient Greek was the most common language of the Mediterranean region.  It’s the language that the New Testament was written in and our earliest liturgies were prayed in. To this this day, there is one part of our Catholic mass that is still (occasionally) said in Greek.  Do you know what it is? I actually gave you a tip off earlier in the liturgy.  It’s in the penitential rite where we pray, “Lord have mercy,” or in the Greek ‘Kyrie Eleison.’  We hear the Biblical origins of this prayer in today’s Gospel reading.   On it’s surface, the reading today appears to be about another healing of a blind person—the restoration of sight to blind Bartimaeus.  I’d like to suggest that the Gospel actually about prayer.   Bartimaeus repeatedly shouts t...

Bellarmine University 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102024.cfm Jesus gives us a challenging instruction today: “whoever wishes to be great among you will … be the slave of all.” We might understandably be repulsed by Jesus’ language of slavery. Who would want to be a slave? We have a horrifying legacy of enslavement in the United States, a legacy that extends to the Caribbean and Central and South America. Slavery has never been a positive force in the world, including in the Greco-Roman culture where Jesus lived. So, it is a shock to Jesus’ listeners then and to us to today when he calls himself a slave and tells them he will be a human sacrifice. By calling himself a slave, Jesus is not saying that he doesn’t have dignity and value, as he is a human being created in the image of God. Nor that his labor and his body can be used up and thrown away by others. Rather he is attacking the human desire to use other people in this way. So-called “gr...

Galt House October 11, 2024 Mercy Education Conference  Jer 22:1-4 Matt 25:31-46 In 1960, an 18-year old Black man stood over the Ohio River looking down from the Second Street Bridge two blocks east from here.  He had just returned from Rome with an Olympic gold medal around his neck.  Filled with pride, he wore the medal everywhere, expecting every door in his hometown to be open to him.  And yet, he found that in Jim Crow Kentucky, the color of his skin mattered more than the color of his medal.  It mattered more than his talent in the ring, more than the poetry than flowed from his lips, more than his good looks.  “I’m prettier than a girl,” he boasted.   The young Muhammad Ali gazed down at the muddy water—a river that had been a symbol of freedom to his ancestors fleeing slavery to the north and a symbol of hell for slaves sold down river to the cotton fields of the Deep South.  Ali took his medal and threw it into the Ohio River....