Foot-washer

  5th Sunday of Lent Scrutinies https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/040625-YearA.cfm  We just heard the second longest Gospel reading by numbers of words in the entire Sunday lectionary.  If you are keeping score, last week’s reading was 851 words.  Today’s is 843 words.  These readings are preparing us for our Passion readings next week which are almost three times as long.   Today, we heard 45 verses – the entire 11th chapter of the Gospel of John.  Out of the 45 verses, I would like to focus on one verse (11:35), which is the shortest verse in the Bible.  It is just two words: “Jesus wept.”   Jesus cries two times in the Gospels.  Today, we see him cry over the death of his beloved friend Lazarus.  Next week, before entering Jerusalem in a procession of palms, Jesus cries for the fate of the city, which is doomed to be destroyed by the Romans in the next thirty-five years in a siege that will result in tens of thousa...

 An incomplete homily for the  Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020 (September 13). This would have been my first homily, but I abandoned it for being too dark for my inaugural.  The story about my friend and the skull is a bit... much.  Maybe I will find the right audience or work it in some place else.  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091320.cfm In the first reading, we hear Joshua Ben Sirach say, “remember death and decay, and cease from sin!”  This is a repeated line in this unfamiliar Wisdom Book of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Elsewhere Sirach writes, “In whatever you do, remember your last days and you will never sin” (7:36).  Saint Benedict, the famous monk, was probably inspired by this line in his Rule.  He poignantly wrote, “Keep death daily before your eyes” (4:47). I know a man who lived as a monk in Rome for several years.   One day several of his monastic brothers were digging in the monastery’s garden when they ...

A Reflection Following the Death of a Student's Parent.  I have had to offer a variation on this reflection too many times in my work as a campus minister.  This is your life, joys and sorrow mingled, one succeeding the other. Catherine McAuley’s Letter to Frances Warde May 28, 1841 The hard truth about being alive is that if we live long enough, we will experience the death of several people that we love.   Seeing these loved ones die is incredibly painful and almost impossible to make sense of. Why does a good God allow people to suffer?   Why do people have to die in the first place? What purpose could it possible serve.          There are not good answers to these questions.   I have spent a long time wresting with them, myself, and the only answer I find satisfying is this: we do not suffer alone.   Our pain troubles God so much that he came to be with us.   God took the form of a human being and told us that...

  Reflection on the Death (Transitus) of St. Francis. Offered at Our Lady of the Woods chapel at Bellarmine University on October 2, 2014.  Readings: https://www.franciscanpenancelibrary.com/transitus-of-saint-francis I have come to know St. Francis through the Franciscans here at Bellarmine and through reading about his life.   I would like to share some of the lessons that I have learned about his life and death. St. Francis teaches us how to die well.   If you were able to able to the Campus Ministry office today, you received a pot filled with Brother or Sister Plant.   This afternoon in the quad, the friars blessed our pets, which we call, “Brother Dog,” “Sister Cat,” or if you are my wife, “Sister Hermit Crab.”   This evening, as our prayer began, perhaps you noticed Sister Moon glowing down at us.   St. Francis praised God through all of these creatures and creations of God. Tonight we also recognize and commemorate the one that he ca...