August 14th, 2011
There is a fellow who keeps sending me e-mail jokes. Some of them are good, many are not. I find some of these jokes to be offensive. They put down people on welfare, new immigrants, people seen as the ‘Freddy Freeloaders’ of society. I think he might be a clone of Sarah Palin or of one of our local politicians. The victims of many of these ‘jokes’ are men and women seen as outsiders, on the fringe of society, those different from ourselves. I think we all have difficulty dealing with some thing or some one we see as different, out of the ordinary.
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| Posted in Homily |
August 7th, 2011
A number of years ago we had a priest helping in the parish on weekends. He preached the sermon one Good Friday. He told me before hand not to get nervous; he knew what he was doing. He went to the pulpit after the reading of the Passion and stood there in absolute silence. We waited and waited for him to begin. He finally said, “we’ve just had a minute of silence.” He asked, “how many of you were uncomfortable, uneasy, and unsure of what was going on?” I think the whole church was. But then he spoke about the silence of Calvary and how we really find it hard to deal with silence.
July 31st, 2011
Good people I want you to hear again the words of our second reading:
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am certain of this that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, depths, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
July 24th, 2011
There is a program on CBC Radio 1 called The Age of Persuasion. It is a good program and it tells of how people in the advertising industry use different techniques to convince us we need to have this or that product. They tell us our lives are unfulfilled if we don’t possess or use the particular product they are pushing. Those involved in the business of persuasion know that the root desires of every person are the pride of power, the accumulation of money and the experience of pleasure.
July 17th, 2011
Let both grow together until the harvest. This is the wise and patient advice of the farmer in response to his enthusiastic slaves who were so eager to root out the weeds they’d discover among the wheat. As you know there are all kinds of different opinions as to how our church should be. The so-called liberals see themselves as wheat and the conservatives the weeds, and vice versa. And enthusiasts on both sides want to rid the church of those they see as weeds. We all need to hear the sound advice of today’s gospel, ‘let both grow together until the harvest.’ Hopefully we as church are done with the days of burning people at the stake for being faithful to their conscience. We must recognize that in our long history we’ve had our own Ayatollahs, Popes and Bishops who, probably out of fear, would not let both grow together until the harvest.
Founded by St. Paul of the Cross, every Passionist takes a special vow to spend his or her energies in promoting remembrance of the sufferings of Jesus, the memory of the Cross, and reflection of the meaning of the Cross for the world.
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