Finding a Treasure

I was reflecting on the man who found a treasure and immediately bought the field where it lay.  His friends and neighbors probably warned him about all the disasters that could happen, about the risks he had foolishly taken—anything but simply celebrating with him and sharing his good fortune.  Or else they didn’t even notice.  [...]

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Living With Questions

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and…try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you [...]

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Those Who Know They Need God

In Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, 12-year-old Meg Murry sets off with her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and her best friend, Calvin O’Keefe, to find her father, who disappeared into space several years before. A trio of supernatural beings, manifested as eccentric old women known only as Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs [...]

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Taking on Great Responsibility

A lot of mental and emotional interference takes place when we hear the readings for this feast. People tend to focus on the line from the Letter to Colossians about wives being subordinate to their husbands, or parents and children exchange looks at the line, “Children, obey your parents in everything.” Most of us don’t [...]

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When Waiting Is Difficult

A farmer plants seeds deep in the earth. He knows from experience that they will produce plants. Does he ever doubt in the cold winter, looking at the barren fields? Even in the spring, waiting for the first green shoots to poke through the ground? We can’t see the growth taking place beneath the surface [...]

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An Advent Wake Up Call

“The night is advanced; the day is at hand”—a paradoxical thought at the beginning of Advent, coming as it does in the winter of the year when the days are ever shorter, the nights longer, darker, colder. This very discrepancy jolts us into awareness. It is easy to be wrapped up in our own comfort [...]

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On not being cosmic busybodies

Our Gospel today is difficult. Often it’s read almost as a blueprint for the end of the world, a fortune-teller’s description of what will happen before the last days. Books like the Left Behind series spin this out into an elaborate fantasy of good and evil. Even more disturbing are those voices on talk radio [...]

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To Live, to Love, to Leave a Legacy

In a recent episode of The Simpsons, the wealthy businessman Montgomery Burns nearly drowns in a fountain. With what he thinks is his last breath, he says, “Apparently I’m dying. Sure wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
We laugh because we know that the reality is that most people will do anything they can [...]

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Climbing Trees and Scaling Walls

Luke tells us that Zacchaeus is short. It’s probably one thing that almost anyone who’s heard this Gospel story would tell you about him. He’s that short guy who climbed a tree to see Jesus. Often they see it as sort of a slap-stick kind of scene, with a normally distinguished businessman puffing and out [...]

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Are we just talking to ourselves?

Luke is very clear in the introduction to the parable of the tax collector and the pharisee that Jesus was speaking to “those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.” Many of the religious leaders of his day had fallen into the trap so familiar to the powerful of believing their [...]

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