Waiting Isn’t Always a Bad Thing

Several commercials for the VISA check card show a smoothly choreographed series of transactions at a store, a food court, a basketball game, until someone wants to pay with cash, and then everything grinds to an irritating halt.
Few will deny that we live in a world that glorifies instant gratification. We hate to wait—for anything! [...]

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Crumbs from Your Table

Sometimes the stories from the Gospels have become such a part of our cultural heritage that we don’t really hear them. Sunday’s parable of the Rich Man (sometimes called Dives) and Lazarus is one of those stories. The rich man neglects the poor beggar at his door, they both die, one goes to heaven, the [...]

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Money, Influence and Friends

Today’s Gospel contains that oft-quoted line, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” The key here is not the word mammon or money, but the word serve. If we let our concern for money or material goods overmaster us, we will be in trouble. Maybe not in the short term, maybe not in how we [...]

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More than saying ‘Lord, Lord’

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” the main character, Mrs. Turpin, is a proper southern lady who has a very high opinion of herself and a very low opinion of nearly everyone else. But when she’s brought up short by an accusation from a mentally unstable girl in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, [...]

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Burning our Plows

The lectionary readings for this 13th Sunday of the year, at least the first and the third, are linked by the image of a plow. In the reading from Kings, Elijah calls Elisha to follow him by throwing his mantle over his shoulders. Elisha leaves his plow and tells the great prophet, “Let me [...]

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At what personal cost?

Today in the weekday lectionary cycle we begin the book of Tobit, one of my favorite books in the Catholic Old Testament. As I was reading through today’s selection, one of the things that I noticed was that the opening scene takes place on the Jewish feast of Shavuot or Weeks. Shavuot was a harvest [...]

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Tenebrae: ‘The light shines in the darkness’

I went to the Tenebrae service at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral last night. This has become my personal tradition for entering into the Triduum. I first experienced it back in the late 1980s at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, where it was sung after the Mass on the Lord’s Supper [...]

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The cadence of a prophet

We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This struck me anew listening to Bono’s acceptance speech at the NAACP awards at the beginning of March. All over the Internet, the response has been one word: Wow!
What he said should not come as news to any of us [...]

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