God strengthens our hearts and raises our heads to live in freedom – Luke 21:25-28, 34-36, 1 Th 3:12-4:2.

Advent 1, Yr C; Notre Dame (Duncan Hall)

What do you want for Christmas?  How about just being free of finals?  As a fellow student, we’ve just come off this lovely break, but now we’re staring down the barrel of some pretty busy weeks here and being free of that, that’ll be a pretty good Christmas gift right there.  And I actually think there’s some spiritual wisdom in there for Advent.  That this is our time, a short four week period, to prepare ourselves to celebrate Christmas, the celebration of God’s first coming among us in human form, and by doing that to prepare ourselves for Christ to come again, which is what our readings on this first Sunday of Advent concentrate on.  And I think that asking ourselves what we want for Christmas, and making that less about what we want to get, and more about what we want to be rid of can be a very real way to do that.

Jesus gathers us – Mark 13:24-32, Heb 10:11-14, 18

33rd Sunday of OT (Year B); Church of Loretto, St. Mary's college.

When a bomb explodes, hyper-pressurized air pushes away from itself, initially moving at almost 200,000 miles per hour, twenty times the speed of sound, only slowing as it hits whatever stands in the way of its will to scatter.  The hyper-pressurized air’s abhorrence of being so concentrated, each particle’s hatred of being so close to each other particular, is what causes the explosive force.  The nature of violence is to scatter.  In our gospel, Jesus promises us that he will gather.

Jesus shows us hope – Mark 12:38-44, Heb 9:24-28, 1 Kings 17:10-16

OT, Yr B, Week 32; Farley Hall, Notre Dame.

Have you ever seen one of those optical illusions which are two pictures in one?  There’s one where it could be either two faces looking at each other, or a cup.  There’s a moving one (and I’d invite you to google this one now [people got their phones out to look at this]): the spinning dancer illusion.  Who thinks she’s rotating clockwise?  Counterclockwise?  It’s apparently called a kinetic, bistable illusion.  That means that once you’ve seen it one way, it’s really hard to see it any other way.  Now, in this case, that’s not really a problem.  There’s no moral reality that one way of seeing it is better than the other way, or even that flexibility with these kind of illusions is really a virtue.