Jesus baptizes us – Luke 3:15-16, 21-22, Isa 40:1-11, Titus 2,3 extracts

Baptism of the Lord, Yr C; Notre Dame (Fisher Hall)

Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  In Luke, it’s our introduction to the adult Jesus, all four of our gospels narrate it, which means it beats out Jesus’ birth by a factor of 2:1 there), it’s important enough to me that I picked an image of it from my first parish to put on the holy card we gave out at my ordination.  Yes, Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  But, Jesus getting baptized isn’t what struck me as the most important thing in this gospel.  Studying and praying with it over this week, one sentence stuck with me: “He will baptize you.”

God welcomes us into the family of love – Luke 2:41-52, 1 John 3:1-2

Holy Family, Year C; Notre Dame (University Village)

We’ve just heard tell of a perfectly loving family.  But that perfectly loving family isn’t the one our feast celebrates today: the one perfectly loving family is not Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but God.  By which I mean: God the Father, and Jesus the Son.  God is family, and by that I don’t mean that God really likes families (though he does), or God is close to us like a familial relative (though he is), I mean it as literally as we can mean anything about God: God is a family, the one perfectly loving family.  The relationship of love between God the Father and Jesus the Son is the love from which all other love is spun.  It’s a love between father and son that drove everything that Jesus did; and everything that Jesus did serves to invite us into that love and empower us to respond in love.  It’s why had to be in his father’s house, about his father’s business.  It’s why Jesus prayed so much.  It’s the love that gave Jesus the strength and the trust to be able to offer everything for us.  It’s the love that drew Jesus up to return to his father after his resurrection, to continue to show us what love looks like, and that led him to send us the Spirit that we might live in that love.

God clothes us with joy – Zeph 3:14-18a, Phil 4:4-7

Advent, Yr C, Week 3; Notre Dame (FOG Graduate Student chapel)

We all like to be praised.  As humans, we have widely varying tastes and preferences in oh-so-many things, but being praised is almost universally liked, I think.  Sometimes being praised is utilitarian, a good grade, or letter of recommendation, or positive feedback from a reviewer: there, sometimes, the pleasure at the praise is really pleasure at what we can use the praise to do.  But there’s a deeper type of pleasure at being praised, a holier one, even, and that’s when we know that the praise comes from someone being really overjoyed because of us, and we rejoice in response not because the person’s important, but because we love them, and stimulating joy in someone we love is wonderful. 

The Word of God comes to us – Luke 3:1-6, Bar 5:1-9

Advent, Yr C, Wk 2; Notre Dame (Walsh Hall)

We love stories about journeys.  Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Odyssey, The Earthsea books, the Wizard of Oz, Watership Down.  Some people even claim that every great story is at its heart the story of a journey (they’re wrong, but lots of people say it anyway…).  Whether they’re hobbits, women, girls, men or rabbits, we do love stories about plucky, beyond-all-odds heroes traversing through all kinds of sticky situations, normally to make it home, a better person for it.  I have a friend who just put in an audition tape for American Ninja Warrior, and it’s amazing how many people (including me) will spend hours of our lives watching people attempt that same short but grueling journey, in the hope that one of them might make it to the top of Mount Midoriyama.  We love these stories, I think, because we love to imagine ourselves on a journey, to narrativize our lives like that.  In fact, it’s a classic spiritual practice.  You can read books about the soul’s journey to God by saints like St. Bonaventure, and more recent spiritual writers, including our own Fr. John Dunne, a Holy Cross priest who taught at Notre Dame for 55 years.

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.