God has planted goodness in the world for us – Matt 13:44-46

17th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross Parish.

There are good things in the world.  And that’s worth celebrating.  Sometimes we work to seek those out.  I think of the joy musicians feel when, after hours upon hours of laborious practice, they participate in presenting something truly beautiful and receive the heartfelt gratitude and appreciation of a crowd.  The joy of being a cultivator of beauty is something worth seeking out.  Sometimes we just stumble on a good thing.  Maybe we’re in an accident or in trouble and a friend or even a stranger reaches out a hand and we encounter true goodness, unsought, unexpected, maybe even initially unwelcome, but eventually deeply appreciated.

God will grow his kingdom to include us – Matt 13:24-43

Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross Parish.

If you had to guess whether she was wheat or weed, you’d probably have guessed weed.  A college dropout, who’d become a journalist and gotten mixed up with the Communists, who had fallen for a sorry excuse of a man who told her he’d leave her if she didn’t get an abortion and then left her anyway when she did.  If our eager servants had gone out, ready to pluck weeds, they’d probably have taken one look at this ne’er-do-well, and plucked her.  But the master bids the servants wait, because God knows better. 

God is with us while we await the lavish harvest – Matt 13:1-9, Rom 8:18-23

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Cross Parish.

I wonder what we focus on when we hear this parable.  A lot of treatments of this parable focus on the dangers and the failures: birds who devour (a la Hitchcock?), paucity of soil, scorching sun, choking thorns.  And they’re real.  There are dangers and in the world.  But they can’t dominate our focus.  Because as we heard two weeks ago on the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, if even the gates of Hell assail the Church, they will not prevail.  As the Sermon of the Mount ends, even if we’re on rocky ground, buffeted by storms, our house will not fail.  As St. John XXIII put it, the prophets of doom have had their say, and the Church has found them wanting.

God plants us on a rock – 2 Tim 4:6-8, 17-18; Mat 16:13-19

Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul; St. Casimir and Holy Cross parishes.

God plants us on a rock.  I find that a very realistic image for what it feels like to live out our lives in the Church.  We don’t live in a rose garden, yet, and we don’t experience perpetual banquet, yet.  Now we get glimmers of those realities here and now, furtively we perceive the grace God is pouring out for us, the wonders prepared for us, and we’re given in foretaste, but for now the experience of living in the Church can be pretty well summed up by that image: we live on a rock.  It’s big and it’s craggy and it’s home.

God feeds us with his love – Jn 6:51-58, Deut 8:2-3, 14b-16a, 1 Cor 10:16-17

Corpus Christ; Holy Spirit Parish (Newman Hall), Berkeley, CA.  [Posted late due to travel.]

One day when I was in Haiti we had ice cream and it was amazing.  I was only in Haiti for less than two weeks, we were busy during the days, walking in blazing heat, having trouble sleeping in the sticky nights’ warmth, getting enough to eat (unlike most of the population there), but nowhere near as much as our Western stomachs were used.  But on Sunday afternoon, things quietened down.  Someone had a radio, we went outside, found a spot in the shade and out came the ice cream.  My limited Haitian was just about capable of crying out to our host repeatedly mesi boku mesi boku mesi boku, but really I had no words in any language to truly express my gratitude at that moment for something as simple as ice cream.  I’ve never, before or since, been so grateful for ice cream… and that saddens me.  I’m saddened that it took temporary presence in a third world country to draw out simultaneously a lament that my practice of hospitality doesn’t come close to matching most suburban Haitians’ and to intense gratitude at ice cream.  Unfortunately, it was too short a time to truly inculcate in me growth in the virtue of gratitude, but I have that memory which inspires me to keep on praying for it.

This week's Office of Readings: Judges

I've had an idea for a new blog series for a while, and figured I'd try it out today: look at the week's coming readings in Office of Readings, and provide an interpretive crux for them.  How can reading these readings be prayer?  Here are some thoughts about Judges, a book easily written off as fun but not particularly spiritual.

Love loves love, and us, as infuriating as we are – Exod 34:4b-6, 8-9, Jn 3:16-18 (Tri Sunday)

Trinity Sunday, Year A -- Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

“Early in the morning, Moses began to climb Mount Sinai, carrying two stone tablets.”  What isn’t clear from the beginning of our reading, is that this is the second time Moses had carried those stone tablets up that mountain.  The first time hadn’t gone very well.  He had spent forty days and nights up the mountain in intense intimacy with the God who had delivered His people from slavery in Egypt and was in the process of entering into renewed covenant with them.  The people below had not been able to trust that God would keep on leading them into fuller and richer freedom.  They feared; they felt abandoned.  So, at Aaron’s invitation, they took off their gold earrings and melted them down, forming a golden calf and worshiping it.  They then encountered the full display of God’s wrath which up until that point they had only seen directed at the Egyptians.  Moses, angry too, descended and smashed the tablets, burnt down the calf and made the people drink its ashes.  He now ascends with new tablets, upset, angry, scared.