Month: June 2017

Posted on

Reverence

As I am now away on a vacation of sorts, I didn’t know if I would do a post this weekend. Since today happens to be rather foggy and damp where I am, it isn’t the best day for hiking – unless I want to get damp quickly, which I don’t. Besides, there have been a few potential topics that have been dancing around inside my head for a while. Today seems like a good day to explore one of them.

Whenever there has been a significant change in anything, we can expect that this change has brought about some improvements. However, any change can also lead – inadvertently, perhaps – to a loss or a diminishing of something important that was already there. The “law of unintended consequences” makes its appearance.  Continue reading “Reverence”

Posted on

Food For The Journey

Corpus Christi (A)

Two weeks ago, we celebrated the feast of Pentecost, which also marks the end of the Easter season in our liturgical calendar. Parish liturgy committees (and others) are told that, after Pentecost, we move into Ordinary Time. Out with Easter white and Pentecost red, and in with Ordinary green!

Well, not so fast.

Although we do move into Ordinary Time right after Pentecost Sunday, the Church adds two more “white” Sundays immediately following Pentecost: Trinity Sunday and then Corpus Christi, or The Body and Blood of Christ, which we celebrate this Sunday (along with Father’s Day in the USA).  Continue reading “Food For The Journey”

Posted on

Gift and Community

Trinity Sunday (A): John 3: 16-18

From the Jewish people, our ancestors in faith, we inherited the belief in one God, in contrast to what many peoples (including our own ethnic ancestors) believed – a universe with many gods and goddesses. This faith in the one God who revealed himself to Abraham and Moses (among others) was summed up in the prayer that every Israelite repeated daily:

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.”  (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) Continue reading “Gift and Community”

Posted on

Life With Fitbit

When I was a child, I was very interested in quite a few things. I would read and watch everything I could find about them, and absorb information better than a sponge absorbs water. One of my interests was the animal world. I had my favorites – elephants, whales, dinosaurs, tigers, deer, and tame animals like cats and dogs – but most any animal could attract my interest. Deer, chickadees, hummingbirds, squirrels, moose. I would even watch grasshoppers and ants carry on their routines. I watched shows like Lassie and Flipper.

I especially liked documentary shows about animals, as I could learn more about animals from them. Jacques Cousteau showed me the wonders of the seas. There was Wild Kingdom, with Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler, introducing me to animals and birds of all types and on every continent.  There were many other such shows, whose names I cannot remember just now.  Continue reading “Life With Fitbit”

Posted on

One In The Spirit

Pentecost (A): 1 Corinthians 12: 3b-7; 12-13

“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Spirit.” – 1 Corinthians 12:3

Many Catholics in this country came from ethnic groups that have been here for generations. Some began to arrive in the great waves of immigration that began in the 1830’s – the Irish, the Germans, the French Canadians, the Italians. Others were descendants of Spanish and Portuguese settlers that had arrived in the Americas long before the English and French began to settle here.

All of these, however, had one thing in common – they were not “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. They had the wrong accents, the wrong customs, and the wrong religion. They usually arrived poor, if not destitute, and were seen by many Americans as bringers of disease and crime, and as a threat to American democracy. (Funny how some things do not change – and sad to see how the descendants of people so treated now treat new immigrants in the same way.) In a word, these Catholic immigrants had no status in American society.  Continue reading “One In The Spirit”