The 20th-century Dutch Catholic priest, Fr. Henri Nouwen, noted that “we should pay attention to the people God puts in our path if we want to discern what God is up to in our lives.” How many of us sit in awe and wonder regarding the...
Last Sunday, on the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we found ourselves in a vineyard parable (Mt 20:1-16) filled with workers and a landowner. In the story, you might remember that there were workers who had toiled in the fields from dawn to dusk...
A man I know once told me the story of a time in his life when his once-thriving business began to decline. As more companies moved into his small town, competition increased, and his sales began to suffer. Not surprisingly, this caused him to make...
The opening prayer for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time begins with these words: “O God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy…” In our first reading, 500 years before the Incarnation...
There is a story of a young woman who, one evening, was waiting for a bus in a crime-ridden area. A rookie policeman approached her and asked: “Do you want me to wait with you?” Quickly, she noted: “No, that won’t be...
In Mark’s Gospel (14:22-26), we read about the Institution of the Lord’s Supper. There, in the Upper Room, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said: “Take, this is my body.” Shortly thereafter, Jesus took a cup...
Our opening prayer for the Third Sunday of Advent provides us with insight that something big is coming: “O God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so...
In Sacred Scripture, “the word, father, is a designation used not only for the immediate male progenitor, but also for the head of a people or tribe (Gen. 19:37), or for the founder of a town (1 Chron. 2:41–52), or of some institution (Gen...
