18th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A

Today, the Eucharist is foreshadowed in the gospel’s telling of Jesus’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14: 13-21). When the disciples tell Jesus to send the crowd away, he tells them to feed them. They protest, but from a meager supply of five loaves and two fish, Our Lord feeds five thousand men, not counting women and children. How often in our own lives do we face a seemingly impossible situation? God asks us to go beyond what we are can do or endure: patience, generosity and forgiveness do not come easily to us. But with his help “we can accomplish all things.”

Here are a few paragraphs on this subject from St. Pope John Paul II’s 1998 Apostolic Letter Dies Domini (On Keeping the Lord’s Day). It’s a long document, but well worth reading and praying over from time to time.

The Eucharist is an event and programme of true brotherhood. From the Sunday Mass there flows a tide of charity destined to spread into the whole life of the faithful, beginning by inspiring the very way in which they live the rest of Sunday. If Sunday is a day of joy, Christians should declare by their actual behaviour that we cannot be happy “on our own.” They look around to find people who may need their help. It may be that in their neighbourhood or among those they know there are sick people, elderly people, children or immigrants who precisely on Sundays feel more keenly their isolation, needs and suffering. It is true that commitment to these people cannot be restricted to occasional Sunday gestures. But presuming a wider sense of commitment, why not make the Lord’s Day a more intense time of sharing, encouraging all the inventiveness of which Christian charity is capable? Inviting to a meal people who are alone, visiting the sick, providing food for needy families, spending a few hours in voluntary work and acts of solidarity: these would certainly be ways of bringing into people’s lives the love of Christ received at the Eucharistic table.

Lived in this way, not only the Sunday Eucharist but the whole of Sunday becomes a great school of charity, justice and peace. The presence of the Risen Lord in the midst of his people becomes an undertaking of solidarity, a compelling force for inner renewal, an inspiration to change the structures of sin in which individuals, communities and at times entire peoples are entangled. Far from being an escape, the Christian Sunday is a “prophecy” inscribed on time itself, a prophecy obliging the faithful to follow in the footsteps of the One who came “to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and new sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Lk 4:18-19). In the Sunday commemoration of Easter, believers learn from Christ, and remembering his promise: “I leave you peace, my peace I give you” (Jn14:27), they become in their turn builders of peace.

9th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A

Sunday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time Year A: Matthew 7: 21-27

A READING FROM A HOMILY BY PHILOXENUS OF MABBUG

This saying of our Master obliges us to be diligent not only in hearing God’s word, but also in obeying it. We do well to listen to the law, because it moves us to good works; it is a good thing to read and meditate on Scripture, because our inmost thoughts are thus purified from all evil; what to be assiduous in reading, listening to and meditating on the law of God without doing what it sees is a wickedness that the Spirit of God has already condemned, forbidding those guilty of it even to pick up the holy book in their unclean hands. God is said to the sinner: Do not touch the book of my commandments, because you have taken my covenant on your lips, but have hated correction and cast my words behind you.

Bell Rock Lighthouse, Illustration by Miss Stevenson

Assiduous readers who do no good works are accused of their very reading, and merit a more severe condemnation because each day they scorn and despise what they have heard that day. They are like dead people, corpses without souls. The dead will not hear thousands of trumpets and horns sounding in their ears; in the same way souls dead in sin, minds that have forgotten

God’s disciples need to have firmly anchored in their souls the remembrance of their Master, Jesus Christ, and to think of him date and night. They must learn where to begin, and how and where to construct the rooms in their buildings, and how to bring those buildings to completion. Otherwise all the passers-by will mock them, as our Lord said about the man who set out to build a tower and could not finish it.

The foundation is already laid, as St Paul said: it is Jesus Christ our God. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold or silver or precious stones, or with wood or straw or stubble, his work will be brought to light, because fire will reveal it and test the quality of each one’s work.

Good habits and righteousness in all its beauty are what Paul compared to gold, silver, and precious stones. Faith is like gold; temperance, fasting, abstinence, and the other good works are like silver; while the precious stones are peace, hope, pure and holy thoughts, and spiritual understanding that contemplates God and the grandeur of his being, and keeps silence, trembling before the inexplicable, uncommunicable mysteries of the Godhead.


Philoxenus of Mabbug, Hom. 1: SC 44, 27-31 (from Christ our Light 2)

Passion (Palm) Sunday, Year A

Palm Sunday! What image comes into your mind of this glorious day? Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, the crowds stretch out their garments in his path and sing praises: “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Lk 19:38).

With our current international crisis, this Palm Sunday the crowds throughout the world are dispersed to their homes, and our hearts are heavy. Who could have foreseen this unique Holy Week on Palm Sunday in 2013, when Pope Francis, fresh from his election, spoke at World Youth Day. May his words bring us comfort and trust in the Lord's loving mercy and may we soon be gathered together as one to praise Christ:

Crowds, celebrating, praise, blessing, peace: joy fills the air. Jesus has awakened great hopes, especially in the hearts of the simple, the humble, the poor, the forgotten, those who do not matter in the eyes of the world. He understands human sufferings, he has shown the face of God’s mercy, and he has bent down to heal body and soul.

Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, Hippolyte Flandrin (c. 1842)

This is Jesus. This is his heart which looks to all of us, to our sicknesses, to our sins. The love of Jesus is great. And thus he enters Jerusalem, with this love, and looks at us. It is a beautiful scene, full of light – the light of the love of Jesus, the love of his heart – of joy, of celebration.

At the beginning of Mass, we too repeated it. We waved our palms, our olive branches. We too welcomed Jesus; we too expressed our joy at accompanying him, at knowing him to be close, present in us and among us as a friend, a brother, and also as a King: that is, a shining beacon for our lives. Jesus is God, but he lowered himself to walk with us. He is our friend, our brother. He illumines our path here. And in this way we have welcomed him today. And here the first word that I wish to say to you: joy! Do not be men and women of sadness: a Christian can never be sad! Never give way to discouragement! Ours is not a joy born of having many possessions, but from having encountered a Person: Jesus, in our midst; it is born from knowing that with him we are never alone, even at difficult moments, even when our life’s journey comes up against problems and obstacles that seem insurmountable, and there are so many of them!

Solemnity of St. Scholastica

On our patronal feast of St. Scholastica, we wish all our friends every blessing!

Those who gaze upon the infinite beauty of God never cease to find in that vision new and amazing depths, surpassing all the mind had previously comprehended. They are filled with wonder at this continual revelation, but at the same time always long to see more, knowing that any fresh vision is certain to be more splendid, more divine, than what they have already seen. The bride in the Song of Songs is in constant wonder and amazement at what she is beginning to see, yet never stops longing to see more. Listening in silence she hears the voice of the Word re-echo: Open to me, my sister, my companion, dove, my perfect one. Reflection will teach you the meaning of these words.

From a homily on the Song of Songs by St. Gregory of Nyssa

Probably 1470-80, from the Leisborn Altarpiece

February 2, Presentation of the Lord in the Temple

As February 2 falls on Sunday this year, we celebrate the feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the temple. "When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses" the Gospel says (Luke 2:22-40), Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord as it is written in the Law of the Lord. An devout old man, Simeon, takes Jesus in his arms. Origen says about this scene:

Simeon in the Temple, Rembrandt  (1669)

... He came there under the prompting of the Spirit of God, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. If you too wish to embrace Jesus and enfold him in your arms, strive with all your might to follow the guidance of the Spirit and come to God’s temple. Now, at this moment, you are standing in the temple of the Lord Jesus, which is his Church, the temple built of living stones. When your life and conduct are really worthy of the name of Church, you are standing in the Lord’s temple. 

If, led by the Spirit, you come to the temple, you will find the child Jesus, you will lift him up in your arms and say: “Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace as you promised.” Notice at once that peace is joined to death and dismissal, for Simeon does not say only that he wishes to go, but adds that he wished to go in peace. This is the same promise as was made to blessed Abraham: “You shall go to your ancestors in peace when you have reached a ripe old age.” Who dies in peace? Only the person who has the peace of God which passes all understanding, and which guards the heart of its possessor. Who depart from this world in peace? Only the person who understands that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, and who, being in no way at enmity with God or opposed to him, has acquired and concord through good works, and so is allowed like Abraham to go in peace and join the holy patriarchs.

Feast of the Baptism

Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light. Christ is baptized; let us also go down with him, and rise with him.

Today let us do honor to Christ’s baptism and celebrate this feast in holiness. Be cleansed entirely and continue to be cleansed. Nothing gives such pleasure to God as the conversion and salvation of men, for whom his every word and every revelation exist. He wants you to become a living force for all mankind, lights shining in the world. You are to be radiant lights as you stand beside Christ, the great light, bathed in the glory of him who is the light of heaven. You are to enjoy more and more the pure and dazzling light of the Trinity, as now you have received—though not in its fullness—a ray of its splendor, proceeding from the one God, in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.

From a Sermon by Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop (330-389 AD)