Welcome to Lent. Forty days of fasting, prayer and almsgiving that can be accomplished together in a way that is not possible outside of Lent…
3.6.22 Bulletin
First Sunday of Lent
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Welcome to Lent. Forty days of fasting, prayer and almsgiving that can be accomplished together in a way that is not possible outside of Lent…
“Repent and believe in the Gospel.” As we begin our Lenten pilgrimage, this year is marked with invasion in the Ukraine, a European war that we thought was part of black and white photos and an antiquarian fight of good against evil…
The Sermon from the Plain. Jesus fixes is eyes on his disciples and this great opening statement about the reign of God asks his disciples to draw happiness from this future event when in His mercy and love all will be made manifest. We are called be Jesus to live our faith in action.
When the Lord stepped aboard Peter’s fishing boat to hold steady before a crowd, to sit and to teach them, Jesus returned the favor by asking Peter to set out and drop nets for a catch. The love of Christ is the power of living in Him. The life of holiness could be felt by St. Peter in the first the pull of the nets. All things work to the good when unfettered from sin and death. Leaving the nets should be the first call of Christian life, specifically for the young to be supported and encouraged to consider religious life.
Word of God
Spoken first and heard last.
Unbegotten
Understood and standing stirring…
The First Miracle of Jesus is for the happiness of the human family. “You have saved the best wine until last” is the promise that betrothal to Christ in the sacramental life gives: beyond what we could plan or even desire in life, the water of our humanity has turned to wine. Let us be disposed to the Spirit, as Paul instructs us in the second reading, so that we may be ready to play our part.
Baptism of the Lord. In Luke’s Gospel God the Father speaks directly to his Son: “You are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.” Later, in the Transfiguration the Father speaks from a cloud to his disciple: “This is my beloved son, listen to him.” The love of the Father for the Son, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit swirl around the meaning of baptism: the inner working of the trinitarian godhead. It is the taking flesh, its humility, with which the Father is well pleased. It bodes well for us that we are made to receive and to be filled with God in our humanity.
Let us practice looking up into the heavens.
Geometry proposes that whether close, middle or far
all angles sigh infinite sighs. You are standing beneath
and are determined by the heaven sent that changes but does not change: light and water…
One boy’s arms full of barley loaves
became food for a multitude.
Was that sign enough?
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
you are looking for me not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled…”
Fifty years ago, the Southern poet Allen Tate remarked in an important essay on the symbolic imagination that America is as dependent on a diminished Europe as ancient Rome was on a diminished Greece…