The first reading we heard this morning was from Deuteronomy. It’s one of my favorite books from the original testament, but it can be a little hard to understand. Moses is talking to the people who followed him out of Egypt, escaping slavery and the power of Pharaoh. They’ve been wandering for a while, and…
He told me, “I have built a life that is perfectly balanced. I’m like a trained seal. I’m standing on a rubber ball, with a tray on my flipper, stacked with porcelain plates and cups. If I make a move in any direction, it’ll all come tumbling down.” * * * My family moved to…
Regardless of how historic this past year has been, I didn’t keep a quarantine journal. What would have been the point? Every day was exactly like the last one: a few thousand more Americans dead and nowhere for the living to go. While my family, and general situation, were fine, I still had lingering blue…
Note: Kristin Neubauer’s story is a work of creative nonfiction, based on the experience of Maya Husseini, Lebanon’s premiere stained glass artist. Illustration by Margaret Wohler. Tick. The second hand on Maya’s watch moves six-tenths of a millimeter to the right, the click of the cogs lost in the space of cathedral’s soaring arches. In…
Good morning to my younger friends at Emmanuel! I hope you all have had a good week. I am so happy to be with you all this morning talking about our Gospel. In our Gospel Jesus is preaching in Galilee which is near the sea. And he tells people “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom…
One night in the hospital, while recovering from my surgery, I found myself unable to remember the prayers I had known since childhood. I would start one prayer, get somewhere in the middle of the prayer, and my mind would then jump to a different section of the prayer, or to a completely different prayer,…
Maybe it’s crossed your mind that it’s a race to either the vaccine or the virus and only time will tell which one will get to us first. Of course, like you, I pray – on my hands and knees – that I get to the vaccine before the virus gets to me. We find…
NOTE: Parents, this is a homily you should definitely listen to and talk about with your young ones. It’s also longer than usual. This week we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.: a pastor and a civil rights leader who is also a saint. He is a saint because he stood up for justice and equality…
It will come as no surprise to many of you that I have been a bleeding-heart liberal from my earliest days. A teenage rebellion, I am sure against my tastefully conservative Republican mom and dad. A straight A student, I rebelled in hippy dippy ways. I skipped school to protest the Vietnam war. I served…
After being ordained as a priest for eight years, I was assigned as the Executive Director of Catholic Charities for the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia. I was in my thirties at the time and going into the new position I felt alarmingly unprepared. From the moment I received the assignment I wondered about the sanity…
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