Religion and Relationship
A Reflection for the 3rd Sunday of Lent In the Gospel reading this week, the fact that Jesus is speaking to a Samaritan woman is quite radical, for Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. Pious Jews were known to take...
Tagged: love
Poor in Spirit and Pure in Heart
Note: Deacon Doug graciously shared this homily with us for February 1st. Unfortunately, due to an email glitch, the piece went unposted. However, we feel it is a valuable reflection and are sharing it now, albeit two weeks late. As...
Love That Lasts in a Distracted World
Valentine’s Day arrives each year with predictable enthusiasm. Shops turn red, restaurants fill, and love is packaged into cards, flowers, and carefully planned moments. For a brief time, it feels as though love is everywhere. Then the day passes, the...
Ten of the Best Passages From Dilexi Te
On October 4th, Pope Leo signed Dilexi Te, his first Apostolic Exhortation. The document, which was much anticipated as a window into the thoughts of our new Pontif, was released today, October 9th. As Pope Leo explains in his introduction...
Cloud of Witnesses
There is a line in the 2nd reading from Hebrews that struck me, and it is the following: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that...
Trinity: Fontalis Plenitudo
I read in a recent science magazine article that 99% of the deep ocean bed remains undiscovered. Oceans cover 71% percent of the earth’s surface and they house 99% of the earth’s biosphere. This means that many of our planet’s...
The Nobility of Matter
Homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord Recently I drove up to the cemetery to say a rosary and visit my mother’s grave site, as well as a number of other parishioners who are buried there. I...
The Order of Love and the Order of Prudence
God loves each person infinitely, without ever limiting His love for every other person. We are given the grace to love with His love, but we can never love infinitely as He does. This means that we always need to...
Gift and Response
It is estimated that there have been some million love songs recorded throughout various cultures and ages. Love as a subject of poetry and pondering never seems to lose its fascination. The desire for love, the search for love, finding...
Dilexit Nos: The Heart of God
In Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis reinforces the Church’s conviction that the central axis of the cosmos is a heart at once human and divine. This wisdom, already present in two earlier encyclicals on the Sacred Heart (Pius XI’s Miserentissimus Redemptor and Pius XII’s Haurietis...
Marriage as a Work of Beauty
I’m an amateur artist. I love color, and I’ve always appreciated talented artists and their work. Sadly, I’m not a talented artist myself, nor have I been formally trained. The reason I paint is that my spiritual director, in the...
To be poor in love is to be truly destitute
There is a saying that I often ponder: “Tell me what you love, and I will tell you who you are.” This is very close to Jesus’ statement, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6,...
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