Author Archives: pat

Blessings to Start the New Year

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The Blessing of creation--God's Primary Revelation

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the Israelites: You shall say to them,

The LORD bless you and keep you;

the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;

the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them. (Numbers 6)

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May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand. Continue reading →

Breath of the Living God

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Let There Be Light

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1)

Mark begins his Gospel with the baptism of Jesus. The opening sentence is high treason—this is the Good News of Jesus the Christ not the “good news” of the divine emperor Caesar. Matthew and Luke fabricate infancy narratives to show how the Christ fulfills the expectation of the Hebrew Scriptures. John goes back beyond the birth of the Christ to show that the Christ was preexistent with the Living One from before the dawn of creation. Continue reading →

Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row

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Jesus in the Bread Lines, Fritz Eichenberg, 1950

This is the way we may know that we are in union with him:
whoever claims to abide in him ought to walk just as [Jesus] walked.

Whoever says he is in the light,
yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness.
Whoever loves his brother remains in the light,
and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.
Whoever hates his brother is in darkness;
he walks in darkness
and does not know where he is going
because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John)

The author of 1 John cuts to the chase. If we claim to live in Christ, we ought to walk as he walked. It all comes down to how we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ. It really is about how we treat the least among us. Continue reading →

God’s Grandeur, Deep Down Freshness

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Frosted Spider Web

Everything that God made is good. And as one medieval mystic liked to say, Every created thing is a Word of God. To those who can see, every created thing, living or inanimate, speaks of God and the Creator. Few poets have expressed this as well as the English Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” and “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. (http://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/C1227R/)

John’s Gospel does not contain an infancy narrative. Rather, John the Mystic wants to place the Christ as pre-existent “in the beginning” and dancing the dance of life as creation flares forth from the Living One. The Christ is God made flesh and incarnate among us. The Cosmic Christ lives in us and in the Cosmos as the Life Force, the Energy which propels life toward the Omega Point which is Christ in his fullness.

The Christ is not up there and out there because up there and out here no longer makes sense in a universe of billions of galaxies. Just recently NASA scientists discovered earth-liker planets beyond our galaxy. Galileo lives! Continue reading →

ChristPower, ChristLife, ChristLove, ChristLight–A Christmas Reflection.

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ChristLight

I started reading Bishop Spong when I too could no longer conceive of God as a being up there and out there who occasionally dabbled in human events. ChristPower is a collection of poems based on his sermons. One sermon is his traditional Christmas sermon. What follows is my understanding of ChristPower—Christ incarnate among us and in the cosmos today.

ChristPower, ChristLife, ChristLove, ChristLight—
Meager attempts to describe the indescribable—
The Living God defies all description and definition.
Yet, ChristPower, ChristLife, ChristLove, ChristLight
Is the driving energy pulse of the cosmos
As the Living One flares forth in the stardust
That evolved over time into conscious life. Continue reading →

Song of Songs – Passionate Love

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My Lover Is Leaping and Bounding over Mountains

 

 

 

 

 

 

Song of Songs 2

8 Listen! My beloved!

   Look! Here he comes,

leaping across the mountains,

   bounding over the hills.

9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

   Look! There he stands behind our wall,

gazing through the windows,

   peering through the lattice.

10 My beloved spoke and said to me,

   “Arise, my darling,

   my beautiful one, come with me.

11 See! The winter is past;

   the rains are over and gone.

12 Flowers appear on the earth;

   the season of singing has come,

the cooing of doves

   is heard in our land.

13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;

   the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.

He is mine; I am his.

he browses among the lilies. Continue reading →

Light Amid Darkness

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Morning Light

Winter Solstice

All of us greet you in the spirit of this blest Solstice season that invites us to see in the dark, to sing in the night, songs to enlighten us on our way.

May we learn the wisdom of this time, of letting go, of drawing in, of making room for the future to be born and borne anew; of looking deeply into the winter skies – star-studded and aflame – to see the stuff of our own incarnation, and remember we are made of Light. (Sr. Kathleen Deignan and Schola Ministries)

We are stardust. We are light. Continue reading →

Peace, Justice, Shalom, and PTSD

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Dew Fell like Gentle Rain

I am the LORD, there is no other;
I form the light, and create the darkness,
I make well-being and create woe;
I, the LORD, do all these things.
Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above,
like gentle rain let the skies drop it down.
Let the earth open and salvation bud forth;
let justice also spring up!
I, the LORD, have created this. (Is. 45)

The Irish Jesuits have web sites called Sacred Space (http://www.sacredspace.ie/) and Living Space (http://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/). Living Space is a repository of commentaries on the daily scripture readings from the Catholic lectionary. In my opinion, these commentaries have much more substance than many of the sites we encounter when we want to pray the daily scriptures. Continue reading →

Greedy Banksters

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Another Glorious Mountain Sunset

Isaiah wrote: “For I the LORD love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing;” Isaiah also promises that the captives and oppressed will be set free. Most of all, Isaiah proclaims a year of jubilee debt relief where all things will be restored to their rightful owners. This latter promise is often overlooked by capitalists, even capitalists who proclaim to be Christians. These promises do, however, comprise Jesus’ inaugural address and we need to ponder them seriously.

Justice is about right order and God has a thing about justice and right order. In the scriptures the Living God and Jesus constantly talk about restoring justice. It is the primal Gospel value.

We live in troubled times. Banks have failed. Nations are on the brink of bankruptcy. Justice is nowhere to be found. Continue reading →