The Gospel reading for the Memorial of the Guardian Angels is one that is familiar to all of us, but also one of the most misunderstood passages of the Christian Scriptures:
Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one...
In the Gospel of Luke, at the end of chapter nine, we read: "When the days for Jesus to be taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem, and he sent messengers ahead of him." (Luke 9:51)
The statement is not highlighted and can actually be missed unless our attention to detail is particularly well developed. Truth be told, the rest of St. Luke's Gospel...
The character of Job figures prominently in the coming week. Reading his responses to the “friends” who come to visit him places us squarely in the middle of a problem that every child of Israel had to confront; namely, borrowing the words of Rabbi Harold Kushner, how do we explain when bad things happen to good people. Rabbi Kushner wrote about the experience from the...
Most of us would recognize the words of St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians 2:9. "Eye has not seen and ear has not heard. . ." Despite this rather definitive response to human inquisitiveness, most of us persist in trying to imagine what heaven might be like. Our preoccupation with or our concern about heaven is quite normal. It has been going on ever since the human family...
Psalm 119 is by far the longest psalm in the Book of Psalms. It is divided into twenty-two stanzas of eight lines, one stanza for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with each of the eight verses in that stanza beginning with that respective letter.
The psalm forms a lengthy meditation on the Law. In praying this psalm, it is important that we remember that for the Hebrew people the...