Here it is, the second week of Easter. The ice on the lake in my neighborhood is gradually receding. The grass is a slightly greenish shade of brown, and the geese are arriving, and I’m thinking about the proclamation of the word in the liturgy.
Archive for category Lectionary / Liturgy of Word
All readers of this blog are grateful to Father Joncas for his series on re-reading of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [SC]. But do these same readers (especially the ‘lurkers’) think that his questions about §24 were answered? They are found in his initial entry, in his seventh comment, in his twenty-fourth comment, and in [...]
What sets apart the Visitation from any other visit from one pregnant woman to another? Prophetic recognition.
Hear, O Israel!
Nov 1
Deuteronomy 6:4-6 is the first part of the Shema Yisra’el, the text that has formed the centerpiece of Jewish daily prayer in the evening and morning from the time of Jesus until today. The first commandment he gives in this week’s gospel, therefore, was as familiar and everyday and fundamental to his audience as the Lord’s Prayer is for Christians today.
I get a lot of my theological energy from dabbling in things that, on the face of it, are not theology. Fantasy is one of those things, and always has been — you might almost say that the first theological work I read, or perhaps the first work I read theologically, was the Lord of the Rings. There are works of fantasy I go to when I think my theological imagination is exhausted, and I find it again there. These are books that are not really about magic, but about mystery: about what draws us on, inward into ourselves and outward into the world in spite of our fear of what we might find in either place.
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, says in §11: “But in order that the liturgy may be able to produce its full effects, it is necessary that the faithful come to it with proper dispositions, that their minds should be attuned to their voices, and that they should cooperate with divine grace lest [...]
This morning’s use of the Canticle of Wisdom as the reading for morning prayer in Give Us This Day (alas not used in the Lectionary) put me in mind of its significance as one of the default communion psalms and canticles.
The U.S. bishops have announced a plan to revise the New Testament of the New American Bible so a single version can be used for individual prayer, catechesis and liturgy.
As mentioned previously, I hope that some preachers will take up the challenge of preaching on Ephesians this coming summer. This means that they will need to study Ephesians 5:21–33 not only in itself but also in its liturgical context. Because of the liturgical context, some preachers might choose to avail themselves of the short [...]
In the summer of 1970 (July 26th to be exact, the 17th Sunday of the Year B according to the new calendar) my pastor breathed a sigh of relief when he came across Saint John’s version of the feeding of the 5000. The western church had been reading the Gospel of Mark for the first [...]