Category: Ars Praedicandi

Thomas’ willingness to touch the wounds, to get up close and personal with pain, even crucifixion, prompts us to do the same. Our families, our neighbors, the stranger, the marginalized are skin-hungry for the compassionate Christ.

Resurrection is the finish line we all hope to cross. Easter is the sometimes slow, often difficult path for getting there.

Today this community and the universal church holds you up as the light of the world. What the ancients called the photozomenoi – people destined for light – supporting you with our own commitment to combat evil and spread peace. You are the flame of this living paschal candle and the church is the wax, feeding and nourishing and supporting you.

Luke’s shaping of Jesus’ teaching into an instruction manual for would-be disciples reminds us that announcing God’s reign is also a battle quite often with ourselves – a battle to model in our own living the discipleship that our baptism expects us to hand on to others.

Beauty may seem a fragile, even futile weapon against brutalization and violence, but it was the terrible beauty of the only-begotten in his unforgettable embrace of enemies on Golgatha that defeated death and brought life to the world.

Sometimes we have spiritual ear blockage, an inability to hear God speaking through unfamiliar, sometimes accented voices that sound an internal alarm about some potential enemy rather than another child of God.

This silent night could be no more than a quaint moment in which we offer congratulations to a young homeless couple occupying a handsome crèche with only one child and no Misha, and no other orphans to be seen. Or it can be a vocational plunge that commits us to allow the child to be born in us again.

From deep want, experiences of abundance. From profound sorry, the potential for delight. From isolating loneliness, the emergence of community. From impenetrable darkness, the promise of an eternal dawn.

by Fr. Edward Foley, Capuchin Eugene Lowry is a favorite homilist, especially celebrated for his somewhat subversive approach to preaching. [1] Lowry has argued that