We continue our observance of Ordinary Time this month, remembering that this time of the liturgical year presents us with opportunities to “fine tune” our response to God’s call, to sharpen our experience of being Catholic Christians in this world. On Sunday, September 7, the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, we are faced with a question from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom: “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord intends?” On September 14, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the second reading, from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, can maybe help us to know, in a small way, the mind of God. The reading tells us that God’s son, Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, gave up his life for us and therefore “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” We see that our life is to be a life of sacrifice for others, patterned after the life of our Lord. There’s more. The following week, we proclaim, in our Responsorial Psalm, that we “[p]raise the Lord who lifts up the poor” (Psalm 113). And on September 28^th, the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear the parable of the rich man and Lazarus from the Gospel of Luke. This parable can be a wake-up call for us, reminding us that it is our obligation, as Catholic Christians, to care for the poor each day. Perhaps this is what the Lord intends. You can prepare for the Sunday readings at https://liturgy.slu.edu/.

There are certain phrases that serve as a kind of shibboleth for millennials, a dog whistle that only ears formed between 1981 and 1996 can discern. “You can’t sit with us!” is one of those phrases.

It’s from the movie Mean Girls, (which, I hear from my younger family members, has now become cool with the kids again, so maybe my point about it being niche is incorrect). The character Regina George, merciless ruler of the cool kids, is rejected from the ultra-exclusive lunch table she herself formed when her minions, tired of her cruelty, serve her the most devastating words a teenager can hear in public: “You can’t sit with us.”

During my baseball career, my best coach often said, “You shouldn’t be worried if I yell at you. Be worried if I don’t. If I stop pushing you, it means I don’t think you have any more potential.” He demanded a lot, and I knew it meant he saw that I could be something special on the baseball field.

Jesus says some demanding words to us this week. “ Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth?” he asks, “No, tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51).

It’s 9:08am on a Saturday morning, and I am too darn busy for confession.

I’ve probably written before about how hard I find it to get to confession — I say ‘probably’ because I really can’t remember. I whine about it so frequently that it’s hard to tell if I’ve made it the subject of a written piece or if it is simply an oft-recited refrain from the Litany of Colleen’s Perpetual Complaints.

Mini reflection: Whatever is interrupting communication between your heart and the One who crafted it, it can be overcome. There is no door thick enough, no night dark enough, no sleep strong enough. Ask and You Shall Receive.

It’s easy to look at today’s Gospel reading and come away with a view of God as disinterested and irritated, reluctant to give us what we need unless we bang down his door, hound him to the furthest reaches of heaven, wrench him from his reverie and force him to answer just so we’ll finally go away.

Mini reflection: Are you anxious about many things? Then you need to be right where Mary is: at the feet of Jesus, with all your burdens. Martha’s Burdens

It’s time to admit it: I’ve been unfair to Mary in the past. Been a little catty about her. Oooh, Mary, she’s so holy. Well, do you like to eat, Mary? Who made your lunch? Yeah, that’s right: it was Martha. Because you know what? It’s the Marthas who get things done in the world while the Marys lounge around reading Aquinas and attending silent retreats and going to Eucharistic Adoration whenever they want.

It takes a cold, hard, godless heart to step over a wounded man on the street. But in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite didn’t step over the half-dead traveler. I think we picture them doing so, in our collective imagining of this well-known story, but the words of the Gospel are quite clear. “When he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side,” Jesus says of both.

Mini reflection: Too often, life falls short of my expectations — an opportunity didn’t work out, a day didn’t go the way I planned — so I ball up my fists and stomp my feet. And God takes the Book of the Gospels and opens it to Luke, Chapter 10. On Pilgrimage

Before I embarked on my trip to the National Eucharistic Congress last summer with a group from my archdiocese, we had an orientation meeting. At that meeting, the coordinator of the trip shared with us “The Five Rules of Pilgrimage.”

"Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer…" These hit lyrics, introduced by Nat King Cole in 1963, are not the definition of our summer liturgical experience. While we may not experience the rituals and festivities of the other seasons, Ordinary Time II offers us "the wisdom of routine", as Joan Chittister, OSB, calls the chapter on this season in her book entitled The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life. In this chapter, Sr. Joan writes that "[i]t is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person” (page 183). Ordinary Time provides us with the opportunity to extend the messages of the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter into our regular, daily life; we have the time to work out what being a Catholic Christian, a follower of Jesus, really means. This isn’t lazy, hazy or crazy at all! It’s hard work, and we can approach it knowing that we have the Holy Spirit, whose coming to us we celebrated on the feast of Pentecost, to guide and support us.

Mini Reflection: What’s so special about Pentecost that it wasn’t until this moment — and not any of the equally world-changing moments that came in the weeks before it — that the Apostles became the Church? Leaving the Room

I was a full-grown adult before I realized that Pentecost is known as “the birthday of the Church,” and it only resonated with me because someone showed up to a church function with cake and candles. Leave it to buttercream frosting to drive home a theological reality I had been missing for 25 years.

The famous 20th century St. Padre Pio said once that he would wait outside the gates of heaven until the people in his life had entered. I’m not sure that I, or frankly many people I know, would say that and mean it. Yet that is precisely the kind of attitude we see in Jesus as he prays for us in the Gospel today. Having celebrated the Ascension of the Lord just a few days ago, we now hear the Son of God at the Last Supper pray to his Father “that they may be brought to perfection as one” (John 17:23). What does this mean for us?

Mini Reflection: I think of the walls of heavenly Jerusalem, so high and so sturdy, guarded so scrupulously by God’s strongest angels. These walls are not barriers. They are shields. They are arms, encircling us, gathering us in.

My Peace I Give to You

When John has a vision of heavenly Jerusalem, he sees walls. “A massive, high wall,” to be more precise. In the modern lexicon, walls have a negative connotation; we use them as metaphors for all that is exclusionary and rigid.

Lent 2025 is now complete and we celebrate the joyful season of Easter. Alleluia! The Easter season lasts for fifty days, ending on Pentecost Sunday, June 8, 2025. The first week after Easter Sunday is called the Octave of Easter; the second Sunday of Easter is named Divine Mercy Sunday. On the Sundays of the Easter season, all of the first readings at Mass are from the Acts of the Apostles, rather than from the Old Testament, which is the usual source of the first readings on Sundays. The second readings this year are all from the Book of Revelation and the gospel readings are from the Gospel of St. John. Contemporary Catholics often find the Book of Revelation difficult to understand. You will find a brief explanation/summary of this highly symbolic book on the US Bishops’ website at https://bible.usccb.org/bible/revelation/0. For a somewhat longer and more detailed summary, you can go to the St. Mary’s Press website at https://bit.ly/SMPRevelation. The Book of Revelation reading on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, ends with the words “Come, Lord Jesus!”, words that we Catholics pray in earnest every day of the year.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Truly Risen!

Dear Friends in Christ, we have completed our 40-day journey and we find ourselves looking joyfully into an empty tomb. We began our Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday and find its fulfillment here on, Easter! Throughout our journey we challenged ourselves to search and find all the brokenness and weakness of our lives, all that would distract us from being true disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.