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.