Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Imagine you are sitting in your pew, Mass is going along as usual, and at the moment of the homily I announce we have a special guest homilist today, fresh from retreat in the desert, wearing a camel hair outfit and bringing with him a favorite delicacy, locusts and honey, to share w ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Readings from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah are familiar companions on our Advent and Christmas journey, made even more famous by their inclusion in Handel’s great musical epic Messiah, first performed in Dublin in 1742. As we approach the Advent season a portion of this Scripture ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Today our liturgical year concludes and we celebrate the great feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Ruler of the Universe. In today’s Gospel we find our King on an unlikely throne, the cross at Calvary. While it seems unlikely to our human thinking, it is a most fitting throne for the K ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel could easily describe our present day situation. Nations continue to rise against nations, families continue to rise against families. Our increasingly interconnected world is significantly divided on many crucial issues pertaining to the survival o ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In today’s Gospel Jesus tangles with the Sadducees, another group like the Pharisees who see Jesus as a threat to their comfortable status quo and hope to entrap him with a ridiculous hypothetical question. Jesus easily defangs them with a moment central to the Jewish faith the ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
I have a fondness for the main character in today’s Gospel reading. Zacchaeus is curious about Jesus, and he does not let anything stand in his way, not his stature, not the crowds, not his somewhat scorned social status as a tax collector working for the Roman occupiers. Unable to ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
This week’s Gospel builds on the call to persistent prayer that we heard last week. This week Jesus addresses who can pray, and how we should pray. The parable exaggerates the self-righteous attitude of the Pharisee, or perhaps simply puts into a verbal prayer the ideas that the ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
It is easy to admire the widow in the Gospel today. She fearlessly and persistently pursues justice when all sides seem against her. She is petitioning a corrupt judge….Now that is a novel and interesting concept. Obviously, it could never happen in our day that we would have a cor ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In his letter to Timothy St. Paul says something I think is crucial to our understanding of, not only this Sunday’s Gospel reading, but what Sacred Scripture is fundamentally trying to teach us - “God’s word is not chained.” (2 Tim: 9) Indeed, God and God’s word are not c ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In the Gospel today Jesus demonstrates how fully He understands humanity. He acknowledges the disciples’ earnest desire to grow their faith with an example of the great feats even a small amount of faith can accomplish, and then immediately tells a parable in which the servant rece ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In an address to the United Nations on September 25, 2020, our Holy Father, Pope Francis, wrote, “We are faced, then, with a choice between two possible paths. One path leads to the consolidation of multilateralism as the expression of a renewed sense of global co-responsibility, a ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In the Gospel today Jesus cautions that we cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve God and serve mammon. We typically define “mammon” as the accumulation of wealth or riches, which makes sense in the context of this Gospel story, but really mammon could be anything that sep ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
In the Gospel today Jesus’s parables give us insight into the nature of our loving God. One aspect of God’s nature is the relentless manner in which He loves humanity. Human nature being as it is, it would be understandable for God to throw up His hands sometimes and leave us t ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Jesus has strong words in today’s Gospel about what will be required of His disciples. Long before He Himself dies on the cross, He tells His followers that they too must pick up their crosses, symbols of agony, oppression and humiliation, to truly follow Him. This can hardly seem li ...
Dear Friend of Carmel Mission,
Today’s Gospel begins with a well-known parable in which Jesus advises the wedding guest to downplay their own importance so that the host has the opportunity to elevate them. He cautions them against putting themselves in the awkward and possibly humiliating position of being as ...
