Friar Daily Reflection
Evangelization
Today is the Feast of St. Luke, the Evangelist. Today’s Gospel is taken from the Gospel that Luke wrote. He not only wrote the Gospel that bears his name but also the Acts of the Apostles. His Gospel is the story of Jesus and Acts describes how the story of Jesus...
Holiness: The Reason for the Custom
The Old Testament is full of rules and regulations. All those rules were meant to maintain Israel as a chosen people with a shining holiness, a special relationship with God. Their holiness was not just for their own personal good, but it was also supposed to attract...
The Obedience of Faith
Today’s first reading is from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, one of the most challenging and complex of all the New Testament books. The reading is from the opening of Romans and contains what is the most interesting of phrases: “obedience of faith.” How are we to...
The Heart: Law or Mercy
An expert in religious law asks Jesus a question: how to get into heaven? Jesus does not answer the question but has the expert answer his own question. His answer is: love God and love your neighbor. Jesus says that is a perfect answer. If he had been in school, he...
Nagging Prayer
In today’s Gospel Jesus continues his teaching on prayer. In yesterday’s Gospel Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them how to pray after Jesus himself had just finished praying. He taught them the words to the “Our Father” although the version in Luke (11:2-4) is...
Justice and Mercy
The book of Jonah is not history, nor is it a fish tale. The prophetic book is best viewed as a parable. It is a story of God’s justice but even more of God’s mercy. As we hear in today’s first reading, what “greatly displeased Jonah” was that God was showing this...
Martha and Mary: Re-Centering Our Lives in a Radical Way
Jesus’ visit to Martha and Mary’s home is a well know story. But we tend to oversimplify the encounter and lose the importance of what really happened that day. This is not a story about choosing an active life or ministry or a life of contemplation and prayer. Those...
Tarshish and Vegas
Today’s first reading is from the Book of Jonah, one of my favorites. It is about our calling, our mission in life, our choices, and the unintended consequences for others. The Lord called Jonah to go to preach repentance to the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh, the...
We have so much…
When I was a year or two short of being a full-fledged teenager, I was invited to attend my first funeral. It was not a Catholic funeral – and as I came to know – nothing like a Catholic funeral. It was a fundamentalist, born-again, raucous affair for a person who by...
Being Sent – Living on the Road
Jesus sends out teams of two who have the mission to prepare the towns for his visit - 36 teams. This is also our mission in life: to prepare those around us for an encounter with Jesus. The mission is very specific and well defined. When I went to Peru on mission, I...