Lord, restore our hunger; revive our appetites that have gorged on the fake bread of disobedience, so that our hearts, like David’s, might sing to you with the new conviviality of the Bread of Life. Matthew 12: 1-8 shows us a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees who spot the disciples plucking and eating ears [...]
Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. We must depend utterly on Him in the process of putting to death our every act of self-seeking, which is always an act of self-exaltation. Matthew 23: 8-12 again presents us with a set of aphorisms of the Lord. You are not to [...]
Happily, our lives are a journey, not a fine art. In knowledge of God and knowledge of self, coupled with detachment, the seed of His word might produce more fruit in us yet. Matthew 13: 18-23 tells us how Jesus understands His own parable of the sower who went to sow his seed. Yet even [...]
At the root of our personal vocations and the paths we take in our lives is this wider command, the universal call to holiness, to be conformed to the image of Christ, as adopted children of the Father so that He find in us the image of His son. Matthew 9:32-37 sees Jesus cure a [...]
Awe reminds us that religion is itself a virtue, a part of justice, and it is especially owed to God and His great works. Yet awe is also connected to respect for the mystery of any other person—be they divine or human. Luke 1: 57-66, 80 sees the birth of St John the Baptist. Like [...]
Some people want to make religion only a matter of the heart, and our spiritual activities an endless hamster wheel of devotions or noisy pedagogies. Yet, in truth, to come close to the Lord is to become still, to be filled with His silence and His love, so that His light might shine in our [...]
When we are made like Him through His grace, His sacraments, through prayer where we commune with Our Saviour, then, the call to be perfect as our heavenly Father is not so much an impossible and absurd imposition but an urging to follow the path with Christ, even to Calvary, even to the Cross, so [...]
We do not see or know ourselves as idolators, but that is because we do not know ourselves well enough, or see how we honour our wayward needs, pamper our desires, sacrifice important things on the bonfire of our own vanities, or place ourselves unconsciously ahead of God and neighbour. Mark 12: 28-34 marks a [...]
Politics and even the goods of society do not complete us; even the wonders of a harmonious community do not define us. Deep down, we are called to something greater and more sublime for we have here no abiding city. Mark 12: 13-17 contains two stories in one: the story of how Jesus’ enemies tried [...]
Having severed himself from God, man was not empowered but disempowered, not expanded but crushed, not liberated but enslaved. What was needed at that point was not only a Saviour who could repair what no human could fix, but also a teacher who could enter into the inner darkness and chaos in the human soul [...]
We need to pursue with dogged fidelity the same reality again and again, going deeper every time, the repetition being the honour human weakness pays to the imitation of the inimitable one: Jesus, in whose image we are remade by grace that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in [...]
John 17: 1-11 is one of the most mysterious, one of the most dazzling, passages in all of the New Testament. In it, we enter into the Sacred Heart, as into some vast cathedral where the soaring vaults carry both the thunder of the organ and the whisper of many prayers. It is hard to [...]
What can our poor prayers—so broken like ourselves—do for if not echo constantly the very petition Jesus has made known to us? Nothing else will matter in eternity. John 17: 20-26 continues the priestly prayer of Jesus that we have been listening to throughout the week. Again, we hear its simple but sublime themes rehearsed: [...]
Listening is of the essence of obedience, the obedience of the Son to the Father and of the disciple to the Son. This is the first condition of joy: that it begins in an open obedience, an obedient openness to the Eternal Word, spoken in the communion of God’s love and shared with us through [...]