“Hitting rock bottom”—a phrase familiar to those who have emerged fruitfully from serious addictions—can also describe a decisive moment in our spiritual lives and in our struggle against the compulsions of sin. The Lord, speaking through Jeremiah, portrays this moment starkly: your wound is incurable, your bruise grievous, and there is no remedy for your […]

Saint Paul in writing to Saint Timothy reassures him that although we are unfaithful, God remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.  Paraphrasing these consoling words, we might say that although we may give up on ourselves, God never gives up on us. Accordingly, like the potter, who tries again and again when the object […]

The spiritual quest for wholeness and integration—also known as holiness—seems inevitably to be preceded by an experience of disintegration and fragmentation. For, just as the walls of Jerusalem, whose rebuilding Pope Leo invokes as an image of our cooperative labor in a fractured world, first had to be breached and demolished—so too must our own […]

As Christians we are so familiar with the notion of seeking God and so we might miss the nuance in this morning’s response to the psalm in which we are exhorted to seek always the face of the Lord. And yet, to seek the Lord and to seek the face of the Lord, are not […]

Reassuring us of God’s constant care, Jesus insisted that not one sparrow falls to the ground without our Father’s knowledge. He then added those consoling words: Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. In today’s gospel, it would seem that the liberation of two demoniacs was worth more than an entire […]

Lord, if you wish you can make me clean. In that simple plea, the leper in today’s Gospel makes a twofold act of faith. First, he truly believes that Jesus has the power to heal him. Second, he trusts in Christ’s intrinsic goodness—his desire to relieve suffering and restore what is broken. There is also, […]

Living, as we do, in an age of religious pluralism, the problem that occupied the prophet Elijah may seem irrelevant to many in our own time and culture. For some, it appears far more important that the people of Israel believed in a god than whether the God they worshipped was the Lord of Israel […]

In urging Timothy to stir into flame the gift of God that you have, Saint Paul touches on the mysterious interplay between God’s grace and our response and cooperation with that grace. Grace is not like some medication that once taken unfailingly accomplishes its healing work without our even being aware of it or needing […]

The disciples James and John reveal a heart still unpurified by obedience to the truth. In their presumptuous quest for glory—seeking seats at the right and left of the glorified Christ—they look outside themselves for a greatness that already dwells, unrecognized, within. The First Letter of Peter reminds us that purification through obedience to the […]

Most of us, I would imagine, have either asked others for prayers or promised our own. In the latter case, we sometimes forget that promise, and so the surgery of a friend we committed to pray for has already taken place by the time we remember—leaving us praying after the event. Although this may feel […]