Like the sun that God causes to rise on the good and the bad, so too good health is experienced by both the good and the bad. Similarly, sickness—sometimes believed to be a punishment for sin—is also the lot of both good and bad alike. However, although this suggests that illness and disease cannot be […]

Although Saint Mark describes Jesus as preaching and driving out demons as if these were separate and distinct functions, in many instances these are one and the same thing. For with Jesus preaching is always synonymous with the Truth and when the Truth is preached and heard, falsehood and ignorance—those hiding places of the demons—are […]

According to Jesus, doing the will of God the Father is the prerequisite for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. This entering of the kingdom can be understood in two complementary ways: The first is that heaven we presently long for and hope awaits us as the end of our long earthly pilgrimage. The second is […]

In affirming that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed to us, Paul is not trivializing our present sufferings—especially the sufferings of those who suffer much. Suffering, as we know, is one of the great challenges to faith in a loving and caring God. Certain approaches […]

Much of our growth in self-knowledge, and understanding the full extent of our estrangement from God, comes from our daily interactions with one another in the give-and-take of community life. And whereas the self-knowledge hereby acquired certainly includes positive and noble aspects of our identity, it more frequently reveals what is negative, sinful, unflattering, and […]

 A crucial aspect of our growing union with Christ is becoming aware of, and breaking, our unhealthy attachments—usually to the passing things and values of this present world. Perhaps someone may wonder if God can ever become an unhealthy attachment? The crowds, described in today’s gospel, offer a clue: We are told that they sought […]

The greater our deficits in true self-knowledge, the greater our tendency to judge and harshly condemn others. This tendency underscores the fact that true self-knowledge includes a deep awareness of our own inherent weaknesses and propensity for sin—either by offending against love of God and/or love of neighbor. Accordingly, the deeper we know ourselves, the […]

Having been born into a sinful world—and ourselves afflicted with Original Sin from our birth—we tend to simply accept much of the dysfunctionality of our world and society as “normal,” or as just the way things are. In doing so, we need to be reminded—like the Pharisees—that this was not how it was in the […]

In what is something of a paradox, our quest for inner peace and happiness is such that when it is attained—even only partially—it exposes us to spiritual danger. And this is because the peace and cessation of the struggle can induce complacency. Then by careless neglect of inner vigilance we expose ourselves to the attacks […]

Memorial of Saint Dominic: In his list of the seven principal vices, Saint Gregory the Great doesn’t list Pride. Instead, he understands pride to be the source and instigator of all the vices. This is no less true of envy and jealousy—manifested so clearly in Miriam and Aaron’s sarcastic-sounding question: “Is it through Moses alone […]