Great crowds accompanied Jesus on his way and he turned and spoke to them. “If anyone comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:1-2). The size of the crowd did not impress Jesus. He could read their minds and intentions. Some…
Category: Spirituality
Seeing what lies near our doorsteps
Henri Nouwen once suggested that if you want to understand the tragedy of the Second World War, you can read a hundred history books about it and watch a thousand hours of video documentaries on it, or you can read the Diary of Anne Frank. In that single memoir of a young girl imprisoned and…
Humility is down-to-earth honesty
The Sunday Gospel On a sabbath day Jesus was invited for a meal to the house of a leading Pharisee (Luke 14:1). No table was considered blessed unless a scholar sat at it. The body will savour the delights of victual and vine all the more if the meal is salted with lively table-talk. In Luke’s…
One God, one guidance system, and one road for us all
At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. This has many implications. It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummeting radically everywhere in the secular world. Those who are opting out don’t all look the…
Get your focus right…
The Sunday Gospel Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. Last Sunday, we heard him say that he had come to bring fire to the earth and that he would have to plunge into the sea of suffering, a prospect that caused him great distress. Somebody came up to him and asked, “Sir, will there…
Making a recessive journey
In a particularly poignant passage in her poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver pictures herself standing at the gravesite of her mother and father, reflecting on their lives. They were far from perfect and she doesn’t sugarcoat their faults. She openly names her mother’s heaviness of soul and her father’s immature faith. She…
Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus
The Sunday Gospel My inspiration this week takes the Second Reading (Hebrews 12:1-4) as a lead in to the Gospel of the day (Luke 12: 49-53). “Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection.” I have often taken this sentence as the theme of…
Disarmed and dangerous
After his first arrest, the peace activist Daniel Berrigan went into hiding. After four months, he was captured, but during those months underground, although a threat to no one, he was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. There’s an irony here that did not go unnoticed. Someone put up a poster of him…
Faith in light and darkness
The Sunday Gospel “Character, like a photograph, is developed in darkness.” So said Yousuf Karsh, the great portrait photographer, who had extraordinary ability in balancing light and darkness to portray not only the outer visage but also the inner character of his subject. All three readings on this Sunday touch on the theme of faith…
Why is there something instead of nothing?
The Belgian theologian Jan Walgrave, who directed my doctoral thesis, was a true intellectual and a rare one. True, in that his thought naturally, instinctually gravitated towards the huge philosophical questions of essence and existence. Why are we here? Who are we really? Moreover, he was also a rare intellectual in that he was an uncommon…