Jan 9, 2021 | Bulletin Essay
When my own children were very young, a more seasoned parent told me that family photo albums (and I suppose now, Instagrams) are filled with pictures of firsts–first smile and first steps, first day of school and so on. Nobody, she said to me, pays as much attention to the lasts. And so I decided to try to capture those moments: waiting for the bus on the last day of school, sunset photos on the last day of a beach vacation, even a sweet snapshot of furry goodbye kisses before the grouchy old cat’s last trip to the vet.
But when I page through the old photo albums, there are a lot more pictures than just those firsts and lasts. There are sandbox construction sites, kite flying and bubble blowing, prom dates and school concerts, and lots and lots of cousins and friends, lined up on the front steps or squeezed around the kitchen table. There’s a lot happening in the middle, between the beginnings and endings, of our family story.
The author of the gospel of Mark seems to have taken to heart a similar understanding of beginnings and endings. Mark’s is thought to be the earliest gospel and it is the shortest, but it is far from the first draft of the good news of Jesus Christ. Mark gave us an intricately-constructed theological statement, and the gospel for the Baptism of Our Lord on January 10 shows his masterful use of beginnings and endings to draw our attention to what’s in the middle.
Jan 2, 2021 | Bulletin Essay
How unlike are the gospel of Luke and the gospel of Matthew in telling the story of Jesus’s birth! This may frustrate historians, but the different perspectives guide us toward a fuller understanding of what this good news will require of us.
The Church reads Luke’s version on Christmas: as soon as Mary gives birth and swaddles her son, angels appear, praising God and drawing the shepherds to the place he was born. The first people to hear the good news of his birth are the lowest and least among us that Jesus has come to save.
Not so in Matthew, whose gospel the Church reads on Epiphany
Dec 26, 2020 | Bulletin Essay
Since 1968, the Catholic Church has dedicated a day to prayer for world peace on January 1. Popes from Paul VI forward have marked the day with a special message. Pope Francis’s 2021 message—his eighth—is titled A Culture of Care as a Path to Peace. My first reaction on reading it was, “he’s not saying anything new.” But if that’s true, how could it be, if we have known what the Church teaches about peace for decades, even centuries, that human beings have been unable to stop killing and maiming each other, creating wastelands and refugees, in near-constant wars all over the world? How can it be that war, violence and hatred are simply facts of our lives?
Or can it be that Catholic teaching about peace is still one of the so-called ‘best-kept secrets’ of its moral teaching? Most of us know very well the sins that we are to avoid—the ‘thou shalt nots’, the seven deadly sins, the pre-eminent evils of our day. But do we know as well the good that we are to pursue, our moral obligation to seek peace? Do we know that we must actively seek peace in our personal lives and also as members of our communities and citizens of our country?
Dec 19, 2020 | Bulletin Essay
My argument with Advent this year began with a hymn that is stuck in my head:
For you O Lord, my soul in stillness waits,
Truly, my hope is in you.
—Marty Haugen, ‘My Soul in Stillness Waits’
The problem is, my soul does not wait in stillness. It is impatient and fidgety, uncertain about exactly what it’s waiting for.
Dec 12, 2020 | Bulletin Essay
Five weeks ago, late on the night of Friday, November 6, I was sitting in a chair outside the room where my wife Danielle was about to give birth to our first child. Margot Ross would be delivered via C-section—news we’d learned just hours before, after it was determined that the baby was in a breech position.
I sat in my papery blue scrubs, trying to stop my heart from racing, rehearsing what I would tell Danielle to keep her calm once I was sitting on a stool beside her, holding her hand. Other than the occasional nurse or doctor who waved to me before entering the surgery prep room, the hallway was empty, quiet, and still.
Next to my chair was a rolling bed with our hastily packed duffel bags and backpacks stuffed on the lower rack. We’d expected the early signs of labor to just be a false alarm, that the nurse would turn us on our heels and send us home—a good trial run for the real thing. But, it turned out, this was not a drill.
Dec 5, 2020 | Bulletin Essay
Advent is the season of hope and we’ve never needed hope more than we need it now. If Advent hope works for us this year, nothing could be more timely. If it doesn’t work for us, then it’s just one more disappointment in a very discouraging year.
We falsely think that hope is possible only because the future is unknown, entirely malleable, at least in our imagination. So we are free to create a future that is as bleak or as bright as possible —any way we want it. We grasp for hope in our lives by imagining a favorable future. People of a particular personality type find this difficult to do, however, because they are inveterate pessimists, always anticipating the worst, while others are natural optimists. Hope, then, seems to be not a virtue at all, but just an expression of our natural disposition. In life, optimists seem to have an easier time of it. Maybe that’s true, but true hope must be more profound than that.
