My mother was an accomplished lay minister, a powerful spiritual director, longtime practitioner of guided spiritual direction, a daily scripture reader, and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology when women were just breaking into that field. She would often teach in her counseling groups and during retreats, Accept No Substitutes! Her
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Uh, er, after yesterday’s deep philological dive into Easter vocabulary I appreciate the three readers willing to continue with me here….ah, em, we’ll try to not geek like that too often. And before anyone draws the direct reference of today’s reflection title with Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 Dune (and there
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Many of you have commented upon my vocabulary in these reflections, for which I thank my parents and several brutal English teachers from Saint Mary’s Episcopal Day School and Jesuit High School in Tampa. Good writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others have also colluded in my grammatical formation.
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Our liturgical worship is predicated upon a theological chronology witnessing to core elements of the life of Jesus in a calendar format. You may notice certain numbers which attract sacral attention for a multitude of reasons embedded in our church calendar. The number 1, the basic unit of Jewish time,
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Alleluia, Christ is Risen! Now we pivot from the somber Lenten season and intense Holy Week, what Egeria called the Great Week, to the Great 50 Days of Easter I will call simply Eastertide. I pray fervently that we also pivot from the darkness of COVID-19 to the dawning light
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LET US KEEP THE FEAST, ALLELUIA! Now we can, finally, share the Alleluia once again! Now those hebdomadarii can finally eat after the Great Week concludes with Sunday feasting, and so can we! For 50 days no one in Egeria’s world fasted, an astonishingly efficient way to finish the remaining
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Αλληλούια! Can you read it, the first word in this new Eastertide reflection journey?! It’s all Ελληνικά to me! How about הללויה in Hebrew, the originating language of this joyous proclamation of praise? In Latin as in English it’s the very same, “Alleluia!” From the Hebrew root, literally, Praise the
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Whew wasn’t getting here a push! 40 days (absent Sundays) from Ash Wednesday until today (Part One). Feels like 4 years in chronological time but no, 40 days, a Lenten quarantina if you recall the Venetian term. Like a new driver, or a grammatical period, or much of the world today,
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Since we will be leaving Egeria soon, I thought to provide a few interesting excerpts from her writing about Good Friday of the Great Week I could not wedge into a longer Reflection above. So, Bonus Egeria this Good Friday morning for you! From her journal…. The Bishop’s Chair is
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We have come to Good Friday. Dark is never darker than here. As an exhausted and broken Frodo Baggins says to his faithful friend Samwise Gamgee after their quest to destroy the Ring of Power is fulfilled and the world around them is being destroyed, “I am glad you are
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