There are many ways to speak of the Holy Spirit: the spirit of wisdom, the spirit of truth, the spirit of understanding. All these tend to position the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son. After all, that is what the Trinity expresses – three “persons” in one God. This idea of “personification” was very […]
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With the Feast of Pentecost we come to the end of our Easter season. As we noted last week, Luke is the only gospel writer who organizes his material to give us accounts of the Ascension and Pentecost in that discrete form. These are wonderful and powerful ways of describing how the disciples felt during
All the Gospels agree in broad terms about the death and resurrection of Jesus. However the picture after the resurrection is less clear. There are big variations between accounts in how long Jesus remained visible to the disciples, where they went, and what they did. Only Luke has the stories of the Ascension and Pentecost
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Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. This Feast lies at the transition from our Christmas season, focused on the Nativity, to the rest of our Liturgical year, based around the adult life of Jesus. The baptism of Jesus obviously links to the grown man – it occurs as Jesus is about
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Last week we had something of a preview of this, our last Feast of the year, the Feast of Christ the King. Our first reading today is the passage from the book of Daniel (Dn 7:13-14) which links to the gospel of last week in which Jesus talks about himself as that powerful figure arriving
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It’s the last day of the year – the Church’s year that is. Next week we start Advent, the build up to Christmas, a new cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. The fact the Church calendar is so out of sync with the rest of our life / world always causes a bit of
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This week we celebrate the feast of All Saints. This is a special feast in two ways. First, it is sufficiently important that it outranks Sunday. Most feast-days if they fall on a Sunday get pushed aside. The general principle is that Sunday celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus and only the most important
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In the readings for today’s feast commemorating Saint Augustine, or San Agustin if you prefer the Spanish, there are two discussions about wisdom – which appear, at first, to point in different directions. First there is Paul saying human wisdom is foolish, while Jesus commends the “wise” virgins for their preparedness, a very human form
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