The Scriptural Deacon

Here is my homily from this past Sunday in the Roman Church: The Readings from this Sunday, all in their own way, call us to reflect upon our lives as faithful sons or daughters of the Living God. This requires us from time to time to ask the question, “how are we doing in this task?” If we are falling short, what is the problem? What is stopping us from fully following Jesus on his way and answering his call? Is it spiritual blindness? Is it the love of worldly power or possessions? Are we just simply lazy? And there are many people like this, those who claim to be so “busy” but completely lax in their spiritual lives. Or are we just weak in our faith? Do we often stifle the Spirit that God himself put into each one of us at our baptism? Does our faith become like a fire that one tries to cover to put out instead of letting it burn? Remember what Jesus tells us, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14) These questions must make us ask ...

This is my second post about a trip my wife and I took to Spain for the occasion of a wedding. The last post was about our taxi ride when we got there, so here it what happened next. Being that one usually arrives in Europe in the morning when traveling from the US, Joanne and I decided to take a walk through a very large park in the heart of Madrid. It is called, “Parque del Buen Retiro” or “The Buen Retiro Park”. It is a little less the half the size of Central Park in NY, but still well worth checking out. Among the many things that we saw two things jumped out at me to think about further. Here is the first one, with the next one to follow in my next post. Hopefully sooner than this one. First, was our walk through the “Palacio de Cristal” or as we would say, “The Crystal Palace”. From the outside it’s a beautiful structure. That has a large pond in the front of it, that sort of acts as a reflecting pool.  But once inside this all changed. I found o...