Gospel hymn for Christ the King Sunday 1 Rise up, ye saints of God! Have done with lesser things, give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of kings. 2 Rise up, ye saints of God! His kingdom tarries long: bring in the day of brotherhood and end the night of wrong. 3 Lift high the cross of Christ!  Tread where his feet have trod; and quickened by the Spirit's power, rise up, ye saints of God! I bid you stand for the gospel from Matthew. We stand in awe, because Jesus comes personally present in the reading and hearing of his holy Gospel. Matthew 25:31-46 His kingdom tarries long, but Jesus said, "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, with the holy angels, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.  Then the king will say to those at his right hand...

In what seems to be opening for me an odd and unexplored bit of life, maybe the best I can do is step back, shut up, quit thinking, get out of myself, watch and wait for whatever comes next. Comes to mind the springtime every year when I was inside, a scruffy boy of five or six or eight, maybe nine, with uncombed black hair and an unwashed face, standing in the kitchen looking out the screen door at the grass in the back yard sloping up to the dense woods beyond, asking mama if I can go barefoot now. Sometimes begging. The day she finally said yes, I didn't wear shoes again until school started in the Fall. The years before the rest of my life. Maybe I'll go back there. Here, scroll down, is far better than anything I can think or say or do right now. If you aren't reading Father Richard, you might try it. He takes the sharp edge off of every morning. T+ Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation From the Center for Action and Contemplation   Week Forty-seven   Thomas Merton: Cont...

During my Fall 1962 semester of MBA studies at the University of Michigan, I took a course in international business and economics, and I recall the professor's first recommendation to the class, that we immediately and permanently subscribe to what he called The London Economist and described as the world's most competent publication on economics, business, politics, and related social issues. The masthead of The Economist reading  "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress".  The professor's recommendation was wise, although in that period of my lifetime from mid-twenties to mid-eighties, I have found ignorance, especially on the political scene, seldom timid, seldom timid indeed; in fact, almost always arrogantly outspoken. An observation that has been in my mind as I try to understand whether the insanity consuming the nation is being advanced as a political ruse, which I pray...

F rom outside the US come several newspapers I enjoy receiving online, including four or five from the Middle East, with varying takes on situations and politics. One is The Times of Israel, which I like partly because I am pro Israel in so many things and so many ways; to some extent, though I am not a Jew, just as I am pro America notwithstanding many troubling things about us.  So anyway, being as I'm no longer posting my daily blog, from time to time I may copy and paste something someone else wrote that especially catches my eye, mind, heart. Arnold Eisen's blogpost for The Times of Israel does that. One reason it so caught my fancy is that I also like to play, in Bible study, on the Genesis account of the impossible conception and birth of Abraham's son Yitzhak, the Oaks of Mamre exchange between Sarah and God, when  God gets the best of Sarah, but Sarah has the last laugh, Isaac himself.  Top photo from 7H looking west beyond Magnolia Beach and Thomas Drive sk...

Recently, some weeks ago, after ten years of looking forward to the daily mental exercise of getting up in the morning and writing a +Time blogpost, sometimes sensible, other times sheer nonsense, but always mentally engaging, sometimes challenging, calling up memories, I realized that I was suddenly dreading it. That it had become a chore because, important to me as a human being and a priest and a friend, it was turning into a source of confrontation and stirring up differences with people I loved and respected. Irreconcilable differences in social and political views that are inseparable from my religious, status confessionis convictions of what it means to be a Christian. Distressed and somewhat stressed, I suspended writing it for a while, then resumed but in a different way to use it as an already established vehicle for staying in touch with my adult Sunday school class.  That has not worked out entirely satisfactory or satisfying. But lots of things are less ...