A Positively Poetic Priest

Part of the greatest joy and frustration in our lives is that certain aspects of it cannot be planned for, events never happen when you expect them. Expectations come up over and over again in the gospel story of Luke, usually with Jesus breaking other people's ideas of who he should be and what he should be doing. Indeed, listen to the stories he tells! The story in the passage for today from chapter 14, a man decides to share a great dinner with lots of people. He wants to share his abundance with others. He wants to share his joy with others, to share with them the substance of life, not only food, but community. Yet, his guests make excuses about showing up. They were not open to the unexpected in their lives and they turn down this open opportunity and invitation to participate in the man's joy. One says he has to tend to some land, another has some oxen to deal with, another has just gotten married. All important aspects of life, but all things which keep them from parti...

"Can I say that curse word now?" - Anger, Disney Pixar's Inside Out The biblical examples of anger, wrath, and ire are awe inspiring. The sheer volume of fire, famine, earth-shaking, and tempest that is attributed to God's anger is impressive. It's no wonder people are afraid of God, the ancient writers attributed a lot of disasters to God punishing the people. I say attributed, because many times God speaks anger and disappointment, but then forgives the people and does not punish the people. Many times also in the biblical stories, the real reasons for the disasters which came upon the Israelite people were from other people, who did not follow the ways of God. Anger is one of the strongest human emotions. It is an acceptable emotion, as long as it is people are still accountable and use their anger energy in good directed ways. We all sometimes feel the need to release our anger in inappropriate ways, yet, anger is an emotion which can tell us necessa...

The Third Sunday of Advent One of the many museums I have been to in my life is the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas. Before I started my last job in Houston, I spent a week setting up my apartment and trying to get to know the city a little bit. I had plenty of expectations about what moving to Texas was going to be like, but part of that first week, I was trying to figure out if those expectations were correct or not. The Museum district in Houston has plenty of museums to choose from and I wandered in and out of a number of them. In the Contemporary Arts Museum though is where I started to realize that many of my expectations were going to be broken, had to be let go of. In its halls were a dizzying array of abstract art compilations, pieces made out of trash, graffiti type works, and a number of things that I stared at, simply wondering what I was looking at. I’m still not sure I understand all of what I saw that day. We all move through our lives with plenty of...