Holy Wisdom Blog

This “octave” of Easter Sunday is sometimes called “low Sunday,” because no one expects the liturgy to compete with Easter Sunday for ebullience and pageantry. Others call it “doubting Thomas” Sunday because the Gospel passage from John chapter 20 does not vary from year to year. The Roman Church has more recently dubbed it, “Divine Mercy” Sunday. Preparation for this homily leads me to title it, “open to change”  and “challenged to change” Sunday. If you grew up in a muti-generational household, you know how different the perspectives can be from one era to another. For instance, I grew up …

Easter Vigil – 2024                          Mark 16:1-8               Lynne Smith, OSB             This is not the good news we are used to hearing at Easter time. Where are the stories of Jesus’ post resurrection appearance? Where is the joy at seeing him again? Where are the alleluia’s? Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with amazement flight. We expect this of the male disciples in Mark. But not of the women too! Because of the other Gospel accounts, we expect the women to be the stars. They get what Jesus taught and are the first to believe. But not here. They too flee …

Good Friday • Isaiah 52:13–53:12 • John 19:16–30 • 3/29/24  Standing near the cross, you feel the magnitude of what has happened. You have felt something like this at other deaths, other endings. Yet this time, there is something more, a strange sense of waiting. Tonight and tomorrow are pregnant with something.  Speaking in the voice of one of the Magi, T. S. Eliot writes, “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”  Now, at the other end of the story, …

Palm Sunday, March 24, 2024 Bearing Witness: What is left for us to do Colleen D. Hartung Palm Sunday at HWM is high ritual framed by a bountiful proclamation of the Word. We expect it.  It is part of our ritual pattern.  But I realized for the first time as I was researching and sorting through this abundance for today’s homily that our tradition of juxtaposing the readings of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the reading of the Passion is not a universal practice across Christian denominations.  After figuring this out, I did a quick survey of my neighborhood …

Six months of remotely watching the bombing, displacing, and starving of Palestinians in Gaza has been exhausting: How much more can they survive? How can the whole world watch this horror and not stop it? And when it ends, how can life, and eventually hope, be restored? It’s an unfathomable challenge. Yet people of all faiths and cultures throughout millenia learn that hope is necessary for life to continue. In the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah witnessed the terror he had warned of: the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem destroyed, the Israelites crushed and removed …