The Transfiguration is weird. It’s strange. Think about it: Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. As He stands there before them, His face begins to shine as bright as the sun. His clothes become dazzling white. Moses and Elijah appear. A bright cloud overshadows them. The Father’s voice speaks, taking us…
The most revealing detail in today’s Gospel isn’t the hunger, or the desert, or anything to do with the specific temptations themselves; the most revealing part is the way the devil begins the conversation. For some context on this passage, Jesus has just come from the Jordan River, He has just been baptized by John,…
Prayer. Fasting. Almsgiving. The Church places these three practices before us every Lent not as some random suggestion, but as a way of reorienting our hearts. They’re meant to help us turn back to God, to clear away what distracts us, and to make room for Him to work more deeply in our lives. Prayer…
Each of us, at some point, has asked questions like: What can I do? How am I supposed to serve? Lord, how are You calling me to point others to You? Those questions live in many of our hearts, especially when we hear readings like these today. We sense that we’re being invited to come…
When we hear today’s Gospel, there’s a detail that we might miss on the surface but is one that’s pretty important when we want to understand what Jesus is saying here. The detail is how little Matthew tells us about the crowd. Think about it: we’re given no information about who these people are, what…
As I was praying with these readings this week, I found myself really drawn into the idea of darkness that we see in the first reding from Isaiah. There is something really unsettling about darkness. It’s not just the fact that we have trouble seeing in the dark, it’s more so that we lose our…
Today marks the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, a date that still carries a heavy weight in our national memory. Even though that decision has been overturned, the deeper issue it revealed has not disappeared. At its heart, Roe wasn’t simply about a court case, it was about whether we truly…
So often, those of us who are trying to grow in the spiritual life, we see other people who seemingly have it all together, those who are really truly holy, and a thought comes to our minds that tells us: I could never be that holy. We tend to think that holiness is reserved for…
Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord and She gives us two scenes in our readings that clearly belong together. First, in this passage from Isaiah, God is speaking about His servant, someone who isn’t a political figure or some brutal conqueror. Instead, the servant the Prophet mentions is one…
Every year, the Church gives us a gift as we begin the new year. She places us beside Mary and invites us to see her not only as the Mother of God but as our Mother as well. The Church invites us to open a space in our hearts to allow Mary to walk with…
Fr. Tom Pringle 