Lent 2017

Aidan Mathews retreat, Lent 2017

Week 6: Stillness exercise

April 11, 2017

I am sitting under a tree in broadleaf daylight outside my brutal fraternity housing in Palo Alto, so it must be spring or summer, or, at any rate, sylvan, because...

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Week 6: Gospel reading [Matt. 20]

April 11, 2017

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard....

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Week 6: Prey

April 11, 2017

The Paschal perspective – which is to say, the Christian take on things – is not concerned about fiscal correctitude, the entrepreneurial prerogative of a paternalistic employer who feels digestively...

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Lent 2017: Conclusion

April 11, 2017

I’ve been asked for a short conclusion, which is rich, since I don’t believe in periods or in punctuation as anything other than necessary human helps in the live-stream sacredness...

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Week 6: Pray

April 11, 2017

Go back to that moment in the garden. Go back to that moment when the water-sprinklers, those dirty little rubber-and-metal spigots you stub your flip-flop toe against in the scutch...

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Week 5: Stillness exercise

April 4, 2017

So it’s late on a Friday afternoon in the open-plan office where I work, and I need to compose the phrasing of some sort of stillness exercise by six o’clock...

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Week 5: Gospel reading

April 4, 2017

The Parable of the Wandering Sheep “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face...

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Week 5: Prey

April 4, 2017

The same master, a hearty, hirsute baritone, taught me Latin and Greek at each stop on the three scholastic terraces, prep, secondary, and college; and, because he looked quite Olympian,...

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Week 5: Pray

April 4, 2017

A word to the wise: the Lord will always surprise us. Nothing is predictable, especially prophecy, which predicts nothing other than the fact that the future is always and everywhere...

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Week 4: Stillness exercise

March 25, 2017

I know from umpteen paperback apologetics that Spiritus in Latin and Pneuma in Greek and Ruadh in Hebrew all signify breath of some sort, the oxygenating impetus that aerates biochemical...

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