In the kingdom of love (John O'Donohue)

     There is a lovely idea in the Celtic tradition that if you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. 

     In the kingdom of love there is no competition, there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have. 

--John O’Donohue,

Anam Cara

Image source: John August Swanson, Francis of Assisi, https://johnaugustswanson.com/catalog/francis-of-assisi-giclee/?srsltid=AfmBOooGU3wYbg1tgtLcpC9iV6JLJpIia97VoeVw3V5Gf4CX3B1PMIIo

Invited to praise God (Friar Thomas of Celano)

    When Saint Francis came upon a quantity of flowers, he would preach to them and invite them to praise God, just as if they had the ability to reason. He would also speak to cornfields and vineyards, stones, woods, and every beauty of the land in this way. He would experience the elements of earth, air, fire, and water with gratitude. He understood that they all willingly served God. 

    In short, he called all creatures by the name brother or sister. He saw hidden things of creation with the eye of compassion. For, in his own way, he had escaped back into the wondrous freedom of childhood. 

—Friar Thomas of Celano,
The First Life of St. Francis (ca. 1229)

Image source: https://thesophiacenterforspirituality.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/in-praise-of-creation/
Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 4, 2026: Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened...

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened…
How do we come before the Lord? 

    In the case of St. Francis of Assisi, the Patron of San Francisco whose solemnity we celebrate this weekend, the answer was straightforward. Unlike Israel, whom God has put on trial for their infidelity in the Book of the Prophet Micah, Francis knew that he should come before the Lord, and bow before God most high with humility and virtue. As Micah tells the people: You have been told, O mortal, what the Lord requires of you: only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk humbly with your God. Francis let go of all he possessed in order to walk humbly with God, in order to understand all that God was calling him to. 

    St. Francis was able to, in the words of Psalm 16, say to the Lord, my Lord are you; you are my only good. The psalmist celebrates the fact that God and his rule over mankind are more important than any other inheritance. God counsels him, leads him, and cares for him; even in the night the psalmist’s heart exhorts him, urging him forward, toward God, that God might show him the path to life, abounding joy in God’s presence. Francis of Assisi found his joy in the Lord, as, on our best days, do we. 

    Yet St. Francis was not without suffering. Like Paul, whose scars spoke to the Galatians of his participation in Jesus’ suffering, Francis bore the marks of Jesus on his body in the form of the stigmata. Such marks proclaimed that Francis found his identity in Christ: the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world, as Paul writes. In the cross, Francis found salvation. 

   In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to those who have accepted his revelation of God’s love in the world: Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Unlike the yoke of the law that burdens the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus’ yoke allows Jesus to bear the weight of our struggles with us, walking beside us, guiding us along right paths. The Son of God, meek and humble of heart, was Francis’ invitation to become the vehicle by which God’s message would be transmitted to the world. Unlike the wise and learned who rejected Jesus, Francis saw himself as a humble instrument of God, obedient not out of fear but out of choice, full of faith in the Savior who died for him, and ready to live the message of Jesus’ love for the world with the whole of his being. 

    We come before Jesus laboring and heavily burdened, but, like our patron St. Francis of Assisi, we come with open hearts, ready to receive the revelation as ones to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father. May we do so in humble obedience, accepting the Lord’s peace and mercy as we follow his rule, conforming our life to Christ’s. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Our highest calling (Pope Francis / ullie-kaye)

     History teaches that pride, careerism, vanity and ostentation are the causes of many evils. And Jesus helps us to understand the necessity of choosing the last place, that is, of seeking to be small and hidden: humility. When we place ourselves before God in this dimension of humility, God exalts us, he stoops down to us so as to lift us up to himself; “For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” 

--Pope Francis 

                How ironic –
               that our highest calling is humility.
               To give quietly.
               To pray behind closed doors.
               To live small.
               To be like the lilies of the field
               and the birds of the air.
               To carry our crosses daily.
               To choose the road less traveled.
               To cherish the ordinary day. 

               The only thing we need to do
               with wild extravagance –
               is love. 

 --ullie-kaye                                           

Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/MostBeautiful/comments/feuzwy/field_of_lilies/#lightbox Quotation source
Poem source

Surrendering our agendas (Jackie Bacon)

     What does being humble, being broken, have to do with our Gospel reading? Jesus shares the parable of the two sons, addressing this parable to the chief priests and elders of the people. We find the father requesting of his sons, “Go out and work in the vineyard”. The first son disrespectfully replies, “I will not” and then, changing his mind, works in the vineyard that day. Son #2, when asked, replies, “Yes Sir,” yet does not go. 

    What does this parable tell us? Both sons had the same Father who wanted them to be active and productive, to go out and work in the Vineyard… to improve it. The first son is not only disrespectful, he is impudent. His needs clearly come first, before the needs of his father. Even though he changes his mind and repents, thus doing his father’s work, his words and his actions are at odds. This incongruity diminishes who he is. 

    At first blush the second son is respectful. Yet he either forgets his commitment or he has lied. His words and actions are not in harmony and he, too is fragmented,  diminished. 

    In our Gospel, Jesus chastises those who dress in fine robes and accessories, the chief priests and elders who claim to be authorities on God. When John the Baptist, as scruffy as he is, points to the path of righteousness, these same chief priests and elders, do not believe, they act in ways that will NOT allow them to enter the Kingdom of God. There is a disconnect between their words and their actions. 

    We need to surrender our expectations, the notion that we are in charge. We need to surrender our agendas, our ambitions, our bitterness and our anger when our expectations are not met. We need to surrender our fears, and we need to surrender those fears that become anger. We need to humble our hearts… for we are not in charge. 

 --Jackie Bacon,
OLMC Communion Service

Image source: https://aleteia.org/2017/10/07/am-i-helping-the-church-be-fruitful/

The Kingdom of God is among us (Fr. Dave Ghiorso)

    Jesus remind us that the Kingdom of God is not something you can point to on a map, that the Kingdom of God is among us. It’s not built with walls or boundaries, but with hearts that love and serve. 

    When Jesus says, The Kingdom of God is among you, he means wherever compassion, faith, self-giving, love flourish, there is the Kingdom, breaking in. 

    Maybe today, we can pray that, living ordinary lives, sometimes difficult lives, we will always do so with a firm commitment and firm belief that the Kingdom resides in each and every one of us, so people will say, Truly God is among us. 

--Fr. Dave Ghiorso,
Homily, November 13, 2025

Image source: https://elmhurstdaycare.com/2020/04/01/teaching-children-the-importance-of-kindness/

Against his own obstinacy (Fr .Peter John Cameron)

   Against his own obstinacy and resistance, the son [in today's parable] who initially refused changes his mind and goes to the vineyard. Perhaps he senses how untrue he is being to himself — to his very meaning and purpose. St. Augustine says that “weak people are those who appear to be zealous in doing good works but are unwilling or unable to endure the sufferings that threaten.” And maybe the refusing son does not want to be like that. 

    His decision to go to the vineyard is an act of obedience. Obedience is not slavery. Obedience is a loving surrender to Another who enables me to be myself. “Obedience,” instructs St. Gregory the Great, “is the way that we overcome ourselves in our heart.” Without the Father’s invitation to obedience, we would never be able to overcome the false self, and then the hope for happiness would be forever impossible. 

    The son goes to the vineyard because that is where the father is. And “by the background radiation of a father’s presence,” writes Catholic journalist John Waters, “a father lets his children become themselves. A father is one who leaves spaces for the competences of his children to grow.” 

    We change our mind and go into the vineyard so that there we can experience “the radiation of fatherhood”: “One must enter the radiation of fatherhood, since only there does everything become fully real” (Pope Saint John Paul II). 

--Fr. Peter John Cameron, OP 

Image source: https://parishableitems.com/2023/09/30/the-parable-of-two-sons-jesus-christ-us/
Quotation source

The unity of love (Karl Rahner)

        We are those who have been called away from the loneliness and isolation of the individual into the unity of the love and grace of God. So we must be in the everyday world too. We cannot pray here together if outside we cannot get on together in love and mutual trust, associate in mutual forbearance. 

--Karl Rahner,
Mary, Mother of God

Image source: Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley, April 28, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1434955155336561&set=a.1434956835336393

What is the lesson here? (Ryan Di Corpo)

   The Swiss theologian Ulrich Luz writes that our understanding of this Sunday’s Gospel—which features the Parable of the Two Sons—is influenced by which son we consider its focus. 

   

    In Matthew 21, Jesus is scrutinized by the chief priests and elders, who question his teaching. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they ask him (v. 23). When they cannot come up with an answer, Jesus tells them the story of two sons: the first, who initially refuses to work in his father’s vineyard but then relents, and a second, who promises to work but does not follow through. 

    The chief priests and elders say that only the first son obeyed his father. Jesus then utters the famous reply: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (v. 31). 

    What is the lesson here? Is Jesus, through the example of the first son, calling us to turn towards him and away from sin? Or is he rather, by way of the second son, chastising people who say one thing and then do another? “Depending on one’s decision,” writes Luz, “our parable is either an exhortation to repentance or a warning against disobedience.” 

    When interrogated by Jewish authorities, Christ is teaching in the temple—which is technically controlled by his questioners. Jesus’s divine authority, given to him by the Father, clashes with the temporal authority of his biblical opponents. Furthermore, the chief priests and elders are specifically skeptical of preaching by John the Baptist, whose power they also view critically.

    Luz writes that Jesus forces the Jewish leaders to select the more righteous son, implying that there is a right and wrong answer. The first son initially refuses to obey his father, but has a change of heart, while the temple leaders both reject John the Baptist and then also fail to correct their error. 

    Therefore, Luz notes, Jesus designates his interrogators as “worse than both sons of the parable,” despite their lofty standing in Jerusalem. Greater than the chief priests and elders, then, are the pariahs of Jesus’s time—people on the margins who accepted the words of John the Baptist and embraced Christ. The faithful “go ahead” (προάγω) of those who wield power on earth. 

--Ryan Di Corpo 

Image source: https://sfodan.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/%E2%80%9Clet-us-walk-and-talk-together%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93matthew-2128-32%E2%80%A0/
Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 27, 2026: Is it my way that is unfair?

Is it my way that is unfair?
How far will we go to understand God’s way? 

    It’s so hard to let go of our own ways of being and try to see how God functions, how God’s love works! The prophet Ezekiel struggled to help the people of Israel in exile to understand that, even in this far and distant country, God was with them, though they had misunderstood God’s teachings: You say the Lord’s way is not fair! The people have come to believe that the sins of the parents are visited on their children. Instead, Ezekiel encourages them to take personal responsibility for their own actions, and for their relationship with the Lord. Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair? Each individual has but to turn from the wickedness they might commit and do what is just and right, and they will have life. For, as Psalm 25 reminds us, the Lord is always merciful: Remember that your compassion, O Lord, and your love are from of old. The psalmist seeks to walk in God’s ways, and be guided in God’s truth, to see past his own limitations and to understand how God works. 

    In Matthew's gospel, Jesus faces a similar struggle with the Jewish leadership of his own time, who refuse to recognize Jesus and what he has to offer, which is the possibility of entering the kingdom of God. But to do so, they need to change, to take responsibility for their own past limitations and to let go of the authority they so ardently cling to. This is the father’s will for which Jesus offers the parable of the two sons asked to go out and work in their father’s vineyard. The one who does his father’s will is the one entering the kingdom of God before the chief priests and elders of the people. The chief priests and elders have to step past their own limitations and recognize the redemption Jesus offers them; after all, he says tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.” In other words, you too can enter, as long as you believe. 

    This is what it means to be a community of faith, to embody that kingdom, as Paul tells the Philippians: be of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing. Through baptism, the Philippians have been bound into a community faith, a people who are one in Christ. This is precisely what Jesus is encouraging the Jewish leadership to join. He knows they are far from God because fear has driven them to hold close to human law. Jesus is inviting them – and us – to draw close to God, by humbly regarding others as more important than yourselves, as Paul notes Christ himself did: emptying himself, humbling himself, obedient to the point of death. We can only do so if we step past the limitations we impose on God and on love, and open to knowing and manifesting God’s ways. The journey is ours; will we choose to take it? 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

An effervescent act of generosity (Bishop Robert Barron)

    God pours out the whole of creation in an effervescent act of generosity, and then, even more surprisingly, he draws his human creatures, through Christ, into the intimacy of friendship with him. Christianity is a religion of grace that exults in this divine generosity. Think in this context of the parable of the workers hired at different times of the day or the story of the prodigal son. 

    But we know that the gift is not for us alone; rather, the generosity of God is meant to awaken a like generosity in us. If amazing grace has saved a wretch like me, I have to become a vehicle of grace to every lost soul around me. 

--Bishop Robert Barron 

Image source 1: https://lmcchurches.org/2023/08/always-more/
Image source 2: https://livingbyfaithblog.com/2012/01/06/a-surprising-outpouring-of-gods-love/
Quotation source

It was there that I searched for You (St. Augustine)

     O Eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity. You are my God. To you do I sigh day and night. When I first came to know you, you drew me to yourself so that I might see that there were things for me to see, but that I myself was not yet ready to see them. Meanwhile you overcame the weakness of my vision, sending forth most strongly the beams of your light, and I trembled at once with love and dread. I learned that I was in a region unlike yours and far distant from you, and I thought I heard your voice from on high: “I am the food of grown men; grow then, and you will feed on me. Nor will you change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me.” I sought a way to gain the strength which I needed to enjoy you. But I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is above all, God blessed for ever. He was calling me and saying: I am the way of truth, I am the life. He was offering the food which I lacked the strength to take, the food he had mingled with our flesh. For the Word became flesh, that your wisdom, by which you created all things, might provide milk for us children. 

     Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. 

--St. Augustine

Image source: https://godshotspot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/spotlight-battleofgods.jpg
Quotation source

God's gift to give (Fr. James Martin)

 

    A few years ago, I heard the interpretation that those who were hired last had been standing out in the sun all day, waiting their turn, and so the landowner is rewarding them. But that still reflects the idea that the landowner, a stand-in for God, must be “fair.” For Jesus, it’s just as important for the landowner to be merciful. Seen in this light, it’s a parable about generosity to the “last.” As Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., writes in the Sacra Pagina commentaries, the answer to the question of why latecomers receive the same pay is: “The kingdom is God’s gift to give and we must not begrudge God his generosity.” 

     “There is a balance between God’s justice and God’s mercy,” writes Father Harrington. “Those who were hired first receive a just reward…. The fact that the latecomers received the same reward can be credited to God’s mercy.” Thus, Harrington suggests that the usual title of this parable, which focuses on the workers, is misplaced. It is more appropriately called the “Parable of the Good Employer," because it is about goodness and mercy. 

--Fr. James Martin,
Facebook, September 23, 2024

Image source: Lucas Cranach, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (15th c.), https://lucascranach.org/en/DE_ESKStMW_NONE-ESKStMW012/
Quotation source

God is not a response to our mail order form (Bishop Rowan Williams)

   God is God. God is not a thing among other things. God is not an item in the world, and God is not a response to our mail order form. He doesn’t simply slot into what we think is intelligible or manageable. God is the infinite, unmanageable, unconditioned context of all that we are and we do, and so it’s not entirely surprising if we can’t boil that down into something we can manage. That’s why, of course, in Hebrew Scripture, when the people of Israel gather at Mount Sinai, the mountain is covered with cloud and fire, and God says to Moses: Keep your distance. I’m sorry. This is how I am. You’re not going to boil me down to something that’s manageable. 

    There’s always an innate depth, inaccessibility, unmanageability about this, and at times that comes home to us with enormous force when we would like there to be a simple answer — part of the burden of what Old and New Testaments alike say: Be careful of idolatry. You’re always prone to making a God you can manage. 

    That’s what idolatry boils down to. You can make that manageable God in any number of forms. You can make it in religious forms. You could make it in economic and social forms. Just be very conscious that, as the Lord says to Moses, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Don’t go putting in his place something which is a pseudo-God.

--Anglican Bishop Rowan Williams

Image source: https://bible.art/p/vsZsKRNJpwiRsJghlde3/god-spoke-to-the-israelite-s-from-the
Quotation source

Seek the God who is seeking us (Sr. Joan Chittister)

There is only one vocation in life
and that is to seek the God
who is seeking us. 

--Sr. Joan Chittister

Image source 1: https://catholicreview.org/seven-surprising-places-to-find-god-this-summer/
Image source 2: https://studyprayserve.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/here-i-am-man.jpg

You too go into the vineyard (Cynthia Bourgeault)

    [In Sunday’s parable,] the vineyard, as it tends to be throughout Jesus’s teaching, is a symbol of the relational field, the dynamic interactiveness of the kingdom of God. 

    Whatever reason we may project onto the vineyard owner for bringing people in, what he actually states is that he’s bringing people in because he can’t stand to see them isolated and just sitting around on their own: “You too go into the vineyard.” The real fruit of this day is not a bunch of grapes getting harvested. It is human beings working together, doing something that’s dignified. You can imagine the songs, the work, and all the things that happen when you’re participating and engaged jointly in an activity. The idea of paying them the same simply invites people to put their attention on what the real proportions are. When “more and less” are introduced into the equation at the end of the parable, we’re just scattering our attention. 

    The bottom line is that everybody has enough. The ones that came in early thought the usual daily wage was fair. That’s taken care of. The real fruit being generated, just like grapes turn into wine, was the work together. In these circumstances, it’s fermented and transformed into some fragrance of human interactivity and abundance that doesn’t exist otherwise. 

    It’s not until you begin from the fullness of love, and the order and coherence that arise from it, that you can recognize what’s being said [in this parable] and how radical it is. 

    We get the invitation to go into the vineyard, but it’s only in stepping up, saying yes, and trusting the relational field that we’re going to actually be participants in the kingdom of God. 

--Cynthia Bourgeault

Image source: Vincent Van Gogh, Red Vineyards at Arles (1888), https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/09/18/gods-goodness-and-the-laborers-in-the-vineyard/
Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 20, 2026: Seek the Lord...

Seek the Lord...
How often do you find yourself looking for God? 

    Though we will certainly never really understand God – For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, the Lord tells Isaiah – we certainly can appreciate the wonderful benefits of relationship with the God who loved us into existence. And while we may turn our back on God, shutting ourselves off, forsaking God, God, for his part, encourages us always to return: Seek the Lord while he may be found, Isaiah reminds the people of Israel, for it is with God that we ultimately find life and love, mercy and forgiveness. Psalm 145 reminds us of God’s qualities that make this so: The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness… To sing God’s praises in this way is to make a confession of our acceptance of the terms of covenant, recognizing our desire for relationship, allowing the connection, restoring it if need be. God wants us to seek that relationship, one in which we will find compassion and justice on our journey. 

    Yet it is not necessarily ours to understand God’s justice either, as our gospel reading from Matthew demonstrates. When a vineyard owner pays the workers who arrive an hour before closing time the same wage as the workers who arrived in the early morning, our human hackles start to rise. That’s not fair! But again, my thoughts are not your thoughts: God makes it possible for all to live, the first to come to God as well as the last. Is it up to us to begrudge the on who comes at the last hour, or will we rejoice because they love the Lord? After all, they are following Isaiah’s directive: Seek the Lord… And God’s love is open to them as well. 

    God’s love is a free gift – wherever we might be. Paul tells the Philippians that whether he lives or dies, his desire is that Christ be magnified in his body; he has dedicated himself to the love of God revealed in Jesus, and spends his every waking hour sharing that Good News, fruitful labor that helps Paul to maintain his connection with the God who created him. Through obedience – conducting himself in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, Paul demonstrates how to seek the Lord while he may be found… We, too, are called to seek the Lord through our attention to relationship, with God, with other, preaching the good news so long as we are able, magnifying Christ with our bodies, so that those who seek him may find him in the love we share. 

This “vintage” post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

A forgiving way of doing justice (Ronald Franz / Caitlin Morneau)

When you forgive, you love.
And when you love,
God’s light shines upon you.

–Ronald Franz,
qtd. in Into the Wild

    Forgiveness is fundamentally an individual act, but with social implications. Every harm has repercussions, rippling impacts through time and community. Really living into the fullness of forgiveness means moving toward as full a reclamation of human dignity and communion as possible. 

    When this becomes the way in which we move and live and have our being, suddenly seven times seventy becomes far more attainable — not a heroic act for the few. But we cannot do it alone. We need to encourage one another daily. And build up systems (legal and otherwise) that create vessels for mercy and grace to shape the labor of justice itself. 

    Because of Christ’s sacrifice and the gift of the Holy Spirit, this forgiving way of doing justice is not out of reach. It is being taken up in communities across this country, and has been alive in native and indigenous cultures for generations. What’s more, it abides within each of us. We might need to peel back the layers of retribution and individualism that mask it, but at our core dwells this desire, God’s desire to love one another as God loves us. May it be so. Amen. 

--Caitlin Morneau

Image source 1: https://daily.jstor.org/catholics-against-racism/
Image source 2: https://catholicworker.substack.com/p/the-catholic-worker-calls-christians
Quotation source 1
Quotation source 2

Love needs to be built upon mercy (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

Forgiveness was meant to broaden our view,
to help us see one another more clearly,
and to help us see God at work more clearly.

 --Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, January 16, 2025

    To say that we love God or to say that we love our brothers and sisters may in fact not get at the point. Because love needs needs to be built upon a mercy, an understanding, a willingness to understand, and our ability to open our hearts. Love can be a static sort of thing that we sort of possess, as if that were enough, and yet love is truly an investment in one another. 

    It is the mercy that we have received from God. That is the mercy we are supposed to mete out to the world. And yet in our time, it is harder and harder for us to recognize that mercy. 

    I go back to that professor in Rome who asked us a question at the end of her presentation on the Passion narrative as it is depicted in Renaissance and Baroque art: How can we paint a crucifixion for today in a world where no one recognizes their own need for mercy, or their own sin? How do you make that death matter? How do you make that life matter? 

    It’s played out in us, and it’s played out through mercy. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, January 8, 2026

Image source: Renato Guttuso, Crucifixion (1941). For a well-developed analysis of this remarkable painting, go to: https://www.americamagazine.org/art/2013/03/14/contemporary-crucifixion/

Risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God's mercy (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

   Those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy as if it were ours to spend, dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity, put conditions on God’s love as if God were a narrow tyrant or a political ideology, or cut off access to God as if we were the keepers of the heavenly gates. We are not! If we link God’s mercy to our own assessment of things, we then link it to our own limits, wounds, and biases. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Image source: Domenico Fetti, The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (ca. 1619-1621), https://lectionaryart.org/2016/09/21/the-unforgiving-servant/
Quotation source

Must you forgive them? (Marcy St. John)

    Jesus’ parable teaches us about mercy — about what mercy looks like and how we are to give it to others. Recall the time when you were a child and you acted badly — most likely toward a brother or sister or other relative. Recall that moment when you knew you “were in big trouble” and had to go to your parent for confession and mercy. Recall that feeling in your stomach, or your head, and your heart. Jesus tells Peter what mercy looks like: If your brother sins against you, forgive him not seven times but seventy-seven times. There is discussion in the Babylonian Talmud — one of the sources of Jewish law and teachings — that forgiveness must be unconditionally given three times — so we should understand seventy-seven as an indefinitely large number. In other words — forgive your brother again and again, always and forever. 

    We believe that God is merciful, and will show mercy to us. But this tells us that it isn’t for nothing that he grants mercy. We, too, must be merciful to receive mercy. Again, we must forgive those who trespass against us always, as many times as needed. This message so important that it is in the prayer we pray most often — at every Mass, at every service: when we gather together with other Catholics, when we gather together with other Christians, and even when we gather with those who are not Christian but who know this prayer — because it is The Lord’s Prayer. We ask God to “forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 

   Why must this be? There are those who have greatly wronged others — the coworker who lies and gets you fired; the banker who refuses to give you relief on your debts; the sister who keeps you from seeing your parent; the criminal who assaults your child or husband. Must you forgive them? This is America! I have rights — the right to sue, to accuse, to demand, to fight, to pursue Justice. 

    I won’t tell you that that is not so. There are times when you do need to defend yourself in the courts on earth against those who have harmed you. But even when you need to take those steps, you still need to forgive the person or persons who trespassed against you. 

   Why? 

    Because Jesus forgives. Because failing to do so injures your own heart and keeps you from your connection to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It is a block, a stone, a pebble, a shard, a nugget of pain and resentment and anger. Or, as Pope Francis calls it, “a bothersome fly in the summer that keeps coming back” It keeps you from fully taking in the Word of God, the lessons of Christ, and the works of the Holy Spirit that are active, alive and giving us grace and mercy every day. 

--Marcy St. John,
OLMC Communion Service,
March 5, 2024

Image source: https://pastorduncansblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/forgiveness-reflections-on-parable-of.html

A welcoming and merciful attitude toward everyone (Pope Francis)

    This is the logic that guides Jesus’ mission and the mission of the Church: go in search, “fish” for men and women, not to proselytize, but to restore full dignity and freedom to all, through the forgiveness of sins. This is the essential point of Christianity: to spread the free and regenerative love of God, with a welcoming and merciful attitude toward everyone, so that each person can encounter God’s tenderness and have the fullness of life. 

--Pope Francis 

Image source 1: Br. Mickey McGrath, St. Frances Cabrini, available for purchase at: https://trinitystores.com/products/wall-frame-gold-st-frances-cabrini-by-m-mcgrath?srsltid=AfmBOoo6GEhZi16BOxZzbYNz6xjP9ye7xTX9eB9IDKM5REwvbTC5mWaC
Image source 2: https://www.catholiccompany.com/blogs/magazine/st-frances-xavier-cabrini-giving-without-reserve
Quotation source

Forgiven people must become forgiving people (Fr. Patrick van der Vorst)

    It is worth listening carefully to the questions that arise in the Gospels. They are rarely just trivial; they are our questions too. [In Sunday's Gospel,] it is Peter who speaks: “Lord, how often must I forgive?” He dares to suggest an answer, seven times, already generous in the language of Scripture, where the number seven points to fullness. But Jesus stretches the horizon even further: not seven, but seventy-seven times. In other words, forgiveness is not something to be counted, measured, or exhausted. And to make his point, Jesus tells a story of a servant whose debt is unimaginably large (far beyond anything he could ever repay) and yet, when he asks, it is simply cancelled. This is how God forgives: not cautiously, not reluctantly, but freely, abundantly, without calculation. Every time we enter the sacrament of Confession, we stand in that same place: bringing what we cannot repay, and receiving what we do not deserve: mercy. 

    But the parable does not end there. The one who has been forgiven so much refuses to forgive a small debt owed to him. And suddenly the light shifts. The story becomes sad... but it becomes a mirror. Because the mercy we receive is never meant to remain with us; it must flow through us. Confession does not only reconcile us with God... it calls us to become people of reconciliation. If we close our hearts to others, if we hold on to resentment or refuse forgiveness, we begin to block the very grace for others. Jesus is not being harsh; he is revealing a truth of the heart: that forgiven people must become forgiving people! 

    In The Confessional (1827) by Sir David Wilkie, we are drawn into a vivid moment of the sacramental life of the Church. A young woman kneels at the confessional, quietly speaking to the priest, while a small crowd gathers closely around, waiting their turn after what appears to have been a penitential procession. The scene is almost theatrical in its intimacy: faces lean in, bodies press forward, and , if you ask me, the figures seem remarkably close, almost a bit too close to the confessional box. This closeness is intentional however. Wilkie is less concerned with strict liturgical accuracy and more with conveying the human drama of repentance: the urgency, curiosity, even tension that surrounds the sacrament. The painting captures confession not as a distant, private ritual, but as something deeply embedded in communal life. The proximity of the onlookers heightens that sense of shared experience: sin and forgiveness are personal, yet never entirely hidden from the community. 

--Father Patrick van der Vorst 

Image & quotation source: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-18-21-35-2026/

Can we forgive? (Robert Schreiter CPPS)

    Where might we stand now, years after 9/11? When we think about perhaps forgiving something as terrible as this, we need to attend to the teaching of Jesus closely. 

    First of all, it is God who forgives sin and wrongdoing. Only God has sufficient perspective to grasp the extent of damage that sin and wrongdoing create in our lives and in the lives of those against whom we sin. 

    In the act of forgiving, we participate in God’s larger act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that comes from God it is a gift of God to us. If we listen closely to Jesus’s words, we will discover that. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s first word on the cross is about forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do ” (Luke 23:34). We often read this as Jesus forgiving his executioners. But in actual fact, Jesus is calling on God, his Father, to forgive them. Jesus is still in the midst of his suffering. He cannot forgive his executioners for something they have not yet completed. But he can call on his Father to forgive. 

    This act of Jesus can be a great source of comfort to us when we struggle to forgive but cannot. We can call upon God, who sees all things, to forgive. And that is a prayer that we, too, someday may be able to forgive. 

--Robert Schreiter CPPS 

Image source: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/can-we-forgive-9-11/
Quotation source (and full article)

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 13, 2026: Unless each of you forgives your brother from the heart...

Unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart…
If you can’t receive the mercy of God, how can you give it? 

    Our ability to be forgiving is based on our ability to accept mercy from God and to know that we need it. The author of Psalm 103 is very clear on God’s abundance of mercy for humankind: The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion. Indeed, God crowns us with kindness and compassion so that we might bring his mercy to bear on the world through our own forgiveness of others. For, as the Book of Sirach points out, mercy restores connection: Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? Rather, forgive your neighbor’s injustice, Sirach suggests, and set enmity aside, so that you might participate in the healing justice that mercy and forgiveness create in our world. 

    How often must I forgive my brother? Peter asks Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. In response, Jesus offers the parable of the unforgiving servant, in which the king understands the power of mercy and forgives the servant’s loan, but the servant himself does not understand forgiveness even after he himself is forgiven: he has his fellow servant put in prison until he pays back his debt. Jesus wants Peter to understand that God’s mercy is tremendous and there is no keeping score; if you have to keep score – as many as seven times? – it is not forgiveness you are contemplating. 

    God constantly forgave the people of Israel as a sign of the depth of his love for them. They didn’t get it, nor do we. God’s mercy is not conditional – God gave his Son for our salvation! -- nor can our forgiveness be conditional. For, as Paul tells the Romans, none of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord. All we do should thus be for the sake of his love for us, including opening ourselves to his divine mercy and wielding that same loving mercy in our world as we forgive our neighbor’s injustice and bring the Lord’s healing kindness to bear upon our world.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Created to experience union (Dr. Wendy Wright)

    God’s heart ‘breathes’ in and out, and our hearts are created to breathe in concert, in inspiration and aspiration, with the heartbeat of God. Our heartbeats are aligned with the divine rhythm by ‘living Jesus,’ by letting His divine-human Heart become our own. 

    Human hearts, too, breathe and beat in concert. 

    Human hearts are created to experience union with each other in the process of coming into union with God. In fact, we are most fully who [we] are created to be when we exercise love relationally. That is, when we love one another as we have been loved: concretely, uniquely, particularly. 

--Dr. Wendy Wright,
Seeking God’s Will Together

Image source: https://cbcmb.com/gods-heart/
Quotation source

It's a give-and-take (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

    In order to create Christian community, it is necessary to help all the members find balance with each other. Nothing will ever be the way we want it to be, but it will be the way we need it to be in order for us to be in community. Concessions will have to be made. We will have to make some changes in ourselves in order to be members of a community, as the community will have to make some changes in themselves to receive us as members of the community. 

    It’s a give-and-take that is the very center of what Jesus means by “love one another.” Love one another in order to adapt. Love one another in order to be transformed by one another. Love one another so that the Lord can work among us. That is change in us. 

   We stay the same and we no more belong than we did before. To belong to any relationship requires change, and that is what love makes possible. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, May 23, 2025

Image source 1: OLMC Advent Fair 2025, Activity Tables, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1306595431505868&set=a.1306604761504935
Image source 2: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/discover-power-community-being-part-something-bigger-than-johnson/