Some readers may remember the chorus to the song “My Grandfather’s Clock”: ‘Ninety years without slumbering, tick tock, tick tock, his life’s seconds numbering, tick tock, tick tock, but it stopped short never to go again when the old man died’. This refrain came to…
Category: Advancing the Kingdom
Sacerdotal
The simultaneous appearance this year of the beginning of Hannukah and the fourth Sunday of Advent invites Christians to reflect on our Jewish roots. St. Paul’s arboreal image in Romans 11 comes to mind: the wild branch of Christianity is grafted to and nourished by…
Diachronicity
“And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (Joel 3:1) These words are ascribed to the…
The Prospect of Caducity
“Use it or lose it”. It isn’t only the prospect of caducity that brings this adage to mind. I think of it when I reflect on my teenage grandchildren’s vanishing skill at cursive writing. Though taught it in early grades, they have no occasion to…
Praxy without Doxy
Let’s keep it just between you and I. If you winced at this opening line more than likely you’re in that certain age bracket that was taught grammar in school. No doubt you learned how to diagram a sentence and were drilled in the roles…
Bliss is Ignorance
As the adage has it, ignorance is bliss. This may be so when related to the innocence of young children who, still unexposed to evil, are content in their trustful openness to the world and its wonders. For the rest of us, though, ignorance is…
Ritual Risk
It’s still there. The Charcoal Pit on the Concord Pike has been a constant. As teenagers we made a ritual of going there after Saturday night movies for hamburgers (pre-MacDonalds) and milkshakes. I recall once we gathered there on a Friday after seeing some film.…
Athens, Jerusalem, Ouagadougou
God is not directed by history. He is its author and guide. But for the active role of Providence in our lives history would neither exist nor perdure. We today accept with beguiled resignation the label of ‘postmodern’. With an arrogance rivalling that of…
Beguiling Ambiguity
This phrase was recently part of a liturgical prayer in which grace is requested to foster in us a deepening awareness of the sacred. By themselves, however, the two words standing alone offer a beguiling ambiguity – one having to do with the grammatical anomaly…
Virtue: Its own reward?
It is understandable how the adage ‘virtue is its own reward’ has fallen into desuetude. (Indeed, the word seems to have been supplanted by its ubiquitous but impoverished substitute: ‘value’). For the most part the expression would be irrelevant in today’s zeitgeist where the only…