In the warm midday silence, a solitary woman slips toward the town well, a site depicted in the Bible as a place for meeting and socializing with others. But at this point in the life of the Samaritan woman, the local well is simply a place to fill her water pitcher at a time when …
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I Dream of a Poetic Church And he was transfigured before them, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I am always struck by the simplicity of transfiguration, which seems to me to be the height of poetic expression and reminds me of the touching experience of the “art”… Read more »
To die out of Love “No, you will not die!” hisses the serpent in the Garden of Eden, but its human inhabitants do not understand and are seduced. Beginning with the first pages of Genesis, that demonic hissing has never ceased to tempt our human nature. As if not dying is the solution to… Read more »
Jesus does not need the baptism John is administering, but he goes to the banks of the Jordan anyway, where people’s sins are being removed like clots dissolved in running water; where sinners overcome their fear of revealing themselves for what they are: persons who need to rediscover their humanity. So Jesus joins the line …
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God is born in Bethlehem–even the stars indicate this. The Gospel seems to suggest that simply doing one’s job with commitment is enough to begin the journey of drawing closer to Jesus. Even though the Magi take a wrong road as they travel, it turns out to be the right road because through this…
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The shepherds set out for Bethlehem without delay. We admire and envy them because their haste is behavior typical of young people or idealists. It is typical of free people–those who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. To set forth without delay has nostalgic overtones: it harks back to a time when…
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While the authority figure of the time manifests his obsession with power by attempting to count the earth’s population, God is born. While people are forced to migrate because of an absurd census, God simply is born. He is only an infant, but he is there, at the heart of every story. He is at…
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The unpredictable introduces amazing things into the fabric of an upright man’s daily existence. God, the Absolutely Unpredictable One, chooses the scandal of dwelling in a virgin and of disrupting Joseph’s sleep with divine visitations. Why he decides to enter the lives of the upright in startling ways remains a mystery. He bursts unpredictably into…
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They have arrested the independent one. They have forced the desert into a cage. They have deprived the sky of its nights. They have stifled his cry of hope. In short, they have arrested John the Baptist. A restless lion, a caged lion, confused, humble, lost–John is no longer the person he…
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John the Baptist flees the city, taking on the status of an exile so as to become the unmistakable sign of a new exile that not even Jerusalem can remedy: an exile of the heart. John is the prophet of the exiles of all times, of all people whose hearts are far away, yearning for…
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