Jerusalem has been much in the news lately as the war rages on between Israel and the Hamas.  I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the old city of Jerusalem.  The Al Aqsa Mosque, also known as the Golden Dome of the Rock, dominates the ancient skyline.  The gold-encrusted dome sits atop a Muslim mosque and a site that is sacred, not only to believers of Islam, but to Christians and Jewish people as well.  Those of you who have been to Jerusalem certainly remember the first time you saw this […]

Every ancient civilization records a great flood occurring in their distant past.  We now know it was the result of the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago.  You can imagine the great destruction caused by the receding glaciers and the floods that ensued as they melted.  As you probably know, the Great Lakes were carved out and filled in at this time.  It was just another moment in the evolution of our planet but, like many other ancient civilizations, Israel saw a divine lesson in this […]

A leper comes to Jesus and says to him, “If you wish, you can make me clean.”  At that moment, the crowd around Jesus surely fell silent.  As they stepped away from the man afflicted with that dreaded disease, they all gazed at Jesus and wanted to see what he was going to do.  They may have muttered amongst themselves was, “One thing he would never do is touch him.”  That’s because those who had spent time with Jesus had remembered that in his previous healing incidents he did, indeed, […]

We don’t often hear from the Book of Job at Sunday Mass.  In fact, we only hear from it twice in the three-year reading cycle, and only in Year B, as we are in this year.  Today’s reading is a good reason why we don’t – it’s really rather depressing, isn’t it?  We hear Job complain: “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? …So I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted me.”  Not very good news, is it?  I don’t know about you, […]