The Divine Hours of Lent

And so we cry out this morning, as our kind have cried for centuries on every Easter morning: Christ has died. Christ has risen Christ will come again. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.

Holy Saturday….Always that has seemed to me to be the strangest sort of name to put on this day. Holy? What is holy about utter silence, utter stillness, utter death? Hallowed, yes; but not holy, at least not yet, not for a few more hours. And so today I am caught all day between two…

As I was nearing the end of the months of compiling the Sayings of Jesus into the The Words of Jesus volume and, even more, during these last five or six weeks since it has been published, I received, and have continued to receive, some fairly thought-provoking questions. I have received enough, in fact, so…

Jesus, as the Passover meal was ending, said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you. But not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and…

Lent ends today; or more correctly, this is the last, full day of Lent. Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, and tomorrow night at sunset, Lent gives way to the Triduum…to the three days that are the culmination of Lent. Tomorrow night, Christian around the world will commemorate the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that Jesus…

Many long years ago–meaning well over a quarter of a century ago–I wrote a book about Lent entitled Final Sanity. It and/or pieces of it have been re-printed so many times that I don’t even have a record of where and when, except to say that it was re-published in toto by Loyola Press some…

My father was an academic all of his adult life. He started his career as the entire faculty and administration of a tiny, rural school and ended up as the Academic Dean of East Tennessee State University, a position he held for almost two decades before his retirement. The undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level education…

Today is the first day of Holy Week, though actually, it’s also a bit more than that: Palm Sunday is an interruption in Lent that manages somehow to lop off the next three days of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from the rest of Lent and then leave them, in a manner of speaking, just hanging…

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday. That means the beginning of Holy Week or, put another way, that means that Lent–and death and winter–are effectual almost over. Tomorrow will be a time of celebration that, in essence, refuses to look dead-on at what will happen five days hence. Rather like the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in…

When I die, I would have it said of me that I have lived a thankful life. I didn’t know that when I started out. Reared in the middle-class work ethic and on the American principle of individualism, I thought that I was supposed to produce something tangible–some kind of “product”–that would show I had…

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