It is Holy Week, and we walk the Way of the Cross to soon find the empty tomb. My hopes for all of you is that this week you are moved to tenderness of heart, to sorrow at the harm done on this week so many centuries ago, to sorrow at the harm in our world, to opening of your hearts to those who suffer or fear, and on the night of the day you receive this, may your hearts be inflamed with the new fire of the Easter Vigil, that continues on into Easter morning, with the confus

And now, with Palm Sunday we enter into Holy Week.  We remember the joyful Hosannas as Jesus rides the colt of a donkey into Jerusalem, coats and palms strewn before him, and then the plot darkens as the powers of political collusion seek and gain an earthly power of darkness over Jesus. For the disciples, their earthly hopes seem lost.     This resonates with our times when earthly powers seem to bring darkness and fear into our lives. Yet the message of Holy Week and of Eas

This Sunday’s scriptures carry despair, confusion, death, life, hope, threat and danger, and the inbreaking of the heavenly to the earthly.  It’s a bit like reading the news this week, save that the news feels to be more breaking than inbreaking.  Yet know that God is with us, and that for every Lent there is an Easter, for every darkness a dawn. God is with you. CJ+

We are deep into Lent.  The scriptures become more penitential, the Gospel readings become longer and multi-faceted, and with all happening in the world, even in church we can feel like we’re carrying a lot.  The traditions and seasons of the greater church do recognize this, and This Sunday is Laetare Sunday, the Lenten equivalent of Gaudete Sunday in Advent – both are Refreshment Sundays, meant to give a break from  denials or fasting and the somberness that accompany penit