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This was my last post for the Diocesan.com Inspire Daily feature of the MyParish app.  I appreciated the opportunity but ultimately had to cut back on some commitments because life is hard, y’all.  You can find all my Inspire Daily posts here. Yesterday was a joyful day of celebrating the birth of our Savior. Today the Church opens a window into a bleaker future of the persecution and martyrdom…

Modern dream interpretation is based on psychology and our understanding of the unconscious mind. If I were going to take a shot at interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as Daniel does in today’s first reading, I would suggest that he fears the loss of his power, that no matter how big he builds himself up to be, he could lose it all in an unexpected way. Daniel interprets the dream as a prophetic…

When I was a little girl I read all the Little House on the Prairie books over and over. I remember being deeply impressed by the rules for Sabbath behavior back in those days. Not only was nonessential work forbidden, any sort of fun was too. Children who resisted were punished swiftly and severely. Sundays were long, boring, and miserable. Read the rest at the link below or on your MyParish…

God delights in us because He loves us. We do not need to do anything to earn His love—in fact, there is nothing we COULD do to earn it. But how can we thank him? How can we praise Him? How can we share this gift of love with others? Read the rest at the link below or on your MyParish app. Preparing the Way / Preparando el Camino  

I first encountered the story of the Passion of St. John the Baptist in the Bible I received from my godparents when I made my First Holy Communion.  I sometimes think I am remembering wrong because the horrifying picture of his head on a platter seems like an image the editors might have chosen to omit from a children’s Bible! But predictably I was fascinated by that picture, and I have many…

Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child, Bye bye, lully, lullay. Thou little tiny child, Bye bye, lully, lullay. Herod the king in his raging Set forth upon this day By his decree, no life spare thee All children young to slay All children young to slay The above quotation comes from The Coventry Carol.  This 16th century English carol representing the last lullaby sung by the mothers of the Holy…

Let Us Go Rejoicing

Weeks are long and weekends are short. Life is hard and we are so busy, so tired. Catching up on household chores, sleeping in, trying to have a little fun with family or friends—for many of us there is so much we want to do or need to do that a weekend never seems long enough.  Sunday Mass can begin to feel like just another weekend chore, and maybe even one that we resent having to do. Read the…

People love to make fun of the songs we sang at church in the early 1970s, but I was a little girl then and I remember many of them fondly. Today’s Gospel took me back to that time instantly, to the refrain of a  song written by Medical Mission Sister Miriam Therese Winter in 1965: “There was a man in Jericho called Zaccheus. There was a man in Jericho called Zaccheus. Now the Hebrews, they were…