From Season to Season

“The king said to him, 'My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?' But he was reduced to silence. Then the king said to his attendants, 'Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.' Many are invited, but few are chosen." —Matthew 22:12-14   This is a season of invitations. As the end of October approaches, many of us will be invited to Halloween parties and numerous parishes will send out information about special All Saints’ Day and All Souls Day services remembering those who have died in the past year. Then, only a short time later family and friends will begin making plans for Thanksgiving. Few of us will have a chance to take a breath before the invitations begin to roll in for the pre-Christmas parties. It almost seems natural, then, that our Gospel this Sunday is a parable that begins with an invitation to a party. In this passage, Jesus tells t...

Jesus said to his disciples: “In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in heaven will be shaken. And then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky”   —Mark 13:24-27 Speculation and anxiety about the end of time and of the world is neither new nor unusual. For centuries, seers and sages and mystical texts—like Nostradamus and the prophecies attributed to St. Malachy—have been making dire predictions about the future. Science, too, has contributed to public anxiety by citing a series of possible scenarios in which the world (at least as we know it) could come to an end through climate change, collision with another celestial body, and even because of the cooling of the sun. While these...