From Season to Season

Included in a collection of essays entitled A Maryknoll Reflection on the Liturgical Year is this story from Father Ken Tesing, a Maryknoll priest who spent decades serving in East Africa: I came back to the United States from my mission in Tanzania, and I was visiting my brother and his family at their farm. As farmers always do, we went out to look at the fields and crops. My brother asked me, “Look, do you recognize those weeds?” I replied, “No, I don’t think I have ever seen them before; how did they get into your fields?” He said, “Some years ago herbicides were developed; the weeds and grasses we struggled with in the crops when we were just growing up have all been eliminated. All these seeds were just lying dormant in the ground; they could not compete earlier with the dominant weeds and now they have sprouted and come forth.” We talked about this. My brother said farming is like life; there will always be challenges, always be differences. We need to be patient and t...

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is honored by many titles and in countless places by Christians around the world. These various names of Mary often tell us something about her role in the story of salvation, such as “Mother of God,” “Cause of our Joy,” and “Ark of the Covenant.” Other titles of Mary tell us something of the unique role she plays in the life of the Church and of individual Christians: “Comforter of the Afflicted,” “Help of Christians,” “Mother of Good Counsel,” and “Queen of All Saints.” Finally, there are those titles of Mary that are associated with specific places like Guadalupe, Lourdes , Fatima , or La Salette . Each of these titles, in its own way, expresses a faith and devotion that was first voiced by the woman who cried out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you” (Luke 11:27).   I have three titles of Mary that are especially meaningful for me and seem to capture my own devotion to the Mother of God. They are “Mother of...

Once upon a time, a teacher told a story. It simply began: “A sower went out to sow.” It’s a story that has come down to us largely unchanged from the way it was first told. And it is a story that we know well. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the stories told by Jesus (the “Parables”) have lost their power to surprise and inspire us. There seems to be two reasons for this. The first is that they often include images and anecdotes from everyday life that are significantly unrelated from most of our day-to-day lives. After all, how many of us have any first-hand experience with sowing a field and understand what goes into cultivating a fruitful harvest. The second reason why these stories have lost their impact is that we know them too well. With the stories of the “ Prodigal Son ” and the “ Good Samaritan ,” the parable of the “Sower and the Seed” is among the best-known of these stories of Jesus.   In Saint Matthew’s account of the parable of the sower ( 13:1-9, 18-2...

In the opening verse of Sirach , we read, “All wisdom is from the Lord / and remains with him forever.” Praise of Wisdom is echoed in other places in the Old Testament, including Proverbs , Wisdom , Baruch , and Ecclesiastes and certain psalms. Continuing its praise of Wisdom, however, Sirach continues: “Before all other things wisdom was created; and prudent understanding from eternity. The root of wisdom—to whom has it been revealed? Her subtleties—who knows them? There is but one, wise and truly awesome, seated upon his throne—the Lord. It is he who created her, saw her and measured her. Poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing, according to his bounty, lavished her upon those who love him” (1:4-10). The passage from the Gospel of Matthew that we heard on the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Matthew 11:25-30), comes in a section in which Jesus can be said to take on the persona of the Woman Wisdom, “speaking with the words and images attributed to he...

When I made my first vows as a Benedictine monk in 2004, I was very excited about the prospect of receiving a new (religious) name. The custom of the community of which I was a member is that the soon-to-be professed monk submits three preferred names to the abbot. The abbot, as head of the community, would then either pick one of the three names or select one of his own choosing. I spent weeks researching names. The only real considerations were that it had to be the name of a saint or beati and that there couldn’t be anyone else in the community with that name. In a community of more than 100 members, options were limited pretty quickly. But, I know a lot of saints and wasn’t put off by the prospect of having a name that was a bit out of the ordinary.    And so, I settled on my three choices: Leander , Silas, and Nicholas . Although the community had had Leanders and Nicholases in the past, Silas would be a first. And, after a few days of waiting, Silas was ...