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Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr

Sketch by Brie Schulze

Coins play a varied role in the scriptures.  We can think of the woman who lost a coin and then found it and had a celebration with her friends.  There is the widow who put one small coin into the offering, which was more than anyone else with large sums.  There are those who received talents and earned talents with them.  The one who buried his talent in the ground and was reprimanded.  When asked if Jesus pays the temple tax, He sends Peter to catch a fish in which he finds the coin he needs to pay the tax.  Judas keeps the purse with the coins, he betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.  Coins represented a value decided upon by the local government – in those times they were typically made of some kind of metal and therefore had some kind of intrinsic value.  Today, sometimes, the intrinsic value of our coins is greater than the value they represent.  It costs more than a cent to mint a penny, and the metal it is made of is also worth more than a cent. read more

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Monday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Sketch by Brie Schulze

The Resurrection must progressively become the only future we are expecting.  This has two consequences on our day to day life.  First, it means we don’t have much else to look forward to in this life: we are glad to see the grace of God at work in ourselves and in others, and we are delighted by the occasions to be part of the divine movement.  Second, it means we no longer expect to get something good or bad out of this life: the resurrection infinitely surpasses anything we have or can experience in this life.  All other goods, compared to the resurrection, are absolutely inferior.  The resurrection is something divine: Jesus says, “I AM the resurrection.”  It is the most godlike thing that can happen to our human flesh – born again to immortality. read more

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Body and Blood of Christ

5″x7″ oil on canvas by Brie Schulze

Today we are celebrating the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.  In Latin this literally means: Body of Christ.  The USCCB provides us with the official English title: Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.  And if we read the readings, we can see that the main focus is in fact not flesh, but blood: the blood of the covenant.

Something that caught my attention as I was meditating on the first reading was the fact that the liturgy has not included several contextual verses of the first section of Exodus Ch. 24.  In particular, after the people and the altar have been sprinkled with blood, verses 9-11 mention the people eating and drinking in the presence of God without fear and seeing Him without dying.  They were of course eating the flesh of the sacrificial victim whose sprinkled blood bound them in communion with each other, with the altar of sacrifice, and with God.  Perhaps the theme of the covenant meal, the Eucharist, is too obvious and the Church wants us to discover something else. read more