Why Do We Pray For The Dead?
When we whisper a prayer —”Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord” —we’re doing more than remembering; we’re loving. Even when someone has already reached eternal life, our prayers still echo, increasing their joy in God’s presence and deepening our own hope in the life to come. In this Ask A Priest episode, Fr. Edward reflects on…
Infinite Incomparable Love
Every time I read the Prodigal Son story, I get misty-eyed. My heart is leaking. It’s so beautiful because this passage reveals the absolute, incomparable love of the Father, which transcends reason. It transcends mathematics. It transcends politics. It transcends everything in the world. We cannot calculate it. We cannot understand it, but we can receive it. In the gospels, if Jesus were speaking to a hundred…
Freedom Greater Than Circumstances (Rewind)
What makes us most free is this submission to God and this dependence on Him. Yes, freedom is dependent on obedience rather than doing whatever I want. When we fall in love with God and experience that love, this profound interior freedom takes place, and it becomes the most important thing in our lives — even to the point that it…
Spiritual Nostalgia
Spiritual nostalgia. It is so real. It is wanting to experience your feelings again during that amazing God moment. It’s wanting to experience again that feeling you had when the Cubs won the World Series. In the gospel for the Sunday, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain and reveals his glory. They feel they experience the realness of Jesus’ divinity, but then they go down the hill, and Jesus seems to have…
True Love Costs Something
Remember when Hiccup loses his leg in “How to Train Your Dragon”? It’s an emotional rollercoaster. The love that Hiccup has for his family and Toothless leads to him sacrificing one of his legs. Hiccup’s love costs something, and the gospel for this Sunday, Jesus, is very clear: it is easy to love when it’s easy to love, but real, true, authentic, Christ-centered love costs something. Are we just loving Jesus when it’s easy when…
Protect Your King
I am awful at chess. Like, bad. But the other thing is I try to protect all of the chess pieces on the board, which means I don’t honestly try to protect my king. This is the only thing that you need to win the game. And if you don’t have the king, you lose. Jesus Christ is trying to get this across in the gospel today. You have everything if you have Jesus and nothing else in your life. But if you don’t have Jesus, if you don’t have the king…