Dwelling Places

Consider this the rest of the story about  the tattered and torn Christ I encountered yesterday, on his way to Tennessee with his mother and little puppy. It's interesting that oft times when ministers minister to a transient soul, that after the good deed is done, the minister thinks he's done. Uh uh! Not so! Not even close. Part 1 tells of the trauma of the carpenter from Tennessee who I just know IS the tattered and torn Christ. He's out of gas, water and food, and is on the way to Tennessee with his mother and a beagle puppy. To recap, he had enough gas to make it into the Diocese Pastoral Center, a bit off the beaten path for a couple making their way from Phoenix to Tennessee. They had no cell phone so how did they find me? There isn't a big Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Las Cruces sign on our building. He asked no one for recommendations as to who might help. Our building doesn't really look like a church. I could understand if the tattered and torn ...

Original sin evaporated God's original balance of a cosmos in motion allowing for the nuclear order of fusion to make way for the order of fission and the violence implied by natural law allowed to take its course outside the preternatural protection of infused grace. But as we wait for the cosmos to experience its final array of catastrophic explosions, stars eating stars, black holes, colliding celestial bodies, implosions and the rebending of space itself, we who are under the protection of the Alpha particle and Omega particle will pass through the storm as spectators watching the fireworks not of destruction, but the brilliance of recreation. Jesus says in the book of Revelation: "Behold, I make all things new." Because all motion is ontologically good, and the essence of preternature is nature, sin did not take away the beauty of the universe, or its essential goodness. However, sin exposed us as "naked" to the power of the laws of Nature wherein before ...

Today I met the eyes of Christ once again. Amazingly enough, the man who came to knock today looked just like Him. Looked just like the Lord. Looked like the Alpha and the Omega. He was adorned clothing unbecoming to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Today, the Man who looked like Jesus was dressed in clothing he'd been wearing for days. He was lost and needed water, food, and gasoline to take himself and his mother back to Tennessee. But the face was so intriguingly familiar. In the course of my work day, I see many many impoverished souls during any given week. All of them resemble Christ in a spiritual sense. But this particular fellow, tall and a little gaunt, looked like Jesus whom I have seen. He'd lost his carpenter job in Phoenix. He'd no where to go but back home to Tennessee. With this one soul I felt the weight of the entire world upon his shoulders. And looking at him, I could tell that he was strong enough to bear it all. "Yeah...Tom," I say to m...

I received a call from a grateful mother for Catholic Charities  of the Diocese of Las Cruces having helped her bipolar daughter cover a utility bill. Mostly, her sense of gratitude was because her daughter told her that based upon our meeting and discussions, she and her husband are returning to the church. You might ask: “So what?” (Or) “You get that a lot, don’t you?”   Of course, Catholic Charities never makes a grant of aid conditional on worship choices. Somehow, the couple eventually related a multitude of dimensions to a dilemma that erupted into a bill that could not be paid potentially forcing the utility company to turn off their water. In Las Cruces, New Mexico in the middle of the summer the temps go up past 100 degrees.  Not to have water to an evaporative cooler is an invitation to dehydration especially for the elderly. In the course of my discussions with the daughter and her bi polar husband, they talked about the difficulties of life that they...