Monthly Archives: March 2025

Reflecting on Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

I know you’ve heard my story: how I shamefully commanded my father to give me my share of my inheritance right then.

Now, let me explain a few things. Because I was the younger son, my inheritance would be a LOT less than that of my older brother. Not only that, but he would inherit the house and the farm, too.

So when I rudely demanded my share that day, I knew it would not be much. But have you ever tried to get food from the earth in the hot sun? Year after year, the work never ends. And, too, just a few miles away was the Roman city, Sepphoris. I wanted to there, see the dancing girls, and drink the delicious Roman beers.

The lure of that exciting city was too much for me. I wanted to see the Roman plays, go to the gymnasiums, and assimilate into the Roman culture.

Well, I ran out of money fast, and all my friends disappeared. The work dried up, and soon I was sinning against the Torah more than ever, feeding the pigs and even eating in their troughs!

And I had family back home! I was starving. And here came my noble father, lifting his robe and running toward me! (He had to run fast, too, because the vengeful neighbors were coming towards me, ready to beat me for my disgraceful behavior.)

How good his arms felt! I was finally safe. And yes, I made it up to my brother, taking his work as my own. I share the majority of the workload now—I am younger, after all.

I wonder. Do you have someone who needs your forgiveness?

Are you still resentful of family injustices from decades before?

Kathy McGovern ©2025 

Reflecting on Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15

This mysterious God who speaks to Moses from the burning bush is exactly the God we all pray to hear. We long for the God who says, “ I have witnessed your sufferings. I have felt your anxieties. I have heard your prayers for healing of the illnesses and sorrows of your loved ones. I am not far away; I am not indifferent. I have been with you all along, and I am going to act in your regard.”

This God was a wholly new experience for Moses. He had forgotten that he was specially called, and that this was the God who called his father Abraham to travel to a new and distant land eight hundred years earlier.

Yet, here was this VOICE speaking to him on the holy ground of the Burning Bush, compelling him to believe that there was a good God, a God who remembered the promises made to his ancestors, a God who had held him and watched over him from before he was born.

We don’t have the same dramatic story that Moses had. We weren’t placed in a basket and sent down the Nile River, praying that a kind Egyptian princess might find and save us. But maybe we DO have our own precious memory of being held by a loving God, our own experience of a God who is present, who tells us to be not afraid (365 times, by the way).

Be silent today. Listen for the voice that speaks to your heart, telling you again that your life and your sufferings are precious to God, and that God will hear and answer you. We are all praying for you.

                  What do you long to hear from God?

Kathy McGovern c. 2025

Reflecting on Luke 9: 28b-36

Lord, it is good for us to be here. Not on Mount Tabor—an exceedingly scary mountain during the muddy season, by the way—but here, in our own cities, and in our own skin.  The Mount of Transfiguration is the perfect place to visit every year on the second Sunday of Lent. It’s good for us to remember Jesus, transfigured in Light, and his heavenly companions, Moses and Elijah.

It’s also good to consider those most intimate of his male disciples, Peter, James, and John, whom he often singled out to accompany him on transformative events. They saw him raise Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5: 37-43) from death to life. That soul-shattering experience must have transfigured them in ways not recorded in the gospels. And it was those three again who were with him in the Garden, during his agonized prayer, and when the soldiers came to arrest him (Mk. 14:33).

With the flash of the soldier’s swords, did they remember the flash of Light on Tabor? Did they see Jesus transfigured then, as he was led away? Or was it they who were transfigured, not at that terrifying moment, but a mere three days later, when the transfigured women—forever changed and forever remembered as the first witnesses of the resurrection—came running from the Empty Tomb?

It’s good for us to be HERE, with all our stuff. We need transfiguring so badly. We need our laziness transfigured into a fiery energy for good. We need our unhealthy habits transfigured into light-filled  habits of returning phone calls, checking in on lonely neighbors, and returning to warm engagement with our families.

It’s finally Lent. Let your LIGHT shine.

What changes are you already making this Lent?

Kathy McGovern ©2025

Reflecting on Luke 4: 1-13

When Jesus defeats Satan in the desert, Mark, at his usual breakneck speed, tells the whole Temptation story in one sentence. Matthew ends the story with, “And then Satan left him.” John doesn’t tell it at all, although there are some parallels in his gospel, particularly when Jesus is tempted to make bread in the wilderness (6:26).

But it’s Luke who ends his narrative with that intriguing last sentence, “he departed from him for a time” (4:13). Ah. Isn’t that always the way? Is there anyone who has “conquered” an addiction problem who would say that they have never been tempted again, that they don’t walk one day at a time, deeply grateful for every moment of freedom?

I wonder if Jesus knew, in the desert, that even though he had just vanquished the Enemy, he wouldn’t go away forever, but would lay in wait for three years? Then, like a ravenous lion, he would reappear, “entering into Judas Iscariot “ (22:3), who turned Jesus over to the chief priests (22:4).

And thus, it began. Next, Jesus told Simon Peter at the Last Supper that Satan had asked to sift him like wheat” (22:31). We know that Peter did not withstand that challenge, but denied Jesus three times in Caiaphas’s courtyard (22:55-62).

But don’t miss this: that’s not the end of Peter’s story. Jesus comforts him at the Last Supper, promising him that he has prayed for him, that he will not fail forever, and that, afterward, he will strengthen the Twelve.

Imagine Jesus saying that to you today. I have prayed for you, that you have the strength to begin again. O Jesus, who vanquished our Enemy, pray for us.

Readers, please choose an unknown person in this reading audience to pray for this Lent.

Kathy McGovern ©2025

Reflecting on Sirach 27: 4-7

There’s a lot to think about in the readings this weekend regarding what we reveal when we start talking. Since our words betray what’s really going on in our hearts, it’s enough to make us all take a vow of silence! I suppose the safest way to talk is to stop after every word and carefully consider your next syllable, but think how tedious an actual conversation would be if both speakers were too terrified to speak.

So, like the fruit of a tree, people’s words disclose what’s really going on in their minds, and we’re advised not to evaluate people until we hear what they say. But, really, isn’t the only way to really know someone is by observing his or her actions?

I think of those two sons in the gospel parable of Matthew 21: 28-32. The father asks both sons to go work in the vineyard. The first says, “No! I’m not going,” but goes, and the second says, “Sure, I’ll go,” and he never does. “Words! Words! Words,” sang Eliza Doolittle. “Show me!”

Our acts flow from our being, from who we are. In his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The just person justices.”  We might say, “Hurt people hurt, healed people heal.”

But time gives us the opportunity to become more of who we want to be, and the son who ended up not going out into the vineyard might very well have gladly gone out a few years later. The Church, says a cardinal in the film Conclave, is not only what we did yesterday, but what we’ll do tomorrow.

Please, God, give me time to be the person I’ll be tomorrow.

Who do you most hope to be tomorrow?

Kathy McGovern ©2025