Every month, Connections offers stories, images, reflections and meditations relating to the themes of each Sunday’s readings.  Material comes from the evening news and the every day, from the stage and screen, from the music world and the marketplace – all designed to help homilists “connect” the world of Monday through Saturday with the Gospel proclaimed on Sunday.

To give you an idea of what Connections is all about, we’ve assembled the following sampling of stories, meditations and 'connecting' reflections from recent issues of Connections:

Presentation of the Lord [February 2, 2025]
Fifth Sunday of the Year / Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
[February 9, 2025]
Sixth Sunday of the Year / Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
[February 16, 2025]
Seventh Sunday of the Year / Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
[February 23, 2025]

Eighth Sunday of the Year [March 2, 2025]

First Sunday of Lent  [March 9, 2025]
Second Sunday of Lent  [March 16, 2025]
Third Sunday of Lent  [March 23, 2025]
Fourth Sunday of Lent  [March 30, 2022]

Please note that, in every issue of Connections, we offer TWO stories/meditations for each Sunday’s Gospel.

After reviewing this “electronic sampler,” if you’d like information on subscribing – or receiving the next complete issue of ConnectionsCLICK HERE for subscription information and an order form.

Enjoy!         


The Presentation of the Lord [ABC]

[Simeon] took [the child] into his arms and blessed God, saying:  “. . . my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people, a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” 
Luke 2: 22-40

“Cross-words”

A childhood memory from an accomplished writer and preacher:

“I would learn to read in the first grade, I was told as a young child, and I couldn’t wait to go.  As it was, I was dependent on the schedules of the adults around me for stories, having to wait until there was somebody who could read to me.  I feasted on pictures in fairy-tale books, of course, and made up stories with my dolls.  And we had a television, which had more stories . . . But my parents and my brothers read happily in silence for hours.  Sometimes you would have to call the boys’ names twice, or even three times, before you could get them to look up from their books.  Reading was that absorbing.  I longed to join the club.

“Somehow I had the impression that I would learn to read that first day, that learning to read was just a secret that would be imparted to me at the proper time . . . I didn’t grasp that learning to read was a process.  Imagine my frustration, then, when we began to go over the alphabet and the sounds each letter signified.  That was all very well.  ‘But when are we going to learn to read?’ I asked the teacher as the afternoon wore on.  She told me that this was learning to read, that this is how you started.  Oh.  This was the biggest disappointment my short life had yet encountered . . .

“Soon, the thrill of the chase took over.  It was fun to sound out the words on the page, to begin to recognize a whole word, to read and write longer and longer sentences.  But it was work, too.  To grow in wisdom doesn’t just happen to us, while we sit there on our hands folded in our laps and do nothing.  We acquire wisdom.  We pursue wisdom.  We follow in her ways.”

[From Let Every Heart Prepare: Meditations for Advent and Christmas by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton.]

Everything that is good and of value in our lives — from learning to read to being a loving spouse and sibling — demands work and struggle.  Today’s Gospel is a sober reminder of that reality: the prophet Simeon proclaims that this child will be a “light” for Israel — but that light will endure great suffering and pain before finally shattering the darkness.  Luke’s Gospel of the Child Jesus reminds us that the crib is overshadowed by the cross, that this holy birth is the beginning of humankind’s rebirth in the Resurrection.  And it will be a long road of joys and wonders, of conflict and hurt.


Fifth Sunday of the Year / Fifth Sunday after Epiphany [C]

“Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch . . . ”
When Peter saw [the catch], he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Luke 5: 1-11

Sometimes a parent can surprise you

The teenager had her driver’s license for only a few weeks.  After a long talk and satisfied that she could handle the drive, Dad let her take the family’s new car to go to the beach with her friends.   

She was very careful.  She kept under the speed limit all the way.  She took great pains to park the car in a safe spot.

But on the trip home, Crunch!  She never saw the other car.  In an instant, the front bumper, headlight and part of the door became a crumbled mass of metal.

She wanted to die.  Dad would have her head.  Might as well burn my driver’s license, she thought.  I’ll be grounded for life.

And so, she limped home in her father’s once beautiful car, dreading the scene to come.

As she pulled into the driveway, she could see both her mom and dad running towards her from the house.  From the looks on their faces, she knew this would not be a happy homecoming.  Dad ran ahead of Mom — and right passed the damaged car and pulled her out of the car.

“Dad, I’m soooo sorry,” she stammered.

But he wouldn’t let her finish.

“Are you all right?  Were you hurt?  Was anybody hurt?” he wanted to know, hugging her tighter and tighter.

She began to cry, a little surprised that her Dad was so understanding — and a little ashamed that she had expected so little from him.

It happened to all of us: Just when we expected our parents to come down on us for something we had done (or not done), they reacted with understanding, compassion and immediate forgiveness.  So it is with God, who always welcomes us back without condition or limit.  We sometimes expect too little from our relationship with God; many of us suffer from an “inferiority complex” when it comes to God: we’re neither good enough nor wise enough in church protocol to consider ourselves “religious.”  Like Peter, we shy away from God because we can’t imagine God loving sinful, Godless us.  But that is exactly the “mystery” of God: that God loves us despite ourselves.  Thomas Merton observed that “the root of Christian love is not the will to love but the faith that one is loved by God . . . irrespective of one’s worth.  In the true Christian vision of God’s love, the idea of worthiness loses significance.  The revelation of the mercy of God makes the problem of worthiness something almost laughable . . . no one could ever, alone, be strictly worthy to be loved with such a love — [such a realization] is a true liberation of spirit.” 


Sixth Sunday of the Year / Sixth Sunday after Epiphany [C]

“Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours . . . but woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”
Luke 6: 17, 20-26

Hope isn’t only about the future

She once saw her life as an uninterrupted line from birth to decline.  She had married and given birth to a wonderful little boy, Zach, and was teaching at the divinity school of a major university.  The next part of the plan was to achieve tenure, master the Russian language, and watch Zach grow up.  She called it “pragmatic determinism.”

But after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of 35, time no longer pointed to the future.  Time was a “loop”: start treatment, manage side effects, recover, start treatment again.  She now lived “in the present.” The sicker she became, the more “hope” was a word that pointed to the unbearable: a husband and child left behind, an end without an ending.

Kate Bowler is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School.  She tells the story of her sudden and unexpected confrontation with her mortality in her best-selling book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.  In a New Year’s essay in The New York Times [December 30, 2018], she writes of her struggle to find tangible reasons to hope:

“Approaching the new year, I wondered how I might renew hope for a future I can no longer see.  So I rummaged around for inspiration in well-used daily planners and to-do lists, only to discover a stack of cards I had intended to mail long ago.  Thank you for reintroducing me to tuna casserole.  Thank you for inviting Zach to make a maze out of boxes.  Yes, my dog often licks the television and thank you so much for taking him.  There were photos that friends had hung by my bed of our last (surprisingly violent) round of Mennonite board games and of my misguided attempt to take my cello Christmas caroling.  Someone had framed an image of Zach, grinning on my lap, my chemotherapy fluids hidden by a series of elaborate sock puppets we had created.

“The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has in fact taught me to live in the moment.  But when I look at these mementos, I realize that I am learning more than to seize the day.  In losing my future, the mundane began to sparkle.  The things I love — the things I should love — become clearer, brighter.  This is transcendence, the past and the future experienced together in moments where I can see a flicker of eternity.

“So instead of New Year’s resolutions, I drew up a list for 2019 of experiences that had already passed: a record not of self-mastery but of genuine surprise.  1. My oncology nurse became a dear friend.  2. Even in the hospital I felt the love of God.  3. Zach is under the impression that I never get tired.  These are my small miracles scattered like breadcrumbs, the way forward dotting the path behind me.”

Kate Bowler’s perspective of time and the direction of her life have been turned upside down.  Life’s meaning is not something to be fulfilled at some future point but is realized now; hope is to be found in the present, in everyday joys that suddenly become miracles.  In today’s Gospel, Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus turns upside down our own understanding of power and wealth, of joy and fulfillment.  Jesus challenges everything our me-first, bottom-line-centered culture holds dear.  Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain articulates a new vision, a new attitude in approaching life, a vision and attitude Kate Bowler has come embrace: the treasure of life and time itself, the hope that can be realized in compassion and generosity, the fulfillment that is experienced in freeing ourselves from the pursuit of the things of this world so as to embrace the small but lasting “miracles” of the kingdom of God.    


Seventh Sunday of the Year / Seventh Sunday after Epiphany [C]

“Love your enemies and do good to them, expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High . . . Be merciful as your Father is merciful . . .
“For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”
Luke 6: 27-38

“In good times and in bad times”

In his book Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, Rabbi Harold Kushner tells of meeting with a young couple to prepare their wedding ceremony.  Everything was going well until the prospective bridegroom asked:

“Rabbi Kushner, would you be willing to make one small change in the ceremony?  Instead of pronouncing us husband and wife till death do us part, could you pronounce us husband and wife for as long as our love lasts?  We’ve talked about this, and we both feel that if we ever get to the point where we no longer love each other, it’s not morally right for us to be stuck with each other and be deprived of any chance for happiness.”

Rabbi Kushner would not agree to the change.

“I told them that I respected their distaste for hypocrisy, for not wanting to live in a loveless marriage,” Rabbi Kushner writes.  “I told them that I could understand their fear of making a total commitment to this marriage because it might hurt too much if it didn’t work out.  But I warned them that if they didn’t enter this marriage on the assumption that it was for keeps, if they moved in together but didn’t totally unpack, ready to move out when things got tough, there was no chance that they would be happy together.  They would not be committed enough to stay together during the inevitable tough times . . . One of the promises a husband and wife make to each other is the commitment to stick together through the hard times in the faith that the hard times will one day end and the affection they once felt for each other will reemerge.”

That is Jesus’ point in today’s Gospel: love — authentic love — is hard work.  But love endures long after the romance hardens into reality; love finds its fulfillment in diapers and mortgages and college tuition and the messes and complexities of everyday life; love dares to hope and sacrifice despite the disappointments and hurts.  May we dare to love as God loves us: regardless of the cost and sacrifice, without limit or condition, totally and completely, in the eternal hope that such love will transform us and those we love in the life of God.  


Eighth Sunday of the Year [C]

“ . . . remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.”
Luke 6: 39-45

If you want the plunger pushed, than you push it . . .

Semon Frank Thompson served as superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary from 1994 until 1998.  As superintendent, Thompson carried out two executions — Ohio’s only two executions in the last half-century.  Thompson supervised the medical technicians who strapped the inmate to the gurney and hooked up the intravenous lines and trained the executioner who depressed the plunger of the syringe injecting the lethal chemicals into the condemned’s veins.  And it was Thompson who asked the condemned if he had any last words. 

And then he watched as the man died.  Sometimes the condemned died quietly and quickly; sometimes the condemned writhed and gasped in pain.

Frank Thompson once supported capital punishment, but, he says, “being involved in the taking of two lives forced me to reckon, on a moral level, with the reality of capital punishment.”

So Thompson offers this challenge:  “If politicians refuse to outlaw state-sponsored killing, then a minimum condition of their public service should be their inclusion in a lottery where they are randomly selected and trained to provide hands-on assistance in an execution . . . a sort of jury service for executions.”

Despite its legality and the clinical conditions in which it is carried out, Thompson points out that assisting at an execution “does not insulate a person from having to deal psychologically with killing another person . . . The results of participating in an execution are exactly what you’d expect: post-traumatic stress disorder, with all its related maladies — substance abuse, suicide, depression.”

Thompson concludes:  “Capital punishment in the United States is cloaked in a cloud of indifference and moral passivity.  Requiring Americans who are responsible for its continuation to bear more of its costs is the only way to ensure that it is soon abolished altogether.”

[“Support the death penalty?  Then assist with an execution” by Semon Frank Thompson, The Boston Globe, September 2, 2018.]

Often the “splinter” in our own “eye” is our indifference and passivity to the pain and hurt suffered by those around us.  Warden Thompson challenges lawmakers — and we who elect them — to realize the consequences of our ignorance and obliviousness to the impact of such policies and practices as the death penalty.  Jesus challenges all who would be his followers to dare to remove from our own eyes the “wooden beam” of self-centeredness that prevents us from seeing the obstacles we lay in the road to the kingdom of God.  


First Sunday of Lent [C]

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert for forty days to be tempted by the devil.
Luke 4: 1-13

Charting your desert experience

So let’s say you decide that this is the Lent you’re going to drop the 20 pounds that have taken up permanent residence around your middle.

Good for you.

Now comes the hard part:  How do you do it?

Eating less, of course.

But how do you go about “eating less”?

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in The New York Times [January 4, 2022] that merely resolving to eat less “rarely works in the long term.  It means changing my eating habits and having healthy tasty food readily available.  To have healthy, tasty food available I have to plan my meals every week.  I also have to make time to cook in advance so that I don’t open the fridge when I’m really hungry and realize that cooking something healthy will mean that it won’t reach my plate for another hour.

“To have that weekly planning and cooking time, I have to free up a big chunk of Sunday.  To free up a big chunk of Sunday, I need to work less so that I don’t spend so much of my weekends catching up on work I could not get to during the week.  To work less means summoning the honesty to remove a whole set of psychological barriers to saying no.  And changing all of these patterns will affect my family and my colleagues, requiring them to adapt and adjust their own habits.”

The decision to “eat less” is only the beginning — to actually “eat less” requires a change in the very way we approach food.

Many of our Lenten resolves fail because we think denial and sacrifice alone will lead to conversion.  To travel our Lenten deserts takes more than “stop doing” and “giving up” — it means rethinking how the many pieces of our lives fit together as a whole.  So may we “chart” our Lenten journey this year, following the same Spirit of God that leads Jesus to his moment of decision and now leads us to meaningful conversion — “turning” — in our lives: finding our way out of our winters of cynicism, our deserts of self-absorption, our wildernesses of despair and hopelessness by reordering our time and priorities.  These days before Easter’s dawning are a time for deciding what we want our lives to be and discerning how we can realize the purpose and meaning of this blessed time God has given us. 


Second Sunday of Lent [C]

While Jesus was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white.  Moses and Elijah appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.
Luke 9: 28-36

God transfigured in life’s messes

A church organized a Tuesday morning mom-and-tots group, where the kids would play and the moms could indulge in adult conversation and sip coffee while it was still hot.  The group became very close, laughing and crying, talking and praying.

One day the group took up a book on prayer.  The author wrote that making quiet time for personal prayer was crucial to the spiritual life.  Most of the moms said they tried to fit in such “quiet time” during nap tie or laundry time or dishwashing time or shower time, but all agreed that a set daily “quiet time” was an impossible luxury.

The book offered a solution for the quiet-time dilemma:  “Get up earlier.”   All moms have to do is get up and have their quiet time in the dark before everyone else is awake, because — quoting the book — “you can sleep when you’re dead.” 

In other words, “a bunch of baby-brained, undernourished, zombie moms were being told that what they really needed to make their lives better was less sleep.”

One young mom spoke up:  “Sleep was the one thing I knew I needed to have if I was going to be a decent mom for another day.  I needed sleep, because my kids needed me to get dressed and go to the park and read the same book 400 times and kiss boo-boos and settle disputes over Legos and cut a single grape into 11 pieces and scoop turds out of the bathtub and not kill anybody, either by accident or on purpose.  Sleep was life.”

How could God entrust her, she asked, with the care and protection of three kids and then expect her to get up at the crack of dawn to “be quiet with him” because “I can sleep with him when I’m dead.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.  I really don’t.  I think God is with us.  Like, day in and day out, in the chaos and the noise and the silliness of life, he is there . . . never absent from the clamor of our kids’ laughter, their squeals, their skinned knees, their fussing and whining and raging fits in the Target parking lot.  God is not withholding himself from us, waiting for us to come to him in the wee hours of the morning as a measure of our devotion . . . !”

“So I’m gonna honor God intentionally in my sleep, because I’m pretty sure God wants me to be the very best mother I can possibly be to my boys . . . Tomorrow I’ll be sleeping in.  And I’m not even gonna worry about it, because I’m pretty sure I’ll have plenty of quiet time with God when I’m DEAD!"

[From The Very Worst Missionary: A Memoir or Whatever by Jamie L. Wright.]

In her call to motherhood, this woman has experienced “transfiguration”: the light of God’s presence radiates in her love and care for her children; the presence of Christ’s peace “transfigures” their home into the very dwelling place of God.  What Peter, James and John witness in Christ on the mountain exists within each one of us, as well:  God is present within us, animating us to do good and holy things, guiding our steps as we try to walk justly and humbly in the ways of God, enlightening our vision with wisdom and selflessness to bring the justice and mercy of God into our world. 


Third Sunday of Lent [C]

The parable of the barren fig tree.
Luke 13: 1-9

A rare gift

Sarah Gray was three months pregnant with identical twin boys when she and her husband, Ross, learned that one of them suffered from anencephaly, a fatal birth defect.  Six months later, Thomas and Callum were born; Callum survived, but Thomas died six days later.  Sarah and Ross decided to donate Thomas’ tissues and organs to science research.  They were able to donate his liver, his cord blood, his retinas and his corneas.

A short time later, Sarah was on a trip to Boston.  She remembered that Thomas’ corneas had gone to the Schepens Eye Research Institute at Harvard.  She and Ross had signed away any rights to future information about the donation.  But she decided there was nothing to lose by calling. 

“I donated my son’s eyes to you a couple of years ago,” Sara explained to the receptionist at Harvard.  “I’m in town on business for a couple of days.  Is there any chance I can stop by for a ten-minute tour?”

The woman who answered paused.  “I’ve never had this request before.”  The woman asked Sara to hold for a moment; finally, someone came on the line and said she would be welcomed.  The next day, Sara met one of the researchers at the lab.  The researcher said that an infant’s eyes “are like gold to us.”  Thomas’ cells were still being studied at the lab as they developed treatment for a number of different eye ailments. 

The warm and grateful welcome she received gave Sarah “the bug.”  So she and Ross arranged visits to the other three labs around the country where their little boy’s tissues had been sent.  At Duke University, they learned that Thomas’ blood was part of a study on how anencephaly develops.  Scientists at the Cytonet lab explained how Thomas’ liver was being used to develop lifesaving therapy for liver disease.  And at the University of Philadelphia, the Rosses saw how Thomas’s retinas were a Godsend to researchers looking for ways to treat retinoblastoma, a deadly cancer of the retina.

For Sarah and Ross and Callum, the donation of Thomas’ tissue was no longer an abstract “nice thing to do.”   The extraordinary good of Thomas’ gifts became something real to them.  Their feelings of grief turned into pride.  Their son and brother was with them in this life-giving work. 

[From Sarah Gray’s story at The Moth, told at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, N.Y.]

Sara and Ross Gray model the generosity of heart and spirit of optimism of the gardener in Jesus’ parable.  Like the gardener who sees some hope for the struggling fig tree, the Rosses are able to see beyond their grief to make some good come from their little boy’s death.  As God’s mercy and compassion know no end, we are called to embrace the faith of the gardener: to work and re-work our own small plots and realize its harvest of compassion and grace.     


Fourth Sunday of Lent [C]

“My son, we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come back to life again; he was lost and has been found.”
 Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

The return of the prodigal daughter

For Valerie Schultz, the parable of the prodigal has been playing out among the women in her family.

“There was a dark time in the life of one of my daughters when I dreaded answering a call from an unknown number on my phone,” Ms. Schultz writes in America Magazine [September 2, 2019].  “Dread is too mild a word, actually, because I was deeply afraid that some unwelcome call was going to be the notification that my daughter was dead.”

“A practicing alcoholic, she was out there, at the world’s mercy, her behavior rash and risky, and there was nothing I could do about it.  When the call finally came, it was less-bad news:  She was not dead but in jail.  Among other charges, she had assaulted a police officer.  I suspect she survived that encounter with the law because she was a white girl rather than a person of color, a thought that fills me with both gratitude and shame.”

Her daughter is now sober and she tells her story with her daughter’s permission.  Mom is now playing the role of the relieved parent trying to bridge the prodigal with her skeptical sisters.

“Their reaction to her recovery has caught me off-guard, although it makes sense: [They] have been the kids doing the right thing, comparatively speaking.  It is as though they were used to her being the one who messed up all the time, who caused their parents all the grief, and now they do not quite know what to make of her.  And as much as she presents this new, improved, self-aware person to them, as much as she wants them to trust her sobriety and integrity and honesty, they do not — not yet, anyway.  Which she, in turn, does not understand.  Why are they so judgmental?  Why do they brush her aside so dismissively?  Why are they holding onto their expectation of a return to her past prodigal ways?”

Valerie’s daughters have always been close, she writes.  “They have different personalities, but they have always supported each other, a steadfast squad of blood sisters.  Now there is turmoil among them, as this changing family dynamic rocks everybody’s place in it.  Do not ever let anyone say that sobriety is easy on a family:  The return of a prodigal can spark consuming fires.”

The prodigal is not a simple story with a clear and easy-to-embrace moral.  The older brother’s reaction is real — and understandable.  How much hurt do we allow the prodigal to inflict?  It’s not easy to be the parent who loves unconditionally; it is painfully difficult to face our prodigal-like failures and sins; it is beyond our comprehension, as the “older” sibling, not to demand accountability from the one who hurt us and the family.  But, as the Schultz’ family is working through, forgiveness begins by seeing things through the eyes of the other, to embrace the other’s hurts and doubts and fears, to understand their struggle to make sense of things.  Forgiveness is focused on the future, about healing the past in order to live joyfully and meaningful in the present.  May God’s complete and unconditional love, mirrored in the love of the prodigal’s father, embrace our hearts enabling us to both forgive and seek forgiveness and so re-create our futures in Easter joy.