The Virtual Oratory

Sunday Readings will be the core of the Newsletter.

Included below are some feastdays...July and August.

July 11, feast of St Benedict...actually, the translation (carrying) the relics of Benedict to St Benoit sur Loire in France to the Fleury Abbey. 

July 16...Our Lady of Mt Carmel. Thomas Merton named his hermitage for her. The Carmelites, coming from...Mt Carmel in the Holy Land...keep an Eastern Church custom of celebrating Jewish saints and prophets. So...

July 20...St Elijah. There are scholars who think that the Elijah cycle is the key to many of the Gospels. Check it out.

(St Elisha, his disciple, is June 14!)

Other Carmelites in July and August:

July 17, the Carmelite martyrs of the French Revolution. Georges Bernanos Dialogues of the Carmelites, Francis Poulenc's opera, and Gertrude von le Fort's little novel, Song of the Scaffold, are all based on this community going collectively to the guillotine. 

July 22, Mary Magdalene...patron of contemplatives. (July 29, Martha, the busy patron of the rest of us.)

Blessed Titus Brandsma 27 July. He died in Dachau. He was a journalist priest who helped smuggle the Dutch Bishops' letter protesting the treatment of the Jews under the Nazi Occupation in World War II. The result of the protest was Brandsma's arrest and the arrest of Catholic Jews...the only country where this happened...

Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun and convert from a Jewish family. She had a doctorate in Philosophy but could not get a job because she was a woman. She was in a Dutch Carmel when she and her sister were arrested and sent to Auschwitz where they were gassed immediately on arrival. See above under Brandsma. 

August 25th is the near illiterate Carmelite, a Lebanese Catholic, who helped build the Carmel in Bethlehem. She said that there was room in hell for all the virtues, but humility...and room in heaven for all the vices except for pride. 

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July 6, 2008

Sunday 14

Come to me all you who labor and are burdened. Matthew 11.

What a powerful invitation in a very hard burdensome world. Rejoice, Oh daughter of

. The reading is from Zechariah 9, an Advent reading, a piece also from Handel’s Messiah…an Advent/Christmas reading…plunked down here in the summer…and do we need it??? Amen.

Lord of all hopefulness! Tempted to over come hard times with what one journalist calls “happy talk,” we are hopeful but not blind…there is weariness, burdens abound, and the call to Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, is not easy piety, but a brave choice in a less than perfect world.

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July 13, 2008

Sunday XV

Matthew 13

Jesus gives teachings bunched together in 5 groups...Matthew's special format. Matthew 13 is the center of the 5 and is the key to all the rest.

What these parables DO is shock us out of a utopian, unrealistic, idealistic, etc etc view of the Church and the Kingdom of God.

Reading ALL of Matthew 13...not a big task...would open us up to face the scandals and abuses in the Church today.

Only a sect with high standards can be utopian. A church is by its nature a mixed bag. Here the sower sows the same seed but it falls on different kinds of ground. Some of the seeds actually grow...most do not...but those who do yield over and over again.

How do we know this is true?

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Sunday XVI

July 20, 2008

Matthew 13 continues (24-43)...

This time it is wheat and weeds. Don't pull up the weeds because some of the wheat will go with it. How long do we have to put up with this mixed bag??? Shock!!! Until the angels come and sort it out at the last judgment.

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Sunday XVII

July 27, 2008

Mattew 13 continues (44-52)...

The kingdom is us...and we are the pearl of great price. We cost God the price of his son. The kingdom is a kind of net wth treasures and with junk...we wait for the angels (again!!!) tp sort it out.

The EXPERIENCE of this is costly. IT can tempt us to give up on our faith. So we pray "thy kingdom come" "lead us not into temptation."

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Sunday XVIII

August 3, 2008

The first reading about come to the water is Isaiah 55...The water is fre come...Come...It is an Easter reading.

A song from St Irenaeus..." I hear within me, deep in the silence of my soul...as from a stream where living waters flow...I hear a gentle, murmuring....COME TO ME>"

Besides the water Jesus breaks bread in Matthew 14 and we are fed. The Eucharist.....2000 years of being fed in the desert. What have been freed from, how are we in the desert, where is the promised land???

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Sunday XIX

August 10, 2008

Matthew 14:22

Jesus

walks on the water

in the middle of the stormy sea

and Peter asks him, "If it is you, tell me to come to you"

Only Peter!!! The stormy sea. Check out on your search engine Blessed Quietness...it is an old Protestant hymn.

Blessed Quietness, Holy Quietness...He speaks peace to me on the stormy sea. And Jesus does. Peace to you!