Mini reflection: Whatever is interrupting communication between your heart and the One who crafted it, it can be overcome. There is no door thick enough, no night dark enough, no sleep strong enough. Ask and You Shall Receive.

It’s easy to look at today’s Gospel reading and come away with a view of God as disinterested and irritated, reluctant to give us what we need unless we bang down his door, hound him to the furthest reaches of heaven, wrench him from his reverie and force him to answer just so we’ll finally go away.

Mini reflection: Are you anxious about many things? Then you need to be right where Mary is: at the feet of Jesus, with all your burdens. Martha’s Burdens

It’s time to admit it: I’ve been unfair to Mary in the past. Been a little catty about her. Oooh, Mary, she’s so holy. Well, do you like to eat, Mary? Who made your lunch? Yeah, that’s right: it was Martha. Because you know what? It’s the Marthas who get things done in the world while the Marys lounge around reading Aquinas and attending silent retreats and going to Eucharistic Adoration whenever they want.

It takes a cold, hard, godless heart to step over a wounded man on the street. But in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite didn’t step over the half-dead traveler. I think we picture them doing so, in our collective imagining of this well-known story, but the words of the Gospel are quite clear. “When he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side,” Jesus says of both.

Mini reflection: Too often, life falls short of my expectations — an opportunity didn’t work out, a day didn’t go the way I planned — so I ball up my fists and stomp my feet. And God takes the Book of the Gospels and opens it to Luke, Chapter 10. On Pilgrimage

Before I embarked on my trip to the National Eucharistic Congress last summer with a group from my archdiocese, we had an orientation meeting. At that meeting, the coordinator of the trip shared with us “The Five Rules of Pilgrimage.”