PAN DE LA SEMANA

Sunday Reflection/Catholic Homily Solemnity of Christ the King(B) November 22, 2009 Readings: Daniel 7:13-14 / Rev 1:5-8 / Jn 18:33b-37 A spate of movies that focus on end-time mega disasters seems to hog the world’s attention – and morbid curiosity – in our days and times! I am sure my readers all await the release of the much-ballyhooed movie 2012 since its trailers started keeping the world in rapt attention these past months. I am not about to dissuade you from seeing what is basically designed to entertain, even as I did not tell people not to watch the “Da Vinci Code” and its sequel (I actually would want to see it!). In fact, it is just as well for me, for as a preacher and teacher, it is always good to have something that juts out concretely from daily human experience that could be used as jump-off point to discuss something that goes beyond merely human experience. The philosopher Gadamer has a 64 dollar...

Catholic Homily/Sunday Reflection 33rd Sunday of the Year(B) November 15, 2009 We are at the second to the last Sunday of this liturgical year. We are bordering on the ending of a year of the Church. Endings connote many things, including the idea of wrapping up events in the course of a journey, a process, a life trajectory. Endings entail at times having to rush things, so as to put a final note to a course of events, giving final touches to a paper due in school, wrapping up a lifetime project, perhaps, to top off a list of glowing achievements in the course of one’s life. Endings are represented by a period, a full stop. The liturgy today does speak, too, of endings, but not in the senses enumerated above. Endings are really beginnings, if we go by what the readings today tell us. In the Bible, the end-times are really not so much the end of an era, as the beginning of a new one, one that is represented by a languag...