This homily is based on Mark 7:31-37.
I’ve been thinking about Cristy these days. I don’t think I will ever forget what I saw when I last visited her in the hospital. I had been warned about her, but I was shocked anyway. She wasn’t at all the Cristy I knew. Her cancer had ravaged her body: All skin and bones, she stared at me with one eye, the other forced shut by the growing tumor in her brain.
This homily is based on Mark 7:1-23.
I took an early morning stroll today in a city I don’t know, one I’ve never set foot in before. Learning that I had only one day in the city, a friendly Afghan immigrant in a 24-hour convenience store pointed the way to a famous park nearby.
This homily is abased on John 6:51-58.
Last night someone who had gone to an anticipated Sunday Mass bumped into me and surprised me with his reaction. He said: “The Bread of Life?! Again?!”
He’s right. This is the third Sunday that the Gospel reading has been about the Bread of Life–and what he doesn’t know yet is that it won’t be the last. Next Sunday will still be about the Bread of Life! I told him, “If you think listening to it for the nth time is hard, try writing a homily about it for the nth time!”
This homily is based on John 6:24-35.
Our Gospel today is literally good news. Our Lord makes us an important promise: “Whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
Jesus is not talking about physical hunger or physical thirst, obviously. Rather, he is referring to an existential hunger and thirst, that profound need that we occasionally sense in ourselves, a space that nothing the world offers can ever fill.
This homily was delivered on the eve of the 40th day for Immaculada “Bobing” de Leon Garcia.
I heard of Tita Bobing long before I met her. When we were kids, her son Gary used to regale his friends with all sorts of stories about his mom, like the time she made him sing in front of our school principal and how she never forgave him because he had opted to sing a Nora Aunor song. But there were many other stories, mostly about how she raised and took care of her brood of children.
Needless to say, even before meeting her, Tita Bobing, for me, was already larger than life,
