30 September 2023Final Sunday in the Season of Creation Lectionary texts: Our lectionary readings today did not include the well-known account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet in John 13. Rather, they illuminate that event. So let us recall: During his final meal with his disciples Jesus surprises them by assuming the role of the…
Tag: Bridgefolk
Washing All Our Relatives’ Feet:
Ars Profetica
a poem by Ivan J. Kauffman from his collection,The Ironshop & Chartres (1982) Declaimed.That is a word seldom used these days.Once popular it has fallen into disuse in our timeswhen anger and psychology have been all the rage. And now I must ask (timidly)is it so unfashionable as to be unspeakable that one might take…
Remembering my friend, Ivan J. Kauffman (1938-2015)
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.” – Reinhold Niebuhr Some men and women measure their hope by business plans, grant proposals, and bullet points. Ivan J. Kauffman measured his hope by oceans. Ivan died on July 15, 2015, as he neared the age…
Washing feet, getting real
Homily for liturgy of footwashing Bridgefolk 2014 Texts: Psalm 33, Philippians 2:1-11, John 1:1-27 Perhaps you have read the novels of the Southern writer Walker Percy. Percy had barely begun a medical career in the early 1940s when he contracted tuberculosis. During his long recuperation he began reading the Russian novelist Dostoevsky, the Danish philosopher…
Sharing Peace:
Mennonites and Catholics in Conversation
Sharing Peace brings together leading Mennonite and Catholic theologians and ecclesial leaders to reflect on the recent, first-ever international dialogue between the Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican. The search for a shared reading of history, theology of the church and its sacraments or ordinances, and understandings of Christ’s call to be peacemakers are its most prominent themes.
For Joetta
Prose Haiku July 2007 We walk the labyrinth, my love and I. Curving around each other, almost crossing, turning away, back, parallel, apart, one mysterious destination. Labyrinthian ways run through the bed where we touch tenderly and weep bitterly. They take us to the table at the center of the maze – extend? defend? bend…
Benedictine values and the need for bridging
Monastic Institute, Saint John’s Abbey, 6 July 2006 Bridgefolk is about, well, bridging — transcending old polarities, exchanging and integrating the gifts of mutually “separated brethren” and sisters too. It is about imagining Christ’s Church without the divisions that long seemed to be givens, and doing the next thing God gives us to do in order that…