Church Talks
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Home ⇰ The Current ⇰ Church Talks
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Beatitude
October 22, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.
A few years ago, after officiating at a wedding, I flew back to St. Louis from Denver on Southwest Airlines. Fortunately I printed my boarding pass the night before. I say fortunately, because the Southwest Airlines computer system went down the day of my flight. There was a lot of chaos and anguish at the airport among the passengers, but I was exceedingly impressed by how the Southwest employees handled themselves and the situation. They were cheerful, polite, sympathetic, reassuring; they did their best and were obviously well trained. They obviously cared about their customers as people. It made me think: what do we care about ?
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Lectio at the Abbey
October 15, 2020 | Gussie Ambrose '21
My name is Gussie Ambrose, I am a prefect and Lectio leader in St. Mary’s dorm. This is my fourth year doing Lectio, and my second year as a leader. I have always been a very outgoing person. I like talking about my feelings and my experiences with people, except when it came to my spiritual life, my relationship and love for God. I think that the reason is because the idea of God, the idea of loving Him and being loved by Him is so immense, so out of this world that I found it difficult to put it into words to share with the people around me.
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Whom Do You Serve?
October 8, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.
I shared with my Form V Theology class the other day a bit of philosophical humor. “God is dead,” said F.W. Nietzsche in 1884. “Nietzsche is dead,” said God in 1900. God always gets the last laugh, but his publicity is decidedly understated.
Two years ago this month, the greatest scientist of the last half of the 20th century had his final book published. Among other things, it definitively states that there is no God. But the author, Steven Hawking, is dead now for 2 years and 7 months and is undoubtedly experiencing some surprising things in his afterlife. I’m not sure why Steven Hawking came to this conclusion about God. His biography says he was born into a family of thinkers. They were not believers. (You can be a thinker and a believer, as I hope all of you are.) His father was a doctor and mother a philosopher. Steven was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist and when you start thinking about the cosmos, it’s mind-boggling.
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Seasons of Change
October 1, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.
It is now officially Fall or autumn. Take your pick. Either way, the sun is definitely on the downhill slide. Halloween stuff began appearing in the stores right after Labor Day and a few Christmas things are popping up already. I used to get a feeling of dread this time of year, knowing that winter was just around the corner. After 70 years, I’ve gotten used to winter, although I haven’t gotten to like it. Eventually, a sensible person accepts the inevitable. I remember my father, somewhere around the age of 70, announcing with irony, “Your mother and I are now in our ‘Golden Years.’” There is some of that irony in autumn. The trees will become colorful for a couple of weeks and then become skeletons, for a season.
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Nothing New Under the Sun
September 24, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.
Nothing is new under the sun. This is one of my favorite parts of my favorite Book in the Bible. It puts things into perspective. Another good perspective is provided by one of my favorite websites, the National Hurricane Center. I checked last night and right now there are no hurricanes, tropical storms or depressions in the Atlantic Ocean. That’s maybe the calm before the storm. The peak of the hurricane season is October, and we’ve run out of names already. Somehow, they do seem very personal. We don’t name them “Tree Smasher”, “Father of Winds” or “Water Terror”; we give them nice human names: Wilma, Sandy, Irma, Harvey – gentle names. Their effect on us is quite personal but not gentle at all.
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March for Life
January 16, 2020 | Lucia McLaughlin
I am here to talk about abortion. Or really, to share my experience at last year’s March for Life in Washington D.C and hopefully influence you to join us next year. Now…. whenever someone talks about abortion, things can get testy. Let me just start off by saying, I am not here to shame or judge anyone or to make anyone feel uncomfortable. But I do want to share with all of you what attending the March for Life has done for me and why I go.
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Walking the Camino
For the Church Assembly of Thursday, February 13, 2020, Ms. Elizabeth Benestad, faculty member of the School, talked about her pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago.
I was at lunch with Fr. Francis recently and we started talking about the Camino de Santiago. He asked if I would give a church talk on my experience. He followed that with – the kids like when the cool teachers speak to them. Ms. O’Reilly responded, You can still do it though Ms. Benestad.
Almost 2 years ago, in the spring of 2018, I took a sabbatical and spent that time walking the Camino. Officially known as the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, it is a pilgrimage. It stretches 800 km (500 miles) from the Pyrenees mountains in France all the way to Santiago de Compostela on the west coast of Spain. Originally a walk to pay homage to St. James where he is said to be buried under the Cathedral named after him, today more than 200,000 people walk The Way each year. One of my closest friends, who actually used to work here, came with me; she was the one who introduced me to the Camino. And lucky for me, she speaks Spanish. I’m not sure how far Latin would have gotten me.
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