There is so much going on in this simple painting of a single simple girl that every time I’ve studied it, I’ve seen more. As we enter the scene, we see a young woman, alone — in the dark. There is no architectural setting around her. The area behind her is simply black darkness. A
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As we enter the back half of Lent, I’m posting a reflection I wrote for our Lumen group on the night before Ash Wednesday. Good time to go back to those resolutions we made then, and re-commit ourselves to finishing strong…. In our busy and hectic lives, it’s often easy to develop bad habits and/or
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Cafe Societal, SoHo. From the very first encounter on this Advent mission, recounted in “Putting Christ Back in Christmas”, to one of the very last encounters of the evening, “odd coincidences” seemed to be a theme. And as later we share stories and a warm meal late into the night at Louie’s, the odd coincidences
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Bleeker to Broome, SoHo. One of the joys of having the brothers with us for a mission is their sheer numbers allow us to blanket the parish, creating a kind of “Jesus Buzz” throughout SoHo. As I made the rounds from our northernmost outpost on Bleeker St, near the border of Greenwich Village, to our
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Café Societal, So Ho. It’s 9:00 pm on Reconciliation Monday and the missionary team leaders are gathered at “Louie’s” to share a hot meal and stories about an incredible day and evening in the vineyard of the Lord. Our young and enthusiastic seminarians, all 55 of them, have recently departed for the long ride home
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“Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!” (Song of Songs, 2:10) St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, New York, wind chill 26 degrees. I arrived at Mission HQ from the office at 2:30. And already the first wave of enthusiastic seminarians had arrived. Wave upon wave of young brothers followed, over 50 of them
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Spring Lake, NJ. Cloudy rainy morning. In a few short days, our street missionary team will be back in SoHo, engaging passersby about matters of faith and eternity. After nearly two long years of lockdowns, and even with the rumblings of yet another Covid resurgence looming, nearly 75 of us will be there. Seeking souls.
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Mission in the Cloud. Whew! What a grace for all of us who participated in this early Holy Week mission. Last night, many of us went to bed thanking the Lord again for letting us be part of his team, his mission. We all were transformed further along in our missionary journey, some deeply, others gently, but everyone
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Mission in the Cloud. Wow! What a night. Our band of missionaries grew last night, in both registrations, but importantly, in each other. Sensing that, we left almost 20 minutes for interactive Q&A and even that wasn’t enough. Great questions and rich responses from our missionary panel. The Holy Spirit really seemed to be with
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Mission in the Cloud. What a night last night! Well over 120 of you in attendance, many with friends or spouses you’d invited. Thank you for being a part of Day 1. In one short hour, we covered a lot of ground on the topic of fear. It started out pretty dark, until Fr. Shawn
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