There is no doubt that at the heart of the religious experience is salvation:  God’s hope that all be saved coupled with man’s need to live in a way that claims the prize already won. 

Sometimes God works in comforting ways.  While I was Rector-Principal at Cathedral Prep the administration often had to face the dilemma of students needing to be removed for academic reasons.

Once again, we come to the most famous of all of the parables of Our Lord in Saint Luke’s Gospel, that of the Prodigal Son. No less than Charles Dickens declared this as the greatest short story ever written.

The Gospel we proclaim this Sunday offers a simple message, a message that is at both the heart of the liturgical season of Lent and, perhaps even more importantly, the basics of the Gospel: “REPENT!”

As in all things, when we read a passage presented to us in the lectionary from the Holy Gospel, we need to place it into the proper context. If we read this particular passage from the Gospel according to the Evangelist Saint Luke, we might get a bit confused.

The gospel reading presented to us for the First Sunday of Lent is rather familiar to all of us — Our Lord’s temptation in the desert. In fact, in every cycle of the lectionary (recall that the “A” cycle offers us Matthew’s Gospel, the “B” cycle offers us that of Mark, and in the “C” cycle, which we are in this liturgical year, we are reading from the Gospel of Luke), this important event in the life of Jesus the Christ is proclaimed.

No disciple is superior to the teacher, but when fully trained every disciple will be like his teacher. All of us are on a journey, led by the Shepherd, Jesus Christ, as he leads us to the Father’s house.

A few weeks after my installation as Pastor, I received an anonymous gift from a parishioner. My secretary found a package beautifully wrapped with an envelope taped to it with my name on it.

Over the last 12 years of my priesthood and during much of my time as a seminarian, people would ask me about my vocation story. The question would always begin with the phrase, “How did you hear the call?”