Is God leading us into a desert, a sacramental wilderness because here he intends to speak to our hearts?

You can profess facts, but you can only trust a face. You can only entrust yourself to a person.

“The Lord speaks in the sacred Scriptures,” some might say. “There, you hear the voice of the shepherd.” This is good, but it is just not good enough.

Love is a resolve we must renew each day. We ought to remember this when we promise we will live differently, more deeply, once life returns to normal.

Staying behind closed doors may make us feel safe, but it keeps us from the people, the events and experiences that we need in order to grow into the selves we were meant to become.

The contagion that matters most the Son of God will receive into his own flesh.

The core of the church is contained in these words of Christ: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20). The church must gather, must be collected by the call of Christ in order to fully be the church.

A virus can keep us from gathering. A spirit-wound, it can curtail the sacramental life Christ gave us. But no virus can separate us from Christ.

The preaching of our Lord in the Gospel of St. Matthew—the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables—has come to a close. Now the preacher embraces his passion.

Nothing is more certain than death. Yet normally, nothing is more hidden from our view. We do most everything that we can to not look death in the face.