December 5, 2004
Third Sunday of Advent

Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

In the summer of the year 49, Paul departed from Philippi, the first city in Europe where he founded a church. He left Luke there to pastor this new congregation, but Silas and (it would seem) Timothy came with him as he proceeded southwest along the Egnatian Road, one of the great arteries that held the Roman Empire together.

A day or two and some thirty miles later, Paul’s party came to Amphipolis (Acts 17:1), about 3 miles inland from the sea, at the point where, Herodotus tells us (History 7.114), the Persian emperor Xerxes had crossed the River Strymon in 480 BC on his way down to the Battle of Thermopylae. As Paul and Silas came near Amphipolis, they could not help but notice beside the road the large statue of a lion that had already stood in that place for nearly 500 years. It was a monument erected there to commemorate the victory of the Athenians over the Edoni in 437 BC, and today’s visitors to northern Greece still stop to admire and photograph it, almost two and a half millennia after that battle.
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November 28, 2004 Second Sunday of Advent, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

When the Apostle Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the triad of things that “abide,” he takes care to assert, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). This superiority of love within the standard Pauline triad seems noteworthy in two ways.

First, there is the stark fact that Paul accords the supremacy to love, not faith. Let me suggest that if Paul had not made this point explicitly, there is reason to suspect that certain later readers of his epistles might have concluded, “and the greatest of these is faith.” My speculation here is justified by the plain fact that some of Paul’s later readers really did attempt to condense his teaching on justification by coining the expression “faith alone.” Pressed on the point, of course, those same students of Paul explained that real faith, living Christian faith, necessarily includes love. Love, thus, is subsumed into their full definition of faith.
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November 21, 2004, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings, by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon

The ancients understood the strength of things arranged in threes, and the thesis that “a threefold cord is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12) expressed a truth that no one in olden times was prone to doubt.

A simple deference to geometry sufficed to settle the question. The triangle, after all, is plain geometry’s only stable figure with straight lines. Geometry–literally, the measuring of the earth–is solidly founded on trigonometric functions, and the surest way to calculate the earth (or the heavens!) is by trigonometrical survey.

When we make such a survey, moreover, we are well advised to steady our instruments on a tripod, for nothing is more stable. Indeed, anyone ever seated on a wobbly chair can testify that chairs themselves seem to prefer three legs to four. Their wobbling is an agitated protest against that extra limb.
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