High up on the shelf in my Sunday School classroom, there was a picture book about the life of Jesus. It had been written and illustrated long before I was born and its pages were fragile and yellow with age. The Jesus in that book—and the Jesus I met in most of the pictures I saw as a child, was a gentle man with a faraway smile.   Some pictures showed him sitting quietly with a sheep across his shoulders or a child upon his knee. Others showed him standing in a meadow, gazing up at the sky,...

The Gospel Lesson we hear today is imbedded in the “Bread of Life” discourse of the 6 th Chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus has already fed the 5,000 with the barley loaves and little fish and has come to the disciples as they huddled in their frail boat during the storm on the sea. The crowd continued to pursue Jesus and when they gather about him, he announces, “I am the bread of life.” Now comes a lengthy commentary on this claim. But as the Lord takes up this pronouncement, he speaks to...

This is one of my prayer books. It is the volume of the Liturgy of the Hours for this season of the year. And priests and bishops are required to recite the psalms, scripture readings, and prayers from the Liturgy of the Hours five times each day. The promise to pray the Liturgy of the Hours is made at ordination and is a solemn obligation. We who preach promise to pray. But prayer is more than the movement of the eyes and the lips and the sound of the voice. Prayer involves time. Prayer...