Fr. Joe Dailey

Send us Fan Mail Living inside a community of love is always costly. “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” St. Paul encourages us, and then  goes on to show us what that looks like: “not seeking my own benefit but that of the many.” (1 Cor 10:33)

Send us Fan Mail By reading Job next to Mark, we begin to grasp the extent of the salvation that is happening here. The world is, in fact, alienated from itself and without hope. But with Jesus, the state of things comes back to plumb, people sink into rest. The evening and the morning are no longer full of disappointment but are overflowing with messianic salvation.

Send us Fan Mail At the end of today’s Gospel, Mark returns us to the theme of authority and teaching. Now we know that he is writing about the kind of teaching which liberates, which discerns the demonic powers which oppress people and seeks to bring about new beginnings.

Send us Fan Mail Notice that what Jesus is doing is itself a sign that the kingdom of God is breaking in. Someone – John the Baptist – has been lost. In gathering a new people, Jesus is ushering in God’s kingdom, a new economy In which no one is expelled excluded, or handed over.

Send us Fan Mail We are coming face to face with some very disturbing images of ourselves. But Jesus turns towards us, looks into us, and asks: “What are you looking for?” Jesus comes to show us the way out.

Send us Fan Mail In these few short verses, Mark has given us an overview of the entire story of Jesus, and Jesus has not yet spoken a single word.

Send us Fan Mail When you walk by God’s shining radiance, then you shall be radiant at what you see. The meaning of this glorious feast, Epiphany, literally means “to shine upon.”

Send us Fan Mail If we have lived long at all, we know that no one can love us like family, and no one can hurt us like family. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Send us Fan Mail God appears in, with, under, and as flesh, with a human body, a body made from the same stardust that makes up all other bodies. 

Send us Fan Mail We too are asked to make a dwelling place for God; to put skin on God, making Christ present and living among us.

Send us Fan Mail I  learned this story from John Shea, who received it as a gift from an Hasidic Storyteller Reuven Gold. It is sometimes attributed to "unknown origin." This is M. Scott Peck’s version of the “The Rabbi’s Gift” as he tells it in the prologue of “The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace."

Send us Fan Mail “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)

Send us Fan Mail Mark's Gospel is just the beginning. After we have heard it, the Gospel continues in us. We won’t need pen and ink; we write the Gospel with our lives. In welcoming Christ among us, every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, all food and drink become a sacrament. And God’s many faces are now everywhere.

Send us Fan Mail Advent means to come. We imagine that we are waiting for the coming of God into the world; but it is God who is waiting for us to incarnate divine love.

Send us Fan Mail Words and Music by Joe Dailey, ©copyright 1988

Send us Fan Mail Matthew 25 should not be read as a parable about the sorting of individuals in the afterlife according to principles of personal charity, but as a prophecy of how nations are measured in history according to a politics of caring for those on the margins, the least of Jesus’ family.

Send us Fan Mail The problem with the timid servant who buried his talent is not that he was an ineffective venture capitalist, but that he fundamentally misunderstood the nature of what he had been given. The divine mercy— received as a gift—is meant to be given to others as a gift. 

Send us Fan Mail The wise maidens are the ones who keep their lamps trimmed and burning, ready to lift a torch for anyone: the hungry, the poor, the stranger and the outcast.

Send us Fan Mail Our beloved dead are connected to God, and therefore connected to everything that God loves.

Send us Fan Mail "“The only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” (Léon Bloy)

Send us Fan Mail Hymn for the Feast of All Saints, reflection on the reading 1 John, 3:1-3

Send us Fan Mail When the Pharisees ask their last tricky question, Jesus does indeed out-trick them. But he doesn't do it by giving the right answer; he out-tricks them by actually being the right answer.

Send us Fan Mail On our best days, remembering that we are made In the image and likeness of God, we will make God present in our living and loving. On that day, the world will have a glimpse of what God looks like. 

Send us Fan Mail In his new encyclical, Pope Francis points to the worldwide tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic that momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all.

Send us Fan Mail Jesus authority and power is shown quite clearly: Jesus is the one who gives life instead of taking it.