Tag: Christianity

Houston, June 21, 2024

    

An institute dedicated to the study and examination of Orthodox matters in light of holy Tradition was recently launched.

The new Orthodox Studies Institute is based at St. Constantine College in Houston.

Dr. John Mark Reynolds, President of St. Constantine College, and Matthew Namee, Executive Director of the Orthodox Studies Institute (and founder of Orthodox History), announced the Institute in a recent email:

Happy feast of the Ascension of the Lord!

The Saint Constantine College is excited to announce the launch of the Orthodox Studies Institute (OSI), which exists to advance the study and application of Orthodox Christianity in faithfulness to Holy Tradition.

As national interest in the Orthodox Church grows in the United States, many of the faithful, as well as non-Orthodox, are seeking resources that faithfully represent the historical and spiritual tradition of Orthodox Christianity. OSI provides resources and educational opportunities, highlighting the historical witness and contemporary realities of global Orthodoxy.

The announcement also includes links to some of the Institute’s first offerings: a study on the priest shortage crisis facing Orthodoxy in America, a paper on deaconesses, and an archival collection of historical documents.

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ATLANTA (OSV News) — On the final day of the Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication addressed questions posed by journalists about the dicastery’s regular practice of posting art by Father Marko Rupnik — a Rome-based priest accused of sexually abusing multiple women — on the Vatican News website and social media, especially to illustrate church feast days.

“As Christian(s), we are asked not to judge,” Paolo Ruffini said to a room full of communications professionals after giving an address at the CMC June 21. He explained that while the process of a Vatican investigation into Father Rupnik is still ongoing, “an anticipation of a decision is something that is not, in our opinion, is not good.”

“There are things we don’t understand,” he said. Ruffini also added they “did not put in any new photos” of Father Rupnik’s art, but rather have been using what they had. “We didn’t decide what was not on our charge to decide,” he said.

In December 2022, Rome’s Jesuit headquarters disclosed it had suspended the Rome-based priest and famous mosaic artist from membership after sexual abuse claims, but Jesuit officials said the claims had been dismissed by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith because of the church’s 20-year statute of limitations.

In June 2023, the order said it had expelled Father Rupnik for disobedience after it compiled a 150-page dossier of credible accusations against him, believed to involve between 20 to 40 women.

However, on Oct. 27, 2023, Pope Francis waived the statute of limitations and instructed the doctrinal dicastery to initiate a new investigation after the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors had highlighted “serious problems” in handling his case.

Mentioning “civilization,” and “humanity along the centuries,” Ruffini spoke directly to the question some have put forward about removing or destroying Father Rupnik’s art.

“Removing, deleting, destroying art has not ever been a good choice,” Ruffini said, mentioning legendary Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known widely as simply Caravaggio, who in the course of his life killed a man.

Removing Father Rupnik’s art from public space “is not a Christian response,” Ruffini said.

Responding to the question first posed by Colleen Dulle of the Jesuit-published America Magazine, Ruffini mentioned that the Jesuit curia in Rome did not remove Father Rupnik’s art from their chapel.

“I think this is also something that can be inspiring in terms of being Christian,” Ruffini said, encouraging patience toward the decision of the Vatican bodies investigating the case.

In a follow-up question, OSV News asked Ruffini how communion through communications, which the prefect mentioned in his address to the journalists gathered there, corresponds to the communion with victims of abuse regarding the posting of Father Rupnik’s images to the Vatican News website, and what he would like to say specifically to victims regarding his comments.

“The closeness of the church to any victims is clear,” Ruffini replied.

He added, “But it’s clear also that there is a procedure going on. So we have to wait (for) the procedure.”

“We are not talking about abuse of minors,” Ruffini said. “We are talking (about) a story that we don’t know.”

“And I think that as Christians, we have to understand that the closeness to the victims is important. But I don’t know that this is the way of healing,” Ruffini added, saying that “there are people that (are) praying in sanctuaries of many churches all around the world” in front of mosaics created by Father Rupnik.

“I don’t think we have to throw stones thinking that this is the way of healing,” he said.

“Do you think that if I put away a photo of an art (away) from … our website, I will be more close to the victims? Do you think so?” he pressed journalists at the end of his answer. When an answer was given in the affirmative, Ruffini responded: “I think you’re wrong.”

Born at Zadlog, Slovenia, Father Rupnik was ordained in 1985 and became famous for his large-scale mosaics, which are displayed at over 200 Catholic centers worldwide, including the Vatican’s Redemptoris Mater Chapel and the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.

After accusations of spiritual and sexual abuse from dozens of women, including former sisters of the Loyola Community, the calls for the removal of the priest’s artworks have since come from advocacy groups.

The alleged victims of Father Rupnik told OSV News in April that his art cannot be separated from abuse claims.

The close link between Father Rupnik’s artistic work and the abuses he allegedly committed was confirmed to OSV News by Gloria Branciani, a former religious of the Loyola Community in Slovenia who alleged Father Rupnik abused her for nine years when the Jesuit was the spiritual director of the Loyola Community.

“In Rupnik, the sexual dimension cannot be separated from the creative experience,” Branciani told OSV News, when asked about his artistic projects. “In portraying me, he explained that I represented the eternal feminine: His artistic inspiration stems precisely from his approach to sexuality,” she explained.

On Feb. 21, Vatican News reported the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “has contacted several institutions over the past months to obtain documentation related to Father Marko Rupnik,” and that the Holy See Press Office confirmed that the dicastery’s investigation was “expanded into other ecclesial realities with which there had previously been no contact.”

South Bound Brook, New Jersey, June 21, 2024

Photo: stsuots.edu     

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA’s St. Sophia Seminary in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, has received full accreditation for the first time.

The accomplishment comes just before the seminary’s 50th anniversary. The accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) begins this summer and runs through 2031, the seminary reports.

St. Sophia’s is thus the only Ukrainian Orthodox seminary outside of Ukraine to offer an accredited program. As an institution of the UOC of the USA, the seminary is under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The seminary’s leadership, Rector Metropolitan Anthony, Academic Dean Archbishop Daniel, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Fr. Theophan Mackey, attended the ATS meeting in Atlanta this week at which the school’s accreditation was officially announced.

“This milestone will enable us to expand our academic offerings and continue our mission with renewed vigor and purpose,” commented Fr. Theophan.

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Mental health, discrimination against minorities, including LGBTQ+ people, and a desire to be included more in church life were some of the concerns young college students shared with Pope Francis on a Zoom conference call.

“‘No’ to discrimination, no. ‘Yes’ to proximity, closeness. Proximity is what leads to love,” the pope said in a response to a comment about discrimination in the Philippines during his more than one-hour dialogue with 12 students June 20.

The conference call was part of Loyola University Chicago’s Building Bridges initiative, which it began in 2022 in partnership with the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and with the support of five other Vatican dicasteries.

The project seeks to create a synodal experience for students attending partner universities in different regions around the world in which student groups listen, dialogue and discern common concerns and hopes that a representative then shares with Pope Francis during a live Zoom call.

The June 20 call was the fourth Building Bridges event and it connected students from the Asia Pacific region, including from Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Philippines and Taiwan.

Divided into four groups of three students each, the students shared personal and common experiences, opinions, appeals and insights with the pope, ending with a question, most often, seeking advice and guidance.

Seamus Lohrey in New Zealand told the pope he thinks the church should not blame people for not attending Mass and instead it should do more active outreach directly ministering to where people are at.

“We expect people to meet our rules instead of us meeting and then elevating them. I am confident that this turns people away from a relationship with Christ and makes our church unattractive,” he said.

People who have procured an abortion, for example, are “desperately in need of unconditional love,” and yet, they “must meet our requirements before we fully minister it to them. This is a contradiction of the word unconditional,” he said, asking the pope how they can promote recognizing the dignity of all people and “not just regular Mass attendees.”

The pope did not address every question and statement directly, rather, he picked up on some of the students’ main points and recurring topics.

He said the only thing that seriously attracts people are those who witness Christ with their actions. The pope connected that idea with another student’s concerns about mental health, saying witnessing Christ, helping people feel they belong to a group or community and giving people a chance to participate with others is what builds up a person’s human dignity.

“Belonging is what saves us from vulnerability,” the pope said, asking students to reflect on what their biggest weaknesses are and to let others help them.

Vulnerability is connected to mental health, he said, adding that “one of the things that affects mental health the most is discrimination.”

He asked the students to think about how they might feel discriminated against and how they may discriminate against others, but without losing their sense of belonging and identity that helps them work, accompany and move forward with others.

The second group of students included Jack “JLove” Lorenz Acebedo Rivera from the Philippines, who had told the Loyola moderators he wanted to wear a rainbow sash to represent the LGBTQ+ community, but didn’t want it to seem too “political.”

He spoke about discrimination against Muslims and women, and how he feels like an outcast who is “bullied due to my bisexuality, my gayness, my identity and being a son of a single parent” who wants, but cannot get, a divorce.

“Please allow divorce in the Philippines and stop using offensive language against the LGBTQIA+ community. This leads to immense pain,” Acebedo told the pope, appealing to him and the Catholic Church to help fight discrimination against all people.

The pope commented by also taking into account the two other students’ comments on identity, hatred and people thirsting for God’s unconditional love.

Closeness, seeking to form relationships and identity are linked, Pope Francis said. “You can’t find your own identity if you don’t have a relationship” built on fraternity and not on discrimination.

“Jack spoke about such intense, intense discrimination, discriminatory policies that are very common among people,” such as the example of his mother and discriminating against people “according to identity,” he said. From this emerges discrimination against women, which is “a very, very dangerous thing” and is resolved “with proximity. We are all neighbors.”

The pope told the students that the capacity to love is what makes people grow. “Proximity makes us neighbors with no discrimination and with a lot of love.”

The only discrimination they should practice, the pope said, is to be able “to discriminate between true love and false love; always choose true love.”

Elizabeth Fernandez from Sydney, told the pope that many young people are lonely and “bombarded by secular ideologies, mocked for our faith and outnumbered in our missions to be beacons of hope.”

Many young Catholics lack appropriate faith formation, made worse by some religion teachers in Catholic schools who “use class time to preach their own agendas of abortion, contraception and gender theory,” she said. “We propose that all religion teachers be trained catechists and that young people be incentivized to become catechists themselves,” who would teach their peers in public schools.

Replying to Fernandez, the pope underlined the dangers of isolation. To avoid isolation and loneliness, “we must have formation in the faith, to know well what our faith is because this can help us be authentic Christians.”

“You say that sometimes people mock, persecute, restrict us,” the pope said. The thing is, Christians have always been persecuted, mocked and ostracized “from the very beginning.”

The key is to avoid the temptation of developing “a lukewarm Christianity, a diluted Christianity that has no substance. No, Christianity (is) concrete,” he said.

“If they persecute you, endure it because martyrdom is part of Christianity,” he said.

The pope thanked the students for everything they said because it allows him to better understand the lives of young people so he can always be close to them.

He reminded them he will be traveling to Indonesia and other countries in the Far East in September. He said he was excited to learn more about their cultures because “you have a lot to give as a culture. Do not feel inferior.”

Sofia, June 21, 2024

bg-patriarshia.bg     

The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church chose yesterday three candidates to participate in the upcoming Patriarchal elections, reports the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

His Holiness Patriarch Neofit, who presided over the Bulgarian Church for 11 years, reposed in the Lord Patriarch Neofit of Bulgaria reposes in the LordThe Patriarch was in poor health in recent years.

“>in March . His successor will be chosen from the among the three candidates by a council of the bishops together with clerical, monastic, and lay representatives, on June 30.

The three candidates for the next Patriarch are:

It is noteworthy that none of the hierarchs who concelebrated with Ukrainian schismatic “bishops” in Istanbul Bulgarian hierarchs concelebrate with Ukrainian schismatics in IstanbulFor the first time, hierarchs of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church concelebrated with representatives of the graceless “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” sect yesterday at Life-giving Spring Monastery in Istanbul.

“>in May were chosen as candidates.

Met. Gregory was elected temporary head of the Holy Synod following the repose of Pat. Neofit, with responsibility for organizing the Patriarchal election.

Constantinople’s decision is against the canons—Bulgarian Met. Gabriel of LovechThe decision of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, announced on Thursday, October 11, does not correspond to the canons of the Church, and the problems arising from it must be discussed at a pan-Orthodox Council, His Eminence Metropolitan Gabriel of Lovech of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church said in an interview with TASS on Friday.

“>Metropolitans Gabriel and ”Our Paschal Joy is Grieved”: The Open Letter of Metropolitan Daniil of Vidin, Bulgaria concerning Constantinople’s actionsI believe it necessary for reasons put forth in my letter to share with Your Eminence my concerns with regard to recent developments in the Orthodox Church.”>Daniil are well known for their firm Orthodox stance on ecclesiology and the issue of the Ukrainian schisms.

Met. Daniil is also well known in the diaspora, having labored for 8 years as vicar in the Bulgarian Church’s Diocese of the USA, Canada, and Australia.

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ROME – This week the diocesan phase of the beatification cause for Italian mother Chiara Corbella Petrillo, who refused cancer treatment to save her unborn child, will conclude, marking an important step in her path to being declared a saint.

The closing session for the diocesan phase of Corbella’s cause was scheduled to take place Friday, June 21, at the Roman Basilica of Saint John Lateran, where the headquarters of the Diocese of Rome is located, and during which the results of a lengthy inquiry into her life, virtue and reputation for holiness will be presented.

Born in 1984, Corbella met her future husband, Enrico, during a trip to the Marian shrine at Medjugorje in 2002. They began dating and were married six years later, in September 2008 at Saint Peter church in Assisi, home to Saint Francis of Assisi and the soon-to-be canonized teen saint, Carlo Acutis.

Shortly after their wedding, Corbella found out she was pregnant, but the child was diagnosed with anencephaly, a serious birth defect in which the baby is born without parts of the brain or skull.

Despite the fatal diagnosis, the couple decided to carry the pregnancy to term and their daughter, whom they named Maria Grazia Letizia, died half an hour after birth.

A few months later, Corbella discovered that she was pregnant again, this time with a boy whom they named Davide Giovanni. However, Davide was also diagnosed with serious malformations, and was missing his lower limbs.

The couple again decided to carry the pregnancy to term, and Davide died shortly after his birth in 2010.

After undergoing genetic testing that ultimately ruled out any connection between the pathologies of her previous two pregnancies, Corbella became pregnant again with her third child, another boy, whom the couple named Francesco.

However, during the fifth month of her pregnancy, Corbella was diagnosed with a carcinoma of the tongue, and underwent an initial surgery in March 2011.

A second surgery was required, as well as radio and chemotherapy, to treat the disease, however, Corbella chose to delay her treatment until after the birth of her son, who was born healthy in May 2011.

Just a few days later, Corbella underwent the second surgery and began her course of chemo and radiotherapy, however, by then the cancer had spread, and Corbella died June 13, 2012, at just 28 years old.

She is buried in the Verano cemetery in Rome, in the same tomb where her two children, Maria Grazia Letizia and Davide Giovanni, are buried.

After Corbella’s passing, news of her death and her choice to postpone treatment to save her unborn child spread, and she quickly gained a reputation for holiness.

In 2018, the Diocese of Rome published an edict announcing the opening of her cause for beatification and canonization. She was declared a Servant of God, the first step in the sainthood process, and the diocesan inquiry into her life and virtue began.

On Friday, the closing of the diocesan stage will be presided over by Bishop Baldo Reina, viceregent of the Diocese of Rome, and members of the diocesan tribunal who conducted the inquiry, episcopal delegate Monsignor Giuseppe D’Alonzo; promoter of justice Father Giorgio Ciucci, and actuary notary Marcello Terramani.

In the edict opening Corbella’s sainthood cause, the Diocese of Rome said her sacrificial choice for her child “remains as a beacon of the light of hope, a testimony of faith in God, the author of life, and an example of love greater than fear and death.”

This love, the diocese said, allowed Corbella to tell her friends and family that she considered it “a privilege to know in advance to know that I would die, because I could say ‘I love you’ to everyone.”

According to the edict, Corbella also told her mother, “If the Lord has chosen this for me, it means that it is better this way for me and for those around me. Therefore, I am happy.”

Corbella is one of a growing number of women in Italy, whose staggeringly low birthrate is an increasing concern of both Pope Francis and leading political figures, who have gained notoriety for refusing treatment for life-threatening illnesses in order to save their unborn children.

In 1962, Italian wife and mother Saint Gianna Beretta Molla died after refusing treatment for a tumor in her uterus that was diagnosed while she was pregnant with her fourth child until after the baby was born. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

Earlier this year, a young Italian woman named Azzurra Carnelos died shortly before her 34th birthday after she refused treatment for a recurrence of breast cancer that was diagnosed while she was five months pregnant with her first child.

The child, a boy whom Carnelos and her husband named Antonio, was born in the fall of 2023. Carnelos died several months later, on April 13 of this year, in her home in Oderzo.

These stories have had a particular resonance in Italy, whose low birth rate Pope Francis has often referred to as a “demographic winter,” calling on Italians to be open to life and to have more children.

“Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague” (Thames & Hudson Ltd, $21.95) is a book about the art of painting and the life of the artist.

It’s about aging, decaying, dying, and the stubborn tenacity of the creative urge.

Author Christopher Neve, a British artist and writer (“Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting,” [Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2020]) was spurred by the COVID-19 lockdown, his own increasing age, and his sense that the earth itself might be dying.

To ride out the pandemic, he returned to his isolated childhood home in the British countryside. He gazed upon the flowers, trees, and birds he loves, knowing that one day this particular countryside will be no more, and knowing, too, that his appreciation was sharpened by this very ephemerality.

Could it be, he began to wonder, that many artists produce their ripest, most innovative, most profound work in their last years?

Is it worth taking a second look at art by people who have already peaked in the eyes of the world; who have become weakened physically, emotionally, and perhaps even mentally, and yet are still painting, drawing, sculpting, growing?

He compiled “Immortal Thoughts” in 2020, interspersing his profiles with ruminations on COVID’s terrifying global spread. He reflected on the last years and works of Poussin, Constable, Pisarro, El Greco, Chardin, Morandi, Rouault, and Chaim Soutine, among others.

I first came across Soutine at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and instantly fell in love. A Lithuanian-born Jew who made his way to Paris, his life, personal hygiene, finances, romances, and health were a perpetual mess. He died in agony of stomach cancer at 50, basically fleeing from the Nazis.

You don’t have to have a degree in art history to appreciate “Immortal Thoughts,” which includes 29 high-quality color illustrations.

Neve isn’t a critic of art; he’s a lover of art, and a lover of the people who make it — Soutine chief among them.

He’s also one of those people who have followed a passion — in his case, painting — but excel as well at another.

His writing is gorgeous, not only because of the beauty of the prose, but because he has taken the time to enter, as much as possible, into the hearts of the painters he profiles: their terrible losses, their isolation and loneliness, their physical frailty and, in many cases, their poverty.

He sets forth their biographies — not the typical critic’s list of exhibits and descriptions of how this or that work was restored, but the stuff you really want to know: their failed marriages, dead children, arguments with neighbors, stays in mental institutions. Their dogged daily return to the studio in spite of it all, the nearly insane drive by which they stay at their watch till the end. The memory, intuition, and dreams he imagines them using to create what he often sees as their best work even as they’re dying.

“In talking about Soutine’s last paintings,” Neve writes, “I need to discuss the idea of risk. Risk in painting is characteristic of many artists’ last work. … That is because they knew far too much to be held up by technical difficulties and because it no longer mattered to them very much what patrons and buyers might expect.”

“In Soutine’s case extreme anxiety and angst are part of his method of inner expression turned outwards, his way of making something his own by realizing it in a system of energetic marks. … To get in touch with your inner genius you act now, this very moment, on impulse and exactly true to your own nature. … This energetic ardour, an uncontrolled appetite for paint and life, can produce out of violence and disorder and profound anarchy an occasional truth, the truth he first imagined as if by accident.”

Of another, earlier artist, he observes:

“Very soon it will be February 8th, 1564 [the day Michelangelo died]. Do not attempt to guess what is running through Michelangelo’s head in these last five drawings.

“All are of the crucifixion. Four include Mary and Saint John. Each drawing is blotched and marked, full of revisions, alterations, corrections, and patently incomplete. In two the vertical of the cross has been changed using a ruler, apparently at a late stage, to a slight tilt, the better to express the dead weight of the body. For in these drawings Christ is dead. … Mary and John are in despairing attitudes. … Their feet heavily grip the ground and their clothes are either absent or so rudimentary as to accentuate their nudity by wrapping round it. The body of Christ himself is beautiful beyond all belief, full of hollows, the agonized muscles of the chest and stretched stomach, which are at the centre of each drawing, conveyed miraculously by a sort of smoke of changing indication within the form.”

“Do not say: This is drawing by an old man’s shaky hand. For it is drawing by one of the greatest sensibilities there has ever been, at its wits’ end.”

Neve lavishes the same depth and care on all his subjects. Would that we aim toward immortality in our own “late style” — however and whenever that comes.

Photo: eparhia-saratov.ru The Ascension of the LordAscension of the Lord

“>feast of the Ascension of the Lord is a joy for us. It is the joy that from henceforth and for eternity well have become inseparable from Christ. The feast of the Ascension speaks to us not of separation, but of meeting, and the possibility of returning home. The Savior ascended into heaven not in order to leave us, but in order to prepare a place for us.

When God came to the world, the apostles thought that this event applies only to the Jews. But as it turns out, this applies to all people living on earth. Christ’s sacrifice is universal and has the same meaning as gravity. Regardless of whether a person knows the formula of the law of gravity or not, he is still subject to that law. Likewise, Christ’s sacrifice has the same significance for all people. Having taken on human nature, Christ ascended to heaven and was seated at the right hand of the Father. Now the Savior, like a spiritual magnet, draws fallen human nature to Himself, giving every person the possibility of attaining deification. It is important that those whom the Lord wants to draw to Himself have something that is like unto Him.

When the apostles gazed at Christ ascending to Heaven, their souls desired to follow after their Teacher as soon as possible. But God willed otherwise. The Lord send His disciples into the world so that they would witness to God, Who came to earth in order to save every human being. This witness was the beginning of the universal preaching of the Good News, and its result was the appearance of the Church of Christ in the world.

From that time on and to this day, every Christian fulfils the same mission as did the holy apostles. We all bear witness to our faith in God. So that this witness would bear fruit and lead people to salvation, we need to live as the apostles lived—looking heart and soul to Heaven, where our Savior ascended, and live for the glory of God on earth, hoping in our speedy meeting with Christ in His heavenly, paradisal abodes.

St. Aloysius was born in Castiglione in 1568 to a noble Italian family. As a boy, he was trained to be a soldier and a courtier, but despite his family’s wishes, he retained a great devotion to God and the faith. When he was 12, Aloysius received his First Communion from St. Charles Borromeo.

He renounced his inheritance and entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome, where he studied under St. Robert Bellarmine. He embraced the Jesuit life of simplicity, self-control and self-denial.

When the plague struck Rome, Aloysius was sent to care for the sick and dying in the city’s hospitals. He treated each person he met with compassion and care, finding the face of Christ in each of them. Aloysius contracted the plague at the age of 23 and died.

St. Aloysius was canonized in 1726. He is the patron saint of youth, AIDS patients, and those who care for them.

Job 38:1, 8-11 / Ps. 107:23-26, 28-31 / 2 Cor. 5:14-17 / Mk. 4:35-41 

“Do you not yet have faith?” Our Lord’s question in today’s Gospel frames the Sunday liturgies for the remainder of the year, which the Church calls “Ordinary Time.”

In the weeks ahead, the Church’s liturgy will have us journeying with Jesus and his disciples, reliving their experience of his words and deeds, coming to know and believe in him as they did.

Notice that today’s Psalm almost provides an outline for the Gospel. We sing of sailors caught in a storm; in their desperation, they call to the Lord and He rescues them.

Mark’s Gospel today also intends us to hear a strong echo of the story of the prophet Jonah. He, too, was found asleep on a boat when a life-threatening storm broke out that caused his fellow travelers to pray for deliverance, and then to marvel when the storm abated (see Jonah 1:3-16).

But Jesus is something greater than Jonah (see Matthew 12:41). And Mark wants us to come to see what the apostles saw — that God alone has the power to rebuke the wind and the sea (see Isaiah 50:2; Psalm 18:16). This is the point of today’s First Reading.

If even the wind and sea obey him, shouldn’t we trust him in the chaos and storms of our own lives?

As with the apostles, the Lord has asked each of us to cross to the other side, to leave behind our old ways to travel with him in the little ship of the Church.

In their fear today, they call Him, “Teacher.” And it is only faith in his teaching that can save us from perishing. We should trust in Christ, and like Christ – who was able to sleep through the storm, confident that God was with him (see Psalm 116:6; Romans 8:31). We should live in thanksgiving for our salvation, as today’s Epistle tells us—as new creations, no longer for ourselves but for him.