Christ the Nonviolent King
Sunday, November 24 is Christ the King Sunday, the end of the Liturgical year. The scriptures for the day are taken the encounter of Jesus, the Nonviolent One, with Pilate.
Saint Oscar Romero
This past weekend, with the gospel of "The Man Born Blind," I gave the following homily. It was inspired by my former spiritual director Pat Carroll, in his book "Take Home Homilies." Take this one home...
2/26/2025 SWEETHEARTS!
I went to a family wedding celebration in Phoenix this past weekend. My nephew Cisco got married, and right around the time of Valentine’s Day, too. It’s wonderful to have people you love actually get married, rather than just live together. It shows commitment and hope for the future.
But what I notice more and more is that families are noticeably smaller than they were a generation or two ago. There are a lot of factors in that calculation, of course. But one of the factors certainly is that there is less hope about the kind of world that couples bring their children into. I have heard that myself, haven’t you?
Probably a major reason is climate change. It seems that every year the world breaks new heat records. Fires, extreme weather, events, and rising ocean levels due to loss of glaciers, and continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Even a place like Seattle is having record high temperatures and smoky summer weather from nearby fires in the northern Cascades and into British Columbia.
Seattle also is very close to the other existential threat to human life on earth. That threat is nuclear weapons. Seattle is within the bomb-blast radius of the Trident nuclear submarine base.
I am currently reading the book Nuclear War - A Scenario. It is chilling. It is very well researched, and tells the story of the outcome of a nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea. Basically the whole world gets destroyed. Things happen so quickly that it escalates out of control. A war of “mutually assured destruction” becomes just that; one side starts it and the whole world gets destroyed. It truly is “MAD.”
I cannot help, but think of Pope Francis, who is calmly struggling for his life at this very moment. He has done more than any human being to speak out against these immoral weapons, in any venue: “It is immoral to possess a nuclear weapon.“
What can you and I do about it? There is only one thing more powerful than a nuclear weapon on this earth. And that is the power of nonviolent, direct action.
Denny Duffell is a deacon in Northeast Seattle, where he lives with his wife of 50 years.
3/11/2025 ORIGINS OF MOTHER’S MAY
The origins of Mother’s Day as celebrated in the United States date back to the 19th century. In the years before the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia helped start “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs" to teach local women how to properly care for their children.
These clubs later became a unifying force in a region of the country still divided over the Civil War. In 1868 Jarvis organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” at which mothers gathered with former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation.
Another precursor to Mother’s Day came from the abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe. In 1870 Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” a call to action that asked mothers to unite in promoting world peace. In 1873 Howe campaigned for a “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2.
In 1870 Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” a call to action that asked mothers to unite in promoting world peace. In 1873 Howe campaigned for a “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2.
Anna Jarvis Turns Mother's Day into a National Holiday
The official Mother’s Day holiday arose in the 1900s as a result of the efforts of Anna Jarvis, daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis. Following her mother’s 1905 death, Anna Jarvis conceived of Mother’s Day as a way of honoring the sacrifices mothers made for their children.
In May 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia. That same day also saw thousands of people attend a Mother’s Day event in Philadelphia. By 1912, many other churches, towns and states were holding Mother’s Day celebrations, and Jarvis had established the Mother’s Day International Association. Her hard-fought campaign paid off in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill officially establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
Jarvis’ conceived of Mother’s Day as an intimate occasion—a son or daughter honoring the mother they knew and loved—and not a celebration of all mothers. For this reason, she always stressed the singular “Mother’s” rather than the plural. She soon grew disillusioned, as Mother’s Day almost immediately became centered on the buying and giving of printed cards, flowers, candies and other gifts.
In 1925, when an organization called the American War Mothers used Mother’s Day as an occasion for fundraising and selling carnations, Jarvis crashed their convention in Philadelphia and was arrested for disturbing the peace! Later, she even attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother’s Day as an occasion to raise money for charity. By the 1940s, Jarvis had disowned the holiday altogether, and even actively lobbied the government to see it removed from the calendar.
Her efforts were to no avail, however, as Mother’s Day had taken on a life of its own as a commercial goldmine. Largely destitute, and unable to profit from the massively successful holiday she founded, Jarvis died in 1948 in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium.
In total, Mother’s Day spending exceeds $20 billion each year, according to the National Retail Foundation. In addition to the more traditional gifts (ranging from cards, flowers and candy to clothing and jewelry), one survey showed that an unprecedented 14.1 percent of gift-givers plan to buy their moms high-tech gadgets like smartphones and tablets.