Mary M. McGlone

Scripture for Life: Today's Gospel challenges us to identify ourselves. What do we live for? What is worth giving our lives for?

Scripture for Life: The Spirit works to disquiet us, to keep us restless like seeds and leaven that are impelled to grow, to burst into life. 

Scripture for Life: Today we hear Jesus' well-known allegory of the sower and seeds, wonderful readings for summertime.

Scripture for Life: Tom Sawyer made his task such an attractive work of art that his buddies paid for a chance to join in. That's what Christ seems to be offering us today.

Scripture for Life: Jesus' idea of family was very different from that of his contemporaries — and much larger. So, too, his sense of identity. He knew he was part of the whole God created.

Scripture for Life: God does not parachute in to solve everything. It's not that easy. God shares this hope with us — that we will follow the Spirit's inspiration to resolve the world's hopelessness.

Scripture for Life: Today's Gospel question asks how we might practice the creative compassion that incarnates the kingdom of God in a suffering world.

Scripture for Life: Jesus offers his life, himself, as a gift to the world to nourish us as the Father nourishes him. 

Scripture for Life: What kind of renewal does the Spirit bring to the face of Earth? Our official church teaching offers an answer that will not be comfortable for all of us.

Scripture for Life: Today's feast invites us to admit our own frustrated desires for certainty in the midst of doubts or weakness of faith. The disciples didn't have all the answers. What they did have was a mandate.

Scripture for Life: The love Christ talks about is not primarily an emotion, but an embrace of our shared identity as creatures, human beings invited into the same life, the same depth, the same identity in God.

Scripture for Life: Are we there yet? No, and we won't be until the end. "There" happens when all is one in Christ and in the Father, and as long as there is life, we are on the way. 

Scripture for Life: When Jesus the Good Shepherd says that he calls each sheep by name, he's saying that he knows each of them uniquely, loving their distinct gifts, talents, desires and limitations.

Scripture for Life: The disciples' carrying the sorrows of the world was a type of penitential rite — begging to see God's mercy in the midst of tragedy. This begins the liturgy Luke's Emmaus story suggests for us.

Scripture for Life: Easter proclaims that we, the motley communities of our family, neighborhood, parish, church and world, can live in such a way that others see wonders and signs of what can be.

Scripture for Life: On this Easter morn, let us heed the command to start again, to reinterpret everything in our own lives and all of history in the light of Christ's definitive victory over evil.

Scripture for Life: As we move toward celebrating the holiest week of our liturgical year, God continues to say, "If only you believe, you will experience my death transforming glory, my life-giving Spirit, my future."

Scripture for Life: Jesus' healing action for the blind man — which happened on a Sabbath — spurred deeper questions: How and when does God act in our world? What does God want from us?

Scripture for Life: Our God thirsts for real presence, for contentious or questioning prayer, for genuine interaction that opens us.

Scripture for Life: The story of the Transfiguration bids us to let go of inadequate images of God in order to discover something new. Free of our preconceptions, we can be surprised by God's unimaginable designs.