RIP: Paul Gould, Jr (1996) (Zoom)

Event Details

Date: 03/22/2025 6:00 am – 6:30 am
Categories: Faithful Departed

Liturgy: Anniversary of Death or Burial
Mass Intention: Paul Brewer Gould
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Meeting ID: 212 243 3458

On the Road Again

Third Sunday of Easter Scripture Readings I can’t overestimate the importance of today’s gospel reading. If you’re looking for an exposé of what the life of a Christian is all about, you won’t do much better than right here. It begins where we all begin—in the midst of disappointment, discouragement, and resignation. We’ve all been there and, in my opinion, without it, you can’t appreciate what it really means to follow Christ. I’d go so far as to say that the cross is the only door to God through Christ, and there is no other. Think about where the disciples were coming from. The master died an ignominious death, some women were talking nonsense about the empty tomb and seeing him, and the Apostles were paralyzed with indecision. There was nothing left for them in Jerusalem. They didn’t need any more drama. Home was only two hours away. Two hours to walk. Two hours to talk. Two hours to do what we always do: lose ourselves in a post-mortem of failed hopes and plans. What went wrong? What did we miss? It softened the sting of loss. It wasn’t at the tomb, it wasn’t in the locked room, it wasn’t in Jerusalem, but it was on the road of remorse that their hearts burned. For the Jewish people, the heart was the center of understanding, not feeling. They’d had enough feeling for a while. What does it feel like, after all, when the thick clouds of confusion start to dissipate and we get to see more clearly, bit by bit, the shape and dimensions of a conundrum that’s held us baffled in its grip for a long while? Doesn’t it burn? The disciples needed to get away from the confusion and chaotic emotions of the city and on the road before any of it could begin to make sense. What happened when they, Scripture scholars that they were, began to look at the all-too-familiar passages of the Law and the Prophets through the lens of the crucifixion? A little distance allowed them to see what they believed from a whole new perspective. What had been so familiar now struck them as if for the first time. It’s sad but true for all of us that it takes a wildfire for us to see the forest for the trees. Was Jesus with them? You betcha… but no less than how he’s with us when we’re walking away. That companion on the road is always with us, but he never walks shoulder-to-shoulder or speaks unless we’re ready, and unless we’re ready enough to want his presence, and to invite him into our private space. He doesn’t come with us unbidden, and he doesn’t stay with us uninvited. We somehow have to be lost and hurting enough to turn to the last resort. God’s still there when all else fails. And then, the meal… sharing the staff of life with a stranger. It’s not an accident that recognition comes at the moment of breakage. This is not just a superficial acknowledgment. The Greek word is επιγινώσκω (epiginōskō). That’s a resonance that began with the new understanding of the old Scriptures and deepens until it shakes us to the core. It’s in our thwarted dreams, our shattered plans, our broken lives that we finally recognize the One who was with us the whole way. In the breaking and sharing of the bread, we are nourished. On the road, we understood that it’s not until we share a life taken, blessed, broken, and given that we are transformed into the Real Presence. We are the bread of transubstantiation. Once transformed, we’re not the same. We’re not satisfied to sit at home moaning, complaining and licking our wounds. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” So, we get up from the table and leave our safe, comfy space, and get back on the road. We go back to where we left, but nothing is the same. Our destination’s not the same. We’re not the same. We’ve had a metanoia to the core. Luke put this story between the empty tomb and the believing Apostles for a reason. It’s not an accident; it’s a lesson. He’s teaching us about the nature of our eucharist. We set out on the road on a Sunday morning like today, with the disappointments and cares of our world weighing us down. We encounter the Scriptures through the lens of our pain, and so our hearts burn within us. We invite our companion to dine with us, and we recognize him—and ourselves—in the bread taken, blessed, broken, and given. And, when all is said and done, we’re sent out to go back where we came from, enlivened, to bring what we have found to others and to be for them the companions on the road that Christ was for us. We have arrived home to Emmaus. It’s time to invite the stranger who walks with us to break bread. Readings & Homily Video Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
Whose Sins You Shall Forgive

Second Sunday of Easter Scripture Readings In preparing for today’s liturgy and homily, once again, as often happens, I discover that the common understanding of the gospel passage is not often the richest one or the best one. It happened once more with this one. Perhaps the usual focus on Thomas’s doubts and his transition to faith may not be the best approach. In fact, it may not be the thrust of today’s gospel at all. Whereas the usual focus on Thomas teaches that faith without proof is a higher accomplishment, how does that affect us who already believe? Remember that John’s mystical gospel implicates us. It’s not easy to find ourselves reflected in Thomas’s experience. If it’s not primarily about Thomas’s doubt and faith, what is the point? Today’s gospel is about one thing: forgiveness. Does that surprise you? Look at where we are in the gospel. What you just heard was the original ending. It is the point toward which the whole gospel has climbed. It is the fulfillment of a promise Jesus made to his disciples: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees it nor knows it.” And again, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name—he will teach you and remind you of all that I told you. Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” That fulfillment happens here in today’s gospel on the day of Resurrection. For John, this is Pentecost, and there is no other. Pay attention to the details John presents us with this morning. It starts on the day of Resurrection, and yet Christ has already ascended to the glory of the Father. He breathes on them. It is the breath of the Spirit that wafted over the waters of chaos to create. Jesus, mirroring the Father, breathes his Spirit over the chaotic band of disciples: cowards, deniers, abandoners, renegades. If the creative Spirit of Genesis brought about the universe and its array, the Spirit of John brought about the community of the church. It creates something out of nothing. And that’s when we notice Jesus’s first words echoing in that upper room: Peace! Eιρηνη (eirene)! Shalom! This is the peace he promised that the world cannot give. The world seeks the end of conflict. The Spirit brings wholeness, healing, fullness of life, and communal well-being. The peace that comes from the Spirit creates new relationships out of old wounds. We cannot understand how this is constitutive of forgiveness until we step away from the concept of sin as transgression. If we’re still counting sins as the number of times we did wrong, we’ll never fully appreciate what John was saying. Sin isn’t transgression. It isn’t wrongdoing. It’s a breakdown in relationships. Once we look around, seeing through that lens, we see our broken selves, our broken bonds, our broken world in a different light. It’s a world that’s not at peace with itself; it’s a world that desperately needs healing… needs the peace the world cannot give. The disciples were gathered in that room in distrust. The doors were locked because they distrusted the Jewish authorities and their minions. They distrusted one another because they’d seen what each of them had done. They distrusted God because the one they’d dedicated their life to in God’s name had failed them. What they found in that room on that resurrection day was peace. The creative Spirit of peace and reconciliation. The Spirit of forgiveness. It has nothing to do with saying you’re sorry, but everything to do with healing the wounds of division. It has nothing to do with beating your breast or on your knees and crying, “O my God, I am heartily sorry…” and everything to do with letting it all go. Don’t think that when Jesus said, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained,” that has to do with the other people. No. When you forgive others as an individual or as a community, you’re healing your side of a broken relationship and setting both of you free to heal. If you retain that brokenness, it remains yours as well as theirs. You see, just as injury is a two-way street, the perpetrator and the victim locked together in a painful dance, forgiveness works the same way. Healing can’t begin until at least one of them gives it up. A man I’ll call David had a falling-out with his brother over their mother’s estate. Nothing dramatic — just the slow poison of a disputed piece of furniture, a perceived slight, a lawyer’s letter. They hadn’t spoken in three years. David came to me not for absolution but because he was exhausted. He said, “I’ve gone over it a thousand times and I’m still right.” I told him I believed him. Then I asked: “How’s that working for you?” He laughed, which surprised him. What he eventually understood — and it took months, not minutes — was that his being right had nothing to do with his being free. He was still locked in that room with his brother, doors bolted from the inside, replaying the same argument. The wound belonged to both of them equally, regardless of who caused it. He reached out. His brother wasn’t ready. That’s the part nobody tells you — you can release your side of it and the other person may not move. But David did something the disciples did: he stopped waiting for the world to fix it and let the Spirit do what the world cannot. He said later, “I don’t know if my brother and I will ever be close again. But I’m not in that room anymore.” Now, where does Thomas come into this picture? Thomas had difficulty accepting that healing […]
Seeing and Believing

Easter Sunday Scripture Readings In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment turned the world on its head. Belief gave way to reason, and the scientific method of observation, questioning, proposing a hypothesis, experimenting, and analyzing took its place. That gave humankind a technological revolution, but it robbed us of something at least as important. It subjected faith to experiential verification, forcing the spirit to compete with the physical—while the conceptual tools of each are incompatible with the other. What I mean is that encounters and experiments belong to two distinct but interrelated universes. Let’s talk about belief. The Enlightenment was right to challenge uncritical beliefs of the sort that infected humanity from the beginning. Humans are, and have always been, storytellers. It’s the means by which we understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos. In short, myth is the framework we use to find and share meaning. Meaning is not a question that science can answer. On the other hand, stories take on a life of their own, and when their context changes—a different time, a different culture—they can not only become divorced from their meaning but can be given interpretations antithetical to their original purpose. Some examples of stories given interpretations far afield of what they were intended to convey include the creation stories in the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. People down to our own day try to apply scientific thinking to these spiritually meaningful texts and succeed only in creating for themselves an unreal universe that has no meaning. They convey neither spiritual nor scientific truths, and rational people are right to challenge those beliefs. They go too far, however, when they challenge the myths themselves because science has no tools to handle spiritual meaning. Why am I talking about this on Easter morning? Because the difference between belief and faith will determine our understanding of Easter. I use the two terms to mean very different things. Beliefs can be learned. They can be shared. They can be expressed. And, depending on context and understanding, they can be wrong. Faith is a very different animal. Faith exists in the realm of experience, in the realm of relationship, in the realm of trust. Faith can find expression in beliefs, and beliefs can bolster faith, but they are not synonymous. We humans do things rather backward. We formulate systems of belief to lead us to faith. Yet faith is the key that unlocks the meaning behind our beliefs. The rationalists are not only right to criticize faithless beliefs, they do us a favor. Faith—that is, trust—must come first before understanding. Look at our gospel today. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found it open and empty. That’s all she knew. Her reaction was fear. Peter came to the tomb and rushed in. He saw the burial wrappings—the shroud and head cloth—folded carefully but empty. His reaction was confusion. The disciple whom Jesus loved hesitated. He approached with reverence. He saw what Peter had seen, but he saw things differently. He saw and believed, though the gospel says they did not yet understand the scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. The disciple whom Jesus loved saw and believed. Was it the love that made the difference? Did his relationship with Jesus allow him to observe what the others had only seen? Was what he saw what we now call the Shroud of Turin? I have seen the Shroud of Turin up close and personal. I have seen, and I believe. If the Shroud is what the physical evidence suggests it may be, what the Beloved Disciple saw was not merely empty linens. He saw linens that bore the image of what had just happened—scorched from within, imprinted by light, still warm perhaps from the event that had passed through them moments before. He saw the first photograph of the resurrection, taken by the resurrection itself. No wonder he believed. No wonder John says he didn’t yet understand—because what he was looking at had no category. It had never happened before. The disciples did not find an empty tomb and construct a resurrection theology. They found evidence of something that demanded a new category entirely. The resurrection is not a conclusion. It is an encounter with something unprecedented—something that leaves marks on linen and on people, and that no one who encounters it up close is ever quite the same afterward. The physical mechanics of the resurrection are beyond our grasp. There is, nor can there be, any physical, experimental “proof” of the resurrection. Our experience of the resurrection begins with the testimony of those who were there. But that’s just the beginning. Our trust in their word—their stories—must lead us to a personal encounter. Like the people of the Samaritan village, we start out hearing their testimony and descend into faith. “We no longer believe because of your word; for we have experienced for ourselves, and we know that this truly is the savior of the world.” Like them, and like Jesus’s own disciples, we cannot seek understanding so that we might have faith. Rather, like Saint Augustine, we embrace fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking understanding. We stand in the empty tomb this morning in the shadow of death. Will we, like the beloved disciple, see and believe? Christ is risen! Христос Воскрес! (Christos Voskres!) Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
The First Word

Easter Vigil Scripture Readings We began in darkness. We began this evening’s liturgy in darkness. We ourselves began in the darkness of the womb. The universe itself began in darkness. We’re asked this evening to reach back and bring forward the תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ (tohu wa-bohu), the shapeless emptiness that came into being in the dark. It’s still with us. It’s still here, underneath it all, resisting all the “let there bes” from God and humanity. It breaks through from time to time, infecting our efforts with futility, our loves with loss, our hope with despair. Its darkness waits patiently for us to rejoin it in the tomb. All of that ends tonight. Tonight we experience…we celebrate the light. As John tells us in his prologue to the new creation, “… the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not devoured it.” [John 1:5] The Nothing cannot swallow creation, the Silence cannot stifle the Word, the Darkness cannot extinguish the Light, Death cannot corrupt Life, and Despair cannot destroy Hope. God’s messenger sits atop the stone we so carefully put in place to bury our weakness, our fear, our guilt, and our shame. We struggle to hide our human weakness away from the light of day. The tomb that held our joys and hopes prisoner in its inky blackness stands open and exposed. “Do not be afraid,” the messenger says, “I know that you are seeking […] the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said.” Darkness and chaos and confusion are banished by God’s word. The waters of tohu wa-bohu—the waters of death and destruction—are transformed by the savior God’s power. The desert of human hunger and destitution is transformed by the waters of God’s love. We approach him without money and without cost. His love comes to us unbidden and unearned and returns to him in the glory of the resurrection. And the dead end of the tomb is revealed as the doorway to endless life. It is finished. Τετέλεσται (tetelestai). Christ is risen. Христос Воскрес! (Christos Voskres!). Jesus Christ has conquered. Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Νικᾶ (Iēsous Khristos Nikā). Glory to God in the Highest. Gloria in excelsis Deo. Praise to Yahweh, our God. Hallelu-Ya! הַלְּלוּ-יָהּ (hallelu-Ya) Alleluia! Alleluia! Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
It Isn’t What You Think

Good Friday Scripture Readings Five years ago this week, I finished the first of my annual Lenten lecture series. The topic was on sin and evil. In that series, I explained how often we look at the world and see evil where none exists because we either fail to realize what creation really is or we forget about it. Without that understanding, today’s events make no sense. How many people, if they gather to consider the Good Friday experience at all, find it senseless at best and, at the worst, blasphemous because they see it as God taking out the punishment we are owed because of sin on his innocent Son. In this case, a lack of understanding leads to a distortion of what God has done, rendering it incomprehensible. For God, creation is not something positive. Creation introduces a negativity into being. Suddenly, there is not simply “I am who am,” but there is God and not-God. We live and move and have our being in that not-God. As much as God is infinite—that literally means without limitations—we exist in a universe bounded by limitations of all sorts. Without those limitations, we could not exist, yet here we are. They are limitations of space and time, limitations of experience and knowledge, limitations of will and strength. Although Jesus’s experiences of betrayal, injustice, hatred, slander, abuse, torture, and death may border on the extreme, they only differ in extent and severity rather than in kind from what people experience every day. We’re tempted to think of Jesus as a victim because we understand that there was no reason he should have suffered as he did. But that’s not the person John shows us in the gospel. What we see, on the contrary, is a man who in himself is the imago Dei—the very image of God himself—willingly embracing all the limitations of our human condition even unto death, death on a cross. From the earliest moments of the Christian Church, people have been applying the text of Isaiah 53:5 to Jesus: But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. Yet, his crucifixion was neither a punishment nor retribution from God, but a lesson to be learned. And what was this lesson? That regardless of the difficulty, tragedy, or injustice, no matter what we must endure as human beings in this life, God goes through it with us. God is not indifferent or impassive, but when we hurt, God hurts, and unbelievably, God even passes through the gates of death with us. And this is not some tale from the far-distant past. Anamnesis tells us that we’re present to it happening here and now. “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall also be with him in his resurrection.” [Rom 6:5] All that is necessary is trust—the same trust Jesus had when he looked back at all he had taught and all that he had shown the world about the Father’s love as he said, “It is finished.” Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
The Three Faces of Eucharist

Maundy Thursday Scripture Readings Tonight, the focus is entirely on eucharist. Tonight, we not only observe the eucharist, we descend into it. We experience eucharist as our sacred communal meal. It touches something primal in our psyche. It’s a sharing of the prerequisites of life. Bedouins traditionally will abstain from eating unless and until they have someone to share food with. Hosting a meal causes a shift in “mana;” in prestige and obligation. It places the guests in debt to the host—a debt that must be repaid in kind to maintain both their relationship and their social standing. That spiritual inequality lies at the heart of all thanksgiving—all eucharist—but most especially when we recognize that the one we are most deeply indebted to is God and that our thanks will never be adequate to repay the gift… or will it? Our debt to God is for much more even than life. It’s too easy to think of God as creator, the One who got this all started, the one who said, “Let there be light.” Yes, God is the one who wound up the clockwork universe, but that lets us off the hook. If we’re just products of God’s great machine, can’t we just say, “Much obliged” and carry on? But no… That God is much too small and much too distant. Ours is a God who gets his hands dirty with time, with human history, and with us. Today’s first reading shows us this God in technicolor. There’s the sacrifice of the lamb—the return of life to the God who bestows life. Then there’s the marking of human dwellings with the lifeblood of that sacrifice that preserves the lives of those within. Then there’s the escape from slavery into freedom—the freedom to offer thanks to our liberator God. Then there’s the escape from those who could put an end to us—our salvation. Even that is followed by a covenant relationship with the One who saved us. And, finally, there’s the memorial meal where we get to be a part here and now of the creator, savior, personal God who has done all these things. But is that enough? Is sharing in the meal that recapitulates God’s creating, saving, loving actions sufficient to balance the scales of obligation? In our second reading, we come to experience the adequacy of our eucharist, not because of who we are, but because of who he is. What was being offered to the Father in the upper room that night wasn’t an empty, token gesture of thanks, nor a symbolic offering of blood sacrifice, but the Son of God offering thanks to the Father on our behalf. Jesus’s eucharist ended with a commission to his disciples—to us. He charged us to do this in remembrance of him. This was not to be a commemoration, but anamnesis—a recapitulation of Jesus’s offering of himself, of his sacrifice, of his passover from death to life. “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory.” Our eucharist is his eucharist. Our thanksgiving is his thanksgiving. Our sacrifice is his sacrifice. Then, why doesn’t John’s gospel even mention “This is my body” and “This is my blood”? Why does John change the subject and show us an event that none of the other evangelists even mention? What deeper meaning are we being confronted with here that may be drawing us in and implicating us? For a religious tradition that has been so intensely focused on the real presence of Christ in the eucharist, how often we fail to grasp the full meaning of what’s happening. There is a real presence here that is too often glossed over, and Paul warns the Corinthians about the consequences of not recognizing the body and blood of the Lord. The action that John describes in the gospel is radical. It is the kenosis—the self-emptying—that we heard about on Palm Sunday in the flesh. Jesus emptied himself—taking the form of a slave. Foot-washing was the work of the lowest household servant—Jewish law specified that a Hebrew slave could not be required to do it. Jesus’s laying aside his garments and wrapping himself in a foot washer’s towel would have been like farting at a state dinner—socially inappropriate. No wonder Peter was appalled. In his self-emptying, Jesus has taken the pursuit of power and prestige and emptied it of any meaning or relevance it could have had for his followers. We may, in the past, have heard that there is a connection between the sacrificial meal of the eucharist and Jesus’s washing his disciples’ feet. That “connection” doesn’t go nearly far enough. We need to recognize that there are not two related things, but only one. John is showing us that the body of Christ in the bread and wine is identical to the body of Christ washing and being washed. They are two sides of the same coin, and even the words used are the same: “Do this in memory of me” and “…as I have done for you, you should also do.” Both are the same anamnesis. Both are making present the body of Christ, emptying himself in thanksgiving to the Father. One bread. One body. One Lord. If kenosis—self-emptying—is the essence of the Incarnation, and kenosis is the essence of the eucharist, and kenosis is the hallmark of Christ’s body, then service of one another isn’t the result of obeying Jesus’s command to love one another. It’s constitutive of our faith and the means by which God interfaces with the world and we with God. It’s not what a Christian does, it’s what a Christian is. Dorothy Day—founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who spent fifty years washing the feet of the poor in the most literal sense—was once asked why she did it. She said, “I don’t wash their feet because they are holy. I wash their feet because I am.” The foot washing doesn’t depend on the worthiness […]