Breath of the Spirit

In his lectures and writings on the Fourth Gospel, Fr. Raymond Brown always stressed the uniqueness of John’s late first century work. It not only contained narratives and sayings of Jesus found nowhere else in the Christian Scriptures, John also championed a “church structure” quite different from his fellow evangelists. Brown coined the term “apostolic” churches for the communities of Mark, Matthew and Luke. These three Synoptic authors stressed the continuity of their writings with the preaching of Jesus’ first disciples.

If the bishops at Vatican III are moved to designate an official church insect, I trust it will be the lowly, despised cockroach. For all its bad qualities, the cockroach has one unique characteristic with which Christian can identify: its ability to constantly adapt and evolve. Entomologists tell us that the ancestors of our modern roaches were thriving on earth long before dinosaurs appeared. And whatever calamity forced dinosaurs into extinction, didn’t seem to dent these perky little bugs’ ability to increase and multiply.