Pastoral, Liturgical, Teaching, and Social Justice Moments brought to you by www.DignityUSA.org.
Breath of the Spirit is DignityUSA’s electronic spiritual and liturgical resource for our members and potential members. Nothing can replace your chapter or other faith community, but we hope you will find further support here for integrating your spirituality with your sexuality and all the strands of your life.
We welcome relevant homilies, inspirational writings, social justice opportunities, or theological articles from other sources also — particularly from wise women and men who can help us grow as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) and allied Catholic/Christians. You may volunteer to help with this program or send your comments by e-mailing info@DignityUSA.org ATTN: Breath of the Spirit.
It’s almost impossible to imitate biblical saints, mainly because our sacred authors rarely portray them in ways that can be imitated. Since these unique writers depict these saintly people against the background of faith, they traditionally emphasize some characteristics and completely omit others... more
One of the first questions Scripture scholars must answer is, “What was going on in the biblical community to prompt the author to write this particular passage?” No one sits down on a beautiful, sunny day, no problems in sight, and writes the Bible. Scripture is only written because our sacred... more
Can’t emphasize enough the importance of today’s Genesis reading. One of the earliest writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, it not only sets the theme for many of the writings which follow, but more important for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth seems to have grounded his reform of Judaism in its... more
I’ve always been amazed at tourists who, at arriving at a famous site, simply park their car, get out, take a picture of it, return to their car, and drive away, never once spending even a few minutes actually looking at the site. They’ve got a picture of it, why do they need to spend their... more
I grew up with my teachers’ warning, “If you can’t define it, you don’t know it.” No matter how hard I’d try to convince them that I really knew the answer to their question, either I handed over a definition or they marked me wrong. There was no middle ground.
No liturgical feast is more important yet more underrated in our church than Pentecost. Were we to return to its original meaning we’d have to not only change our church government, we’d also have to change the way we picture God working in our lives.
I often mention that today’s John 17 gospel pericope was always proclaimed on a very solemn occasion in one of the seminaries I attended: immediately after priestly ordinations, just before the meal commemorating that happy event. In that non-biblical context, we (men) automatically bought into the... more
It’s far easier simply to say, “Jesus has risen!” than to reflect on the implications of his resurrection. The fact we have four – sometimes contradictory - gospel narratives of the discovery of his empty tomb prove that point. Because of our evangelists’ Semitic both/and thought process, each... more
I learned very early in my religious career that one sign the Roman Catholic Church is the one and only “true” church revolves around the conviction that only the Roman Catholic Church has never changed through the centuries. Though other churches have frequently changed, we’ve toed the line, never... more
To correctly interpret Scripture, we must take ourselves out of our day and age and put ourselves in the day and age of Scripture’s original readers. For instance, most of us who read today’s Christian Scriptures are members of various institutions which have been promoting the “Christian religion... more
One of the most difficult things for modern Christians to pull off is to put ourselves in the environment of our Christian sacred authors. What triggers them to write, and for whom are they writing? They certainly aren’t writing for followers of Jesus in the 21st century.
One of the most significant lines in today’s three readings comes at the end of our gospel pericope. Appearing to his disciples on Easter Sunday night, Luke’s Jesus reminds them, “You are witnesses of these things.”