Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ cover art

Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ

Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ

Written by: Cold Drinks Questions and Christ
Listen for free

About this listen

 Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ is a Podcast by Fr Parker Love of the Archdiocese of Regina. Each week, Fr Parker tackles something that he wants to talk about for more than a half hour, usually a book, tv show, or movie. Art Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Social Sciences Spirituality
Episodes
  • BONUS HOMILY: Easter Vigil 2022

    BONUS HOMILY: Easter Vigil 2022
    Apr 17 2022
    Here we are: we have reached the climax of our celebration. For the past seven days, we have journeyed from the Lord Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, to the final hours of His life, His death on the Cross, to this: the glory of the Resurrection. The glory of the Resurrection that it so beautifully described in the Easter Exsultet as “the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.” Resurrection is so often described as the goal of Christian life, the promise made by Christ to all Christians. I dare say, though, that we might not fully grasp the meaning and the significance of the Resurrection of Christ or what it offers to us; actually, I don’t think it takes too much boldness to say because to grasp the fullness of the Resurrection is to grasp the fullness of God, and what we must constantly remember is that pursuit is beyond our reach. The human family has been given a mediator to the inaccessible God, His Son, Jesus Christ, and to know the Church and the breadth of its gifts is to know Him, but I don’t think even the boldest of Christians would claim to know Christ, His Church, His will for them, or the meaning of the Resurrection fully. We live in that in between time where the victory of life over death, good over evil, Christ over sin has already been accomplished, but in the in between time we still don’t see Christ fully in the great beatific vision that we have been promised—that is to say, that great heavenly splendour that awaits us. As we have done throughout this Holy Week, it would be useful to turn again to the symbols that our faith offers us to understand the great mystery of God in our life. On Palm Sunday, we saw how even of deepest despair could be a proclamation of faith; on Holy Thursday, we saw how service and love of our neighbour brings God even more fully into the world; and on Good Friday, the symbol of suffering was made manifest in the example of Mary who herself is a symbol of perfect discipleship. At this most ancient celebration, the clearest and most distinct symbol offered to us is the contrast between light and darkness, especially as it’s made manifest in the Easter fire that continues to burn in our Easter Candle. Rightly, the Easter Vigil begins with this holy fire because, unlike how fire is often a symbol for the Holy Spirit at times like Pentecost, it is a symbol for Christ. The fire burns greatly in the beginning of time and indeed even before time when all that existed was God. In the time before time, before space, God lived in perfect relationship with Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation happens, and this is the very first scripture we hear proclaimed: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” but if there is a beginning, there must have been something before that beginning. That something before the beginning is what we call God; St Thomas Aquinas might call it the unmoved mover. The point is that God was before there was.  His first creation, while “the earth was [still] a formless void” was light. But for a time, human life still seemed to be in darkness. God had not vanished, but His light was that of a candle in the darkness, and the people He chose to reveal that light to most clearly were the Jewish people. Why God chose particularly the Jewish people will always remain for us here a mystery, but certainly the faith of men and women like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were part of that choice. Their great example of faith, of encountering God in profound ways, anticipates the faith we are called to emulate and the deep relationship with God that we are similarly offered.  The people in these ancient times, the Jewish people included, did not know God as we know God; we must uphold their great dignity and uniqueness while acknowledging that to know Christ is something different, and indeed, something better. That doesn’t mean that Christians themselves are necessarily better; we need only to look at history recent or long ago to know that with certainty. But that knowing Christ is objectively something different and better is what the Lord reveals to us in the great prophecies of Isaiah and Baruch that we hear tonight—the promise that the Lord will not abandon Israel, and how that promise is manifest in His messiah, His messiah who is the manifestation, in fact the Incarnation, of law and prophet, of God Himself. This promise is what Baruch and Israel are anticipating. Turning back to the Exsultet, we hear proclaimed, the great petition:             “We pray you that this candle,              hallowed to the honour of your name,              may persevere undimmed,              to overcome the darkness of this night.              Receive it as a pleasing fragrance,              ...
    Show More Show Less
    11 mins
  • BONUS HOMILY: Good Friday 2022

    BONUS HOMILY: Good Friday 2022
    Apr 16 2022
    Good Friday looks a lot different than most of the days when we gather as a community. Most of the time when we gather as a Catholic community, we gather to celebrate the Mass, to celebrate the great event when through the power of prayer, God transforms bread and wine into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. This great transformation is the presence of God in the world, the Eucharist, the reason Catholics gather. We call it, and I repeat over and over again, the source and summit of our faith, the origin and destination—where our faith comes from and where our faith is going. This great mystery of our faith is removed from us on Good Friday. We don’t celebrate Mass on Good Friday. We still receive Communion; indeed, that the Communion we share today was consecrated last night at the Holy Thursday Mass is a great symbol of the continuation that exists between the two celebration and the celebration that we look forward to in our Easter celebrations tomorrow night and Sunday Morning. But the absence of a Mass today is a unique thing; in fact, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the only two days of the year that there is not a Catholic Mass. Sometimes, Priests need days off or communities can’t gather, but always, every day, somewhere in the world, at all times except Good Friday and Holy Saturday, there is a Mass being celebrated. The great absence of this prayer, of this celebration, of this opportunity for our community to gather is minimized by what we do here, in this unique way that we gather, this unique way we manifest our prayer and raise our intentions to God. We gather in memorial, in commemoration, of Jesus’ death, this very sad moment in our salvation history. The man Jesus is stripped, beaten, and the crucified beside two criminals, where our Lord who did nothing wrong is treated with such contempt and violence and evil. Yet in the last moments of Jesus’ life, as we hear in the Gospel of St John today, His focus is not on His suffering; His focus is not on His impending death, but indeed, it is on the Church, the community of believer that He will leave behind. So, in this great action of prayer and this great sacrifice, He also takes this great action of entrusting the Church in the Grace and Providence of His Mother, Mary, who will be there for a time to journey with the Church as a guide, as a leader, as an example of what it is and how it is to follow Christ. Mary, we know, followed Christ Her whole life perfectly, from the moments before His birth and beyond the moments after His death. Mary is a perfect example of what Christian faith is and how Christian faith should be lived out.  Faced with the death of her son, she provides for us a model of how to deal with suffering, how to deal with sadness: meeting and encountering her son who has been beaten and flogged and is now crucified, there is no description of a profound change in Mary; she continues along in her mission, ministry, and prayer as a mother, disciple, and lover of Jesus. This reveals to us a great acceptance, and in the great acceptance of her suffering, Mary makes Christ present by bearing suffering beside Him. She carries out her daily duties, but there could be no denial that suffering carries tangibly in her life. Indeed, the great tradition of the Church gives Mary the Crown of Martyrdom not because she was killed violently as the rest of the other martyrs in our tradition have but because of the great suffering she endured seeing her Son crucified and die on the Cross.  In this great example of what it is to suffer, we see what it is to bear the wounds of Christ without actually physically bearing the wounds of Christ. We see in this a model of discipleship, an invitation and a reminder that our suffering, although it is not physically on the Cross with Christ, it is similarly offered to the Lord and with the Lord. Our suffering has the opportunity to be a great prayer of supplication to the Lord, an opportunity to bring our suffering as prayer to the Lord as Mary did and as Isaiah describes when he anticipates how the Messiah will bear “our infirmities and carry our diseases” in the first reading. Even if all we can do is suffer beside the Lord, He will use that suffering as a great prayer, as a great invitation to draw deeper and deeper into relationship with Him and deeper and deeper into imitation of Him. Suffering can and indeed does become the holiest part of our lives. Sometimes, I think we would like to imagine that holiness is pious things we do like kneeling in the Church or doing great acts of service, but what the Gospel reveals to us today, what the model of Mary shows us today, is that the greatest act of Christian Faith is suffering. When we see the hurt and the brokenness of the world, but we choose to worship God anyway, that is great Christian faith. When we act not in absence or ignorance of that suffering, nor when we expect to see some miraculous removal of...
    Show More Show Less
    9 mins
  • BONUS HOMILY: Holy Thursday 2022

    BONUS HOMILY: Holy Thursday 2022
    Apr 15 2022
    Before diving deeply into the heart of tonight’s homily, I want to ensure that we all share an understanding of an important concept. A symbol is something that points to something else of much deeper or more abstract meaning than the initial symbol itself could contain. A stop sign, for example, is a symbol for the instruction to stop; the sign itself cannot make us stop, but our shared knowledge of what it stands for, makes us stop. The Sacraments are symbols—not simply symbols, but symbols nonetheless. Baptism points us to a much deeper understanding of eternal life than simply being washed in water could do alone. The Eucharist points us to Christ’s salvific actions, on the Cross, to His Resurrection, and even more. Baptism and Eucharist are much more than symbols, of course; beyond pointing to it, Baptism is the entry into eternal life in the here and now; Eucharist points to Christ’s salvific actions because it is truly the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. But the symbolic action of the sacraments is crucial to understand because it allows us to enter more deeply into the mystery—that is to say, to enter more deeply into that which is beyond the human experience: the divine experience. The eternal life offered in baptism is a good thing, indeed a very good thing, but by understanding the symbolic value of the sacrament, we are invited to enter more deeply into the mystery, to ponder what it means that are sins are forgiven and to embrace salvation it offers in the here and now—to be changed by God not just in eternal life but in our present life. Every time we receive the Eucharist, we receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, even if we don’t understand what it is or what it points to, but when we fully participate in the great mystery by understanding what the symbol points to, we even more fully embrace the Grace that God gives us, allowing a more profound change in us through God’s action in the world. I preface tonight’s homily be ensuring an understanding of symbols because tonight’s Mass has a symbol that is only seen once a year, and sometimes, as has been the case in the last two years, and I gather even longer in this Parish community, even more rarely. The Washing of the Feet is a unique symbol in tonight’s Mass. The Gospel assures us that this important symbol is not an arbitrary decision, but an imitation of the last moments of the life of Jesus. Describing this important event in the last hour of Jesus’ life, Pope Emeritus Benedict says that: “Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act. He divests himself of his divine splendour; he, as it were, kneels down before us; he washes and dries our soiled feet, in order to make us fit to sit at the table for God’s wedding feast. …[T]he meaning is that Jesus’ love ‘to the end’ is what cleans us, washes us. The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us ‘clean.’” There is such profound theological meaning in the Washing of the Feet. It reveals even more clearly how the ministry of Jesus is about the emptying of Himself, the willingness to be the servant instead of the served, and it points to how Christ’s salvific act will wash us of our sins and make us prepared to share in His great heavenly wedding feast. Long before I knew about this great theological meaning, and indeed, long before I knew much about Christianity at all, I shared with a friend about my desire to know more about the Christian faith. Growing up, her Christian faith was important to her, and one particular moment stood out. As I remember her telling me, near the end of a retreat opportunity, the small group of young Christians she spent much of her time with were gathered together and told that they were going to have an opportunity to wash one another’s feet. There was much trepidation in this small group about what that would mean. The Washing of Feet is such a unique thing that there isn’t really any contemporary equivalent, but in Jesus’ day, it really was just a sign of power; the master would have his dirty feet washed by his slave who was understood by all to be beneath the master. In her group, my friend was uncomfortable as they were all instructed to take off their shoes and socks, and sitting around nervously with her peers, she was very unsure what to do next. The leaders in the group took the initiative, though, and one leader in particular made a bee-line to her, a leader whom she thought never really liked her and with whom there had even been some conflict. The leader poured warm water over her feet and smiled awkwardly at her as he wiped the water away, and my friend described how in that moment, all the awkwardness washed away, all the tension between the two of them washed way, and she knew that she was loved. In this great act of service, in ...
    Show More Show Less
    11 mins
No reviews yet