Our readings for Sunday are here.
***Repeat from Seventh Sunday posting*** I do not have any notes or poems for Fr Dennis homilies for the Sixth Sunday Ordinary Time, Cycle A or C. In a moment of inspiration this morning (Thank you, God!), it made more sense to offer the notes and poems from the Seventh and Eighth Sundays of Ordinary Time, Cycle A rather than the Sixth Sunday, Cycle B.
The Roman Catholic (and many denominations’) date of Easter is derived each year from the observance date of Jewish Passover, because Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead three days after being crucified, following the Passover meal with his disciples, i.e., the Last Supper. Over millennia, this became a murky process with human biases and frailties built-in, on top of shifting and different calendars.
Catholic Answers (catholic.com) offered a succinct description of current calculation of the date of Easter and associated observances:
- On the Gregorian calendar (the one that we use), Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after March 21. Easter thus always falls between March 22 and April 25.
- Now, to find Palm Sunday (the sixth Sunday of Lent) you start with the date of Easter and back up one week: It is the Sunday before Easter Sunday.
- To find Ash Wednesday, you start with the date of Easter Sunday, back up six weeks (that gives you the first Sunday of Lent), and then back up four more days: Ash Wednesday is the Wednesday before the first Sunday of Lent.
As a result, it varies how far into the “single-digit” Sundays of Ordinary Time we go in any given year. This year, we will not observe the Seventh and Eighth Sundays of Ordinary Time prior to entering Lent. We celebrate Pentecost, and then at the end of May return to the observance of daily Mass in the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time (with various memorials on different days).
On Sunday, June 14th, we will observe our first Sunday Mass in Ordinary Time, the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A. I have found this site of an online Ordo, created by a Jesuit, Dennis Smolarski, SJ, is very helpful to see the patterns of liturgy. The Ordo is the schedule that indicates which observance and guidelines for each day’s mass(es) are associated with each year’s calendar date.
Annnnd, all that leads us back to why I might not have notes from a particular combination of Ordinary Time and Cycle. 🙂 ***End repeat from Seventh Sunday posting***
These are the poems, my notes, and interpretations of Fr Dennis’ homilies from the Masses of
- February 23, 2017 8:30AM (poem only)
- March 2, 2014
_______
The poems Fr Dennis references these years are (and without indication of permission on the websites):
In 2017, I must have caught up with D2 during the day and found out the poem he read.
In 2014, we reflected that
- This gospel is analogous to the Sermon on the mount and its deeper revealing, e.g., “Do not murder” of the Ten Commandments is revealed by Jesus’ teaching: Do not be angry.
- D2 also shared a retreat story about someone feeling inadequate before God, and the response this person received (in prayer, rl recollects from the story): Fear not, you are inadequate. 🙂 So. Turn it over to God and worry less.
- There is a popular misquote of Saint Ignatius, in which the actual emphasis for prayer and works are reversed. But the original is along the lines of: Pray as if everything depends on us, work [peacefully] as if everything depends on God.
- In Ann Arbor of 2014, there were not near as many beds of goldenrod as there are now in 2025. Instead, day lilies filled garden beds and residential hillsides. He suggested that day lilies, too, work with the Mary Oliver poem’s insight “of giving one’s gold away” gracefully and naturally.
The Surest Sign 