Our Lady Of Light

04/26/2026

Congratulations to our newly Confirmed! May the Holy Spirit guide you always. 🕊✝️

Thank you, Bishop Michael Pham, for celebrating with us!

08/31/2025

08/31/2025

Preparation for the deep pit bbq

07/18/2025

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Matthew 12:1–8), Jesus corrects the Pharisees with this theme of his ministry: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

Every saint had a past, and every sinner has a future. That is key to Catholic spirituality. In the lives of every one of these heroes of the faith, there is some conversion. And every sinner—every one of us—has a future. That is why we soak in the mercy of God.

There is a beautiful reference in the Psalms to oil running down upon your beard, upon the collar of your robe. The divine mercy is like that: poured out upon us, poured out without reservation—and not because it’s earned, because it can’t be earned.

God doesn’t love us because we’re worthy. We’re worthy because he loves us. We don’t deserve his mercy, but we soak it in and thereby are transformed.

06/22/2025

Friends, our Gospel today (Luke 11b–17) tells about the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus instructs the crowd to recline, and they do so on the grass. Taking the loaves and dried fish, Jesus makes a meal that satisfies the enormous crowd. They are hungry, tired, worn out from their exertions, and Jesus gives them sustenance for the day.

For Thomas Aquinas, the great metaphor for the Eucharist is sustenance, food for the journey. The Eucharist is daily food, nourishment to get us through the day to day. How effective would we be if we never ate, or ate only on special occasions and in a festive environment? Not very. So, in the spiritual life, we must eat and drink or we will not have strength.

Is this just meant in some vague symbolic way? No, rather in a vividly analogical way. For just as the body needs physical nourishment, the spirit needs spiritual nourishment, and there is no getting around this law.

“Well, it’s no big deal if I stay away from Mass and refrain from receiving Communion.” Think again!

06/16/2025

Friends, today, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38–42), the Lord exhorts us to nonresistance to evil. Martin Luther King Jr. was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s techniques, and Gandhi learned them, largely, from the Sermon on the Mount.

Both Gandhi and King appreciated that the text dealing with the nonresistance to evil has nothing to do with passivity in the face of injustice but rather with a new and distinctive type of resistance.

Consider the Lord’s injunction, “When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.” I realize that this sounds like mere passivity, fleeing before evil, but the truth is anything but. In Jesus’ time, you would not have used your left hand for any type of social interaction, since it was considered unclean. Therefore, to strike someone on the right cheek is to strike him with the back of your hand, the way a master might treat a slave.

By turning the other cheek, one neither fights back directly nor flees but rather stands his ground and declares, “You will not treat me that way again.” It thereby effectively mirrors back to the aggressor his aggression. It is the declaration that the aggressed person refuses to cooperate with the world of the aggressor.

06/10/2025

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Matthew 5:13–16), Jesus calls his followers salt and light, thus exhorting them to evangelize their culture.

The theme of Jesus’ “inaugural address” is conversion: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” And the motif of his final words is mission: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” The Christian life is lived in between, and under the conditioning of, these two imperatives.

Having been seized by the beauty of revelation, our only proper response is a change of life and a commitment to become a missionary on behalf of what we have seen. In the scriptural tradition, no vision or experience of God is ever given solely for the edification of the visionary; rather, it is given for the sake of mission. Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Peter, and Paul are visionaries because they are missionaries.

When Jesus crucified and risen is not proclaimed, a beige and unthreatening Catholicism emerges, a thought system that is, at best, an echo of the environing culture. Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, said that the Church has taken its own dynamite and placed it in hermetically sealed containers and sat on the lid.

06/09/2025

06/09/2025

Eucharistic Pilgrimage San Diego Celebration!

06/07/2025

Come, Holy Spirit!