Abraham obeyed because he trusted the one who bade him to have faith. It was not blind faith, but rather an experience of God as reliable that offered Abraham another way of seeing and evaluating.

If this week's readings have a "theme," it could be "unseen vigilance." Wisdom speaks of the Israelites who kept their faith in "secret," while Hebrews offers the classic definition of faith as the "evidence of things not seen" and speaks of Abraham, who "went out, not knowing where he was to go."

CATHOLICS THESE DAYS are angry. I live in a curious region that votes majority conservative Republican yet harbors a subset of way-out liberals. Both sets of Catholics are angry. While the politics of anger can be complicated to parse, one thing unites the rage on both sides: a crisis of confidence in church leaders.

Gird your loins! A great instruction for readiness that has its origin in Roman times, when soldiers would draw up and fasten their tunics between their legs to give them more mobility and agility in preparation for battle.

The whole day, even before sun-up, his son was chattering away. They were on their first fishing trip together and his son was excited. It soon became clear that the boy hadn't had much experience being quiet.

During the height of the Cold War in the '50s when I was a child, every Tuesday morning at 10:30 the civil defense sirens would go off throughout Chicago. They were supposed to remind us of what we should do if there ever were to be an attack from the Soviet Union.

At Mass each week we say "we wait in joyful hope." Often, joyful hope is not the state people are in when waiting. We wait in anger, anxiety, impatience, annoyance, resentment, or fear that somebody else is going to get what's coming to us.

As the people of God, we ask for God's loving mercy.

The night of the Passover was known beforehand to our fathers. . . . The first reading comes from a rare use of the Book of Wisdom in the lectionary. We find the writer in the midst of a recounting of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt, in particular the Passover.

God will gird himself, bring his servants to table, and wait on them! Behold an unexpected inversion of things, a terrible reprimand to masters, a surprising reversal of subordination. . . .  --Peter Chrysologus  (406-450)