**🕯️ Thursday of the First Week of Advent LECTIO DIVINA (in the voice of G.K. Chesterton)

Lectio — What the Word Says

I hear Our Lord speak with the thunderous simplicity of a carpenter who knows the feel of stone beneath His feet:
“Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ enters the Kingdom… but the one who does the will of My Father.”

The Pharisees, the sentimentalists, and even I myself have often tried to build castles in the air—beautiful, pious, architectural fantasies—but Our Lord insists that houses belong on rock, not on romance. Floods, like critics, arrive without warning; winds, like temptations, blow whether we want them to or not. And when the storm comes, one does not want a theory; one wants a foundation.

The strange thing about Christianity is that it insists on turning faith into something as solid as geology. It tells us that the soul must learn the art of standing, not merely the art of speaking.

MEDITATIO — What the Word Says to Me

🎵 Song Pairing: “Carry On” — Fun

As I watch my Livestock Guardian Dog puppies tug at a long knotted rope, I cannot help but see a parable of the Church herself—a wildly comic, often exasperating rope of salvation in which each puppy (or bishop, or layman, or stubborn writer like myself) gnaws ferociously at one knot, convinced that this knot is the only knot.

One puppy pulls east, another west, and the rope holds them all, though each insists that his little tug is the crucial labor for the Kingdom.

“If Boston is the fault line of the child sexual-abuse scandal that has convulsed the Roman Catholic Church, then few places have felt the aftershocks more deeply than the Diocese of Amarillo.”

New York Times
August 24, 2002

And here I stand—gnawing at the knot of that tribute to Bishop Matthiesen, erected by John Salazar, a convicted pedophile priest who built it as a grotesque thanksgiving to the bishop who gave him his “second chance.” My teeth are sunk into that knot with all the stubbornness of a T-Rex LGD puppy. Meanwhile, many of my brothers and sisters tug their own knots such as the Diocese of Amarillo Centenial Celebration, sometimes pulling against me, as if my insistence on naming Clergy Abuse is a bothersome yelp rather than a necessary bark.

But the Mass—ah, the Eucharist!—is the place where all our knots meet. Liturgy does not deny the knots. It holds them all together in one rope—the rope of salvation, the rope of the Church, the rope that binds heaven and earth.

To act on Christ’s word is to keep tugging faithfully, but always toward the Rock, not toward the sand of self-importance or indifference.

Oratio — What I Say to God

Lord, make me a LGD for truth but not a brute;
a puppy for joy but not a fool;
a laborer pulling my knot with humility,
while You hold the rope that holds us all.

“Almsgiving can be beneficial to you in erasing past sins, if you have amended your ways.” 

Dilexi te, §46

Purify my heart through acts of mercy
towards victims of clergy abuse in the Diocese of Amarillo,
so that almsgiving—when born of conversion—
can erase past sins and straighten the path beneath my feet as I celebrate the centennial of the Diocese of Amarillo.

Give me courage to act,
not merely to admire the architecture of the Gospel
but to build my house upon it.

Amen

CONTEMPLATIO — Resting in God

Perhaps the rope is not merely a toy for puppies nor a symbol of ecclesial frustration.
Perhaps it is the mysterious rope lowered from Heaven,
the rope the saints have climbed,
the rope knotted with centuries of prayer,
the rope held firmly in the wounded hands of Christ.

And perhaps my knot — my stubborn grip on truth and justice, my insistence that during this Centennial year the Diocese of Amarillo must finally remove the tribute raised by an abusive priest for Bishop Matthiesen who enabled him — is not an irritation or impediment at all.
Perhaps it is the very point on the rope where Providence has placed my hands,
the knot I am meant to grasp and refuse to abandon
until, by grace, the whole rope is tugged safely toward the Kingdom.

ACTIO — I Live It (with Synodality + Laudato Si)

🎬 Movie: The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

👉 Action:

Today I will choose one concrete act of justice that strengthens communion rather than isolates me.

“We require a new and universal solidarity.”

Laudato Si’ §14

So today, I will practice synodality—
walking with others, even those tugging different knots—
and I will pursue justice for the poor and wounded
not by shouting from afar
but by inviting others to hold the rope with me.

My Story

• Bishop Matthiesen, who rode the white horse of public activism even as he brought abusive priests into our diocese—wounds that still mark us today. I spoke with him often, pleading with him to reconsider his “no regrets” about bringing those priests here…
• Bishop Yanta, who sought to enforce the Dallas Charter even when Bishop Matthiesen resisted him, and who bore the personal and pastoral cost of doing so. I met with Bishop Yanta about Bishop Matthiessen’s “no regrets” stance. He listened. He believed me. He acted where he could. And when he retired, he urged me—quietly but firmly—to keep speaking out.
• Bishop Zurek, who told the Diocese of Amarillo he had “no facts” about the Philadelphia report even as Amarillo’s connection to that tragedy was headline news. When I continued to speak out, as Bishop Yanta had once urged me to do, he later wrote that I was not among the faithful and loyal disciples whom the Lord Jesus desires.
• And now Bishop Strickland, whose own fall from leadership echoes the pattern — a man whose zeal burned like a torch but often without the oil of communion, misused by others, yet still a wounded shepherd who, like me, carries pawprints of injury and longing.