Mother Claire's Sermons

When I was working at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA, we held a children's chapel during the liturgy of the word every Sunday. One Sunday, we were talking with the kids about the call to love our enemies. The kids were struggling with the lesson because none of these K-3rd graders had enemies. Plus, their only exposure to an enemy was probably in a superhero cartoon, so of course none of them had an enemy like the Green Goblin. And so the kids had a really hard time understanding what it was to love an enemy because they couldn’t understand having an enemy. While adults understand that enemies occur in real life and usually don’t have masks and superpowers, we oftentimes have the same problems with this text as the kids in children’s chapel had. We wouldn’t identify people as enemies. Sure there are people that I don’t particularly like. There might even be people that I think are actively against me, but I don’t feel comfortable calling them enemies. It just feels li...

When you begin seminary, there is a whole host of new vocabulary to learn. My friend Fr. Stephen calls them “Ten Dollar Seminary Words”. For example, if you want to get lunch, the place to go is not the “cafeteria” but instead the “refectory”. If you are writing a paper on some scripture, it isn’t a “section”, but rather a “pericope” - a word that you have to be careful with, because Microsoft Word will auto-correct it to “periscope”. And if you are in a Bible class and looking to talk about someone’s method of biblical interpretation, the Ten Dollar Seminary Word there is “hermeneutic” - a word I had to look up every time I encountered it for a while. It just wouldn’t stick, because I could not understand why we needed another word when “biblical interpretation method” was working just fine for me. There are four main schools of hermeneutics: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical. What is important to know is that any time you read scripture, you are approaching it with a hermen...

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City on August 28, 1774, and was raised as an Episcopalian. In 1795 she married William Seton, and their family came to include five children. In 1801, the family business went bankrupt. In 1803, her husband developed symptoms of tuberculosis, and they set sail for Italy in the hopes that the warm climate might cure his disease. The Italian authorities, fearing yellow fever, quarantined them in a cold stone hospital for the dying, resulting in William’s death. Elizabeth, now a young widow struggling to support five children with few resources, was befriended by Roman Catholics and, as a result, was drawn to the Catholic Church. Returning to New York with five children to support, she found herself alone and in financial straits. She turned to Catholic clergy for support and, in 1805, she formally became a member of the Catholic Church. In 1806, she met Father Louis Dubourg, who wanted to start a congregation of women religious, patterned after t...