Fr. Brendan McGuire - Podcasts that Break open the Word of God
Breaking open the Word of God …Applying it to the lived experiences of daily lifeIn the busyness of modern life, it is sometimes difficult to see and experience God in our lives. Through his homilies, Fr. Brendan challenges and invites us to take a break focus on what the Lord is saying. God is not only present but is opening up the divine story in each of us.
Episodes
230 episodes
Homily for the memorial of Pope Francis - Joy of the Gospel
Pope Francis called the whole church with that sense of calling us back to the roots of who we are. He kept on bringing us back to Jesus. He kept on calling us back to primarily God’s mercy, his love, and his joy. I always remember his first le...
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4:59
Gem of God's Grace - Holy Saturday At the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter
We are called to let the light of Christ shine not only on us and within us, but from us, so that others can see that they have the grace, the gem of grace within them. These luminous minerals that we have in rocks are like the luminous grace o...
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9:41
Homily for Good Friday of the Lord's Passion - Oil of Our Presence
To watch a hopeless death is one to be avoided at all costs. But Christianity has a response. It may not be the answer we want, but it does have a response. Let me offer it to you because it is about what happens today. This is the response: it...
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9:01
Homily for Holy Thursday Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper - New Perspective: New Model to Follow
My friends, tonight is about service. Can we find a way to serve some other person in our community who feel completely left out? Some neighbor who feels estranged, maybe have lost a spouse, there is nowhere else to go. Can we love them where t...
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9:56
Homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion - Defining Moments
The scriptures are a collection of defining moments for the Jewish and the Christian people. They have been put together for the most defining moments of our history. The Gospels are collection of defining moments of Jesus' life. And today's Go...
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10:14
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Third Scrutiny - Showing Up
Today, more than ever, we need to be people who are willing to show up, to show up and not save people, not to rescue them, but to be present to them in the midst their suffering. Whether it be from a divorce or whether it be from a rejection o...
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9:05
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent - Love Not Lectures
All of us have made mistakes. We have all done something that was wrong, whether a little thing when we were a child or something older. We will always remember how we were treated in that moment of shame, that moment of being caught. That mome...
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7:25
Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent - Thin Places and Holy Ground
Our lives have become so busy and even about the good things, we can be so busy, we miss God speaking to us at these liminal moments where God is trying to say something different than what we want to hear. It might be saying something challeng...
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9:01
homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Second Scrutiny - Darkness Can Be Our Friend
Sometimes the darkness in our lives can be in fact our friend, because it allows us to focus only on what we need to focus on.Today we have this reading, this classic reading of the man born blind in his blindness. Here is the irony. Here is a ...
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9:24
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent - Coming to His Senses
Sometimes we find it hard to accept that God would forgive us for our mistakes. Sometimes when we hurt somebody who we really love and we know we have hurt them and we ask for forgiveness from the Lord, we ask in a sense why did I do that? And ...
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7:22
Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, First Scrutiny - Living Water for All
We are called to take the living waters, take the bread of life that we receive from here, and to share it with those who so desperately need that fresh living water. You and I might be the only person this week who offers it to them. If you ge...
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9:25
Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent - Come To Know Christ and Love HIm
“Who do people say that I am?” The apostles first say, you are Elijah or John the Baptist, or one of the other prophets. But then he asks them, he says, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the one who confesses says, “You are the son of the ...
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8:46
Homily for the First Sunday of Lent - Who We Are Is the Core of Our Identity
How we refocus ourselves this Lent is not about our will. It is not us trying to will ourselves back and pushing away the devil in some dramatic fashion. Just come back to who we are. Come back to the fact that we are children of God and that G...
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10:33
Homily for Ash Wednesday - I am a Sinner. I am a Hypocrite
What we do today is put ashes on our forehead. Not to have a badge of honor that says, “Look at me. I am one of the Catholic ones.” We put ashes on our forehead to remind us to say, “I am a sinner. I am a hypocrite.”But we do not stay there. We...
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7:58
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time - Love your Enemies
Jesus reorders life. He quotes the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That was in the Book of Deuteronomy as one of the laws of the Lord. But he takes it a step further. He deepens it and calls his disciples, the ...
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7:22
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time - Guardians of Beauty and Prophets of Truth
Pope Francis has declared 2025 a Jubilee Year of Hope, a timely reminder that even in the face of immense suffering in our world, we are not abandoned, Jesus always accompanies us and most especially in our times of suffering. The cross stands ...
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7:39
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time - Limitation to Invitation to Abundance
You can hear a sense of frustration in today’s gospel with Peter. Peter has been working hard all night with his friends, he says they were up all night and caught absolutely nothing. Then here comes Jesus. Remember, Jesus is a carpenter and he...
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12:35
Homily for the Presentation of the Lord - The Marian and Christian Way
Mary watched her son suffer greatly. This prediction by the prophet Simeon is very real. The climax of that suffering for her was at the foot of the cross. We have to examine this because it is very important how Mary suffered. It was not just ...
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9:35
Homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time - Dialogue With Scripture
Jesus is the fulfillment of the scripture. Jesus is the bright light that leads us to see all other lights. He is the one who enables us to see what God is fulfilling in our lives. So Jesus, in a sense, God becomes our north star, if you would,...
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12:18
Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time - Abundant Joy In Life
In today's Gospel, Jesus turns everything around. He takes six stone jars fills them with water and turns that water into wine. These jars would have held 20 to 30 gallons each. Just to give you an understanding of how much wine we are talking ...
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8:39
Homily for the Baptism of the Lord - In You I Take Delight
We need to hear this message of delight because we hear all the other messages, all the other negative messages, the competitive ones on online, how good everyone else is and not how good we are. Let’s combat it with a message of love. Let’s sa...
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8:19
Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord - Change Your Perspective
There are layers of irony here that Matthew is trying to communicate to his Jewish audience, kind of waking them up. “Hey, hello. It is the Messiah. The Messiah was born. You need to go to Jerusalem. You need to leave Jerusalem and go to Bethle...
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11:20
Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family - Wisdom and Joy: Hold Onto Love
With the passing of time we certainly grow in age, but we do not always necessarily grow in wisdom. There are no guarantees that wisdom comes with age! It is one of those things that is an opportunity for us, but we have to apply the lessons th...
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12:43
Homily for the Nativity of the Lord - Make Room in Your Heart for The Story of Jesus
Today , we stop and we share what we believe is the greatest story ever told. The story of Jesus Christ being born among us. And right from the very beginning, there is a twist. And the twist is that God, the Author of life, the author of the B...
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9:47
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent - Hear the Voice of the Father and Believe What we Hear
Mary believed! She just did not just hear, she heard and believed. And so we too must be willing to hear and then to believe what we hear. We will need to hear and believe that we are a beloved child of God. And we are called to go share that l...
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6:36
