A modern myth

I am scheduled to preach this weekend, the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time. I also get to witness another wedding, which will be nice. I used my AI-assistant to assemble the preparatory notes on the readings - history, commentary, and so on - and it was…only marginally useful. Some of the bits on Jeremiah’s context were useful and perhaps informed a single phrase I’ll use, but that was about it. The real insights came during lectio and meditation. I’ll probably still use it occasionally; never know what little nuggets might turn up.

For the wedding, the homily will be brief:

1. Marriage is modeled on the Cross because
2. As Christ died on the Cross to save humanity, so you are both called to die to self for the other so that
3. Your spouse becomes a saint

The rest is contained in the Exhortation before Marriage, which gets read prior to start of the liturgy.

As for Sunday, my homily’s kernel is captured in this quote which appears in Sykes' biography of Evelyn Waugh:

‘You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you, Mr Waugh?’ [Waugh answered that]…‘you must understand…that the man in the street does not exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use streets time to time.’