SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 Luke 21: 5-19 may be the least consoling words from a man who preached peace, compassion, and love. most popular preachers and writers try to fix a timetable for eschatological times from it. It in fact does not indicate any time, perhaps there is no common time that is applicable to all. It is not about predicting timetable but for forming character, for the passage ends saying, through your endurance you shall save your soul.      Luke penned his gospel around 85 CE, a decade and a half after the Roman legions had reduced Jerusalem and its magnificent Temple to rubble. One can scarcely imagine the trauma that reverberated through the early Christian communities—the very stones that had seemed eternal, the sacred spaces where God's presence had dwelt, now scattered and profaned. Surely, many whispered, this must be the end. The apocalypse had arrived. Yet Luke's response to this existential crisis reveals a pastoral wisdom that transcends his particular histori...

 Once Christopher Coelho OFM, an artist, author, and composer was traveling in a bus in India. At a bus stand, a young man selling combs came to him to sell a comb. The man insisted that Christopher buys a comb. Pointing the combs to Christopher he began the conversation saying, ‘one for you sir.’ Christopher removed his cap and he was completely bald. They both had a smile. The comb seller did not give up, he said, ‘one for your daughter sir.’ Christopher said, ‘I have no daughter.’ ‘Then one for your wife sir’, said the man. Christopher said firmly, ‘I don't have one’. The comb seller still did not give up, ‘then please sir, buy one for me.’ In spite of its uselessness to him, because of the sheer persistence of the man the 'bald priest' finally bought a comb. In Luke's Gospel, Christ presents us with a striking parable: a widow, marginalised and powerless in her society, approaches an unjust judge repeatedly, demanding justice. This judge, by his own admission, neith...

 The passage from Luke 17: 26-37 presents us with one of Scripture's most unsettling paradoxes: the people of Noah's generation perished not because they were committing extraordinary evils, but because they were living extraordinarily ordinary lives. They ate, they drank, they married—all legitimate activities, all necessary for human existence. Yet Jesus uses this very normalcy as a warning of spiritual catastrophe —you are called to be much more than just eating, drinking, and making merry. What made their destruction inevitable was not the activities themselves, but the totalising absorption in them. They had become so enclosed within the immediate that they lost the capacity to perceive the ultimate. The floodwaters rising around them were not merely meteorological but metaphysical —they represented the consequences of a society that had made comfort its compass and self-interest its creed. This is the danger Jesus warns against: not dramatic apostasy, but a kind of sp...

 We live in an age where everything is packaged, marketed, and sold—including salvation itself. The Kingdom of God has been reduced to a commodity, advertised like any other product on the shelf: "Buy now, save later." Religious entrepreneurs peddle the divine in readymade cans and packets, promising delivery of what can never be transported because it has never left. How attractive the drama of a distant future becomes—the Second Coming , the Last Day , the final vindication where we emerge as winners! Business-minded preachers have built empires on this postponement, keeping the Kingdom perpetually out of reach, always just beyond the horizon. Where there are dead bodies, vultures gather. And where there is spiritual hunger, middlemen multiply. But Jesus spoke a sentence that demolishes this entire commercial enterprise: "The kingdom of God is within you" ( Luke 17: 20-25 ). Consider the design of our existence: eyes that look outward, noses that smell outward, ...

 There exists a beautiful paradox in the role of the spiritual teacher: to be a bridge that teaches others they need no bridge. Jesus embodied this contradiction with extraordinary grace—serving as a middleman whose ultimate purpose was to make himself unnecessary. When we approach an enlightened presence , we encounter not comfort, but conflagration. Jesus did not offer easy answers or distant promises; he brought an immediate, transformative fire that consumed everything false within those who truly drew near. This fire is indiscriminate and complete: It burns away negative desires—our hatreds, our resentments, and our fears. It burns away positive desires—even our spiritual ambitions and holy longings . It burns away hope itself—that postponement of life into some imagined tomorrow. What remains when everything burns? Only the eternal present , the naked now, stripped of past regrets and future anxieties. "The kingdom of God is within you" ( Luke 17: 25-30 ), —is perhap...

 At the heart of human existence lies a fundamental choice: do we invest ourselves in what passes away, or in what endures? The Gospel of Luke 16: 9-13 speaks of this plainly. It tells us we cannot serve both wealth and God—we cannot love both the temporary and the eternal. Our lives ultimately reflect what we choose to love most. The temporary includes everything that will not last: our money, our status, our possessions, our physical strength, even our ideologies and religious institutions. All of these will fade. The eternal, by contrast, encompasses what transcends time: compassion, mercy, truth, kindness, and genuine human connection. We naturally become attached to temporary things. Some people, like the Buddha, awaken early and let go, beginning a journey towards what truly matters. Others only turn to the eternal when the temporary fails them—when success eludes them or when what they've built crumbles. Sometimes it takes loss to make us look beyond. St. Francis of Assisi w...

 When Francis of Assisi told the pope that the gospel itself was his Rule, he wasn't being mystical or abstract. He was being ruthlessly practical. Imagine if someone asked you today, "What's your life philosophy?" and you answered, "I just try to do what Jesus actually said to do." It sounds simple, almost naive. But that's exactly the point Francis was making—and exactly why it's so challenging. Richard Rohr in his reflection, Francis and the Gospel , describes how the teachings of Francis of Assisi became the foundation of Franciscan spirituality . Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) began his community with a clear intention: “The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the gospel.” The first Rule (the guide for the community’s way of life) that he started writing around 1209 was little more than a collection of New Testament passages. When Francis sent it off to Rome, the pope looked at it and said, “This is no Rule. This is just th...

  In Richard Rohr 's essay,  Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy , a striking claim emerges: Francis was not limited to the Catholic Church of his time, which gravitated around sound doctrines and orthodoxy. Francis directed his gaze towards horizons the institutional Church of his era had ceased to contemplate. Through his prophetic witness and unwavering commitment to embodying the gospel, he forged what Rohr terms an "alternative orthodoxy "—a living tradition that would flow through Franciscan spirituality for centuries to come. The Franciscan alternative orthodoxy is a path that leads through suffering into solidarity, and through practice into the profound knowledge that comes only from doing. One of the earliest biographical accounts preserves Francis's instruction to his first friars: "You only know as much as you do." This simple maxim contained a revolution. By elevating action, practice, and lived witness above theological speculation, Francis init...

 The phrase "I will make you fishers of men" represents one of the New Testament 's most memorable metaphorical transformations. When examined through the psychological concept of affordance theory —developed by James J. Gibson in the 1970s—this calling takes on fascinating dimensions that illuminate both the pedagogical genius of Jesus' approach and the possible processes underlying vocational transformation. In psychology, an affordance is the potential action that an object or environment offers to an individual. There is something in the object, environment, or in a person that indicates that something else or something more is possible. Affordances are the perceived or actual properties of an object that suggest how it can be used. In design, affordances are visual clues that indicate possible actions; such as a door handle suggesting it should be turned or pulled. These clues are defined by the relationship between an object's properties and the capabiliti...

 In Luke 12: 1-7 , Jesus stands before a crowd so large that they were trampling one another, and he speaks words that cut through the anxiety of existence itself. His message pivots on a profound paradox: be afraid of the right things, which is to say, fear God alone—and in doing so, discover that you need fear nothing else at all. " There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed ," Jesus declares, "or hidden that will not be made known." This is not a threat but a liberation. He's describing a universe where truth is the fundamental architecture of reality, where everything hidden moves inexorably toward revelation. In such a world, our human instinct to conceal, to manage perception, to hide our contradictions—all of it becomes exhausting theatre. The futility of cover-up is not just moral but metaphysical. Where there is truth, fear has no place. Consider what Jesus means when he tells his disciples not to fear "those who kill the body and after ...

 Separated by approximately 6,000 kilometres, India and Germany share a surprising depth of connection. In India, German engineering excellence is abundant through brands like BMW , Mercedes-Benz , Porsche , and Audi . We listen to the compositions of German masters— Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven . We study German philosophers— Martin Heidegger , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Karl Marx . We celebrate Oktoberfest with Hefeweizen and Pilsner . Reciprocally, Germany boasts numerous scholars of Indology and Indian languages , with arguably the finest library collection on Indian studies anywhere in the world. Germany's fascination with India runs deep and has endured for generations. In 1911, Hermann Hesse —later to become a celebrated author—travelled to India on a spiritual quest. He arrived with an idealised vision of the subcontinent, expecting to find sadhus meditating everywhere and hoping to discover definitive answers to his religious questions. Instead, wh...

 We must pray continually and not be discouraged ( Luke 18:1-8 ). Pray, call on God and goodness, and hold on—persist and persevere in justice, nonviolence, fairness, and honesty . Even the hardest structure and injustice will crack. The woman who persevered until justice was done is the hero of today's gospel, for her persistence is relevant for all times. Nothing good and just comes to you without time and effort. Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography by Nelson Mandela , South Africa's first democratically elected President, first published in 1994. The book profiles his early life, coming of age, education, and 27 years spent in prison. Born in 1918, he was a key figure in the fight against apartheid , a system of racial segregation, which led to his imprisonment for 27 years. Upon his release in 1990, he helped dismantle apartheid and worked to create a new, multiracial South Africa, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Do you want to be relevant in your classroo...

  Prophet Nathan approached King David to confront him about his immorality with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah , and he did it without direct accusation. If it were direct at a time when the king had so much power, he would have been instantly done away with; instead, Nathan told a story. When Changampuzha Krishna Pillai (1911-1948) wanted to expose feudal exploitation in Kerala , he wrote a poem. Separated by millennia, culture, and context, both narratives employ the same powerful technique: they make injustice visible through art. Art, be it a poem, a story, a film gives people time and space to process. People feel safer to accept it. In Nathan's Parable to David ( 2 Samuel 12:1-7 ), There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It ate from his table, dra...