THIRST FOR LIFE, VOL. 1
Weeks 1 through 9 of Ordinary Time

Societies fall apart if they lose their fundamental beliefs. There are some signs of this throughout the world — for example, the increasing instability of marriage; competitiveness to the neglect of everyone and everything except work; inequities and discrimination; the fixation on materialism; the deadening impact of mindless jobs; an increase in the number of single parents, mostly mothers, who must work to live; the failure of schools to prepare children for productive, satisfying lives; coarsening of society’s attitude toward love and sexuality; an increase in violent behavior. To survive, we have to escape from a mentality which sees society as just a mass of individuals placed side by side without any concern or responsibility for one another. There are fundamental moral values on which all societies depend, such as respect for truth, for justice, for compassion, for care of the environment, and above all for the sacredness of human life. This current volume is entitled Thirst for Life because the gospels for this portion of the Church year (weeks one through nine in the Church’s Ordinary Time) are mostly from St. Mark, whose gospel, through the active Jesus on the move, shows a thirst for life — divine life — treasured, sought, and given, then and now.

About the Author: The author of a book of Pastoral Talks for Special Occasion (Alba House, 1994) and a highly-acclaimed trilogy of reflections on the Readings for the Sundays and Holy Days of the Liturgical Year (Alba House, 1997): God Still Speaks: Listen! (Cycle A), All Things Made New (Cycle B), and Ode to Joy (Cycle C), Harold A. Buetow, PhD, JD is a priest from the Diocese of Brooklyn who spent thirty years at Catholic University where he taught and was Senior Staff Editor on The New Catholic Encyclopedia. His present trilogy of Meditations / Homilies for the Weekdays of the Year includes, besides Thirst for Life (Weeks 1 through 9), The New Out of the Old (Weeks 10 through 21), and Rejoicing in Hope (Weeks 22 through 34 of Ordinary Time).