Welcome to Ordinary Time! We’re back with our friend Mark this week, and it’s a Greatest Hit: the parable of the Mustard Seed! Having heard this story probably a trillion times before, you may be tempted to breeze through it, but this is not how we Beta Groups roll! I hope you’ll learn something new this time around, and find inspiration, too.

One week after we tackle the mystery of the Trinity, we tackle yet another mystery, that of how Christ is present in the Eucharist. This is a Very Catholic Reading, and the Church teaching on the Eucharist is pretty deep stuff, so you may want to take a minute to review what your group members understand about the Eucharist. How does it work? What does it mean? Who is it for? If you’re so inclined, you can take a deep dive into transubstantiation and whatnot, but the meaning of sacrifice is an alternative direction to take; if you choose this way, it might be helpful to read the other readings from this Mass along with the Gospel (not so much the psalm). Whichever direction you take, I’ve tried to include information in the background information section to shore up your conversation.

I hope you’re enjoying this feast of feast days between Easter and Ordinary Time. This week, it’s the Most Holy Trinity that we’re celebrating, and writing this week’s lesson, it struck me; how crazy is it that this central belief of our Church is one that no one can explain or even understand?? To me, that’s equally frustrating as it is intriguing. But this week at The Prayer Course, I heard something that might help us deal with this; our host said “contemplation is more like star-gazing than astronomy…” and that makes me think that maybe, even if we can not understand the Trinity, we can contemplate it, and be better and more united to God in that. I pray you have wonderful conversations about this scripture, and blessed feast days!

Someone at Mass this morning asked me “Is this the 27th Sunday of Easter?” and I had to admit, it does seem like we’ve been in this season a while now… one more week of John

Easter continues, but in the Gospels, we stay in our swing back through the Farewell discourse in the Last Supper. Now that we know how the Easter story turned out, we are able to read Jesus’ words with the added context of a couple of thousand years of experience. I hope you have wonderful, fruit-filled conversations around how these messages, shared in Jesus’ last days before His crucifixion, still apply today.