Brad Bursa

An Advent Reflection from a Mexican Restaurant She flipped the lid off her burger and stared at it.  “This is not what I was expecting. What is this?” She reached down, picked up the patty, and held it in front of her, limp.  “What is this?” “That’s a hamburger,” I replied. “From the moment you…

One’s relationship with God is the most important thing. Prayer is the way to grow that relationship, because, simply put, prayer is conversation with God. In his little book, Appointment with God, Fr. Michael Scanlan says, “If we don’t pray I don’t think we can ever get our lives in order or accomplish all we…

A reflection on the importance of Advent in re-educating our culture. “It’s simply the way things are. We’re not really in control.” “What?” “We just think we’re in control,” my friend continued, “We’re not. Experiences like this remind us of the way things are.” He was commenting on my grumbling about how difficult it was…

We prioritize family dinner. With kids in sports, play, student council, and so forth, this means we might eat at 4:30pm one day and 7:00pm the next. Though we make sacrifices to eat together, being at table tends to provide some of the craziest times in our house.  The early Christians connected an actual dinner…

A deeper look at “The Creation of Adam.” God first admits that things were not good in Genesis 2:17. Now, God utters this “not good” before the original sin, before Adam and Eve damaged their relationships with God and with each other. Before the first sin, God says, “It is not good for the man…

At the bottom of it, prayer is a loving conversation with God. Helping children have such a conversation can be tricky. The combination of short attention spans, an new thing, and a parent’s own unfamiliarity with prayer can make it easy to simply avoid the whole thing altogether. I mean, isn’t saying an “Our Father”…

On the importance of parents sanctifying their time. The way we talk about time is telling. For the most part, we complain about it. There’s never enough time. Except those times when there was too much time and we got bored. It goes too slow, or too fast. We talk about time like it’s a…

Up until a few years ago, it was quite common to hear this “trialogue” in our house: Parent: “You need to apologize to your sister.” Guilty kid: “Sorrrrr-rrrrryyy” (while contorting the face and looking away for the chance to run as soon as possible). Injured party: (head raises slightly from teary heap and in a…

Cutting down on family chaos. Things were unraveling. We reached a point where too many people were going in too many different directions. Each person was fending for him or herself. One week was bleeding right into the next, with no relief in sight. The semi-disorganized way we had been living for so long was…

When we don’t really know someone, but we’ve heard a lot about him or her, our imaginations can take over. We paint a certain picture of who this person is. We’re often wrong. For many people, this experience is analogous to our experience of the Holy Family. We’ve heard a lot about Jesus, Mary, and…