Recently I’ve had the experience of moving my parents from a big house into a smaller apartment. And if you’ve never done anything like this in your family, when it does comes up, take my advice, and do whatever you have to do to be out of town on urgent business the weekend it happens. It’s not the physical labor of doing it. It’s not even the challenge of trying to sort through years’ worth of accumulated stuff, trying to make decisions about what you’re going to get rid of to fit a whole houseful of things into a small apartment. No, it’s the resistance that you meet at every…

I have never drunk wine out of a wineskin, and if anyone here has, I’d like to know the circumstances and your condition at the time, so please stop and tell me about it after mass. But here is what I have found out about traditional wineskins: When they’re new, they’re flexible and can hold anything. The point is that when they get older, as you might expect, they get dried out and brittle and inflexible. So that when you take an old skin and fill it with new wine, something that’s still fermenting and fizzing and bubbling, because it’s so new, an old, brittle container with a stopper in…