Most of us think we aren’t very good at praying, or at least, that we could do a lot better in both the frequency and the content departments. But no matter how little we know about prayer one thing we do all know, that in this gospel the Pharisee shows us exactly how not to do it. “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity.” In a way, it’s an encouragement for the rest of us to get back to prayer, since really, almost anything incoherent we might decide to blurt out has to be better than this. It’s easy to laugh at this caricature…
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Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve lived around Princeton Junction now for more than 30 years, and I’ve been part of this parish for almost all that time, almost 20 of them as a deacon. And on the one hand I wonder of course what’s happened to my life so quickly, it wasn’t at all what I had planned, at one point I was hoping for a lot more excitement than you get in West Windsor. But on the other hand the fact is that being around a place and a group of people for so long is a tremendous pleasure in life. No matter where I…
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I don’t know about you, but I am a careful and conservative person. And believe me, this has its pluses in life. Part of it comes from my careful and conservative German-American father, a wonderfully kind and patient man but who didn’t like risk-taking of any sort, and who saved everything for a rainy day. In fact even when that rainy day came, he was still saving everything for an even rainier one. My guess is that many of you were taught the same way, and you have absorbed some of the same life rules. Choose a safe career that you’ll never go wrong with; before you start a project…
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On Patriots Day, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, there was a man who had been through a lot in life. He’d been through more than any of us, we hope, will ever have to face. One of his sons had been killed in Iraq about ten years before, and when this man heard the news, he became despondent, and ultimately set himself on fire with a can of gasoline and a propane torch. He survived, but five years later he lost another son, who himself committed suicide, never having recovered from the family’s loss. When the bombs went off that day at the finish line, in the…
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This long gospel with the three familiar characters that we all know so well almost doesn’t need a homily or an explanation. So today, we should take just a couple of minutes to turn one phrase over in our minds. It’s that wonderful cinematic moment at the real turning point in this story when we’re told that the prodigal son suddenly came to his senses. Came to his senses, a great phrase, as if he finally began to use his senses, after years of just indulging them, he opened his eyes and ears and noticed the unhappy world that he had surrounded himself with and in a moment, it looked…
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Last weekend, at the invitation of Brother Robert, I was on a panel for our 8th grade PREP students here about religious vocations. Of course they also had a priest, our friend Father Dave Farnum from the Paulists, and there was one of Brother Robert’s confreres in his religious order, and two incredibly friendly and appealing religious sisters. We all did the best we could to give an account of what we do. If you’ve never seen Father Dave at work recruiting for vocations, he is a real pro. He has a wad of $20 bills that he takes out and he offers one to any young man who’ll step…
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You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he learned in this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me”. Instead, what he probably came away thinking was a more familiar lesson we all know: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” We feel sorry for him, a basically good man who asks what he ought to do and can’t bring himself to do it, and is then told that it will be very, very hard for him to ever see the kingdom of God. Let’s leave aside the image of the camel and…
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If you have an iPhone, maybe you have used the virtual assistant it comes with, Siri. If not, I’m sure you have seen friends of yours who are now accustomed to speaking to their phones like they are human beings, giving Siri all sorts of assignments. My sister-in-law had gotten very accustomed to this, until one day when she asked Siri a fairly routine question, and she swears, Siri answered, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you right now.” I never really thought Siri was anything like a human assistant until I heard about that moment. It seems that even virtual assistants can drop the ball, and lose track…
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Back when I was growing up, I had six aunts who all lived in the same town, and of course they were in charge of pulling together the food for every sort of family gathering, from Christmas to the 4th of July to the occasional funeral. And a special fear had clearly been passed down to my aunts: the fear was, that at a gathering you were in charge of, you’d run out of food. We don’t know where this fear came from, whether it was something they got growing up during the depression of the 1920s, or whether it went back much further to pre-history in the mountains of…
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My mother was a very perceptive person with strong opinions about a lot of things. And she could be very quotable, in fact, some of her quotable quotes are still part of my interior life. At various times, when she saw someone getting out of line, doing or saying something that showed that the perpetrator didn’t understand his appropriate position in the universe, whether it was someone close by or even someone on the national scene, you’d hear her say, “Who does he think he is?” Or, if you were way out of line yourself, you might be unlucky enough to hear her say, with a penetrating look, “Who do…