Last week, I was at a meeting of some clergy. There’s a lot I’m not going to tell you about this meeting, because I feel the need of protecting the identities of the people involved. One thing I will assure you is that no one else here today was at this meeting. In fact, they weren’t all Catholic, so what I’m going to say isn’t singling out any particular denomination. It was depressing. The energy level was low, people drifted in, it took forever to get started, even the few things that needed to get settled took forever, people weren’t even all that friendly. Worst of all for me, they’d…
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Something clearly happened out there, something like a transfiguration, because this story is so important to the early church that it’s heard in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and every single year, on the Second Sunday of Lent, we hear about this ultimate religious experience. Surely if anything was going to change your life forever, it would be this. Jesus with just a few of his disciples, three to be exact, on the top of a high mountain, and an experience of light, and sounds, blinding visions and clouds. It revealed to this handful of disciples a secret, a powerful secret, who Jesus really was,…
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Three weeks ago, when Cardinal Bernardin died of cancer in Chicago, his death grabbed people’s attention, and made them stop and think. There were a lot of reasons for that: one was how he seemed so full of courage in the face of a painful illness, another was how many friends and admirers he seemed to have from every walk of life and every faith. But there was also simply how much he seemed to be able to accomplish in what turned out to be a very brief final act in his life. He knew that he was dying, of course, but instead of turning to privacy and withdrawing from…
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When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a science fiction show called The Time Tunnel. If you remember it, please come see me after mass and we can reminisce. The premise of the show was pretty simple, as I recall it. Some inventors had come up with a way to travel in time, but once they’d started traveling they couldn’t control the machine very well, so for each week’s episode they were randomly landed in the past or the future, one week on board the Titanic, one week in the future space age, then the next week all the way back to the dinosaurs. So…
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Every family tree has a few branches that have some people on them that you aren’t eager to have it generally known that you’re related to. My spouse will confirm from experience that I have more than a few branches like that, and this week I found myself remembering one of my cousins back in the Midwest. A few years ago this cousin went to the doctor and reported to him that she seemed to have pulled a muscle in her lower back while doing some heavy lifting in the garden. After examining her, the doctor informed her that she was expecting. In fact, he estimated that she was expecting…