It’s hard to celebrate Christmas without being flooded with memories. I know every Christmas I can’t help but be brought back to Christmas the way it was when I was a kid back in Indiana, going to a big Christmas Eve party in a packed little house with my six Croatian aunts and five Croatian uncles and dozens of others, a house overloaded with food and presents and desserts. My Uncle Dan was a wiry little man, but every year at the climax of the evening he’d put on a faded and ratty Santa Claus suit, with no padding at all — really I should just summarize it by saying…
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In my professional life, I’ve worked in a lot of different places and types of organizations, large and small, but looking back on it, there’s a pattern to a lot of those places that was pretty clear to me at the time and is even clearer looking back. And it’s this: The main concern of most of the people at most of those companies was not taking a risk; and in many cases, the main concern of the whole company was making sure that the people that worked there didn’t take any risks. It’s one of the very natural but kind of negative downsides of being even a little successful,…
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Sometimes what you hear people saying that what they really need more of in life, is that they looking for balance. And it’s true that when we’re overwhelmed by all the things we feel pulling at us, that’s a very appealing concept. It’s great to think that we can get to a point of serenity, or at least sanity, by fine-tuning our commitments and interests so that no one of them takes over too much. We like to think there’s an art to dividing up our priorities and our time and the things we value, in a way that causes us as little internal conflict and discomfort as possible. I…
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Today in the gospel we have another parable about what the “kingdom of heaven” is like. And when we hear the word “heaven” we immediately think two things: first, something way off in the future, definitely not now, and second, a world operating in a very different environment, maybe in the clouds, where everyone is on their best behavior and a whole different set of rules apply. So when Jesus starts a story that says “the kingdom of heaven is like,” we think he means this is the way things will be like in heaven when things are perfect. It will be great — off there in the future, when…
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The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has 2,865 numbered sections, and in this edition it runs to at least 700 pages. In the index you’ll see that it covers topics from the Trinity to ordination to bioethics, and you can pull it down off the shelf to settle almost any argument about Catholic theology and customs and practices. If you want to know what the Catholic church teaches, a lot of it is right here. But here’s the problem with having that big a book as our catechism. It can make what you need to know and believe to be a Catholic Christian seem much more complex than it…
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Every few years, when the feast of Saints Peter and St. Paul happens to fall on a Sunday, it takes over the usual Sunday feast we would be celebrating. Peter and Paul are linked together like this because tradition says they both died as martyrs in Rome, at just about the same time in the first century. But despite the fact that in so many early Christian drawings they are often shown in an embrace, like brothers, in fact they are two very different people, and very real people. So today let’s think about them as people, and we’ll take three things about them as people that matter to lives…
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This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also…
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This is a gospel we wish we could have been there for, to see someone being raised from the dead. If you were directing a film, you couldn’t have set it up better: the crowd gathered around the tomb, the stone being rolled back, the dead man staggering out in his burial garments, maybe squinting at the sunlight. Even in Jesus’ own resurrection, we don’t have anything like this: so dramatic that John’s gospel says this was what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus had gone too far. Someone who could create a scene like this could do anything. But as for what happens before this great moment in the…
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I don’t know if this is as popular an act as it used to be, but I’m sure you’ve all seen someone who gets up in front of a crowd of people and at least pretends to be able to read people’s minds. They pick a volunteer out of the audience, and then the mind-reader, who supposedly has never seen this person before, tells him or her all sorts of things that it would be impossible for a stranger to know. Sometime it’s pretty vague — for example, the mind-reader says that the volunteer has a troubled relationship. And of course that’s an easy one — who doesn’t have at…
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There are endless jokes about the scene that confronts people after they die. Most of them involve St. Peter, and a gate, and a large book in which records of their lives are kept. These stories might also involve three priests, or a priest, a minister and a rabbi. Many of the funniest ones, for some reason, involve lawyers. You’ve all heard them. They all tend to hinge on what you have to do to get through the gate into heaven, and there’s usually a lot of confusion and strange loopholes, or cases of mistaken identity or complicated questions you get asked. Maybe we tell so many jokes because the…