Angels are big business, these days. Barnes & Noble has a whole angel section. More importantly, it’s a big week coming up for angels generally, the message of the angels to the shepherds that will make us smile, as it should, when we hear it on Tuesday night, and of course today’s angel appearing to Mary. Yet despite all these books and gorgeous paintings and Christmas cards, we live pretty angel-free lives, and this last Sunday of Advent is a time to think about why. Angels are in fact a perfect sign of what this week asks us to remember. Because there is a thread that runs through today, and…
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Some of you have probably had the experience I had this week of having something at work come up that completely disrupted and reorganized everything I had planned. I had to make a trip out of town with some other people from work, they set the time and the agenda, it came up on no notice, and I had to drop everything and go. It messed me up but good, and a lot of plans went by the boards. Doctors’ appointments, pleasant lunches, meetings, other trips, things at home, I spent as much time on the phone changing it all as I would have at the actual events themselves. I…
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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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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…