THESE DAYS "render unto Caesar" has got to be one of the most oft-quoted passages of the Bible, along with "an eye for an eye." It is used by some to justify thoughtless agreement with government, even when government policies and actions are clearly contrary to faith, and mindless obedience to the law, even when the law prevents a Catholic from performing his or her Catholic duties.

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TIMES have changed. No longer do trainers and gym teachers use the phrase “No pain. No gain.” They have learned that pain means something is wrong and needs to be attended to.  More...

IN A small parish high school in a tough neighborhood in Chicago, Sister Silvia ruled the hallways. She stood just barely 5 feet, but she had all the students under her sway. Even the burly senior boys, who were afraid of "nuthin' or nobody," knuckled under when Sister Silvia gave her stern look. She had true authority.  More...

GO TO most any bookstore. Find where the religious books are kept. And look under the heading of “Christian fiction.” Dominating the shelves will be novel after novel chronicling the rapture and the last days when Gabriel will blow his horn and the saved will be lifted up bodily to heaven. These books are astonishing best-sellers. We have very little in our literature that can compare with this phenomenon.  More...

A LARGE PART of a parent’s life is spent making sure their kids don’t go out into the world unprepared. “Wear a sweater!” “Bring your keys.” “Don’t forget your backpack!” “Bring that permission slip I signed last week!” And the inevitable, “Be careful!”  More...

WE HAVE become a nation of gamblers. It is not only the proliferation of casinos, or the growth of Las Vegas, or even the liberalization of gambling laws in so many states and all the lottery games that go along with it.  More...

HOMESICKNESS is a powerful disease for which there is no cure but going home. We may miss our own room or bed. Maybe we need the routine that we have grown accustomed to over the years. It could even be the food or the exact time of day we are used to eating. It includes a familiarity with just about everything around you that has suddenly become just a memory rather than a reality.   More...

JOSEPH, husband of Mary, had guts. He had the guts to pay attention to his dreams. He had the guts to trust his inner wisdom as opposed to conventional wisdom when he discovered that Mary was pregnant before their marriage, and also when he fled with his family to Egypt to escape the horrors of Herod who ended up sacrificing innocent children to protect his own power. Joseph was wise enough to be led by God as to where his family would live and how they would live.  More...

FOR MANY PEOPLE the problem starts in autumn when the clocks are turned back an hour and evening darkness comes earlier. Depending on where a person lives, it is a sign that there will be precious little sunlight to enjoy until winter turns her face toward spring. Days will be shorter and dark nights longer. People respond differently when this happens.  More...

WHEN THE Hubble space telescope began beaming back never-before-seen images of stars in the making, the sheer power and glory of these dramatic and psychedelic unfoldings rendered most of us awestruck. Feelings of insignificance soon followed. But in the end the images-like the star rising in the East that the Magi followed-should inspire us to make no small plans. Wondrous events are occurring in our universe, and we are all invited to play a part in the drama.  More...

WHENEVER I HEAR the Christmas story told, Herod always comes across like a 2-year-old. This king of Judea is self-absorbed, jealous of anyone who might steal his spotlight, and willing to destroy anything or anyone to get his way. Such behavior is to be expected in a child moving from infancy to childhood, but it's ugly and dangerous when it persists into adulthood. Many parents, when their kids go through a particularly selfish stage, fear the kids will get stuck there and never grow out of it. That's a scary thought.  More...

PRAISE—much more than money—is probably the single most effective human motivator. Sycophantic flattery won’t do. It must be genuine commendation for a job well done or a decision well made. Good managers know this as do teachers, coaches, counselors, volunteer coordinators, and fundraisers—anyone who is trying to get someone to take the next step, stretch themselves, and constantly strive to reach a higher level of commitment or performance.  More...

I GOT in a lot of trouble in grammar school. And though I didn't like staying after school, the punishment I really hated was hearing that my behavior "reflected badly on my parents."  Heck, Mom and Dad always behaved. Why should they be tarred for my mistakes?

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SOME OF US are natural-born leaders, others followers. Followers often get a bad rap in our entrepreneurial, individualistic culture. If you're not a maverick out there risking everything on some high stakes venture, then you must be a wimp with an incredible lack of imagination. There's nothing sexy or exciting about taking the backseat and letting someone else do the driving, or so we're told.

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IT IS FASHIONABLE for some people to complain about all of the messages that they receive and how busy they are. Usually they bring it on themselves. They have their home phones and work phones and cell phones. Then there are answering machines and pagers and voice mail and e-mail. All of them need to be checked regularly for messages that just might need a quick response.

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A COMMON REACTION after hearing the story of the first disciples-fishermen who are told to come follow Christ and become fishers of men-is to try to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. There we are on the job, and Jesus walks up and tells us to drop what we're doing and come follow him. Could we do it? Would we be willing to quit our jobs just like that to follow Jesus? But as we make our way through the gospels, we realize that most of the disciples don't stop being fishers. They just end up fishing fish as well as human beings their whole lives.

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MANY OF US experienced being overwhelmed in school by the number of papers we had to write, tests we needed to study for, and books we needed to read. Who among us didn't at one time or another fall back on Cliff's Notes to get us around reading Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or some other lengthy tome?

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I USED TO FEEL guilty I wasn't like the first apostles, ready to drop everything and run after Jesus. I know how many attachments I tend to hang onto, even when I think I'm "letting go and letting God."  More...

TRAVELING on the interstate along America's industrial corridor feels like a trip into some forsaken ring of hell. Columns of fire shoot hundreds of feet into the sky while thick black smoke spews from the chimneys and stacks of refineries that litter the skyline. For all the purifying of oil or metal that is taking place on the inside of those gargantuan structures, they sure do make one ghastly mess on the outside.  More...

SHE SPOKE very little English. But everyday you would find her with a smile on her face at the doors of the church, the first one, waiting patiently for them to be unlocked. There could be enough snow on the street to shut down the city, but somehow she could find a way to make it to church. Before Mass she would read her morning prayers from a tattered book with cards and pages falling out. It was all held together with rubber bands.

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I WAS TALKING with my friend Ed Murray about how devastating it must be for young people to hear story after story about trusted leaders-in business, in government, even in the church-who turn out to be untrustworthy. Will this undermine young people's ability or even willingness to make a commitment and live it out?  More...

EVERY TIME I hear the story of Simon Peter's mother-in-law, I stand amazed: The woman is lying in bed, sick with fever when Jesus takes her hand, pulls her up, and instantly cures her. She then waits on him and his pals.

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REMEMBER the little cardboard Valentine's with their odd-shaped envelopes? Some had a little clasp that allowed a part of the card to move. We used to be able to buy the cards by the bagful, sometimes paying as little as 50 cents for a hundred of them.

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AS A YOUNG GIRL she always tried to avoid getting drafted to work in her mother's garden. She disliked the planting, the pruning, the watering. She disliked the weeding the most. And so she would rush off to play with her friends.

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"I JUST WANT my $1,500 dollars," the man complained to the agent answering the compliance hotline. "It's reimbursement for my gas and mileage. The clinics I service are refusing to pay even though it's in my contract, and now they're calling into question my job performance. It just doesn't seem fair that I can't get my measly 1,500 bucks when the doctors collect their checks, and they don't even show up at the clinics."

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AFTER SPRING BREAK a priest and fellow teacher with few remnants of the full head of hair he once had, returned to school fitted with a toupee. When we all saw him for the first time, we couldn't help but let our eyes travel right up to his new hairline. But he just ignored our stares. And we just pretended like we didn't really see anything different about him.  More...

THE DAY after 8th grade ended my family moved, and all summer long I missed my friends back in the city. So I invited my friend Billy to spend the weekend.

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THOSE OF US  of a certain age remember with a twinge of laughter and horror Secretary of State Alexander Haig claiming he was in charge when Ronald Reagan was shot. In that one frantic moment, Haig threw all thoughts of legitimate constitutional succession to the wind.

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ON A LONG TRIP with a carload of friends, for no reason a driver in another car pulled out a rifle and pointed it at us at a rest stop. Then he threatened his own girlfriend as he pulled her into his car and drove off. We were all left shaken. We called the police, and a state trooper met us where it occurred.

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I ONCE SAW an ad in a magazine with the headline: "Will it take six strong men to carry you back into church?" Beneath the headline was a picture of pallbearers carrying a coffin up the church steps.  More...

IT WAS SHOW-AND-TELL TIME  in the first-grade class at Knoll Hills school in Overland Park, Kansas. The assignment was to bring something to class that you play with at home every day. So lined up with the teddy bears and Tonka toys stood Terry Tuohy's little sister, P.J.

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THERE IS A GLUT of so-called "reality shows" on television these days. They seem to appeal to the immature voyeur that is in a lot of people. These programs purport to give us a slice of what life is really about, raw and unscripted, showing us the frailty and the complexity of human relationships. They are supposed to be more appealing to us than the usual fare on television because what they are showing us is advertised as real.

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I ONCE MET a woman who had grown up in a series of foster homes. Of the many stand-in parents she encountered, one foster mother stood out in her memory.  More...

MY NEWEST HERO is my neighbor across the hall: a public high-school teacher thought of as funny, sensitive, but not all that deep.

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DOROTHY SINGING Over the Rainbow to Toto remains one of the most magical moments recorded on film. It touched something deep within many people's hearts. In many ways, the only thing more delicate and ethereal than the colors of a rainbow in the still-glistening sky, its darkness being overcome by the bright light of the sun, is the look on a child's face when he or she sees a rainbow for the first time. What is it about a rainbow that is so special for young and old alike?

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THERE'S AN OLD JOKE about the young man who went to Confession and said he had been experiencing temptations. "Did you entertain them, my son?" asked the kindly confessor. "No, Father," replied the confused penitent, "but they sure entertained me!"  More...

THE ENRON AND WORLDCOM SCANDALS  spurred a new round of calls for tough legislation against corporate greed and promises from CEOs to clean up their acts and police themselves. But mass firings and major restructurings seem to be the only fixes they ever propose.  More...

THOSE OF US  who live at sea level often have trouble breathing when we are up in the thinner mountain air. Many people have trouble sleeping. Others notice that their appetites are affected. Some people become lethargic. Others complain of being lightheaded or dizzy. It affects people in different ways, but most are affected.

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HAVE YOU SEEN the T-shirt that says, "God's not finished with me yet?" Maybe that's the souvenir Jesus should have bought the disciples after they went up the mountain with him and saw him revealed in all his glory. The apostles thought they'd attained a state of perfection. Peter even wanted to set up tents and live there permanently. Can you blame him? But Jesus would have none of that kind of thinking. There was plenty more to be done.

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IF THEY HAD TO SIT through one more employee meeting with the accounting supervisor insisting that what the company needed was a little more love, they were going to jump out of their skins. Jesus made whips out of cords to cleanse his temple; no doubt the pulls on the blinds would do for them.

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THERE HAVE BEEN a number of arguments between politicians and civil libertarians over the Ten Commandments, and numerous attempts have been made to place the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, courtrooms, libraries, public squares, and parks. Every time such a suggestion is made, there is somebody ready to challenge it and to go to the courts to argue the separation between church and state.

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ONE DAY I was walking in downtown Chicago, passing sights so familiar to me that they hardly registered. My progress was interrupted by a group of tourists from a foreign country who had stopped in their tracks and stood pointing and staring at the front of a building across the street from us. Their obvious amazement caused those of us around them to stop and look.

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MOST OF US  have been there-that zombie state from working too many hours for too many days in a row. You say to yourself, "Just one more week, as soon as I finish this one project." But then that next week comes and you're not quite finished, and suddenly more days are swallowed up in the frenzy of industry.

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MANY SURVIVORS of the Holocaust recount how they were brutally taken from their homes to the horrific concentration camps where so many died. For some the journey to the camp was itself a living hell. Those who did not live close to the train stations were forced to walk or even run many miles without stopping. At nightfall they were jammed into homes and barns of others who were already taken ahead of them. Afterwards they remembered those homes where it appeared as if the people who had lived there might return at any time. It looked as if they had gone away on a vacation.

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GRANDMA WAS  in her glory because her grandchildren were circled all around her. She gloried in their presence, looking at each fresh-scrubbed face, peering, it seemed, deep down into each of their souls. And she liked what she saw.

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ONE OF THE SECRETS  of successful businesspeople is, invariably, balance between their personal and professional lives. They'll say that their weekends are sacrosanct or maybe it's the nine-hour day. Whatever their terms, the rest of us in less rarified air often fail miserably at balance. Our reasons come in every shape and size: It's expected that we stay past 7 p.m.; I need the quiet of the weekend to get to this project off my desk; just one more hour will really help me, and I have no plans tonight anyway; I've got my kids' tuition to worry about, so I have to put the extra hours in.

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TALK SHOWS have become a staple of American daytime television, for better or worse. Some try to gear themselves toward helping people help themselves. At the other end of the spectrum are those shows that try to show people at their titillating worst.

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MOST PARENTS want their children to grow up to be good and moral people. So parents can find some consolation in today's reading from Jeremiah, "I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts." We can approach the task with the knowledge that the impetus to goodness is within each child, just waiting to be nutured.

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LABELED THE MOST CORRUPT COP  in Chicago history, a former Chicago police officer was sentenced earlier this year to life in prison. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Blanche Manning said, "There comes a time in every person's life to embrace what he or she has become, to check the compass of his heart, to remember paths traveled. I'm afraid to discover, Mr. Miedzianowski, what you are now."

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MOVIE SCREENS  are getting bigger again. Special effects create worlds beyond our imagination. Hit movies need to be reviewed and labeled as "spectacular" and have stars of international status. Bigger, louder, more spectacular always seems better. Usually it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a blockbuster movie.

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HOW DO YOU PASS ON a living faith to the next generation? A few years back, Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion, conducted research among people who considered themselves religious and asked what influences from childhood had helped their faith take root. One of the factors that scored high among people who grew up to practice their faith was that they were raised in homes where religious objects, artwork, and symbols were commonplace. It may have been a family Bible, an icon, or a crucifix, but that treasured family possession stood as a daily reminder of the importance of faith.

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THE PASTOR of a rundown urban parish wanted an old-fashioned Easter parade to liven things up. So his never-say-die events coordinator made it happen.  More...

SO HERE IT IS: EASTER  Why should we be thinking about what has perhaps been the most popular movie ever of the season-the Christmas season, that is-It's a Wonderful Life? Sure, its heartwarming, climactic ending occurs next to a Christmas tree and snow is falling and Jimmy Stewart is singing "Auld Lang Syne" off key. But in reality, it is a movie made more for what Easter is all about than Christmas.

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I'VE ALWAYS HAD  a hard time with Easter. Maybe it's that I don't do well when I eat too much candy, which I inevitably do on Easter Sunday. But I find Easter a difficult day to celebrate. I feel a lot like the disciples who, even after Jesus' Resurrection, scurried back to the upper room uncertain and confused.

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IT WAS A HIGHLY UNORTHODOX  ritual to play out in the office. He asked his staff to stand in a circle around him. He then moved from one person to the next, called them by name, and said, "I grant you the authority to do your best work." Then he asked each person to do the same: walk around the circle and commission his or her coworkers to do their best work.

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POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS  often boil down to a few short sound bites, carefully edited and produced at tremendous cost by professionals who specialize in such a product. After a debate, a candidate's professional staff works the room of reporters putting a positive spin on what their candidate said and how the debate was handled. If the candidate misspoke, the opponent will be quick to use those words against him or her. Sometimes such a phrase can sink a campaign.

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IF YOU WANT your children and grandchildren to grow up generous, let them watch you be generous. In the first reading this weekend we hear how the first Christians shared all they had, with the ultimate result that "there was no needy person among them."

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BUSINESS LUNCHES  are not what they used to be, and even power breakfasts are waning, but meeting face-to-face and sharing a meal with someone with whom you're interested in doing business is still a good idea. Talking business while dining has a different feel than a scheduled meeting in the office. It is less formal and constraining. Conversation and creative thoughts flow more freely, and much is revealed about a person's character in the simple process of ordering, eating, and paying for the food.

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SOME PEOPLE  are born with the knack of putting names and faces together and never forgetting that connection. That is a real blessing to have in life. It endears you to people instantly and can also be an effective tool in business and politics. There are also those who can continue to put the correct name to a face years after the last encounter, overcoming the obstacles that passing time adds to someone's appearance. This seems to border on genius.

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WHEN MY KIDS  were little, if they fell down and hurt themselves, they would usually run to my wife or me to show us their "boo-boo." And we would swoop them up in hugs and kisses and tend to their bruised egos as well as their skinned knees. For a child to show his or her wound is an act of trust in a moment of vulnerability. It's also a chance for the parent to respond with concern, love, and care. It's a moment that captures the humanity of both the wounded and the one who cares.

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AT OUR DAILY WORK each of us are shepherds. We are  in charge of the quality and quantity of work that we do. No one can make us be less than we are. We are responsible for our actions, and as good shepherds we must be willing to put our jobs on the line for the sake of preserving our integrity and the integrity of others-be they our customers, coworkers, bosses, or employees.

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IT HAS BEEN SAID that a mechanic is only as good as his tools. It's a good bet that the same can be said about a shepherd. However, not too many in our congregation, unless you are reading this in New Zealand, can list "shepherd" under occupation on a census form.

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I REMEMBER how badly it stung. The kids in the neighborhood were choosing up sides for a pickup game of touch football, and I was odd man out. Rejected. Told to sit on the sidelines. I slunk on home and read comic books-taking solace in reading about the rejection that Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne experienced. Little did the world know whom they were rejecting in Clark and Bruce-and me.

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TODAY WE HAVE a lesson in produce. A number of years ago, researchers found that in order to get people to eat more grapes, they had to do something about the seeds. Biting into them was unpleasant. Swallowing them could lead to problems. Spitting them out was not an acceptable solution for many. What to do?  More...

CERTAIN MEMORIES remain vivid as years go by. One that stands out clearly in my mind is a memory of my wife sitting in a gold chair in the living room of our first house. It was the middle of the night and she was nursing our newborn daughter. They had not heard me, and I stood in the doorway watching them, moonlight spilling onto them from a window behind them.

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MY COUSIN has decided to become a cop. She's 39 years old, and the cutoff to enter the academy is 40. She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish before she decided to make this startling career shift. Now she runs three miles a day, lifts weights twice a week, and lives a Puritan existence. She passed the physical and written exam with ease and charmed all the cops who interviewed her. Her training began in March. Watch out world!  More...

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, one of the most celebrated pop singles ever-written by the Beatles in 1967-said little more than: "All you need is love. Love. Love is all you need. Love. Love. Love."

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WHEN I WAS A KID my brother Pat and I used to get in arguments with the neighbor kids. We went to Catholic school and they went to public school, and often the rhetoric devolved into snide comments about Catholics vs. "publics." We may have felt that we had moral superiority on our side, but Steve, Jan, and Jeffrey held the trump card: Because they were publics they claimed exclusive ownership to the public sidewalks, which kept us trapped in our own front yard.

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TOM IS A PHOTOGRAPHER and art director by profession and a Nebraskan by birth. Maybe the combination of creative vision and Midwestern common sense keep him on such an even keel. Whatever it is, few have seen the man display anger or lose his cool on the job, though no one would say he was without compassion or sympathy.

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I USED TO BE picked last when my grammar school friends and I gathered to play 16-inch softball. It wasn't because I was that bad a player. Actually, I was pretty good. But because I worked after school in my father's grocery store most evenings, I just didn't have the opportunity to play as often as the other guys. So it meant often settling for right field with nothing to do and batting eighth with nobody on base.

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THE FIRST LETTER OF JOHN can sound lofty, but we know that in families, love often shows up in very mundane disguises.  More...

ALI IS A SIMPLE CARPENTER NOW, but his boss, Abe, knows that he was once a colonel in the army-strong, disciplined, brave, and loyal. Abe respects this carpenter, maybe even fears him a little, and to the surprise of many, trusts him implicitly.

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CATCH THE SPIRIT! Celebrate the spirit! We've got spirit! Schools, businesses, yes, even churches set aside time to fire up people so that they will perform better, respond faster, show more excitement about what they are doing. An entire industry has built itself up around building and promoting people's spirits.

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"TO BE ALIVE, and feeling free, and to have everyone in our family!" Forty young guys sang out those words at the top of our voices. We were on retreat in our senior year of high school. We'd had a tumultuous four years together during which time Vatican II turned the church upside down, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and our basketball team had a thrilling season going all the way to state finals.

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A LOT OF PEOPLE REPORT  having dreams where they show up at a high school or college class for the first time all semester only to find out it's time for their final exam. Or they're pushed out on stage in a starring role and they haven't a clue what their lines are. Perhaps the worst such dream was reported by a friend of mine who said, "I dreamt my daughter was down at the front door yelling up to me, 'Mom, Martha Stewart's here. She says she wants to inspect our linen closets.'"  More...

ONE OF MODERN American life's rites of passage is the moment when a teenager is issued a driver's license. For the teen it becomes the ultimate symbol of freedom, of having grown up, of independence from the family. On the other hand, for the parents of that teen, it usually is a very traumatic moment, a time when the important lessons of responsibility and respecting authority need to be reinforced.

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FAMILY MEMBERS were on edge. A beloved aunt had died, and all her grown nieces and nephews were gathered in her home to figure out how to dispose of her lifetime of belongings. You could feel the tension in the room. Old hurts were close to the surface. Fear reigned in everyone's heart as they worried that they would not get their due. And, though they didn't realize it at the time, fueling all the fear and tension was the pain of having lost someone who had always loved them so well.  More...

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THIS ADVENT, a mother who has been addicted to diet pills will find the strength to get help from her doctor to kick the habit. A father who has blown his top once too often will find better ways to deal with his anger and frustrations. A kid who has been hanging out with friends who are heading down a wrong path will get the strength to choose new friends and new ways.  More...

THERE ARE TWO SECONDS left to play. The shooter is at the foul line. The game will be decided by his two free throws. He needs to make both of them to win the game. It is all on his shoulders. There is lots of pressure. He bounces the ball five times as he always does. Then he takes the first shot. It goes in. The crowd roars. A whistle blows. The opposing team calls time-out so he can feel the pressure and be rattled by it. He grabs a towel and takes a sip of Gatorade and then he is back on the line. Five bounces again. The ball is in the air and through the net. He's won the game.  More...

IMAGINE MARY'S bewilderment when the angel Gabriel greeted her with the familiar words, "Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you." But despite her confusion she responded openly with a resounding yes to God. The Lord is with each one of us, too. How do we respond to God?

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HOMESICKNESS is a powerful disease for which there is no cure but going home. We may miss our own room or bed. Maybe we need the routine that we have grown accustomed to over the years. It could even be the food or the exact time of day we are used to eating. It includes a familiarity with just about everything around you that has suddenly become just a memory rather than a reality.  More...

JOSEPH, husband of Mary, had guts. He had the guts to pay attention to his dreams. He had the guts to trust his inner wisdom as opposed to conventional wisdom when he discovered that Mary was pregnant before their marriage, and also when he fled with his family to Egypt to escape the horrors of Herod who ended up sacrificing innocent children to protect his own power. Joseph was wise enough to be led by God as to where his family would live and how they would live.  More...

IN THIS SEASON of signs and wonder, today marks one of the most legendary-the arrival of the Magi who followed a star from the East to pay homage to the "newborn king of the Jews." These crafty wise guys, as my dad used to call them, made their way to Bethlehem, found the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother, offered the remarkable gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and then outsmarted vicious King Herod and went home by another route.

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LEGEND TELLS US that it was Saint Francis of Assisi who "invented" the Christmas crèche, the now familiar Nativity scene with all the figures of angels, animals, shepherds, and the three Magi. Many people eagerly await these figures as part of the church's decor for the Christmas holidays.

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WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of Samson pulling down the house on the Philistines, the story of the Magi was my favorite Bible story as a kid. It's just got so much going for it: mysterious royalty, treasures, a miraculous star, and best of all-camels!

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IN GRAMMAR SCHOOL I dreaded composition class. I just couldn't understand the concept of a thesis statement and outline. My problem was I couldn't think ahead. How do you know what you're going to say until you say it, I'd wonder. I'd go through the motions of setting up what fell under Roman numerals I, II, and III-and I knew you couldn't have a point A without a B. But when it came to actually writing an essay, I just started scrawling pen across paper with no notion where my train of thought would take me.  More...

EVERY FEW YEARS I like to take a long car trip somewhere all by myself. It accomplishes a lot of different things for me. Mostly, it gives me time to think. Traveling the same distance in an airplane does not afford me the same sense of distancing myself from all that I am leaving behind.

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A GUY I KNEW had drifted away from his faith. He had gone to Catholic school and had even been an altar boy. But when he became a teenager, religion seemed too limiting: "It cramps my style," he said. Later, he was busy building his career and getting his life set up. He didn't have time for all the superstition and hypocrisy that seemed so intertwined with the religious practice he knew growing up.

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I CAUGHT MYSELF responding to a compliment I'd received about an employee by saying, "Oh, yes, thank you, she's my shining star."

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FRIENDS OF MINE were stranded in Florida during one of the many hurricanes that caused so much destruction in a past storm season. They spent the storm in a hotel ballroom that was windowless and safe in the center of the building. Water and food had been stored. I asked them what was the hardest part of their ordeal. Without hesitation, they said it was when the lights flickered and then went out. Emergency lighting lasted and dimmed until the batteries gave out. The darkness affected them the most. A box of candles brought in by an employee was cheered.

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AT THE END of a large airport concourse sits a man who, amidst his few belongings, sings, every day and all day. One of his favorite songs is the spiritual This Little Light of Mine. He has a good voice and good musical ability-better than most others who try to pick up a few dollars for food or drink or drugs by making some kind of music at the airport. Thousands of travelers on their way from the parking lot to the terminals and back must pass him every day, some dropping pocket money in his upturned hat lying on the floor, others smiling with amusement or derision, and others ignoring him completely. Some are annoyed at the noise.

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IT WAS the word jihad that set Michelle off. Her son Dennis had come home from school using the word, and she didn't like it. She had heard the word used enough on the evening news, and it left her with an uneasy feeling. "Stop saying that," she told him. "You sound like a terrorist."

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WHILE VISITING Ireland, a friend and I happened upon a small Catholic church in the city of Cork. When we entered, we were both struck by the intricate mosaic tile on the entrance floor and up along the nave-not for its beauty, though it had that, but becasuse it depicted the 12 zodiac signs set in an arch over images of the stars in heaven. My friend turned to me and said, "This looks more like a pagan temple than a church."

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IF YOU'VE HAD THE PLEASURE to drive in a car with a GPS (global positioning system), you know what a handy little device it can be. Just punch in where you want to go, and the GPS guides you there-just like magi following a star. You don't even have to tell it where you are-it knows! And if you make a wrong turn, it tells you so and recalculates its directions accordingly.  More...

STAR LIGHT, star bright; first star I see tonight." Remember that nursery rhyme about wishing on a star? Our heart's desire can be a pretty powerful force when we pay attention to it. The magi of Epiphany looked to the night sky to fulfill their longing, to know what was unknown, and to discover a piece of the great mystery we call God.

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NICKNAMES: Did you have one? Did you like it? Did it stick with you? Some nicknames are pretty obvious in their origins like "Shorty" or "Lefty" or "Irish." Some clearly were terms of endearment given to a baby or a child that stuck like "Baby" or "Junior." Some may be diminutives of longer names like "Little Joe" or "J Lo." Some are nonsense syllables first spoken by a sibling many years ago like "Zu-Zu" or "Momo."  More...

A NERVOUS MOTHER telephoned the priest just a week before the scheduled baptism of her baby. She had heard that when he baptized babies, he immersed them in the water of the font. Not understanding what that meant, she was very concerned and requested that he simply pour a few drops of water on her child's head.

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WHENEVER YOU HEAR  about a public figure's son or daughter messing up, you just want to say, "What were you thinking? Don't you know your father is the mayor," or "Your mother is school principal?" It seems as if it would be so ingrained in those children to behave, but no parent can force his or her kid not to rebel, push limits, or be unhappy-even if he or she is the leader of the free world or creator of the universe for that matter.

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A FRIEND OF MINE  likes to say, "Ninety percent of being successful in life is just showing up." I think this is especially true for parents. When my daughters were infants, my wife would count it a successful day if she got a shower in before dinner, the house was still standing, and everybody was still breathing. Taking a nap was an extravagant luxury.

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CHERYL WAS a different kind of kid growing up. She liked to make things. At school she was much more interested in woodworking class or the machine shop than she was in the things that attracted the attention of the other girls. As you might guess, she didn't get a lot of encouragement from the boys. They didn't want her invading what they considered to be their domain. The other girls weren't very supportive either; they thought she was a little weird.

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THERE'S A FAMILY I know that reminds me of the Trinity. Each member of that family is a unique individual with many outside interests and distinct qualities. Within the family are artists, musicians, scholars, business professionals, and adventurers. And yet their interests and qualities blend together so well that they are clearly all one family. Their individual interests flow from and support their common interest, which seems to be enjoying life itself and helping others to do so as well.

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AS A LOVER OF WORDS I was fascinated to learn that  the root of the word liturgy, comes from Latin for "work of the people." What an amazing insight that brings to the central ritual of Christianity. Breaking bread with fellow Christians, remembering Christ, and sharing in his body and blood are actions that early Christians actually considered their work.

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A LOCAL BLOOD BANK has the name LifeSource. Blood indeed is what keeps us alive as it courses through our veins bringing in oxygen and taking out carbon dioxide.

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I WAS in my friend Billy's kitchen waiting for him to come downstairs so we could go out and play. Billy was the oldest of nine kids. Dinner was over, and his mother stood at the kitchen counter and dealt out the bread for eight sandwiches-12 pieces of bread, side by side, for the six kids who were in school, and four more pieces next to them to make the two sandwiches her husband would take to work with him.  More...

SHE WAS out of shape, lonely, and feeling generally adrift in the world. At the urging of her sister, she began taking long swims after work. It took 10 laps before her energy kicked in, but then she could do 30 without effort. After a while she could tell how long she'd been in the pool by how relaxed and rejuvenated she felt. She started using the time for meditation. Several Hail Marys would help pace her, and then she'd watch as the thoughts floated past her mind's eye. She tried not to latch onto any of them but allow them to be released into the water.

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GO TO the Chicago Historical Society and you will see the clothing that presidents and generals wore from Revolutionary War time up to the present. Besides the wide differences in materials and style and comfortability, one of the things you will notice is how much smaller most of our forbearers were physically than we are. It was rare to be Lincoln's height in his day. The suit worn by James Madison would barely fit an average junior high student today.

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SAINTS PETER AND PAUL ought to serve as parents' patron saints when our children have a hard time catching on to the faith. Peter always had good intentions, but throughout the gospels you could count on him to get it all wrong-at least at the outset. He wanted to put limits on how much he ought to forgive, he got terrified in the stormy boat when Jesus told him to have faith, and of course despite his boasts to the contrary, Peter denied Jesus three times when Jesus was most alone.

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WHEN MRS. GATES, a charity maven, and her husband, a successful Seattle lawyer, looked at their scrawny, scrabbly son, Bill, back in 1967, they would have hardly pegged him as a future world-shaker. In fact most people thought of 12-year-old Bill Gates as a geek. But not Paul Allen, whose budding friendship with Gates ignited a technological revolution of staggering proportion.

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A FRIEND OF MINE told me he wasn't going to his high-school reunion. "Why not?" I asked. "Back then everybody thought I was a loser. I've put together a very happy and satisfying life where people respect me, and I don't want to return to being the butt of their jokes."  More...

WATCHING TELEVISION back in the 1950s was a whole lot easier than it is now. Sure, there was no cable or satellite dishes. There weren't any remote controls to change channels and only a handful of channels to choose from.

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HER PEERS on the faculty watched as her body wasted away. They sat quietly eating their lunches during meetings, knowing she was in the bathroom purging hers. Her perpetual bruises, black eyes, and broken bones were explained away as everyday accidents, though everyone knew they were symptoms of her progressing disorder.

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WE REMEMBER "FIRSTS" in our lives because they are guideposts to where we've been and to where our lives are now pointed.

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MY FAMILY AND I were on a walk while at my parents' cottage on a small lake in Southwest Michigan when we got a lesson about life.  More...

LIKE THE APOSTLES who gathered together to tell Jesus "all they had done and taught," every evening at dinner my sisters and I would report to my father and mother all that we had done and learned during the day.  More...

THERE IS A TYRANNY of technology that we all are facing. The very inventions that were created to save time, make life easier, and assist us at the workplace have instead turned on us and made our lives more complex by making us more accessible.

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A NOTICEABLE "BUZZ" spread through the wedding banquet hall. Two great-uncles of the groom, brothers who had been so close growing up but who hadn't spoken to each other in more than 20 years, were soon going to be in the same place at the same time. How would they react?

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IN HONG KONG citizens began hoarding food as the fear of the deadly SARS disease spread. American Airlines senior-level managers hoarded benefits when the company teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, and every day millions of people hoard their time and generosity, worried that if they say yes to one act of kindness, they'll be roped in to 10 more.

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SOME FOOD is better eaten the next day. That is why it's always good to make enough for leftovers. Cold pizza makes a great breakfast for some. Meatloaf is a great middle-of-the-night snack. And that turkey served so formally the first day can become a casserole, soup, sandwich, pasta dish, and so much more in later appearances at the table.
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A GUY I KNOW grew up believing his grandma was with Jesus when he fed the 5,000. He came to that belief because whenever that particular gospel would be read, everyone in the family whispered, "Grandma musta' been there!" And they would laugh.

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EACH ONE OF US who is not independently wealthy wakes up and, in one way or another, tries to do exactly what Jesus tells us not to do: work for food that perishes. Not that Jesus has anything against earning a living and feeding ourselves and our families. But that should not be where all our energy goes. It should go toward doing the work of God, which, we are told, is to believe in the one God sent. That is our full-time job; every other duty in our lives falls under this responsibility.

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THERE ARE MANY different diet plans. Bookstore shelves are filled with diets that say eat only this type of food or that. Some diets tell people to skip a particular food. Some concentrate on removing entire food groups out of your diet.

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MARK TWAIN WROTE, "I have known many troubles in my life, most of which never happened." I know about such troubles, too. These are the troubles looming just out in the future that occupy my mind in unguarded moments throughout the day or especially as I try to drift off to sleep. I can worry about world problems a little and work problems even more. But the problems that keep me up the most are family problems. Or at least I portray them as problems in my mind.

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WE WERE taking in the sites of midtown Manhattan, chomping on hot pretzels, when a haggard, down-on-her luck woman walked up to my sister and cried, "Help me, please. I'm hungry." Without hesitation, my sister handed the woman her pretzel. "That's not what I want," the woman shot back. "Give me money!"

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MOST SHOPPING MALLS now have large food courts with a number of different styles of food. Certain streets feature one fast food restaurant after another. Some neighborhoods become noted for their upscale restaurants. Even colleges, once notorious for bad food, now sport elaborate food stations.

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I'M SURE I was being overdramatic. I was a teenager, after all, and the ups and downs of a teenager's life feel very dramatic, indeed. I had been volunteering my summer to work at a camp for orphans. It was more demanding than I expected. I'd made a few mistakes in how I handled my newfound authority and felt like a complete failure. What's more, I'd gone swimming on my one evening off and split open my foot on a sharp rock, and now I was hobbling around a rustic camp on crutches. I was ready to throw in the towel.  More...

MY HUSBAND went to get the car while the nurse went over a few last-minute details about how to care for our newborn daughter, who had a serious heart defect and a diagnosis of Down syndrome. The nurse outlined the telltale signs of distress that would indicate a trip back to the hospital; she advised me on the best diapers and formula ("whatever's on sale"). She reminded me how to swaddle the baby and how to use the suction syringe to clean her nose. She gently lifted my daughter out of the hospital crib and tucked her safely into her carseat. Then she walked me to the door and waited with me for my husband to pull up.

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IT SEEMS that when you are hungry, your senses conspire against you. That is why some restaurants put elaborate, full-color pictures of their meals on their menus or place sample plates in their windows. Their visual impact is to first entice you into the restaurant and then have you order even more than you planned.

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THE PEOPLE in today's gospel who just "don't get it" when Jesus tells them his flesh is the living bread from heaven remind me of a time we scared the daylights out of my younger daughter. She was just about 3 years old when she and her older sister were having trouble getting to sleep.  More...

THAT WAS IT; he had had it with God. The woman he loved was gone, and the job he applied for was given to someone else. He was angry, disappointed, and deeply hurt by people he trusted and thought he knew. He had had it out with God before, but this was the last straw. He experienced an overwhelming sense that God didn't care-that life was arbitrary and capricious and prayers didn't matter. He was determined to accept the idea that no one was at the helm of this crazy universe.

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IN A CATHOLIC wedding ceremony, couples have many choices to make, from the type of procession to the music, readings, and prayers they want proclaimed. They also choose if they want to incorporate actions like walking to Mary's altar and praying or lighting the unity candle.

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ON OUR  10th wedding anniversary, some friends gave my wife and me a welcome mat that had the words from today's first reading on it: "As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

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AS THE CEO of a major publishing house, he was a big fish in a big pond. His main publication was a world-renowned reference set. He had made it to the top by schmoozing and playing it safe. His main goal was to enjoy his privilege and keep the stockholders happy.

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IGNORANCE OF THE LAW does not mean we are free from keeping it. It is our responsibility to know what the laws are. Ignorance is no defense. Maybe that's why there are so many lawyers.

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WHEN I WAS a young teenager my friends and I formed the Eddie Haskell Fan Club. Eddie was the smarmy kid on the Leave It to Beaver television show who acted sweet and nice in front of parents and other adults but was selfish with his peers and mean toward kids younger than him.  More...

JESUS CURED the deaf man with the speech impediment in today's gospel by poking him in the ear and spitting in his mouth. Oddly enough that was the common method of treatment among the healers of Jesus' time. So what made Jesus different? Why was he thrilling the masses like no other healer before or since? I chalk it up to one simple gesture: Jesus took the deaf man "off by himself away from the crowd."

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A FEW SUMMERS AGO I was on a team that was running a men's retreat weekend, and I was on kitchen duty. The setting was rustic and the kitchen primitive. We made meals using a few available utensils and a couple of propane rings to cook on. Other team members were enjoying interacting with the men, and I was struggling just to make a pot of oatmeal, a vat of spaghetti, or something that resembled coffee. I found myself getting angrier and angrier as the weekend went on.

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WHAT DO the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Philosopher's Stone, the Holy Grail, the Elixir of Life, the Fountain of Youth, the Phoenix, Tolkien's Elves, Marvel Comics' Eternals, the films Beetlejuice and Highlanders, and Harry Potter's Horcruxs all have in common? They are but a small sampling of the countless representations in myth and literature of one of humanity's most enduring quests-the search for eternal life or immortality.

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HE HUMBLED himself," Saint Paul wrote of Christ, "and because of this, God greatly exalted him."

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I'VE NEVER BEEN to the Holy Land and followed the path to Golgotha. No visits to Auschwitz or Wounded Knee. I haven't even had a chance to pay my respects at Ground Zero. But I understand why people make pilgrimages to places so profoundly scarred by evil-such places are, paradoxically, also the most sacred places on Earth.  More...

I ALWAYS LIKED scary movies. I especially like the ones when good ultimately triumphed over evil. That's why I liked movies about vampires the best. There was always a climactic scene when the hero, ready to be destroyed by the fanged monster, holds up a crucifix. Suddenly light bursts forth, there is triumphant music, and the monster recoils. As a kid, it made me proud to be a cross-wearing Catholic!

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SECOND-GRADER Jeffrey kept hiding his returned tests and homework under his mattress. The grades were bad, and he was afraid to show his mom. And when the teacher sent home a note warning Jeffrey's mom that the boy was in danger of failing, he tucked that under the mattress, too.  More...

MY DAUGHTER, Hannah, was naturally loving, as all babies are. She thrilled her grandparents and aunts and uncles with her willingness to sit in their laps and cuddle with nary a whimper for Mommy or Daddy.

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I WAS ON RETREAT once when a group of us were talking about spiritual practices that we find helpful. One guy shyly admitted that he makes a practice of doing something nice for some person every day while making sure no one knows about it-especially the person the good deed was done to.

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THERE ARE SOME who play because they have a sheer love of the game. But they are few and far between. And then there are those who play to win. And for too many, that means winning at all costs.

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BIG JOHN the Muffler Man was a legend among Midwestern salesmen. During the '50s and '60s, he travelled the U.S. highways calling on automotive parts stores in an eight-state area. His customers knew he would try to give them the best deal and he never failed to deliver on a promise. They loved his stories and jokes and stood in awe of his large size and giant Irish thirst.

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OUR TRACK RECORD as a church is, alas, not much better than the rest of society. We have our own sad history of excluding people from our pews, our sacraments, our schools, only because of their accents or the color of their skin. How we could have possibly justified such behavior when confronted with readings from scripture like this Sunday's remains a mystery.

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BLANCHE AND HER FRIENDS had been in charge of the Mothers' Club at their parish for years. They'd hosted lots of events, raised a lot of money for the religious education program, and had a lot of fun. Lately, though, it seemed the younger mothers were not getting involved, and a good amount of their meeting was spent griping that the same old people were doing all the work.

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SANTO AND HIS WIFE came to church every Sunday. He would give the priest a courtly tip of his hat and then hold the heavy oak door open for his wife. This was their weekly routine, one of countless others that grew in their 50-plus years together.

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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a time in history when one group or another wasn't being abused, exploited, or denied the rights and dignities deserving of any human being.  More...

I'VE BEEN MARRIED dozens of times-all to the same woman. In any relationship you have to keep committing and recommitting as times and circumstances change and you come to know more about your partner and yourself. And so a marriage is not a wedding day but a series of decisions to be for and with the other person "for better or for worse."

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IT'S SUNDAY MORNING. You can tell. People flood to their place of worship and kneel before the symbols of all that brings them joy and happiness in their lives. Unfortunately the temple to which many people make their pilgrimage is the health club, the gym where they look for eternal youth on the elliptical machine or treadmill or stationary bicycle.  More...

A DOCTOR I KNOW finds today's gospel about the rich man going away sad the most disturbing of all Jesus' stories and parables. He has notes and comments scratched alongside these verses in his Bible, and his personal journal is filled with pages of reflections about what it takes to follow Jesus.

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HAVE YOU EVER FELT like a camel? I did several years ago. My family and I were on a long-awaited vacation to Italy where my wife and I had studied together in our junior year of college. Back in college I traveled all over Europe with just a small backpack and not even a credit card to my name.

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THERE ARE MANY SYMBOLS that reflect our society, some for better and others for worse. The professional athlete is one of those symbols that seems to endure generation after generation. Children still look up to them. Wheaties still puts them on their cereal boxes. And all the sports channels give interview after interview. They become our heroes, to be emulated and imitated.

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FINE. You want to be in charge. I hope you have your shot at it because then you'll see just how hard it really is. You think it's a matter of what you say goes. No, it means constantly compromising and negotiating and trying not to step on toes. It's all about mentoring, coaching, and helping others understand their strengths and weaknesses. It is a big pain in the neck.  More...

MOM, I WANT TO ASK you a favor. Promise you'll say yes?"

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THERE IS SO MUCH that we are blind to in our lives, isn't there? We don't see the few pounds we've added until the pants don't button any more. We don't see the graying hairs and wrinkles until the waitress innocently asks us if we want the senior discount. We don't see the pain and hurt we cause until someone finally breaks down in tears.

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I SAT SLUMPED in my pew listening to the drone of the deacon's sermon. "How do I always get this guy?" I carped to myself. "Please don't lecture us. Must you sap the life out of every gospel?" the uncharitable complaining inside my head continued.

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OVER THE YEARS, Reader's Digest and other such publications have made a business out of editing and condensing everything from magazine articles to entire books. People who are busy can get the information they want quickly. Unfortunately, the subtlety and nuances are often sacrificed in the process.

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GO EASY on yourself and others today as we honor All Souls. God expects a lot from each of us, but not without God's help. Today is a day to remember that God is our salvation; that we are greater than our faults; that we are more loved and lovable than our sins would admit.

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WHEN I WAS a kid I was forever losing my belongings. I'd lose my mittens, my boots, my textbooks, and my homework (honest!). I lost a few baseball mitts, plenty of baseball cards, comic books, and my brand-new bike (on its maiden voyage). I lost my bus pass so often my mother decided I would walk to school from then on, which gave me more opportunity to lose more stuff on my meandering walk.

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NO, YOU ARE NOT misreading the calendar by six months. This week the church celebrates the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the cathedral church of the bishop of Rome, the pope. This is celebrated throughout the world because this church is considered the "mother" church of the entire church everywhere. And that should make it special to all of us.

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WHEN JESUS SANCHEZ arrived, the building was a brick shell. It was his job to work with the carpenter to build walls; drywall, plaster, and sand; and repair and lay floors. He brought a team of eight guys, and they worked 10 hour days for three weeks straight (except Sundays).

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"I GET TO EMPTY the trash this week!" said my elated second-grade daughter. Her wise teacher had borrowed a lesson from Tom Sawyer and made a privilege of being the one "chosen" to carry the class trash to the big container at the end of the hall. Only the kids who behaved and participated in class would be considered for such an honor.

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THE SPECIAL EFFECTS we see in movies have become almost perfect. The use of computer animation and graphics can create just about anything. And it all looks so real that it takes no imagination on our part. Our belief is suspended as we watch the screen with rapt attention.

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LIKE A MICROCOSM of the end time described in today's gospel, I have regular experiences of dark days filled with the tribulation of piled up deadlines at the office, unrelenting household chores, family responsibilities, financial worries, psychic funks, and catastrophic events, such as the illness and death of loved ones.

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I WAS A YOUNG KID excited to be downtown with my mom and my brother. Even though it seemed a bit overwhelming, I loved the excitement of the city. As we stood waiting to cross a busy intersection, a street-corner preacher started wailing through a bullhorn that the end of the world was coming-and soon!

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IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, Mel Brooks, playing Louis XVI, had a running gag: "It's good to be the king." It implied that the king was free to do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, and however he wanted to do it. Funny? Maybe. Historical? Not at all. What he really was describing was a despot or a dictator, not a true king.

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PILATE, LIKE MOST OF US, is a guy who can't handle the truth because it means accepting that our world is upside down and inside out.

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I WAS MAD at a guy in my parish. He had accused my daughter of pulling a Halloween prank-splattering his porch with eggs and shaving cream. My daughter tried to explain to him what happened-that she was trick-or-treating with friends when a group of older kids attacked them-but he wouldn't believe her. He hung up on her. I trust my daughter, but I was happy to get independent confirmation from a neighbor who saw what happened that her story was true. She happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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LOOK AROUND. The so-called "signs of the season" are all around us. We cannot seem to escape them. It used to be the Saturday after Thanksgiving when Santa would appear in the department stores and the decorations would be put up and the lights turned on. We all know that everything has been put up and lit up, most of it, since Halloween.

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IT HADN'T BEEN  a good day-the computers shut down at work, and after hours on the phone with technical support, the problem still wasn't solved. He closed the door of the office knowing that he would come back to the same problems Monday morning. He sat in rush hour traffic and considered the unrelenting stress in his life. The more he dwelled on his problems the more miserable he became.

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IT HAD BEEN a very difficult day at work, a day filled with anxieties and conflicts and much uncertainty. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. All I wanted to do was go home, lie on the couch, and watch TV. Maybe I'd pull a blanket up over my head and go to sleep. As I walked to the train, thoughts of hibernating were all that propelled me toward home. On the train I could barely keep my eyes open. Afraid I was going to drift off to sleep and miss my stop, I moved toward the exit on the train and stood on the stairs looking out the window.

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LIKE SO MANY OTHERS before and after me, when I was in college I discovered the power of caffeine. I could stay up all night and prepare for an exam. With my photographic memory it was just a matter of going over the material enough times to imprint it in my brain. The combination of No Doz and strong espresso did the trick for a factual kind of exam.

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I HOPE I get an iPod for Christmas. I hope Dad gets home soon. I hope I passed that test. I hope Mom's OK. I hope it doesn't snow. I hope it's nothing serious. I hope you had a nice time. I hope to see you soon. I hope I didn't hurt your feelings.

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WHEN I WAS A KID all the guys in my neighborhood played a kind of game-or was it a form of torture?-called "Think quick!"

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HOW DO WE CHOOSE whom to invite to a party this holiday season? Some we have no choice about inviting-the boss, co-workers, family members, the neighbor who invited you to her party. Some we invite because they are friends. And there are some we have no good reason for inviting. Good parties have a mix of guests who will keep the evening interesting but won't make anybody else uncomfortable.

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IT ALL BEGINS with a cry in the wilderness. In the amazing musical The Lion King (both on stage and on screen), the action opens with the piercing wake-up call of Rafiki, the wise old baboon, who calls all the animals of the kingdom to take their place in the circle of life. The slow, insistent gathering of the animals is a powerful symbol of how every creature responds to the one call.

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IN 500 YEARS I will not forgive her!" proclaimed my fiancé in his thick Bosnian accent after my cousin, who had more wine than food at our engagement party, asked my intended to find her a boyfriend, but, she added-and here comes the unforgivable part-"preferably one who speaks English."

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THE LITTLE BROTHERS OF THE POOR bring food and more to homebound seniors throughout Chicago. But long ago they realized that a meal, no matter how healthy and appetizing, is not enough. One's soul must also be nourished. So they also bring a flower and sit and talk with the person to whom they are delivering the meal.

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I WAS AT a holiday party standing around the chips and dip with a number of people, most of whom I hadn't met before. We were enjoying lively conversation about movies, politics, and current events. Then one of the people made a pointed comment about capital punishment  More...

WHO ARE YOU and what do you have to say for yourself? Those questions put to John the Baptist aren't easy to answer.

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FROM EARLY in our childhood it was drummed into us how valuable our family name was. We were taught that we were to do nothing that would embarrass the family in any way. We were never to be called to the principal's office, be stopped for a ticket, be taken to a police station, or have the family name besmirched in the papers.  More...

IN HIS FINE BOOK The Works of Mercy: The Heart of Catholicism, James F. Keenan, S.J. recounts a time he gathered for a spirituality conference with a group of priests and nuns, most of whom were models of joy, love, fidelity, and service. There was one, however, "who was miserable and who perpetually manipulated her community by her very dominating dispositions."

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EACH YEAR on our birthdays my mother would tell my sisters and me the story of our births. My dad, a traveling saleman during those years, was always out of town when my mom would start labor. But then by some miracle, he would get there before or just after each of us was born.

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WHY IS IT that Christmas carols, the same ones we sing year after year, mean so much to us? I hear Silent Night, and I think of setting up the creche in the family grocery store. I hear O Holy Night, and I remember being thanked by an elderly couple from their window after going caroling through the neighborhood. And Adeste Fidelis always reminds me of carrying the infant Jesus to the crib at Midnight Mass.

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TO SAY the "Word became flesh" is to say that human beings in all their earthiness are holy creatures-true children of God made in the very image of God. Consequently the work of human hands is equally graced.  More...

IN FIFTH GRADE our teacher let us have a Christmas party, complete with a grab bag gift exchange. That morning I spied a big package-the size and shape of a fun board game-wrapped in shiny paper and with a big glitzy bow on it. I knew I had to have it.

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THERE IS ALWAYS a market for nostalgia. Depending on our age, we look back at the '40s or '60s or even the '80s as the "good old days." On the internet and in specialty stores, we can listen to music from Guy Lombardo to the Jackson 5. We can purchase lava lamps and bean bag chairs. We can play with Slinkys and Barbie and Pong. Things are in fashion one day and out the next.

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I MET A MAN who told me this story. He had three sons. And from the time they were first born he would bless them every morning and every evening. Touching their foreheads, he said the words he found in the Bible (Numbers 6: 22-27). He would say, "May the Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord let his face shine upon you and be gracious to you! The Lord look upon you kindly and give you peace!"  More...

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS I've been to more funerals than I care to count as my parents' generation crosses the threshold into all that is unseen. One theme that runs constant at the funerals for mothers is "Mom was a good listener." Despite problems they may have had with their mothers, when it came right down to it, their mothers were their close confidants.

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I AM AS GUILTY of it as any of you. If you are like me, you find it frustrating when someone you are talking to on the phone cuts you off and puts you on hold because another call has come in. This service is euphemistically called "call waiting." It should be called "call interrupted" or "maybe this call is more important than you."  More...

CAUGHT UP in the fervor of a high-school retreat, I lay awake asking God how I could be of service. After a while, I came away with a very clear message: Spread my Word. But how? I went on to study theology in college and then stumbled into Catholic publishing. Aha, I thought, this must be what God meant.

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WHEN MY DAUGHTER would tell us she wanted to teach in a foreign country one day I would silently pray that this notion of hers would pass. As her father, my thoughts ran immediately to every possible danger she might face in an unfamiliar place. My fear was that I wouldn't be there to help her or protect her. I wanted to argue her out of her plans, but I held my tongue. And in due time she did arrange to spend two years teaching in Honduras and it was an amazing, life-giving adventure for her.

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HURRICANE KATRINA did more than damage buildings, flood neighborhoods, and affect energy costs. It also drastically changed the lives of thousands of residents of "The Big Easy." Not only were the memories of the past so attached to the history of the places in the city blown away by that storm, but also, and more important, so were the hopes for the future  More...

IF WE CONFIDENTLY call ourselves Christian, we no doubt have a "call story"-roughly defined as that moment when we decide that, despite our doubts or confusion, we are casting our lots with Jesus and following the path that says our lives have meaning (we are children of God), that we have a mission (to bring good news to the poor), and that we are not alone in our joy and suffering (we are the body of Christ).

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IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, told many stories of how people came to be part of the Worker. One was Hazen Ordway. He had been the librarian at the seminary of the Marist order in Washington, D.C. He heard Dorothy speak there in 1937, and in her words, "left immediately to join us, associating himself with us ever since."

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ONE OF THE EARLIEST pictures my brother took was of me back in 1955, a half century ago, dressed in my Hoppalong Cassidy outfit with hat and six shooter and holster. I was kneeling as my brother Tony, an Indian, shoved a lance through my body. For a while I really wanted to be a cowboy. That was before I wanted to be a priest and after I wanted to be Captain Video.

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I WAS WALKING past a schoolyard yesterday and the kids were hanging out waiting for the bell to ring to start the school day. As kids will, some little third grader was taunting another one. She said, "Why should I listen to you? You're just a dork."

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IN 1989, in the months leading up to the 40th anniversary of the communist regime in East Germany, a Lutheran pastor in the city of Leipzig began preaching at a peace vigil in the city's Nicolaikirche. With every passing week, more people came to the vigil, and eventually attendance reached into the thousands.  More...

A LOT HAS BEEN WRITTEN about light deprivation, that phenomenon that occurs in winter time. Some people, because of the lack of bright sunlight in their lives get depressed. They can deal with the condition simply by sitting under certain types of bright lights that mimic natural sunlight. This has been shown to alleviate the depression.

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PREACHING AND HEALING are all of a piece for Jesus. You speak of God's love and people are healed. Author Tony Hendra experienced the power of this combinative ministry the first time he encountered the late Benedict Monk Father Joe Warrilow, whom he pays tribute to in Father Joe (Random House, 2004).

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LAST JUNE, six men were ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of Brooklyn-the most ordained for that diocese at one time in several years. Among them was Father Richard Zuk, a native of Queens. When he had graduated from college, he started working in direct marketing and sales. He had also stopped practicing his Catholic faith. "The focus was all on me and making money," he said in a Newsday article. But then, he continued, "I started volunteering on an ambulance and in soup kitchens, then the deeper questions came: What is life all about? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my meaning and purpose?"

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BEING ANIMATED, my hands are always in motion. If I am not gesturing dramatically in conversation, I am rubbing my eyes or scratching my head. Now we are being told that touching our hands to ours faces should be avoided, especially during this season of colds and flu and that we should always wash our hands before touching our faces.

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EVERY DAY of my third-grade year started with the same routine: My sister and I would board the school bus braced for the abuse that would be hurled my way by a handful of older boys-seventh and eighth graders-who took offense to my very pronounced overbite. The moment they saw me, the chant would begin: "How much wood could a P.J. chuck if a P.J. could chuck wood, hey! How much wood . . . ."

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WHAT IS IT about we human beings that we have such a need to divide people into the "ins" and the "outs"? It starts young. When I was in kindergarten Charlie Goebig decided that one unfortunate girl in our class had cooties and that we should all run from her on the playground. It was an unimaginably cruel thing to do, and I'm sorry to say we all did it.

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A LOT OF PEOPLE have been paying attention to the financial markets lately. It's become clear that, in the world of finance, there's always a risk in any investment. But Jesus' story about the three servants and the talents they were entrusted with by their master makes the point that in the spiritual realm, it's more risky not to invest.

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I AM A CITY BOY, born and raised. I profess very little knowledge about animals of any kind-wild, domesticated, or farm. I do like dogs and cats. Beyond that my experience has been pretty limited.

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SOME KIDS are sitting around a board game and one of them is reading the instructions. The rules are quite elaborate and confusing. Finally, one of them says, "Can anyone just tell me how you win this game?"

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A FEW DECADES AGO pundits were predicting the demise of the once mighty and proud city of New York. It had become in too many people's minds virtually ungovernable, incredibly dirty, frighteningly dangerous, and so, totally uninviting. Almost in desperation, the "I [HEART] N. Y." advertising campaign was launched to counter those attitudes. And somehow it worked. The city not only has survived, but despite horrendous tragedies like 9-11 and power blackouts, it has thrived.

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SAINT PAUL PRAYS for the Philippians that their love will increase in knowledge and perception so that they may discern what is of value. Think about it: Love is not the first thought that comes to mind when you're trying to figure out what's best in any given situation. Should I stay late and finish this project for the client, or leave now and get home in time to say goodnight to the kids or give an old pal a call? Hmm . . . perhaps if I try loving more, the answer will come to me.

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SHE WAS AT an awkward age, no longer a child but not yet mature. And so she didn't quite know how to play Christmas any more. She used to love the presents and the "secret Santa" rituals and the prospect of dolls and games and toys. But she'd put all that behind her recently and would constantly be telling her parents, "I'm not a baby anymore."

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IT IS A TRADITION that started way back with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and has continued at political conventions and gatherings ever since, even up to today. To spark the delegates and crowds a band starts playing "Happy Days Are Here Again." It is clearly a hopeful message, a positive message. The irony is that the song was written originally to celebrate the repeal of prohibition. What an interesting metamorphisis has taken place over the years and decades.

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THE CHURCH calls this Gaudete Sunday, which means "rejoice." Gaudete Sunday always reminds me of Fezziwig. Fezziwig is a character in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a man from Scrooge's memory of Christmas Past. Fezziwig was a businessman who had hired the young Scrooge.  More...

“HAVE NO ANXIETY AT ALL,” Saint Paul tells us in today’s reading. Sorry Paul, but at Christmastime, your plea falls on deaf ears. And that prayer at Mass for God to “protect us from all anxiety”—that doesn’t seem to be working either, at least not for anyone I know.  More...

THIS WEEKEND usually is one of the busiest travel times of the year. Airports, bus terminals, train stations, and, of course, highways will be filled with people laden down with gifts, all trying to make it home for the holidays. Home with their loved ones is where people want to be, if at all possible.  More...

NEW JOBS, job promotions, acceptance at your first-choice school, straight A's, getting engaged, the mortgage approved, the account you were vying for, front row tickets to the game of the century-these are all extremely exciting moments in the course of any life, but they pale in comparison to giving birth-at least for most people, under even the worst circumstances. Human beings can't help themselves: New life is irresistible, even if only for a brief moment before the worries and responsibilities of caring for this new life push their way into the nursery.

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THE YOUNG COUPLE would sit on their small patio at the rear of their small house. They sensed they were blessed to be present at a slow-motion miracle, the nine months waiting for their first-born child. And so, each night after dinner, they would sit together and look at the stars. They would sense the endless possibilities in store for them and this new human being they were getting ready to welcome into the world.

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I GREW UP WATCHING an old black-and-white RCA television wishing I had been born into a family like on the Donna Reed Show where dad was a doctor and mom solved all the problems; or Leave It to Beaver where mom cleaned house and cooked in a dress with her pearls and dad was so understanding of everything the kids did wrong; or Father Knows Best where the whole family gathered every night for dinner around the dining room table and never ate in the kitchen.  More...

“JESUS ADVANCED in wisdom,” the last line of today’s gospel tells us, and it’s a good thing, because worrying his parents the way he did was not very wise. He had his reasons to stay in Jerusalem, to be sure, but a simple note—”Mom, Dad, catch you later”—would have saved his parents a lot of heartache. But as any scripture scholar will tell you, Luke’s attention wasn’t focused on the domestic life of the Holy Family.  More...

I REMEMBER WHEN one of our daughters got lost at an amusement park. She was 4 or 5 years old, and I remember how terrified my wife and I were. She was gone from us only a short time, but in those moments my heart raced and my imagination was filled with disturbing thoughts of what might have happened to her.  More...

I HAVE A SPECIAL great niece, less than a year old, appropriately named Grace. I was fortunate enough to baptize her. I had been told by my niece and her husband that had Grace been a boy, she would have been named after me. Maybe the next one.  More...

WHY DID JESUS need to be baptized? Certainly he had nothing to repent, and he was already filled with the Spirit. So why did he bother?  More...

A FRIEND SHARED this story with me: “I had really goofed up. I had hurt my wife badly. She was angry at me, but mostly hurt. And I knew it. There was nothing I could do to undo what I had done. It was like when you throw a stone in a pond; the effects of my thoughtlessness kept radiating out, affecting her and others and I could not call them back.  More...

WEDDINGS ARE supposed to be joyful and happy for the bride and groom, their families, and all in attendance. But in our culture weddings have moved into the world of consumer excess and competition.  More...

THEIR COMPANY’S presentation to the new client wasn’t ready. Another day—even four or five more hours—and they could have had it in the right shape. But her partner said, “No, we’ve got to go. We can’t be late, and we can’t postpone again. This is it. Let’s go.”  More...

ONE OF THE BEST films about the joys and trials of growing up is Stand by Me. One of the heroes and the narrator of the tale is Gordy Lachance. His older brother was a star athlete and his parents’ obvious favorite. Now the older brother has died, and in their grief, Gordy’s parents have totally lost sight of their younger boy.  More...

NOT LONG AGO I gave a rousing speech at a tax relief rally about rising property taxes forcing people of moderate income to move out of their houses. After the speech I was congratulated by many people, including one shabbily dressed gentleman. He told me how powerful my words were. That obviously made me feel good. Then, looking around expectantly, he asked if we were going to serve any refreshments.  More...

IN THIS PASSAGE describing Jesus’ return to Galilee, Jesus is in a take charge, electric mood. Imagine sitting in church and an altar boy from years ago walks up to the podium, reads from scripture about the coming of the Messiah, and then proclaims to the congregation that “this scripture is fulfilled this very day in me.”  More...

I HELD A NUMBER of part-time jobs growing up, working in lots of low-level departments in businesses, factories, and shops. Wherever I worked, one thing was always the same. My co-workers would eventually get around to saying, “Nobody appreciates what we do. If it weren’t for us, this place would fall apart.” And of course, to varying degrees, they were right. Each group—from janitor to copy clerk, from the loading dock to the reception desk—had an important function to play. Yet from time to time they all felt unappreciated.  More...

JEFFREY’S BROTHER JESSE was slow. Though Jesse was two year’s older, he acted years younger than Jeffrey. He had suffered brain damage at birth and would never progress past the mental maturity of a 4-year-old.  More...

“YOU KNOW, it was the one about being nothing but a gong.” So said my friend when describing the reading he was asked to do at a wedding. The gong is an unforgettable scriptural image.  More...

WE LIVE IN WORLD filled with uncertainties. What we used to take for granted, we are now concerned with, worrying over, upset by.  More...

A POPULAR TELEVISION show this past year features ordinary people who have decided that their physical appearance is so lacking, it is negatively affecting their entire life.
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“TRUST ME, the right job is going to come along,” his daughter Terry assured him. John was having his doubts. He had retired from full-time work but after several years found he couldn’t make it on his pension. What could he launch into this late in life? That was his big concern. He was starting to question his worth and felt embarrassed that he wasn’t in better financial shape.  More...

THE CALL OF GOD in our lives is at once a call to the most profound and to the most practical. Though the invitation of God is to give our whole selves, the manner of our response is typically focused on small, specific actions—right where we live. To what in my life do I need to say, “Here I am, Lord”?  More...

AN OLD JAZZ duet was being interviewed on Larry King Live. It was fun seeing clips of their earlier days and hearing the behind-the-scenes stories of how they met and what other jazz greats they worked with throughout their long careers. Then King started asking them about their family life, and in the process they recounted how they had lost their oldest son to a rare heart disorder. The devastation of that loss was immediately apparent in their faces.  More...

AN 8-YEAR-OLD CHILD of a couple in the parish was devastated when the Chicago Cubs didn’t make it to the World Series last fall. He asked his father how there could be a God since no one answered his or all the other long-suffering fans’ fervent prayers for the Cubs.  More...

I STOOD ATOP a mesa in New Mexico from where I could see for miles. I was struck by the contrast between the vast stretches of barren desert and the narrow band of abundant life skirting the bank of a dry river bed. These stretches of life, like ribbons of green and gold glistening in the sun, were the cottonwoods, oaks, and pines that grew where fresh water flowed.  More...

THE BROTHERS HAD BEEN business partners for years. They were well-respected in their industry and they were making good money. It was time to sit back and reap the fruits of their labor. Instead one of the partners found out his wife was pregnant with her eighth child. He panicked. “My gosh, I’ll be paying college tuition into my 70s,” he cried out loud.  More...

I REMEMBER IT like it was yesterday. My brother had a new bicycle. It was an “English racer” with narrow tires and a lightweight frame. All the kids in the neighborhood gathered around to admire it. My brother declared it to be the fastest bike ever made. All of a sudden, three older boys from the next block over challenged him: “Put your money where your mouth is.” It was the ultimate childhood challenge.  More...

“I HATE MYSELF,” I heard my daughter say. “I’m so stupid!” She was struggling with a school project, and it was not coming together as she had hoped
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SOME OLD-TIMERS look back fondly at all that used to be a part of Lenten fasting and abstinence. Some felt it provided them with benefits beyond the spiritual renewal intended. They speak about a sense of camaraderie during Lent. It was easy to spot another Catholic eating a cheese sandwich at work or ordering tuna salad at a restaurant. You weren’t alone in your sacrificing. There was a shared consciousness.  More...

NO MORE BARGAINS. I’m giving up bargaining for Lent. Not the shopping-discounts or market-bazaar kind of bargaining–I’m no good at that anyway. Show me an overpriced item, and I guarantee it’s already in my shopping cart or on my shelf at home.  More...

SOME COUSINS FROM IRELAND came for a visit recently and all the clan gathered for a feast. Before the first bite was taken, we stopped to pray.  More...

THOSE OF US who live in the big city miss a whole lot when it comes to the beauty of nature that is all around us. On my first time being out in the country, on a boat in the middle of a calm lake late at night, I remember looking up. I had never seen so many stars before in my life.  More...

THERE’S A MOMENT in the movie Stand by Me when the young hero, Gordie, is bestowed a gift from nature. He and his pals are on an adventure of the type that young boys are drawn to—following railroad tracks out of town and into the wilderness. When they stop to camp out they each take a “watch” during the night, keeping an eye out for dangers that might come their way.  More...

IT WAS NO SURPRISE who won the award of excellence. Year after year for nearly 15 consecutive, he was top in his field. With a new panel of judges every year no one suspected favoritism. In fact, no one doubted his work was the best. The question was how did he keep so consistently good? The answer: Each day he was committed to doing his best work.  More...

A WHILE BACK, in an exclusive Chicago suburb made up of many gated communities, a person went on a shooting rampage and killed a number of people. The entire community went into shock.  More...

THOSE UBIQUITOUS Post-It notes you use every day—to mark a page, write a quick note to yourself, or place on a co-workers desk—were a mistake. The 3M Company was trying to come up with a new kind of glue mixture and instead they created a glue that didn’t really stick. How absurd! Such blunder!  More...

WHEN I WAS a college student I visited Ireland, the land of my ancestors. The spiritual highlight of my trip was when my Irish cousins brought me to the town of Raer Cross to stand among the ruins of a stone hut where my grandmother was born. I was surprised that I was so deeply moved.  More...

IT IS THE RARE movie star that receives top billing for the first movie they make. When it does happen usually that person was already a star in another medium like television or recording.  More...

WHEN I WORKED as a camp counselor, the kids loved when I told campfire stories about wanderers who had been lost and were seeking their way home.  More...

THEY SAT THERE fuming. The two junior partners on the litigation team put in 80-hour weeks for a solid year to win a multimillion dollar case for the firm. They missed anniversaries, birthdays, and vacations with their families. Throughout, they kept saying, “Well, at least the money will be good.”  More...

I REMEMBER IN THE eighth grade, Sister William sharing with the class the story of the woman caught in adultery. Sister explained that what John the Evangelist excluded when he gave us this gospel was the listing of sins that those who wanted to stone the woman committed.  More...

I GREW UP WATCHING Flash Gordon reruns with my brother on Sunday mornings after church. The show’s writers perfected the “cliffhanger ending.” At the end of each program it would appear that our hero was facing mortal danger with no hope of escape. We had to tune in the following week to see if he survived.  More...

THE BOARD of directors’ decision to hire a consultant to come up with some new fundraising strategies at the financially hurting organization was met with huge resistance.  More...

POLITICIANS LOVE parades. They are great opportunities to be seen by lots of people. And there is little risk involved. No speeches need to be given or stands on issues taken.  More...

MY ELDEST SISTER lies with her head resting against my mother’s side. My mother strokes her hair. “Honorable Number One Daughter,” my mother whispers softly. Tears well up in my sister’s eyes. “Mom still remembers me,” she thinks to herself with a mixture of hope and sadness.  More...

MY FIFTH-GRADE teacher, Mr. Cihocki, could really give “the look.” He was a young teacher, full of idealism, eager to reach us and teach us. And I was a blurter—a kid who couldn’t help but blurt out comments and quips I thought were funny. When I got bored in class I would blurt out some comment—just to spice things up.  More...

ONE EASTER, when we were children, my brother decided to play a trick on the family, one I suggest that no one choose to imitate. He took a raw egg from the refrigerator, colored it, and put it in the basket along with all the hard-boiled eggs. Then he waited with great anticipation to see who would select that egg.  More...

LIVING IN A FAMILY is a great way to learn that people’s biggest fault is typically just the flip side of their best virtue.  More...

OUR IMAGE of an entrepreneur—especially in this dot com era—is of a 20-something single person who has nothing to lose by taking a risk. But risk-takers actually come in all ages.  More...

They talk about the importance of fans in football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and other sports. In fact, in football, the so-called “12th” player is the noise and the roar of the fans in the stands. Fans and team become one.  More...

PERHAPS MY earliest memory is being carried from our family’s car and into our new house by my father when I was about 3 years old.  More...

IN WOODY ALLEN’S Hannah and Her Sisters Max von Sydow plays a cynical old artist who watches T.V. all day. At one point, after flipping stations apparently from televangelists to news of war between Christians, he says, “If Jesus came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.”  More...

IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD there is a sad reminder of what damage we cause nature. A building is up for sale. It had not long ago been a thriving fishery and restaurant located on the bend of the Chicago River.  More...

WHEN I WAS a kid there was a narrow, shallow, stagnant pond that ran for half a mile or so between two sets of railroad tracks near my home. In the summer we would spend hours at a time there trying to catch crayfish.  More...

MY DAD MADE breakfast every weekday morning for himself long before the rest of us were awake, and every weekend for the whole family.  More...

THERE SEEMS to be a primordial instinct in most human beings to support the underdog.  More...

THE COMPANIES that most often appear on Fortune magazine’s list of the top 100 companies to work for don’t necessarily have the best opportunities for growth, the most competitive salaries, or the most generous benefits packages. A common thread of companies that appear on the list year after year is an appreciation of the good work being done by each employee.  More...

A FRIEND WAS talking about a time she was sorely tempted toward revenge. A person at work had hurt her and now it was in her power to turn the tables. She found out something about this co-worker that would have deeply embarrassed the woman, and my friend savored the possibility of spreading the news.  More...

THIS MOTHER’S DAY weekend we focus on our mother’s love for us.  More...

JESUS SAID TO LOVE one another, and each of us tries in small ways to do just that. It is a given that we strive to love parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends. But even to those outside our intimate circles we do our best—on a good day—to offer simple courtesies and acts of kindness.  More...

ONE OF MY favorite movie moments occurs in The Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge throws open his shutters on Christmas morning and looks out on the world with new eyes.  More...

AT OUR HOUSE, Sunday lunch was pasta. It always had been and I guess that I always expected that it would be.  More...

MY SISTER’S friend Natalie was the richest girl in our town, mainly because most of her father’s property was owned by trusts in her name. She and her mother even had streets named after them.  More...

WHAT’S YOUR IMAGE OF heaven?  More...

ONE OF THE VERY first homilies that I was supposed to preach as a newly ordained priest was the Solemnity of the Ascension. I was to preach at the children’s liturgy. I stopped at a local mall and picked up a dozen helium balloons to use as visual aids with the children in my homily.  More...

“FATHER, THEY ARE your gift to me.” Guess who Jesus is talking about when he makes that statement in today’s gospel? All of us. You and me, and everyone else who attempts to love in Jesus’ name and do God’s justice.  More...

I HEARD OF A FAMILY where the dad was concerned that his many kids weren’t getting along. As they began to reach adulthood the kids each went their own ways.  More...

AS A SEMINARIAN, I spent four years helping out in a small parish that was not blessed with more than a handful of Sunday Mass lectors. Every year it seemed that the same lector was scheduled to read on Pentecost. As sincere, devout, and well-intentioned as he was, there was no way he was capable of pronouncing correctly the names of the areas from which the Jewish people traveled in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  More...

MOMMY, DADDY, I’M thirsty.” At one time when our girls were young, this plea for water was a strategy they used to put off going to sleep. They knew this ploy was good for another visit from Mom or Dad.  More...

MARTIN MARTY, renowned church historian, was giving a talk recently on Martin Luther to a packed house filled with friends, colleagues, and students of theology. Five minutes into the lecture a man in the front row called out a question. Marty smiled and said, “I’ll take questions at the end of the lecture”—a point he had noted before he began to speak.  More...

WE IN AMERICA like our heroes, and we especially like them to be bigger than life.  More...

THE EMPLOYEES at an international publishing house specializing in encyclopedias and world data were just as one would imagine—culturally diverse, well-educated, bookish, and respectful of others’ beliefs and social mores.  More...

I WAS VISITING my great-aunt in a nursing home, and while waiting for her to return from physical therapy I turned to talk to one of the older patients. An aide teased, “Don’t ask how he is, you’ll have to sit through an organ recital.”  More...

RECENTLY I WAS invited to dinner at a friend’s home. Seven of us sat down to eat. There were eight breasts of chicken on the plate, eight rolls in the basket, and eight double-baked potatoes. We politely took what was clearly our assigned portions, ate them, and then stared longingly at what was left.  More...

OFTEN, NO MATTER how dire their circumstances, a beautifully peaceful look will wash over the face of a nursing mother. These women report an overwhelming sense of joy in nurturing and nourishing their young.  More...

I WAS ON A TRAIN in Italy with college friends. It was a slow train that stopped at every town and village between Florence and Rome. People boarded the train loaded with bundles and baskets and children in hand. Our train cabin, which could hold eight people comfortably, was jammed with 15 or 16 people.  More...

WE STILL CALL them funeral parlors because not too long ago when someone died they were often laid out in their own living room, perhaps on the couch where they used to read or crochet or take an afternoon nap. And surrounded with the familiar objects of their life and the family who would be grieving their loss, it was the natural place.  More...

MY DAD HAD A FRIEND who was severely paralyzed in a car accident just weeks after he was ordained a priest. He spent his many years of priesthood living and ministering at a major Chicago hospital.  More...

DENYING OURSELVES has never been socially acceptable. More wealth, more power, or more glamour is forever the order of the day.  More...

REMEMBER Rodney King, the terrible riots in L.A., and his now-famous plea “Can’t we all just get along?”  More...

JULY 1, 1999 is my independence day. That is when I quit smoking after 25 years. For all the pleasure I got out of my addiction, I came to despise it in the last years before I quit.  More...

I HAD FRIENDS who knew from a young age what they wanted to do as a career. One friend always wanted to be a cop. Another knew from first grade on that she wanted to teach. Another wanted to be an architect. I envied them.  More...

I HAVE AN OLDER BROTHER who was born on the Fourth of July. He loves all the parades and fireworks and barbecues. Part of me thinks he really believes that the entire Independence Day holiday was set up to honor him. As a child I was jealous of him because there would always be a family party on the Fourth.  More...

THE TWO salespeople walked into my office, asked for a minute of my time, and took 10 before they got to their point: Please switch your business phone service to ours.  More...

I LOVE WATCHING BABIES at church. I suppose I shouldn’t admit that. It might sound as if I’m confessing to being distracted and not paying attention.  More...

EVERY ONCE in a while there is story in the news in which an ordinary citizen is referred to as a “Good Samaritan.”  More...

A YOUNG PROFESSIONAL woman was driving home late one night when she spotted a group of teenage boys all huddled together in a vacant lot just off a fairly deserted street. She had her window rolled up, but she could hear vague cries. As she drove past she was sure she saw someone crouched in the middle of the crowd.  More...

LATE FOR AN IMPORTANT meeting, I was running for a bus when I tripped and skid headlong on the sidewalk. I hopped back on my feet and caught up with the bus, huffing and puffing and embarrassed. The stares from people in the crowded seats and aisle tipped me off to the fact that my hands and nose were bleeding.  More...

ONE OF MY FAVORITE STORIES about Dorothy Day was the time she was being interviewed by a young reporter at a Catholic Worker House. It seemed that every few minutes into the interview the doorbell would ring. Dorothy would politely excuse herself and give a sandwich or a pair of gloves or a token to the street person at the door.  More...

THOUGH I readily empathize with Mary’s poor, beleaguered sister, Martha, I think we do the gospel a disservice when we pass her off as a fussbudget hostess whom Jesus gives a little setdown. Martha’s anxiety goes much deeper than that.  More...

A FEW YEARS AGO my wife and I added a new routine to our preparations for family parties that we host. It’s made a world of difference.  More...

I LIKE THIS WEEKEND’S reading from Genesis almost as much as any in scripture. It is so simply human and yet carries such a great message about God’s mercy and forgiveness. But I must confess that I like it most of all because I truly enjoy that kind of bargaining immensely.  More...

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL image of God we are given in today’s readings: merciful, compassionate, generous, forgiving, sacrificing for our sakes, willing to listen to our pleas endlessly, able to answer our prayers even before we ask.  More...

A YOUNG MAN I was on a retreat with once told this story of prayer: “I was so angry at God because I had asked and asked him to help me stop doing drugs. And then before long I was getting high again.  More...

AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH and a few years of living all on her own, my mother chose to find herself a senior retirement complex in which to live. When she found one she liked, she sold her home and, never looking back, moved in with all new clothing and furniture.  More...

LINUS TORVALDS, a Finnish computer programmer, and Richard Stallman, an M.I.T. researcher, are in a class all by themselves when it comes to sharing treasures.  More...

I ONCE KNEW a woman who prided herself on her disdain for worldly goods. She would echo today’s gospel and say, “Life doesn’t consist of possessions; it’s all about relationships.” And yet she treated her relationships like possessions.  More...

DURING THE HEIGHT of the Cold War in the ’50s when I was a child, every Tuesday morning at 10:30 the civil defense sirens would go off throughout Chicago. They were supposed to remind us of what we should do if there ever were to be an attack from the Soviet Union.  More...

I CONTINUE TO HAVE nightmares filled with hellish images of Iraqi prisoners being mocked, abused, and degraded by U.S. soldiers. I wake up and think, “Oh, this was a dream. It didn’t really happen.”  More...

THE WHOLE DAY, even before sun-up, his son was chattering away. They were on their first fishing trip together and his son was excited. It soon became clear that the boy hadn’t had much experience being quiet.  More...

YES, THE OLYMPICS can become very nationalistic. Yes, perhaps the games promote an unhealthy level of competition. But there is no denying that the approaching Olympic Games in Athens will carry some very dramatic images.  More...

ONE OF THE MOST moving images in literature and film is at the end of the courtroom scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  More...

NOWADAYS she would have flipped open her cell phone and called her cousin. “Guess what?” she’d have exclaimed. But as soon as she found out she was expecting, Mary set out and traveled to see her cousin Elizabeth, who was also expecting.  More...

TOUGH LOVE is easier to talk about than to put into practice. Tough love means not giving in and empowering someone you care about to continue on a destructive path of behavior.  More...

KEEP YOUR NOSE clean,” my dad used to say, “and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” That was an Irishman from Chicago’s version of “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” It is good advice but not easy to follow.  More...

A GUY IN MY men’s group greets any new challenge in his life by asking, “Where’s the lesson to be learned here?” He’ll say this when things go poorly at work, when he struggles with members of his family, or even when something tragic will happen. I admire his courage and resilience.  More...

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO my cousin got married. The wedding reception was held at a very sophisticated French restaurant. The timing between the ceremony and the reception was not well thought out, however, so people went right from the ceremony at church to the reception at the restaurant with more than two hours for cocktails before dinner would be served. You can guess what happened.  More...

A GREY-HAIRED woman, neatly dressed and well into her 60s wasn’t exactly what the partners had in mind for their receptionist, but, “We’re desperate,” they reasoned. “She needs the work. Let’s take her on for a few months.”  More...

A FRIEND OF MINE was secretly hurt when the provisions of his mother’s will were announced. He’d always assumed that his mother would bequeath her wedding ring to his daughter. She was the only granddaughter and his only sibling had no children. Instead, his mother left the ring to her god-daughter, a young woman who was not married.  More...

I REMEMBER when I was about 10 or 11 years old walking to church with my parents or my grandmother. The closer we got, the faster I would walk, consciously pulling myself ahead of them. I was in no hurry to get to church to pray. I simply ran ahead because I was uncomfortable with their speaking Italian to one another. And so, I didn’t want to be identified with them.  More...

I WATCHED in amazement and admiration as five men worked one scorching summer day putting a new roof on the apartment building next to mine. The black tar and rubber made it 20 degrees hotter for them than the rest of us sweltering in 90-degree heat. They were in long pants and thick boots—protective gear most of us wouldn’t choose to don on a hot, humid day.  More...

IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD where I grew up, one day a developer started a huge project—a block-long, 15-story building in our neighborhood of small, single-family homes. Construction crews were busy for months—and then one day, nothing. For years, the skeleton of a grand idea stood as silent witness to a dream gone awry.  More...

A FATHER SHARED with me a conversation he had with his son who had just started driving. The first few times the son took the family car everything went just fine. So the father wasn't prepared for the night his son arrived home 40 minutes late. There was no phone call. "I knew you would just yell at me," was the son's reasoning. And there was a noticeable scratch on the front fender.  More...

THE 30-SOMETHING woman broke down in the middle of the store and started bawling her eyes out in front of her friend Andrew. “I’m so unhappy,” she confided. “I hate the way I look. I hate my job. All my friends are married or coupled off. I’m so lonely and miserable.”  More...

MY WIFE and daughters and I were at an amusement park one summer and our youngest daughter got lost. Three of us took a left at a fork in the path while 5-year-old Patti got carried along to the right with a large group of kids on a school outing. She wasn’t missing long, but it seemed like forever.  More...

WHEN I WAS A KID a corner store opened up across the street from the public school, obviously looking for the children’s business. It sold candy and toys, the cheap but gaudy kind that attracted your allowance, all of it, without your having to ask your parents for more money. The store should have been a natural money maker.  More...

“THAT’S NOT RIGHT,” Natalie complained when she found out her neighbor Paul was subletting three parking spaces for $80 each a month when the man who owned the spaces was leasing them to Paul for only $75 total per month. Apparently the other two parking subletters were none too happy either and started questioning Paul’s honesty.  More...

I USED TO PLAY volleyball at a park with my brother and a bunch of guys from his parish. We had a great time with lots of spirited play and great volleys. We thought we were getting pretty good, too. One day a group of newcomers joined us and things changed.  More...

FROM MARIE ANTOINETTE’S “Let them eat cake” to the president of the United States who declared that ketchup be considered a vegetable in federal school lunch programs for the needy, it’s amazing how out of touch people can become to the realities of life.  More...

THE BOSS STROLLED into his office and responded to a simple “How do you do?” from one of his employees with a moan and groan about how busy he was.  More...

I WAS HONORED to be asked to be Kevin’s godfather. His parents are longtime friends of the sort that feel like family. And on the day of his Baptism, I listened carefully when the priest asked, “And what do you ask for this child?”  More...

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS celebrity poker games from Las Vegas have become popular on TV. The famous and well-to-do gamble with somebody else’s money. The winner has a big donation made in their name to a charity of their choosing. You be the judge of the morality of all this.  More...

A STICKY NOTE sat on top of a pile of work with the words, “Couldn’t get to it, could you?” scratched on it. The missive writer was an assistant to the manager. The missive reader was the manager who came in Monday morning expecting his employee to have completed a specified list of tasks before the young assistant went on vacation. The manager reread the note several times in disbelief.  More...

HAVE YOU EVER experienced the disorientation of a fun house hall of mirrors? I remember going to Riverview, the great old amusement park in Chicago, when I was a kid and getting lost in Aladdin’s Castle. It was a dark, seemingly endless maze of trap doors and tilting floors and a hall of mirrors that reflected distorted images.  More...

THE PORTION at the restaurant was too large, even for me, so I asked for the proverbial “doggie” bag. Walking to the car with that uncomfortable feeling that I had eaten too much, I was stopped by a man sitting on the steps of a building. “Do you have five dollars? I’m really hungry.”  More...

MY AUNT LEE, who lived overseas for 25 years, sent all of her nieces and nephews the most marvelous Christmas presents each year—dolls from Japan, Germany, and the Azore Islands, Aran sweaters from Ireland, silver from England, jewelry from France, leather from Morocco.  More...

WE’RE ALWAYS aware of our pain; we’re not always aware of our healing. A child will run to a parent and point to the “boo boo” where she scraped her knee but soon be off to play, the pain forgotten. Adults, too, can be absorbed in the pain of the moment but forget all about it when the pain passes.  More...

WHEN I FIRST STARTED coaching freshman high-school soccer, I had a real problem beyond no coaching experience at all. Eighty to 100 freshmen would try out for the team, and I had only 25 uniforms to hand out. It was never easy putting together a team in only one week.  More...

MY 3-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER’S favorite movie is The Sound of Music. She’ll announce 20 times a day, “I want Maria. I want Maria,” referring to the movie’s main character, who is a troublesome nun-in-the-making sent from her abbey to be a governess. Thanks to my daughter, Hannah, I know the lyrics and dialogue of the movie by heart.  More...

I HAVE A PICTURE, clipped long ago from the newspaper, of Chicago Bulls player Scottie Pippen holding up Michael Jordan as they walk to the bench for a time out. It was a game in which Jordan, suffering from stomach flu, could barely stand during the time outs.  More...

WE ENJOY a proliferation of daytime televised court shows that feature judges hearing cases and then making decisions based on the testimony.  More...

THE CRITIC who lives in my brain gives me very little peace. She sits in constant judgment of the people and situations I encounter each day.  More...

A SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR ruined one of my favorite past-times—judging others and putting them down.  More...

IT IS HALLOWEEN. Hopefully we will all have the opportunity to enjoy and chuckle at the children dressed up so innocently in their costumes.  More...

THE WOMAN WAS TOP in her profession—fun, talented, wealthy. But she was hiding something, and her closest friends knew it. She had an eating disorder, that was certain, but that wasn’t the root of her problem.  More...

THERE’S A COLUMN in a popular magazine that explores case studies of marriages in trouble. It asks the question, “Can this marriage be saved?” In Sunday’s gospel Luke tells us about a man who seems to have been a scoundrel and asks, “Can this man be saved?”  More...

IN MY FIRST YEAR of priesthood I was privileged to bring Holy Communion monthly to a 95-year-old woman who was being cared for by her only surviving child, a 75-year-old man.  More...

AT A LEADERSHIP retreat, two teams were given the task of getting from point A to point B on a huge Twister-like grid. The rules were very specific about what moves forward, backward, and sideways were legal and which weren’t. It was very apparent that a straight run by every team member would not do the trick.  More...

THERE ARE TIMES when the skeptic in me refuses to give rational assent to religious doctrines, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Resurrection. Thankfully, pure rationality is not the only, and certainly not the best, means of coming to understand deeply spiritual truths.  More...

THERE ARE television evangelists who seem to make their living predicting that the end of the world is imminent. They quote scripture passages like today’s gospel. And they back up their claims with verses like those found in the prophet Malachi, today’s first reading.  More...

IN THIS AGE of billion-dollar corporate bankruptcies and catastrophic foreclosures, the apocalypse, as a time of cataclysmic events, appears to be now. Yet as a time of divine revelation and the victory of good over evil, the apocalypse seems destined to remain in the future.  More...

ONE SUMMER, years ago, I was an activities counselor in charge of 16 young boys, ages 5 to 10. I would often load them into a big van and off we’d go on fun adventures.  More...

OUR PARISH sings a wonderful Communion hymn titled Bread to Share. The hymn’s opening line goes, “Plenty of bread at the feast of life, plenty of bread to share.”  More...

FOLLOWING a devastating world war and nearly a century of vicious conflicts among nation states trying to establish their identity and independence, Pope Pius XI decided it would be a good idea to remind Chrisitans that when all is said and done Christ is the King, the ruler, the head of state. If we kept that in mind, he wrote in 1925, our conflicts might not be so frequent or severe.  More...

WHEN MY DAUGHTERS were little and I would read them fairy tales we’d often come across lands where the king was either bad or missing in action.  More...

RESEARCH TELLS us that more people suffer from light deprivation during winter months than we realize. Soon the sun will be at its lowest point in the sky. Dawn will come later and darkness will occur earlier. People who suffer from the lack of light quite often do not realize what is happening because the process of growing darkness creeps up.  More...

IT’S 1:30, YOU JUST had a delicious turkey and swiss on rye from the deli, and now you’re sitting in an afternoon meeting where a speaker with a voice just above a whisper is giving a presentation with the lights low and the topic dry. Someone could triple dare you to stay awake, and odds are you’d lose.  More...

WE KNEW eventually it would happen again, but we never knew exactly when. When we moved into our bungalow we soon discovered that most of the basements on our block would flood whenever the rains fell too quickly—including ours.  More...

WHEN I MET Monsignor, he was well into his eighth decade. His 6-foot, 2-inch frame was now stooped by arthritis. But I had a sense of what an imposing figure he must have presented. He had been pastor of one of the largest parishes in the city. With a true gospel spirit he guided it through painful racial change, welcoming believers no matter the color of their skin.  More...

TODAY, John the Baptist, asks us to think of ourselves as trees. A mighty oak comes to mind or a graceful birch. Apple trees are lovely, and who could deny the splendor of a magnolia tree? Being a tree has a calming effect. I feel myself swaying in the breeze. Life is good.  More...

A GROUP OF FRIENDS WERE talking about how easy it is to be hard on ourselves and others. One guy told how in high school he got caught cutting a class to smoke. The much-feared dean of discipline had called him to his office and was about to dish out just punishment when the school’s wise principal intervened. “Can I talk with this gentleman for a minute?”  More...

THE HOLIDAY SONG tells us “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” And that is the case with less than two weeks remaining before it arrives.  More...

MY HUSBAND and I sat across the desk from the surgeon who was to repair the hole in our 4-month-old daughter’s heart. The doctor explained in simple, unadorned speech the two-patch procedure his team would use.  More...

“IF YOU HAVE NOTHING good to say about anybody, come sit next to me” is a delicious twist on an old proverb, attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth. It captures the delight inherent in one of humanity’s favorite pastimes—talking badly about others.  More...

WHEN MY OLDER brother was in the fifth grade, he came home from school proudly clutching an Advent Calendar he had won in a contest. You opened one of the doors or windows every day, and there would be a little picture hidden behind it along with a trinket or a piece of chocolate. He told us he would open only the one door each day.  More...

JOSEPH WAS a stand-up guy, a regular Joe, a by-the-book rule follower, a good Jew. But like any faithful person, he let his conscience be his final guide.  More...

A FRIEND of mine was adopted. While her parents waited for her impending arrival, they created a book for her.  More...

ON YOUR MARK! Get set! Go! It is the day after Christmas and it is a Sunday. That means a lot of us don’t have to go to work today. And so today will undoubtedly be one of the busiest shopping days of the year.  More...

WHEN I WAS growing up, families picked up and moved at a moment’s notice because of company transfers or new job opportunities. My family moved three times before I was 5, and my cousins lived in three states and six houses before their oldest child was in high school.  More...

A MAN SAT DOWN on the desk chair in his son’s room. His boy was lying on his bed, face pressed into his pillow. For quite a while no words passed between them.  More...

I AM BLESSED with eight great-nieces and great-nephews. They are a joy to be around. I watch their parents, my nieces and nephew, remembering when they were the age of their children, and I marvel at how quickly time has gone by.  More...

AFTER HER ELECTION, the attorney general of Illinois informed her office staff that she would answer phones for an hour or two every couple of weeks so that she could understand what citizens were asking for and getting. Needless to say, her staff balked. It wouldn’t be right; it wouldn’t be seemly, they advised.  More...

ONE OF MY favorite television programs when I was growing up was a quiz show called To Tell the Truth. On this show three contestants, all claiming to be the same person, were quizzed by panelists about their identity. The two phonies could lie to the panelists, but the real person had to tell the truth.  More...

THIS WEEK we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Among all his accomplishments, his Letter From Birmingham Jail stands as an incredible testimony of faith and became a defining moment in his life, lifting him from a civil-rights advocate to a leader with a true moral force behind him.  More...

MOST OF US can probably count among our friends or acquaintances the professional job-hopper. That’s the person who moves from one good job to another, always open to the next offer that promises more.  More...

IN THE MOVIE Home Alone 8-year-old Kevin McCallister acted surprisingly brave—except when it came to going down into his basement.  More...

CERTAIN PIECES of music have had an incredible impact in my life.  More...

SOCCER SEASON had just begun, and the young athletes were ready for action. The under-12 group was gathering for their pregame warm-up.  More...

SAMMY JOHNSON was a peacemaker. Sammy was a little boy who lived at the childcare home I worked in years ago. Every time I hear the phrase, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” I think of Sammy.There were 16 boys, aged 5 to 9, who lived together in his dorm. They were all wards of the state, taken from their homes for various reasons, usually neglect.  More...

BEWARE OF ANYBODY who starts a sentence with “I am a Christian, but . . . .” That “but” will usually lead to trouble.  More...

MY SISTER was discussing the significance of offering the sign of peace at Mass with the students in her C.C.D. class. “Many times you are extending peace to people you know—friends and family. But often you are offering the gesture to a perfect stranger. That is a very powerful thing to do.”  More...

BLAND. What a horrible trait. It sounds like a punishment: “Since you’ve worked yourself into an ulcer, you need to eat bland food for three months.” I knew a guy in college who could best be described as bland.  More...

A FRIEND TELLS this story about the first apartment he rented after leaving the college seminary. His downstairs neighbor, for reasons never determined, was militantly anti-Catholic. So on Friday mornings as he was leaving for work, she would stand in the doorway waving a strip of bacon in his face.  More...

IN OUR LIVES, we’ll all be tempted to commit prideful, selfish acts. For some of us, our greed and ego will reach enormous heights and lead to disgraceful acts of catastrophic proportions.  More...

IF YOU’RE SO TOUGH,” the kid from across the alley taunted, “why don’t you jump off the roof?” My buddy and I had climbed up on my garage roof and felt like we were pretty cool up there. We could look down the alley all the way to the railroad tracks.  More...

AS I WALKED through the ornate cemetery on the outskirts of the family hometown in Southern Italy with my cousin, I searched for family names on the graves. There were many such names, but not all were relatives.  More...

YOU WORK OR PLAY alongside particular people for years, thinking they’re good, kind, decent human beings. Glad you know them. Happy to call them friends. But suddenly there is a defining moment when you see them in a new light, and you realize that these people are not just good; they’re holy.  More...

I ALWAYS FELT SORRY for Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. She tried so hard to share the wonders of her adventure, and all she got from her Auntie Em and others were bemused stares. “Sure, sure,” they said. “You got bumped on the noggin and your imagination went wild.”  More...

A WHILE BACK, a young deacon came to our parish to help out on weekends. He loved coffee, the stronger the better. So I was surprised on the night before Ash Wednesday when he announced he had decided to give up caffeine for Lent.  More...

A YOUNG MANAGER signed on to run a fundraiser at his parish. He asked for 10 volunteers to help pull all the plans together. Then he set them to work during the day; at night after his regular job, he’d stop by the parish to see how things were going. It never failed that certain people just couldn’t follow instructions, but one volunteer proved herself invaluable to the project. Everything she did was neat, organized, and accurate.  More...

HE THOUGHT he’d lost everything. He’d lost his job. He’d lost his car. He’d lost his self-respect. And now he was losing his family. The one thing he couldn’t seem to lose was his thirst. Emily had told him if he came home drunk and ornery one more time she’d take the kids and leave. Now she and the kids were living at her sister’s.  More...

WHEN MY NIECE was about 12 years old, she brought some friends with her to visit her grandma. While there, she showed them the pictures of her uncles on my mother’s dresser, commenting on each of them. “That’s my Uncle Dominic,” she said, pointing to my picture, “he’s the ugly one so he had to become a priest.”  More...

EVERYONE in the gospel story of the healing of the man born blind appears to be in the dark about who Jesus is and why he does what he does, and most feel threatened and confused by Jesus’ good works.  More...

I WAS AT A FRIEND’S HOUSE, and his young son was doing a school project on a topic I happen to know something about. I offered my assistance, and at first the son seemed to welcome any help he could get. But every time I tried to tell him something new he interrupted by saying, “I know, I know.” He said it even when it was clear he didn’t know quite as much as he thought he did.  More...

A MOTHER CAME UP to me with her second-grade son at her side. She told me that he had something he wanted to ask me. He held on to her hand tightly. The words clearly were difficult for him to formulate.  More...

ACTUARIES traditionally use a 75-year window when projecting into the future. Going beyond that into infinity would make their calculations unrealistic for decisions here and now. Jesus must have had an actuary’s spirit because he was a real here-and-now guy.  More...

I ONCE HEARD a TV commentator say, “The difference between a rut and a grave is only about 5 and a half feet.” I thought of that this week when I was reading the bold and amazing promise that Ezekiel delivers: Thus says the Lord God, “I will open your graves and have you rise from them.”  More...

A WHILE BACK there was a TV commercial for a series of recordings. They were selling classical music. But their pitch was that their recordings were not the entire selections by various composers. They recorded just those familiar and melodic portions of the compositions.  More...

TO ME, the whole point of being a Christian is so that I will never have to stand on the side of Jesus’ torturers. If I am true to my faith, then such depravity and inhumanity will be impossible for me. If I follow Jesus’ way of love, then I will never be in Pilate’s camp, washing my hands of one I know to be innocent.  More...

EARLY IN MY MARRIAGE I had the horrible habit of becoming extremely drowsy whenever my wife wanted to deal with a difficult issue. It was a highly inappropriate psychological coping mechanism, and I had the hardest time overcoming it.  More...

OUR PARISH holds an annual egg hunt on Easter morning in the park behind the church. It is a delight to watch hundreds of toddlers filling their baskets with plastic eggs, each with a piece of candy inside.  More...

MY DAD had a knack for gathering in troubled souls, and my mom had a talent for nurturing them back to health. My parents’ charges didn’t always stay well, but at least they were offered a moment of sanity in the chaos of their lives.  More...

THE TRUTH of the resurrection is a hard one for humans to wrap our minds around. Death appears so final. And yet life in a family can give us clues to help us see and believe.  More...

WHEN I THINK of strip malls, I think of convenience stores, dry cleaners, maybe a coffee shop. I don’t think of a facility with MRI machines. But that is what moved into a strip mall up the street right next to a tanning salon and a hairstylist.  More...

“AWE CAME UPON everyone” in the early Christian community, Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles. I see that same awe come upon my 4-year-old daughter whenever we’re at Mass.  More...

NO ONE SAW much potential in Billy. It’s not that the staff at the orphanage thought badly about him; they just didn’t think much about him at all. He seemed to feel comfortable floating beneath everyone’s notice—not getting in trouble but not getting much attention either.  More...

IT WAS NOT GOING to be an easy day. Just two weeks earlier the family had gathered with profound sadness to bury my mother. We all knew she was the glue that held us together. We were still raw with the pain as we gathered for our Christmas celebration and meal. It would not be an easy day.  More...

A FEW YEARS ago managers at a small firm decided to honor someone whom they felt had served the community exceptionally well in the previous year. They planned to invite the person to lunch, offer him or her a lovely plaque, generate a little good will, and call it a day.  More...

I HEARD A STORY once of a little girl who was lost in the woods. She wandered around looking for the family she had been separated from, but she soon grew hungry and tired and lay down and fell asleep. All through the night her parents searched for her, anxious for her safety.  More...

ACROSS THE STREET from the parish parking lot is a double row of townhomes. A private roadway between the two rows is what separates them. Some units face on to that private road and others open outward to the street. There is one walkway entrance through which you can be buzzed onto the property and an electronic gate for those whose garages face the inner road.  More...

JORGE looked with glee at his first big commission check from his interior design company. He decided to buy a Porsche. As he strolled around the car showroom looking at $100,000-plus sports cars, he couldn’t find the color he wanted—lapis blue metallic.  More...

THE RCA COMPANY was one of the first to develop the phonograph, or, as they called it, the Victrola. Their logo was a dog sitting next to an old-style phonographic speaker with his ear cocked and listening. RCA’s selling point was that the sound of their phonograph was so true to life that the dog would be able to recognize his master’s voice.  More...

WE MOVED out of our family house, where I had spent my entire life, during the summer before I left for the college seminary. It really was the only home that I knew. It was torn down at the end of that summer so that a high-rise apartment building could be built on that site. So there could be no going back home for me.  More...

TYRELL had recently separated from his wife, and she and his daughter were going to spend Thanksgiving with her family. His family lived out of state and he didn’t have Friday off, so he was going to spend Thanksgiving alone and very sad.  More...

AT THE TIME I probably thought of him as a party pooper, but now I’m grateful to Don. I was in high school, and a bunch of my friends and I were scheming to pull a prank on a guy in our class who was often the butt of our jokes. We were telling ourselves that it was all in good fun. But it wouldn’t have been much fun for the guy at whom we were aiming our joke.  More...

THERE ARE TRADE-OFFS. We make them all the time. You can choose to wait for the train or drive. The train might be running late, so you could be in the cold for a long time, or it may be uncomfortably crowded. Then again, it is cheaper than driving and often faster with less stress.  More...

ONE OF THE great lies of sin is that we are alone in the world. If we orient our lives toward that conclusion, then it’s easy to get swallowed up by fear and loneliness. We’ve all gone down that path.  More...

LLIE SIGNED ON to teach a year in Bolivia. She enjoyed the work, the country, and the people—especially one young man, Oscar, who was intelligent, good-hearted, and handsome. That year, she and Oscar fell in love. Eventually, he came to the United States, and they got married at her parish church in Boston.  More...

LISTENING TO an opposing team’s coach giving the pep talk against our school’s team, I was appalled by how completely negative all the comments were. Our team, he sneered, looking at us with disgust, had no heart. We were quitters.  More...

I WATCHED MYSTERY and glory revealed each time my mother knelt down to pray. Mom didn’t look particularly different—no far-away gaze, ethereal glow, or contorted features that you might associate with someone tapping into eternal life. She had the same sweet, friendly look she always had—except for the tears.  More...

WHEN I READ this Sunday’s gospel I thought of my wife’s Aunt Marie. As Jesus tells his Father of his fervent concern and prayers for the “ones you have given me,” I heard echoes of this beloved aunt. After all, Aunt Marie always had that same deep concern for everyone who came into her life who needed her help or prayers.  More...

AT THE WAKE of the priest who had died suddenly, I overheard among those standing around sadly that they felt he had “walked the talk.” That is an interesting expression. Lots of us can verbalize our concerns with passion. We can articulate the needs and concerns we face. But how many of us are willing to go beyond the words and act on what we believe?  More...

A ROOMFUL OF disgruntled citizens—parents, teachers, students—sat around the table with big shots from city hall for a “listening session.” The meeting was meant to appease the citizens, who were furious over a deal politicians had struck behind closed doors with developers that would mean the eventual closing of a vibrant public high school.  More...

WHEN I THINK of Pentecost I think of teaching my younger daughter to ride her bike. It was about this time of year many years ago that she was ready to try riding without training wheels.  More...

BACK WHEN I was a student in the seminary, we would be tested in general areas of theology as well as in the specific course work we were taking. They would give us an extensive reading list for those “area” exams. One of them included the theology of the Holy Trinity.  More...

A YEAR MINUS A DAY ago on May 21, my mother died. Mom suffered through cancer three times and eventually succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Through all her difficulties, she rarely complained. Even as her storehouse of knowledge and remembrance was ransacked, she never lost her sweet nature or quick wit.  More...

GOD’S GOING to punish you!” the angry older sister said. Her little brother had been misbehaving since they’d arrived at the playground. Her babysitting resources all depleted, the girl resorted to her trump card—threatening punishment from God.  More...

EVERY YEAR at the First Communion liturgy, I bring out the old studio portrait of my First Communion. I am seated on a stool in my new suit holding a rosary and my prayer book. My eyes are downcast as though I were in deep prayer.  More...

I USED TO LOVE having pancakes for breakfast—whether homemade or hot from the kitchen of some breakfast spot, where I’d order extra maple syrup, hash browns, crisp bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. After years of gobbling up flapjacks, however, I finally had to acknowledge a sad truth: Pancakes filled me up, but they didn’t satisfy.  More...

WHEN I WAS 15, my mother would go crazy if she found me staring for long stretches into an open refrigerator. I knew I was hungry, but I wasn’t sure for what. I’m sure that the disquieting changes going on in my adolescent self prompted a hunger I couldn’t quite satisfy.  More...

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THE BELEAGUERED manager just shook his head as his top salesperson left his office. He called her in to tell her that she really needed to spend more time in the office, get her reports in on schedule, and be more of a team player.  More...

I WAS AN ALTAR BOY at my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary Mass. After the church celebration on that grand occasion, many family members and friends of Thomas and Margaret McGrath gathered in our parish hall to eat and drink and sing and dance and surround my grandparents with gratitude for the countless acts of faithfulness that had brought them to that day.  More...

THERE COMES A MOMENT in each of our lives when we realize we have limits and that there are certain things we cannot do no matter how hard we try. Some would say that knowing these limits is a sign of maturity. Others would lament that same knowledge as a milestone in life reflecting a loss of idealism and confidence.  More...

YOU’VE GOT TO hand it to Jesus: He was stretched too thin, so he deputized his closest followers to help him in his ministry, knowing full well that they weren’t completely ready. Though it went against his fundamentally perfect nature, Jesus was moved by pity to settle for progress, not perfection.  More...

TODAY’S GOSPEL tells that “at the sight of the crowd, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them.” And seeing their plight, he took not only pity, but also action on their behalf. He sent his disciples forth to see the world with his eyes.  More...

MY DAD WORKED incredibly hard. As a child, I used to watch him in the grocery store as he’d lift up a 100-pound sack of potatoes on his shoulders and carry it from the back room to the bin in the produce department. He never seemed to walk when he was at work. He always moved like he was in a hurry.  More...

Namur who was murdered by a pair of gunmen as she walked along a rural road in Brazil’s Amazon region.  More...

THE KID WAS 10, old enough to enter the part of the pool where the diving boards were. A few of the big kids stood around taunting the smaller kids who refused to climb the high platform. “What are you, chicken?” one of them would say, and the others would strut around bawk, bawk, bawking away like chickens.  More...

THERE IS a whole subculture, a world of video games out there that most of us adults know little about. These games are visually and technically stunning. Their graphics are incredible. They range from typical to dramatic to incredibly violent.  More...

A DOCTOR CALLED his patient, a mother-to-be, at work to tell her the test results. In shock, the woman hung up the phone with a barely audible, “Thank you, Doctor.”  More...

BACK IN GRAMMAR SCHOOL, when Sister Jerome was teaching us about the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, I thought of my next-door neighbor Max Goldstein. The description of the prophets sounded just like Max.  More...

ON THE EVE of the Fourth of July as celebrations are under way, I have a confession to make: I am not very fond of parades. There is nothing more boring for me than to stand on the sidelines as floats and bands pass by. It is even more of a drag to watch it on television.  More...

THE AVERAGE work week for most Americans is 46 hours, although 38 percent of respondents in a National Sleep Foundation study admitted they work more than 50 hours per week.  More...

IN THE DAYS before the Super Nanny, a troubled boy was brought into a childcare facility, and from the time he hit the front door of his new dorm he disrupted everything. He was loud and abusive, and he refused any help and defied all instructions.  More...

EVERY ONCE in a while it is good for city folks to take a long drive into the country and see the row after row, acre after acre of crops growing. It helps them to realize what the farmers know, that it is hard work to raise the food we take for granted.  More...

COMING-OF-AGE stories are as old as literature itself. From Odysseus to Saint Augustine, Tom Jones to Jane Eyre, Pip to Huck Finn, Holden Caufield to Scout Finch, Celie to Harry Potter. This classic genre captures the struggles, turmoil, and adventures young people experience as they mature and develop as human beings.  More...

THE ELDERLY WOMAN down the block from us spends as much time as she can in her garden—and it shows. She can get plants to grow that none of her neighbors can. “I spend a lot of my time preparing the soil,” she says.  More...

IN ONE OF THE MORE affluent suburbs of Chicago, in front of an expensive home, there is a front yard that looks uncared for and virtually abandoned. It has made the news because the new owner has taken out the green, unmowed lawn and let the yard revert back to its natural, prairie state.  More...

SOME AMERICANS alive today can still vividly recall the horror of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid hunt for communist infiltrators in the 1940s and ’50s, which ruined or stalled the careers of dozens of writers and entertainers who were labeled communist sympathizers.  More...

MY WIFE AND I were young and naïve when we bought our first house. We moved into it in early spring, and soon discovered that the woman who owned the house before us had been a wonderful gardener. Each new day of spring seemed to reveal another flower, plant, or shrub coming to life.  More...

ON PUBLIC TELEVISION there is a program titled Antiques Roadshow. People bring items to be appraised by professionals and experts with the hope that their vase or painting or chair might be a valuable antique.  More...

AS A JOURNALIST gathered notes for a story on Msgr. Jack Egan, renowned labor priest, she could feel his eyes searching her face. Egan was 80 at the time and had already become a legend among Catholic activists as a man who spoke truth to power and fought racial discrimination and social injustice with the faith and ferocity of an Old Testament prophet.  More...

IT WAS ABOUT 51 years ago that Bill sat with Shirley on her family’s front porch talking late into the evening. It was their third date, and they were falling in love. He talked about how he wanted to own a big company and have lots of people around who admired him. She wanted to be a writer whose published stories and poems would touch people’s hearts. When they talked about it together, these dreams seemed almost a sure thing.  More...

I WAS WITH a fellow seminarian many years ago helping out in a multicultural parish. We attended their annual Holy Thursday potluck dinner after the liturgy. It was a feast of food from around the world. We were hungry and ready to eat. So we piled more and more items on our plates until they were full.  More...

TODAY’S GOSPEL assures us that we will be fed and that nothing, not even Jesus’ own grief, will separate us from God’s love. Christ is always on call for us, ready to heal and console.  More...

NEIGHBORS CALL them the casserole ladies. When someone on the block passes away, the casserole ladies get the word out and soon there’s a parade of women carrying covered dish dinners, pound cakes, hams, and other good food to the home of those who lost their loved one. One neighbor who was a recent recipient of their benevolence said, “Their kindness is like an eighth sacrament.”  More...

I LIVE IN CHICAGO. Among the many nicknames for the city, the one that stands out the most is the “Windy City.” Many people, residents as well as visitors, think that title came from the sometimes very strong winds that blow into the city across Lake Michigan.  More...

WE ALL HAVE someone in our lives whom we think walks on water because of something he or she did for us or a loved one.  More...

HAVE YOU EVER tried to teach someone to swim? That was part of my job description when I was a camp counselor back in high school. Some of the kids took to the water like little otters, slipping and swooshing around and having a ball. Others sank like the sand-filled milk bottles we used as anchors for the camp rowboats.  More...

MY FATHER told me the story about his being an immigrant teenager desperately looking for work on the East Coast with his two brothers. Employment office after employment office had signs that said “Italians need not apply” or “No Italians wanted.” To find work, they had to go to Pennsylvania and take the dangerous job of working in the coal mines, work that nobody else wanted.  More...

MY DAUGHTER, Hannah, was baptized in a beautiful ceremony with her godparents and 30 or so family members gathered around the baptismal font. Our pastor kept his comments brief; we prayed, sang a song, and exchanged a sign of peace. At the end of the day, after the celebration back home, I remarked to my husband, “That was really a lovely service, wasn’t it?”  More...

NECESSITY MAY BE the mother of invention, but it is often mothers in need who are driven to be inventive for the sake of their children. Such was the story of Sephali Begum, a 26-year-old single mother from Bangladesh who, in concern for the future of her daughter, took the desperate step of offering to sell one of her own eyes.  More...

BACK IN THE 1950s there was a popular TV quiz show called What’s My Line? Four celebrity panelists would each ask questions until they received a “no” answer from a contestant. They were trying to guess the contestant’s unusual occupation. The contestant would receive cash for each no answer that he or she received from the panelist’s questions. Each show also featured a celebrity whose identity the panel had to guess while blindfolded.  More...

PAUL CALLS God’s judgments inscrutable. Inscrutable, indeed! Most of us see no rhyme or reason to half the events that take place each day. We don’t understand how or why certain people have great power or influence and others barely have any.  More...

AT A NEW JOB I took on years ago, everyone I met in my first days mentioned how the general manager of the organization was a genius. They spoke of him in awed tones. And so when I met him, I was disappointed.  More...

WHILE WE ARE sitting in church today listening to the three very difficult readings, thousands of well-meaning people are flocking to churches that preach a “feel good” version of Christianity.  More...

WHO AMONG us hasn’t thought: “I’ve worked so hard, been honest and true, I deserve rest and reward.” That only seems fair and reasonable. Good people deserve good lives—it’s the presupposition of most cultures—and the essence of the American Dream.  More...

TODAY’S EPISTLE has me wondering what it would be like if Saint Paul reappeared today in, say, New York or L.A. After a chance to watch some TV, surf the Internet, catch up on the major issues in the news, and see how our culture is driven by conspicuous wealth, self-indulgence, and obsession with celebrities, I imagine his message would be the same as it was in the first century A.D. “Do not conform yourselves to this age.”  More...

ONE OF THE MOST successful musicals playing on Broadway and elsewhere is a prequel based on what happened before the events of the movie The Wizard of Oz. The name of the musical is Wicked. And that is a great title. Reminding us of the Wicked Witch of the West, it is both foreboding and nostalgic.  More...

JESUS TELLS US that there is strength in numbers. Instead of stewing over the wrong someone did you, you should meet with the person and discuss the problem. This advice applies to situations at work, at home, or among neighbors.  More...

“MOMMY, she hit me!” “Yeah, but he hit me first!” A wise parent knows not to enter into that kind of morass without a game plan.  More...

DO YOU HAVE a temper? Do you get angry easily? Some people are incredibly placid. Others blow up at the slightest provocation. Still others, like me, bottle it up inside and then explode worse than a Fourth of July fireworks show.  More...

WHEN THE FIRST PLANE slammed into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, I was in the throes of a crisis that left me deeply hurt and confused. I had experienced a personal betrayal I couldn’t imagine ever understanding and certainly never forgiving. I was lied to, cheated, deceived, and disrepected.  More...

HE SUPER NANNY is all the rage among beleaguered parents. With her severe look and all-business British accent, she swoops, like a stern Mary Poppins, into homes where the children have staged a hostile takeover.  More...

WHEN VISITING PARIS for the first time, I found one custom so different than here or other places I had visited, that it made me genuinely uncomfortable. It was tipping.  More...

“IF THERE’S ONE THING I’ve learned in life, it’s that things happen by God’s Rolex not my Timex.” Those words were shared at a reunion between two coworkers long after they both gave up trying to set the course of their lives on a timetable. They had spent a lot of time over the years on the “pity pot,” as one of them called it, measuring, calculating, and weighing. And no matter how they figured it, God was shortchanging them.  More...

THE JUDGE was surprised when he read the complaints. Before him sat four people who were the adult children of a recently deceased multimillionaire. The older two siblings were contesting the will—a very generous will, I might add. What was their gripe?  More...

WHEN I TAUGHT high school, I spent a number of years coaching the freshman soccer team. Then I became a soccer referee. That was back when I could still run up and down a field for an hour blowing a whistle.  More...

WE CALLED my sister’s college crush the Great Disappointer. He was tall, handsome, successful, smart, funny. Men loved having him around to talk business and sports; women loved his flirty, teasing way. He was a welcome guest at any party. The problem was, he rarely showed up when he said he would.  More...

I WORKED AS A COUNSELOR for a childcare agency years ago. The kids were orphans and/or wards of the state. One boy, Ray, was a good kid—friendly, helpful, even cheerful. Yet just below the surface, there seemed to be a slow-burning anger in Ray. It erupted one day unexpectedly. After a losing effort on the baseball field, Ray had an emotional meltdown.  More...

LAST YEAR I visited some friends who were living in California. Instead of taking me on the usual tour of the popular wineries with their famous names, we went down the back roads to some of the oldest wineries in the state with vines that were planted more than 100 years ago.  More...

A MAN FROM GRAND FORKS, North Dakota robbed the First Community Bank in Fargo. After he left with the money, police were called and upon reviewing the ransom note, they realized it had been written on the robber’s bank deposit slip, complete with his name and address.  More...

I ASKED A FRIEND, Don, how life was going for him, and he said that things were horrible at work. His wife’s friend’s husband had been out of work a year or so back and Don paved the way for him to get an interview where he worked. Don’s company hired him, and Don felt pretty good he was able to help someone out.  More...

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO my cousin got married on an early Sunday afternoon. Both families had planned on an elegant wedding reception and dinner at a very fancy restaurant. The ceremony went quickly, and no one was delayed as they drove to the restaurant. This resulted in an unexpectedly long cocktail reception before dinner—two hours long.  More...

PEOPLE TURN DOWN great business opportunities every day out out of fear, suspicion, or lack of vision. Instead of seeing possibilities, they see threats and end up losing out. Supervisors, middle managers, and CEOs alike can suffer from this debilitating fear of risk and lack of self-confidence.  More...

KELLY, A TEENAGE GIRL on vacation with her parents, was having a horrible time. And her face and her posture let everyone know it. All week long she’d moped by the resort’s pool—alone with her iPod.  More...

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, people have invoked the name of God before going into battle with people of another nation who have also invoked the name of God with confidence that God would defend them. This puts God on both sides of the battlefield. This is a troublesome place for people to put God.  More...

CLOCKWATCHING is a miserable pasttime, yet sadly people all over the world are in jobs where they often do just that. It really has nothing to do with the job. Corporate presidents can fall into the wretchedness of clockwatching just as easily as a loose-leaf filer at the local law library.  More...

I MET A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER at a number of meetings in the neighborhood. I liked her style, so one day I asked her how she had gotten into her profession. She spoke of her idealism in college, but that it was mostly talk and little action. A trip to India radicalized her as she experienced the sheer enormity of the poverty that she found all around her.  More...

I HEARD A LITTLE GIRL in the grocery store pleading with her mother. “Please, please, please buy me the pink cookies!” she wailed. And then she decided to set the trap. “Will you buy me the pink cookies, or do you hate me?” she asked.  More...

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind doesn’t really need a second commandment to follow it. But Jesus offers one about loving your neighbor as yourself. Why? If 1st-century Jews were anything like us, they didn’t really have a clue what it means to love God.  More...

MR. CARDINALE was rehearsing his lines in his mind. His daughter had missed curfew once again, and she’d already been warned. How often had he told her about curfew—rule number one? Now, he was going to lower the boom.  More...

RECENTLY AT A WAKE I met the vice president of the Chicago Cubs. As we got to talking, I mentioned to him that I was able to tell how the Cubs were doing in the standings without even hearing a score or reading a newspaper. He had no idea what I was talking about. I told him that when the Cubs were winning, nobody offered me free tickets. But when they were out of the race, I was offered box seats, a skybox, you name it. I must confess that these were perks that I took advantage of and enjoyed.  More...

POLITICIANS, civil servants, and business and religious leaders get themselves into trouble when they hold themselves above accepted and expected moral and ethical standards. Not a day goes by where we don’t read in the newspaper or hear on the nightly news the sorry story of someone abusing their authority or taking unfair advantage of their position.  More...

ONE DAY it dawned on me that my eighth-grade teacher was a phony. He was a decent person, I suppose, but he was young and insecure in his first year of teaching. His insecurity led him to try to act tough, but he didn’t have the courage to stand up to the wilder kids in the class (and there were some wild kids in our class!).  More...

A FEW YEARS BACK I celebrated the wedding of a couple in a church in a northern suburb of Chicago. The reception was in a country club in a southern suburb across the metropolitan area. Traffic was terrible, and everyone was late arriving.  More...

AT AN ADVENTURE CAMP for teens, the campers were divided into teams to test their camping skills. When the earnest instructor tried to demonstrate safety practices, one group of guys mimicked him and spent their time laughing and joking.  More...

IN THE FIRST WEEK after Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast, city and state officials were being inter-viewed endlessly. As they stood before the cameras, their tired, red eyes, swallowed by deep, dark circles, told the story of their long ordeal.  More...

WORKING in my dad’s grocery store as a teen, I was taught that the customer is always right and to smile at them no matter what. One day as I was at the cash register, a stranger asked me for change for a $20 bill and then a ten and then a five. I was responding with my dazzling smile when my brother slammed the register drawer shut.  More...

THE ONE WHO had one talent buried his talent “out of fear.” The fear of this one-talent servant is not the gift of the Spirit we know as Fear of the Lord, but rather pride masked as fear. Genuine fear of the Lord, so the Book of Proverbs tells us, “is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7).  More...

I HAD A FRIEND whose father worked a lot of evenings and also traveled a lot for his job. He once told me, “I was always relieved when I heard Dad’s footstep on the stairs coming up to our apartment. Life never seemed quite right when he was away, and for a while I found myself becoming withdrawn and even depressed during his absences.”  More...

I CAN’T REMEMBER when I learned how to play chess. I wonder if children today are learning the game. To them, with Play Stations in hand, chess must seem incredibly quaint, old-fashioned, and slow. It uses a whole different set of skills, relying on thinking ahead and getting into your opponent’s thoughts rather than hand-eye coordination.  More...

MOURNERS proceeded slowly toward the grieving mother who stood beside the casket of her son. This very young man had died in a tragic accident. Everyone who had gathered to pay their respects ached inside, wondering what they might say to this sorrowful mother. But she smiled at them through her tears. And she said, “At least I know where my son is right now.”  More...

OUT OF Howard Hawks’ epic Western Red River comes one of the great lines of filmdom, spoken by Walter Brennan to John Wayne: “You was wrong, Mr. Dunson.” As you can imagine, the Duke’s character, Mr. Dunson, isn’t used to anyone telling him he’s wrong.  More...

TAKING EXTREME measures, like the paralytic’s friends did when they cut a hole in the roof and lowered the sick man down to Jesus, may seem unusual, but actually it happens every day among family and friends. Each of us can surely think of countless times when we’ve gone to great lengths to aid a loved one or been the recipient of such assistance.  More...

HAVE YOU HAD a bad cold or the flu yet this year? If it hit you, what category do you fall into? Some people, when they get sick, like to be pampered. A warm comforter, soothing chicken soup, extra sleep, orange juice, a fluffed-up pillow—part of the cure comes from the attention you receive and relish.  More...

MURDER VICTIMS’ FAMILIES for Reconciliation (MVFR) is a national organization that supports family members of victims of homicide. They also oppose the death penalty in all cases. The people one would most expect to support capital punishment have transformed their grief and trauma into an effort to limit, repeal, and prevent reinstatement of the death penalty.  More...

IF YOU ARE from Chicago like me, the fall of 2005 was an interesting time. After eight decades, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. It was great, but not like Boston the year before. All of Boston celebrated their long-awaited victory. But Chicago, try as it could to come together, remained divided between Sox and Cub fans and those in between that neither side recognized.  More...

HOW MANY TIMES have we vowed to ourselves that we would not get caught up in some stressful situation ever again only to find ourselves in the thick of the same unpleasantness in very short order?  More...

I WAS WAITING for a friend at Starbucks as a stream of early morning customers ordered their coffee. At least three dozen people went through the line during that time, and I don’t think two people had the same order.  More...

“BUT YOU PROMISED!” When my mother heard my friend Murray say this to me, I knew instinctively that, at 12 years of age, I was about to learn a very important life lesson, like it or not. She firmly told me that if I had promised to help Murray with his science project by helping him collect and display leaves from 25 local species of trees, that would be how I would spend my Saturday.  More...

A FRIEND OF MINE is a Trappistine nun who spends a good part of each day in silent prayer. She once told me the hardest adjustment she faced when entering the monastery was realizing how much “noise” was going on inside her heart and head—especially at times of silent prayer.  More...

PEOPLE SAY “Come hell or high water” to describe dogged determination. But hell or high water create determination, too. Take Margaret Tobin Brown, better known as the Titanic’s “Unsinkable Molly Brown.” While films embellish her colorfulness and candor, she became a dynamo that night forever after.  More...

GROWING UP in the flat Midwest, my idea of a hill was a small bump we named “Devil’s Hill” and rode our sleds down in the winter. No wonder real mountains fascinated me. In my 20s I visited the Rockies. What I thought would be an incredible adventure ended up with me out of breath and nauseous from the altitude. I could not wait to get back to sea level.  More...

TRANSFIGURATIONS appear to take place at one precise moment, but often they are the culmination of a gradual process of seeing people through different eyes until we are startled by the affection and admiration we feel for this person or are thrown off balance by a kind or courageous act we never dreamed possible coming from this person.  More...

TED LOOKED through the lens of his birthday present camera, framing objects in his backyard, practicing for the pictures he would take with his new toy. Panning along the fence, his viewfinder settled on the face and form of his wife, Evelyn, tending her rosebush. He opened the aperture to blur the background and brought her features in sharp focus. She was lovely.  More...

WHEN I WAS a rookie teacher, I found myself with a class of high school sophomores I could not control, much less teach. Frustrated, I swallowed my pride and asked a master teacher, Sister Helen Marshall, O.P. to come to my class, observe what was going on, and then tell me how to proceed.  More...

I USED TO LOVE Let’s Make a Deal. It seemed that Monty Hall could turn any situation into a deal. Got a comb in your pocket? He’d ask you to trade it for what’s behind the curtain. Got a bobby pin in your purse? You could turn that into a new washer and dryer if only Monty would call on you.  More...

THE WEAKNESS of God, Saint Paul, says, is stronger than human strength. The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Sacrificing oneself, as Jesus did, in fidelity to God and out of love for others looks to the world like foolishness and weakness. But in it is the greatest strength and wisdom.  More...

I REMEMBER as a child watching a live drama on television called Green Mansions. The cast was entirely African American. The character of God was portrayed as strict and stern, like a formidable Baptist minister. He watched over and protected the people with a steady hand. It was an image straight from the Old Testament.  More...

ZORAN LANDED IN THE U.S., speaking no English and equipped with skills (as a fighter pilot) that weren’t imme-diately transferable. Like many immigrants before him, he took to the trades and tarred roofs, built porches, and laid brick—whatever needed to be done, he’d do it.  More...

IT WAS THE PURSE Lucy’s mother had given her for Christmas the year before she died, and it was the most pre-cious thing in the world to her. What was she thinking when she left it on the bus? Now it was gone forever, along with her wallet, her credit cards, her glasses, her keys, and everything.  More...

EVERY FIRST FRIDAY of the month for five years, I brought an elderly gentleman Holy Communion. And every time, he would tell me with great certainty that it would be my final visit. He was sure that he would be dead by the next First Friday.  More...

I FREQUENTLY come in contact with young adults who are wondering what to make of their lives. They receive no shortage of advice—from magazines, television and radio programs, self-improvement books, and self-appointed gurus. Yet many—and not just young adults—remain bewildered about where to look for reliable guidance about how we are to live in these times.  More...

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Natasha is in the second grade in Pakistan. Her home and school were destroyed in the devas-tating earthquake that hit the region last October, and her father was killed when the house collapsed. She also lost 36 of her classmates when her school was flattened by the massive tremor. Now she is living in a tent with her mother, brothers and sisters, trying to survive the long Himalayan winter.  More...

A FEW YEARS AGO it seemed that everyone was talking about the movie The Passion of the Christ. It was an apropos title on so many levels, inciting passionate comments from many.  More...

THE WORDS passion and patient come from the same Latin root: pati, meaning “to suffer.” Jesus’ Passion is the account of his suffering—his endurance of pain and trials without complaint. We could just as easily have called this period in the life of Christ his Patience.  More...

THIS DAY we hear the story of Christ’s self-sacrifice. Saint Paul describes Jesus’ “self-emptying” in becoming a human being and accepting death on a cross. This self-giving of God for our sake gives us the model of how we in return should live: for God and for one another.  More...

AS A PASTOR I quickly realized that the weather makes all the difference when it comes to the celebration of Easter. The better the weather, the bigger the crowds at church.  More...

ON EASTER my mind doesn’t turn to thoughts of parades and fancy fashions or lilies or Easter baskets. Instead I think of the hospital sitting room where my family waited while my father was being operated on. We weren’t alone there.  More...

IN THE AFTERMATH of the death and destruction Hurricane Katrina visited upon the Gulf Coast, many survivors lost everything they had and basically became displaced persons.  More...

THE BOSTON Red Sox had never played the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field. But interleague play brought them there. I cashed in a lot of my “pastor’s chips” to get some seats for myself and a few friends who came from the East Coast to share some friendly rivalry with me.  More...

SEVERAL YEARS back I attended the wake of the father of my cousin’s fiancée (it’s an Irish thing). As my father, sister, and I stood in line to wish our condolences to the man’s widow, whom we’d never met, we heard a commotion up near the casket.  More...

THE APOSTLE THOMAS may be the patron saint of doubters. But don’t dismiss Thomas’ doubt too quickly as misplaced or simply a lesson.  More...

MOST OF US who have lost a loved one know how intensely painful the loneliness is especially after the immediate shock of death has worn off. People try to console us by telling us that time will heal that pain. But time takes time.
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ARE YOU AWARE that you didn’t come to a complete stop at that stop sign back there?” a police officer asked after he had pulled a teenager over as she was driving to the movies with her cousin.  More...

DESPITE THE PAIN and terror her two daughters suffered in the July 7, 2005 London bombings, Patty Benton spoke with optimism and forgiveness shortly after her daughters emerged from surgery to address the injuries sustained in the blast.  More...

A RECENT ISSUE of Fortune magazine presented its annual list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For.” While these firms use many recent management and human resources techniques, in another way their approach hearkens back to business values of an earlier era: Be generous and loyal to your employees.  More...

DR. BENJAMIN CARSON, a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, grew up in dire poverty in Detroit. His parents divorced when he was 8, and his mother, a single black woman with only a third-grade education, had limited opportunities.  More...

BEN WAS CONSCIENTIOUS on the freeway, staying alert, checking his mirrors, and signaling his lane changes. It was the other drivers who were idiots. Their aggression and thoughtlessness angered him to no end. He was not a man given to vulgarity, but when another driver did something stupid, he’d erupt in swearing and rude gestures.  More...

MANY PEOPLE hear the story of Paul’s conversion and think of the famous words to Amazing Grace: “Was blind, but now I see.” Not only did Paul go from being a persecuting hatemonger to seeing the error of his ways—not unlike the former slavetrader, John Newton, who wrote the words to Amazing Grace—but Paul literally was struck blind for a short time.  More...

FRED D’AMICO, 61, had kidney disease and needed a transplant. When a donor kidney became available, he got to a New York hospital for the operation only to run into his friend, 58-year-old Izya Dukorsky, who also had kidney disease and required a transplant.  More...

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. That is the theme of today’s readings. Love exists not because we love but because we are loved. Love is—that is, love exists—with or without us. As Jesus reminds us, he chose us; we didn’t choose him. He chooses to love all of us all the time—whether or not we return that love.  More...

THE SAME FIVE GIRLS kept showing up for detention after school, so Mrs. Willis, the detention monitor, decided to organize them into a kind of detention club, an association of misfits rejected by the other teachers.  More...

WE HAD SOME tough kids in our grammar school. I suppose by today’s standards they were pretty tame, but they scared the heck out of me. We had one guy who could have walked directly onto the cast of Grease without any changes to his appearance.  More...

“REMEMBER, RED, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” That is the advice prisoner Andy Dufresne, the main character in Stephen King’s short story Shawshank Redemption, offers his inmate friend in a letter Andy leaves for Red the night he escapes from Shawshank Prison.  More...

WE HAVE grown up with images of the Holy Spirit as a tongue of fire or a hovering dove. But there’s another way to imagine this gift of the Risen Jesus: breath.  More...

WHEN THE BODY of Quaker peace activist Tom Fox was found in Iraq and his death at the hands of his captors confirmed, his organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, used Fox’s own words in response to the news:  More...

ED AND LOIS loved to dance. They had met at a dance, fell in love, got married, and have been waltzing around together for 35 years. They were pretty good at it, too. They even entered amateur dance competitions and whirled around the dance floor together with a number pinned to the back of Ed’s tuxedo.  More...

MY DAUGHTER was having a meltdown in the middle of the lobby of the Playboy Building, which, oddly enough, houses her pediatrician’s office. She did not want to leave, but she didn’t want to stay. She had entered the dreaded toddler contrarian mode that no amount of cajoling can deactivate.  More...

THERE’S A GREAT SCENE in the film Forrest Gump that relates to today’s readings. In the movie, Captain Dan lost his legs in a battle that he believes was a sign of his failure as a leader. In his anguish he wishes he had died on the battlefield. He is mad at God, at life, and at Forrest Gump for his unshakable faith in goodness.  More...

DANIEL AND HIS SISTER Daniela have been blind since birth, the consequence of a genetic disease. They were born in a rural area of Ghana, where resources are scarce and disease runs rampant. Before Daniel reached his teen years, his father died, and his mother struggled to keep herself and her four children alive. Finally out of desperation, she led her blind 11-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter to a small hut in a remote area and left them to die.  More...

GENEROSITY, SAINT PAUL tells the Corinthians, has a lot to do with equality. Because you have more, and others are in need, it makes sense to balance things out—to take from your surplus to make up for another’s deficit.  More...

LAURA WAS ON a crowded subway train one morning, sipping a coffee and enjoying her morning newspaper. At some point, she noticed a pregnant woman standing in the aisle. Laura offered her seat. “I’m pregnant, not disabled,” the indignant woman huffed. “Oh, well okay . . . my mistake!” Laura replied, as nearby passengers snickered and shook their heads in disbelief.  More...

WHAT ON EARTH are you talking about?” Linda demanded of her 5-year-old, Hanna. The little girl had been going on and on about her new puppy, the one she’d just gotten for her birthday.  More...

TAKING SAINT PAUL’S teaching to heart, Sam woke up praising God’s glory. He thanked God for the beautiful summer sun and the gentle breeze wafting through his window. As he washed his face, he was overcome with gratitude for the life-giving water on his skin. He buried his head in a soft cotton towel and breathed deeply. Then he placed the towel on the rack and the bar broke.  More...

I‘VE BROUGHT YOU the Eucharist,” says Joseph, the head catechist for the Diocese of Leribe in the African country of Lesotho, to a group of elderly villagers. In addition to his service as eucharistic minister, he also visits the sick, holds prayer meetings, and teaches, including instructing those preparing for baptism.  More...

WHEN THE WIZARD Gandalf shows up at Bilbo Baggins’ door at the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo greets him: “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water. . . . Sorry! Thank you. Not today. Good morning!”  More...

TWO THINGS BOB HATED to do: go to the dentist and deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles. He’d already had his semiannual dental checkup. Now he had to visit the DMV.  More...

TODAY’S GOSPEL IS so incredibly counterculutral that it’s hard not to write it off as a supernatural event that doesn’t relate to real life. Rapper and R&B diva Mary J. Blige captured the predominent “It’s all about me” worldview perfectly when she said in an interview this past May, “My God is a God who wants me to have things. He wants me to bling. . . . I don’t know what kind of God the rest of y’all are serving, but the God I serve says, ‘Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I’m gonna make sure you’re doing that.’ ”  More...

WHEN JESUS SAW the hungry crowds who had followed him in search of healing, he found a way to feed them immediately. Not everyone in today’s world is so fortunate.  More...

YOU’VE PROBABLY seen cartoons in which a bedraggled spiritual seeker has struggled to a mountain top to ask a guru, “What’s the meaning of life?”  More...

THE NUMBER 52 bus sighed as it knelt down to pick up the old woman waiting at the stop in front of the supermarket. She struggled on board, slowed down by two plastic grocery bags pulling at her arms and the weight of years bending her body.  More...

UDITH, A RECENT IMMIGRANT to the U.S., was desperate. She had a young daughter to care for, a job that barely covered the bills, and nowhere to turn for help. On the verge of tears coming home from work one evening, she cried out, “Father, you say you are Our Father. Well, you have a daughter to look after and she is going hungry some nights. Please help.”  More...

WHAT’S THE LEADING cause of hunger in the world? Crop failure? Natural disasters? Disease? Agricultural mismanagement? How about armed conflict.  More...

MRS. NUÑEZ LOOKED UP at the priest standing by her hospital bed and asked him, “Padre, am I going to die?”  More...

JESUS WANTS TO improve your vision. That’s why there are so many gospel stories about blind people being restored to sight. But it’s crucial to understand that in Jesus’ view of reality there are three ways of seeing.  More...

CONTEMPLATIVE MONK Father Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. tells the story in a long-ago interview in U.S. Catholic of a fellow monk who receives word that his sister has been murdered. The monk goes to his sister’s apartment and sits in silence as he examines the scene of the crime. After years of centering his thoughts on God and practicing the peace of Jesus, he wonders whether this will tax him beyond what he can bear.  More...

THE ASSEMBLED TRIBES of Israel reaffirmed their faith in God when they remembered what God had done for them in bringing them out of slavery. They remembered God’s promises.  More...

WHAT A BIG difference it made to Tina and Rick when the last of their kids went off to school and just the two of them were in the house. They discovered that they had no one to blame things on!  More...

TRADITIONS come and go. The very thing built to withstand the test of time succumbs to time. Leanne, newly married, is preparing Sunday supper when she insists on slicing off each end of the roast before placing it in the pan. When her husband asks why, she admits she’s not sure but it’s what her mom always did.  More...

IN A SCENE in the lighthearted romance Just Like Heaven, with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, the lead character, Elizabeth, a doctor, must coach landscape architect David through a risky procedure to save the life of a restaurant patron who has collapsed and stopped breathing.  More...

EACH MORNING Pauline Whitesinger, an Arizona Navajo, prays and makes an offering of white-corn pollen to the rising sun. “Did not God choose those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?” Does she hear these words?  More...

A QUICK RUN through the supermarket wasn’t the place Jennifer expected to learn a lesson in faith, but faith overtook her one Thursday in the checkout line.  More...

IF SOMEONE has nothing to wear or eat, the Letter of James says, and a Christian gives that person only their best wishes, “what good is it?”  More...

COMMUNION had just ended at the Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church. The choir sang its last note and the celebrant was about to speak when loud voices rang out from the back of church. An usher, who had been trying to maintain a muffled tone, called out, “No, no, it’s too late,” to a man in a wheelchair who had come to Mass late and was now trying to break free from the usher’s grip and wheel down the center aisle.  More...

JOE HAD JUST gotten off a commuter train when an older woman came up to him and asked for directions. She was supposed to meet a friend who was taking a particular bus to a particular spot near the train station. Her English was a little broken, and the instructions her friend had given were less than complete.  More...

GETTING HIS driver’s license was the beginning of Justin’s freedom, which he found an opportunity to exercise on Sunday mornings. His parents went to the Saturday Vigil, so he chose to go on Sunday, knowing Mom and Dad wouldn’t deny him use of the car for so noble a purpose.  More...

THE NATIONAL SOCCER TEAM OF Argentina went into the World Cup last summer as a strong contender. But a Methodist bishop from that country expressed some misgivings about the event that echo the Apostle James’ warnings to the rich about the injustice their wealth was based on.  More...

AS THE MOTHER of a 5-year-old, I find Jesus’ pronouncement that the kingdom of God belongs to children both reassuring and frightening.  More...

LAST SPRING a woman brought a 5-year-old Hispanic girl to a Kansas City hospital. The child, Jessica Chavez, had already died. She was dirty and underweight, and doctors said she had died of a blood infection caused by pneumonia. The woman claimed to be the girl’s mother and said she had been bringing the child from Mexico to Chicago.  More...

HECTOR HAD ALWAYS been a pretty good guy. He had learned kindness and gentleness from his parents grow-ing up in Mexico and brought those values with him when he migrated to this country. He got a good job and began to make a decent living. True to his roots, he used a fair part of his income to support his church and help the needy.  More...

I PREFERRED HER to scepter and throne,” scripture says of wisdom, “and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her.”  More...

IN 1970, RETIRED AT&T executive Robert K. Greenleaf started a quiet revolution in management circles when he published the essay “The Servant as Leader,” which outlined his concept of servant leadership: The servant-leader is servant first.  More...

WHEN THE APOSTLES James and John jockeyed for the best spots in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus set them down a peg by telling them true glory comes not from lording it over others but from serving.  More...

WHEN JESUS asks blind Bartimaeus “What do you want me to do for you?” we might be thinking, “Duh! What do you think?” Yet in an interview, Ray Charles insisted that if God offered him his sight back, he wouldn’t take it. Why not? Because, he said, sometimes beautiful people “are not packaged very beautifully. But you don’t know this when you are blind."  More...

DR. GOVINDAPPA Venkataswamy came to the conclusion as a young man that “intelligence and capability are not enough. There must be the joy of doing something beautiful.” So instead of retiring at the age of 65, ”Dr. V” mortgaged his home and opened a hospital to perform free or low-cost cataract surgery–if untreated cataracts can lead to blindness–on poor Indians.  More...

HEAR, O ISRAEL: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” To Jews the words of this prayer, the Shema, are both one of the most familiar prayers as well as one of the most familiar passages of scripture. They say it twice daily, at morning and evening prayers. It’s as familiar a prayer for Jews as the Lord’s Prayer is for Christians.  More...

MELISSA GAVE herself plenty of time to get to the airport. But she didn’t figure on the heavy traffic or the long line at the rental car drop-off. And the shuttle must have stopped a hundred times for more passengers headed home for the holidays.  More...

WHEN TERRY was a kid growing up, his parents used to always put two dollars in the collection basket at church. So when he started working, he followed their example and did the same every Sunday.  More...

WHEN I TOOK classes for RCIA, there was another candidate, Mabel—a woman in her late 30s—who could never make it to class on time, sometimes arriving only for the final prayers. When she did arrive, she was unprepared and appeared flustered when Father Pershing asked her about assignments. But always when she first came in, she held a look of relief, as though there were no room she would rather walk into.  More...

FOR CATHOLICS and many other people of faith, a person’s mortal remains deserve a special reverence. The body represents to us the person whose living flesh and blood it once was. It also symbolizes our faith, because it had been one with an immortal soul gone to God.  More...

IT WASN’T HARD for Susan to make a lot of money. She had the education and the skills to get a top-paying job anywhere. She liked the money and the things the money could buy, like a nice apartment, a really cool car, and fun vacations. Still, she just wasn’t happy doing the things she needed to do and dealing with the people she needed to deal with in order to make the big bucks.  More...

THEY CALLED him a coward. They called him un-American and unpatriotic. They called him a sissy and an enemy sympathizer. Why? Because he refused to take up a weapon and fight alongside his fellow soldiers in Iraq. Jermaine was brought up in a devout Catholic family and went to Catholic schools all the way through high school. He knew that killing was wrong. He also knew that violence is not the way to peace.  More...

FRANCES HESSELBEIN, editor of Leader to Leader, a publication of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management) and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient for her service as head of the Girl Scouts of America, wrote several years ago on the art of listening.  More...

WARNING: The anxieties of daily live may cause drowsiness, so says Jesus in today’s gospel. We pray at Mass to be protected from all anxiety because we don’t want to miss out on the coming of our salvation. But sadly, most of us can’t seem to shake away our cares.  More...

VIGILANCE is required of those who wait for the coming of the Lord. But the words scripture speaks go beyond dire warnings. The return of the Son of Man will be an event of joy for those who have remained in the love of God and one another. For Catholics and other Christians in Japan, this vigilance and faith-keeping have not always been easy. Many faced martyrdom in their efforts to proclaim and live the gospel.  More...

WHEN THE South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted amnesty to the apartheid regime’s last law minister, Adriaan Vlok, and another person for their role in the 1988 bombing of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) offices, not everyone was prepared to accept it, including the former general secretary of the SACC, Rev. Frank Chikane.  More...

ON APRIL 20, 1964, South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela made the following statement before be-ing sentenced to prison, where he would remain for the next 27 years: “During my lifetime . . . I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”  More...

SIX WEEKS before her wedding a California woman discovered that her fiancé’s affections were secretly engaged elsewhere. The wedding was called off and gifts returned. But the former bride-to-be discovered that she was still on the hook for the reception. Instead of simply being out the money, she transformed the event into a chartiable fundraiser at which strong women were honored.  More...

“WHAT SHOULD we do?” the crowds asked John the Baptist. From those crowds came forward tax collectors and mercenaries—“unclean people”—with the same question. John had called them to repentance. They felt a stirring in their hearts to respond, but how?  More...

AS A PARENT of a child with autism, Cammie McGovern had thought it was important that others not single her out as someone who had a child with special needs. So when a friend asked if she would be interested in helping out with an afterschool program for children with such needs, like her 6-year-old Ethan, she was reluctant.  More...

SANDY AND ERIC were 17 when they found out Sandy was pregnant. They were happy, and determined to have the baby and take care of everything together. Their families rejected them, however, making it clear they were on their own. “It was like they were just waiting for us to fail,” says Sandy. Despite the lack of support, Eric and Sandy had their child, finished high school, were married, and have been able to support themselves and their new baby.  More...

EACH YEAR the pope issues a message for the World Day of Peace, January 1. In January 2005, Pope Benedict XVI, in his first Day of Peace message, drew on a phrase from the Second Vatican Council, saying that humanity “will not succeed in ‘building a truly more human world for everyone, everywhere on earth, unless all people are renewed in spirit and converted to the truth of peace.’ ”  More...

ANN LANG O’CONNOR, author of The Twelve Unbreakable Principles of Parenting (ACTA, 2006), was helping her parish develop a mission statement when she realized that her family could use a mission statement as well.  More...

WHAT COULD BECOME Poland’s biggest export? Machinery, manufactured goods, food, and animals would all be good guesses. But another “export” is growing, a Warsaw magazine noted: Catholic priests.  More...

DRAWING a lesson from humanity’s treatment of Jesus, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “This race is never grateful: from the first, One fills their cup at supper with pure wine, Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge, In bitter vinegar.”  More...

WHEN KEVIN stepped through the doorway and heard the door clang shut, he remembered how he felt two years, seven months, and 26 days before when he walked through the same door and heard it lock behind him. He remembered thinking how life could not get any worse. But it did.  More...

IN ONE of the many versions of the “what’s in your wallet?” commercials, a man asks a woman to promise that she’ll wait for him as he takes care of business with his credit card.  More...

NOT MANY YEARS after turning from wealth and war to a committed Christian life, Saint Francis of Assisi, filled with zeal, tried to reach the Holy Land to evangelize the Saracens, an Arab and Muslim people who were fighting Crusades. After failing several times, he reached a Crusader camp in Egypt with his companion, Brother Illuminato.  More...

MARTIN Luther King, Jr. was born and bred a Southerner. Yet, when he began to organize nonviolent resistance to segregationist policies that had been entrenched in the South since the Civil War, he was imprisoned, his home firebombed, and his phone tapped. Clearly, he was a prophet not accepted “in his native place” (nor in most other parts of our nation, for that matter).  More...

MUCH LIKE the calling of Peter, James, and John some of us can trace one event that made believers out of us. For a woman in Ohio it was that her daughter learned to speak French.  More...

“DAMN!” Sandra’s wrench had just slipped off the nut she was trying to tighten on the Buick and she skinned her knuckle painfully on the alternator bracket. Holding the bleeding knuckle to her lips, she licked her wound and cursed several times more, invoking the Deity, the Savior, and various biological functions.  More...

ONE of the great gifts of faith is hope, scripture says today. Hope takes many forms. For many African American boys in the Indianapolis neighborhood of Martindale-Brightwood, where more than 50 percent of children live in poverty and many come from single-parent homes, hope looks like an organization called Jireh Sports.  More...

In the book A Hand to Guide Me actor Denzel Washington recounts how he keeps with him the first letter of recommendation he received from his English teacher when he was applying to the American Conservatory Theatre.  More...

DOLORES LOOKED out her kitchen window at the fourplex across the street. She could tell by the cars in the driveway, the occasional loud music, and the sounds of frequent arguing that the young couples with children living there were all poor. She wondered if her neighbor down the street was right when he speculated that there might be a meth lab hidden away in there somewhere.  More...

DURING the funeral for Officer Thomas Wood, a slain police officer from Maywood, Illinois Maywood Police Chaplain Rodney Smith offered this story as an example of Wood’s character (as reported in the Chicago Sun-Times):  More...

“THE WORD is near you,” Saint Paul assured the Romans. How close the Word was to Michael Hoskins ended being quite a surprise to the Virginia electrician.  More...

THE READING from Luke’s gospel can be a little vexing. My first thoughts are: Doesn’t Jesus say that we should plead to our Father, “Lead us not into temptation”? But here we see the Spirit lead Christ to the desert expressly to be tempted by the devil. Does following Jesus in our Lenten fast imply following him also into temptation?  More...

FRIDAY EVENING Sabbath services at the Beit T’Shuvah congregation in Los Angeles are a little different. The congregation is located at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, and its members are mostly people struggling with addiction.  More...

HOW MANY STARS are in the sky? Scientists tell us that a person can manage to see about 5,000 stars with the naked eye. So, when God invited Abram to “count the stars, if you are able to count them,” this is about as far as Abram would have gotten.  More...

ONE CHRISTMAS Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, Alabama had his car broken into and a number of ceremonial items stolen, including his crosier, pectoral cross, and pallium. A simple line in the news report in the Mobile Press-Register titled “Church is hoping for burglar to repent” read: “While not offering an award, a top archdiocesan official said they hope the thief returns the stolen items.”  More...

GOD PROMISED to bring God’s people into a land of their own. That land today, however, bears names that evoke images of conflict: Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza. For Palestinian Christians and other Palestinians, their home has been anything but a “good and spacious land.”  More...

HELEN DREADED Easter because it meant another argument about going to church. Her mother would call to see if the kids “needed a ride” to Mass. It was her subtle expression of disapproval because Helen had stopped going to church. Since the old pastor retired and the new priest came, going to Mass on Sunday had become a weekly hour of torture for her and her kids, and she wasn’t going to do it anymore.  More...

THE RETURN of a son brings to the surface the forgiving love of a father—and shows us the same for God—while Saint Paul says that because we are reconciled to God through Christ, we ourselves must be agents of reconciliation.  More...

THE LIFE of Christopher Gardner, the man behind the movie The Pursuit of Happyness, embodies scripture’s emphasis this week on pursuing an upward calling.  More...

TODAY’S GOSPEL, with its message that determining the worthiness of another life is not the role of flawed human beings, is often used as an argument against the death penalty. The Catholic Church now teaches that in modern times the conditions that would make capital punishment necessary “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,” to use Pope John Paul II’s words.  More...

THE DIFFERENCE between the good guys and the bad guys always seemed pretty apparent to Raphael. He had fought in both Iraq wars, where the bad guys were the enemy, the people he was supposed to search out and neutralize. After he finished his last tour of duty, he joined his local police force, where the bad guys were the criminals he was supposed to capture.  More...

IT WAS THE BEGINNING of Lent, and a teacher at a school in England introduced her students to the custom of eating hot cross buns. The buns were “hot,” she explained, because of spices that livened up a food otherwise made bland because fasting left out some ingredients. The cross marked on the top of the buns represented the cross of Christ.  More...

THE EXPERIENCE of our salvation—of Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of ours—isn’t always as dramatic as the events described in today’s gospel. Many of us only realize we’re experiencing God’s saving love after a long process of transformation. One day we feel alive again, and we realize the renewal was months in the making.  More...

THERE ARE AT LEAST two stories told in Luke’s account of the visit to the empty tomb. The first and most obvious is the glorious news of Christ’s resurrection. The second story, less often appreciated or retold, is that of the role of women as important disciples of Jesus, and as the first witnesses of the resurrection.  More...

CONSIDERING one of themes of this week’s readings—forgiveness—we might look back before the Easter season to Jesus’ Passion and a key figure in that event, Pontius Pilate. When Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified, he “took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood.’ ” This gesture, it turns out, may have a basis in human nature.  More...

LET’S PARTY!” Jamal had heard the call many times and he had always responded with great gusto. He had invested himself wholeheartedly into his first semester of college away from home and had gotten straight A’s in all the disciplines of his newfound social freedom: staying out late, getting drunk, skipping classes, and carousing with the freshman party crowd.  More...

IN THE 1995 MOVIE Clueless, loosely based on Jane Austin’s Emma but set amid Beverly Hills valley girls, the lead character, a cheerful, popular teenager named Cher, is asked by her history teacher to debate the pros of allowing Haitian boat people into the country.  More...

STANDING before the Sanhedrin, Peter and the apostles declared, “We must obey God rather than men.” This following of God in the face of opposition would lead all the disciples to martyrdom at one time or another.  More...

HEARING JESUS’ voice, following his call, is what it means to have a vocation. We discern our vocation, our life’s calling, by listening. But that is a very challenging task, given all the distractions of daily life. We may know Jesus’ voice when we hear it, but how do we create the conditions that enable us to hear it?  More...

ALL ANTHONY wanted to do was dance. His mom used to say he could dance before he could walk. He took some lessons after school, but they were mostly for waltz and cha-cha and stuff like that. What Anthony really liked was ballet. The great Baryshnikov was his hero. He had a DVD of Baryshnikov performing The Nutcracker, and he watched it endlessly in his room.  More...

WHAT PART of illegal don’t you understand?” Joyce was livid. Her son Tony, who lived in the same town, had taken a family of undocumented immigrants into his home. Joyce was afraid that Tony would be found out and arrested. Not only that, but Tony’s father was a prominent citizen in town and would be terribly embarrassed if Tony were caught.  More...

HOW DID JESUS love his disciples? Did he shower them with material goods and coddle and pity them? No, he challenged them to be their best selves and live a life of service, commitment, and compassion.  More...

WHEN THE APOSTLES and other elders of the early church had a conflict, they met with one another to talk and resolve the problem. To their meeting they sent the most basic and effective form of communication—real live people—with another simple means of conveying information, a letter.  More...

TODAY’S SECOND READING, from Revelation, offers the image of the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. This powerful image has entered religious and popular culture in many ways over the years. In 1804, William Blake wrote a poem using this image in which he lamented the destruction of nature because of England’s industrialization, the “Satanic mills” in the poem’s first stanza: “And did the Countenance Divine / Shine forth upon our clouded hills?/ And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills?”  More...

SHE SAID IT again. No matter how hard Jennifer tried not to say it, that word kept coming out of her. It was a word she wasn’t supposed to use. It was a vulgar word and it made her feel dirty when she said it. OK, all the other kids used the word. It peppered the conversation at school and at the mall where Jennifer hung out with her friends. But it wasn’t her word, and it wasn’t right for her to say it.  More...

CHRIST’S PRAYER for his disciples in the Gospel of John powerfully expresses the unity he envisioned for his church: He and the Father and the disciples were to be one, and in this unity the church would go forth marked by love.  More...

LEADERSHIP requires courage, and the most courageous thing you can do as a leader is to tell people who you are. That is how you gain their trust. If people feel they know you, then they feel more confident in what you have say.  More...

PENTECOST LEFT the disciples no room for confusion. They could not doubt what was really going on. After all, we hear nothing of their internal experience in that room. Rather, they witnessed it with their human senses. For that reason, there was no need to struggle at translating an internal experience into words.  More...

BRYAN NEVER thought of himself as a spiritual person. Oh, he went to church once in a while, especially on Christmas and Easter, and during Lent, but he never thought about it much. Now he had come to know the truth about himself and had come to understand that the truth was from God. And the truth about Bryan was that he was an alcoholic.  More...

ONCE UPON a time, public atheists were marginal figures who occupied a few minutes on a slow news day. Now, people like Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion have their own “Atheism” section on the shelves of the big book retailers.  More...

NO LONGER able to bear the heart-rending stories of farm families suffering from the devastating effects of the extreme draught in the state of New South Wales in Australia, local community and church groups in Sydney have begun large donation and awareness drives.  More...

DOROTHY DAY’S 1963 book Loaves and Fishes chronicled the founding and early decades of the Catholic Worker movement, which Day started with French worker-scholar (and illegal immigrant) Peter Maurin in 1933. Day’s story is dramatic and inspiring, with her radical roots, religious awakening, unpopular but steadfast pacifism, and courageous defense of civil rights and of all those who find themselves marginalized.  More...

OUTSIDE Johannesburg stands the Voortrekker Monument, which commemorates the Boer exodus into the South African hinterland, and in a sense marks the beginning of the South African system of racial separation and oppression, apartheid.  More...

WHEN IT CAME to getting to church on time, Sylvia and Bob were the champions. They were usually among the first to show up for the 9 o’clock Mass on Sunday. They always sat in the same place near the front, right on the aisle. When latecomers arrived, they had to climb over Sylvia and Bob to get to the middle seats.  More...

SCRIPTURE SPEAKS of the mission of believers to carry the good news of God to the ends of the earth. This mission includes the activity at which many people spend a major portion of their time: work.  More...

IT IS A SPECIAL kind of joy when children use their first word to call out their parent’s name. Indeed, this joy can become so coveted that mother and father will gather in front of their child, calling out and vying for this first word. Say it, say it: Mama. No, no: Dadda, Dadda. And, as parents discover, when this name is spoken, many, many more words soon proceed.  More...

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP is not something you can do on the side or in your spare time. It is an all-or-nothing proposition–similar to any other commitment. Yet, like other commitments, sometimes people just are not quite ready to say “I do.”  More...

AREN’T WE QUICK to want to call down fire on our enemies? It kind of goes with the territory of human existence. If we can identify the bad guys–“them”–then we can claim the identity of the good guys–“us.” Calling down fire on them is just the next step in the process.  More...

LATE ONE SPRING NIGHT a police sergeant was flagged down by a driver whose car had just collided with anoth-er vehicle. The driver in the other car was unconscious and the car’s engine burst into flames just as the sergeant called for an ambulance, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. The sergeant tried to open the driver’s side door but it wouldn’t budge.  More...

WHEN JESUS SENT the 72 out on to share the Good News, he instructed them to take no money, to rely on the hospitality of others, and to bring wishes of peace to all whom they met. They were to be missionaries and pilgrims for peace.  More...

THE EASTERN ORTHODOX layman, artist, and author Alvin Alexsi Currier once said, “What is radical about the teachings of Jesus is that . . . he commanded us to go down, down, down to the least, last, lost, and poorest one of these our brothers and sisters,” including, Currier said, “the wounded Samaritan lying unconscious beside the road.”  More...

WHAT WOULD YOU think if it was your wedding day, or your daughter’s wedding day, and you were at the church and the priest who was going to conduct the ceremony called you on your cell phone to tell you that he was going to be late? And what if the reason he was going to be late was that he had come upon a van broken down on the road and he had stopped to help.  More...

A SHORTAGE OF 80,000 nurses by the year 2020. A need to recruit 2 million new teachers in the next 10 years. Eighty percent of law enforcement agencies who say they can’t fill their vacancies and two thirds of fire departments that are understaffed. A major drop in the number of Protestant clergy.  More...

THE STORY OF MARTHA and Mary has a lesson to teach us about the dangers of distraction, a lesson well suited for today’s fractured communication environment. Between e-mail, instant messages, BlackBerrys, Smart phones, Internet browsing, and the like, people are having more and more trouble concentrating on any one thing for more than a few minutes.  More...

IN THE GOSPEL Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, and gives them examples of how God hears prayers and cares for them as a loving parent. This combination of prayer and care can take many forms, as the women of Lothian, Maryland’s St. James Prayer Shawl Ministry have demonstrated.  More...

WITH VERY FEW exceptions, parents would most likely profess a readiness to do whatever they could for their offspring. It is the nature of parenting and human nature to express at least a willingness to help out when it comes to family.  More...

A FEW YEARS AGO a marine researcher was heading home after participating with his crew in an annual race across the Pacific Ocean. Because they weren’t in a hurry, they took a route they would usually avoid through an area known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a large, nearly windless oval-shaped expanse of ocean. During the seven-day crossing of the gyre, the boat sailed through a carpet of floating debris, largely pieces of plastic.  More...

APRIL, A STAY AT HOME mother of one, greeted her husband Jake, a successful private-practice physician, with a flutter of anxious movements. Barely could she embrace him before pushing off through the foyer into their high-ceiling, stainless steel kitchen.  More...

THE HAPPY PERSON, the philosopher Aristotle said, has everything they truly need. But, he pointed out, most people believe that happiness is what each thinks themselves happy, personally, when in it fact it’s pretty much the same.  More...

IMAGINE YOUR BOSS offering to carry your golf clubs; or how about coming home to find your rich neighbor mowing your lawn; or maybe your science teacher shows up at your door and says, “Here, let me finish your science project so you can watch your show on television.” Silly? Well, that’s just the kind of image Jesus offers for the coming of the kingdom.  More...

JEREMIAH’S ATTEMPT to witness to his faith in time of war landed him in prison, charged as a deserter, and then left to die at the bottom of dry well, accused of “demoralizing the soldiers.” The prophet has served as an example to Christians in later times who have refused to let the state use their bodies for war.  More...

THE SOLDIERS of the Roman Empire couldn’t understand this new group of people who followed Jesus Christ. These men and women knew they would be persecuted, even to death, for their worship. Yet every Sunday they gathered together in large groups, seemingly waiting to be captured. They just made it too easy.  More...

COMPLIMENTS SUCH AS, “Your daughter has lovely manners” or “Your son is quite the gentleman” are music to the ears of any parent. But the discipline that went in to achieving that model behavior was at least for a time sheer agony for the parent and the child. How many reminders to say “thank you” and “may I please be excused”; how many “but whys” and “do I have tos” when it was time to quiet down or do the dishes?  More...

HOW MANY WILL BE SAVED? someone asked Jesus. Note he did not answer the question directly—“this many” or “you and you but not you.” Instead, his reply lay more in the direction of “some who think they will be may in for a rude awakening.”  More...

JESUS’ GUIDE TO PARTY-GOING and hosting is a far cry from the tit-for-tat mentality that permeates our social norms. In our culture the rule of thumb is to spend little more and certainly no less on a gift for your host than your host has spent proportionately on you.  More...

SO INSTEAD of asking the boss and his wife over for dinner, how about having the kid who works in the mail room come for an evening of food and entertainment? Or maybe you could invite the guys who do the lawn in for lunch. It’s always nice to have the pastor over on Saturday evening after the vigil Mass, but have you ever thought about bringing home the janitor?  More...

IN OUR FAST FOOD, drive-thru, one-stop, meals-in-minutes culture, the concept of elaborate preparation is anathema. But true lovers of cooking know that most good meals take hours of planning, shopping, sifting, and sorting to gather the right ingredients to prepare the perfect combination of flavors and textures.  More...

THE RYUGYONG HOTEL in Pyongyang, North Korea is a 105-story, empty concrete shell that when begun in 1989 was intended to be the tallest hotel and one of the largest buildings in the world. But it is uninhabitable and will never be finished due to cost and poor structural integrity. Instead, it towers over the Pyongyang skyline as a testament to poor planning and lack of follow through.  More...

DISAFFECTED CATHOLICS, especially younger people. Separated and divorced Catholics. Those hurt by the clergy sexual abuse crisis, extremism and division in the church, conflicts over gender and sexuality issues. Do these people represent those that God seeks to reconcile, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep or a woman scouring the house for a lost coin? Yes, says the recently formed Paulist Office for Reconciliation.  More...

THERE ARE plenty of prodigal sons out there. Oh, their stories may not be as dramatic as that of the repentant wastrel in the parable, but they nonetheless hold a place in our families.  More...

“IF YOU HAVE NOT been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?” asks Jesus, challenging us to examine our attitude toward wealth—how it is obtained and how it should be used.  More...

THE PIANIST Joyce Hatto had studied with several notable pianists and enjoyed a modest concert career. But after contracting cancer, she retired to her home in the mid-1970s. And there—apparently—her career took off. She began producing more than 100 recordings of piano playing at the highest level.  More...

MOST OF US can probably remember being told at some point in our childhood that we should eat everything on our plates because children are starving in China. Because we were kids hearing this from our parents, it probably never occurred to us to investigate the connection between cleaning our plates and easing the hunger of those Chinese children.  More...

WHILE SCRIPTURE does not tell us how old Lazarus was, the number of aged modern-day Lazaruses now represents the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population, according to a 2006 study by the University of California at San Francisco.  More...

HONOR, COURAGE, commitment—those are the same three philosophies that Islam teaches us.” These words come not from an extremist but an Egyptian American soldier who had recently completed a tour of duty in the Middle East and who was comparing his Muslim calling with the values of serving in the military. His statement came as he worshiping at the Quantico, Virginia U.S. Marine Corps base.  More...

SAYING “PLEASE” and “thank you” is second nature when you’re brought up in a family that daily demonstrates the social graces. Religious observance, like saying your prayers and going to Mass on Sunday, can also become a way of life if it is lovingly instilled at an early age. But in the gospel story of the 10 lepers, gratitude and piety clash.  More...

SCRIPTURE this week tells us of God’s particular outreach to outsiders like Namaan and the 10 lepers. Let’s hope God’s help is also going out to the many people around the world who suffer under inferior social and economic conditions, because things aren’t getting much better for them.  More...

A SHORT TIME after dusk in November of 1965, 10-year-old Jay Hounsell walked home after an afternoon with his friends, making his way though the side streets of Conway, New Hampshire. Wishing nothing else but to pass the time, the boy picked up a stick and began to whack it harmlessly against trees and mailboxes. With equal lack of concern he struck the side of a large telephone pole. Just when the stick hit the pole, he noticed the light go out. Looking around, he saw that the lights of the entire neighborhood had gone out. Panicked, he went home and hid up in his room.  More...

BE PERSISTENT,” the Letter to Timothy says, and Moses and the widow were. Persistence, though, can have different sides.  More...

THIS PAST SUMMER in Chicago a young priest pleaded guilty to five counts of child sexual abuse and was sen-tenced to five years in prison. Most people were relieved to see an end to the case, but many expressed disappointment at the relatively short sentence the priest was given. The archdiocesan spokesperson responded to the criticism with comments that shocked even the most hardened Chicago reporters. After describing in somewhat graphic detail the priest’s crimes, the spokesperson said, “He has not been accused of rape. Never. There’s a big difference between abuse and assault. It wasn’t assault, which is a more egregious crime.”  More...

IN 1918 A VIRGINIA farm boy named Leslie Payne went to an airshow and was captivated by what he saw. Though he never became a pilot—and may never have flown in a real plane—he did the next best thing.  More...

THE TROUBLE with Angels, a popular movie produced in the 1960s that stands the test of time, follows the escapades of two mischievous teens at a Catholic boarding school run by an unidentified order of nuns.  More...

IMAGINE Sandra Bullock showing up at your door and asking, “Can I have dinner with you guys tonight?” Do you suppose her movie-star friends would complain because she was hanging out with normal people?  More...

GROWING UP, I recall hearing a recording of one of comedian George Carlin’s routines. In it, Carlin was a Catholic grade-school kid, the smart-aleck, troublemaking type. He poses a question to one of the nuns: “Sister, if God is all powerful, can he make a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?”  More...

REMEMBER the good old days when getting into heaven was just a matter of going to church on Sunday, confess-ing our sins once in a while, not eating meat on Fridays and . . . oh, yeah: putting our envelopes in the basket.  More...

WHEN MOTHER TERESA had to make a speech, she did not use notes or read from a prepared text. To get ready, she would simply withdraw to a church or chapel or other quiet place for a few minutes and pray. Then, when the time for her talk came, she always found the words she needed.  More...

GIVING TESTIMONY IN THE AFTERMATH of the election we’re left with the realization that once again religion and politics have met on the battleground of public opinion. We’ve heard from the commentators that the church should stick to spiritual matters and keep its nose out of the political debate.  More...

THE CELEBRATION of Christ the King helps people to remember to put Christ first in their hearts—and in so doing put others first, too.  More...

WITH A FEW notable exceptions, Christians were largely silently complicit during the Nazi Holocaust. As the churches stood by, 6 million Jews and perhaps 5 million other victims were murdered. Looking back, we can fault others for their apparent lack of moral courage. But would we have stood up to Hitler’s troops and the hateful ideology of Nazism?  More...

IN THE LAND, the Middle East, where Isaiah first uttered his message of peace thousands of years ago—”one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again”—a group of young people are trying to make his vision come true.  More...

THERE ARE many things that separate people. Some take up positions on the political right while others camp on the left. Some work for wealth, believing that a rising tide will lift all boats. Others work for the disadvantaged, patching up the leaking boats that will otherwise sink deeper to the bottom.  More...

THE PROPHET ISAIAH makes it clear that true knowledge and understanding are gifts from God. The kind of knowledge, though, makes a difference.  More...

BEING THE SON of multimillionaire Eugene Lang, founder of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation, 8-year-old Stephen very well could have presumed entitlement enough to ask his father for a toy gun. After all, if a millionaire would not buy a toy for his son, whom would he buy it for?  More...

JESUS EXTOLLED the greatness of John the Baptist, describing him as the prophet who prepared the way of the kingdom of God. But not even John was the greatest—"yet the least in the kingdom is greater than he.”  More...

DURING the summer of 2006, seemingly incessant storms in Florida made for a massive shortage of tomatoes nationwide. So much so that many restaurants, including fast-food chains, were forced to eliminate tomatoes or make them available only for an extra charge.  More...

MORE PEOPLE live in cities than at any other time in human history. With this growing concentration of population in urban areas, many commentators predicted an accompanying increase in secularization.  More...

HOW QUAINT THAT JOSEPH’S first reaction to the news that Mary was pregnant was to devise a strategy that would provide Mary with the least possible discomfort and shame. Hadn’t he dealt with God long enough to know that God never offers us the easy way out. Following the divine plan invariably leads us into a pool of pain that seemingly cuts our lifeline to any promised joy.  More...

THE HOLY FAMILY had their share of forced relocations: traveling with a pregnant Mary to respond to a census, fleeing to Egypt to escape a murderous king, resettling in a new town out of fear of another king.  More...

DO YOU TRUST YOUR SPOUSE? How about your kids or siblings, your friends or the people you work with? . . . Perhaps it’s time for us to resolve to become more trusting and trustworthy, so, like the Holy Family, we’ll have the necessary confidence in God and ourselves to know what to do when we’re faced with difficult decisions.  More...

IN THE THIRD CENTURY the Greek bishop Gregory the Wonderworker wrote the extraordinary Homily on the Holy Manifestation about the Baptism of the Lord, in which he interweaves first-person prayers in the voice of John the Baptist with quotes from the gospel passage telling of the encounter between John and Jesus:  More...

THE SPIRIT of God descends “like a dove” in today’s gospel. Doves, when trained as homing pigeons (“dove” and “pigeon” refer to the same family of birds) also have a long history serving as humanity’s messengers.  More...

WE CAN GET very disturbed when, despite our best efforts, we see our kids falling away from the faith. We despair when they get older and stop going to Mass on Sunday. Then they get married and have their own kids, and we wait anxiously for the baptism that doesn’t come. And no First Communion. We just don’t know what to do.  More...

IN A MODERN version of John the Baptist’s introduction of Jesus, Mary Mitchell, in a recent column in the Chicago Sun-Times, introduces readers to a woman named Cheryl Breaux. “I’ve never met her face-to-face,” writes Mitchell. “But Breaux has been the sister who calls me out on a regular basis.  More...

REPENT, Jesus says in scripture this week, bringing to life the prophecy of God’s people being brought to a great light. In this same spirit a new federal program seeks to reach out to nonviolent fugitives who have decided to repent their lives on the run and seek readmission to the community.  More...

THE BEATITUDES are among the most recognizable passages in the Bible. We marvel at the beauty of the words and the graciousness of God’s blessings on all who are needy in the world. But where do we fit in, we who are not the poor, not the persecuted, not the insulted of the world? Regrettably, we are sometimes on the other side of the blessings.  More...

FEW ROCK SINGERS in the past quarter-century have captured the spirit and soul of the common man better than Bruce Springsteen. Following the release of the album Magic, Father Raymond De Souza asked in a review for the National Post: What lessons has the older Springsteen learned?  More...

CONTEMPORARY Catholic theologian and historian John Cavadini has compared the story of the Fall to someone who wins a big money lottery jackpot but refuses to follow the rules of collecting the prize because this person did not write the rules themselves.  More...

IMAGINE THAT in the week before their largest game of the season a football coach addressed his team and said, “All right, we know they’re going to attack us with the running game, so we want all of our defensive line and safeties to take the week off of practice. In fact, don’t even review plays. See you at game time!” The players would think he had lost his mind.  More...

FOR MANY OF US, daily prayer can become mundane and boring. When that happens, we start finding creative ways to avoid praying altogether. Then we feel bad because we’re neglecting our prayers. How would you like a little boost to your spiritual life, something permanent you can come away with from your Lenten discipline?  More...

TODAY’S PASSAGE from 2 Timothy invites the reader to accept the hardships of holy living by entering into Christ’s suffering, and thereby into his glory. These hardships can take many forms.  More...

THE CONNECTION between water and life is not accidental, neither in the physical nor spiritual sense. God saves the Israelites in the desert not only by giving them water to drink but also by keeping their spiritual journey going as well, despite their stubbornness.  More...

ALL AROUND, water is drying up. We are told that the Great Lakes have shrunk. Florida predicts that very shortly it will not have enough water to support its population. Georgia once appealed to be declared a disaster area due to an epic drought.  More...

OPENING EYES is what the founders and contributors of Disaboom.com set out to do a few years back. Dis-aboom.com, an online social network for people living with or directly affected by disabilities, is the brainchild of J. Glen House, M.D., a quadriplegic.  More...

OH, THE BURDENS that parents bear. What mother or father hasn’t asked the question, “What did I do or what did I fail to do that caused my son or my daughter to stray from the path?” It’s only natural.  More...

WE SEE A LOT of emotion from Jesus in John’s story of the raising of Lazarus: his love, his anger, and his striking gratitude. Even before he commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb, Jesus says, “Father, I thank you for hearing me.” Jesus is that confident that God will grant his request that he says thank you in advance.  More...

THE STORY of Lazarus doesn’t end with today’s gospel. We learn in the following chapter of John’s gospel (12:10-11) that the high priests planned to put Lazarus to death because of the number of Jews who were believing in Jesus on account of what had happened to Lazarus.  More...

SCRIPTURE TODAY testifies to the suffering and adversity that frequently occurs before better things happen. It is one of life’s patterns the Passion of Jesus shows us and makes meaningful. It’s also something many people in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are living through firsthand. And in the latter nation, an unlikely young man is trying to guide a culture through destruction to new life.  More...

IT’S HARD to even say it. But the life and ministry of Jesus was a total disaster. All the Lord’s teaching, all the miracles he performed, and all the good things he did for people came to a catastrophic end.  More...

MARY MAGDALENE, first witness to the empty tomb and the Resurrection, has long been an important and com-plex figure in Christian tradition and the popular imagination. She has been the subject of study, debate, confusion, and legend for centuries.  More...

WHILE on her morning walk last fall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Elizabeth Gibson saw a painting sitting on a pile of trash. “It was a huge, powerful, and beautiful painting,” Gibson thought, “and I said to myself, ‘It is wrong to be in the garbage.’ ”  More...

IN THE SPAN of two years, the 19th-century Orthodox priest Iakov Netsvetov lost his wife and father and watched his home and most of his possessions go up in flames. His request to enter a monastery was made dependent on finding a replacement who could cover 2,000 miles of the Aleutian Islands.  More...

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SHARING FOOD, as the risen Jesus’ meal on the road to Emmaus shows, can be a powerful source of revelation, both of the presence and the proclamation of God. The two disciples recognized the resurrected Christ in the blessed and broken bread and then went on to share their news with others.  More...

TWO DISCIPLES of Christ are met by their resurrected Lord, yet they cannot recognize him. They see merely another man and, apparently, an ignorant one who does not even know the events that have occurred that day. They spend much time with Christ and converse with him at length, but still nothing; they do not see him.  More...

LEADERSHIP, good shepherding—whether in politics, business, religion, or other areas—sometimes takes a default position in which people trust leaders with all knowledge, judgment, and authority and see their task as merely following along. Scripture today, however, paints a different picture of leading and following.  More...

WHAT’S THE BEST NEWS you could hear today? How about this: Jesus came that you might have life and have it more abundantly. Does that light up your life and bring you joy? OK, how about this: You just won $10 million in the lottery. Ah hah! Big difference, eh?  More...

LET YOURSELVES be built into a spiritual house,” Saint Peter wrote. In its early days the church was made of small communities; then, in the 20th century especially, “small Christian communities” (SCCs) made a comeback as an intentional way to recapture the spirit of the early church and provide a way to encourage commitment and discipleship.  More...

THE APOSTLES had every reason to feel confident as they saw the number of Christ’s disciples grow. If they had simply continued to focus their attention on preaching and prayers, likely these numbers would continue to grow regardless. However, it took the Greeks to point out the social responsibilities the apostles had toward their flock.  More...

WHEN MY HUSBAND and I discovered in my fifth month of pregnancy that our baby had Down Syndrome coupled with a serious heart defect, the doctors and geneticists encouraged us to terminate the pregnancy and save ourselves a lot of heartache.  More...

PHILIP’S MISSIONARY journey to Samaria could not have turned out better. He found an audience that listened closely to his words and healings and responded with “great joy.” Even the big guns came down from Jerusalem to lay their blessing on his efforts. Wow!  More...

A 2006 STUDY OF the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer concluded that intercessory prayer had no therapeutic effect on patients undergoing heart surgery, and those patients who knew they were being prayed experienced a greater percentage of complications in their recovery.  More...

SHEL SILVERSTEIN, who wrote and illustrated many popular children’s books, was also an accomplished musician and song-writer. In his hilarious piece Folk Singer’s Blues, Silverstein laments that he would love to sing about classic folk-singer themes like working on the chain gang, walking down the long, lonesome highway, and slaving in the coal mines. “But what do you do if you’re young and white and Jewish?” the refrain goes.  More...

AS PART OF THE 2007 Davis Projects for Peace, in which college students are awarded grants for summer initiatives that will improve the prospect of global peace, Dafna and Noga Ashkenazi, two Israeli sisters studying in the U.S., were given the opportunity to implement a seemingly simple plan: teach Arabic to Hebrew-speaking Jews:  More...

IN JEWISH TRADITION the day we call Pentecost was called Shavuot, which was celebrated 50 days (the literal meaning of Pentecost) after Passover. Shavuot marked the beginning of the harvest season, and on this day the “first fruits” of the harvest were to be brought to Jerusalem.  More...

UNLESS YOU were very popular in school, you probably know what it’s like to stand on the outside of a circle of friends looking in. The desire for inclusion is strong in social animals like us. And the pain of exclusion is fierce.  More...

SAINT PAUL says peace will be with you if people “live in peace.” In 2011 it is hoped the world will take a step to-ward that future peace at an international convocation to be held in Kingston, Jamaica as the conclusion to the World Council of Churches’ Decade to Overcome Violence.  More...

MANY ADULTS over 40 grew up eating sandwiches made with Wonder Bread, the brand that promised to “build strong bodies 12 ways.” But when the makers of Wonder Bread first introduced sliced bread in the 1930s, the concept was so novel that many consumers were reluctant to accept it.  More...

IF YOU GO to Zagreb, Croatia’s Jedno (“Sail”) Café and don’t have any money to pay for your coffee, don’t worry. They accept prayers.  More...

DO YOU KNOW George Clooney? You might say, “Why yes, I know George Clooney. I’ve seen all the Ocean’s movies, loved him in Michael Clayton, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one of my favorite movies of all time. I even have all his Aunt Rosemary’s CDs!” But do you really know George Clooney? Did you ever have lunch with him? Go for a walk together? Or spend a week with him in the Bahamas?  More...

JOHN BRADBURNE was a quietly heroic doer of God’s peace. Bradburne, a Third Order Franciscan, was known as the “leper saint” for his work in Zimbabwe before his death in 1979.  More...

FOR SAINT PAUL, Abraham was a hero of faith. Abraham’s believing, his “hoping against hope,” made him the “fa-ther of many nations”—and three world religions. For centuries an out-of-the-way place in modern Jordan has stood as a symbol of common ground among the three “Abrahamic” religions.  More...

IN ONE of the most moving scenes of the popular film Schindler’s List, Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, discusses the relationship between fear and power with Amon Goeth, a man responsible for the extermination of an entire Jewish community. Goeth is convinced that the power the Nazis hold comes from their willingness and ability to kill. Schindler responds to him that rather, “Power is when we have every justification to kill—and we don’t.”  More...

CHRIST’S WORDS in the gospel seek to strengthen the church in all ages to live its faith in the kingdom of God and in Jesus who proclaimed that kingdom. God cares for all who do so; even Jeremiah regains his confidence in God after a bout of despair.  More...

GOD VALUES YOU to the point that not only is your soul dear to God, but every hair on your head is an object of God’s full attention. There are few moments in Jesus’ preaching that can convey the physical intimacy of God’s love for us more powerfully than the image we are provided with in today’s gospel.  More...

SAINTS PETER AND PAUL were the unlikely leaders of a countercultural movement that sent history reeling. Peter was a simple fisherman, and Paul was a persecutor of followers of the very movement he came to embrace. Truth be told, though, unlikely leadership is often the best kind.  More...

WHEN THE AUTHOR of 2 Timothy said Saint Paul was “already being poured out like a libation,” he was envisioning his possible death as a sacrifice, an act of worship, an offering to God.  More...

TROY MCCULLOUGH had been dealt a series of bad breaks in his 52 years. His burdens were heavy, but he remained faith-filled. One chilly spring morning, according to Chicago Sun-Times reporter Stephanie Zimmermann, he was up early waiting for the doors of StreetWise, a newspaper sold by homeless people, to open so he’d be first to get his bundle of papers to sell.  More...

JESUS THANKS the Father for hiding things from the wise that are revealed to “little ones.” We can all remember playing “hide-and-seek” when we were little ones. What did we learn from the game that we can apply today? What has been hidden that we can seek?  More...

IN EARLY 2006 a lawyer for one of the prisoners being held by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay revealed that with their bare hands and makeshift tools, detainees, many imprisoned since 2002 without being charged, fashioned a secret garden where they have grown plants from seeds recovered from their meals.  More...

IF YOU’RE A GARDENER and you checked to see if the corn you planted at winter’s end was at least “knee-high by the 4th of July,” it will surely be ready for your table by next month. It will join the abundant tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other veggies that grace your every meal.  More...

SAINT PAUL WRITES of the help the Spirit provides. Each year the Spirituality and Practice website (www.spiritualityandpractice.com) picks 50 books for special recommendation.  More...

WEEDS WAS THE NAME of a movie from the mid-1980s about a San Quentin prisoner, played by Nick Nolte, facing a life sentence without parole. After trying to kill himself several times, he resigns himself to his fate and checks a book out of the prison library to pass the time.  More...

REMEMBER THE STORY of The Wizard of Oz? Four characters—the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and of course Dorothy—are in search of what they believe will make them complete. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man needs a heart, the Cowardly Lion seeks courage, and Dorothy just wants to go home.  More...

THOSE “INSTRUCTED” in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says in the gospel, are like those who bring from their storerooms both the new and old. In Christ God is doing something new, Matthew is saying, but we need to see that newness in the light of tradition. Christianity has always been a mix of old new. And in every age new situations have challenged the church to reflect on its tradition.  More...

THE RECIPE for the feeding of the 5,000 was pretty simple: five loaves of bread, two fish, and a miracle. But while meals are central in the Bible, scripture is pretty short on the details of how food was prepared.  More...

SO MANY NEEDY mouths and seemingly not enough food to go around. According to a recent statement by the director of Catholic Relief Services, the world’s food shortage has reached a crisis point beyond the reach of quick fixes to control, confronting many leaders with a predicament similar to that which the disciples face in today’s gospel reading.  More...

ELIJAH MET HIS GOD not in winds and earthquakes but in a tiny whispering sound. Then he heard a voice ask him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” When Saint Francis of Assisi was praying the chapel of San Damiano, he, too, heard a voice: “Rebuild my church.” The rest of the story is well-known. Francis at first took the call literally to repair the building; eventually, though, his rebuilding extended to the whole church.
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THERE MUST BE something wonderfully compelling about roller coasters. Many people pay lots of money to spend hours in long lines just to ride for a minute and a half. Perhaps what is so attractive is the incongruous juxtaposition of terror and security.  More...

THE SURPRISINGLY inclusive vision scripture presents this week—all people welcomed to God’s house, the af-firming of the irrevocable gift to the Israelites, and Jesus’ conversation with a Canaanite woman—points to the role of Christian community in gathering all kinds of people and giving them equality in baptism.  More...

IN OUR relationship with God, what is a more common experience than the sorrow of silence? Even a cursory overview of the writings of the church’s great saints will show that a confrontation with God’s silence is much closer to the rule than the exception.  More...

IT CAN BE ANNOYING when you are mistaken for somebody else. Or it can be delightful, like if somebody thinks you’re Sandra Bullock or Will Smith. At any rate, it’s certainly understandable that people in first-century Palestine thought Jesus was John the Baptist.  More...

ISAIAH’S PROPHECY shows how God withdrew favor from one official whose way of life provoked God’s wrath to a more suitable figure. “Political” changes can also happen in the human heart.  More...

BUSINESS and life coaches stress the importance of coming up with your own definition of success before embarking on new venture or career.  More...

LOSING ONE’S LIFE, the gospel says, will save it. For one African athlete, this transformation from death to new life was a terrible and highly personal experience.  More...

WHO AMONG US hasn’t come this close to treating a person we love like a Gentile or tax collector? He or she has refused to listen to reason from us or anyone else. Despite our strongest entreaties, the person has chosen to shirk their responsibilities and knowingly hurt others in the process.  More...

IT’S BACK to school and once again we have the unwelcome opportunity to get into all kinds of conflict with our kids and grandkids (and our parents!) over homework and grades and television and dating and curfew times and everything else in family relationships associated with the return to the classroom. Oh, if there were only a way to get around all the hassle.  More...

WHEN A COMPANY installs door handles instead of knobs to accommodate arthritic employees or ramps in addition to stairs for those in wheelchairs, no one dreams of crying foul. The accommodations are not equal for everyone, but they certainly seem fair. But when it comes to salaries, flextime, or other special considerations, employees and managers often consider fair and equal one in the same.  More...

BACK IN the early centuries of the church, it was the practice of some catechumens, most notably Emperor Constantine, to delay baptism until death was at the door. The reason for this was simple: Penance and reconciliation were still works in progress. So it was understood at the time that baptism was your one shot at forgiveness. If after that you messed up, you were toast.  More...

IN THE MOUNTAINOUS forests of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Michel Sibilondire wages a lonely struggle to help turn others, in the words of the Letter to the Philippians, from “wickedness” and violence to reconciliation and justice.  More...

WHEN JESUS warns the Jewish religious leaders that “the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” he is not condoning the lifestyle of prostitutes or the corruption of tax collectors. He is simply pointing out that they have taken his message to heart and reformed their lives, whereas the religious leaders prefer to try to trip him up with word games and clever traps.  More...

IN 1968 THE FIRST black children to attend Mount Greenwood Elementary school on Chicago’s South Side received police escorts to and from school each day amid yelling, spitting, and cursing from the white residents in the predominently Irish Catholic neighborhood.  More...

WHAT GARDENER among us hasn’t slaved over their tomatoes for weeks, watering, feeding, trellising, only to see their beloved plants gobbled up overnight by some voracious bug or withered to droopiness by an unseen underground monster?  More...

ISAIAH SAYS the Lord will invite all peoples to a “feast of rich food and choice wines.” While earthly food and wine may not get people into eternity, certain food selections may put off your entrance into it.  More...

TOWARD THE END of the 18th century as the newly formed Christian movement of Methodism spread through an increasingly wealthy England, many of its members were faced with a serious dilemma—one some of us wouldn’t mind having: Methodists were becoming rich. Might not sound that awful, but the question arose as to how this wealth could coexist with their Christian ideals.  More...

THE FACT THAT God can work even through someone like a Cyrus reveals how the divine often shows up in unexpected ways.  More...

THESE DAYS “render unto Caesar” has got to be one of the most oft-quoted passages of the Bible, along with “an eye for an eye.” It is used by some to justify thoughtless agreement with government, even when government policies and actions are clearly contrary to faith, and mindless obedience to the law, even when the law prevents a Catholic from performing his or her Catholic duties.  More...

YOU SHALL NOT molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves,” God warns the Israelites, but sadly it is not a message that has been passed down to all peoples.  More...

BECAUSE “ALIENS” had limited rights in ancient Israel, they were vulnerable to exploitation. God’s law for Israel—once an alien people itself—commanded the respect of these resident foreigners.  More...