The prophet Jeremiah faced a crisis and a conflict: between his own limitations and the opposition he was encountering on the one hand, and the fact that, on the other, he still was called by God.

“Fear no one,” Jesus says. Not long after, he nuances this command: Fear only the one who can destroy the soul along with the body. Soul killing may sound esoteric, but it’s pretty common nowadays.  At times it feels like someone has murdered the soul of America while no one was looking.

“Don’t be intimidated. Eventually everything is going to be out in the open, and everyone will know how things really are. So don’t hesitate to go public now.

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.

Sister Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, was murdered in 2005 by a pair of gunmen as she walked along a rural road in Brazil’s Amazon region. Stang had been receiving death threats for years because of her work on land reform, peasants’ rights, and environmental issues and had asked the government on a number of occasions for better protection for the people in this isolated area, whom loggers and large landowners wanted elsewhere.

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.

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.