On the morning of May 19, 2018, I joined 29.2 million other viewers to witness the marriage of Britain’s Prince Harry and the American, Meghan Markle. I watched as guests paraded into Windsor Castle in a display of pageantry that the events of the British monarchy seem to inspire.

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.

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.

In History of the World: Part One, 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.

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.

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!

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.

Sharon and I pulled onto the property of a farm in beautiful Eau Claire, Michigan and drove past the quaint, tidy house in the front to the trailers in the back that were anything but.

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.

As the dean of formation of the high school seminary, every summer I joined in rewriting the student handbook based on what we had learned from the previous school year. Most of it needed no changes.