Jesus shows a lot of emotion in today's gospel. He's perturbed and troubled; he weeps; he gets perturbed again. Death has that effect on most of us. Death is shocking. It makes us angry and sad.

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."

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.After some squirming and hesitating, he finally asked me if he could bury his deceased pet hamster in the soil on the side of the church.

Jesus wept. Of course he did. He was human after all. And he lived in a big extended family and had lots of friends. There's no way Jesus could have gotten through life without shedding a tear or two.

In the story of Jesus' curing of a man blind from birth, the blind end up being the ones who really see "while those who do see . . . become blind." The great 20th-century German organist Helmut Walcha had remarkable vision--inwardly.

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.

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."

The Disciples were certain that when a man was born blind either he or his parents must have sinned. People can hold a lot of false ideas about how God works, which gets in the way of our relationship with God.

Jesus must have been very thirsty; he had been traveling and it was the heat of the day. His encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well, though, hinges on a much deeper yearning: her recognition of the difference between ordinary water and the Living Water Christ offers.

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.