Our students are back on campus, and it has been a breath of fresh air. We asked them to quarantine for the first two weeks of the semester, since they were coming from all parts of the country and some of them would undoubtedly be shedding the virus.
I’ve never had to write an obituary. I realize how fortunate that makes me. As a professional writer, I’ve imagined what it would be like to write one. Perhaps that’s morbid, but it’s a curiosity of mine.
“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Ps 121:1-2).
“Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man” (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1604). This begs the question, “How does God love man?”
It is my first winter in the Northeast. Here, snow falls upon fallen snow. Great mounds are piled in parking lots and driveway margins, and one wonders if they will melt before April. I’ve been outside quite a lot, actually. Though I have neglected to buy drapes or rugs for our new house, we are all fully outfitted in appropriate attire for comfortably spending hours outdoors even in February.
The Gospel for this Sunday presents us with a flurry of activity, set at the beginning of Christ’s public life. In the space of a few lines, the Lord Jesus has healed Simon’s mother-in-law, healed the diseases of the crowd, cast out many demons, gone to spend the night in prayer, been pursued by the whole town and gone on to preach elsewhere. We see here the dynamism and urgency of the love he bears toward the people of Galilee and, through them, toward us as well. Yet there are strange things tucked away in this continuous stream of ministry, and we would do well not to miss them.
The pro-life movement has lots of heroes and heroines, sung and unsung alike, but there’s always room for one more. As an addition to the roster of unsung heroes I therefore nominate Dick Delaney.
Well, I was all set to write a nice little first column of 2021 about looking ahead and new beginnings and loving each other. And then Jan. 6 happened.
What if we have it all backward? What if rest isn’t so much about what we do when we sink into bed exhausted at the end of a busy day as it is about a quiet moment in the hush of the morning? Often, we persuade ourselves that we are tired and we aren’t resting well because we’re so busy serving — working for our families, caring for our children, tending our gardens, keeping our homes. In truth, we are tired because we forget we are to work as unto the Lord, and instead, we work as if we think we’re the Lord.
Childlike faith
We are just a month out from the end of the Christmas season, yet we have in our Gospel today a powerful example of childlike faith. A leper comes up to Jesus, kneels down and pleads, “If you wish, you can make me clean.”