10 - 2021 - Unpaid Bill

Take care

A homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 31, 2021

Dt 6:2-6, Heb 7:23-28, Mk 12:28b-34

Let’s imagine for a minute that it’s Christmas, and we’re 10 years old.

Our favorite uncle has given us the bicycle we’ve been dreaming about — shiny, painted in a red-and-gold sunburst, custom seat and no training wheels.

We throw our arms around Uncle Joe and say, “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” about a hundred times.

We grab our coat, wheel our prized new bike out into the December chill — which we don’t feel at all — and pedal around the block a few times.

Just like Ralphie in the movie, this is the best present we ever got or would ever get.

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In focus

A homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 24, 2021

Jer 31:7-9, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52

What makes a good photo?

Composition, yes. Lighting, indeed. The right subject, absolutely.

Focus? Essential.

The same is true when we look. Look, and not merely see. Because the act of looking adds focus to all the visual inputs that can bombard us when we open our eyes.

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Walk a mile

A homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 17, 2021

Is 53:10-11, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45

It’s such a cliché: “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” The activity is supposed to give us a sense of what it’s like to be that person, or a person of that person’s ethnicity, or socioeconomic situation, or belief system, but it’s a fundamentally flawed exercise.

I am not, and never will be, anything but a white male human descended from Irish-Welsh-French-Alsatian-Croatian-Slovak stock, raised in the suburban dead center of New Jersey, educated at Catholic grammar and boys prep schools in that aforementioned Central Jersey and at a small, private liberal arts college in the rural dead center of Pennsylvania.

Put me in Manolo Blahnik shoes and I will not be a supermodel. Put me again in work boots atop a pile of hot asphalt and I may labor but I will not be a laborer. Put me in moccasins and — at best — I am guilty of cultural appropriation.

We may try, we may try with every fiber of our being, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, but in the end, the most we can hope for is partial enlightenment.

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A stitch in time

A homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 10, 2021

Wis 7:7-11, Heb 4:12-13, Mk 10:17-30

It’s still possible to buy a needle threader, an incredibly brilliant yet simple tool that helps people with unsteady hands or so-so eyesight — or without the patience and tolerance for frustration — to pass a thread through the eye of a needle.

The fine wire goes through the eye first, and then the thread gets slipped through the lasso-like diamond on the other side.

A quick tug on the handle — or whatever it’s called — and the fine wire lasso hauls the thread through the eye.

Of course, you have to get the needle threader’s wire lasso through the eye first, but pound for pound that’s a far smaller challenge than jabbing a limp, frayed string through a tiny metal oval.

And, no, using a tool is not cheating.

Continue reading A stitch in time