Month: June 2022

This way

A homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 26, 2022

1 Kgs 19:16b, 19-21, Gal 5:1, 13-18, Lk 9:51-62

In 1966, Walt Disney produced a movie called “Follow Me, Boys!” about a man who settles down in a small town and becomes a scoutmaster. It starred Fred MacMurray, best known to the TV generation as the father in “My Three Sons” and to the Turner Classic Movies generation as the star of “Double Indemnity.”

In one scene in “Follow Me, Boys!” MacMurray stumbles into a restricted area and is questioned by the Army. After he explains he’s a scoutmaster, the soldiers challenge him to tie a sheepshank, a complicated knot he never got the hang of.

Had he tied it, the knot would have been incontrovertible proof that he was a troop leader.

Oops.

(His identity did eventually get clarified.)

Continue reading This way

Gift above all gifts

A homily for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 19, 2022

Gn 14:18-20, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Lk 9:11b-17

Our news flashes and history books are filled with accounts of women and men — heroes, we call them — risking their lives or even making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of others.

Often, these heroes act for the benefit of absolute strangers. Sometimes those strangers are right there where the act of heroism takes place. Many times, the strangers are thousands of miles away, across oceans on another continent.

That’s the case, of course, in world wars.

And sometimes the strangers who will benefit the most have not yet been born, because the act of heroism has a history-making or civilization-changing impact.

Risking their lives. Making the ultimate sacrifice. Smothering a grenade with their body. Spilling their blood.

Continue reading Gift above all gifts