Tag: Faith

Vantage

A (brief) homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024

Acts 4:8-12, 1 Jn 3:1-2, Jn 10:11-18

Thank you for bearing with me while I’m out of town on personal business this weekend. A fuller homily — which I will preach at all Masses next weekend — will be here as usual.

A few years ago, I started having trouble with glare while driving at night. Headlights, streetlights, traffic lights: I saw them as stars, or as beams with rays shooting out in several directions.

The experience was jarring.

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A-plus

A homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 14, 2024

Acts 3:13-15, 17-19, 1 Jn 2:1-5a, Lk 24:35-48

I was a guest at a wedding reception at a Jersey Shore restaurant on the Atlantic Ocean boardwalk. The sun-dappled waves were breaking almost under our feet; the food was delicious and plentiful; the other guests were fascinating and friendly.

A good time was had by all, to coin a phrase.

One element that truly elevated the evening, though, was the extraordinary service. The brigade of men and women attended to all our requests promptly and, in particular, delivered and removed the multiple courses of the meal cheerfully, seamlessly and efficiently. Not a detail was overlooked.

A+ service. A+++.

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Expect the unexpected

A homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 7, 2024

Acts 4:32-35, 1 Jn 5:1-6, Jn 20:19-31

The night our daughter was born, Andrea and I attended my 10-year reunion at Christian Brothers Academy. As we sat nibbling on dessert, a tall, powerfully built man I did not recognize ambled over to our table and introduced himself in a basso-profundo voice. 

He was a CBA classmate I remembered as being short, a little pudgy, with a squeaky voice. 

“Yeah,” he said with a wide grin, “I’ve been getting that reaction all night. I shot up in college and bulked up at Quantico during FBI training.”

I did not expect that.

I saw him again at another class reunion. This time, though still tall, he was rail-thin. He’d left the Bureau and started running marathons.

I did not expect that, either.

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Reset

A homily for The Resurrection of the Lord (Easter Sunday), March 31, 2024

Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9

It’s been more than 30 years since videogame systems went from curiosities to must-have additions to nearly every household, at least here in America.

Children and parents alike learned about levels and bosses and cheat codes, especially how left-left-down-A-A-C-up-B-C could give a player extra lives.

Extra lives.

Before cheat codes and game-reset buttons, the only notion of extra lives revolved around cats and their supposed nine of them.

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What if…

A homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Scrutinies), March 17, 2024

Ez 37:12-14, Rom 8:8-11, Jn 11:1-45

Mom died in the hospital on Easter morning 1987 in the middle of telling her roommate a joke. The roommate said Mom headed to Heaven right before she delivered the punchline. 

Yeah, telling jokes was more my father’s thing.

Julia Marie McCosker Zapcic was a month shy of her 58th birthday. She left behind a husband, six sons and several (forgive me; I forget how many at that time) daughters-in-law. She never met some of my brothers’ wives, nor did she get to play with 12 of her 14 grandchildren. Mom knew only my two now-grown offspring.

Our family often wondered what else she never had the chance to do.

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20/20

A homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Scrutinies), March 10, 2024

1 Sm 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a, Eph 5:8-14, Jn 9:1-41

Long before Airbnb, a colleague of mine and his son toured Iceland by staying in several of the guesthouses Icelandic families offered to tourists to make extra income. As I recall, they took the trip near the end of summer, and they asked their hosts how they coped with the dark days and nights of Arctic winters.

As opposed to what? the Icelanders replied. It’s what they know, they said.

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Well, well, well

A homily for the Third Sunday of Lent (Scrutinies), March 3, 2024

Ex 17:3-7, Rom 5:1-2, 5-8, Jn 4:5-42

The fable of the city mouse and the country mouse has a few different versions with differing details — cats, porcupines, skunks, more cats — but the moral they share is always the same: Don’t be a snob.

Well, not precisely; it’s a bit more like we all live our own lives the way we want to, the way we know best. Each of us deals with our own challenges and celebrates our own joys, and what fits one of us may be the wrong size for someone else. And we all should respect that.

But we don’t. When someone thinks they’re better than someone else because of their respective ways of living, then, yeah, that’s snobbery.

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Revealed

A homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, February 25, 2024

Gn 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18, Rom 8:31b-34, Mk 9:2-10

We all know about Clark Kent, right? Mild-mannered reporter for The Daily Planet, who wanted a job someplace where he could hear about emergencies or disasters anywhere in the world.

And why was he so interested in hot topics? Was he some sort of news junkie?

No.

As we all know, every time he took off his glasses and otherwise changed his outfit, he was duty-bound to go and help people in trouble. Whenever he arrived to save the day, everyone around him saw his true self, his true identity, the identity he kept secret the rest of the time.

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Shhh…

A homily for the First Sunday of Lent, February 18, 2024

Gn 9:8-15, 1 Pt 3:18-22, Mk 1:12-15

I’m pretty sure I have a bad case of FOMO. Or I’m just plain nosy.

Then again, I’m legitimately extremely curious, and with better-than-average peripheral vision and much-better-than-average hearing — even in my dotage — I’m easily attracted and distracted by interesting things and events.

Such as God’s Creation, and the various activities of my fellow children of God. In other words, Life.

I always have been.

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Employment

A homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 4, 2024

Jb 7:1-4, 6-7, 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23, Mk 1:29-39

In my first job as a professional journalist, at the now-defunct Daily and Sunday Register in Shrewsbury (better known as the Red Bank Register), I was obliged to do a lot of typing. Sports scores and statistics, mostly. Long, long lists of stats and records. Much of it was on a tweaked IBM Selectric typewriter, modified so my words on legal-size paper could be scanned into a rudimentary computerized typesetting system. 

This was 1978, after all.

I also had the task of tapping the keyboard of a hand-me-down phototypesetting system, sent from The Register’s absentee owners in Toledo. Yes, the hometown of Max Klinger from M*A*S*H. Into that “tube,” I transcribed the wit and wisdom of George Sheehan, The Running Doctor, as well as the results of the thoroughbred races at Monmouth Park.

It was tedious, what a colleague years later would refer to as “chimping.”

A different colleague, though, had a more sanguine outlook: “That’s why they call it ‘work.'”

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