Tag: Prophet

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.

Continue reading 20/20

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.'”

Continue reading Employment

A homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 14, 2024

1 Sm 3:3b-10, 19, 1 Cor 6:13c-15a, 17-20, Jn 1:35-42

Back in 2000, when Haley Joel Osment was younger and cuter, he starred in “Pay It Forward,” a movie based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. It’s a change-the-world story based on the notion that, after someone does you a good deed you couldn’t have done for yourself, you must do a similarly large favor for three people, preferably strangers. And, in doing so, you must explain to the mitzvahs’ recipients that they are now obliged to pay it forward as well.

This, in theory if not in practice, would add up to an exponential growth in kindness and justice that could overspread the world.

And even though the movie received mixed-to-negative reviews, the notion — and the phrase — etched a place in our social consciousness.

Continue reading Handoff