Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Photo by  Sam Carter  on  Unsplash Making the social media rounds this past week: a sheep caught in a narrow ditch, face down. So these young boys pull on its hind legs trying to get it out, all the while it is struggling. They finally pull it out, let it go, and it starts running at high velocity away. Watching it we can see the inevitability of what is about to happen, and when it does, it is funny and tragic. Boom right back into the same ditch, same position. Here is the link for the video Stupid sheep. Yet, very human. We all can find ourselves repeating patterns in our lives.  Not all are bad. Rituals, say in the morning, help us to get ready without having to think too much.  Still, we all can probably recognize other patterns, behaviors, that are not what we desire, but for some reason we keep on repeating them, again and again; as persons, as a people, nation, church. People with addictions certainly know this experience.  Others, we overreact to situations, to perceive

The other day in our office, somehow the subject of Soap Operas came up. We started to discuss what we had watched: Days of our Lives, Guiding Light, All My Children, General Hospital..  Those stories that over-exaggerated the human condition! Almost inevitably a question I will get because people are curious about the private lives of priests who think that we spend our free time praying, because we only work for one hour or maybe two on a weekend therefore we have an overabundance of free time...  They want to know what I watch on TV. I watch escapism...I get enough drama, or draaaama in life. I go home and I want to forget or escape...so of late, Wandavision, Falcon and the WinterSoldier, Chinese magical movies about dragons on Netflix… We do all try to make sense of our lives; we all try to grasp our lives, to gain some measure of control, try to protect our lives and the lives of the ones we love. We struggle to do what is good, to make the right choices.  All this within the

The other day on TikTok there was a video of these two older women, from New Jersey or Bronx, somewhere in that area based on the accent. Albeit they were hamming it up a bit. Remind you, this video was meant to be humorous. It was too. They were talking about an experience of mass, and they said that this family brought their toddler, and lots of toys were spread out. They talked about in their days, nuns clicking when to sit and stand, and the severity of it all. The gist was they couldn’t get nor did they want to, the church in now. I bet if we administered a test to determine people’s idea of what “church” means, we would have a wide variety of ideas. This is technically called Ecclesiology.  We all do have an idea of what we believe church is supposed to be like and its mission, whether we are conscious of it or not. The problem is that we can think our idea is the only idea, and that it is shared with the billion other Catholics in the world, and the several hundred here in