January 28, 2024
Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it that determines the meaning. Fr. Dennis was in a play in high school. The setting was in the Old West and the town was starving to death. Someone rushes in announcing that a wagon train was coming. One of the characters was supposed to… Read More »
January 21, 2024
Look at things from Zebedee’s point of view. He had worked his whole life to build the fishing business. The fisherman’s life is hard – get up before dawn every day. Use years of experience to find where the fish might be biting today. Work under the blazing sun or in terrible weather because if… Read More »
January 14, 2024
“Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “It was a dark and stormy night.” Opening lines can set a tone for what is to follow. There is even a contest every year, in the spirit of “it was a dark and stormy night,” to write the most… Read More »
December 31, 2023
When Saigon fell, many refugees from Viet Nam came to Camp Pendleton in California for re-settlement in the United States. I served in a parish in Orange County which was helping the families. I got to know the Ky family which consisted of father, mother, teen age son and a four-year-old girl whom we called… Read More »
December 25, 2023
Christmas is impossible. How can the God who made the Cloud Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy become a little child who can only make pooh-pooh diapers? How can the God who dreamed up the eleven million different species of animals which exist on the earth today – to say nothing of the millions more who went… Read More »
December 17, 2023
Back in the day, when I was young and carefree, I served as the youth minister in the parish. We had one group activity which was a variant of the game “twenty questions.” As we practiced it the twenty questions were a repetition of one question: Who are you? The answers usually started off with… Read More »
December 10, 2023
There are certain words that move from specific to general over time. Pass me a Kleenex, you might say. What was once a brand name has become the catch-all word for a tissue. Could you Xerox that for me? Sure, I can, on my Canon copier – much to the Xerox Corporation’s chagrin. Did you… Read More »
