The Generous Sower

The grace of God is given generously to all, but it's up to us to notice, receive, and appreciate it. My homily for this weekend is posted here.

XT3

A couple of years ago I was excited to read that the folks who administer vatican.va were working on a social networking site, a kind of Myspace or Facebook for Catholics. I've been looking for it ever since, but it hasn't appeared.

Nevertheless, yesterday I discovered that such a site has been launched for World Youth Day 2008. Presumably it will remain after the event as a place to meet and network.

Check out XT3 and sign up!

Note to Men: Get Married

In the parish where I work we average just over a hundred funerals a year. So I've had a lot of experience with wakes, funerals, and committals in the year I've been here. I've made a lot of observations in the course of this, but here's one of the most striking: there is, generally, a remarkable difference between the funeral of an old maid and that of an old bachelor.

Now I'm no sociologist, and I don't know any real statistics, but it seems to me in my anecdotal experience that old maids live just as long as their married sisters. What's more, they seem to have just as many friends and associates who show up for their wakes and funerals.

It ain't so with old bachelors. They seem to die younger than their married brothers. They also usually have many fewer people show up for their wakes and funerals.

If I may wildly and irresponsibly extrapolate from my experience, it seems that for men, staying single is bad for you. For women, it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Anybody who really knows anything care to correct or corroborate my conclusions?

Really?

An article in the New York Times this morning cites "a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day."

Really? This is new? With its intense themes the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple and the re-constitution of Israel, all against the background of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, isn't this what the New Testament is about in the first place?

Check out the article here.

Beginning the Pauline Year

Last week's feast of Ss. Peter and Paul began the Pauline year--a celebration of the bimillenium the Apostle's birth. My homily for this weekend is posted here.

Retreat Notes 6: Talking

On one of my trips to the bookstore (I like to walk down and up the hill each day) the garrulous German (?) monk Fr. Peter starts a conversation. I'm always amazed at these talkative Trappists. He remembers me from past retreats and recalls that I'm a Franciscan. He notices (from my concelebrating, presumably) that I am now a priest and says that this makes him happy.

He asks me if I have seen Into Great Silence--the DVD is on the store counter for sale. I say that I saw it at Kendall Square in Boston on the night of a huge snowstorm. He says that he saw it there twice, (taking the opportunity during the religious duty of airport runs) and then a third time at the monastery. I'm amazed to hear this, not only because I don't think of Trappists as going to the movies, but because I could hardly bear sitting through the film once.

I make fun of him, saying that I'm surprised to see them even handle the DVD in their store, seeing as in one of the precious few spoken scenes in the film, "Trappist" is used as an insult. He says that he liked the honesty of allowing old monks to appear on film with untrimmed nose and ear hair. "Religious life is not so glamorous as it is often portrayed, brother."

Retreat Notes 5: Observations

Seeing the Trappists at prayer, I recognize many from the nine years I've been coming here. It's like the people you see when you ride the bus or the subway every day. You see the same people you don't know over and over again. Like my own community, I can tell that theirs is shrinking. There are fewer than before. On this visit I see only one novice, not particularly young, and no observers.*

There are differences between these monks and my own religious brothers, though. They seem more evenly divided over the different age groups than we are. The older ones seem to get around a lot more easily than ours, and they're all lighter on the whole. This is probably due to differences in diet and regular physical activity, namely bad are rare for us vs. better and often for them.

*On the last morning of the retreat, I noticed that novice was missing from choir (Trappist novices stick out because of the different color of their cowl and scapular). After Mass, walking back to the retreat house, we saw him getting into a car bound for the airport.