Jim Mayzik SJ Blog

Watch humans turn into fountains.  Silly,  but funny.

I had a long phone conversation the other night with a young man who was deeply upset.  He had left his home, and was staying with the family of a girl from his high school.

What if, says a small child to me this afternoon,
We made a poem without using any words at all?

Fr Austin and I were talking about getting something done—or rather, not getting something done because we were procrastinating—and we both suddenly uttered the phrase “I can’t think about that now, I’ll think about that tomorrow”, one of the great lines at the end of the classic movie Gone With the Wind. Scarlet O’Hara is faced with the unpleasantness of a major decision, a decision that could change her life, and she says that line, putting today’s decision off till tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.   

An intense and poetic ride down the highline of Bossons Glacier.  Mesmerizing.

We’ve got a sign outside the Church of the Epiphany in Manhattan.  It’s one of those glass-enclosed signs you see in front of many churches, announcing in white letters on a black background coming Church events, dates and times, the title of an upcoming sermon, that kind of thing.  The sign at Epiphany had gotten so old that it wasn’t used for a while, and when I arrived, I asked if I could fix it up and use it.  Fr Austin gave me his favorite phrase of approval: “Sure, knock your socks off.”

It happened on the subway, on the 6 train.  It was early in the evening, and they were on their way home from an appointment at the doctor’s.  They sat in the middle of the car, surrounded by a crowd of animated young men and women on their way to a night of happy New Year’s partying. Some were dressed to the nines for fancy affairs, others bundled in layers for the frigid blasts of city winds.

Ominous inscrutable Chinese news 

to get just before Christmas, 

considering my reasonable health, 

marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan, 

career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet...

When I was growing up--at least in the later years--the ritual on New Year's Eve was always the same.  My parents would get ready to go to a neighbor's house for a little party in their finished basement.  My sister and I would be watching television beside the Christmas tree, my mother simultaneously getting dinner ready for us and applying her makeup. 

Here are two Nativity stories for Christmas 2017

A touching revelation of what we all want for Christmas.

A short film for Christmas.

Of course I went to the opening night of the newest Star Wars movie on Thursday at a huge IMAX theater in Connecticut. It’s called the Last Jedi, and I have a particular interest in it because, well, wanting to become a kind of Jedi was part of the reason why I joined the Jesuit order in the first place.

The art of flying is a short film about “murmurations”: the mysterious flights of the Common Starling. It is still unknown how the thousands of birds are able to fly in such dense swarms without colliding. Every night the starlings gather at dusk to perform their stunning air show. Because of the relatively warm winter of 2014/2015, the starlings stayed in the Netherlands instead of migrating southwards. This gave filmmaker Jan van IJken the opportunity to film one of the most spectacular and amazing natural phenomena on earth.

Last week it was clear that I needed to buy more Christmas trees for our Forest of Love outside.  When I proposed the project to the parish, I wasn’t sure if anyone would buy the trees so that we could raise money to bring gifts of love to our homebound parishioners and to the people sleeping on the streets of our neighborhood, but I went out on a limb and called a Christmas tree wholesaler and asked him if he could sell me 30 trees.  “Gee, Father, I don’t know, it’s pretty late for that kind of an order”. He said he’d call me right back, but it was doubtful. 

Will you wake up from this monster?

Christmas trees lined like war refugees, 

a fallen army made to stand in their greens...

Advent is now officially upon us, and so is winter, drawing near. It grows dark quickly now, and soon to come are the deeply chilling winds of winter.