Current homilies

I was on Prince Street, and it was 4:45 in the morning.  Dark, of course. It’s a good time to be walking the streets of our city. It’s quiet. You can walk down the middle of the street without fear of being run over by an Uber or a delivery man on a silent bicycle.

Did you ever notice that every family has a particular smell to it?  When you visit their home, are invited into the apartment, the first thing that hits you is the smell of them. It's hard to describe the particular smells of a particular family, the only thing you can say is, it smells like, like, well, like the Mayziks, or the Tituses (which of course includes the smell of Murphy the dog). 

Probably as in your life, things have been a little crazy here in the last week or so as we approach Christmas.

AN ADVENT STORY.

When you are young and healthy and the future lays before you like a golden road of adventure and opportunity, you don't think much about obstacles or potential problems or calamities that might come your way. You are hopeful when you're young, you are hope-filled, time seems endless and you feel immortal, and there is so much to do with your life at times you just don't even know where to begin.

I was standing out on the plaza, right by the sidewalk yesterday morning, waiting for some people to show up to help me set up the Christmas Tree Forest of Love.

 It was Thursday, and traffic was down, the streets relatively clear--everywhere but on Brian’s route.  Brian’s bus traveled a route right through the center of the island, and on Thursday that route was jammed with cars and trucks and taxis as far as the eye could see.   It was the stupid parade, every year the stupid parade was a massive headache for Brian, who drove that giant, articulated, double bus on the M7 route. 

One of the most dazzling meteor showers in decades is occurring above our heads as I speak: the Leonids, over a thousand meteors an hour can be seen in the clear night sky---meaning you’ll have to leave the city’s light pollution if you want to experience what the end of the world might look like. 

I hate pennies.  I have no idea why we still have them. I checked out a recent report from the Treasury Department that stated it costs almost 2 cents to make a penny, which makes it sound all the more ridiculous that we still use them.

I was alone in an elevator the other day in midtown, and it had a video screen tuned to a news channel, I guess to entertain passengers during those awkward moments when you are in that confined space with strangers.

I was going through the aisles of CVS the other day, looking for an adaptor plug for some new headphones I recently bought. 

Googled the word “humility” the other day, and came across an article that included the following statements:  “My IQ is one of the highest…and I am a stable genius”.

We’re almost three weeks into autumn, but you’d never know it living in Manhattan. Up in Connecticut at the university where I used to live and teach the leaves are pretty much at peak: flaming yellows, reds and oranges, whole trees looking—from a distance—as though they were on fire, flaming wildly on the horizon. 

Friday was one of those days that has made our common life together so challenging. I know it was riveting television, but I chose not to watch the unfolding testimony that went on for hours. 

I wonder what Jeff Bezos is doing right now. He is the guy, of course, who founded Amazon about 25 years ago, and he is presently worth about 151 billion dollars, making him the richest person on earth.

So the school year is about to begin!  This coming week all the kids at schools in Manhattan will once again be spending their days inside a building that was designed to help them learn, filled with lots of people who want to help them grow up, teaching them practical information about themselves and about the world. 

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday, written by a parishioner of a Catholic parish in Atlanta.  Last Sunday he received national media attention when he stood up in the middle of the homily, as the priest was speaking about the sexual abuse report from Pennsylvania, saying that the Church had to change. 

I got home Wednesday night from a short vacation with my sister and her family in a remote mountain lodge in Vermont.  We were blessed--and I do mean blessed-- to be without any phone or internet service. 

The other day I turned on my phone and started to dial and didn’t realize that I had actually answered an incoming call—which I don’t usually do if I don’t recognize the number.