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In order to get the right answers about life, it is necessary to ask the right questions.  A lot of people get the right answers to the wrong questions and end up wondering where and why they missed out on life. For example, a young person may enter college asking, what career can I choose that will make me the most money?  And that person may find the right   answer to that question and yet be bitterly disappointed with the discovery.  All across the industrialized world, there are thousands of top-bracket executives who are absolutely miserable, both in their personal […]

Can you remember as a child the anticipation you felt as Christmas approached?  It was such an exciting time of year.  For some reason, adults seemed to be a little happier and less fussy than usual.  Music filled the air, packages were under the tree, secrets were being whispered from person to person.  Sometimes the excitement would build until you would think you were going to burst.  Perhaps we have since discarded that kind of anticipation as just a childish fantasy; but I hope not, for it isn’t altogether without scriptural precedent.  For example, there is the meeting between Virgin […]

One of the best loved of all Christmas carols is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, written more than a hundred years ago.  The first part of the song is primarily historical, celebrating those events that surrounded the birth of Jesus.  But the last verse makes Christmas a very personal thing.  It says: “O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend on us we pray.  Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” We have never understood Christmas until it goes beyond a historical fact and becomes a personal experience.  It is true, of course, that all of us […]

                Six days a week – Monday through Saturday – we live our lives in a highly competitive world.  Nations compete for power.  Politicians compete for votes.  Business competes for customers.  Workers compete for victories.  All of us, it seems, are competing with someone for something that both of us want but only one of us can have.  That is how we live six days a week.  Then on Sunday we come to church at Annunciation-Our Lady of Fatima for worship and encounter a totally different emphasis.  In Church we pray that God’s […]

I read a story recently about a woman who got on a crowded subway in New York City.  When a man got up and offered her a seat, the surprise was so great that she fainted.  When the woman recovered she said, “thank you”, and the man fainted. I suspect that this story isn’t true.  Well at least, I am reasonably sure it isn’t.  But one wonders how much of it is really exaggerated!!  It seems that in our society common courtesy and simple gratitude seem to be so rare that we are pleasantly surprised by them. We need to […]