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Some time ago, a newspaper article was entitled, “Simple courtesy facing extinction in America.”  The writer told of four different instances in which he had gone out of his way to be helpful, and not one of the persons he had helped even bothered to say, “thank you.”  I guess that most of us can recall similar experiences.  You held a door open for someone carrying an armload of packages, and he passed through and hurried away without saying a word.  You paused to let a driver pull into your lane of traffic, which he promptly did without so much […]

The early fathers of the Catholic Church compiled a list of what they called “the seven deadly sins.”  Number one on that list was the sin of pride.  I doubt that you and I would have done it that way.  We may recognize that pride is indeed a sin, but most of us would not think of it as the first and worst of the deadly sins.  I can think of at least three sins that most of us consider to be more serious than the sin of pride – murder, adultery, and stealing. And is there not a sense […]

I read an old story about a New Englander and his son who were fishing in the Atlantic, off the coast of Maine.  They had been at it all day, and the sun was sinking low in the west.  A storm was moving in and the waves were building higher.  The boy, partly afraid of the storm and partly tired and hungry, was ready to go home.  He said to his dad, “Papa, right now mother is probably  praying for our safe return.”  The father understood and said with a smile, “You’re right; I’ll hold the rudder while you run […]

Heartbreak always presupposes love.  Others can stir our resentment, kindle our wrath, cause inconvenience, bring disappointment; but the only person who can break our heart is the person we love.  All of which says that love is indeed a risky business.  It makes us vulnerable.  And God has chosen to take that kind of a gamble with you and me. To be estranged from, lonely for, out of fellowship with the one you love, that is a basic element of sorrow.  You don’t go in sacred scripture until you run into that – the loneliness of God.  The book of […]

It is uncomfortable to admit that we sin.  It is much easier to admit that we make mistakes, or are weak, or do not live up to our expectations of ourselves.  It is easy to carry around feelings of guilt.  We try to avoid confronting ourselves with the fact that we willfully and deliberately sin, that we do things that are wrong in the eyes of God.  We find it very hard to admit that some of the things we want to do and actually do are against God’s commands to us and therefore are sins. One of the insidious […]