I think we can all agree that we live in an age that neglects the soul. Man makes his body sleek and fills his head with information, but because his soul is left to carry the burden of life in this fallen world all alone, like a blow upon a bruise, man abandons his mind to error and his body to stress by leaving them unaided by his spirit.

My brain may filter and effect my interaction with this world, but it no more accounts for the whole of who I am than does my body.

My soul is all throughout, uniting me in mind, body, and spirit. It is where my “I” is. It is the “who” I am, and is affected by everything I experience.

We do not like waiting. Well, in any case, we’re not good at it, which is obvious; in this age of invention we’ve all but eliminated the need to wait for anything.

There was a time we waited for the seeds to germinate, the rains to fall, the sun to shine, and the plants to bear fruit. Some still do, but most of us go to the supermarket and complain about the checkout line.

I left a comment on YouTube this week, something I rarely do. The video described the vastness of the physical universe with breathtaking facts about the infinite void that both creates and surrounds the relationship between the celestial bodies. I had nothing critical to say about the science, but instead about something the narrator said, which seemed intellectually dishonest to me.

I was going to entitle this first section, “The Church Has No Mission,” but it would have been too obvious that I was trying to get your attention. Still it’s true that the Church does not “have” a mission. Rather, the Church is a mission. Even the word “Mass” comes from the Latin “Misa,” which means mission.

My classmate, Father Tom Tassone, is an exceptionally talented man; he can build just about anything. One of the last things he built (while he was still living at Saint Joseph’s) was a wooden boat. When I saw it and asked him, “How did you bend the wood like that?” he told me about the steam box.

It’s an enclosure made by the woodworker that he fills with steam before inserting pieces of wood to make them pliable and able to bend without breaking.

You may know that we design a customized curriculum here for the children of our Faith Formation. Last year we taught seven months on the seven Sacraments. This year is on the seven virtues.

What we would like this year is for all of us to benefit from our evangelization and catechetical efforts. We get so excited when preparing the lessons that we say, “I wish the whole parish could hear this!”

Did you know that King Herod is described in the Gospels as “trying to see Jesus?” I wonder if that strikes you as odd. Why would a man with so much of this world’s riches and power want to see Jesus? Perhaps it’s for the same reason we do. We eat of this world, but hunger all the more. We get drunk and high, but are still unhappy. We clothe ourselves with comforts, but grow even colder.