Imagine your parents gift to you a tree from a nursery. They deliver the tree to your front yard, its roots wrapped in burlap. “Thank you,” you say to them, “how lovely. And look! Its leaves are beginning to bloom! I love it. Thank you.”

We were formed from the dust, from the earth. But - and this is the most important thing - while God did form us from the dust, He did something more. As He formed us, He also breathed His life into us. He gave us a rational soul, an intelligent spirit. And in that intellect is our reason, our free will, and our conscience, the stuff of God’s own life. And It’s what makes love possible.

I remember meeting Monsignor Albacete for the first time. I was in the Minor Seminary in Douglaston, Queens, studying Philosophy. I had only just begun priestly formation, and I had no idea what I was doing. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was cut out for the priesthood. I never was an altar boy, for example. In fact, the first time I ever served at the altar during Mass was in the Seminary.

There is a similarity between Jews and Catholics that strikes me. Of course, there is much shared between Christianity and Judaism, proper, but I mean specifically with regard to the way a non-practicing Jew, for example, will say he is Jewish because of his distant ancestral connection to Israel.

When my cousin Paul was just 3 years old or so, he and his mother were making their way to their parish church, Our Lady of Grace in Babylon. I was with them. I was 9 or so. For the entire car ride, he was asking for gum. Actually, he was demanding gum. “Gum! Gum! I want gum!”

You may have heard of the Holy Father’s efforts to limit the celebration of the Latin Mass, more properly referred to as the Extraordinary Form, the style of Holy Mass that was common and universal from the 1500’s to 1962.

How many times have you heard something like the question, “Do you believe in the God of the Old Testament, or the God of the New Testament?” Of course, we know it is the same God, but some people say that God is “nicer” in the New Testament than in the Old.

My father was an air traffic controller. Sadly, after returning from the Vietnam War, he was let go by Regan in 1981 in response to the PATCO strikes. He went back to school to become a math teacher, but his heart never left the tower. To this day, I ask him to share about those years just to see his excitement.