I know that Mother Teresa famously said that God wasn’t calling her to be successful, but to be faithful. But it is nice to know that sometimes God gives us the grace to be successful too! This past week, our annual parish summer camp was a great success!

I know my parents are not perfect. That might be self-evident to others, but I need to admit that. I need to permit that, and even to love that. Because it seems to me that the perfect love of God can come to us when we allow ourselves to be loved imperfectly by others, and that the fear of being ashamed of the imperfection of our family is not from God.

As I’ve been preparing to take some time to rest for the month of July, I’ve been thinking about two or three books I’d like to read. Throughout the year I’m usually “reading a bookshelf,” as a friend of mine once put it. That is, I’m always reading a few pages at a time from a few books at a time. It’s a little utilitarian. Those books help me to stay recollected and connected, which helps my preaching. But the summer months are for reading a book solely for the duty of delight.

So while the physical senses of the body are incapable of sensing God’s presence directly, the soul and the spirit nevertheless remain capax Dei, capable of God. In the intellect this perception of God can happen. In the Christian tradition, we call this “prayer.”

The more we focus on durability, on maintaining a hard exterior and rigid interior, the harder we are to repair. Durability comes at the expense of repairability. And yet, repairability is necessary for Christianity.

This past Monday, the Church celebrated a Memorial that I believe can help us to respond to our loved ones about sensitive and contentious issues surrounding sexual morality, and it does so by reminding us of the meaning of our lives, even our bodies.

The early Church understood that the Risen Christ was truly present in their midst - in the life they lived together, and in the celebration of the Eucharist. In other words, they realized that their new communion with Jesus was a holy communion.

When I think back to my experience of learning about religion as a boy, I seem to remember it as little more than being told about things that God did many years ago. God, to me, was real, but He was in the past. I wasn't taught how to know Him as a presence.