A number of years ago I attended a funeral. The man to whom we were saying goodbye had enjoyed a full and rich life.

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world.

I don’t always find it easy to pray. Often I’m over-tired, distracted, caught-up in tasks, pressured by work, short on time, lacking the appetite for prayer or more strongly drawn to do something else.

A colleague of mine shares this story: Recently, after presiding at Eucharist, a woman from the congregation came up to him with this comment: “What a horrible Scripture reading today! If that’s the kind of God we’re worshipping, then I don’t want to go to Heaven!”

What is the real root of human loneliness? A flaw within our make-up? Inadequacy and sin? Or does Augustine’s famous line, “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” say it all?

They say that the book you most need to read finds you when you most need to read it. I’ve had that experience many times, most recently with Heather King’s book Shirt of Flame, A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux.

No generation in history, I suspect, has ever experienced as much change as we have experienced in the past 60 years. That change is not just in the areas of science, technology, medicine, travel and communications, it is especially in the area of our social infrastructure, of our communal ethos. And perhaps nowhere is this change more radical than in how we understand sex. In the past 70 years we have witnessed three major, tectonic shifts in how we understand the place of sex in our lives.

When I first began teaching theology, I fantasized about writing a book about the hiddenness of God. Why does God remain hidden and invisible? Why doesn’t God just show Himself plainly in a way that nobody can dispute?

The world takes our breath away as we honour its author, the Lord

“Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of Heaven and a son of Earth.”

There are now more than seven billion people on this Earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the centre of the universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighbourhoods, in our families.

Recently, at an academic dinner, I was sitting across the table from a nuclear scientist. At one point, I asked him this question: “Do you believe that there’s human life on other planets?” His answer surprised me: “As a scientist, no, I don’t believe there’s human life on another planet. Scientifically, the odds are strongly against it. But, as a Christian, I believe there’s human life on other planets. Why? My logic is this: Why would God choose to have only one child?”

God, as I understand Him, is not very well understood. A colleague of mine, now deceased, was fond of saying that. It’s a wise comment.

Some time soon we will witness the canonization of Dorothy Day. For many people, especially those who are not Roman Catholic, a canonization draws little more than a yawn. How does a canonization impact our world? Moreover, isn’t canonization simply the recognition of a certain piety to which most people cannot relate? So why should there be much interest around the canonization of Dorothy Day — who in fact protested that she didn’t want people to consider her a saint and asserted that making someone a saint often helps neutralize his or her influence?

An American humorist was once asked what he loved most in life. This was his reply: I love women best; whisky next; my neighbour a little; and God hardly at all!

Just because something is politically correct doesn’t mean that it might not also be correct. Sometimes we have to swallow hard to accept truth.