A long-anticipated trip to Ireland, researching ancestors, a poignant story about children playing with a potato, even the name Barack Obama, all eventually led me to pondering the plight of Syrian refugees and the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

Standing recently inside one of the oldest tombs in the world, with about 200,000 tonnes of stone above and around me, strange thoughts manifested in the darkness. The thoughts were not of fear but of perplexity about today’s materialistic, even hedonistic, culture.

It was a sight of beauty. Perhaps as beautiful a thing as I have ever seen. I saw it during morning rush hour on a freezing cold day in front of a busy Toronto bus stop. I was driving and fortunately the light turned red, allowing me to look more closely at what was taking place.

It was a good idea that didn’t work. Before the reform of the Roman calendar in the 1960s, the octave day of Christmas — Jan. 1 — was celebrated as the feast of the circumcision and holy name, as Jewish boys were named on the eighth day after birth. There was a minor feast of the divine maternity of Mary in the calendar on Oct. 11, which St. John XXIII chose for the opening of Vatican II, and now serves as his feast day.

In the final week of Advent, I was in an Ottawa sandwich shop having coffee with two photographer friends when a man behind us pitched himself into our conversation.

Even as the world was reacting in horror to the slaughter in Paris on Nov. 13, Fr. John Walsh was moving past the how and what to asking why.