Contrary to what most of my professors believed, I sometimes paid attention when I was in the diaconate formation program at St. Augustine’s Seminary. Liturgically I may not have known my ambo from my elbow, but when it came to pastoral care I was totally present.

Alleluia, alleluia give thanks to the risen Lord Alleluia, alleluia give praise to His name.

The music had barely faded from our Easter liturgy when I walked into the hospital room of a woman I had been asked to visit but had never met.

There’s a saying statisticians love to trot out when questioned on the value of their surveys. “You are what you measure.”

Winter was settling in and it was a blustery, cold evening as I walked around the streets with Tracey, a survivor of the street who for 14 drug-addled years had called the alleys and drug dens of the downtown area “home.” 

It was one of those nights when I was challenged by Pope Francis’ insightful observation in The Joy of the Gospel: “The Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas.”

We all have a longing for a place to call “home.” For people who spend many aimless years living on the streets, “homelessness” is more than a condition of the body, it is a condition of the soul. 

I have become used to the cacophony which inhabits the downtown of the city and usually treat it as background noise as I walk around. 

A Catholic, a Baptist and a Mennonite walked into a bar and the barman said, “What’s this, some kind of a joke?” 

“I’m going down east to try to be reconciled with my father.” 

The summer had been warm and humid, and unlike many churches that can afford air conditioning, the church on the street had to find its own way of surviving the muggy evenings.