If a change is as good as a holiday, then I have been on vacation lately, big time. After deciding to retire as president of a university, I found myself called back to the role in a different city and context. Not as big a change as when I left Australia to return to Canada, but still different.

My inclination is to defend whoever is our pope. I say this for several reasons. For one a pope is Christ’s shadow on Earth. I also believe popes are chosen by men influenced by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, I’m a convert. The idea of criticizing a pope seems presumptuous for someone relatively new to the faith.

Presence has been swirling around me, chasing me in the fall wind, working its way through my hair. I taste it in time with friends, in singing in a choir, and in the longing to run away from what is hard.

The world today has numerous crises — climate change, pandemic, growing discrepancies of power and wealth, the nuclear threat and war, not only in Ukraine but wars in places that go underreported. Perhaps the greatest crisis is the lack of leadership capable of dealing with these substantive crises.

I have often prayed for others to join the ministry of “The Church on the Street.” However, even though many have come to look and see, none has chosen to follow. My offer of “franchises available” has failed to convince. Unfortunately, the front-page news this week of two murders in the area dampened any enthusiasm there might have been.

The best sermon I ever heard was delivered by Fr. Philip Merdinger, the founder of the Brotherhood of Hope, a religious community dedicated to campus ministry. Father preached a retreat for us Daughters of St. Paul, and the gist of his sermon was: “You are not the most important thing in the world. God is.”

As a child, I was fishing off a wooden dock at the small lake near the town in B.C. where I grew up when a farmer from Saskatchewan and his son appeared  as if out of a dream I didn’t know I was having.

I have indulged in a passion for puns throughout my career. Despite feeling gleeful about this on one level, I also remember an army of English literature professors intoning that puns were the lowest form of wit. While there are legions of people who deeply oppose puns on principle, there is an equally vast array of fans that believe in them at all costs.

It’s the new buzzword, popularized by a recent TikTok video, to describe the strategy a significant chunk of the workforce is now pursuing: “quiet quitting.”

The overriding “reform” of the Second Vatican Council was a renewed call to mission to the world. The reform of the liturgy, the expanded sense of Church as the pilgrim people of God, the openness to ecumenism and the paring back of Catholic triumphalism are all to be of service to that central idea.