The opening to Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou is predictably impossible to watch. An eye is open, observing the viewer, and then a razor blade is sliced across its surface. Few could watch this without blinking or looking away, something the director depended on as he “cut” from a human to a cow’s eye. And yet, as I lay on the operating table, with a mask covering my entire face except for my exposed right eye, I remember thinking, as I watched the scalpel move towards me, and then felt it press on and into my eye, that this was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. I hoped it wouldn’t be my last.

Complexity is piling up like snowbanks on my lawn. We just get one wet snowfall shovelled in time for the next one to blow into a bank around the door. The piles started out neatly enough. But it is February now and the ice threatens to freeze my heart along with the missing mittens. The chaos and division desperately need some spring.

The one thing all should hold dear is their freedom of conscience. It may be our most effective tool in combatting oppression and ensuring religious freedom. It’s there for everyone to use but to employ it sometimes takes courage. But when put to work it can feel liberating.

Sparse and empty shelves are becoming the norm in most grocery stores.

As a young man, I developed a curiosity about the Cistercian way of life. Part of my interest came from reading books by Thomas Merton, the dissolute young man who discovered a unity of life and spirit upon entering the Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

Perhaps the oldest strategy of war is: “Divide and conquer”— which can take many forms. Physically divide a land mass into north and south. Encourage a portion of a country to secede. Partition. Physical divisions create smaller spaces and populations to overtake, can leave families separated and citizens stranded. But the most insidious division is spiritual, psychological, social. If planned from without and then wormed into a once-harmonious (even if not homogenous) group, division can be made to feel organic and even righteous through… you guessed it: fear-mongering.

I am often asked to speak to groups about my experiences on the streets of the city, and what it means for each of us to be the Church on the Street. Recently at the end of one of these talks I was asked, “What do those on the street need the most?” I could do no better than to quote one of my heroes, Fr. Greg Boyle who works with the gang members in Los Angeles and who said, “Gang members need hope. They live with a lethal absence of hope.”

It was a celebration of a woman many hope will one day be declared a saint. It was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the man who gave the homily was New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

We arrived in the Eternal City with the dawn. On the in-flight screen, as we flew through the darkness, I could see the sun racing towards us. It reached Rome the same time as we did.

Add one more item to the list of COVID-19’s destructive impacts: the concept of private health care may be becoming more palatable to a majority of Canadians, a claim that a national survey made early last month.