Tom Scotus

My son Matthew is 3 ½ years old and, like most little children, he is enthralled with the world around him. Books on a shelf, stuff in drawers, cans in a cupboard and similar things fascinate him. He points to each item and asks, “What’s that?”

As I get older, I see that all of our earthly lives involve some form of tragedy: We must work at jobs we dislike. We are forced out of our jobs. Our spouses are unfaithful. We grow old. We loose our hair. Our teeth fall out. Our feet turn purple. We live in chronic pain. Our children rarely visit.

In my final year of University, I was 24 years old and living in residence. I befriended a 17 year old named Steve. During one of our frequent conversations, I had referred to myself as an adult…

I’m a Knight of Columbus. One of our mottos is, “Time flies, remember death.” In eternity, there is no time, as we understand it on earth. There is just the ever-present now.

We all seem to have an “enemy” that we can think of as evil and blame for our problems or the problems in the world.

What do you want? What do you really want?

The prevailing message of mass media is much more controlled in Western democracies than most people realize.

Don’t you sometimes wish that you could completely erase all the negative stuff in your memory and keep only the good stuff?

I remember a discussion I had last year during Lent with a parishioner at my church. I asked him if he had gone to confession yet. “No,” he said.