In the earliest morning hours one day in late September 1219, avoiding the scorching heat of midday, Illuminato and his companion set out from a siege camp outside the Egyptian port city of Damietta for the encampment of the Muslim Sultan Malik al-Kamil, eight miles away.

Prevaricators! Fabricators! Fabulists! Mythomaniacs! All good words! If it were children we are speaking about, we might call them “fibbers!” But they can be applied to some American religious and political leaders – those claiming that churches, synagogues and mosques are “essential places that provide essential services.”

The Roman Catholic bishops of German have a history lesson for their American counterparts. Between 1939 and 1945, German priests went to the battlefields of Europe, administering the sacraments and consoling their war-broken soldier countrymen. German Sisters and nuns served as nurses in field hospitals, tending to the wounded.

Doctors and Nurses, Field and Food Packing Plant Workers, DACA Kids and Others. Nobody, but nobody does ceremony and ritual better than: the U.S. Marines; the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment (known as “The Old Guard,” charged with guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burials at Arlington National Cemetery and the Army’s official ceremonial unit and escort to the president; it represents what is best in our military, which itself represents what is best in us as a nation, and includes the Continental Color Guard); and, the Vatican.

Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes will host a ticker tape parade honoring health care workers and first responders as New York City’s first major event after the coronavirus crisis has passed. Perhaps. Perhaps. But remember May 7, 1985?

“God must really love drunks and fools; he made so many of them.”

Frank Flynn

Yes. We know the idea isn’t original to my father. A French version dates to at least 1708.

My “me time” (prior to the Corona virus) is mornings – ninety minutes pushing heavy (for a 74-year-old priest) dumbbells, barbells, and exercise machines and at least two or three miles on the treadmill.

My closing days in Xi’an did not begin well. Expecting a contingent of visitors from Miami, I invited David and Sicko to ride with me to the airport, serve as translators and begin a week of travel with my guests.

I’ve seen the Living God, the Living Christ. Twice. As I recall, during those days in September 1973 when I was held as a political prisoner in a locker room of Chile’s National Football Stadium and expecting my (promised) immediate execution…

Paul tells the Romans, “None of us lives to himself alone, and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” (Romans 14:8)

It’s probably three decades ago, but he remains one of the most memorable, and certainly the most odious, human beings I’ve ever met. He was a modern day Gestas, the impenitent thief crucified – by tradition – to the left of Jesus.

I prize my chalice - the cup with which I celebrate Mass. It’s wood. And it’s broken.

I love my paten – the plate on which we place the bread to be consecrated, the bread which has been consecrated at Mass.

They are the two unanswerable questions. More difficult than the final in a doctoral program in Astrophysics.

Well, one question is a little easier to answer: “How do I forget?”

By my guess, the gentleman is right around my age. Watching him walk - he avoids curbs and sharp turns, I appreciate his arthritis and day-to-day aches and pains. Yet, what is most fascinating is to watch what he does in those three-hundred or so feet from his car to the Wellness Center.

When I was ordained, in the “good ole days” when priests sat in the confessional from 3:00 to 5:00 on Saturday afternoons, a standard item on the shopping list was “I lost patience with my husband/children/brother/sister (fill in the number of times).”

Sometimes, perhaps too often, Americans – even those of us struggling to stay ahead of bills and hoping to avoid a major medical problem - forget just how fortunate we are and in the forgetting we miss wonder.

Most priests and deacons have at least one bookshelf dedicated to ritual books. Not copies of Sacred Scripture. The “how to” books of everything from baptisms to burials, confessions to marriages and Sacrament of the Sick.

Perhaps for Julian of Norwich, surviving the 1348-1350 Black Death and the Peasants Revolt (1381), not to mention the beginnings of the persecution of break-away Catholics in England, it was possible to declare “all manner of things shall be well.”