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.”