There is nothing on this earth more to be prized
than true friendship.
Thomas Aquinas

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Oscar Wilde

He who hath many friends hath none.
Aristotle

Show my who your friends are, and I will tell you what you are.

You put your cell phone in; you put your cell phone out;
You put your cell phone in your mouth
And you shake it all about.
You put your Twitter in; you put your Twitter out….
To be sung to the tune of “The Hokey Pokey”

Perfect timing: A young woman’s question “How do I get Faith?” and an unexpected trove of old email-essays on the same day.

A startling headline from the Journal of Imaginary Archeology and Biblical Errancy:

First Century Parchments Explain the Moses Plagues

Miami is crisscrossed by expressways connecting far southwestern suburbs and downtown Miami’s medical, court and entertainment centers - the go-to favorites of the Lexus-Beamer-Mercedes super self-important pack. They are also some of the most dangerous roads in South Florida, especially in the before-sunrise-after-the-clubs-have-closed hours.

Pretty sure a version of this story involves chopsticks and a Chinese banquet. In contemporary (“politically correct”) terms that might be “cultural appropriation.” Or it reflects a universal understanding of the consequences of good and evil.

We’re tired! So very, very tired! Of the virus news! Of the daily numbers! Of the claustrophobia-inducing voluntary and involuntary quarantine! And, almost certainly, no one wants to think about the possibility of death tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow!

The best “confession story” of all time belongs to then newly ordained Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois from Lutcher - just between Gramercy and Paulina – Louisiana. Two weeks after ordination, Roy was asked to hear second graders’ second confessions. All went well until a towheaded young man with a Cajun accent began, “Bless me, Father. It’s been two weeks since my last confession and this is my second confession and my sins are: I disobeyed three times, I told lies four times, I fought with my little brother. And I committed adultery fourteen times.” Things went downhill from there.

The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt has sounded the alarm: “In China every day is Kristallnacht.” Writing on the eighty-first anniversary of that infamous Hitlerian night – November 3 2019, Hiatt noted, “It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.”

The conversation happened more than thirty years ago. My friend, one of the three most honest men I’ve ever known, declared with Gospel-certainty, “We don’t know anyone” affected or infected by HIV/AIDS. “Oh, wait,” interrupted his wife. “What about…? And then there’s…” The list began to grow and, in a minute or two, included six or seven men and women – all within two degrees of separation.

“They were so young! Boys! Farm boys!” he practically whispered. The urgency of his words made all the more serious by the coarseness of his voice as my friend, paralyzed now well more than three decades, sought to describe an Alabama Confederate cemetery he visited long ago.

It is coming. Surely! Certainly! Like a monstrous and all-destroying tornado still just far enough off that it cannot be seen, yet it can be heard as the air turns cold. The “them-ing,” the “they-ing,” the “those people-ing” and “other-ing” of America and, in 2020, too many cases of “Christians” and “communities of faith” are falling prey to the all-infecting “those people” message.

With all due respect to the playwright Robert Bolt, his hero, Sir Thomas More, was not A Man for All Seasons. He was a man of his time, caught-up in his own and other’s political and religious fervors, willing to send - and actually sending – those whom he believed were heretics to the Tower of London and to be burned to death at the stake.

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.