Dear friends, Growing up in mid-century North Central Pennsylvania, people of color were few and far between.  I thought it was because they just didn’t live there, but I later learned that the KKK was meeting in the region where I grew up, and they may have encouraged persons participating in the Great Migration to just “move along.”   Still, my father was a devotee of Abraham Lincoln (and as he was a funeral director, learned most of what there was to know about Lincoln’s funeral and its...

This Sunday’s gospel concerns a parable that Jesus tells about a Pharisee and a tax collector praying in the temple. The Pharisee is proud of himself, the tax collector is bereft with contrition, and utters, “God, have mercy on me a sinner.”, which became the Jesus prayer, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me a sinner.”   This has become, in some parts of Christianity, the basis for a prayer discipline, where this phrase is repeated, often using knots in a prayer rope to pace and mark...

St. Gregory Dear friends,  I write this on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, and offer this beautiful passage from St. Gregory...