Many years ago, I heard the story of a school principal in South Africa who quit his job rather than submit to the school’s apartheid policy of racial discrimination. His friends told him he was crazy, but he said, “One day I am going to meet God, and God will ask me, ‘Where are your wounds?’ If I reply that I have no wounds, God will ask me, ‘Was there nothing that was worth fighting for?’ I could not face that question.”

I am not a gardener. In fact, I moved into a house with a large garden a decade ago and I joke that I have killed off one species of plant each year. Except that it’s not a joke.

When I was in Grade 8 at St. Augustine School in Regina, one of the priests at the neighbouring Little Flower Church frequently asked me to be the altar server at funerals. After a few of these ventures, my teacher told me to stop taking time away from school to serve at these Masses. I considered his command and decided that since this was a Catholic school, being the server at these funerals was the right thing to do. So, I engaged in my first acts of civil disobedience.

Near the end of June, I pulled into our parish parking lot full of gumption at the resumption of Masses after four months of COVID-forced church closures.

Falling is on my list of least favourite things.

We need to stop from time to time to contemplate what it means to be Catholic in this aggressively secular society of ours. It is easy for our beliefs to be swamped by the detritus of a powerful popular culture that looks upon us with bare tolerance at best and derision at worst.

When I was growing up it was popular to mock a film made in the 1950s to prepare children to survive a nuclear war. Older folks will remember this odd cross between animated and live action footage featuring a bow-tied Bert the Turtle who could “duck and cover” at the sign of danger.

A long-time fan of the Edmonton Oilers, I hold in my heart the glory days of the 1980s when my team won five Stanley Cups in seven years. It was an exciting time for both me and the city. Although I lived most of those years in Winnipeg, I remained a dedicated member of the Oilers’ diaspora.

Our calendar of liturgical seasons is rather bare compared to some of our sister Catholic Churches. That is never more evident than in our long season of “Ordinary Time,” an uninspired translation of a banal original (in Latin, “Sundays of the Year”).

The board of the Irene Thomas Hospice hoped faith alone could stop the onslaught of MAiD at the 10-bed palliative care facility on Vancouver’s southeast edge.