In many ways, gratitude is the basis of love.

Sometimes, morality is the enemy of justice. Leading a morally upright life should lead one to act with integrity and compassion. Society itself cannot be good unless a critical mass of its people is morally good. But when we try to make other people good and judge them harshly when they don’t live up to our standards, we become repressive.

Since the Daughters of St. Paul have always printed papal encyclicals and works of the popes, we naturally collected and published John Paul II’s extraordinary “Theology of the Body” — a series of catechetical talks he delivered in the early 1980s.

This is the 250th anniversary year of the death of St. Marguerite d’Youville, the founder of the Order of Sisters of Charity of Montreal. The first Canadian-born saint, she was canonized in 1990 by St. John Paul II.

As fall turned to winter, I found a prayer for life transitions in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. We were considering a move, in the middle of a pandemic. It all felt very complicated. And the opening line of the prayer resonated with me: “Lord, help me now to unclutter my life, to organize myself in the direction of simplicity.”

I come like a beggar with a gift in my hand. These are the opening lyrics to a song by Sydney Carter that I learned as part of the Toronto Catholic Worker community many years ago. As we enter the season of Lent and its call to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, I find myself quietly singing it to myself. The song continues, “By the hungry I will feed you, by the poor I’ll make you rich, by the broken I will mend you, tell me which one is which.”

Sean Murphy was a Mountie for 37 years and a local coroner for years after that. Yet even he is astonished at how quickly Canadians have become comfortable with obliging health-care workers to perform medically-assisted homicide.

I had some concern about writing this column, worried that it might be construed as self-pitying or a way of drawing attention to myself. But as a Catholic I wanted to bring attention to myself so prayers would come my way. So this is why I am writing about the news I received a few weeks ago that my liver cancer had returned.

Recently I was listening to a report that explained why margarine was bad for you, which concluded that we would all be much better switching to butter.

Soon after moving to work at The Red Deer Advocate in 1978 I learned that Albertans do not fit the stereotype outsiders have of them. Even in supposedly redneck Red Deer, a rapidly growing centre servicing the petroleum and agriculture industries, there was significant diversity of opinion.