The International Court of Justice has delivered its interim judgment. Even a political body appointed by the United Nations General Assembly, whose members are mainly non-democratic states, couldn’t bring itself to order Israel to ceasefire, but we should not be grateful for that. They had no moral right to order Israel to cease its just war of self-defense in the first place.

Each night when I was growing up, my mother would do “prayers & lullabies” with us. One prayer was to recite a simple passage from Scripture. I am quoting my “prayer-memory” here and not the actual Scripture:

The hard part was sitting down properly on the T-bar ski lift, or rather not sitting down. If you sat down, the whole vertical pipe would swoop forward violently and dump you on your back in the middle of the track for the skier behind you to pierce you with their long skis. The object of the T-bar was to brace your knees in a slight crouching position, hang on to the pipe with your hands, and let the seat drag you to the upper altitudes by the back of your thighs. Whoever designed this lift deserved a sadistic engineer of the year award.

Your description of Israeli actions in your Jan. 21 editorial “On the side of real justice” leaves a lot to be desired. What happened on Oct. 7 — and I certainly do not condone it — did not happen in a vacuum. Yet there is no sense of any understanding of what has been happening in Israel and Palestine for many years.

In the week that we looked into the online mirror and saw pornographic deep fakes of Taylor Swift staring back, Canada’s Catholic bishops published a compelling pastoral letter on Christian engagement with social media.

The CCCB’s pastoral letter from its Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, released this week, calls on Canadian Catholics to serve Christian values by following seven commitments online.

One winter when I was 13 and my brother was 14, we took a family trip to New Hampshire. To ski. Because my brother really wanted to. He promised he would teach me how to ski. My elderly dad, an avid outdoorsman and sports enthusiast, had never, however, in his long life, skied, and was wary of its potential dangers involving bone protrusions and close encounters with trees. He agreed to take us despite.

As the end of the Advent season drew near, I was blessed with an Emmanuel moment that became a Christmas gift that has kept on giving.

As a humourist I have often asked myself if my lighter reflections were appropriate in a time of such deep division and grief. As a columnist for over 10 years, there have been times when I have wondered if I should change tack, focus on darker or more politically edgy work, addressing the catastrophes of our times. It is surely fair to ask if one’s lightness, at a time of dark, is fitting or even welcomed. Truth be told, I continue to be torn. Humour, I know, has had a role to play in every context since the beginning of time, as a mediating influence, a salve or as a weapon to address contentious topics.

In his beautiful Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis reminds us that as pastoral people we have to accept tension between fullness and limitation, and not be concerned with immediate results.