11/30/25 – On this last day of the month of November and the last day of our Thanksgiving Day weekend, let us remember what it means to be human and be grateful for it. God doesn’t love us because we are perfect AI robots or his puppets. He loves us in our humanity. We need to love each other in our humanity. This means in our blessedness and…in our brokenness.
The homeless are often talked about with statistics and policies. Immigrants, refugees and migrants are often talked about with statistics and policies. It is much easier to demonize faceless numbers or to design policies around their abstracted existence, or, in keeping with God’s love, we can figure out how to address related societal challenges as God would – with respect for people’s humanity.
When you look at a number or an AI chatbot, you aren’t looking at a human being. You’re looking at a human creation. Every child born anywhere in the world is God’s creation, knit together cell by cell by his hands because no life anywhere would exist without him. All life belongs to God – not to any human being. Remember this, and handle all life with care and compassion.
We have rules for engagement in war and in peace, not because we are weak or suckers and losers, but out of respect for the divine and the life he created – the life that belongs to him. If we are to move forward, to advance as humans and as societies, it will ultimately depend not on our human creations, but on how well we respect God’s creation, the originator of all life.
One of the best ways to express gratitude is simply by listening. To really listen to someone is to see someone’s spark of the divine. You are looking at and listening to God’s handiwork. In this video, he creates a map of community on his walking stick. What would the map on our collective walking stick look like? Would it look like love? Jesus asked us to walk with him. Let us walk with him, with respect for God’s creation and…in our own brokenness.
From homelessness to home, in my dad’s honor. Settled.
11/23/25 – The joke is on the people who think power and money are the path to triumph and the people who voted for them. This is the state of our democracy. Theoretically, we vote for moral public servants who want to serve the American people – not themselves. Instead, we’ve been cultivating a culture of corruption that is the inevitable result of the superficiality and the narcissism that have plagued the country for decades, and, more recently, has been amplified by perverse technological incentives. There is one true king – Jesus Christ. We know this because he hung on the cross for us. God became flesh to serve us. We need to serve each other.
11/23/25 – What is going on with this country? A pandemic comes along, and people lose their bearings to this degree? Sometimes, it feels unrecognizable from the country we knew just a quarter century ago. Is this a joke? “The premise that foundational ideas don’t need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy.” If you have to pull out your cellphone because you haven’t memorized your multiplication tables or can’t do basic arithmetic, including with fractions, you need to learn how to do those things. You also need to know how to read at an advanced level. You also need to have a strong work ethic. That means showing up to work, day after day, on time and working hard. If you can’t do these basic things, you’re failing at life. The pandemic was not an excuse. It was a test, and, apparently, much of the country failed it.
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11/16/25 – You don’t have to rage against the machine to defeat the machine. As God designed us, we have free will. You can just choose to live a simple life that respects the limitations God has imposed on us. As humans strive to be more God-like, they would do well to revisit the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and how that ended. When you feel enticed by fever dreams of technological and scientific dominance over these limitations, ask yourself a simple question: Do you know how the story will end?
Adam and Eve clearly did not despite God’s explicit limitation, which they did not heed. It should be obvious to even a casual observer that what we are gaining in terms of conveniences, extended life expectancy, options for life creation, and such, come with tradeoffs to the integrity of our planet, the human species, and all life.
The Catholic Church’s position regarding the planet and life respects God’s limitations. Perhaps this feels too “old-fashioned” to you. Perhaps it seems like resistance to “progress.” What is progress? If you think that the “progress” we have made, as described above, comes at no cost, you are wrong. There are always tradeoffs in economics and in life. You just did not consider them, and you do not know how the story will end. You are biased by the short-term gains without considering the long-term costs.
For a religion that was based on the rich intellectual and spiritual traditions of Judaism, the shallowness of many Christians’ practice of the Christian faith is rather disappointing. Perhaps it is a failure of catechesis. More likely, it is failure of the person, similar to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, an overestimation of one’s own ability and a desire to be like God, but lacking all of the features that make God God. As mere mortals who are made in the image of God, we have been granted certain rights and a privileged position that comes with great responsibility. But do not be confused; we are nothing compared with God, and we never will be. God knows how the story will end. Do we know how the story will end? No, and we will never know. Do not take comfort in the false security of earthly power and money or partisanship instead of in the true love of God and surrendering to this truth. Walk humbly with the Lord.
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11/8/25 – Who says small towns are boring? What is boring? Maybe it’s realizing a midlife crisis in an extraordinary and ridiculous tale? Maybe what isn’t boring and also what actually matters are the simple things in life.
-How do the church ladies make such good jam and in creative flavors?
-Why is the plaster on our beautiful churches peeling, and can we find a cheap and easy fix? (Spoiler: No, we can’t.)
-How can one simultaneously be at both parish meetings and work meetings? (Spoiler: You can’t.)
-Why is mom’s cooking still better than anybody else’s in the family even though she’s using less salt for health reasons?
-Why do kids do the grossest things, and what can we do to help them stop?
-Potholes. Traffic. More potholes. Weeds. Weeds. And more weeds. And potholes.
This is a lot. This is a full life, right here. You are born. You do a few things. And then you die. (Spoiler: Not a single one of those few things you do compares to God simply existing, doing nothing, just hanging out, scratching his a–. Hard truth.)
The Missing Kayaker
11/2/25 – Luminiscence is starting its North American tour at The Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a beautiful church in a city that needs to ask some hard questions of itself.
11/2/25 – Believing in God has always been the more logical choice, but let’s set aside the intellect and consider the whole person, most importantly, the soul. Let’s consider the soul as the good, the true, and the beautiful, but let’s start with the opposite, the bad, the false, and the ugly.
Imagine that you’re an insecure man willing to sell the soul of his nation and its people for his own and his wealthy friends’ insatiable desire for money and power. You’re willing to engage in any and all lies and to desecrate anything, no matter how beautiful, historic or holy, to achieve this end. In chasing everything of this world, you will have impoverished yourself, and by the end of your life, you will have, well, nothing.
As the leaves turn brass, copper and gold, and fall from their branches like coins, covering the ground with their spectacle of brilliant money, only to disintegrate into brown dust, just like the soil from which they grew, let us consider our own mortality. We can spend our lives chasing the things of this world, but no matter how much earthly wealth we amass, we too, like the fall leaves, will decay and die.
True wealth comes from the condition of our soul, and the more it is aligned to the good, the true and the beautiful, the closer we are to God. It is in our Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ that we receive everlasting life. Chase him as he chases you. He died for you. Be willing to die for him, as our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ are willing to do. Pray for them today on the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church and every day.
Jesus was asked before his death: what is truth? What is your answer? How about: what is good? What is your answer? Is it your political party or your tribe? What is beautiful? Is it bathrooms of marble and gold or golden ballrooms. Do you have an answer? Or is it the weighty gaze of an innocent girl willing to say “yes” to God no matter the earthly cost, not out of obedience but out of love?
The monks who gave up everything of this world knew the answer to those questions, and they gained everything that mattered. Just like you cannot fill a spiritual hole with material goods, if you chase the wrong things, you will end up with nothing.
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