At long last, the final post for Kicking and Screaming.  Thanks for reading everybody!

As I begin to write this last post of “Kicking and Screaming,” I am flying back to my permanent ministry assignment after having said the last of my “official” Masses of Thanksgiving in Austin, Texas. After ordination it is customary for many new priests to celebrate Masses at the parishes that had a significant role in their formation and spiritual journey. Indeed, in following weeks after ordination I went on what some of my friends referred to as “the tour,” celebrating Masses along the eastern seaboard at various churches that had held major roles in the previous forty years of my life. (T-Shirts from this tour are still forthcoming.)

But if January sounds a little late after a May ordination to still be celebrating these Masses, the Lone-Star “leg” of that tour was originally scheduled for the third week in June. Then my oncologist scheduled the radiation treatment for that week with a required quarantine for the next three days.

It was probably well and good that I had to put off the Austin trip. My treatment required me to …

The following is the homily I gave for the Masses I celebrated this past weekend in Horeshoe Bay and Austin, Texas… hence the Longhorn bias included therein.  

Whenever I go on an extended trip, I have the habit of making a CD mix in order to capture the “je ne sais quoi” of the place to where I’m going.  So in preparation of the big Austin trip, three super-cool mixes were made based heavily on the music I was listening to when I lived out there three years ago.  On one of the songs, Lone Star local Bob Schneider was singing about all of these people he wanted to be in life.
Want to be like Captain Kirk – get up each morning and love to go to work…
Want to be like Cassius Clay – change my name and go all the way…
He continued down the list.  But then something interesting happened by the time he got to Jesus.
Want to be like Jesus Christ.  Keep the party moving giving good advice.  
At first, I thought that Mr. Schneider’s theology might be a little limited.  But then, when reading the gospel about the Wedding at …

I may have felt a little nervous on the morning of my ordination but the next morning, I was in a PANIC.

This morning, I had some pre-Christmas errands to run and I found myself on the corner of Bloor and Bay, for those of you who know the “ritzy” part of Toronto.  They have some great displays in the stores and I had already checked most of the items off of my list, so I decided to go for a Christmas Eve walk, Egg Nog Latte in hand.  Along the way, I stumbled upon this sign in the middle of the sidewalk that said, “Give JOY.”  I got very excited—“JOY!”—so I went into the store and there was a clerk at the front door who said “welcome.”  So of course, I asked the clerk where I could find THE JOY and the man pointed me over to the shelf.  As I started perusing some of the items on the shelf, I began to realize that JOY in this part of town is very expensive.

In fact, I would venture to say that most people in this church would say that Christmas itself is very expensive, no matter what part of town you are in.  There are all of the presents.  The special foods.  Travel costs.  Etc.  Etc.  Elton John has this pretty …

This weekend we celebrate the first weekend of Advent… and I am already tired of Christmas. Yes, I too got excited when I walked into Starbucks November 1 and saw that sales of Egg Nog Lattes had begun. Yes, a broad smile came to my face when I heard the piano keys and jangling bells of Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” come over the radio. And I have to confess that I got a kick when I noticed the “Mistletoe Kissing Station” located in front of the CIBC on Bloor. But after the fifth playing of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” on a particular day, Christmas begins to feel like a politician that is trying too hard to be liked. By mid-November, all I want for Christmas is for Mariah Carey to leave me alone.

I feel not a little hypocritical in admitting my yuletide exhaustion. It was not too long ago when I would roll my eyes whenever someone from the Church would lambast the insanity of a society gone mad every December, when I would roll my eyes at a priest criticizing a pop-culture that …

Ironically, I had started writing the article before the images of floods and disaster in my home state of New Jersey and of New York City covered the airways.
The following continues a series that will serve as the conclusion of the Kicking and Screaming blog.

In 1975, Billy Joel decided that it was time to return to New York. His time in Los Angeles had been fruitful — he released his first two albums under Columbia Records and had garnered some of his first hits, including his signature song Piano Man — so the move might have been a surprise for many. It was a dark time for the Big Apple. The city had lost much of the romanticism it had enjoyed in the previous decades, many of its urban areas were beginning to decay because of white flight, and there was real concern that New York would find itself in default. The mood of this era is probably best reflected in the infamous (and misquoted) Daily News headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

It is against this background that Billy Joel recorded his third album, …

Then one morning, after loosing track of just how many steps I had taken and how many days had passed, I had arrived at May 19. So I simply did what I had been doing every day for the past six years; I took one more step.

This homily was given for the Sunday Readings located here.

Today’s Gospel, the one where Jesus is appears to be telling his followers to cut off indiscriminate body parts, is actually not as bad as it sounds.   Jesus often spoke in allegorical terms and there is no reason to think that he is not speaking allegorically here.  After all, you would think that if anyone were to follow this teaching after Jesus gave it it would be the disciples.  And yet, as archeologists tell us, there is absolutely no record of the disciples having to spend the remainder of their days being forced to limp across the dessert with one foot, unable to “high five” each other because of past sins committed.

On the one hand, we can breathe a sigh of relief that being a follower of Christ will not necessarily entail any scenes from the movie series Saw... that living out our faith in Christ will not necessarily entail a trip to the Home Depot.  But if we spend some additional time with the point at which Jesus was actually trying to arrive, it might actually be worse.

Jesus …

One of the advantages of having a Paulist lead you on a retreat is that cinematic offerings are usually not off of the table the way they might be under Jesuit or Franciscan guidance. And there was probably more than a little divine inspiration when he suggested on closing the retreat with a movie: The Avengers.

This was the cosmic equivalent of either Jim Perry or Bob Eubanks turning over the Queen of Diamonds on the game show Card Sharks and all I had to do was shout, “Lower!” Yet when the Game Show host Fate turned over that next card, it turned out to be the King of Spades, I was one of that 5-10%.

In the Old Testament Class for which the paper was being written, we discussed how the personification of divine insight in the Hebrew Scriptures is often referred to as “Woman Wisdom.” But sitting in a waiting room to find out if I had cancer, I could not help but wonder if I was also being joined by “Dame Irony.”

I have to admit – for my first homily in Toronto, I basically wanted to tell a few jokes, say “Jesus loves you,” and then sit down. The problem with that plan came when I started reading the newspaper this week. I arrived in town on Wednesday and there was this story about this mass shooting at a crowded block party in Toronto in which two people were killed and 24 were injured.

The following continues a series that will serve as the conclusion of the Kicking and Screaming blog.

When I told people that I was going to L.A. for Spring Break, I received a deluge of advice on places that I just HAD TO VISIT. The Getty Museum, the Beverly Hills Hilton, the Die Hard building, the Santa Monica pier. And while those places are all fine and good, there was only ONE place I had been dying to visit since I was five years old. You know how in the 90s they had those commercials where someone would win the Super Bowl, the World Series, Star Search, or something like that, and an announcer would ask, “Now that you’ve just , what are you going to do next?” Yes, I know, the newly proclaimed Master of the Universe would proclaim that s/he was going to Disney World, but two months before my ordination, I wanted to go to the original.

I am not going to suggest that I led a somewhat deprived childhood because I had ONLY gotten …

The following is the first in a series that will serve as the conclusion of the Kicking and Screaming blog.

The story of my ordination to the priesthood begins in a Los Angeles graveyard.

At the very end of the movie Pretty Woman — as Julia Roberts for all intents and purposes begins her film career and Richard Gere essentially closes out his (zing!) — a voice wafts over the streets of Southern California and proclaims, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep on dreaming. This is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreaming!”

When my plane arrived in the land of dreams for Spring Break in March, it had been at least 15 years since my last visit. The Paulist formation program had decided for this year to send us to cities where the community had a parish or ministry that we had not yet visited; as it turned out, I had not yet visited any of the Paulist ministries in Los Angeles. So on my first day, I was fortunate enough to preach at …

As many of you know, I hail for the great state of New Jersey. And when you grow up in the Garden State, there is a rich assortment of personalities that have shaped the culture and the history of New Jersey for generations. Singers, politicians, actors… a wide variety of people who have contributed to this large tapestry we know as American culture. People to look up to, people to model one’s life around. And one of my greatest heroes from my home state is… Tony Soprano.

(Okay, Bruce Springsteen is REALLY my hero from New Jersey. Tony just works better for the direction I’m heading, so just go with me for a bit…)

And I don’t know about you, but I often have times in my life when I don’t always feel like the strongest person in the world. Many of us have probably had the experience when we feel downright weak. But that’s what makes Tony seem so appealing for me… NO ONE messes with Tony. And sure, sometimes Tony’s methods might be morally questionable… but hey, you can’t deny that the guy gets the job done. And addition to his efficiency, his strength, his ability to control events, Tony …

When we think of Lent, David Bowie is probably not the first person that comes to mind. But in 1977 he released a song called “Heroes.” Granted there was no duet with Bing Crosby involved, but there was a bold proclamation: “We could be heroes! Just for one day!” At first glance, this sentiment may not seem to have a lot to do with Jesus. After all, we think of Jesus as all of these different things: Messiah, Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity … but we often don’t take the time to consider him to be a hero.

Why not? After all, a hero is defined (according to Wikipedia) as “someone who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, displays courage and the will for self sacrifice for some greater good of all humanity.” That sounds like Jesus to me. But maybe we don’t think of Jesus as a hero because no one is simply born a hero … you become a hero by making some grand gesture at expense to oneself for the betterment of the whole. Jesus may have been born the Son of …

Did you know that Ash Wednesday is the busiest church day of the year? I was surprised to hear that! I thought it might be Easter, but then someone explained to me that chocolate hangovers might affect attendance. So, I thought the busiest day must surely be Christmas, but then I remembered all of the big movies that are released on Christmas Day, and it made a little bit more sense. But Ash Wednesday? I guess on the one hand, there’s no chocolate around because people have given it up for Lent. And then on the other hand, everyone knows that Hollywood waits for the dead of winter to release all of its bad movies because the Oscar nominations have already come out and it’s too cold to leave the house anyway.

But if it’s too cold to leave the house, why does Ash Wednesday continue to be so popular? Maybe it’s because there are giveaways on Ash Wednesday. When you go to a trade show and walk through all of the booths, the most popular booths are the ones with the best giveaways. Like the company giving away mouse pads and the USB drives. On Ash Wednesday, …

You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but on this Pro Life weekend, I really didn’t know what to say today. Every time I started to write one thing about the March For Life, two other concerns came to the fore. This was an issue that I used to look at in very black and white terms when I was younger. Then I got to a point where I could only see it in terms in gray. Now I guess I am at a point where I look at it in terms of black and white…and gray.

At first glance it’s a black and white issue, an open and shut case, there’s really not much more to discuss. And I have to say that this past October, I was given the amazing gift of two nieces — each from my two sisters — and I even got to be in the room for the birth of one of them.  During Christmas I got to hold each one of them in my arms and during that …

When you study to be a priest, attending Mass is as much of a part of one’s routine as brushing your teeth and applying deodorant. It may not happen EVERY single day, but it usually happens every day.

Anyway I mention this because I consider myself to be a pretty connected person in terms of news events; what I do not learn through my iPhone, I typically pick up during church. When you go to a Mass in which most in attendance feel free to vocalize the thoughts, concerns, and groanings in their souls, it can serve as a regular RSS feed on what is going on in the world. And, ironically, it was in this manner that I learned that the famed-atheist Christopher Hitchens had passed.

I struggled to write this reflection for a while; I was actually asked to do it two weeks ago. On the one hand I cannot claim to have read much of Hitchens’ material, so it seemed unfair to comment on the life of someone of whom I was only tangentially familiar. I had seen him on Bill Maher a few times and while I …

My wonderful five-year-old nephew has been asking questions about a certain topic the past few months.  He has been talking with all of these boys at school and my sister—his mother—decided that he was ready.  And I have to say that I am flattered that both her and her husband decided that I would be the best person to shepherd him across this very important Rite of Passage.  And so this Christmas break, I will be introducing my nephew to the Star Wars movies.

This is not a responsibility I take lightly. There are many questions.  For example, do I start like I started, with original Star Wars (now known as “Episode 4”)… or do I start him with the prequels?  If I do start him with the original trilogy, do I show him the Special Editions or do get the original versions?  You know, the one where Gredo doesn’t shoot first?  Do I try to avoid the whole Jar Jar Binks thing?  I know that I’m only talking to about half of the people out there right now but these are tough questions.  It’s during these moments that I really empathize with all of the parents out there and the …