Once I was invited to a group meeting with Pope Francis. Entering the room, I paused, eyeing the seats next to the Pope’s fancy chair. Someone saw my paralysis and invited me to sit in the seat farthest from what I wanted. Hiding my disappointment, I sat. We waited. To our surprise, an aid pointed out that those seats were still empty and invited me and another to have them. We calmly but gleefully strode across the room and sat. Pope Francis entered, and we enjoyed two hours of amazingly uplifting conversation.

I’ve been hiking Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona most of my life. It is a vigorous forty-five minutes to the top. Near the peak, the end suddenly appears much further away, and steeper. At that moment, a descending hiker often offers encouragement: “Keep going! The peak is right there. It’s not as far as it looks. You can do it!” It usually works. After another five minute push, you summit and enjoy a glorious panorama of the Sonoran Desert in the Valley of the Sun.

During my baseball career, my best coach often said, "You shouldn't be worried if I yell at you. Be worried if I don't. If I stop pushing you, it means I don't think you have any more potential." He demanded a lot, and I knew it meant he saw that I could be something special on the baseball field.

There was a young mother in my parish community who was depressed due to fnancial strain. She prayed for help. One morning before Mass, she placed on the counter a zip-lock bag flled with jewelry and old coins. Smiling, she explained she had been fxing an old cabinet and found the items hidden deep within the walls of her home. One particular coin could be worth as much as $900,000. The contents of the bag–previously unknown to them–were now their prized possession. Their plans changed that week. They had to learn how much it was worth.

Recent studies suggest that millennials will be the frst generation in America to be worse off than their parents in terms of financial earnings and job status. Many lament this. I propose that this week’s Gospel provides a hopeful way to see the trend as good news.

The Lord Jesus says, “Take care to guard against greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist in possessions” (Luke 12:15). Greed damages us with the deception that we are what we possess. But to Jesus, this is simply not true. What makes us happy is who we are, who we become.

Once I went to a hospice facility to celebrate Last Rites for an elderly dying man. His family had told me that he had been uncommunicative for days. At the conclusion of the ritual, we began to recite the Our Father prayer. To everyone’s surprise, his lips moved, clearly mouthing the words to the Lord’s prayer. Stripped of most of his faculties, the man could still pray those precious God-given petitions. A lifetime of prayer had planted the words even deeper than his failing consciousness.

One of my close friends is a hermit priest who lives on a desert mountain. Recently I found myself in a group conversation about him. One vehemently objected, “What does he do up there all day? Nothing! Priests are down here working, running parishes, making a difference, and he…he is doing nothing! What a waste.” The words dripped with indignation and resentment. Most of the group quietly nodded in silent agreement. Were they correct?

I used to be a bad neighbor. I’d get wrapped up in my life and ignore those around me. Then I found sage advice from Benjamin Franklin to this effect: to be a better neighbor, ask someone to do a favor for you. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? Tell strangers that I need their help? Yuck. I’ll risk looking needy. Worse, I’ll be indebted to them. But I tried it, and it works like a charm. Recently I asked my neighbor Alan for a hacksaw, and Inga for an egg. They kindly obliged, and our friendship is growing.

In the days after the awful 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Catholic friend remarked, “Racism is today’s great evil. We should put all our energy into fighting it.” I admired her intuition that the church must stand firmly against evil. Amen, I thought. At the same time, something felt wrong. As months went by, I saw her steadily slide into bitterness and anger. Soon, despondency. She spoke of giving up the fight. Don’t we too wonder how to fight evil without losing our joy or energy?

What do you call brothers who are born on the same day? Twins, of course. That is what we celebrate today in the inestimable saints, Peter and Paul. Wait: twins? Yes. The early Church believed that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome on the same day. Since the day of martyrdom is celebrated as a saints’ birth into eternal life, the result is striking: Peter and Paul are twins in God’s family, the Church.

A Catholic friend of mine occasionally says, “The Eucharist is not a noun. It’s a verb.” In so saying, he is making the point that the Eucharist isn’t simply Jesus’ bodily presence given to us in holy Communion. It also manifests the dynamic pattern by which Christ actively loves and saves us. He teaches us to cooperate with that pattern. This Eucharist actually embodies four verbs: Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and gives. Let’s consider each one.

I am amazed at how my four siblings teach their many kids in age-appropriate ways. For example, now that my nephew Brandon is 24 years of age, they give him insights and freedoms that would have been positively confounding or even dangerous when he was a toddler. Imagine if they had taught him at age four how to drive a car, use a credit card online, or handle power tools. But eventually, they did, and he is a high functioning young man, I’m proud to say. They are good teachers.

When I was a seminarian almost 20 years ago, a bank vice president taught us etiquette classes. She said, “Gentlemen, please make sure your breath isn’t bad. Take some breath mints before you hear confessions, okay?” We nervously laughed because the proximity that makes breath noticeable (whether pleasant or not) can be a bit awkward.

The famous 20th century St. Padre Pio said once that he would wait outside the gates of heaven until the people in his life had entered. I’m not sure that I, or frankly many people I know, would say that and mean it. Yet that is precisely the kind of attitude we see in Jesus as he prays for us in the Gospel today. Having celebrated the Ascension of the Lord just a few days ago, we now hear the Son of God at the Last Supper pray to his Father “that they may be brought to perfection as one” (John 17:23). What does this mean for us?