Two days before Christmas in 1973, it was cold and beginning to snow when I set out from Great Lakes, Ill., at 6 a.m. to get home to my boys on Long Island. I was in the U.S. Navy then.

As I carefully unwrapped and hung the ornaments on the tree this year, I was struck by how many of them were made by hand, crafted expressly for me and my family. How had I never noticed this before?

My wife and I are expecting our fifth child in February. It’s been six years since we had a newborn in the house, so there are some things we need to relearn about life with a baby. Most pressing perhaps is the role that technology will play in our family life when the new baby arrives.

Back in October, on a sunny Sunday morning, I had a very moving and beautiful experience of grace. I was in Chicago with one of my brothers-in-law, running in the marathon.

Years ago, a child in my family asked, “If a Church is God’s house, is a cemetery God’s garden?” I lack the theologically correct answer. Yet, that question recognized what I know is true: there is something profoundly sacred about the land where we lay our loved ones to rest.

On his upper right shoulder were tattooed the words:  VENI  VIDI  VICI.

The middle-aged man pumping gas into his SUV at the pump in front of me didn’t look like a Latin scholar. But his large tattoo opened up a way of conversation on this quite warm early autumn day. No, he answered my query, he was not a student of an ancient language, but rather more of a Roman historian. Since his retirement from the medical profession, he now pursues his lifelong passion of studying the Caesars and their entourage.

In the weeks of mid-autumn, when colors fill the trees and crisp air fills the evenings, advertisements for high schools and colleges fill the pages of diocesan newspapers as 8th graders and 12th graders try to select the place they will call home for the next four years. 

“The chicken runs at midnight” isn’t a sentence you’ll find in your Bible, but it is a divinely inspired statement that brought proof of heaven to Rich Donnelly, a grieving father who needed to find his way back to God.

In a standing room only crowd at the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Church in Ozone Park, more than a thousand people came together with one common goal: to say thank you to Father Paul Palmiotto. I had the honor of attending the Mass on Sept. 29 to celebrate the life and priesthood of an incredible man who was retiring from the priesthood due to an illness that has limited his ability to speak.

In one of His appearances to the disciples after the Resurrection, Christ said to them, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).