When Mike Foley was a child and lost something, his mother would say, “It’s just stuff.” However, when he lost a marriage, a job, and three generations’ worth of family heirlooms, it’s not easy. Yet at age 69, the former lieutenant with the Boston Fire Department is not bitter. “I’m not in charge, I leave […]
This month a deluge of holiday gifts are returned to stores. It’s hard to give the perfect gift, and almost as hard to remember getting one. Yet Patricia Kachinsky of Milton still talks about what she received years ago. Back then she told her four young daughters, “I want a memory of something your father […]
I had my first Christmas in prison. No, not as an inmate. In 1998 I was a Bible study volunteer at Webster Correctional Institution, a low security prison for men in Cheshire, CT (since closed). That year we threw a Christmas party for the 9 inmates in our group. However, word got around and 50 […]
Mary, Jesus’s mother, spent her last days in Turkey, and I visited her house, surrounded by maple trees, high above the ancient Roman ruins of Ephesus, five miles from the Aegean Sea, now rebuilt by the Catholic Church as a holy place. After Jesus entrusted his mother and apostle John into each other’s care, it […]
Centuries before the science of positive thinking, the apostle Paul wrote this in 62 A.D., “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, […]