Fall is everybody’s favorite time of year, so it seemed, decades ago, to a young person, who thought, who could be so shallow as to choose any other time of year?
Autumn is dramatic, as is life, and moody, as is anyone beset with troubles from the earliest age.
Summer is gone with its wearisome abundance of heat, light, and cheer, and the monotony of Winter recommends itself but little. Spring has its irrepressible, unquenchable vigor, but Autumn will come, with the wisdom of another year of disappointments, with the empathy cold, dark, rain, and wind have for a weary soul.
As a teenager, a then-obscure singing group released their second album and called it “October,” lending further cachet to this month.
By a certain age, a well-rounded person might have at some point preferred each season as his favorite.
Winter, when everything begins. Spring, joy and innocence. Summer, long days outside with little ones. Fall, with its majestic tumult of the psyche.
Winter, with Christmas, and New Year’s. Spring, with St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter. Summer, with July 4th and Labor Day. Autumn– Halloween!
Jesus spent a lot of time exorcising demons. It’s a full-time job, combating the forces of darkness within us, the selfish, anti-social, self-destructive anger within us, always afraid that someday the fuse that is forever being lit won’t be extinguished in time, and havoc will ensue.
Within ourselves, a lot of traffic goes back and forth between our good sides and our bad sides, the subconscious and the conscious. Intuitively, it’s easy to believe that we are surrounded by invisible legions of spirits who have gone before us, who watch over us, who threaten us, who intervene for us, who rejoice when we fall. We haven’t slit our wrists yet, and that’s a relief, but maybe someday we’ll be pushed too far, and we will, and that’s genuinely scary. That’s the dynamic of the holiday, and the season.
Happy Halloween!

Tough times for Catholics, this week.
When will Pope Francis do something of substance, some of us have wondered. Gestures are fine, but one good cop against a background of a bureaucracy full of bad cops seems disingenuous.
Then we had this past week’s rumors that a Vatican synod of bishops, meeting to discuss family issues, was on the verge of issuing a statement welcoming homosexuals as people with gifts to bring to the Church (like everyone else, I add), as people who benefited from their romantic relationships.
It wasn’t hard to predict how that would be received. Instead of all that, the bishops suggest that we treat homosexuals with respect and sensitivity.
When Christians have to be told to start treating other people with respect and sensitivity, as opposed to how we have treated certain people up to this point, we must have sunk really low.
The bishops did, however, include language that is shocking– that civil heterosexual unions outside the Church contain positive elements.
One hesitates to take this to the logical conclusion, which is, have we been supposed to have been thinking that a Catholic marriage is the only type of marriage that contains anything good at all? Such unbridled arrogance and condescension is absolutely insane.
Read your catechism, someone might say. That’s not what the Church teaches. Well, I really hope not! But there it is in the newspaper, and that’s what people will think, so, mortifying though it is, we have to deal with it on this level.
It’s hard to imagine that someone could be found who would say those things, but when people are running scared and looking over their shoulders at narrow-minded watchdogs who will leap for the jugular at the slightest sign of weakness, people will say crazy things just to get the hounds off their backs.
It’s easy to capitulate to the experts. “They’re the experts, those bishops and cardinals and priests,” we shrug. “We can’t argue with them, and it’s nice that we always know what they’re going to say about situations that, if one really thought about them, could get confusing.”
We used to sing the song, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
That’s a promising idea, but it’s vague. Love of God, do they mean? If it’s love of God, then maybe we should show that by being super faithful to the Church and following all the directions from the clergy. Or not.
Love of each other, do they mean? Sometimes we have to practice tough love. We can’t just smile and go along with everybody all the time. We have to be able to say, “You are wrong in your ideas and beliefs, and you need to straighten up or face the consequences.” That’s something everyone has to do some times.
Maybe a different type of love is meant, a type of love that expresses itself in solidarity and support with all types of people, because we all need solidarity and support, and if we were disqualified from that by our moral failings, why did we ever bother to sing that song?
Sexual immorality is not a comfortable subject. The Church simplifies it by differentiating between heterosexuality and “intrinsically disordered” homosexuality, which implies an unequal playing field slanted in favor of heterosexuals, but like any type of sexuality, heterosexuality is the orientation of people who are otherwise compromised by any number and variety of moral failures.
We have our religious leaders who take upon themselves the burden of adjudicating the relative seriousness of various types of sin, but as a layperson, I’m glad it’s not for me to decide who– the advocate of the death penalty, the soldier, the banker, the high-salaried CEO, the heterosexual who occasionally looks at porn, the stealer of office supplies, the homosexual– is in the more or less serious state of sin.

“My dear madam!” huffed the gentleman. “This is an outrage!”
Another type of tantrum is to pick up the first hefty thing in sight and throw it against a wall, breaking the thing and damaging the wall.
“There is that deadly sin of anger!” observers will disapprove, quietly so the angry person won’t hear.
God’s purposes are never served by anger, we say. “Anger management” has become a common theme, as anger has always been a common phenomenon.
People often try to explain a tantrum away by explaining why they were so upset. It was just how they expressed it that was regrettable, but they were right to be angry, they suggest.
You can count to ten before you say something, or do something, but when you’re really mad, there’s no counting to ten because if you wait that long to react, people won’t appreciate how angry you are.
Never go to bed angry with your spouse, people say, but what’s the point of having a discussion in which you’re not going to prevail? Better to keep quiet and allow the anger to fade, because it isn’t always something that can be talked away.
Some people are just born angry. Someone can be having a decent day, but someone accidentally gets in his way at the grocery store, and, angrily, he says, “Excuse me!” and, as thoughts of revenge race through his mind, he looks fiercely back at the other person, who is baffled and scared, and simply wants to get away from this psycho who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, capable of who knows what.
Anger can be a bad thing that will ruin your day for no good reason. When that happens, obviously there’s a problem, and the person needs to learn to not think so much of himself and not take things so seriously.
But if someone steals your lunch out of the work refrigerator, of course you’ll be angry, because that’s not right, and the thief shouldn’t have done that, although it’s not likely to stop because the thief probably won’t be caught, and it’s probably not the case that the thief is a poor person temporarily in such straits that he needs to steal lunch, and when the thief’s situation improves, he’ll make up for it tenfold? Yeah… no. There are people who just like to steal lunches, and if you work with such a person, of course you get angry when your lunch is stolen.
The natural response to injustice is anger.
Jesus called James and John “sons of thunder.” I imagine they made a habit of expressing themselves forcefully. Paul routinely called his followers “fools” and addressed them in blistering terms.
Jesus too had angry words for his listeners.
God is repeatedly described as a God of anger and wrath.
A bird has to fly. A cloud has to rain. The Sun has to shine. The tide has to rise. A pot of water on a fire has to boil, and the way things are sometimes, for better or worse, try as hard as we can to avoid it, sometimes, a guy has to get angry.

Between the Stone Age and the 21st Century, where do the New Testament characters fit in?
These people seem incomprehensible. How could they not provide a physical description of Jesus?
Even Luke, after going over the whole story, through all the written accounts, didn’t. If only Theophilus would have said, “Be sure to include exactly what Jesus looked like– hair, eye color, nose, chin, all that.”
Instead, we have the bizarre world of renderings of Jesus we could call “Jesus Classic,” “Radical Jesus,” “Ethnic Jesus,” “Hippie Jesus.” There’s probably a Wall Street Jesus bobblehead out there. He could have been bald, and we can’t be sure John didn’t say, “Nobody cares about that stuff.”
I routinely wonder, what did the New Testament folk wear? How did they live? What did they eat?
Paul was a tent maker, he says. So he was like an REI employee? That doesn’t seem right.
James and John, Andrew and Peter: fishermen. How big were their boats? What kind of fish did they catch? Did they have a little shop where they shouted chants and threw fish to each other to the delight of the ladies? Doubt it.
The obvious facts of their lives are mysterious. Even more so, their writing.
Yet, theologians tell us how each of the four Gospels was carefully crafted for particular audiences with particular approaches to Judaism and religion that the writers had to work within so that the Gospel would be favorably received.
We have to figure, these were sophisticated people who could walk into our houses and, tidied up and given the right clothes, they’d have the computer booted up, heat up food in the microwave and be right at home, driving our minivans on the freeway, stereos blaring hip-hop, in no time.
Today’s Sunday readings include an excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. He mentions the peace of God that will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Peace has been on my mind this week, since the feast of St. Francis of Assisi was yesterday. That day always includes meditation on his famous prayer, which includes the petition, “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace,” which sounds nice, but it’s not so easy when one is engaged in hostile circumstances instigated by an antagonist who, naturally, needs to be confronted and opposed, so one stands up to him, words are exchanged, enmity is established, and some sort of truce is established. No instrument of peace was involved. Later, one repents, and wishes he had attempted to interact from the perspective of “Gospel values.” But that requires creativity, which is hard to muster in circumstances that, instinctively, crave boisterous histrionics.
To have peace in our hearts, then, is an ideal we are to pursue. But what did Paul (and Jesus) mean by that?
What they meant exactly, I daresay, is less important than how can we interpret that concept in a way meaningful to our modern take on the elements of a human person.
“Heart” is differentiated from “mind,” “body” and “soul.”
“Soul” is most useful as a literary device. If 35 people are killed in a bus crash, the sensitive journalist will write, “There were 35 souls aboard that bus.”
A body wracked with pain is a body in anguish, not a body at peace, but physical suffering is altogether different than emotional, mental, psychological pain. The mind can be at peace, though the body suffers.
So can the heart be at peace while the mind (and body) suffer.
While the mind is afflicted with doubts, the heart can remain in the right place, the heart that belongs to Jesus. That is the heart that responds to the Gospel, that, though the mind be distracted, and emotions run this way, that way, every which way, and the soul be troubled to the point of failing, the heart can remain the center of gravity, the faithful witness to one’s innermost wishes, desires, and intentions, and that constancy is peace.