Foot-washer

January 24, 2021 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012421.cfm   If you ever visit the city of Venice in Italy, you will see a peculiar sight.     Flying  from flag poles all over the city, is a red and yellow flag with a huge image of a winged lion holding a book in its paw.     As it turns out, this is the flag of Veneto, the province that Venice is in.       The lion represents St. Mark, the evangelist who wrote the second Gospel.  You see, twelve hundred years ago, a group of clever and crafty Venetians travelled to Alexandria in Egypt.  Once there, they stole the body of St. Mark and snuck his remains away in a barrel covered in produce and took him back to Venice.  Then the Doge of Venice built a giant, glorious basilica called, of course, “St Mark’s” with an altar over his remains, and the city has showed off their great Christian pedigree by flying their St. Mark flag everywhere.  And they told the Egyptians, “we’re not giving you your saint back.”     I realize that I am i

January 3, 2021 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/010321.cfm Happy Epiphany and a continued Merry Christmas as we celebrate the   10 th   Day of Christmas.     And Happy New Year, to boot. If you have ever been down to 4 th  Street Live you may have noticed a peculiar historical maker on the street out front.  It chronicles one of the most famous ‘epiphanies’ in modern times. A 43 year old monk named Thomas Merton who lived in the Abbey of Gethsemane near Bardstown was visiting Louisville in 1958.  4 th  Street was bustling then as now.  He wrote:    “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness ... [I felt such a sense of relief and joy] that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of bein