I was reading at a Starbucks on the northeast side of Colorado Springs one morning last month when a teenage couple walked into the cafe. The girl was pulling a large suitcase and was wearing a baggy beige Cabela’s sweatshirt with pictures of deer and oversized grey sweatpants. The boy was similarly unkempt, wearing jeans three sizes too big and a dark, zip-up hoodie with pictures of marijuana leaves down the sleeves. His black hat was pulled low across his forehead so that his eyes disappeared behind the bill. The girl ordered and they went onto the patio to smoke as they drank, leaving the suitcase inside.

Let me just get this out of the way:  the band Black Sabbath is not for everyone.  If their choice of band name is not enough to turn off good and proper people, the anecdotes of their excessive living are sufficiently dissuasive.  It is an infamy that stems, in large part, from their lead singer Ozzy Osbourne who, for those of my generation, was the subject of playground legend for biting off the head of a live bat during a concert in 1982 (which is not fiction, by the way).

This month marks the eight-year anniversary of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter, “Laudato Si’” (On Care for Our Common Home).  When it was initially published in May 2015, it received both praise and criticism from Catholics and non-Catholics alike.  In a somewhat less politically polarized world than the one we are living in today, Francis’ plea for environmental consciousness and care became linked with partisanism.  Progressive, non-Catholics for whom much of the Church’s moral teaching is objectionable, nonetheless praised the letter, while some conservative Catholics took exception, mostly to what were regarded as critiques of capitalism. 

On one of those cold, gray afternoons this past February, I ran into a friend at a coffee shop who greeted me with a warning of her sour mood and explained that she was tired of the gloom.  It was the perfect word for those weeks leading up to Lent.  The darkness and cold of the season seeps into our collective psyche and a pervasive gloom seems to settle into our daily lives.

One Christmas day, 15 years ago, I sat next to my wife’s grandmother, Marie Vigil, at a family gathering as my kids and their cousins tore through presents with delight and awe.  She watched her family with a smile, laughing occasionally at a child’s outburst of joy and parents’ attempt to maintain order.