Under the Fir Tree

Let’s start with something plain: one priest can’t personally care for a parish of thousands any more than one schoolteacher can tutor every child in town. That’s not a criticism of priests. It’s just reality. A pastor today carries a full wagon. He celebrates Mass, hears confessions, prepares couples for marriage, baptizes babies, buries the dead, visits the sick, counsels the troubled, manages staff, handles buildings and budgets, sits through meetings, answers calls and emails, prepares homilies, and still has to pray, rest, and remain human. A man can do many things well, but he can’t multiply hours in a day. So when we expect one priest to provide deep, personal care to an entire parish, we’re asking arithmetic to perform a miracle. And arithmetic usually refuses. Jesus understood this. He didn’t try to personally maintain intimate relationships with every person in Israel. He invested deeply in a small number, formed them well, and sent them out. The early Church followed the sam...

John 13:17 You reach for your phone and scroll a little longer. You listen to a sermon, underline a verse, nod at the right moment. Something in you even says, Yes. That’s true. And then… nothing changes. Jesus once put it with disarming simplicity: “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” That line lands right in the gap most of us live in. Because knowing what’s right isn’t the same as doing what’s right. Awareness can feel like progress. Clarity can feel like maturity. But Jesus doesn’t attach blessedness to insight. He attaches it to obedience. Not the kind that’s flashy—just the next faithful step. And this isn’t just a “religious people” problem. It’s a human one. We all know the strange self-deception of being informed but unchanged. We can read, learn, agree, and still stay the same. We can have the right ideas and the same habits. We can be moved and still unmoved. But for Christians, the stakes get sharper. We’ve been given light not merely to admire it, bu...

I didn't expect to meet him again tonight. It was only a highway, only another small town in western Oregon—blink and you miss it, the kind of place where the mill once was the center. But as I drove past, the old sign with the town’s name flared in my headlights, and for a moment I was twenty-something again, a seminarian with a borrowed car and a worn breviary, sent here for a summer to “help the pastor.” In a town this small, every sorrow’s got an address, and the fields lean into the mist like parishioners who’ve run out of words. I went believing I was bringing something—maybe clarity, maybe courage, the right sentences, the clean procedure of something  I  had to offer. I didn’t yet know ministry isn’t a delivery. It’s a vigil. The pastor's voice from those decades ago echoed: “There’s a man who needs to talk. He doesn’t come around much. Why don’t you go?” So I went. He lived alone in a small house set back from the road, as though it'd taken one step away from the e...