Furthermore…

I heard the late Dr.  D. James Kennedy on the radio use a funny biker tale to make an instructive point to his congregation.

A peaceful old man riding a little put-put scooter was stopped at a red light. Up beside him pulled a big tough Hell’s Angel type on the biggest hawg they make. Chortling at the little man on his little conveyance, the badass pretended to be taken with the features of the little scooter and walked around it, looked it over, bent down to look at its workings, and asked the codger, “Fast?” 

 ”Fast enough” he replied.

I’ll show him ‘fast,’ he thought, and when the light changed he roared away, front wheel in the air. and got it up to 125 going out the flat road. His eye caught something coming in his mirror, a little speck coming like gangbusters. It was the little man and scooter, passing him like he was standing still and nearly going out of sight ahead. A moment later they came back, even faster, going back the other way. A third time he came at the Harley, this time hitting him with a terrible crash.

 The shaken brute crawled over to the horribly injured old man and asked him, “Old man, is there anything I can do for you?”

 ”Yes,” he said, unhook your suspenders from my handlebars!!”

Dr Kennedy observed that we can get caught up with the Devil this way, having a wild, exciting ride, but we will be headed for a  mortal crash.

Perplexed junior monk in monastery kitchen approaching his superior: “How do we cook canned ham?”

I got into the habit of adding a prayer to a saint or two in between decades of the rosary.  This originated with a set of audio cassettes on praying the rosary I got from a publisher with  ‘St Joseph’ in its name, and they put “St Joseph, pray for us” after each decade. Well, my list of saints began to grow, keeping the great St Joseph of course, and adding my favorite,  Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks. Then I added Saint Teresa of the Andes and Saint Alberto Hertado, whose biographies touched me when I saw them on EWTN. As others ‘joined’ my group, the brainstorm hit me to add those saints who have been important in my life, like St Boniface and St Thomas Aquinas, patrons of my schools. Then, the roll call becoming a bit unweildly, it hit me to organize them chronologically in the order in which they entered or influenced my life, with St William, my name saint, at the start, continuing with the roll call in the nice orderly sequence I found so easy to remember,  and which  reinforced my sense of being personally blessed and involved with the holy asemblage. Try it!

One boy to other as tough-looking priest enters Confessional to begin hearing Confessions:

“I hope he’s more merciful than he looks!”

I’ve gotten into an email correspondence with someone who loves Gospel music, on which I am fairly uninformed, but anyway I love the Hallelujah Chorus and got to wondering how it would sound  Gospel style. so I put it into Google and found references to a couple of performances along this line, but it didn’t show any evidence of recordings of these renditions being available*, so if any anyone has any comments on this subject, don’t hold back!

*I must admit I didn’t scrutinize all million Google hits.