In my second-to-last year of seminary, I woke up one September morning to devastating news: two beloved classmates had died in a car crash. I was overwhelmed with grief and anger like I had never known. I entered therapy for the first time and had intense conversations with my spiritual director. For months I felt lost in a spiritual wilderness. But something unexpected happened: I encountered Christ there. The fear and sorrow didn't destroy me. In fact, that spiritual desert was a time of intense growth in faith.

Last year, my wife Maria and I heard the Lord call us to travel to each state's capital -- to pray in reparation for the sins of the nation against the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Church's clergy abuse. We answered the call and our adventure was incredible and continues to bear much fruit. In this 60 day pilgrimage, we learned many lessons including three major components: Fasting, Daily Mass and Prayer, by way of the Rosary, Adoration and spiritual reading/development.

I recently learned why zebras have stripes. Scientists used to think it was for camouflage, but new research suggests something more interesting: the stripes help zebras blend in with one another. When a predator looks at a herd, the overlapping stripes make it hard to single out one animal. But if a researcher spraypaints a dot on just one zebra, predators lock on it and eventually attack. The lesson? In the wild, blending in is protection. Standing out can be dangerous.

A priest I know was once falsely accused of a terrible crime. The claim was wild and easily disproved, but for a while, it didn't matter. In the atmosphere shaped by the abuse crisis of the early 2000s, the public assumption was guilty until proven innocent. His name was dragged through the mud, and his ministry placed on hold. I had the privilege - and the burden - of walking closely with him during that time.

He was angry. He was confused. He felt abandoned and deeply disoriented. The last thing on his mind was the words of Jesus in today's Gospel: "Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me ... Rejoice and be glad" (Matthew 5:11-12). Rejoice? He felt anything but.

To start this third installment of this article series on our parish vision statement, let me begin with bringing to attention two points from Scripture:

God desires every person to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth (1Tim2:4)

Every person was made by and for God, to have life to the full (Jn 10:10).

Last week, the first of this article series on our parish vision/mission statement: We exist to bring every person into intimacy with Christ, I wrote about how the first words of our vision/mission statement causes us to think about why we, and every person, exist. Which is to know and love God, who created us, in an intimate relationship. That truth echos our recent pope's call for the Church to return to our deepest identity -- as Pope Pius VI says, "The Church exists to evangelize".

Over the next several weeks I will be writing articles to explain our parish vision/mission statement: We exist to bring every person into intimacy with Christ. The purpose of the statement and the articles is to help better unite us as parish toward the same goal, a goal hopefully each one of you can agree with and will join actively in working towards it. I'll begin the series with the first two words: We exist.

When I was 22, I went on a pilgrimage to Rome for the Jubilee Year of 2000. I was traveling light with just a backpack, one blue shirt and black pants, little money, and no Italian. I had a few close friends and one goal: to reach the Eternal City. Despite the challenges and deprivations, I felt alive in a way I had never known before.

When do you feel most alive? I’d wager it’s not when you’re most comfortable or surrounded by stuff. Rather, it’s when your life is aimed at something great; when you’re on a meaningful and challenging journey with good friends.

When I was ten, my dad gathered our family around the table in small-town Vermont and told us we were moving to the big desert city of Phoenix, Arizona. We were leaving behind family, friends, and everything familiar. None of us knew what to expect.

But something beautiful happened. As we made the move together, our family grew closer. In retrospect, I'm amazed at my parents' courage to go on that adventure. Even as a kid I realized our family found, in that challenge, a deeper unity and mutual love.

A priest friend recently told me a remarkable story. One of his cousins reported having a vivid dream in which an angel told him the family needed to exhume their grandmother's body from a cemetery in New York and return it to her birthplace in Romania. She had been dead nearly ten years. As you might expect, the family thought it was, well, crazy. But astonishingly they exhumed her body. It was incorrupt, showing no signs of decomposition. That experience sparked healing, faith, and reconciliation throughout the family.

When I was 11, I was riding my bike on a Friday night in Scottsdale, Arizona. I saw giant spotlights swirling in the sky. Something amazing had to be happening. I pedaled after them with excitement. Sweaty and tired, I arrived, only to find a used car lot. Bright lights, flapping banners, inflatable balloon men swaying wildly in the wind. I stood there, heart sinking. All that spectacle, and all my effort … for this?

This week we hear that John the Baptist is out in the wilderness eating "locusts and wild honey" (Mark 1:6). It's not just a strange historical detail. It's a symbolic expression of a healthy spiritual diet. The path to Christ includes both the hard and the beautiful, the gritty and the sweet. We have to learn to gulp the locusts and savor the honey.

I remember working with a young couple preparing for marriage. They were sincere, but raw - barely beginning to discover faith. Part of me wanted to rush them ahead, to fill in all the gaps, to bombard them with scripture and church documents. I swallowed that instinct. It was like eating locusts.