I am a child of the Catholic church courtesy of my mother who took us to mass every Sunday and on holy days. I still have my St. Joseph’s missal, a battered, beaten book that guided me through the liturgical year, year after year. I was an altar boy in the days of the Latin mass which opened with “Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam" translated as " I will go into the altar of God: to God who gives joy to my youth.”

And I particularly enjoyed the gospels, because they were always stories. Little short ones. And those stories stuck with me, and I know the priest was usually trying to tell us what the gospel meant in his sermon, but I hardly listened because the sermons weren’t usually meant for small boys and they were hard to follow. But the little short story was easy to grasp, and I got to suss out the meaning of the stories all by myself. Probably not what they had in mind, but I was a literary child who liked to read, and I knew the stories were instructional.

Take the gospel of the Publican and Pharisee, Luke 18:10-14. I’m fairly certain this is where I got my distaste for public displays of religiosity or any other chest-beating behavior for that matter. The story seemed to say humility was and is the key. Try to be good, be good, but don’t go bragging about it. Just do it. And if that’s not what they wanted me to get out of the story, it’s probably a little late in life to hear it. So as we go forward, I’ll share a few more of my favorite gospel stories because it’s apparent to me as I go through this exercise that a large part of my approach to life was built on those little stories.

Part 11, Living in America, An Old Man’s Journey into His Pas