Once I was invited to a group meeting with Pope Francis. Entering the room, I paused, eyeing the seats next to the Pope’s fancy chair. Someone saw my paralysis and invited me to sit in the seat farthest from what I wanted. Hiding my disappointment, I sat. We waited. To our surprise, an aid pointed out that those seats were still empty and invited me and another to have them. We calmly but gleefully strode across the room and sat. Pope Francis entered, and we enjoyed two hours of amazingly uplifting conversation.

I’ve been hiking Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona most of my life. It is a vigorous forty-five minutes to the top. Near the peak, the end suddenly appears much further away, and steeper. At that moment, a descending hiker often offers encouragement: “Keep going! The peak is right there. It’s not as far as it looks. You can do it!” It usually works. After another five minute push, you summit and enjoy a glorious panorama of the Sonoran Desert in the Valley of the Sun.

During my baseball career, my best coach often said, “You shouldn’t be worried if I yell at you. Be worried if I don’t. If I stop pushing you, it means I don’t think you have any more potential.” He demanded a lot, and I knew it meant he saw that I could be something special on the baseball field.

Last summer I was at the National Eucharistic Congress when Fr. Mike Schmitz delivered an impassioned call to repentance in his keynote address during an evening revival session. The crowd received his message with great enthusiasm. Their applause and the cheers shook the Lucas Oil Stadium.

The next night, Sr. Josephine Garrett took the stage and, in her address, got into the nitty-gritty of what it means to be a disciple, what it means to live repentance — or, as she so beautifully put it, to embrace the hunger. And in doing so, she called back to the previous night’s thunderous approval of Fr. Mike’s message.

It’s 9:08 on a Saturday morning, and I am too darn busy for confession. I’ve probably written before about how hard I find it to get to confession — I say ‘probably’ because I really can’t remember. I whine about it so frequently that it’s hard to tell if I’ve made it the subject of a written piece or if it is simply an oft-recited refrain from the Litany of Colleen’s Perpetual Complaints.

Once I went to a hospice facility to celebrate Last Rites for an elderly dying man. His family had told me that he had been uncommunicative for days. At the conclusion of the ritual, we began to recite the Our Father prayer. To everyone’s surprise, his lips moved, clearly mouthing the words to the Lord’s prayer. Stripped of most of his faculties, the man could still pray those precious God-given petitions. A lifetime of prayer had planted the words even deeper than his failing consciousness.

One of my close friends is a hermit priest who lives on a desert mountain. Recently I found myself in a group conversation about him. One vehemently objected, “What does he do up there all day? Nothing! Priests are down here working, running parishes, making a difference, and he…he is doing nothing! What a waste.” The words dripped with indignation and resentment. Most of the group quietly nodded in silent agreement. Were they correct?

I used to be a bad neighbor. I’d get wrapped up in my life and ignore those around me. Then I found sage advice from Benjamin Franklin to this effect: to be a better neighbor, ask someone to do a favor for you. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? Tell strangers that I need their help? Yuck. I’ll risk looking needy. Worse, I’ll be indebted to them. But I tried it, and it works like a charm. Recently I asked my neighbor Alan for a hacksaw, and Inga for an egg. They kindly obliged, and our friendship is growing.

Before I embarked on my trip to the National Eucharistic Congress last summer with a group from my archdiocese, we had an orientation meeting. At that meeting, the coordinator of the trip shared with us “The Five Rules of Pilgrimage.”

If you’re not familiar with them (I wasn’t), here they are:

1. Don’t complain.
2. Don’t complain. (It’s so important, it’s listed twice.)
3. When you see a bathroom, use it.
4. When someone offers you something, receive it.
5. When someone asks you for something, give it.

What do you call brothers who are born on the same day? Twins, of course. That is what we celebrate today in the inestimable saints, Peter and Paul. Wait: twins? Yes. The early Church believed that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome on the same day. Since the day of martyrdom is celebrated as a saints’ birth into eternal life, the result is striking: Peter and Paul are twins in God’s family, the Church.

It isn’t uncommon for me to get to the noon hour only to realize that I haven’t yet eaten anything that day.

It drives my husband crazy. He was raised by a bunch of Italian women, so he can’t help but think three meals ahead. And don’t get me wrong, I love food — I literally dream of donuts. But some days, I’m just so busy and I keep putting it off until I realize how weak I feel, how light-headed. And I think to myself: Stupid, you’ve done it again.

I am amazed at how my four siblings teach their many kids in age-appropriate ways. For example, now that my nephew Brandon is 24 years of age, they give him insights and freedoms that would have been positively confounding or even dangerous when he was a toddler. Imagine if they had taught him at age four how to drive a car, use a credit card online, or handle power tools. But eventually, they did, and he is a high functioning young man, I’m proud to say. They are good teachers.

I was a full-grown adult before I realized that Pentecost is known as “the birthday of the Church,” and it only resonated with me because someone showed up to a church function with cake and candles. Leave it to buttercream frosting to drive home a theological reality I had been missing for 25 years.

The famous 20th century St. Padre Pio said once that he would wait outside the gates of heaven until the people in his life had entered. I’m not sure that I, or frankly many people I know, would say that and mean it. Yet that is precisely the kind of attitude we see in Jesus as he prays for us in the Gospel today. Celebrating the Ascension of the Lord, we hear the Son of God at the Last Supper pray to his Father “that they may be brought to perfection as one” (John 17:23). What does this mean for us?