For people who live in New York City, Times Square is a nightmare place, a hellish whirlpool of bodies, noise and capitalism. But this weekend I discovered something new and not awful there.
I did not expect that the first time I administered the sacrament of baptism would be at 2 a.m. in a hospital. And I could not have guessed it to have happened at the intersection of my vocations as both a Jesuit and a nurse.
The great Catholic irony is that the Mass—that ripe cadenced insane activity at the heart of the church—is weirdly, bizarrely, the right and fitting place to bring our concerns about the Mass itself.