When the Homily is about Immunology

With these hands

My dog really likes my hands - and most specifically my right hand. It's a funny thing to witness, because it almost seems that he interacts with my hand in the same way that my human loved ones interact with my face. He watches my hand, he nudges my hand, he licks my hand, etc. (okay, okay, my human loved one's don't usually do all this to my face - but you get the point!) If you think about it, it makes sense. Nearly every sort of "contact" he and I share involves my hand - whether that be petting, rough housing, or discipline. To him, my hands are the center of my being.

Not wholly untrue, I think. In some sense I am what I do. Or perhaps more accurately, I do what I am.

As I very weakly recall, in the movie "Witness" there is a scene where an Amish elder (a grandfather perhaps?) is speaking to the little boy who witnessed the murder. The old man is concerned about how the boy might have been affected by what he saw. At one point in the conversation the man askes the boy if he could ever kill someone. The boy responds that he could only ever kill a bad man. The elder then asks how the boy could ever know if a man is bad or not. Could he see into the depths of the man's heart? And the boy replies (my paraphrase): "No, but I can see what he does."

How long can you hide evil in your heart? I find, in my own life, that the evil bubbles out quite freely but that I do have a sort of choke valve that can stifle the flow in certain circumstances. But stick around me long enough and you will be able to see that I am unable to keep that valve closed all the time. I further find that the more I fill my heart with garbage, the harder it is to keep the valve closed. It becomes like a dam whose resevoir is overfilled. The goal, here though, is not to release the water and flood the valley, but rather to allow the prescriptions of the Church to evaporate it.

And my dog reminds me, that while I do not know sign language, my hands can none-the-less speak volumes.