On the evening of that first day of the week, when, for fear of the Jews, the doors were locked where the disciples were, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
—John 20:19

It wasn’t just Peter, of course. The others had also denied Jesus. When he asked them to stay awake with him and keep watch, they had slept. When he was arrested, they had fled. When he was condemned to death, they had kept their distance. And now he was dead. It was evening, and the doors were locked.

We Catholics take a lot for granted. Consider, for instance, the fact that our Church was founded by God.

Only four pages long, Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Flannery O’Connor’s shortest short story—a fragment, really, of an unfinished novel. The hero, sort of, is Walter Tilman, a twenty-eight-year-old bookish type, unmarried, living at home, without anything that might commonly be called ambition. He remains enigmatic, partly because we only see him through the disapproving eyes of his mother, to whom he’s a maddeningly incomprehensible cipher, “like an absorbent lump . . . taking everything in, giving nothing out.” But he pretty clearly fits the profile of one of O’Connor’s flawed Southern prophets—a more or less crazy outsider who turns out to be saner, in certain crucial ways, than all the normal, practical people around him.

At the start of the story, Walter’s father (“Tilman”) has had a stroke, and after a two-week hospital stay, it’s time to bring him home. On the way, riding in the ambulance, Mrs. Tilman studies her husband’s paralyzed face:

Something strange is happening; there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.
—from an ancient homily on Holy Saturday

Christmas Eve, like Holy Saturday, is a quiet day. Advent builds to a mighty crescendo, and then—a solemn pause. Exhausted with preparation, the Church comes to a standstill. She holds her breath, as it were, listening intently for that “tiny whispering sound,” the cry of a little baby (cf. 1 Kgs 19:12).

Ivan Ilyich saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic, “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

It’s short, and it’s all about death. Maybe that’s why we read it in high school.

Tolstoy’s classic novella about the slow, terminal decline of an ordinary, middle-aged lawyer continues to fascinate both young and old, though in different ways.

For love, thou know’st, is full of jealousy.
—Valentine, Two Gentlemen of Verona (II, 4, 837)

Jealousy, in whatever way it’s taken, arises from intensity of love.
—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (I-II, 28, 4)

In whatever way it’s taken. St. Thomas, then, was dealing with an ambiguous word. Even in Latin it had a slippery sound—zelus—and its ambiguity would later give rise to two closely related English derivatives: “zealous” and “jealous.” Originally, these meant much the same thing. As zeal was the passionate promotion, so jealousy was the passionate protection, of some beloved person or thing.

And Philip found Nathaniel, and told him, “We have discovered who it was Moses wrote of in his law, and the prophets too; it is Jesus the son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” When Nathaniel asked him, “Can anything that is good come from Nazareth?” Philip said, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathaniel coming towards him, and said of him, “Here comes one who belongs to the true Israel; there is no falsehood in him.” Nathaniel said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathaniel answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You shall see greater things than these.”
—John 1:45–50

In proclaiming this Gospel passage today, on the feast of the Apostle Bartholomew, the Church follows and endorses a long tradition according to which Bartholomew and the disciple here referred to as Nathaniel are actually the same person. There are many reasons for supposing that this tradition is sound.

In 1551 Saint Ignatius founded the Roman College, “a school of grammar, humanity, and Christian doctrine.” By the 1580s, this predecessor of today’s Gregorian University boasted some very illustrious professors—Suárez, Vásquez, and Saint Robert Bellarmine—as well as one very unusual student. At thirty-two, he was as old as some of his teachers, and, at six-and-a-half feet tall, he towered over nearly all his contemporaries, especially the thirteen-year-old boys with whom he attended Latin class. They would laugh at their gigantic, bearded classmate and say, Venisti tarde! “You’ve come late!” Of course, if they had known their friend had once been a battle-hardened soldier with a violent temper, they might have spoken more respectfully. As it was, they just got an affectionate smile.

Perhaps the most basic trait of a happy childhood is trust. An implicit, nearly absolute confidence in one’s parents is at the root of that carefree spirit which we typically associate with youth, and the betrayal of this confidence is a calamity of such profound and intimate consequence that, unless we have suffered it ourselves, we feel presumptuous commenting on it. Most of us, however, as we grow older and assume the burden of providing for ourselves and others, look back on our youth as a time of comparative ease; and we can even become desperate to recapture what Evelyn Waugh memorably described as its “languor”:

“Offer it up!” It’s not an expression we hear much anymore, but for a long time it was a commonplace among Irish grandmothers, much to the chagrin, perhaps, of their less stalwart progeny. It’s a distinctively Catholic saying—certain Protestants might almost call it heretical—and yet Catholics themselves are less and less able to understand, much less appreciate, its meaning. To most, it’s simply an exhortation to stoic resignation, a pious way of saying, “Stop complaining,” “Do your duty,” or “Accept your lot in life.” As such, it seems a somewhat ungracious response to another’s suffering, a poor substitute for sympathy. If we dig a little deeper, though, this old chestnut turns out to be a nexus of deep theological truths and, accordingly, a maxim of great spiritual profit.