When I was 18 or 19, I lived in a small apartment in Toronto, Ontario. I was in my second year of seminary. My roommate and I didn't have laundry facilities in the building in which we lived so we had to walk a few blocks up the street to a laundromat. One evening, as I sat in the laundromat, a young man sat down beside me. He noticed what I was reading—a book that was on the required reading list for one of the courses I was taking. We started to talk and the conversation quickly turned to...

There was a time, long, long ago, when my brother and I would eagerly await the arrival of Fall and every train that rolled into our northern Ontario hometown. We knew that on one of those trains there would be wonderful gifts with our names on them. No socks, shirts or pajamas—at least not on the train. Fall meant that a box of apples and another one of pears from the farm of one of our uncles would surely be arriving any day. Fresh fruit was hard to get and expensive up north back then....

It came up again this morning during a Zoom meeting. It's one of those things we seem to want to avoid acknowledging. " Simon, Simon,...