The Ambo: Homilies for the Faithful

by Deacon Rick Bauer I was baptized and confirmed in a nominally Catholic home. My dad’s 33-year career in the U.S. military and the diplomatic service led us overseas among many moves as our 6-child family grew up, spending years in Panama, Cuba, and Colombia. Despite a Jesuit education into high school, by the time we returned to Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s, I was a high school student growing rapidly disillusioned with my faith and with the Catholic Church. If you remember, the American Church was in what I now understand as its “post-Vatican II phase”, and our parish in suburban Washington, DC was particularly “loopy”; on one memorable Easter Sunday, the pastor drove a VW bug up the main aisle of the church, dressed in a bunny suit. By the time I was a cadet at West Point, I had come to describe myself as an agnostic, but perhaps more for the fact that I enjoyed sleeping in on Sunday mornings instead of attending mandatory religious services. The Church of Christ A ...

In the summer of 1893, a thirty-six year-old English professor at   Wellesley College in Massachusetts, had taken a train trip to   Colorado Springs , Colorado, to teach a short summer school session at   Colorado College . Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, and they found their way into a poem, including the   World's Fair   in Chicago, the "White City" with its promise of the future contained within its alabaster buildings; the wheat fields of America's heartland   Kansas , through which her train was riding on July 16; and the majestic view of the   Great Plains   from high atop Zebulon's   Pikes Peak . On the pinnacle of that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel in downtown Colorado Springs. The poem was initially published two years later in   The Congregationalist , to commemorate the Fourth of July. It quickl...