SEPTEMBER 1, 2026 DEACON MIKE WALSH
So, today we come together in thanksgiving, and one of our sponsors is a person who’s turning 100 years old. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment, achievement, a milestone.
I did a little research on this actually, I kept calling this, when you become 100, you’re a ‘centurion’, but I think that’s from the Bible, right? Maybe it’s a centenarian. And, did you know, it’s the fastest-growing demographic in Canada?
So, people are living longer and they have much to share, and as I was reflecting on someone who’s turning 100, just imagine what this person has witnessed during this lifetime. How much the world has changed.
She would have lived through the Great Depression, and any of us who know people, like my parents, this person would be my parents’ age, who lived through the Great Depression, you know that that had a “transforminal,” imprint on their lives as they lived with true austerity.
And then World War II, almost everyone knew the loss of someone through that war, whether it was just someone close to them or in their own family, and the reality of unexpected death through things like tuberculosis, we don’t hear about that much today, but back then it was a true reality, or a child who dies very young. Again, it happens today, but then it was a regular occurrence.
She would have witnessed the arrival of television, the space age, she would have seen those things, and then a whole bunch of things perhaps that she she’s not all that familiar with, like the computer, the internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence.
She would have remembered things like ration books. Now, I’m old enough to remember this one, party line telephones. Where you had to remember which ring was yours, right? Or if you really wanted to, you could listen in on the neighbours.
She might have remembered horses working on farms, and one of the things that occurred to me. She would have remembered a time when you built a house and the porch was in the front.
We just did a tour of where my family’s from, Stratford, Ontario. These big, old, beautiful houses with these big front porches, and what happened around the end of the Second World War, the world went from being a front porch oriented society, that is that’s where the kids played, to a backyard oriented society. So, she would have witnessed that.
She’d see today something where we can carry all of the world’s information in our pocket, but she might ask “Are we any more at peace because of it?”
But perhaps the greatest change is not technology, I’d like to argue that the greatest change that Pearl would have witnessed in her hundred years is childhood, the experience of childhood.
So, when she was a child she would have learned to respect her parents, obviously, honour her elders, family mattered. It was extremely difficult, life. As I mentioned earlier, people died unexpectedly. There were certainly hardships. Children learned resilience, because they could not avoid disappointment. It was right there for them, but they had this strong faith foundation on which to deal with it. At least they understood some of it, or they were surrounded by people with that foundation.
As she would have grown to become a parent herself, she would have tried to pass these things on to her own children, to work hard, tell the truth, keep their promises, and most likely, she had passed on that strong faith foundation.
But as she watches her grandchildren, and now perhaps, many great-grandchildren, grow up, she’ll see that it’s quite different.
I came across this phrase, I really like it. Childhood today, children often experience smartphones before bicycles. Something to think about. Social media before they have the mature judgment to deal with it, and this unlimited information, but very little wisdom.
And perhaps the greatest difference between childhood over this century, they hear adult fears long before they have an adult perspective. They hear about wars and climate change, pandemics, violence, economic uncertainty, but they have not yet developed the wisdom to interpret these things.
And at the same time, many of them grow up without the great stories of our scripture that once formed generations of Christians. They’ve grown up without the creation story, without Abraham, without the knowledge of the incarnation, that is the non-commercial version of Christmas, without the Good Shepherd, without The Sermon on the Mount, without the cross, and perhaps, most tragically, without the Easter story.
So, the result is, in many ways, they are a fear-filled generation.
And how has this happened? Well, Paul explains it in our first reading. He says this so brilliantly. He says that we, the ones who follow Jesus Christ, we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God.
And the Gospel really goes very well with the first reading. We see Jesus casting out the demon. Paul explains that, how he does it, because he has the spirit that is from God.
But he doesn’t just cast out the spirit, he reveals the truth, and the Holy Spirit teaches us that truth. The wisdom of the world changes all the time, but the wisdom of God never changes, and the world tells us who we should become, but the Holy Spirit reminds us of who we already are.
Whenever I read one of these stories about Jesus or the disciples casting out demons, it would seem like there were demons on every corner. We don’t have that today. So, where have all the demons gone? Have they disappeared?
Father Ron Rolheiser offers this insight. I think it really captures it. Father Ron says, “The greatest trick of the devil is not to make us evil, but to make us believe that God is not good or that we cannot trust Him.”
You see the devil is much more clever than we give him credit for, right? And he’s much quieter, but he casts into our hearts this doubt that God is not good and we cannot trust him, and just think about that. If we stop trusting God, everything else begins to unravel. Faith weakens, hope fades, and the lie becomes stronger than the truth, and we live in fear.
I’ll offer you this one piece of advice that I’ve been thinking about for a long time and I have shared it before. That if you can only teach your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren one thing, it is this foundational truth, this is the truth on which all of the other things that we learn as a follower of Jesus Christ is based, and here it is, that you are the beloved child of a loving God.
You know, before your first report card, before your first success, your first failure, before anyone applauded you or criticized you, you already belonged to God, and with that foundation we can teach our story.
See, Jesus does not simply cast out the demons. He exposes the lie, he reveals the reality, and later in John’s Gospel he tells us this. He says that “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Notice he simply does not teach the truth. He is the truth and everything begins with that.
So, when we teach our children that they are the beloved child of a loving God, it means they can go forward in times of great suffering, and when we discovered the one who said these words that “I am the truth, the way,” and the life,” we also discover he is the one who leads us home.
This allows us to truly go in peace, free from fear, and to glorify the Lord by our own lives, sharing with everyone that we meet this greatest truth, that we are the beloved children of a loving God.
