Lost in My Mind
And finding something more
The following is an augmented transcription of a homily given on June 28th, 2026 at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Brooklyn Heights, NY. You can watch the homily here.
A Small Panic
There’s something I carry in my pocket that I’ve had since February of 2009—something that MacGyver seemed to always have in his.
My trusty Swiss Army knife. I remember exactly when I got it. It was February 13th, 2009, the day before my college friend Greg married his wife Melanie. I was in the wedding party, and he gifted all the groomsmen with a pocket knife. It’s been a trusted companion ever since.
I had a little panic moment this past week. As I was emptying my pockets onto the dresser, I realized the knife wasn’t there. What happened? Where did it go? I always have it on me, so I started retracing my steps, frantically calling the places where I was earlier in the day—did it fall out somewhere? It didn’t turn up.
There was a part of me that thought, it’s good to be detached. We all need detachment in our lives. So maybe this is just one of those moments—it’s just a pocket knife. I know it has sentimental value, I know it’s been with me for seventeen-plus years, but it’s okay. It’s just a knife.
Then, the next day, it came to me: I had thrown it in my backpack. There it was. Crisis averted. There is a God, after all!
But that little scare got me thinking about the whole experience of losing things—and the great joy of finding them again. We also know we can lose things and not get them back. We’ve all lost something important at some point and never recovered it. That’s true enough of material objects. But there are deeper things we can lose that don’t come back so easily.
The Hardest Loss
We think about people who lose loved ones—we’ve all known loss like that. But perhaps one of the hardest things to lose is memory itself—the ability to recall basic things that we have done.
We live in an age when more people are living longer, and more people are facing the trials of dementia and Alzheimer’s. I’d guess that nearly everyone reading this has walked through that with someone, in one way or another. I walked through it with my own father, who had an early-onset dementia at seventy-seven. And recently I reconnected with a good friend from my first parish assignment in Jamaica, Queens—a man I used to go on communion calls with—only to discover he now has dementia and needs to move into assisted living. He can’t remember what he did five minutes ago. It’s a painful, painful thing to witness.
It’s a strange disease, too. There’s a long-term memory that holds on—people can recall things from childhood, from years past—even as the last five minutes disappear. Yet we all know the trajectory only moves one direction. You don’t get your memory back.
Losing Life to Find It
I was thinking about all this in light of today’s Gospel, because I think the heart of the message is this paradox: those who find their life lose it, and those who lose their life find it. Jesus is always the master of paradox. You have to sit with his words, because they don’t make sense on the surface.
We’re all expected, in a way, to find our life—to figure out our purpose, to live fully. We have a responsibility to discover what we’re here for. And yet Jesus says: the moment you think you’ve found it, you lose it. So what is he getting at?
I think when we lose something essential to our very being, we discover something deeper about who we are and whose we are. When you lose your sense of control, your autonomy, you realize you’re at the mercy of the people around you—for better or worse. You have to lean on others, and trust that they’ll help you. That’s a big ask in a culture like ours. We’re about to celebrate Independence Day. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, capable of handling everything on our own. But when we lose even our ability to think clearly, it reveals something truer: we are intrinsically interconnected. No one does life alone.
For those of us caring for someone losing their memory, we lose something too. We lose the parent we knew, the way we used to rely on them, the way we expected them to act toward us. We lose all of that. And I think about that loss alongside Jesus’s hard words: whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
Loving the Presence, Not the Projection
That sounds harsh on its face. Why would Jesus want us to love our parents less? But maybe what he’s pointing to is how much of our love for our parents is tangled up with who we think they are—or who we want them to be, or who they used to be. We love the version of them we’ve constructed. And when they’re no longer that version, we pull back, we get frustrated, we grieve a person who’s still sitting right in front of us.
Maybe Jesus is not asking us to choose between loving our parents and children and loving him but simply asking us to love his presence in them—not our projection of who they are, what role we expect them to play, how we think they should behave. Is it possible to find the presence of Jesus in a parent who no longer thinks the way they used to, who’s losing their faculties to disease? It’s tough. A tough requirement. But somehow we come to realize that each person is present to us at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way—ultimately for our benefit although it may be hard to see in the moment.
Meeting Each Person for the First Time
Just yesterday, I was up in Queens, at the same parish, and I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen in years. She told me her husband had died from Alzheimer’s. She said, “You told me something ten years ago that I never forgot.” I did not know what she was referring to. She said: “You told me: when you see your husband, love him as if it’s the first time you’ve ever met him.”
I thought, that’s pretty good! But isn’t that really how we’re meant to show up in life? To meet each person as if for the first time, loving them with that same intentionality—because Jesus is ever ancient, ever new. Jesus is the past and the future, but most of all, Jesus is the present. How do we recognize the presence of Christ in the people around us today, especially the ones who don’t meet our expectations?
Finding Christ Where We Least Expect It
It can be genuinely difficult to find Christ in someone who is acting in a way we simply cannot find amenable—someone who is, frankly, hard to love in the moment. And yet, when we gaze at a crucifix, we don't look away from the ugliness and death on display there; we recognize that God is fully present even in that moment. This isn't permission to excuse bad behavior or to gloss over real harm with rose-colored glasses—it's something quieter: trusting that God gives us what we need, when we need it, and that grace often surprises us precisely where we least expect it.
That’s why I think prayer as attention is so fundamental. How do we actually pay attention to what’s happening around us—and to who is around us? It’s within that attention that we become capable of glimpsing something of the divine, even in people and circumstances that don’t look very godlike at all. It’s the same attention we bring to the liturgy, where, gathered around the altar, we gaze upon objects—bread, wine—that are more than what they appeared to be. What our eyes see reflects a beginning of knowledge, not an end.
When we can do that—when we can discover Christ’s presence rather than stop at our own projections—we realize we haven’t actually lost something. We’ve found something new to behold.
