Do you want to hear a story?  My sister has a little dog named Glenda.  She is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, a pit bull the color of honey.  Glenda is the luckiest, happiest dog in the world.  She has three beds to sleep in, each one with a pillow.  She gets presents for Christmas and her birthday.  My sister talks to Glenda as if she were a child, and refers to the dog as “mother’s lamb.”  Glenda gets love and attention from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to sleep in one of her three beds.

If I were a lazy preacher, and you all were an ordinary congregation, we could wrap up this homily quite quickly.  I could say, “Thomas doubted and made Jesus mad; then Thomas believed and made Jesus happy. Doubting is bad; believing is good.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  And then you all could reward my laziness by thinking to yourselves, “Well, that was useless, but at least it didn’t take very long,” and then we could get on with the rest of Mass.