I’m wrapping up a long weekend in Maryland, where my wife and I have been celebrating my in-laws’ 50th wedding anniversary; yesterday, there was a small mass for the family, with about 20 kinfolk — children, grandchildren, extended family — in attendance. Your Humble Blogger was deacon — preaching the homily and renewing their vows — and then there was a larger reception and dinner in the evening at a favorite Chinese restaurant. I’ll post more on that, along with my homily, when I return to New York.

But while I had a spare moment, I wanted to draw your attention to a very good post on a very good man: Tony Snow. It comes to us from Elizabeth Scalia, the Anchoress, who does a great service by reminding us of the generosity and decency that made Snow such a rarity in journalism and politics. (Tim Russert, I think, was cut from the same cloth). All you have to do is read Snow’s remarks at a college commencement:

To love is to place others before you and to make their needs your priority. Do it. When you put somebody else at the center of the frame, your entire world changes, and for the better. You begin to find your own place in the world. When you’re drawn into the lives of others, you enter their problems, their hopes, their dreams, their families. They whisk you down unimagined corridors, toward possibilities that had been hidden to you before. So resolve to do little things for others. You don’t know where they’re going to lead but then again, you don’t have any idea where your life is going to lead. When I was your age, I had long hair, a beard and thought of myself as a socialist. You are going to pinball all over the place, from experience to experience, job to job. And I want you to remember that you’ve got company. And that if you engage them with heart and mind, with faith and energy, you are going to find yourself on a cresting wave. It’ll carry you forward and it’ll push you under water from time to time. And some day in the dim and distant future, when you’re looking back at it, you’re not going to think about your car or your career or your gold watch. You’ll think about a chewed-up teddy bear you had as a baby or maybe your child’s smile on a special Christmas morning. The only things that are sure to endure are the artifacts of love. So go out and build as many as you can.

Beautiful words for a Sunday, they serve as a kind of homily, or even a benediction, for all of us. I’ll try to post more on Snow when I get home. (I remember swapping e-mails with The Anchoress when Snow left his White House job, and I expressed the hope that he’d write a book. I don’t know if he ever got to put more of his thoughts on paper or not.) Meantime, let us remember him and his grieving family in our prayers. He gave so much. But he was taken too soon.

UPDATE: There’s a poignant and deeply felt tribute to Tony Snow by William Kristol in the New York Times. You can read it right here. And Deacon Keith Fournier has a very good remembrance and appreciation of him over at Catholic Online. I was a little surprised to see Deacon Fournier mention Snow’s Catholicism. In all the items I read about Snow’s faith, and how his spirituality deepened after his cancer diagnosis, I never saw any mention of Catholicism. I didn’t even realize he was Catholic. Sunday morning, in fact, Brit Hume went on at great length describing a close relationship Snow had developed with a Protestant minister, and how that seemed to have helped him in his “relationship with Christ”; much was made of Tony Snow the Christian, but nothing was said about Tony Snow, the Catholic. That was in stark contrast to the tributes that poured in about Tim Russert, a man who seemed to have the Catholic Church (both with a big C) woven into his DNA.