What do you call brothers who are born on the same day? Twins, of course. That is what we celebrate today in the inestimable saints, Peter and Paul. Wait: twins? Yes. The early Church believed that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome on the same day. Since the day of martyrdom is celebrated as a saints’ birth into eternal life, the result is striking: Peter and Paul are twins in God’s family, the Church.

It isn’t uncommon for me to get to the noon hour only to realize that I haven’t yet eaten anything that day.

It drives my husband crazy. He was raised by a bunch of Italian women, so he can’t help but think three meals ahead. And don’t get me wrong, I love food — I literally dream of donuts. But some days, I’m just so busy and I keep putting it off until I realize how weak I feel, how light-headed. And I think to myself: Stupid, you’ve done it again.

I am amazed at how my four siblings teach their many kids in age-appropriate ways. For example, now that my nephew Brandon is 24 years of age, they give him insights and freedoms that would have been positively confounding or even dangerous when he was a toddler. Imagine if they had taught him at age four how to drive a car, use a credit card online, or handle power tools. But eventually, they did, and he is a high functioning young man, I’m proud to say. They are good teachers.

I was a full-grown adult before I realized that Pentecost is known as “the birthday of the Church,” and it only resonated with me because someone showed up to a church function with cake and candles. Leave it to buttercream frosting to drive home a theological reality I had been missing for 25 years.

The famous 20th century St. Padre Pio said once that he would wait outside the gates of heaven until the people in his life had entered. I’m not sure that I, or frankly many people I know, would say that and mean it. Yet that is precisely the kind of attitude we see in Jesus as he prays for us in the Gospel today. Celebrating the Ascension of the Lord, we hear the Son of God at the Last Supper pray to his Father “that they may be brought to perfection as one” (John 17:23). What does this mean for us?