Blog
June 29, 2014
I was reminded yesterday of the meaning of the word martyr. I needed the reminder on the Solemnity of The Feast Of Peter and Paul because the meaning of martyr, for me, has devolved to mean dying for God. Perhaps for you too, the word martyr has been perverted by teen-aged boys and girls with suicide vests who agree to blow themselves up…along with as many infidels as possible, for God. But the priest reminds us that these two men: Peter and Paul were not out to die; quite the contrary, they were living to give witness to what each […]
June 17, 2014
I had been to this church in November of 2009 while in Texas to research my recently published novel; I am back to Texas to do early promotions for the book in Austin and Houston. Five years ago the parishioners in Austin were raising money to build their beautiful church and were holding Mass in an auditorium; I enjoyed the Mass but do not recall much about the liturgy or the homily. Perhaps because of the light- filled brand new St Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in northeast Austin, I am still reflecting on the homily preached by Fr. […]
June 5, 2014
Orioles and Eden Each morning, very early, I walk to the 3 areas where the Bullock Orioles dine on their meals of oranges, and a mixture of meal-worms and grape jelly. Always, I hear the staccato like chatter as they wait for their breakfast in the trees in our gardens…it is not chirping, the sound is unique to these birds. And always, I smile because I feel privileged- honored, really- that these splendid creatures come here and trust they will find the nutrition they need to nurture themselves and the babies they fly thousands of miles to have here in […]
May 18, 2014
Due to major changes in my personal and professional life, I now have more free time…more time to write, pray, ponder, read, exercise-one, all or none of these. I should be more grateful than I am and there should be more to show for this first full week of my new business arrangements. But I have written next to nothing this week nor have I done much of anything else. My new large chunks of unstructured time make me uneasy as has always been the case in my life. And the current lack of deadlines in my life result in […]
April 15, 2014
It’s been a little over a month since I lost my best friend- a Doberman named Ally. And this is the 4th post I have written in my attempts to come to grips with the loss of this remarkable creature with whom I was graced for a little over 7 years. Over 3000 words before I felt that the tribute had been written. As I write about what I have learned, I think of one of my many teachers, CS Lewis, when he talked about experience: ‘But we learn, by the awful grace of God, we learn,’ because that’s what […]
April 3, 2014
My friend Rachel’s dog Houdini died Remember the song from Annie, I Don’t Need Anything But You“: ‘Yesterday was plain awful and Daddy Warbucks sings back: ‘You can say that again’ and she does? It’s been 3 weeks tonight since I saw my Dobie boy drop dead and I really thought I had accepted that he was gone…could focus on the joy this boy brought into our then 4 creature family-the great memories of long hikes in the mountains behind our house with my 2 four footed boys, being ever so grateful that his heart did not stop out there in the wilderness where […]
March 27, 2014
When Christ meets her, she’d had 5 husbands and is currently living with a man to whom she is not married. But in the eastern Catholic Church, she became St. Fantine…Fantine, the mother of Cosette in Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s tragic story we know because of the splendid-at times celestial- music from the Broadway play and the recent film. We are taught that the Gospel is the living Word…despite all the iterations of translations through the centuries, that truth becomes evident to me with a March 9th homily on the conversation in the Gospel of John which should never have […]
March 22, 2014
Grief, sorrow, loss- Is There a purpose in them? Deeply aware that I am writing of one of life’s deepest mysteries- the suffering we face from the death of those we love- a suffering from grief, sorrow and loss which none of us escapes, I write this morning anyway. And I am more than aware that for many of us, this was ‘just a dog’. After all, we simply turn on the news to hear the plight of thousands…perhaps millions of souls as they battle with the loss of children, spouse, entire families in this beleaguered journey we each travel…alone; […]
January 24, 2014
I don’t know what I expected from this movie- I thought I knew but didn’t. Sure we can expect violence and death; after all, it is called Lone Survivor. I did not read the book but have spoken with several people who did-apparently everything is based on actual events. It’s been a few weeks since we went to see this movie but I decided to write about it because of the 2 portrayals that I continue to think about all these weeks later. The first is about rules of engagement. Most of us know what that phrase means, intellectually. While […]
January 11, 2014
One of the many reasons I remain a Benedictine Oblate is the promise we make each day to read, study and ponder the words of the Daily Office. Known as the Breviary, there was a time that the Office was accessible only to priests. Somewhere around or after Vatican ll, that prohibition was lifted. Only upon reflecting upon a sermon by a saint I have never heard of-Saint Maximus, Bishop of Turin, did I stop to consider why the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus ends the season of Christmas in the Christian liturgy. Maximus writes in the Second Reading […]
October 12, 2013
Cheap grace: sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But even a cursory reading of Diedrich Bonhoeffer reveals it’s itchy truth. Germany: the land of Luther, Wagner, Nietzche, Hitler, Rahner, and Ratzinger. The list combines the very noblest and the most bestial of the minds and hearts of man. And there was also a man called Bonhoeffer. I have read occasional meditations by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and found them intriguing but it was not until I began to read Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas that I began to grasp the power and the far reach of yet another great theological mind […]
October 10, 2013
Eerily reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, absent Hal, Gravity places two American astronauts alone in the vast, black, void of outer space. I saw the movie last week but keep drifting back to the film and the stunning cinematography which transports the willing viewer to a place of pure silence, isolation; the abyss. With its stark absence of dialogue, and its placement of the man and the woman as the paradox of humanity: fragile and vulnerable yet with a spark of the divine, Gravity manages a strange combination of the very […]
August 28, 2016
We use the word talent to connote skill or expertise. Often, we mean an individual with intrinsic aptitudes toward a thing, whether it be athletics or mathematics, someone with unusual ability. Frequently, organizational recruiters look for specific aptitudes in people considered potential employees. In our “flattened secularized culture” (I love this phrase used by Bishop Robert Barron in his Word on Fire series) however, we perceive these capacities as our own, as our property to do with as we wish. Rarely do we see these capabilities as gifts, on loan. But yesterday’s Gospel parable about talents confounds our twenty-first- century […]
December 25, 2016
It was 1918. The young intellectual was nervous about her upcoming visit to Anne, the widow of Adolf Reinach, killed at the 1917 Battle of Flanders. How could she offer comfort? What could she say? Reinach had been a fellow scholar at the University of Freiberg, an assistant to the great philosopher, the ‘master’ Edmond Husserl. She had been attracted to the Christian faith of her colleague: His goodness and kindness radiated through his person, vitalized his teaching of the opaque philosophy of Husserl. The Christian conversion of Edmond and his physicist wife Anne had nonplussed Edith Stein who had ‘stopped […]
January 22, 2017
We feel it everywhere: Anger. Whether a seething whisper or bellowing roar, resentment, anger, even rage, feels like the fuel of this brand new year as the second decade of the twenty-first century heads south. The source is anyone’s claim. An endless laundry list of injustice, victims and causes. Here in what is arguably the safest country in the world. Here in a country where close to twenty percent of the population receive free food, where the government spends more money on its citizens than does any other country. Millions of Americans believe it’s not enough. Remember that axiom, “May you […]
March 5, 2017
“If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society… It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.” Although Newman wrote these words over a century ago, their wisdom […]