The empty sanctuary of ordinary time. The churches were glorious during this Christmas season. For more than twenty days, the poinsettias stayed vibrant, and outside Saint Matthew’s Church in San Antonio, the soaring tribute to the Triune God became, literally, a tower of light. Now, emptied of Christmas decorations, the empty sanctuaries are stark. The […]
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On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death By contemplating the beauty and use of each thing, [a man] is filled with love for the Creator. He surveys all visible things: the sky, the sun, moon, stars and clouds, rain, snow and hail … the four-legged animals, the wild beasts and animals and reptiles, all the
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Christmas Wake-Up Call: Stoning, Massacre and a Trump PS on Becket Wake-up call? Why do we need a Christmas wake-up call? Consider that for much of the world, Christmas starts right after Thanksgiving. Christmas music plays everywhere, shopping ads begin and the Christmas trees go up. Weeks later, when Christmas Day finally dawns, the excitement’s
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The blood of the church: love Just as the human heart must have blood to maintain life, so must the church have love to live. The metaphors are not mine but Madeleine Debrel’s, Venerable Madeleine Debrel. The blood of the church: love. She was a poet, this French mystic who poured out her life for
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Feast of Christ the King of the Universe: The Holiness of Ordinary People Just a few moments of reflection about the state of the world in 1925 compels us to stop. And think very hard about the inspiration which led Pope Pius Xl to proclaim the Sunday ending the liturgical year in the Christian liturgy as the
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Remember the wife of Lot El Greco’s painting soberly adorns the cover of this month’s Magnificat. The artist placed the Lord’s left hand upon the globe of the earth, while Jesus’ right hand is raised in a calculated gesture. What kept me mesmerized by this painting, though, was the light. The sole source of light
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Pope John Paul In Arguing With the Pope, journalist Barbara Harrison wrote about Pope John Paul’s trip to Denver in August of 1993. He was there because it was the eighth World Youth Day. I remember little more than my complete sense of bafflement as I read her piece. How could this man evoke the thunderous adulation and
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Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect It’s a heck of a phrase, isn’t it? The adjectives strung together are strident and wholly negative modifiers of—the intellect. Huh? In our knowledge-obsessed twenty-first century, the statement, Curbing the Aggressive, Capricious, Untrustworthy Intellect sounds like heresy. Unless we stop, really HALT. And think about the amount of words we read, hear, and
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In the Belly of the Whale: Jonah, The Reluctant Prophet. We’ve all been there. Alone. In the dark. Terrified. In the belly of the whale: Jonah, the reluctant prophet. Just four chapters long, the book of Jonah seems at first to be just another fantastic Bible story. Surely a wild tale, of course it’s allegory, right? And
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Photo Courtesy Mont Saint Michel Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael The stunning image is of Mont Saint Michel Abbey in Normandy, France, takes me back to a journey there before my conversion. That trip comes to mind because after my friend and I climbed the 350 steps to enter into the Abbey, we’d no idea
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