It’s spring in Nevada And the benefits of my March cleanup efforts are everywhere I look. The ponds and streams constructed years ago now flow cleanly and powerfully. The roses are magnificent. I can recall so readily what this house looked like when we came here…can it possibly be seventeen years ago? There was nothing. […]
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We Do What We Can: Or Do We? These words sound weak: “we do what we can” in this culture of superlatives where someone is not just good but “amazing”, where a movie is not merely excellent but “awesome.” Recently, I spoke with a long time friend about why the phrase, “we do what we
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Death, Hope, Heaven, What are we here for, anyway? In my pre-Catholic ‘pagan’ years, I worried about death. Mostly because I feared standing before a God I did not think I believed in and explaining why I had wasted knowledge, understanding, and time. After twenty years as a Catholic, I would like to think that
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Your life is worth dying for… Exactly what are we worth? We usually think about our worth in dollars and cents. In terms of salaries, bonuses and raises. Each of us asks the question at least once, probably several times during the different phases of our lives: From the beginning of our careers and the
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King David, You, Me and Idleness It isn’t as if King David opened his eyes that morning, to ask, “What are the 3 most effective ways I can take this blessed God-Given-Life and invoke the worst conceivable miseries upon me and on everyone I love, am obligated to?” Or “How can I best take the
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Making an oratory of the heart… The phrase, “oratory of the heart,” is not common parlance. I first encountered it in Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God,. I had to stop and think about the word oratory. It’s not one we hear in daily conversations. Oratory is defined first as as eloquence in
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A joyous lent? It isn’t something you can understand easily. At least I can’t. That essential connection between joy and sorrow. The sorrowful agony of the man on the cross and the joy of the resurrection. I think it’s why we write poetry. Because the two emotions sound wholly opposed, as if they live in
If we are not frightened by brutality are not my words, instead, they are those of St. Augustine as he wrote about the serene, loving and Christlike words that poured from the mouth of the brutally tortured and dying martyr, St. Vincent during yet another of the successive regimes of persecution against Christians in the
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Last year, I selected one from a list of preset questions that comprise “author interviews”: “Do you view your writing as a spiritual practice?” Surprised at the question, I stared at the words for a while before realizing that yes, I did think of my writing as spiritual… even a spiritual practice. And wrote this
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A House in Haiti: A Counter-cultural Christmas Present “Wow…Really? It’s all paid? Someone in Haiti will get a house?” I was dumbfounded… I had emailed Food for the Poor because the money that had been debited from my account each month had stopped. I thought there was a glitch of some kind, it never occurred
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