Are you living your life or someone else’s? Ever asked yourself that question? Silly question? And thinking it impossible to live another’s life? Humor me. For just a few minutes, please. From childhood, we learn by mimicking, listening, reading, studying the words and actions of others. We learn too from experimenting with tools, ideas and attitudes: […]
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Child, have none told you? God is in your soul. That line, that stunning, arresting line is from a poem by Jessica Powers. Remember the Hallmark cards of a couple of decades ago? That is how I remembered Jessica Powers until today. August 18, the anniversary of her death in 1988. When I learned that Powers
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“Love: I know nothing about it.” My statement was in reply to a priest who had asked if anything was wrong. Mass had ended and there I sat, alone in the big, cold New England Catholic Church. Staring at the quintessence of agony: the crucified Christ. Instead of coming to console with words or presence,
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For converts like me, the story of the prodigal son evokes a tsunami of emotion: gratitude, relief, sorrow and recognition are only a few. But upon reflecting on the well-known parable that Jesus tells the complaining Pharisees and scribes, I began to think about the older brother with an entirely different lens. Rather than my
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Overcoming anger: the final spiritual struggle 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.
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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
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On this Feast of the Good Shepherd, I think of a hike I took up in the mountains behind our home here in the high desert about two years ago. The lone lamb suddenly appeared in the brush and then raced into the high desert running as fast as she could, both dogs close to
“You stupid, senseless Galations!” One of the last Divine Office readings before Ash Wednesday is from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galations. He minces no words and we can practically see the spittle collecting at the sides of his mouth as we read the Apostle’s exhortations. Paul is admonishing the new community of Galations in
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Once Peter has been handed the keys to the Kingdom, Jesus harshly-even cruelly, rebukes him for his most understandable response to hearing Christ predict his own horrific suffering, rejection, humiliation and execution. Mark writes that Peter “took him aside and began to rebuke him.” We infer that Peter took Jesus away from the other disciples
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Revolution. We think of uprisings, upheavals, often political like the American and French Revolutions. Of the earth’s rotation around the sun or of Mary’s reply to Elizabeth’s “And why am I so favored that the mother of our Lord should come to me?” Not so much. Or never. December twenty-first was the winter solstice- the
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