I put everything that interests me to use, one way or the other: martyrs, cults, women’s tennis, Scottish otter keepers, heroin-addicted jazz singers, cloistered nuns, serial murderers.
TREE OF LIFE
“Ora et labora,” as the monks say: prayer and work. Thus, I do my own housework, happily (not that I’m great at it). I shouldn’t own more stuff or inhabit more space than I can comfortably keep clean and cared for. And for me, the filling of the birdfeeders, the replacing of the batteries in the string lights, the polishing, scrubbing, wiping down, re-arranging, neatening, are all part of some larger, beautiful purpose, of a gift that’s been given to me.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND FIRE
Anyway, then Jesus sees the disciples out on the sea toiling and without further ado, and no indication of how he got down from the mountain, “cometh unto them,” walking upon the sea. That’s weird enough, but what’s really weird is that “he would have passed by them.” WHY?
WASTEBASKET NOT, WANT NOT
Still, there was the matter of the old trash can, which technically still had quite a bit of life in it.
RUN AFTER THE STAR
The whole of the Advent and Christmas season is for me liminal time. The Divine Office, with Morning, Evening and sometimes Daytime Prayer; emerging from daily vigil Mass in the dark and walking home down the light-festooned streets…
THE LAST HOUR
I think many stop short at the brokenness, fallenness and failure of the Church (and how could it be otherwise, as the Church is comprised of us?) to live out the Gospel message. But I don’t see how anyone could go to Christ–to his heart, his life, teachings, death; the parables with their inexhaustible levels of meaning, and fail to be electrified.
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES
Sick members of the community are nursed and nourished; it’s as if trees, too, exist as part of a Mystical Body. So strong is the instinct toward collective health that a kind of equalizing principle is at work, whereby more robust trees work to strengthen the weak.
JOYOUS CHRISTMAS
Like the shepherds, who watched over their flock by night and were thus present to see a host of heavenly angels, I have kept watch this Advent, too.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
Am I the only one who gets ever-so-slightly OCD over string lights this time of year?
O ANTIPHONS AND MORE!
Here’s the obit for one Renay Mandel Corren who died December 15. It begins: “A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.” I hope I get such a full-bodied tribute when I keel over.
J’ACCUSE!: ON SNITCH CULTURE
It’s as if the secular culture, with neither God nor theology, has come up on its own with a twisted notion of the Fall whereby half of humanity is by its nature violent, greedy, hateful and irredeemable; and the other half is by its nature sinless, pure, gentle and blameless, and therefore needs no redeeming.
COME FLY AWAKE!
The Pharisees’ goal was to be “good,” correct. excellent. Christ’s goal was to come awake, in love.
THE FREE WORLD
“[Louis] Menand himself seems not much to admire any of them. Is he saying that, given an unlimited amount of freedom, this somewhat uninspiring group—the way he paints it, anyway—is the best that post-WWII Western civilization was been able to produce?”
THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS
“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make this horrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that somehow she is the body of Christ and that on this we are fed.”
–Flannery O’Connor