Back in my room, I gazed out at the stars. The older I get, the more keenly aware I am that our time on earth is finite. I’d stayed once before at New Camaldoli, many years before: would I pass this way again?
RIP MSGR. TERRY RICHEY, APOSTLE TO THE ADDICTED
Many of us are looking to be transformed in a certain way. It helped to hear that resurrection never looks anything like we think it’s going to.
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
We Catholics keep our decorations up till Epiphany (January 9th this year), I’ve learned (or depending on whom you consult, is it The Baptism, which this year falls the day after Epiphany (Jan. 10th), or is it January 5th which, counting December 25th, is the twelfth day of Christmas, or is it January 6, which is the day the three wise men are supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem)?
In short, just leave them up for now.
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY
Then I settled down to one of my favorite kind of afternoons: I started reading “Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania & Healing” by Horatio Clare. H, as his friends (and now, I) call him, wrote a stellar memoir about growing up on a Wales sheep farm called “Running for the Hills”, and has written a bunch of travel and landscape type books since. He’s also possibly an alcoholic, and possibly bipolar, and suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and really, really should not smoke pot.
NURSERY MAGIC: THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
“Real isn’t how you are made,’ ” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“AND THE BABY?”
From War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by journalist Chris Hedges : a story about new life and a lowly cow and an old man who sacrificed so that the light shine for someone else. A story, in other words, about Christmas: “I sat one afternoon with a Bosnain Serb couple, Rosa and […]
METANOIA
“Metanoia is a response to an invitation that focuses on God’s promise that something new is in the offing. It is an invitation to a conversion of mindset. It is so radical that we don’t have an English word capable of communicating it.”
“DRESS CODES” AT THE AUTRY
As Yves St. Laurent said, “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for in my clothes.”
SUMMON THE WHEAT
It’s good to give–but why is it so fiendishly difficult for some of us to receive: to impose, to “bother,” to make a pest of ourselves (or so we tell ourselves?)
RICHARD DIEBENKORN’S OCEAN PARK SERIES
Take, for example, Ocean Park No. 140 (1985). It may not be a landscape, but its two triangular swaths of gorgeous saturated color—dark green and deep blue—to my eye irresistibly evoke land, sea and sky.
THE FOLKS I DIG
I wasn’t hallucinating but it was kind of like when I used to drop acid back in high school–an altered state except not dark, not delusional. If only I could see through those eyes and feel that way all the time!
THE UNION OF THE HOLY SACRIFICE
That we should be counted worthy to receive the Eucharist — in any setting, under any circumstances — even once in our lives would be the summit of our existence.
HIRAETH
” ‘Hiraeth’ is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter, likens it to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness.”
THE ANXIETY OF THE JOYFUL MYSTERIES
God doesn’t will us to suffer anxiety but, given the human condition and the order of creation, we are bound to. Knowing that we are in solidarity with all the anxiety of the world doesn’t calm our nervous systems but it does allow us to offer our suffering to relieve someone else’s.