Category: DIVINE INTOXICATION

  • THREE GREAT CALIFORNIA MEMOIRS AND A BLESSED ADVENT

    THREE GREAT CALIFORNIA MEMOIRS AND A BLESSED ADVENT

    Blessed Advent to all!

    In this week’s Angelus News column, I consider three great California memoirs: God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, by Victoria Sweet, MD; Dear Los Angeles: The City In Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018, edited by David Kipen: and Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.

    So many memoirs, so little time…I’ve already got the draft of a column called “Three MORE Great California Memoirs.”

    Meanwhile, I came across this essay from a book of Christmas readings that’s on my list to read and feature in 2026. “The Dangers of Advent,” by J.B. Phillips, the essay’s called, and the blurb runs: “No amount of familiarity with the trappings of Christmas should blind us to its quiet but explosive significance.” Check it out.

    I’m off to NYC December 22 for a week. This will be the second year in a row I’m on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for Christmas and I just may make it an annual ritual. Cannot wait to walk the frosty streets, see the lights, and mingle with the world’s hoi polloi as we await, whether we know/recognize it or not, the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

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  • GARDENS OF EARTHLY DELIGHT

    GARDENS OF EARTHLY DELIGHT

    Churches and gardens are one way to order travel. I visited lots of both during a recent trip to Ireland, then NYC.

    This and the three below are of the Victorian Walled Garden at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, Ireland.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 8, 2025: AGAINST EASE, SUMMER IN THE DESERT, AND IRELAND AHEAD

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 8, 2025: AGAINST EASE, SUMMER IN THE DESERT, AND IRELAND AHEAD

    This week’s Angelus News column is called “Against Ease” (or was, before they changed the title to “How Much Failure and Suffering Must One Endure for a Good Life”).

    Anyway, as Flannery O’Connor observed: “We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we allow ourselves to be.”

    Here in the Sonoran Desert, the high yesterday was 113. The whole last two weeks it’s been well above 100 every day. The effect is kind of like an extended snow day back East. You’re excused from just about all activity. Noon Mass is fun cause the thermometer in the car will say like 121 degrees when you come out afterwards and till the A/C kicks in you have to handle the steering wheel like a hot potato.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 6, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 6, 2025

    My Angelus arts and culture column this week is on one of my (many) soul-mates: the very strange Hans Christian Andersen:

    The truly brutal summer heat hasn’t yet quite kicked in here in the Sonoran Desert…though my front yard is overgrown with trees and agaves and is actually cooler than outside the “enclosure” as I’ve come to think of it, leading my monastic little life as I do.

    I’ve taken to having my morning prayer outside, on the glider, with my candle and incense, accompanied by the dawn chorus of my beloved birds. There are a pair of resident cardinals, tons of mourning doves, house finches, goldfinches, and white-throated sparrows, I spotted a vermilion flycatcher in the back yard last week–oh, hummingbirds, of course–and a Gila woodpecker (these also abound, very comforting to hear them hammering away at the telephone pole) recently performed his ablutions in the birdbath…

    Anyway, this, to me, is the “abundance” and “prosperity” people natter on about.

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  • ASH WEDNESDAY

    ASH WEDNESDAY

    Our FAVORITE liturgical season is upon us!

    As a friend said yesterday, “Advent always ends way too early, and Lent always seems to go on forever”…

    Here’s a little video I worked up about one intention I mean to set for the next seven weeks: setting a guard over my mouth…asking God to keep watch at the door of my lips…

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  • WHEN HAS CATHOLICISM NOT BEEN “WEIRD”?

    WHEN HAS CATHOLICISM NOT BEEN “WEIRD”?

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    “Let’s make Catholicism weird again,” is the cri du jour (cry of the day) of today’s “influencer” crowd. Again? When has it not been weird?

    For starters, we have a Savior who speaks in parables, who commands us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and who then hangs suffering and silent, nailed to the cross. Can anyone possibly imagine Jesus trying to “curate an image,” or taking a selfie, or impugning his integrity trying to be popular or “trending” or cool?

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    ART IS FOR INCREASING LIFE

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    From a recent essay in “Salmagundi,” a literary journal published at Skidmore College, titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art,” by William Deresiewicz: 

    “Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for — why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life?… Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves. … Art is one of the only times when life is anything like being in love. Attention, intensity. …”

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • AND IN THE MORNING YOU WILL SEE HIS GLORY…

    AND IN THE MORNING YOU WILL SEE HIS GLORY…

    Blessed Christmas Eve!

    I am safely arrived and settled in NYC for a couple of weeks.

    Sunday, flight day, and Monday were the coldest days of the year to date. My bizarre faux-Cossack hat and super duper Arctic-worthy coat stood me in excellent stead! Yesterday I braved the cold and like a good tourist, made my way just for the heck of it (though had a goal in mind which was this Prints and Textiles exhibit at the NY Public Library) from 61st and Lex down Fifth Avenue to 42nd Street. HORDES of people. At the library, HORDES of people. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I stopped in a for a blessed respite, HORDES of people.

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  • DEAR MAKER OF THE STARRY SKIES

    DEAR MAKER OF THE STARRY SKIES

    First line of another great old-timey hymn…

    We sang it here at St. Andrew’s Abbey the other day at Mass…

    Blessed Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

    I make my final promises as a Benedicine Oblate at today’s Mass. They give you a piece of “parchment” and you hand-write out the pertinent passage of the oblation–“I offer myself to almighty God, through the Blessed Virgin Mary and our Holy Father Benedict…and I do promise before God and all his saints the reformation of my life, and the service of God and humanity…This I do on the 12th day of December, in the year of our Lord, 2024″…

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  • FESTIVAL OF BROKEN NEEDLES

    FESTIVAL OF BROKEN NEEDLES

    I am so not one of those people who sit around decrying the commercialism of Christmas. If buying gifts for your friends and family seems wrong or obligatory or like an empty gesture to you, or wasteful, or over-the-top, or show-offy and competitive or like a weaponized version of love, don’t do it.

    I don’t–but I also don’t begrudge or much pay attention to what anyone else does.

    My old friend from Maine sends me a Gustave Baumann calendar each year: I send her a book. I contribute to a few of my favorite charities. I hand-address and hand-write a message and send out Christmas cards. And I deck out my living space with old cards I’ve saved often for years, vintage mercury bulbs, Advent calendars, string lights and candles.

    But mostly for me Christmas is about the mystery, the liturgy, the Sacraments. I love switching out my Ordinary Time Weeks 18-34 breviary, which I bought used decades ago and is swathed in dark green imitation plastic, for the Advent and Christmas season one, bound in dark blue leather.

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  • EGG BLOOM

    EGG BLOOM

    I know I mentioned that in a recent week of house-sitting in LA. one of my chores was feeding and watering three chickens.

    I may have also mentioned the conversation that ensued between me and my friend Patrick as I contemplated the prospect.

    “Patrick: So will they wake you in the morning with their crowing?

    Me: Um…I think that’s guys. Aren’t chickens female? Yeah, they have to be, cause they lay eggs. I don’t think they make noise.

    P: But how do they lay eggs without a male?

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  • HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING

    HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING

    Friday, November 22, was the feast day of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. (Unbeknownst to my brother Joe, who heads up a punk bank, I have assigned her as HIS patron saint as well).

    A virgin martyr, she suffered one of those grisly deaths beloved (in memory) by us Catholics.

    This deeply moving statue of her is housed at the St. Cecilia Basilica in Rome.

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  • “LUMEN” AT THE GETTY

    “LUMEN” AT THE GETTY

    Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

    Run, don’t walk, to “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light” at the Getty through Dec. 8. You could easily spend the whole day contemplating this beautifully curated, fascinatingly thought-provoking exhibit.  

    “Lumen” is part of the “PST ART: Art and Science Collide” series currently mounted at various sites around LA. Special installations by Pasadena-based Helen Pashgian and Charles Ross, both artists who explore light and space, extend “Lumen” throughout the museum. 

    An essay entitled “A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects” sets the tone:

    “To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity.” 

    READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

  • PERSONAL COST

    PERSONAL COST

    “For it is always true that God never invites us closer to himself unless this invitation comes with a personal cost.”
    –Fr. Donald Haggerty, Contemplative Enigmas

    Just thinking to check in, after twelve or so days in LA, each packed to the gills with people, walking, talking, eating, prayer…

    I will head up to one of my brothers in the high desert up the I-15 tomorrow, and then leave early Thursday for the long drive home badk to Tucson.

    Where do we come from? Where are we going? Where do we belong? How can we best serve?

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