My latest YT video, generated by a bout of acedia…the noonday demon…or was it just self-pity?…
HAPPY MONDAY!!
Category: EXISTENTIAL CRISES
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THINKING AS GOD DOES, NOT AS MAN DOES
This week’s Angelus column is about Mother Antonia Brenner (1926-2013), a Beverly Hills wife, mother and socialite who visited Tijuana’s notorious maximum security prison, chucked it all, moved into her own cell, and ministered to the prisoners for decades. In all that time, she summed up, “I’ve never had a moment of depression.”
If you’re anything like me, every once in a while, from out of nowhere, come the thoughts: What’s it all for? Have I ever really offered anything, sacrificed anything, meant anything? Is what I do just busy work, performed robotically simply so I don’t lose my mind?
Maybe fall more than any other season tends to bring such musings on.
Anyway, the other day I realized: You are thinking as man does, not as God does (Viz. Mt. 16:23, Mark 8:33).
Only humans, with our egos and desire to “make a mark,” are remotely concerned with such things. Look at God, who creates gazilions of flowers, trees, clouds, and people, none of which/whom are ever really seen or cherished or appreciated. I’m sure He appreciates all efforts on our own part to pitch in, help carry the load, persevere.
SUNSET IN TUCSON -
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: ROMANI GUARDINI’S “THE LORD’S PRAYER,” CONNEMARA, TRAGIC YOUNG DEATHS
God’s will, says Guardini, is what “by his decree should be accomplished in the world” — and that depends, absolutely, on our cooperation and consent to his grace. Read all about it in this week’s Angelus News.
Next Thursday I fly out to Dublin. Why? To host a MEMOIR WRITING WORKSHOP at Kylemore Abbey!
We’ve already calendared out next year for September 6-12, 2026, so put that in the hopper.
We had a death in the family this week, my 23-year-old grand-niece back in New Hampshire: car accident. Then–the chlldren in Minneapolis.
Makes you kind of want to hunker down.
Visit and subscribe to my Substack at DESIRE LINES: BOOKS, CULTURE, ART, for at least twice-weekly posts.
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 30, 2025
This week’s arts and culture column features a podcast (the only one I listen to, actually) I HIGHLY recommend: Haptic & Hue.
From the H & H website:
Haptic & Hue explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.
All of humanity, not only women. This is a quality offering, and the people who make it do the world a great service.
Other news: The entire month of May in Tucson has been heaven. Temps haven’t yet soared to the uncomfortable 100-degree plus range. I spend each early monring on my front patio enjoying my aviary. A pesky ground squiirrel has teken up residence under an adcaent shed and keeps trying to dig a burrow in the back yard which I just know would extend underneath the house. Let’s just say I am an a first-name basis with several of the personnel at Termagon.
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: BLESSED TRIDUUM 2025
Greetings, all.
This week’s Angelus News column is a reflection about sitting with Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane.
It begins with a quote from Albert Camus: “When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane.”
—from “The Myth of Sisyphus”
After Easter, I hope to start working up a new Writing Workshop format and setting some dates.
Wishing you all a rich, blessed, profound Triduum.
Meanwhile, I urge you to subscribe–which you can do FOR FREE if you wish–to my new Substack, which is essentially the blog you’re used to reading here.
As always, a thousand thanks for any and all support.
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER APRIL 11, 2025
Greetings. I hope everyone had a good week.
This week’s Angelus News column features Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, patroness of ‘people without categories’ and a fantastic (and eccentric) French laywoman who lived among and cared for the poor. She also wrote many books, most notably The Joy of Believing.
Other exciting happenings: the people next door have decided to build an “ADU” (I call them ICUs–what’s wrong with the lovely phrase guest house?) Whatever you want to call it, the construction will take place about fifty feet from my office. I have already befriended the workers and learned the estimated completion time is three months which really doesn’t sound that bad. Plus, having attained a new level of maturity during Lent, I am not allowing the prospect of noise from 6:30 am to 3 each day to rattle me one bit!
From Father Donald Haggerty’s new book, The Hour of Testing: “As a consecrated woman wrote to my once, her suffering had become for her ‘almost like a precious royal garment that is given to me to wear–and it’s an honor to do so–but which actually does not belong to me.’”
In that case–happy to lend it out!
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AGATA IZABELA BREWER’S “THE HUNGER BOOK: A MEMOIR FROM COMMUNIIST POLAND”
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Lent is upon us. Pray, fast, and give alms, saith the Lord.
Apropos of fasting, I recently read a food-based memoir that is about very much more than food.
Agata lzabela Brewer, author of “The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland” (Mad Creek Books, $24.95), grew up in Lviv during the 1980s with a terrifying, unstable, alcoholic mother and a little brother whom she adored and protected.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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ME–SELFISH!?
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Recently someone with whom I’m walking the path of recovery chided me for being selfish. She thought I should offer myself for a certain kind of service that, at this point in my life, work, and Benedictine oblateship, I feel is beyond me.
“This isn’t just about you and your self-transformation,” she said. “It’s about passing what we have on to others.”
My first reaction was an inward, “Excuse me? My whole LIFE is a service!” The prayer, the books, the talks, the columns, the 15 years of blog posts, the endless correspondence, the travel, the countless “favors,” the hours spent in recovery circles, both giving and receiving. In fact, in the recent past, I’d faithfully shown up in service to her for an hour each week for more than a period of two years!
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE
“Listen to him,” says the Father at Christ’s Transfiguration, mirroring Mary’s injunction to the wedding guests at Cana.
Boy, do I like to do the opposite, endlessly nattering on, sharing my projects and plans, presenting my well-reasoned Pharisaical defenses of the faith to Christ–Christ!
This morning I was reflecting that Jesus suffered on the cross, and continues to suffer, so that the gate may remain open a crack–the narrow gate that few will enter because I, for one, so mightily resist dying to myself, taking the last place, surrendering completely…
Anyway, here’s a video I worked up yesterday in a burst of enthusiasm…
Flannery O’Connor’s stories, like the parables of Christ, open up many more questions than tney answer.
This is a reflection on one of my all-time favorites: “Good Country People.”
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GOD AND MAMMON
The other day I had an online conversation with a young seminarian, studying here in the States, who comes from Nigeria and hopes to have his writing published. He’s about to become a deacon and if all goes well, will be ordained next year.
He’s not been home for four years, an ache.
“We read of what’s going on there for Catholics,” I said. “That is so hard, and so sad!“
“The new statistics came out this morning. I can’t even look at them,” he replied.
(As of a year ago, 62,000 Nigerian Christians had been murdered since 2000).
“A friend of my brother, also a priest, was recently found dead, executed, in his car. To be a priest in Nigeria means the willingness to be a martyr.”
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THE THORN IN OUR SIDE
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
The older I get, the more deeply I ponder the axiom that there’s a little bit of bad in the best of us, and a little bit of good in the worst of us.
That we can exercise incredible nobility of spirit in one area — and incredible sloth, or blindness, or pride, or ongoing compulsive behavior, in another — is an ongoing mystery.
I think of Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose lifelong addiction to nicotine led to the emphysema that killed him. Married for 53 years to the faithful Lois, a union that by all accounts bore abundant fruit, Bill nevertheless had a complicated emotional life that included deep relationships, at the very least emotional, with at least two other women.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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MY FORAY INTO GPTCHAT
JUST FOR THE RECORD, I BASICALLY CONSIDER AI THE ANTI-CHRIST.
From what I can discern, it seems to have been developed, and is marketed, by people who are vehemently anti-human. I know many consider it the greatest “advancement” ever, but I can’t share that enthusiasm. It has already invaded, or tried to, our laptops and phones, whether we want it to or not, whether we’ve asked for it or not. That alone strikes me as deeply ominous. Anyway, here’s the back-and-forth that ensued from dipping my toe in.
You said:
Jesus Christ is my Lord and Redeemer. Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Redeemer?
ChatGPT said:
I respect your faith and beliefs. If Jesus Christ is your Lord and Redeemer, that is deeply meaningful to you. My role is to support and engage in thoughtful discussions on faith, theology, and spirituality in a way that respects all perspectives. If you’d like to share more about your beliefs or discuss something related, I’m here to listen!
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ONE PEOPLE, ONE LANGUAGE: PLEASE!!
Is not the below scenario as contemporary as can be?
“Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. 2 It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and [c]settled there. 3 They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. 4 They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
–Genesis 11:1-9
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LET NOT OUR HOPE BE PUT TO SHAME: THE 2025 WILDFIRES
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of the spiritual classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” wrote:
“Dostoevsky said once, ‘There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
Catholicism is tailor-made to make us worthy of our suffering: past, present, and future. Whether our transmission just went out, or our house just burned down, we’ve been welcomed into and united with the suffering of Christ, which is to say the suffering at the heart of all mankind: the lame, the blind, the leper, the poor in spirit.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.