By the end of the war, 90% of the children Irena Sendler had saved were dead. Trying to locate the parents of the survivors — most of whom had also died — was another herculean task.
EXISTENTIAL CRISES
EMPTINESS
“The hardest cross to bear in life is the thought that we are wasting our time, that we are useless, that the world is rushing along and we, apparently, have not yet found our feet. For the missioner the monotony of merely marking time, of facing petty tasks, or even manufacturing small jobs to kill […]
FROM PRODIGAL TO PRIEST
So he did what any true child of God and follower of Christ would do. He called his mother, back home in Spain, and poured out his heart.
BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT
I brought up the Gospel reading where the waves were threatening to overwhelm the boat the disciples were in, and Jesus’s response was to curl up and take a nap.
THE DAY BEFORE THE LAST SUPPER
It might be a nice reflection for Holy Week: to imagine Jesus taking one last walk.
KATHERINE BOO’S BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Boo is firmly enshrined in my personal communion of saints, a subset of which is “Writers Who Are Catholic Without Being Catholic.” Would that more of us wrote with her curiosity, excellence, intelligence, willingness to suffer, and heart.
THE ORCHARDS OF PERSEVERANCE
In the silence and solitude, stripped of their previous lives, many of the men underwent a kind of disintegration of personality. The realization that they weren’t who they thought they were could be profoundly unsettling.
MONSIGNOR LORENZO ALBACETE’S CRY OF THE HEART
When we cease to be shocked by the suffering of either ourselves or our neighbors, we become protagonists in an ongoing drama. We’re no longer bots in a humorless, culturally programmed wasteland. We become free.
LET’S BUILD A BOOTH
And in giving my all—the giving itself at the urge and under the aegis of a power infinitely greater than myself—I entered for a time into that cloud that covered Jesus on Mount Tabor.
AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM
A work of art, Perl insists, is “an imaginative achievement to which the audience freely responds.”
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
Arthur Birling crows: “Makes all the difference in the world whether we said it in private or it becomes a public scandal.”
“The girl’s dead and we all helped to kill her,” Eric rejoins bitterly. “That’s all that matters.”
DR. MICHAEL JAMES SULLIVAN, GOD’S ANESTHESIOLOGIST
If he could give one piece of advice to any physician, it would be to develop the skill of “empathetic listening.”
THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL
St. Paul fell off his horse, but Christ comes in the form of a lamb, a dove, a heron. That’s not to say he’s always gentle.