There are advantages to living in a house that’s been divided into eight apartments. If I croak alone in my kitchen, I’m not going to lie there till mummification sets in. If I didn’t show up for a day or two, someone would definitely notice.
EXISTENTIAL CRISES
TO MAKE ONESELF NEW
“We see this spiritual dissonance everywhere today—grounded in hearts made for God, yet lived out by wills ordered only to themselves. It is part of the great secularizing sickness of our times. It is part of the dread we might feel, even if we are afraid to acknowledge it. It is the fear that wakens us at night, the vision of inauthenticity, of prevarication, of a selfishness that cannot be a part of the new kingdom of heaven.”–Fr. Aelred Niespolo, OSB
GRATITUDE VERSUS COMPLAINING
The thing about complaining is generally other people don’t have the same complaints as you. They have other things–their own things–to worry about, and they’re having the graciousness not to impose them on you.
THE SCAPEGOAT
My take on the current cultural imposition of a kind of martial law as to how we’re to speak, act, and think.
Let’s not forget that another name for Satan is the Accuser. And I hope everyone’s read Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
STILL FULL OF SAP, STILL GREEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. I am not going gently into that good night JUST YET.
ÉLISABETH LESEUR: THE THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX FOR MARRIED WOMEN
Servant of God Élisabeth Leseur has been called the Thérèse of Lisieux for married women. Her husband was a crabby atheist.
USE LESS, SHARE MORE
“[M]ost of the want and suffering we see in our world today originates not from earth’s inability to provide but from our own inability to share….It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many of us are left with almost nothing.”
From award-winning geobiologist Hope Moore’s “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here.”
USE ME
Robert Macfarlane, author of “Mountains of the Mind,” observes that continued agitation excites the climber, the huntsman, the gambler, the warrior. I’d like to add the writer to that list.
INCLINE THE EAR OF THY HEART
Join the Portsmouth Institute’s Virtual Summer Conference on Saturday, June 20. The Conference takes as its theme “Incline the Ear of Thy Heart: Rediscovering the Virtues and Practices of the Christian Life.” I’ll be speaking on the subject of “Pilgrimage.”
OUR NATION’S SACRED PROMISE
Conversion of heart around racial injustice encompasses a wide spread. Here’s a recent sentencing update of Liz McAlister, 80, the oldest of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
G.K. CHESTERTON ON THE COLOR WHITE
wrote G.K. Chesterton: “God paints in many colours; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”
DARK WOOD TO WHITE ROSE
Helen M. Luke’s “Dark Wood to White Rose” is a Jungian-Christian take on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
VANITY FAIR: HOLLYWOOD CALLING
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Remember the carefree days when we could leave our homes, gather in public places maskless, and take in a museum exhibit of a Sunday afternoon? I did that, way back on February 23. It was right after the Annenberg Space for Photography mounted a presentation, now […]