Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Linda Dakin-Grimm grew up Catholic, first in Riverside, then in Portland, Oregon. In college, she moved away from the faith, then became an attorney and for decades worked as a trial lawyer in high-stakes business litigation. She was partner in a prestigious firm, with offices in […]
EXISTENTIAL CRISES
WHAT WE’RE OBLIGATED TO SEE
I’ve been working on getting my next book, HARROWED: LIFE LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN, in publishable shape. And getting the dox together to apply for Irish citizenship. And writing my weekly column. And having many conversations per week with the many people of prayer, thought and heart who keep me afloat.
TIME TO THINK
Over the freakishly hot weekend, I enjoyed a couple of days indoors of reading, resting, pondering, and writing in my journal–and in the process learned some unsavory but nonetheless quite welcome things about myself!
ART WORTH DYING FOR: JAMES DICKSON INNES
Born in Llanelli, Innes studied at Carmarthen Art School and the Slade. A colleague there noted that he ‘was of middle height, black haired and thin featured, handsome to many people… there may have been something satanic in his look.”… He was already dying of tuberculosis, having been diagnosed at 21.
THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “If you invest in the marriage of the inner and outer worlds by putting honest energy into dreaming a dream on, all the people in your life, maybe the whole of humankind, is enriched, though it may not produce the result your ego was seeking. This […]
24 YEARS A CATHOLIC
In solitary confinement, in the labor camps, Fr. Ciszek learned at last what St. Thérèse of Lisieux did in her Carmelite cell: “Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day.”
I’M NOT A BRAND, I’M A FRAME!
I’ve been hard at work and have come up with a kind of frame to put around my work. More on this later, but for now I’ll just say the frame is called DESIRE LINES: Arts, Divine Intoxication. Faith. Above are my logo and banner! You’ll be seeing more of this in the coming week […]
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
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.
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.”