That doesn’t mean you never say things with which people disagree. It means you don’t make a career, in or out of the Church, out of being a provocateur and a hater.
EXISTENTIAL CRISES
MARDI GRAS
I’m embarrassed to admit that my eating habits are truly abysmal. I eat standing up, hunched over the kitchen counter; or while wandering through the apartment doing ten other things; or bent over my laptop answering emails, reading the paper, watching movies, researching and/or writing.
FALLOUT: THE EVIL OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
When journalist John Hersey arrived in Japan, over a year after the dropping of the bombs, he was staggered by what he found. A mother who’d clung to her dead infant daughter until the body started to decompose. Human beings who had been vaporized, leaving only shadows on the ground or walls. Residents, desperate to rebuild, who were still coming across severed limbs and charred corpses.
PEACE! BE STILL!
Around 2:00, I glanced at my phone, noticed a Voicemail and saw the transcription: “I have your wallet at the giftshop at the church.” My wallet!
ON THE EXECUTION OF LISA MONTGOMERY
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: The world revolves; the Cross stands still. I don’t know Latin, but that’s the rough translation of the motto of the Carthusian order (Stat crux dum volvitur orbis). I’ve thought of it often these past weeks. Things are happening in our world, nation, state and city […]
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. But he’s often gentlest when we’ve been doing terrible violence to ourselves and others.
ÉLISABETH LESEUR ON GIVING LESS THAN WE EXPECT
“It is a source of pain and difficult sacrifice to have to divine one’s life so much and always to give to each one less than he or she expects.. This sometimes leads others to feel not enough is being done for them, and they perhaps experience some sadness or regret, which becomes painful to her who is the involuntary cause of it.”
RELIGION AROUND BILLIE HOLIDAY
Holiday was no poster child for political correctness. She frequently chose—in fact, sought out—men who abused her physically and emotionally. She was notoriously profligate with money, food, and space, sharing her apartment at times with pimps, prostitutes, addicts. Her fondest wish was to have kids, open a home for orphaned children, and have her own little supper club, maybe 200 seats, where she could feed people and sing.
Instead, she was “existentially correct”….
WONDER AND ENCHANTMENT
“Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us.”
–Robert Macfarlane, “Landmarks”
THE ONE ULTIMATELY IRRESISTIBLE PERSON
I think people who have not been huge desperate sinners perhaps don’t understand those of us who are drawn to Christ. Always I carry the wound of my sins. I have to believe, I do believe, I’ve been forgiven. It gives no glory to a Savior who came precisely to reconcile us to God in spite of the blackness of our consciences, to hold ourselves to a higher standard than he does.
THE FEMININE GENIUS OF OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: A few weeks ago, I attempted to make an appointment for an intake session with a therapist. My co-pay would be zero, I’ve never availed myself of such help, and especially after this past year of COVID, wildfires, political unrest, I thought—Why not? I had to […]
FR. ALFRED DELP’S ADVENT MEDITATIONS
“Unless a man has been shocked to the depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as at the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot possibly understand the full import of Advent.”
NOT GRITTING MY TEETH!
I keep thinking of Fr. Walter Ciszek, who said clandestine Masses in the woods, under penalty of death, as a prisoner in Siberia. “[T]hese men would actually fast all day long and do exhausting physical labor without a bite to eat since dinner the evening before, just to be able to receive the Holy Eucharist—that was how much the Sacrament meant to them in this otherwise God-forsaken place.”
GRIEVANCE VS GRATITUDE
“We are userers whenever we make demands upon others as a return for our actions or gifts; whenever we say or subtly feel that we are owed something or by life itself.”