From a friend, last week, at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario: “The Loons and the Great Blue Heron have returned from the south. The maple sap has quit running and the maple trees are budding. Yesterday there was a work bee to take the leaves off the flower beds because the crocuses have just started […]
OUR COMMON HOME
MEDIOCRITY BARE OF PATHOS
“How difficult it is to recognize the self-revealing God! How difficult to steer clear of the scandal to the worldly sense of propriety and righteousness!”
NOAH’S ARK AT THE SKIRBALL
Some calamities consist in real-life storms. Then there are metaphorical storms in our lives. Where do we seek shelter, find home, seek the helpers?
THE PROBLEM WITH CONTRIVING TO BE CONTROVERSIAL
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.
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.
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.
HOBO FOR CHRIST
At first she stayed mostly with friends and, along the way, experienced unexpected healing. “My core wound is the belief that I have to earn love. But everywhere I went, people would say, ‘Don’t leave. Just move in.’ ‘You don’t have to earn love,’ the Lord was telling me. ‘You already are enough.’ ”
ROBERT MACFARLANE’S LOST WORDS
His capacity to conjure landscape is alone astounding. Add to that an astonishingly wide-ranging grasp of geography, geology, natural history, cartography, and literature. Throw in the fact that he’s no mere scholar or armchair philosopher: every book is grounded in his willingness to take on the physical hardship of mountain climbing, hiking, camping, sailing, and tramping. But what makes Macfarlane sublime is the aching longing for a lost Eden that sounds like a bass note beneath all his work.
HAPPY NEW YEAR: BIRDS, SPIRITUAL COMPANIONS, NEW LIFE
Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point Reserve, a mute swan, and saving lives for the New Year…
DESIRE PATHS: A GUEST POEM
“All conspiring without a plan,
unmapped siren channels
through a city at your feet. “
O HOLY NIGHT
Advent, as always, has been packed with emotion. I become over-excited, awaiting the birth of the Christ child so eagerly that my sleep is thrown off. With Daylight Savings Time, my circadian rhythm naturally leans more toward both early nights and early mornings. I love waking in the dark, lighting the beeswax candles, opening the […]
THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES
“You can picture the stage set: Christ, the Messiah, seated on top of the mountain: the crowds so far below they are literally at his feet. They have to crane their necks to see his face.”