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 […]
PEOPLE ARE DIFFICULT
MORNING LIGHT
Every once in a while I end up at some strange, random church and hear a homily that makes me sit up straight. The priest at the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Nogales, AZ, in the gentlest possibly way, pointed out that every one of us is exactly like Judas. How many times have we sold him out for thirty pieces of silver–or, for that matter, way less?…
ACTING AS IF
“Acting as if” doesn’t mean pretending everything’s “all right” and that we’re not in terrible pain; it means not transmitting our pain to, or blaming our pain on, others.
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 […]
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.”
G.K.CHESTERTON: I AM
Legend has it that around 1910, The Times posed the question to a selection of eminent writers and thinkers: “What’s Wong with the World?” “Dear Sirs,” G.K. Chesterton replied: “I am.”
THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF CONFORMISM
Graham’s thesis is that passively conventionally-minded are the largest group and the aggressively independent-minded (among whom he clearly counts himself) are the smallest.
We would probably all like to count ourselves among the independent-minded. But how deeply have the purportedly independent-minded in our culture truly thought?
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!
THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING
“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 is a saint’s task, clarifying a bit of the […]
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.”
MOTHER LOVE
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them,” observed Chesterton. “The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
Who better to restore that doctrine than women, who carry the evidence for miracles in our wombs?
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.”