My dog Shadow “When he looks at me, it feels as if he sees straight through to my soul.” The vet was commenting on my dog Shadow’s face like so many who can see the purity, wisdom and dignity of this beautiful animal who adopted us about 12 or 13 years ago. A gaze which […]
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Child, have none told you? God is in your soul. That line, that stunning, arresting line is from a poem by Jessica Powers. Remember the Hallmark cards of a couple of decades ago? That is how I remembered Jessica Powers until today. August 18, the anniversary of her death in 1988. When I learned that Powers
Child, have none told you? God is in your soul! Read More »
“When there is no food for three or four days, the children cry from the pain. So I make them mud cookies to fill up their stomachs.” The missionary priest, Monsignor Patrick Marron from Food for the Poor, quoted a woman living in a village of about two hundred people about 20 miles from Port
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For converts like me, the story of the prodigal son evokes a tsunami of emotion: gratitude, relief, sorrow and recognition are only a few. But upon reflecting on the well-known parable that Jesus tells the complaining Pharisees and scribes, I began to think about the older brother with an entirely different lens. Rather than my
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Walls of our unbelief: Edith Stein It was 1918. The young intellectual was nervous about her upcoming visit to Anne, the widow of Adolf Reinach, killed at the 1917 Battle of Flanders.How could she offer comfort?What could she say?Reinach had been a fellow scholar at the University of Freiberg, an assistant to the great philosopher,
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We use the word talent to connote skill or expertise. Often, we mean an individual with intrinsic aptitudes toward a thing, whether it be athletics or mathematics, someone with unusual ability. Frequently, organizational recruiters look for specific aptitudes in people considered potential employees. In our “flattened secularized culture” (I love this phrase used by Bishop
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In the physics of spirituality, it’s all paradox. St. Thomas Aquinas put down his pen, never to pick it up again, after four-thousand pages of his great work the Summa Theologica. He had reached question 99 when he quit. And when asked why, replied, “…‘All that I have written seems like so much straw compared to
On this Feast of the Good Shepherd, I think of a hike I took up in the mountains behind our home here in the high desert about two years ago. The lone lamb suddenly appeared in the brush and then raced into the high desert running as fast as she could, both dogs close to
“The prodigal son gospel reading is the perfect, ‘leticia’ for the fourth Sunday in Lent…leticia means joyous…we are happy because we’re now halfway through Lent,” the new Pastor, Fr. Jose Alberto Vasquez at St. Patrick’s Church in Arroyo Grande, California, claimed. Then he exclaimed that reconciliation is not about sin but forgiveness. Several times, he
“You stupid, senseless Galations!” One of the last Divine Office readings before Ash Wednesday is from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galations. He minces no words and we can practically see the spittle collecting at the sides of his mouth as we read the Apostle’s exhortations. Paul is admonishing the new community of Galations in
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