A priest I know shares this story. Recently, on their priests’ retreat, the retreat director began his opening presentation with these words: we take for granted that most people are going to hell. Then he tried to ground this assertion by quoting Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad…
I generally try to be sensitive to using politically correct language, though sometimes that can be exasperating because of various hyper-sensitivities where people are too easily offended. Simply put, someone can take offense at almost any word. However, despite our occasional exasperation with those who are too easily offended, we must admit that in the…
Fifty-six years ago my father died, late on a December night. As clearly as I remember his death, I remember the bitter cold. Within a day the temperature dipped to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. I was still young; too young (I thought, at the time) to lose a father. Later, I’d realise I was wrong.…
Who are we really? Who are we when we are stripped naked in soul: stripped of ego, stripped of the image we have of ourselves, stripped of the hype, fads, and ideologies that we unconsciously inhale and which colour our thinking, stripped of the trauma we carry from our wounds, and stripped of our habitual…
We need to invite and challenge each other to what’s best and higher inside us, writes Fr Ron Rolheiser I grew up in a rural area where most everyone was either a first or second-generation immigrant. And most of us were just above the poverty line, struggling economically and struggling to speak English properly. And…
There’s a lyric in a song by Gordon Lightfoot which tries to interpret the struggle going on in the heart of Miguel de Cervantes’ mythical hero, Don Quixote. His goodness separates him from the world, even as he understands that wickedness has the same source, namely, that both “the wise and wicked feed upon life’s…
Sometimes it is hard to tell sickness from health. When we’re suffering, is it an indication that there’s something wrong with us or might it be that the suffering is the healthy result of living faithfully? When we are anxious, are we worrying God’s kingdom into birth or are we simply worrying ourselves to death?…
“We can end up as good people, no big betrayals, though no big self-sacrifices either,” writes Fr Ronald Rolheiser Thomas Merton once said that what he feared in his own life was not so much a massive betrayal of his vocation, but a series of “mini treasons” that lead to a different kind of death.…
During most of the two thousand years that Christianity has existed it has not been friends with science, and science has not been friends with it. From the Church condemning Galileo, to the Enlightenment thinkers declaring faith ‘a spent project’, science and Christian faith have been more foe than friend. Happily, this has changed. Today…
One of the saints who speaks to me is Thérèse of Lisieux, commonly known as the ‘Little Flower’. This wasn’t love at first sight. For years I was put off and left cold and uninterested by how her person and her image have become encrusted in an overly saccharine piety. She was too sweet, too…