“Some things need to be said and said and said again until they don’t need to be said anymore.” Margaret Atwood wrote that. I quote it here because each year I write a column on suicide and mostly say the same thing each time because certain things need to be said repeatedly about suicide until…
Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay in a Church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay in a Church…
O God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water. We pray these words with sincerity. Do we ever really mean them? Can we honestly say that the heartaches that drive us to our knees are a longing to see God?…
“There is only one true sadness, not being a saint!” French novelist, philosopher, essayist, Leon Bloy ends his novel The Woman Who Was Poor with that much-quoted line. Here is a less known quote from Leon Bloy which helps us understand why there is such a sadness in not being saint. “Joy is a sure…
Several years ago, a colleague of mine suffered a crushing disappointment. Her instinctual temptation was towards anger, towards shutting a series of doors and withdrawing. Instead, wounded in spirit, she asked herself the question, “what is love asking of me now?” In answering that, she found that despite her every instinct to the contrary, love…
As a seminarian, I was privileged one summer to take a course from the renowned liturgist, Godfrey Diekmann. This was back in those heady days shortly after Vatican II when it was very much in fashion to frown on prescribed ritual prayers and write your own. This was particularly true for the Eucharist Prayer, the…
Home is more than a house or a place on a map. It’s a place in the heart, the place where you most want to be at the end of the day. The metaphorical idea of home can help us sort out many things, not least how sex connects to love. The soul, as we…
Often when listening to someone singing live or on television, I close my eyes to try to hear the song so as not to let the singer’s performance get in the way of the song. A song can be lost in its performance; indeed, the performance can take over so that the song is replaced…
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. We know this works for love. Does it also work for hatred? Can someone’s hatred follow us, even into eternity? Agnes doesn’t know what to do with that hatred, which dominates her world and…
Gloria Steinem once confessed that, while never having been overweight, she has always been concerned about her weight because the genes she inherited from her parents predisposed her in that direction. So, she says, “I think of myself as a fat woman who is slim at the moment”. Her comment helped me to understand something…