Gilbert K. Chesterton once stated that Christianity is the only democracy where even the dead get to vote. In light of that, I share two stories. A psychologist at a conference I once attended shared this story. A woman came to see him in considerable distress. Her disquiet had to do with her last conversation…
Words give us meaning. We can’t make or remake reality, but the words we choose to name our reality can lift us out of the humdrum of everyday experience.
Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment – Thou shalt not commit adultery – and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth commandment – Thou shalt not kill! There’s a truth here worth examining. In the Catholicism I was raised there was…
There are different ways of being excluded in life. Earlier this year, one of my older brothers died. By every indication he had lived an exemplary life, one lived mainly for others. He died much loved by everyone who knew him. His was a life lived for family, Church, community and friends. Giving the homily…
In a book, The Book of Hope, which he co-authored with Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams makes this statement: Creating the human race may be the single biggest mistake evolution ever made.
Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, in describing the French mystic Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness. What is that? Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for moral affinity, that is, for a soulmate, for someone who meets us, understands, and…
Perhaps all of Jesus’ invitations to us can be summarised in one word, surrender. We need to surrender to love. But why is that difficult? Shouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world? Isn’t our deepest desire a longing to find love and surrender to it? True, our deepest longing is to surrender…
You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. No single line, outside of Scripture, has ever spoken to me as powerfully, as persistently, and as hauntingly, as that line from St Augustine. In essence, it’s Augustine’s life story – and the story of each of our…
The subtlety of hypocrisy! How easy it is not to see our own inconsistencies, even as we so clearly see the faults of others. Are we wilfully blind, or is it that we just don’t see? Is this a moral problem or a visual one? Consider these examples: In his travels, the 18th Century explorer,…
Someone once asked Thérèse of Lisieux if it was wrong to fall asleep while in prayer. Her answer: “Absolutely not. A little child is equally pleasing to her parents, awake or asleep – probably more when asleep!” That’s more than a warm, cute answer. There’s a wisdom in her reply that’s generally lost to us,…