“To tell someone, with fullness of heart, ‘I love you’, is virtually the same as saying, ‘You shall never die.’ Twentieth century philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote those words and they echo words written 500 years earlier by Blessed Magdalen Panattieri, a Dominican Tertiary, who wrote to a friend, “I could not be happy in heaven…

“No man is an island.” John Donne wrote those words four centuries ago and they are as true now as they were then, except we don’t believe them anymore. Today more and more of us are beginning to define our nuclear families and our carefully chosen circle of friends precisely as a self-sufficient island, and…

Let the preacher say, you have permission to be sad! In a book, When the Bartender Dims the Lights, Ron Evans writes: “There’s a line I came upon in the musings of a preacher: On a Sunday morning many of the people sitting before you are the walking wounded, and you need to give them…

In the summer of 1854, US President Franklin Pierce sent Isaac Stevens to be governor of Washington Territory, a tract of land controlled by the federal government. Governor Stevens called for a meeting of Native chiefs to discuss the tension between the US government and the Natives. One of the tribes, the Yakima, was stubbornly…

As a child, I was taught that I had a guardian angel, a real angel given me by God to accompany me everywhere and protect me from danger. I remember a pious holy card given to me by my mother, showing a young boy playing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff and an…

In Walker Percy’s 1971 novel, Love Among the Ruins, his central character is a psychiatrist named Tom More. Dr More is a Catholic who is no longer practicing his faith, albeit he still believes. This is how he describes his situation: “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music…

We need to pray even when that seems the most lifeless thing to do. That’s a counsel from Michael J. Buckley with which we need to challenge ourselves daily. In the face of real life, prayer can often seem like the most lifeless thing to do. What difference does prayer make? I will pray for…

Twenty years ago this week, struggling to digest the events of September 11th, I wrote this column. Two decades later, my reaction is the same. Here’s the column. Iris Murdoch once said that the whole world can change in 15 seconds. She was talking about falling-in-love. Hatred can do the same thing: On September 11…

Recently at a workshop, a woman shared her anxiety about the death of her brother. Her older brother had died from the Covid virus before there were vaccines for it, and had died because he had dangerously exposed himself to catching the virus. However, he had exposed himself to that danger for a worthy reason.…

Nothing so much approximates the language of God as does silence. Meister Eckhart said that. Among other things, he is affirming that there is some deep inner work that can only be done in silence, alone, in private. In the end, the other is heaven, the salvation for which we are ultimately destined. Utter aloneness…