One of Dorothy Day’s favourite saints was Therese of Lisieux, Therese Martin, the saint we call ‘the Little Flower’. At first glance, this might look like a strange affinity. Dorothy Day was the ultimate activist for justice, protesting in the streets, being arrested, going to prison, and starting a community and a newspaper, the Catholic…
You are as sick as your sickest secret! That’s a wise axiom. What’s sick in us will remain sick unless we open it up to others and to the light of day. As long as it’s a secret, it’s a sickness. However, perhaps the problem is not with what we keep secret, but that we…
In 1986, Czechoslovakian novelist Ivan Klima published a series of autobiographical essays entitled, My First Loves. These essays describe some of his moral struggles as a young agnostic seeking for answers without any explicit moral framework within which to frame those struggles. He’s a young man, full of sexual passion, but hesitant to act out…
In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis shares how in his youth he was driven by a restlessness that had him searching for something he could never quite define. However, he made peace with his lack of peace because he accepted that, given the nature of the soul, he was supposed to feel that restlessness and that…
Recently I received a letter from a woman whose life, in effect, had imploded. Within the course of a few months, her husband divorced her, she lost her job, was forced to move from the house she had lived in for many years, was locked down in her new place by Covid restrictions, and was…
A colleague once challenged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with this question. You believe that good will ultimately triumph over evil; well, what if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, what happens to goodness then? Teilhard answered this way. If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that would be a…
How do we search for God? It is easy to misunderstand what that means. We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Usually, we think of our search for God as a conscious religious search, as something we do out of a spiritual side of ourselves. We tend to think of things…
Lying is the most pernicious of evils, the most dangerous of sins, the worst of blasphemes, and the one sin that can be unforgivable. Perhaps we need to be reminded of that today, given our present culture where we are in danger of losing the very idea of reality and truth. Nothing is more dangerous.…
Most of us are familiar with the story of Zorba, the Greek, either through Nikos Kazantzakis’ famous book or through the movie. Well, Zorba was not a fictional character. He was a real person, Alexis Zorba, who had such a larger-than-life personality and energy that when he died, Kazantzakis found his death very difficult to…
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Anne Lamott Division Those are words worth contemplating, on all sides of the political and religious divide today. We live in a time of bitter division. From our government offices down…