My first love was literature, novels and poetry. As a child, I loved story books, mysteries and adventures. In grade school, I was made to memorise poetry and loved the exercise. High school introduced me to more serious literature, Shakespeare, Kipling, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning. On the side, I still read story books, cowboy tales from…
Classically, both in the world and in our churches, we have seen despair as the ultimate, unforgivable sin. The simple notion was that neither God, nor anyone else, can save you if you simply give up, despair, make yourself impossible to reach. Most often in the popular mind this was applied to suicide. To die…
Dorothy Day is alleged to have said: “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily!” A new biography on her by her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day – The World will be saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother, will, I believe, go a long way in preventing…
With the exception of scripture and a few Christian mystics, Christian spirituality, up to now, has been weak in presenting us with a vision for our retirement years. It’s not a mystery as to why. Until recently, the majority of people died shortly after retirement and so there was no need for a highly-developed spirituality…
The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history. Recently I signed a card for a friend, a devout Baptist, who was raised to have a suspicion of Roman Catholics. It’s something he still struggles with; but, don’t we all! History eventually infects our DNA. Who of us is…
Believers and non-believers alike have been arguing about the Resurrection since the day Jesus rose. What really happened? How was he raised from the dead? Did an actual dead body really come back to life and step out of the grave or was the Resurrection a monumental life-changing event inside the consciousness of Jesus’ followers?…
To understand Good Friday we need to separate what was happening on the surface from at some deeper place Good Friday was bad long before it was good, at least from outward appearances. God was being crucified by all that can go bad in the world: pride, jealousy, distrust, wound, self-interest, sin. It’s no accident…
Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true; this has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God’s name.…
What is meant when certain schools of psychology today warn us about our ‘shadow’? What’s our ‘shadow’? In essence, it’s this: we have within us powerful, fiery energies that, for multiple reasons, we cannot consciously face and so we handle them by denial and repression so as to not have to deal with them. Metaphorically…
Everything is gift. That’s a principle that ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every commandment. Everything is gift. Nothing can be ultimately claimed as our own. Genuine moral and religious sensitivity should make us aware of that. Nothing comes to us by right. This isn’t something we automatically know. During a class some years…