Early Christian monks believed in something they called acedia. More colloquially, they called it, the noonday devil, a name that essentially describes the concept. Acedia, for them, was different from ordinary depression in that it didn’t draw you into the dark, chaotic areas of your mind and heart, to have you diseased before your own…
Recently a man came to me, asking for help. He carried some deep wounds, not physical wounds, but emotional wounds to his soul. What surprised me initially was that, while he was deeply wounded, he had not been severely traumatised either in childhood or adulthood. He seemed to have just had to absorb the normal…
Recently, while on the road giving a workshop, I took the opportunity to go the cathedral in a city for a Sunday Eucharist. I was taken aback by the homily. The priest used the Gospel text where Jesus says “I am the vine and you are the branches” to tell the congregation that what Jesus…
So much of life, particularly today, constitutes an unconscious conspiracy against reading. Lack of time, the pressure of our jobs, and electronic technology, among other things, are more and more putting books out of reach and out of mind. There is never enough time to read. The upside of this is that when I do…
Fr Conor McDonough We must protect “the world (that) is more than just decay” writes Fr Conor McDonough as, “it is a place also of birth, of new beginnings” There is something immensely moving about the feast of Epiphany: bearded old men leave their dusty old books and journey by the light of a star…
For many of us, I suspect, it gets harder each year to capture the mood of Christmas. About the only thing that still warms our hearts are memories, memories of younger, more naïve, days when the lights and carols, Christmas trees and gifts, still excited us. But we’re adult now and so too, it seems,…
Whenever we have been at our best, as Christians, we have opened our churches as sanctuaries to the poor and the endangered. We have a long, proud history wherein refugees, homeless persons, immigrants facing deportation, and others who are endangered, take shelter inside our churches. If we believe what Jesus tells us about the Last…
Art too has its martyrs and perhaps our greatest pain is that of inadequate self-expression. That’s an insight from Iris Murdoch and it holds true, I believe, for most everyone. Inside of each of us there’s a great symphony, a great novel, a great dance, a great poem, a great painting, a great book of…
People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom. There have been speculations about the end of the…
A prophet makes a vow of love, not of alienation. Daniel Berrigan wrote those words and they need to be highlighted today when a lot of very sincere, committed, religious people self-define as cultural warriors, as prophets at war with secular culture. This is the stance of many seminarians, clergy, bishops, and whole denominations of…