Reading the Letters of Dorothy Day recently, I ran into this line, “doubtless we need a Savonarola as well as a St Francis”. She was speaking about what spirituality needs in order to be healthy and balanced. That triggered something inside me, something I have never been able to sort out. I have always been…

Who has God’s sympathy? For whom especially should we be praying? For whom should we be asking God’s blessing? We are in the middle of the Olympic Games. What we see there are the healthiest bodies in the world, beautifully adorned with colourful spandex and youthful smiles. The Olympic Games are a celebration of health.…

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the value of various philosophical arguments that try to prove the existence of God. Can there be such a proof? Brilliant philosophers, from Anselm, through Aquinas, through Descartes, through contemporary intellectuals like Charles Hartshorne, submit that the existence of God can be proven through rational argument. Except, a lot depends…

“Some things need to be said and said and said again until they don’t need to be said anymore.” Margaret Atwood wrote that. I quote it here because each year I write a column on suicide and mostly say the same thing each time because certain things need to be said repeatedly about suicide until…

Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay in a Church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay in a Church…

O God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water. We pray these words with sincerity. Do we ever really mean them? Can we honestly say that the heartaches that drive us to our knees are a longing to see God?…

“There is only one true sadness, not being a saint!” French novelist, philosopher, essayist, Leon Bloy ends his novel The Woman Who Was Poor with that much-quoted line. Here is a less known quote from Leon Bloy which helps us understand why there is such a sadness in not being saint. “Joy is a sure…

Several years ago, a colleague of mine suffered a crushing disappointment. Her instinctual temptation was towards anger, towards shutting a series of doors and withdrawing. Instead, wounded in spirit, she asked herself the question, “what is love asking of me now?” In answering that, she found that despite her every instinct to the contrary, love…

As a seminarian, I was privileged one summer to take a course from the renowned liturgist, Godfrey Diekmann. This was back in those heady days shortly after Vatican II when it was very much in fashion to frown on prescribed ritual prayers and write your own. This was particularly true for the Eucharist Prayer, the…