“Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over the whole earth, until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying: “Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why hast thou…
Temptation
“I will announce,” says the king, “what the Lord has declared. He said to me: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask, and I will give you all the nations; the whole earth will be yours…’”…
St. Francis De Sales, Gentle Evangelizer
We all know St. Francis de Sales. He is the one those schools and churches are named after. He is a saint. He wrote books. Didn’t he? Well, today, you learn about a most gentle, eloquent and, to tell…
Your Shack and Mine
Everybody has a shack: a place of pain, regret, and what-ifs, a canyon of terrible sadness and hidden rage at unsustainable loss, the kind of loss that makes you wish you’d lost everything. Everybody has a shack, a place you…
Lent: Not What I Expected
Lent is not going the way I planned. I feel as if I’m failing at all the goals I set to accomplish this Lent, from the study to finding more time to spend with God. My life has been a…
A Parish That’s Thriving, But Irrelevant?
Would the community be impacted if your parish ceased to exist? Would there be a decline in concrete acts of love? Would fewer people experience transformed lives in the power of the Risen Lord? There’s no such thing as a…
Spiritual Direction
Faith is awareness of God as a personal God, with our personal response to the love in which we have come to believe. It is a personal encounter, a contact with the divine Persons into which we are taken by…
Three Questions for Lent and Beyond
Popular Catholic speaker Matthew Kelly often begins his presentations with this phrase: “There’s genius in Catholicism.” That couldn’t be truer. There are so many things about the Church that make perfect sense and one of them is the calendar. The…
That’ll Leave a Mark
It’s Lent not November. By now you have at least pondered how you will try to alter your prayer and faith life for the good. You may or may have not been successful up to this point, the first week…
Have a Chestertonian Marriage
A few years ago, a former student invited me to lunch. He was discerning the married life and he wanted my advice as a married man. I was shy to give it. It is not because I have a bad…