When I was growing up, my mom used to make a point about switching our normal weekend Mass attendance during Advent from Sunday mornings to Saturday evenings. She would say that there is something about attending Mass in the dark that helps us feel the season of Advent.
How an experience at the Kino Border Initiative transformed the heart of one volunteer.
Just as a poem transmits greater meaning in an audible reading than a theoretical analysis, Holy Week offers us a powerful and carnal memoir.
During the first week of my long retreat I was having disturbingly vivid dreams about wounded children. I’d awake having dreamt of kids in hospital beds…
Some years ago, I put one of my younger sisters onto Douglas Adams’ science-fiction work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The book’s taste for the fantastic and the absurd was just my sister’s kind of humor, but…
The velorio, a gathering in the home of the deceased, is a Mexican tradition that allows loved ones to gather to share meals, memories and to mourn. And, even still, life around us is a reminder that not even death can conquer our hope.
I’m living in the time of cancel culture. I notice that the news about cancel culture often triggers my temper because of how outrageous it can be. Although anger can be righteous whenever the news about cancel culture triggers my temper, I immediately want to react with everything I have. I want to ostracise the thing that causes harm to me and society. Those things do not deserve to exist, and, by wiping them out, society will be better, at least that’s what I think.
I stopped drinking during the last semester of my regency, a stage of Jesuit formation where we work in a Jesuit institution. My last binge led me to see how my story with alcohol was going to end. If I kept on drinking, I would have left the Jesuits and continued deteriorating. In this “moment of clarity,” I decided that I needed to stop drinking in order to live. Though I am writing this anonymously, my story is a truth I carry with me. I am a Jesuit, and I am an alcoholic.
The morning is gentle. I’ve come at the perfect time to sit and pray near the old living room windows. The sign of the cross, coffee on the window sill, closed eyes. I’m opaque inside today. I pray about yesterday. And sometimes my prayer isn’t always clear.
I’ve been throwing pottery for over a year now. For a while, I had the technique down, or at least down enough to center the clay and build from there. But lately, I have had the worst time centering the clay. As I sit with my struggles to center the clay, my mind wanders to the world around me: does anything feel centered these days?