My abrupt final days as a tutor at McQuaid Jesuit High School coincided with the famed Rochester Lilac Festival when a glorious garden in the middle of the city is filled with flowers and fragrance and visitors coming to soak it all in. A few weeks later I yearned to be back with the students and our jokes and routines and even the boring vocabulary tests.
Churches are empty these days. Even if they open up again soon, the norms of physical distancing will necessarily limit the way that we pray together. No more hugs and handshakes. No more chalices. No more songbooks, holy water fonts, or donuts after Mass. At least, not yet.
The gift of a scattered mind is that it reaches to the limits of everything I know and grasps to make sense of it. It’s the only way that a new baby girl, a recollection of old habits, a life in religious community, and a global pandemic can come together and remind me that love is greater than fear. Love is the only thing that brings my mind back to center.
One of the great images of Lent is Jesus being driven into the desert where he goes toe-to-toe with Satan. As real as Jesus’ temptations are to pleasure, fame, and power, they are but expressions of a more fundamental and deceptively obvious one: the temptation to forget who and whose you are.
There is something I find at Mass on Ash Wednesday that I don’t find elsewhere. Nowhere besides here do I step in line with old ladies in purple sweaters, fellow students, elderly widows, the nuns, the homeless, the workers on lunch hour, the priests, and the University president to face our shame, imperfections, and our transgressions, together.
A prayer for those whose Thanksgiving may be rife with stress, anger, and regret.
What women religious can teach us about how to respond to the Church sex abuse crisis.
If, when it is all over…and we somehow come to find out that there is no God after all, I am going to be absolutely livid.
The call to conversion is not always satisfying and can be uncomfortable.
I still remember memorizing the Our Father as a child in Sunday school. Whenever I’m on a bumpy plane ride, that familiar prayer of my youth comes to me sooner than any comforting words I could assemble on my own…