From his hospital bed this morning (one-day stay for a minor procedure), Dad asked me to please help him with flowers and a cake for Mom’s birthday. She is turning 75 this weekend. Once at the store, I had to send multiple pictures of options to him before he was...
A few years ago, my son attended the funeral of a classmate whose life had been tragically cut short by an automobile accident. Though Stan did not know him very well as they were both relatively new to the school, he said the boy was “soft-spoken and very kind.”...
This is how you ascertain the truth of spiritual experience: it propels you back toward the world and other people, and not simply more deeply within yourself. from My Bright Abyss
The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.
You have the healing touch, even if you may not realize it. It is not a supernatural gift, but a common gift, one given to us all. We are born to be healers, along with other vocations, to help us navigate this world as vulnerable beings. We have the power to hear one...
Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the...
If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are...
Grief is like an earthquake. The first one hits you and the world falls apart. Even after you put the world together again there are aftershocks, and you never really know when those will come.
The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on...
Jesus never says to the poor: "come, find the church," but he says to those of us in the church: "go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned."