It’s a long time that I’ve loved you. Never, never go away. – “Love Song of the Little Bear”, Margaret Wise Brown An ash leaf drifts on the surface of the water, vermilion and thin, as the sand sucks slowly at my ankles. The bay’s chill embrace beckons with curling fingers, veins of sand running…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. – William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” I’ve had…
As human persons, we are born with an innate incapacity for self-regulation. Our initial understanding of self exists only in reference to our mothers; we are inescapably relational creatures from the first stirrings of conception. An infant can no more control his or her emotions than cause the sun to rise and set at will….
For the newly postpartum mother, the exact tone, pitch, and key of her newborn infant’s cry can trigger panic, milk, and tears simultaneously. This is not coincidence. This is not emotionalism. There is nothing in the world like the cry of a newborn mammal, and there is no one in the world more equipped to…
The Latin root for the word compassion is pati, which means to suffer, and the prefix com- means with. Compassion, originating from compati, literally means to suffer with. www.compassion.com There are places in the human heart too raw and terrible to be translated into speech. There are times when the pain of a loved one is so mammoth…
There is a term called “existential loneliness,” indicating that the very state of being human is to be alone, to suffer alone, to die alone. Some argue we are living in an epidemic of loneliness, even before this pandemic and social isolation. I have heard doctors refer to cancer cells as “acting out of a…
I watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ last night. I know some people may think this was a very unwise decision, while some people may get it. For me, it was a way of entering into my faith, especially Our Lady’s experience of suffering through every single step of her Son’s Passion. It…
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when, in your heart, you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.” – Frodo in The Return of the King…
I have long held a theory that love is about presence–and not just any type of presence, specifically physical presence. We live in a society that allows us to substitute physical presence with many types of shortcuts, technological alternatives, or gimmicks, but the reality remains that nothing can substitute true, physical presence. Physical presence is…
Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his…