This past week, I took a continuing education course in bioethics from my graduate school, the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC. I’m not sure what I expected from this course, but I don’t think I expected it to address the heart of my grief so acutely. I suppose it was inevitable to…
When I was in college, I simply couldn’t understand why atheists got out of bed in the morning. What was worth living for? What was worth dying for? What mattered beyond material satiety? And if you believe that we were made from nothing and destined for nothing, then why didn’t you just kill yourself to…
Happy Easter, everyone. Exactly a year ago today was Lizzy’s funeral. This is also my 100th post, and I have decided to finally make this blog public in the hopes that it can help someone else who is either grieving a child or even just asking the hard questions in the midst of this Coronavirus…
Holy Saturday has traditionally been a very quiet day for me. Quiet, contemplative, and waiting. This morning, I woke up thinking about Our Lady cleaning the wounds of Christ and preparing his body for burial, and I wondered if this act helped her to cope with the reality of his death. I then thought about…
Today is Good Friday, the day on which we remember the passion and death of Jesus Christ, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of this word “passion” to describe the suffering that Christ endured. It seems so archaic, given our colloquial use of the word “passion” as something about which we feel…
I think it’s fair to say that I have had very limited experience with the nature of evil, and I’d like to keep it that way. I have never consciously allowed myself to delve too deeply into the study of evil (despite its insinuating fascination) because my limited experience has been so disruptive and cancerous…
It is seared into my memory–that last night at home with Lizzy–that blue and broken morning when we went to the ER, and those terrible, endless days that followed. I can tell you every detail, down to the smell of the hospital, the expressions on the faces of the doctors, the cadence of their voices…
Meditation: Jesus will return to the world on Judgement Day. When you are inside of time, and–more deeply–when time is your master, it becomes increasingly more difficult to conceive a state of being that is timeless. Death takes us outside of time. Heaven is timeless. So too, will the world become timeless at the end…
Meditation: Jesus comes into the world to die for the world. We are born to suffer and die. This is the problem that walks with me, dogging my every step. Memories of Lizzy dance with tiptoes, glinting like fairy lights around every corner, and yet the problem of human pain and death thuds dully behind…
Meditation: Jesus arrives in the hearts of believers. This past weekend, I visited the Saint John Paul II Shrine in DC, followed by vigil mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. While Cecilia was asleep in her stroller, I cried my way through most of the exhibit on JPII the Great, a saint…