OPINION
LIFE LINES
Broken, beautiful and beloved
If you look around my office prayer space or on my bedroom dresser, you'll notice one constant: broken conch and whelk shells everywhere. Small and blue-gray, large and sun-bleached, twisting, turning, spiraling in that gorgeous and mysterious way that seashells do. Although I have one perfect channeled whelk shell that …
‘MY CHRISTMAS MOMENT’
A mother’s joy and passion for everyday miracles is a lasting gift
My 95-year-old mother is a genuine sweetheart. Even with advanced dementia, she has a spirit of selflessness and love that pervades everything she does.
ADVENT REFLECTION
Sacred signs at the kitchen table
Lighting the Advent wreath each night for prayers before dinner has long been my family’s tradition. The flickering candlelight growing brighter with each passing week mirrors the interplay of darkness and light we see outside our kitchen window at this time of year.
What shall we do? Rejoice!
Our continuing journey of Advent can seem so brief, and it is hard to imagine that in just over a week we will be celebrating the great feast of Christmas together.
INTERIOR EPIPHANIES
Advent: awaiting light in the winter darkness
I love the dark. Not the depressing, foreboding, frightening dark. I mean the creative dark that serves as messenger of insights; the humble dark that hangs as backdrop of brilliant lights.
PERSPECTIVE
Glad I didn’t win the lottery
I bought a few tickets in the recent big lottery. Before the numbers were pulled, visions of sugarplums danced through my head.
REFLECTION
The challenge of Advent
At no time of the year is Christian faith more under siege by the secular, anti-Christian and consumerist world than in the Advent season. This is the time of year which is make-or-break for the purveyors of want rather than need. The pressure to entice us to its false values …
OUR NEIGHBORS’ FAITH
Congregations help homeless families through Family Promise
On a recent Sunday evening, Delmar Presbyterian Church welcomed three homeless families for a week-long stay, repurposing rooms normally used for meetings and religious education to provide each family with a private, comfortable bedroom.
SEMINARIAN’S DIARY
On the mountain, marveling at God’s creation
Have you ever noticed that, when God has something important to tell us, it is often on a mountain?
PERSPECTIVE
Shine a light in darkness
A prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp looked out through an opening in his cell as the dawn was approaching. Depressed and desperate, he then saw a light go on in a distant farmhouse. The thought came to him, “A light shines in the darkness.”
REFLECTION
‘Welcome, Father; we’ve been waiting for you’
I've always kept in mind a very special memory of a former parishioner that took place on the day I arrived in that parish long ago.
SEMINARIAN’S DIARY
Pray for seminarians who have ‘courage to try’
Virtue means little until it is challenged and lived. If I have no desire to act selfishly, then being unselfish requires little of me.
PERSPECTIVE
Ordained at tumultuous time, priest of 50 years reflects
Fifty years ago, my classmates here present and I were all asking the same question amid a world that was in turmoil. Before our ordination to the priesthood in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; right after our ordination, Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
PERSPECTIVE
The hidden horror of abortion
I went to see the new movie “Gosnell” recently. I asked a few friends if they wanted to join me. All responses were negative, with a few offering that they’d never heard of it and one suggesting that seeing Bradley Cooper in “A Star is Born” would make for a …
OUR NEIGHBORS’ FAITH
Holy Myrrhbearers: Orthodox monasticism
Orthodox monasticism in America saw a rise in parish awareness and support in the middle of the 20th century, though it is still not as well-known or visible as monasticism to pre-Vatican II Catholics. Monasticism comes somewhat out of the “old world” ethos still held by many enthusiastic New World …
250 X 250 AD
250 X 250 AD
Events
250 X 250 AD