The wind of God, the Holy Spirit, continues to sweep over the face of the earth. After billions of years God’s creativity is as vibrant as ever. God just can’t stop! Day by day our world is becoming more and more “charged with the grandeur of God” (Gerard Manley Hopkins).

As a human being, Jesus Christ was as subject to daily tasks as any of us. In the carpenter shop in Nazareth did Jesus wonder about the punishment of Adam and Eve to work, especially the work that is tedious, thankless, mindless and so repetitive that we wonder why we

Today is the anniversary of my promise of fidelity or temporary vows. Great years of community living, productive mission, awesome prayerful moments! Oh yeah–and some terribly catastrophic times. That first promise is truer today than it was years ago. My religious life began in the high drama of youthful romance

Oak Openings’ yellow trail is a study in opposites. Hard ground gives way to sandy soil. Sweet smells turn to brackish odors. Shadows part in a shaft of sunshine raining down like wheat from a hopper. A wooded park is a place to contemplate opposites, those paradoxes that are integral

When I walk around the lake or into the woods, I have a feeling of expectancy. Will I see deer? Will a heron fly across the lake? Will I need to sidestep poison ivy? When on a leisurely stroll or an urgent errand, I am attuned to whatever will be,

I picked red raspberries last evening, a good night to do so with wind and few mosquitoes. The secret to getting every berry is to pick carefully going in one direction, then coming down the same row in the opposite direction. The different perspective yields more berries. Paula D’Arcy in

Today we celebrate St. Benedict. He reformed the way monks–and we–pray the Liturgy of the Hours (Divine Office). He chose the “Lite Psalter” method of fewer psalms and shorter hours (prayers prayed periodically throughout the day). Before his reform some monks would claim “One for the strong!” meaning they would

Who invented the phrase “feet in the air”? Could it have been the apostles as they looked up as Jesus ascended? Was their last visual memory of their Master “feet in the air”? I’ve been reading about the Jesuits who so often went off to a mission land at a

When people need our attention, sometimes we can give them only a minute or two of listening. And maybe their spoken or unspoken requests can find only a little space in our heart. Perhaps we’d like to give them more of ourselves and our time. Or maybe we begrudge the

We might wonder, “What did Jesus look like?” “What does God look like?” Then remembering that we are made in the image of God, we may hear God say to us, “I look like you.”