Pope Francis recently acknowledged the “shame and repentance" of the Catholic Church's failure to act on decades of sexual abuse by clerics against our young people. He stated emphatically that the Church “showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them." Like many Catholics, I appreciate his words, but they are not enough. …
Tag: calling
We live in unsettled, dangerous, destructive, confusing times, and it would be easy to allow our only response to be one of resignation, of saying to ourselves and to the rest of the world, “I give up. It’s just too big. It’s just too destructive. I have nothing to offer that will make a difference.” But such a response is lazy and not a response of faith. A response of faith allows us (perhaps propels us) to roll up our …
There’s always an “unknown blessing” on its way. We’re all walking headlong into a blessing every day that we can’t see coming, and it might have taken a long and winding road to get to us. We just need to live with our eyes wide open and watch for it. We need to show up and do stuff. We need to take chances. We need to not miss the blessing when it appears. …
Sometimes, the quiet we seek is not mere silence. Rather, it is silence enough to hear a whisper, the voice of God calling out to us in the sounds of the earth. For this sunny, warming Sunday morning, I offer a poem about what we can hear if we dare silence ourselves. …
As we begin a New Year, perhaps the best resolution we can live out is the resolve to answer the call that has been given to us, and that begins by learning to pay attention to our lives and to those things that give us life and joy. For in those moments, we find God and begin to hear a call. …
When the heroine of E.B. White’s classic children’s novel “Charlotte’s Web” first writes “SOME PIG” in her web in an attempt to save her friend Wilbur’s life, she was creating more than a PR campaign. She was creating wonder. She was making everyone who saw her web stop in their tracks, stand back, scratch their heads, and try to contemplate something they couldn’t fathom. That, in fact, is a pretty good way to go through life. …
This weekend, Sue and I are in southern Wisconsin, and yesterday I walked through a broad swath of wildflower prairie adjacent to the place where we are staying. I stopped in amazement of what was before me: a noisy, ever-moving and always changing sea of grass, flowers, bees, birds and shifting light. When we stand in the midst of such natural glory, we stand at the center of creation, and we can begin to find our place in the world. …
Heatwaves, snowstorms and other extremes of nature have a way of getting our attention. They smack us across the face and remind us of the power, majesty and unpredictability of the earth. They recall for us of the continuing cycles of nature, of the gentle spinning and revolving of the earth around its axis and around the sun, taking us into and out of our days, nights, seasons and years. If we think we’re in control, we need to stop …
Sometimes, your choice isn’t between the good and the bad. That would be easy. Sometimes, we need to choose between two very good options, and for those decisions we are called to a new kind of freedom. It is a freedom that stems from our faith, a freedom that says, “choose as best you can and then follow the path.” …
So caught up in the business and busy-ness of our work and lives, we can all sometimes feel guilty about doing “nothing.” But, of course, it is exactly this nothingness that we need. We need time to unplug, time to refuel, time to remove ourselves from the rest of life so that we can be, in fact, better for the rest of life, better for those who need us, better for the work that needs to be done. …