Ignatian Spirituality in real time
Last month my twenty-year-old niece passed away suddenly. I spent ten days with my sister and her family trying to help them through what will likely be the hardest thing they ever have to endure. Perhaps the greatest fear of any parent is that something will happen to their children. Those of us who are parents know our own vulnerability, and we know the suffering that such a loss would cause. My sister and her family are trying to find a way to a new normal, but it is a …
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Perhaps it will happen only once in your lifetime. Ignatius said that more was revealed to him sitting by the Cardoner River in Manressa than in the rest of his entire life. Mother Theresa clearly remembered receiving her “call within a call” on a train ride in Darjeeling, India. Albert Einstein was able to articulate the theory of relativity after an image “came to him” of what it would be like to be riding on a lightning bolt. Perhaps it is the moment Michelanglo envisioned in his painting in the Sistine Chapel of the hand of God touching the hand of Adam. Have you had one? (I haven’t…fully. Mine was more miraculous than enlightening I think.) Read the rest of this entry →
I am back in New York for the first time after having lived here for three years. I forgot what this place is like, and that it took me a year-and-a-half to get used to living here the first time. As it is now, I sometimes wish that I had never left it. Something about this place, the proximity of humanity with all of its triumphs and failures, it reminds me of the importance of who it is that Love is calling me to be. Read the rest of this entry →
2012.
Have you heard the bad news? 
The world is going to end.
Yes. I know, I know: another 2012 joke.
Its overdone, used too much,
and while we used to laugh,
it is a little bit canned by this point.
But its true, you know.
The world is going to end.
Maybe not this year, but it will.
Your world is going to end. Read the rest of this entry →
Advent is a season of waiting. We wait, we watch, and we anticipate. The prophets and saints are our companions as we wait symbolically for Christ’s first coming and birth, while we also anticipate His second coming and return. Our posture of waiting is shaped by the Advent themes of hope, love, joy and peace. “Come, Lord Jesus, Come” is our prayer. Read the rest of this entry →
The other night I attended a documentary on Climate Refugees. It was an assemblage of apocalyptic predictions about the mass migrations that could be triggered if warming continues unabated and the world warms 3 or 4 degrees Celsius. Things, the film suggest, are pretty much going to suck, I mean really suck. The goal of the filmmaker, I suppose, was to scare the crap out of us in the hope that this might motivate us to change. This approach bugs me. Read the rest of this entry →
