Part 1
13 March 2007 – a post I wrote two years ago for another blog:
“Every morning when we wake up, we look for God’s face” is how someone once started a reflection. It had made a lot of sense to me at the time, a clear image of God our mother, whose face we seek first thing when we wake up, as any trusting three year old would do.
For some time, I tried to imagine God’s face in the morning, looking at me, but it was more up to my …

These days, it feels if a big hand is moving me along in life, gently but a little too fast for my tastes. The coincidences that happen to me in great number are all blessings, and the nature of the graces that I receive shows me that somewhere, somehow, someone must love me tenderly.
Not that I can make any sense of it at the moment (that’s why I call them “coincidences”) but I’m sure it will all come together eventually. There is the grace of having two wonderful friends from …

I tried not to look because mass was in full course. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him only when people started to stare and shuffle: probably a foreigner, as they call them here in Italy, of unidentifyable southern European complexion. A beggar. A nuisance on a Sunday morning – we are here to pray after all! He started walking around. Wrinkled face but not a streak of gray in the brown hair under his hat. A heavy bag over his shoulder.
Two people blocked his entry (gently) …

This past weekend topped anything I have experienced so far in my two years in Rome. Being better networked now means that I get invited to more things around town, and almost all of this weekend’s events in some way involved religious and priests.
There was an Ordination in the Romanian Greek-Catholic (Byzantine) rite, and I was able to glimpse some of the beauty of long masses in a different language and what that does to unveil a mystery rather than veiling it. You would think two hours forty minutes in …