The darkened room is lit only by the blue hue from the computer screenof my lap top. Three feet away from me lies my 80 year-old father in his hospital bed, wheezing for breath, reaching for hallucinated objects, babbling incomprehensibly. And I try to make sense of this beginning of the end for my dad.
I struggle to understand what could be the purpose in such an ending to this life, to spend weeks if not months or years in deluded or vegetative states. As I watch my father change from …

I’ve been a practicing Ignatian Christian for several years now—I practice it, but I am not there yet, so I keep practicing.  My practice arena of choice these days seems to be right here in my own home.  It is the place I do my Examen. It is the source of many of the tensions I have been instructed by my spiritual director to “sit with” rather than constantly try to fight to go away. It is where I most frequently experience God in the form of love from another …