What are you reading this summer? And what spiritual reading are you doing this summer? I love to read any time of the year, but there’s something about summer reading when the days are longer and the sunlight mingles with the printed word that turns my bookworm self into a book butterfly because my imagination…
One of our three-year-old family mystics teetered precariously on the top step of the stairs, clutching his stuffed “Bun-Buns,” and peering over the abyss. “There’s something down there,” he whispered, eyes wide with primal terror and simultaneous wonderment. VERY still, riveted with one toe over the edge, he listened with all ears, eyes and nose…
What are the sounds of silence? What speaks when we are brave enough to be still? What song does creation sing as we wake to a new language that might sound foreign? As my beloved other Mom propped herself up on one elbow in her hospice room, the wide smile and tears of joy indicated that…
“We do not emerge from a crisis the same; we emerge either better or worse.” To emerge better, we need to “care for nature so that it can care for us.” —Pope Francis, Earth Day message This week we celebrate as a global community the sixth anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the care…
“The journey, the sacred journey of the universe, is the personal journey of each individual … The universe is the larger self of each person, since the entire sequence of events that has transpired since the beginning of the universe was required to establish each of us in the precise structure of our own being…
I had written this poem for a meeting last fall of the Women in Interfaith Dialogue, hosted virtually by Prairiewoods. The topic for the day was “spiritual self-care and resilience.” ONE DAY Are these two words—one, day— a triangulation, a trajectory, to one point, to some later day, something we imagine, we hope, to be…
Christians throughout the world today sense themselves “called out,” complicit in the suffering and violence of the world. We hear the cries, “Why have you forsaken me?” from all walks of people and animals and Earth herself. THIS Good Friday, perhaps like no other, we see and experience face-to-face the world’s collective shadow through the…
Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, is one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar. Maundy comes from the Latin word mandatum, which means “command.” It refers to Jesus’ new commandment given on this day to love one another as he has loved us, not superficially, but selflessly. On Holy Thursday—the day before the crucifixion…
Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 (New International Version) There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time…
I just finished reading the book Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor by Leonardo Boff, and I found myself starting at the end, reading chapter by chapter from the back. Then after several chapters, moving to the beginning of the book and finding my way forward. I usually don’t read books this way,…