Praying in Crisis

When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully to God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and our anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys, successes, and strengths alone. . . . Anxieties can gray the whole sky...
Read More →

Love Alone Overcomes Fear

It is shocking to think how much the world has changed in such a brief time. Each of us has had our lives and communities disrupted. Of course, I am here in this with you. I feel that I’m in no position to tell you how to feel or how to think, but there are a few things that come...
Read More →

Simply Living The Gospel

The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the Gospel. — St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) One of the things I most appreciate about my Franciscan heritage is its alternative orthodoxy. The Franciscan tradition has applied this phrase to itself and its...
Read More →

Waiting and Unknowing

Advent [meaning “coming”], to the Church Fathers, was the right naming of the season when light and life are fading. They urged the faithful to set aside four weeks to fast, give, and pray—all ways to strip down, to let the bared soul recall what it knows beneath its fear of the...
Read More →

Everything is Sacred

To repeat: by virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred to the person who can distinguish that portion of chosen being which is subject to Christ’s drawing power...
Read More →