• Thoughts

    Longing to Be

    I recently read an essay that laments the unrest in the world, concentrated, as usual, in the Middle East. Two specific statements (sentiments) shared by the author (editor of an art magazine) caught my attention, because each purports to be…

  • Thoughts

    Sharing an Apple

    Poet Jane Hirshfield is new to me. Robert Bly is the one who introduced us, in his book, Looking for Dragon Smoke, and although I knew Bly’s name, I had paid it no attention (perhaps because none of my college…

  • Thoughts

    Hope is Enough

    Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory Greene makes his statement about a starving dog with a broken back or broken legs that drags herself to the door of…

  • Thoughts

    Daring Despite the Danger

    “The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. … When we are in the domain of the known, so to speak, there is no reason…

  • Thoughts

    Time for Hope

    Jesus has redeemed the time. I’d not understood this until recently. I thought that we (each of us Christians) were called to redeem the time. Where did I come up with such a notion? Well, here and there, from this…

  • Thoughts

    All We Need for the Journey

    For one reason or another, I saved a Magnificat meditation by Dorothy Day. Her words appear in purple. Today the atmosphere is very heavy. Rain threatens. So often one is overcome with a tragic sense of the meaninglessness of our…

  • Thoughts

    An Encounter

    Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete tells me that being a Christian is about an encounter with Jesus that changes your entire life. I don’t dispute what he says, but I don’t know that I can put my finger on such an encounter…