What Is Shame Good For?
If you want to break a pattern, respond differently. Such a simple statement. I would call it deceptively simple, and by that I mean more easily said than done. In fact, I would contend that, although responding differently is essential,…
Free Yourself
Early in life, we build cages to protect ourselves. From the inside they look the way Wonder Woman’s jet does from the outside: invisible. Sometimes other people see what we’ve built and furnished and comfortably live inside, but in order…
Tear It Out
A poem from way back in June, 2016 Billy’s life of quiet desperationnever before concerned you,so why pretend to care now? I stepped in to fill the void you leftwhen you snuck away with Ted,taking with you all Billy held…
When Clarity is Needed
In The Power and the Glory, considered by many to be Graham Greene’s masterpiece, the whisky priest is on the run in Tabasco, a state in Mexico where Catholicism was outlawed in the 1930s. Priests are being rounded up and…
Bring It
I spent my life not speaking up for myself. More regrettably, the last 25 years have included way too many instances of me not speaking up for my six children. I learned this reticence from my parents. My mother’s life…
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…
