Spirituality

If you are like me, it is easy to forget how “God provides” if you are too focused on others’ blessings. We live in a culture that incessantly prompts us to want more and more of what others have – and INSTANTLY! Temptations are thrown in…

Every time I leave my house, I’m amazed at how impatient and frenzied the world has become. It seems as if most people are striving to stay busy with family activities, work, and pursuing the “perfect” life of health and wealth. As a whole,…

Secular culture has brought with it a heap of advantages. For instance, it’s pushed hard for the tolerance of every sort of difference, especially religious differences, for which in an earlier times people were willing to fight and die.…

Our Lord has asked each one of us to participate in the holy mission of bringing the Gospel to others and to live it ourselves. “ said to them, ‘The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out…

I am easily distracted in prayer. This hardly makes me unique — even many of the great saints confessed to this struggle, so at least I am in good company. Different things will pop up to derail me. Sometimes the events of the day intrude.…

We all carry both psychological and spiritual wounds that affect our motives, our reactions to other people’s behavior, and the deeper reasons we fear or avoid certain things. When I was in junior high, I dabbled in the occult. My parents…

Have you ever been with someone as they passed from this life to the next? As a priest, I have been. I also hear many stories about someone’s last moments before drawing their dying breath. The richness of our Catholic tradition preserves…

Remember the 1990s when Ashley, Ashleigh, and Ashlee all ended up in the same kindergarten? That’s what it was like to research St. Hippolytus. I found two different Hippolytuses who claim the feast day, Aug. 13 and a third thrown in on…

Finally, a woman! Have you noticed that most of our saints with funny names are men? It’s not my fault. There just aren’t that many women on the Eastern calendar. In June alone the ratio of females to males is 3:22. It’s really nobody’s…

“Miss LaTassa, during recess today I’d like you to stay in the classroom and work on our May altar.” It was the spring of 1973, and I was delighted to have been selected by Sr. Gemma to assemble the May altar for grade 4-1. Altar-building…