I still remember a homily I heard years ago while on a family vacation at Bethany Beach. The gospel reading for Mass that day was the parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20). The priest drew my attention to an aspect of this passage I had never thought about before. My reading of the passage always …

Bonnie Thurston’s book, Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Merton’s Monastic Spirituality, has a chapter exploring the monastic vocation to solitude. After reflecting on the gifts of solitude for a monk, Thurston writes, For those of us who live outside the monastery, the solitary vocation is to simplicity, silence, poverty, emptiness, anonymity. Shaped …

I recently read Henri Nouwen’s journal, Sabbatical Journey, written during the last year of his life. When he wrote this journal, he didn’t know it would be his last journal or the last year of his life. He died suddenly of a heart attack on September 21, 1996. The journal describes a trip Nouwen took …

One of my favorite quotes from Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, comes from a talk he gave to a group of Catholic Sisters in Alaska two-and-a-half months before his death. His talks in Alaska focused on the spiritual life, and when he tried to articulate the experience of the depth of God’s love for us, he …

A year and a half ago, I was given an alumni award by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. To celebrate that occasion, my daughter-in-law, Christina, gave me a small Willow Tree figurine called Wisdom. The small six inch figurine is a woman dressed in a long white dress; head tilted in full concentration toward an open book …

The very first verses in the Bible include an image of water. God’s creation begins with a description of darkness covering the deep, while the breath or spirit of God sweeps or hovers over the waters (Gn 1:1). Water is associated with God’s creation and from that moment on, water is a symbol for God …

I have written a book that is yet to be published. The book I wrote is called Listening for Joy.  In the book I use my life experiences as a wife, mother, and grandmother to reflect on the meaning of stories in Luke’s gospel. I sent the book to several publishers and received rejections from …

Marie-Laure Leblanc is the protagonist of Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Can Not See. When the novel opens Marie-Laure is living with her father in Paris toward the beginning of World War II. She is blind and loves to read but she only has one book in braille, not even a whole book. …

I enjoy yoga and have a consistent home yoga practice. The practice of yoga reminds me of the gymnastics training that lies in my personal history. I draw from the foundation of strength and flexibility gymnastics training provided, but I also encounter wounds from that same training. One wound I am consistently aware of is …

When my daughter Molly was in college, she attended a campus ministry event that left a lasting impression upon her. There was a guest speaker at this event, a man who had grown up in Sierra Leone during that country’s civil war. This man’s story was a story of intense experiences of pain, suffering, terror, …