faith

  • Sing

    I am pretty sure I sang flat for almost all of Mass today. There was a monitor issue, and one of my ears is a bit blocked, and (insert excuse here), but I wasn’t happy with what I was doing and not entirely sure that any ministry I may have been attempting was hitting its…

  • Saint Matthew

    I asked God to help me to see my life the way He sees it, so He brought me to Mass and Fr. George, who talked about a painting and so I looked it up and there I am. The painting is ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ by Caravaggio and it depicts the moment that…

  • Sentence

    My daughter’s AP English teacher gave his students five minutes to describe themselves in one sentence. The idea was to help his students to comprehend the power of language to communicate ideas but also to help them understand themselves while making themselves understood. Her teacher said that most people are strangers to themselves, which as…

  • Unsung

    Attending the funeral of someone who lived life well is like completing a masters-level course in an hour and a half. Lesson after lesson flies at you and you can’t quite catch each one, but you want to hold on to all of it if you can. I attended a funeral like this today for…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth revisited

    Earlier, I wrote about a pattern in my life that keeps coming up, and it’s modeled after three days in November of 2012 in which we celebrated my Mom’s last Christmas, mourned her death, and focused on her new life in Heaven. Now I find I go through these seasons over and over; times of…

  • Bird, continued

    God uses images and music to get my attention. When something sticks in my brain, I know I’m supposed to pay attention, like when I was in shivasana in yoga and clearly saw in my mind’s eye two big football players blocking a doorway, and me with no way to get past them. Those guys…

  • Court

    I was making my way round and round the eighth-mile indoor track when a couple of people walked into the empty gym. It was a Dad and his probably not quite two-year-old son, and they grabbed a couple of basketballs and started to play. They were adorable to watch. Dad would dribble, and his son…

  • Bird

    People I know are seeking and finding new opportunities, and I am mostly so happy for them. They are leaving, moving forward, and growing, and I am not. I’m a bird in a nest when everyone else is flying and I am left picking at straw. Sometimes watching them makes me cranky and jealous, and…

  • Girl

    When I was a teenager, on summer days when I wasn’t working, my mother sometimes encouraged me to “call a friend and go somewhere”. Maybe she thought I was being difficult, or maybe she was hopeful that something had shifted in the landscape, but she certainly knew the truth that I couldn’t make myself say:…

  • Road

      Poems, songs, books, and movies have been written about roads. Like shoes, mountains, and valleys, roads are a ready allegory for how we make our way through life. Give yourself ten seconds and you’ll be able to come up with a line about a road that has meant something to you along the way.…