faith

  • Creature

    My dog does not speak English, though I wish she did. When I leave in the morning, I wish I knew for sure that she understood I am always coming back. She sometimes looks so fearful in those moments just before the door closes; I always think, if we just spoke the same language, it…

  • Communion

    As a music minister at a First Communion Mass, I have a front row seat for some real beauty and also some outright hilarity. I watch the facial expressions of the second-grade children as they receive the Eucharist for the first time, and it can be hard to keep my place in the music; they…

  • Tapestry

    “Not everything is a metaphor, Mom…not everything has to mean something,” my sixteen year old daughter says sometimes when I look too deeply at some small thing. And, I get it. Mothers can be annoying, and our quirky habits can be fodder for teasing and the very best eulogies. My ability to find a metaphor…

  • Mother

    I cannot sleep until my children are home. These days as a mother of teenagers, it makes for some late nights on the couch, phone in my hand, until I hear the car pull in, the door click open. Their father is able to sleep soundly without one speck of worry in their absence, and…

  • Character

    When we were young, our mother would gather me and my sisters on Good Friday to read the story of the Passion. Wearing pajamas and carrying mugs of tea, we sat from noon to three, for once not rebelling against her wishes. She told us that every aspect of humanity could be found in that…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth

    On November 4, 2012, my family celebrated one last Christmas with our Mom. She died the next day. The day that followed that was my forty-first birthday. On that birthday/funeral planning morning, as Facebook greetings poured in on top of condolences, one sweet friend wrote that she hoped I would one day find some meaning…

  • Soul

      I was crossing the line from sleep to waking and was already making lists in my head. Post office, laundry, papers, mess, dishes…things I needed to get done to make way for the things I wanted to do, like meet an old friend for lunch. Before I even got out of bed, I felt…

  • Cardinal

    My spiritual advisor has got me journaling, which is basically a process in which you ask a question and then freeform write out answers. You write without judgment and in my case, without stopping, and when you’re done, you look back over what you’ve written and some of it may be from God Himself, using…

  • Love

    Valentine’s Day is a hard day for a lot of people. I have friends who are still searching for a partner, friends whose marriages are in trouble, friends who are divorcing or divorced, friends whose spouses are in Heaven. For them, this is a day in which they are bombarded with images of romantic love,…

  • 11:04

    I know lots of people who see significant numbers everywhere they look….on clocks, receipts, in line at the grocery store. 11:11 is a common one, and when you happen to catch it, it’s supposed to be a little hello from someone you love who has died. My sister sees her birthday numbers, 3.16, as a…