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  • Click

    Once I travelled south to New York City with my daughter for the day to see a show and go back home again. On the same day, another woman travelled north with her son to see the same show. We sat a row apart and did not meet. She reads Shauna Niequist, loves her family…

  • Door

    I am always sending things out: ideas, emotions, hope, and it sometimes seems that I am sending these things out into a shapeless void. I place pieces of my heart in sealed envelopes, put them in my outgoing mail, and never hear anything ever again. This is a false view, of course, and self-centered and…

  • Grateful

    Today I heard a homily from our beloved deacon and, even more so than in his words, I felt the force of his message really just in his presence alone. Our deacon lost his wife almost two months ago, and he is in the haze of grief that only those who have walked that road…

  • Waiting

    I don’t like waiting. Waiting for something important feels, for me, like a racing heart and a pit in my stomach and like my small voice echoing in a canyon: I AM ALONE. In the season in which I waited to get pregnant with Brian, I agonized and strived and pleaded with God. Two years…

  • Six

    I haven’t been able to bring myself to really read about it, let alone write about it, but it’s everywhere anyway. My friends and neighbors, and even Rob Lowe and Maria Shriver are experiencing it and writing in excruciating detail. I keep seeing references to that song by Nichole Nordeman everyone is talking about, but…

  • Joseph

    Today I met three Josephs, and each of them, as Josephs will do, pointed me to God. I met the first Joseph at his funeral. Well, I guess you could say we didn’t meet exactly, but I sang for the Mass, and got to know him a bit from the words and presence of his…

  • 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…

  • 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.…