When the Wise Men are called to seek the Christ Child, they are drawn forth in a strange way: by an unusually bright star, shining in the heavens. In Matthew 2 we are told, “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.’” We rarely pause to acknowledge how odd this story is.
Read More
All week, I have been haunted by a “Monday in Holy Week” journal entry from The Duty of Delight, a collection of Dorothy Day’s journals. Day’s sundry list of “unnecessary things” calls to mind, for me, exactly what I am so resistant to giving up each time Advent and Lent return: cigarettes, candy, liquor, movies, radio, newspapers. For each of us, the list is different—mine might be something like chocolate, social media, music, podcasts, coffee—but all of us have a list of unnecessary things to which we are unduly attached. And all of these lists signal the same impulse to find hope (or rest, peace, joy, forgetfulness, pleasure, healing, etc.) in something that is not God.
Read More
Trinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
Read More
Last weekend, we celebrated the feast day of St. Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus said, in Matthew 16:18-9, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Before these prophetic words came true, though, St. Peter had to face Gethsemane.
Read More
We have considered what it means to make our artistic vocations, as Evelyn Underhill puts it, “an oblation from the first.” As we consider how to do this in our own lives, I want to put the example of a specific artist before you.
Read More
We’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?
Read More
Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist. This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.
Read More
In the first verses of Isaiah 40, God declares, “Comfort, yes, comfort My people! … Speak comfort to Jerusalem.” These first verses frame the chapter to follow as an extended meditation on comfort as God understands and offers it to his people.
Read More
Once, as a day fell into evening on the edge of the Salish Sea, I sat under a cold wind and watched sunlight burn pink over the horizon. A pale haze made the Olympic Range look ghostly. Five minutes into my solitary reflection, I was startled by movement—an enormous bald eagle, who had been resting on the rough asphalt of an old basketball court, stirred. I watched as it stepped a few paces forward and raised its wings, then flew over the field past a friend of mine, who was wending her way back to our camp cabin. The eagle alighted above her on an old barracks roof and proceeded to survey the scene.
Read More
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. The advent of Christ – that Coming we’ve anticipated for weeks – is imminent. Like the virgins who await the bridegroom in Matthew 25, we must wake up and trim our lamps. The Bridegroom comes. It is time to meet him.
Read More
The Story of a Soul is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual autobiography. It tells the story of how, at a very young age, she conceived a passionate desire to become a Carmelite nun. She fought hard to be admitted early entry, and took the veil at the young age of 15.
Read More
We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.
Read More
We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?
Read More
In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?
Read More
The collect for the 10th Sunday after Trinity makes a curious request. After asking God to keep His ears open to our prayers, it asks Him to exercise His power over those very prayers: “. . . and, that [thy humble servants] may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.”
Read More
Tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost. In the week and a half since Ascension we have been waiting for the One Christ called the Holy Spirit to descend and meet us here. We have been opening our hearts and asking the Holy Spirit to come.
Read More
In Lent, our fast cleared out new space in our lives and helped us re-examine our relationship with enjoyments and dependencies we tend to take for granted. Now, it is Easter, and we can go back to enjoying those things we left behind—we must celebrate, after all!—but in some cases, we find ourselves facing a conundrum when the TV habits, or social media scrolling, or regularity of chocolate-eating, or whatever-it-might-be, are again fair game. Namely: do we want to go back to those things? Do we still enjoy them? And if so, in what way do we want to go back to them?
Read More
Palm Sunday is our entrance into Holy Week. As we celebrate Christ’s Triumphal Entry with the citizens of Jerusalem, we process with them into the city where He will die. We sing songs and wave palm fronds on a morning that feels festive, hopeful, if a bit mundane – and perhaps we don’t think too far past the celebratory tone of the service, and the hymns, and the bright spring sunshine. It is Palm Sunday! Christ must be celebrated as He enters Jerusalem.
Read More
In Dakota, Kathleen Norris writes about moving into her maternal grandparents’ home in rural Lemmon, South Dakota after her grandmother died. This is not a move Norris anticipated, or even necessarily wanted, and moving into a place that held so much family history – and to a geography marked by so much silence and isolation and severe weather – compelled her to face ghosts in her family’s past and her own spiritual life.
Read More
On Tuesday we celebrated the Feast of St. Valentine, a third-century Christian martyr. The two most popular hagiographies about his life locate him in third-century Rome. They say he was a leader in the Church (either a bishop or a priest) who ministered to and supported Christians in a time of severe persecution under the emperor Claudius Gothicus…
Read More