Life is Prayer, Prayer is Life
A reflection on the readings for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 16, 2022. In 2019, while preaching my homily on the same scripture readings we have today, I said, “I would like to take 2019 and just throw...
Tagged: prayer
Pope Francis, discernment, and spontaneity
One of the transformational moments in my spiritual journey was the realization that in order to grow in faith and my relationship with God, I would have to learn to live with tension and uncertainty. Accepting and living with tension...
Prayer for Autumn
As the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a season for everything. Not all of us are afforded the feeling of readiness for the changes as they come our way. For some, change can’t come soon enough. No matter...
Think Twice, Tweet Once
Today, especially during the present political and social climate, there is much toxicity, hate, and vileness, that take place on social media. Pope Francis has warned of toxicity on social media, and in his address to the participants of the...
Learn by Doing, not Merely by Thinking
Pope Francis has often condemned an over-intellectualized approach to the faith. In a 2018 Message for World Communications Day, he wrote: In Christianity, truth is not just a conceptual reality that regards how we judge things, defining them as true...
Praying in the Presence of God
As we enter the Triduum, many of us are taking stock of the Lent we’ve had–and the resolutions to commit to prayer which we’ve likely made, broken, and re-committed to–and could be feeling more than a little discouraged. We know...
In the Holy Presence of God
A reflection on the readings for the Second Sunday of Lent, March 13, 2022. What came to mind for you when you heard about “the cloud” in today’s Gospel? Most of us are more familiar with “cloud computing,” the sort...
The abyss of evil at the heart of war
On Wednesday during his general audience, Pope Francis made an appeal for peace in Ukraine, and called for a day of prayer and fasting next week on Ash Wednesday: My heart aches greatly at the worsening situation in Ukraine. Despite...
Lent 2022: Don’t Let it Catch You by Surprise
Super Bowl LVI is over, leaving some ecstatic and others crushed. Soon it will be time for March Madness – a thrilling twenty-one-day extravaganza of exceptional sportsmanship. Perhaps not as extravagant or thrilling, but Lent 2022 is also on the...
Panning For Gold – Part One
In his homily for the opening of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis presented three verbs that “characterize the Synod.” These three verbs are encounter, listen and discern. In a general sense, to “discern” means to” perceive or recognize (something)....
Are you living your baptism?
A reflection on the readings for Sunday, January 9, 2022 — The Baptism of the Lord Each week, I pray with the Sunday Scriptures when I begin to prepare my homily. I’m always amazed when the Holy Spirit surprises me...
Return to the Sources
Editor’s note: This is the seventh article in “Combat For Contemplative Life,” a series about the responses — inside and outside the cloister — to Pope Francis’s reforms for women religious in contemplative communities. Part one, by Mike Lewis, “A...
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