I grew up in a hell-fire-and-damnation church and one of the lessons I was taught there was that Jesus had to die a painful death on the cross to save us from our sinfulness, which started with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. I absorbed that lesson so well that, as a young […]

I have been reading Fr. Gregory Boyle’s latest book, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. He might have just as well called it The Whole Language of Love. Fr. Boyle runs Homeboy and Homegirl Industries in East Los Angeles for ex-gang members he has invited to find a new way to live. One […]

  As we approach the day we celebrate Jesus’s birth, all of us who would follow Jesus might well acknowledge our very human nature: 1) the walls we’ve built to protect us that also keep God at some distance, 2) our own egocentricity that won’t allow us to trust Him completely, and 3) the habits […]

12.20.21 Lately, I bought a book by Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision For a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity. As a writer myself, I underline what particularly strikes me in the books I read. Then, I will dog-ear the pages that are particularly meaningful to me. And, if I’m working on a theme at […]

From the Hebrew word for the presence of God, paneh, and the four Greek words, enopion, emprosthen, para and prosopon, we gather that the definition in the Bible for our modern word, presence, is the face, appearance, presence of God; it means to come before, in front of, to face, to act on behalf of […]

  Humility for us human beings is an accurate appraisal of where we each stand before God. If we are truly humble, we know that God loves all people, that we are all made in His image (Genesis 1:26-27), so that none of us stands out above the rest no matter his or her education, […]

11.29.21 Advent   Thanksgiving, gratitude to God for all that we are, all that we have, all that we are to become—Thanksgiving in our country ushers in Advent, the celebration of the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ, in this world. Advent is the season of waiting, of anticipation, of knowing the gift that is […]

I wrote a few weeks ago about gratitude. And here we are in the week of Thanksgiving. The first pilgrims feasted in the fall of 1621 in thanksgiving for this new country, for the help of the natives in settling in, and so we do, too, exactly 500 years later, celebrate this country and all […]

  Last week I wrote about living in the truth instead of the narrative: the narrative is the story that we have been taught by our culture, our parents, and through our own experience—it is what we want to have happen in our lives. And now this week, I turn to what happens in our […]

  The narrative is the story we’ve each grown up with, the stories in our culture, the stories in our families, and our own take on what has happened to us. The narrative is what we look to be affirmed in the world, in ourselves. We are wholly dependent on this, our version of the […]