Weekly Word

Of all the stories told about Benedict, this one may be the most impacting of all on our own lives. Most of us will never work miracles or found monasteries or humble invaders, that’s for sure.

What does the prophetic tradition, the prophetic dimension of the spiritual life, have to do with us?

The eternal icon of the prophet occupies the corner of my desk.

Slowly, slowly I began to ask myself a different question: Could a woman really be a Catholic at all? The fullness of the faith was surely not meant for us.

Psalm 130 teaches us to pray: “My soul relies on God more than a sentry on the coming of dawn.” Someplace deep inside us we know, even in our loneliest moments, that we are not alone.

Only one evangelist, Luke, talks about the Ascension as a separate dimension of the life of Christ.

The first time I went to Rome, experienced the intrigues of the Curia, saw the politics of the system, watched the maneuverings of national clerical alliances, and realized how helpless women were

No one ever taught us Marian theology in any organized academic way. They didn’t need to even try. It came with the May altars we built in grade school.

The sixth step of humility is to be “content with the lowest and most menial treatment.” We might say, “to be content with less than the best.”

Of all the attitudes we bring to prayer, presence is at once one of the simplest and one of the most difficult.

Interesting. The day starts and ends at the tomb. No flash of light. No announcement. Simply the awareness that what has been is gone.

What is worse than the actual event of death is the awareness of the degree of loss that comes with it.

There are several ways to survive the interruptions of life. One way is to assume that what we don’t want to have happen but can’t change is God’s mind for us—mysterious, but magical nevertheless.

Commitment is that quality of life that depends more on the ability to wait for something to come to fulfillment—through good days and through bad—than it does on being able to sustain an emotional

“The life of a monastic,” Benedict writes, “ought to be a continuous Lent”—a life in which holy reading, self-control, and reflection on the great questions of life could be of the essence.