My Spiritual Wanderings and Wonderings

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  • Inspiration from St. Ignatius

    An Inspiration from St. Ignatius I was praying to St. Ignatius, so maybe he gave me this inspiration: It’s better to do it when you think of it than to think about it later and know you haven’t got it done.

  • “Indifferent to All Things”?

    When St. Ignatius tells us (in the Principle and Foundation) to live “indifferent to all created things” it might sound like an insult to our passionately loving Creator, who made the sun and the moon and all the peoples, for his great love endures forever (Ps.136:5).   We are correct to rejoice in the earth and…

  • Suffer as Jesus Did?

    The first thing to keep very clear is that Jesus did not say that we would suffer if we follow Him.  No one saw the suffering abroad in this world as He did.  And suffering is abroad in the world not because God created it; God is love and love does not do that.   This…

  • Persons in God’s Image

    Here is one way to approach our personal relationships with the Lord Jesus. See if it makes sense to you. We are made in the image and likeness of God. When we think about that, we want to remember what has been revealed to us about God: God has existed forever as Three Persons, whom…

  • Jesus Is Transformed

    Jesus had a premonition or a inspiration that he was to take His closest friends and go up to a high place. There, He was transfigured—His clothes becoming like light and His face shining and splendid. Then Moses and Elijah were with Him, just as physical as He was—suggesting something about the afterlife. But God’s…

  • Jesus Preaches the Kingdom

    What might it have been like?  Maybe like a dean announcing that every graduate who took the LSAT to get into a law school had excelled. Or like a mother announcing to her big brood that she’s PG again and they will have a little sister/brother soon.  Well, Jesus did something much, much bigger. To…

  • The Feast at Cana

    Three things huddle below the surface of this event. First of all is what made the Lady Mary pointedly call her Son’s attention to the failure of wine.  She knew that He had not yet used His powers, so insisting now means that she felt that He was in some manner connected with the failure….

  • Trust the Way You Pray

    My Uncle Chappie, when I visited him in the elegant diocesan hop for the elderly, had a packet of holy cards with prayers on the back. Every one he got—and he got a lot—he added to the bottom of he pack. “It takes me more than half-hour to pray through all of these.”  Then he…

  • I Want Him Back

    My brother Charles and his wife Toby had children from high school to not yet in school.  The youngest was Michael. Charles had a warning heart attack but didn’t take the warning, though Toby had tried.  The second was fatal. So I came back from graduate school to be there when he died and then to…

  • Charlie’s Hope and His Children

    A father who is a friend of mine wants his children to go to Mass on Sundays. Charlie (I’ll call him) wrote to me this beautiful sentence that he would like to say to his children to keep them faithful to Jesus and to show it by going to Church: “I want to go to…