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Purpose
I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop. — Psalm 102:7 (Douay-Rheims Version) Last night at twilight, a large woodpecker lighted on the utility pole in the back yard. He made a few desultory taps on the treated wood, then scurried to the top and sat there, looking around, his magnificent head a flash of color in the ebbing light of a day that was on the edge of slipping into the past forever. The bird began to sing, the sound an exotic, quasi-tropical series of notes as staccato as the ones his beak made in the weathered fibers of the pole. Ten to…
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The Most Catholic Thing
Tomorrow I will embark on the most Catholic thing I’ve done to date: I will begin the 33-day preparation for a consecration to Mary on the Feast of St. Loius de Montfort. I’m looking forward to the focus and the discipline of this preparation. So many of the events swirling in the air today have reminded me of exactly why I began to be drawn to traditional Roman Catholicism some years ago, setting in motion a series of broken friendships and relationships that still grieve and perplex me to this day. *** I saw my bicyclist friend on the side of the road yesterday morning, in the rainy dark. I…
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June Into July
There he is again, above me, half-watching me as I am half-watching him. As I write this, the hummingbird is on the telephone wire over my head, his tiny feet curled around the wire, his baton of a bill moving left and right, conducting the orchestra only he and his kin can hear. The summer day is hot and still, and much quieter than the summer Sundays of my youth, the sultry days down in the Delta when the reedy drone of locusts and katydids stretched across the hours and surprised you at night when it began to fade. Quieter here, yes, and perhaps not as hot, but hot still.…