• Church Life,  Daily Life,  I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation,  Paintings,  Quotations,  Reflections

    The Fleeting Light

    Where are the voices crying out, not for agreement with a doctrine or assent to a particular teaching, but for taking virile and perhaps physically fatal responsibility for one’s own reaction to the evil we see around us? The voices that do cry out do so in an attempt to persuade people to agree with them, or to at least debate with them about their position. Who speaks words of comfort for those who cannot and will not trust any of those clamoring for followers? What are the once-faithful and now-bereft to think, to do, to believe? The road to self-knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the…

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  • Daily Life,  Photographs,  Reflections

    Winter Rampant

    Ah, it’s a winter day and the breathing of the year is slowing down, agonal, soon to stop. The endless circling of the stars and the thin shafts of sunlight spear down into the earth and bring a certain gladness, it seems to me, to the birds who go about their business above me. The frost retreats from the heat of my thumb, pressed against the grainy glass of the windshield in passing, a reminder that I still have within me the heat of the life-force, the soul-ember that can melt the deep cold that exists between the planets, that exists between men of the same bloodline who should be…

  • Lectio Divina,  Prayers,  Reflections

    Before My Candle

    I sit before my candle and watch it the flame. How can a thing so still be so alive? The flame is mysterious to me. I’m told that energy is never destroyed, that it merely changes form. What form does the blue-and-yellow flower of fire morph into as it reaches to the ceiling, immobile as long as my breath does not reach it? Does it cycle back to be used by some other soul, some child of God asking questions that all seem rhetorical? The candle illuminates my face, and I wonder how I appear to it. I suspect that animals can see and hear and sense things that are…

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