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Third Sunday in Easter
On certain days, when the sun lifts into the sky, the first rays travel across to the copse of trees across the road from our house, where they light on the center of the trees and ignite them in morning splendor. Yesterday, I happened to look outside just as this happened and was able to get a picture of it. The picture of course does not capture the deep beauty of the true moment, but it does communicate a certain surface element of the beauty. Sometimes when I scuff along the graveled lanes that twist around our farm, I feel blind to what is around me, so intent am I…
- Books, Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Lectio Divina, Prayers, Reflections
Suffering’s Work
I have for the last several days been in a sustained mood of contemplation and prayer, feeling and responding to an almost urgent sense of needing to pray, to seek companionship with God the Father, with Christ the Lord, with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and with my patron saint, the Maid — St. Joan of Arc. Today before entering my place of work, I offered a very focused supplication that I might not be drawn into nor affected by the dozens of little soap operas whirling about me on any given day. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been battered by the foolishness that is the norm…
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A Big Little Life
Up until this past weekend, I had read exactly one book by Dean Koontz. It was a supernatural suspense novel called Whispers, and I read it when I was a young Marine in 1980. The book came into my possession just as I was ending a two-or-three year spree of reading Stephen King novels, and I was growing tired of the genre. Whispers did its work with me — it kept me up late into the night reading, and later kept me awake listening to the night sounds and thinking about the world Koontz had created. But I assumed that Mr. Koontz was treading the same ground King had already…
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Make The Man
I believe it was in the fall of 1984 when I visited Savannah, Georgia for the first time. I went with three other Marines to explore the old city. We were stationed at Parris Island and I was the only one in our quartet who was not a Drill Instructor. The four of us decided to take weekend liberty and check out the storied cemeteries and streets and pubs. I wanted to prowl through a city I’d heard so much about, and they wanted to be away from the bumbling mobs known as recruits. Two of my buddies were off that Friday, but one of them was still “on the…