A girl is standing in front of the teacher, a girl rather small for her age. The round face is quite childlike, while the slight body already betrays the early maturity of this southern race. The girl is clad in a peasant smock. She wears wooden shoes. But everyone, not the children only, wear them here, except those very few who belong to the so-called better circles. The brown eyes of the girl a...
Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
Several months ago, I had the opportunity to travel to a far-off land, a land I had read about and imagined my whole life. “To Hogwarts you went?” some might ask. While Hogwarts would have been a magical experience, I went to a land that was home to a figure infinitely more awe-inspiring...
Protons, neutrons, electrons. Atoms, elements, and chemicals. These are words that you are probably used to hearing in a science class, not in a blog post about how one encounters God. I am a chemist, though, and as strange as it might sound, through these basic building blocks of matter, I find God in my work.
This post was originally delivered as a homily at Vespers on Wednesday, April 13, 2016. We are grateful for the author’s permission to publish it here.
Silence is both a terrible and a beautiful thing. But how does one describe silence? Since I was born profoundly deaf in both ears, I know silence quite intimately. Even though I use a hearing device called a cochlear implant for my right ear, I am still able to encounter silence whenever I turn off my cochlear implant, and from my experience, I can tell you that the silence of the hearing world i...
In his recently translated book, Mystery and Sacrament of Love: A Theology of Marriage and the Family for the New Evangelization, Marc Cardinal Ouellet writes:
This reflection recalls a prayer experience that occurred during an 8-day Ignitian silent retreat. On the fourth day, J.M. Hogue's spiritual director asked him to contemplate the Annunciation. For one of the hour long prayers, she invited him to go to the retreat center’s labyrinth, which follows the same pattern as the one inscribed on the floor of Chartes Cathedral in France. After explaining th...
After the angelic song of the Gloria concludes, in which heaven and earth kiss, silence descends upon the assembly. The priest says, "Let us pray," and then a series of words follow that (if you're me holding a toddler performing acrobatics), you rarely listen to.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Lk 2: 13–14)
In the celebration of the liturgy, the Glory to God occupies a unique place. On the one hand, it is a response: we have just participated in the Penitential Act by recalling and confessing our sinfulness ...
At the heart of Catholic life is the celebration of the Mass. This does not mean that Catholics' only purpose in the world is to attend Mass regularly. Catholics serve the poor. They join together with one another in informal prayer. They hang out at bars and talk about theology.
