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What God Loves About Your Past
It is certainly not a tenet of the Catholic faith that life only becomes valuable on the day you marry or make your final vows in religion. However, the kind of formation that emphasises the Great Big...
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Servers versus Choristers
The relationship between servers and choristers is like the ancient rivalry between vampires and werewolves – two races equally legendary, equally unlike the mainstream society that views them both...
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Redemptorist Rhapsody
I don’t know about you, but I never think about Redemptorists. I mean, I know they exist, but I never think of them in terms of saints, and I’ve certainly never thought of them as boasting the kind of...
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The Continuum
I mentioned that I’ve been reading John Saward’s “Sweet and Blessed Country: the Christian Hope for Heaven.” If your idea of a good spiritual reading is the sort that makes you sigh deeply, and then...
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Hail to the Mother
Happy Feast! Between today and the Feast of the Immaculate Heart I’m going to write a lot about Our Lady. There are many good reasons that people struggle with devotion to her. Others get worn down by...
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2015. The Year of Healing. The Year of the Polyglot!
It’s hardly a revelation to say that focusing on an interesting project or work can be a great help when moving through grief or shock. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that signing up for the first...
View ArticleAgnostic Questions and My Answers
An agnostic friend prompted me with some of the questions below. Thinking them over, I asked myself more questions from her viewpoint. This is her/my interview of me/myself: Q: How much of you belongs...
View ArticleShe Gathers the Herbs for Battle
I have arisen from the bronchitis-that-would-not-die to find that we’re just over a month off the Feast of the Assumption. That means it’s time to start preparing the fruit, herbs, spices, and teas for...
View ArticleOn Turning Forty
Single women raised in conservative communities dread their fortieth birthdays. (I don’t know if the same is true for men; it would be interesting to know.) After twenty years feeling the sidelong...
View ArticleWe are the Culture
Those who have never been seriously hurt by their religious communities will think of apostasy in terms of truth and non-truth. Your religion is true, and that is the only thing that matters, so the...
View ArticleThe Village Fair
Today, between the world’s best coffee and one of my local churches, I found our village fair. My suburb is the strangest mix of coffee, pollution, Greek, Lebanese and Portuguese elderly, artisan...
View ArticleIn Praise of Leaf Tea
One of my life’s blessings has been my collection of grandparents, who have been, for me, a community of good memories and the kind of example one keeps in the heart. Recently, one of my grandmothers...
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A Dowry for the Wonderworker
If I ever attempt the making of a Catholic set of Oracle cards (!?), the deck will certainly feature St Nicholas of Myra, whose feast day is today. He is also known as St Nicholas Thaumaturgus, the...
View ArticleIn Thurgoona
Thurgoona means ‘darting bird’ and if, rather than drawling it, you exclaim it suddenly – something like ‘TH’GUNA! – it sounds rather apt. There is no man-made ambient noise here at all. At all. A few...
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