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Ver sacrum—“holy spring”! Come, O south wind, Blow upon my garden. Now the acceptable time! Crocuses slither out of winter’s belly Like Jonah sputtering relief. And jonquils and daffodils yawn.   Christ, our Awakener, bid us rise And live your life. Wake up!  Rise up! The forty days and nights of snow are gone.  …

             People who love to dig in the soil feel an urge around February to get into their gardens. Their hands need to be in the earth. However, until winter turns to spring, they must content themselves with repotting house plants. In the spiritual realm we sometimes feel a similar…

A mystic of the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart wrote, “Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion.” Sometimes we don’t know how to help people. They lose a job, experience violence or disaster, cope with failure or loss; and we don’t know how to respond. Like God, our first response can be compassion.

“Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” The doctrine of the cross is a bittersweet legacy of Christ to his followers—bitter in the loss, sweet in the finding. It is the paradox of death being life, crucifixion being salvation. When we descend to…

I hope that I die during the Easter Season. Then there may be a chance that the liturgy would include the Easter account of the two persons journeying to Emmaus, hearing a Stranger talk to their hearts “burning within” them, and then recognizing the Christ in the breaking of the bread. There’s hardly a story…

To the untrained eye, a newly-tilled garden is just a patch of ground, but the gardener sees soil replete with moisture, nutrients, air, and living organisms. To the gardener the soil is a living thing. A gardener touches, smells, and remembers the soil’s past history to capitalize on the wealth stored there. To the gardener,…

The eyes of Jesus and Mary met for a fleeting moment on the via crucis. Because Mary and Jesus loved immensely, they could encourage the other forward through the streets toward Calvary. They knew the present kenosis (self-emptying) would hollow them to receive the greatest capacity possible for God’s life and love, although such thoughts…

“I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”  (Isaiah 42:6b-7) Imagine God reading Isaiah 42:1-7 to you to remind you that you were formed…

After an unusually harsh winter the spring thaw may make us more eager than ever to plant a garden. Gardening gives us many metaphors for salvation history and our own spiritual lives. Our human history began in the Garden of Eden, a microcosm of the Garden of All Creation. In the beginning all was beautiful,…

“What paralyses life is lack of faith and lack of audacity” (Teilhard de Chardin). Audacity: a great thing to have in yourself, but others probably won’t like it. The world’s most influential people were audacious: Mahatma Gandhi, Clara Barton, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Paul Revere, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King,…