Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a …
Category Archives: Thoughts
Poems for the Easter Octave III
Seven Stanzas at Easter Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and …
Poems for the Easter Octave II
Happiness There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, …
Poems for the Easter Octave I
Missing God His grace is no longer called for before meals: farmed fish multiply without His intercession. Bread production rises through disease-resistant grains devised scientifically to mitigate his faults. Yet, though we rebelled against Him like adolescents, uplifted to see an oppressive father banished – a bearded hermit – to the desert, we confess to …
All Quiet on the Posting Front…
Loyola Hall is in the middle of its season of spirituality courses and I am working at full capacity or, given the ME/CFS, slightly beyond it. The courses though are something I love to be involved with–there is such a palpable sense of God at work during them. A week ago was ‘Theology and Spiritual …
Pray-As-You-Go II
Peter Scally has asked me to make clear that Pray-As-You-Go is running on a trial basis right now and might change quite a bit before it is finally and formally released. Until then please take part in the trial and give him any useful feedback you can. Please note that the URL has changed from …
Deja Vu All Over Again
As attentive readers of this blog will know I sometimes succumb to that most terrible of preacherly temptations–to recycle a homily created for one community and time and place and use it in another setting. Sometimes it is laziness; sometimes pressing need; sometimes it seems as though I’ve said whatever it was as well as …
Pray-As-You-Go
If you are looking for something new this Lent to help you pray your way to Easter look no further than Pray-As-You-Go. This site, the brainchild of Peter Scally, SJ, co-creator of SacredSpace, provides a daily 10-minute reflection in mp3 format to download to your iPod or play on your computer. Each day’s file includes …
Jesuit Jokes
Brandon over at Siris has a bunch of Jesuit jokes today. My own favourite joke at our expense is this one: A Franciscan, and Dominican, and a Jesuit were out playing golf one day. They were moving along the course quite well, until they got stuck behind a group of golfers who were taking quite …
Conversion… Promised Pic
Here’s the photo to accompany my most recent homily. Click to see it full size.