Contemplate This - We are being asked to imagine ourselves joining hands and becoming a circle around our planet and through space and time. Conscious of who we are at our best, we take part in a mutual exchange of wisdom and protection.
COVID-19 is teensy particles that go all over and spread, just like glitter. An anonymous description I read is this: "Picture us around a table, making individual crafts. One of us is using glitter. How many projects have glitter?" (They all do, since glitter spreads. Everywhere.)
Horizons - 2020 certainly has been a year like none other in our lifetimes. "Unprecedented" is the word that has been used countless times, so much so that I can barely stand to hear reporters say it. And yet, it is actually the perfect word.
Being in the presence of transgender people made something shift inside me — from fear and avoidance to a rehumanizing of my attitudes, explained in three words: revaluing, resurfacing and refinding.
In the St. Alphonsa youth group for young women at our parish in Karumandapam, I serve as animator, trying to guide them and be a friend and empowering them to be the "now of God," as Pope Francis called young people at World Youth Day last year.
I'm not talking about "big stuff" or life-changing decisions — those seem obvious for responding out of faith and prayer and discernment. I'm talking about the everyday stuff, the routine, the automatic.
From 1982 until 2020, sisters, singers and musicians accompanied people who came to Taizé prayer to find peace, solace and God's presence at the convent chapel. Now, somehow, COVID-19 has transformed and enhanced our prayer.
This sacred season of waiting and expectation is especially poignant now as our world holds its collective breath wondering if joy is even possible amid pandemic pain.
Horizons - Embarking on Advent this year, songs and reflections tug me along toward the season's idyllic waiting. But I am tired of waiting. And some people have been waiting for way too long.
There are no COVID-19 cases in the Cook Islands as of Dec. 9, but the global pandemic has had great economic, social, cultural, mental and environmental impact on us here, with both positive and negative results.
Jubilee is a time to return to the source of life, God when we wander away from our real home (forgetting that we can never survive, away from the source of everything). I realized in my isolation, without God, to whom else can I go?
For many women and girls in our country, the war zone is not the battlefield — their own homes are, and the war is orchestrated by their own partners or people who are supposed to protect them.
I've recently retired and developed a part-time writing ministry. I often get asked, "What are you doing these days?" What I'm doing is learning how to live life in a "Wait for it; watch for it; trust it" mode.
There are many good people today who possess an agnostic consciousness. They deserve to hear the good news about what God is doing in and through the significant spiritual movements of our time.
Horizons - The Scripture of Advent is rich, colorful and arresting: lambs and lions, floods and calamities, feasts with good wine, exhortations to repent. What are we to make of these paradoxes, particularly in these tumultuous times?
It has been 40 years since Archbishop Óscar Romero and the four churchwomen were killed in El Salvador. Later, in 1989, six Jesuits, and a housekeeper and her daughter were killed. My thoughts come from Isaiah on the kind of fast that our God wants.
Sr. Elena Jaramillo, a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange, California, had been in El Salvador for 30 years when I met her. Her manner of accompaniment caused me to imagine what the North American churchwomen martyrs would be doing today had they not been assassinated.
It seems the pope wants to take the church to a new place in the world, not as an authoritarian leader, but as an animator of the spirit. However, he has ignored the novel theology ushered in by the early Franciscan theologians.
We do this all the time: We sleep through darkness every night — it's no big deal. Somehow though, as we passed the autumn equinox this year, the coming of the dark time carried anxieties and dread it never did before.