Pastoral Message Marking One Year of Pandemic
A sign on the door of St. Mary's Catholic [...]
A sign on the door of St. Mary's Catholic [...]
During serious illness conversations, some doctors will ply their patients with this question: “What is your minimally acceptable quality of life?”
Death is an uncomfortable truth. Despite the comfort of our Catholic belief in the soul’s immortality, the thought of leaving this life is an alarming one.
There’s nothing quite like a good Chuck Norris joke. A while back, my family went through a streak of sharing one-liners and memes heralding the prowess of Norris, now 80 years old. It was unbeatable humor even for the siblings who couldn’t tell you what he did before the turn of the century.
“A baby is God’s way of saying the world should go on.” My mother spoke this truth a thousand times while I was growing up. She said it every time we heard news of a friend or relative expecting a baby, but also each time the world darkened with terrible suffering or personal tragedy. She saw in each human life a great possibility: the prospect of new beginnings meeting the promise of hope.
Looking across a barren field on a frosty morning, I see an abstract quilt of colors and textures. Scraggily golden cornstalks, dark stripes of ploughed land, stripped grayed soybeans, dried-down alfalfa.