Know It All
The Volume Library. God love you, Dad. When you signed on the dotted line for that scam, you were trying to do the right thing. Your blood sugar may have been on the way down and you just wanted your…
A New Way of Living
Today is the first day of my new life. It sounds dramatic, I know, but I spent my old life avoiding drama at all costs. So, let’s double down on the drama: everything I thought I knew was just guessing.…
Go Ahead, Be Fresh
“I am not a cruise director” is one of the statements I used to make to my children more often than I would have liked, but certainly not on a regular basis. It was my almost reflexive response when one…
Do Any of Us Really Know What We are Doing?
Paleo Principles by Sarah Ballantyne is an enormous tome, and I generally set a box of poker chips atop the pages of one side to hold it open so I can read while I eat breakfast. Bridget purchased the book…
Bamboozled
The word “corruption” jumped out from the pages I read today in Couturier’s Sacred Art, and I jotted a quick note: “Corruption: you can’t go home again, and you can’t start over as if the past never happened.” I guess…
The Awful Futility of Explaining
In Marcel Billot’s foreword to Sacred Art by M.A. Couturier, he explains that L’Art Sacré was a review run for a time by two Dominican priests, Father Couturier and Father Pie-Raymond Régamey. They managed, apparently, to work together and produce…
Trust Issues
Domenique de Menil writes, in her foreword to Sacred Art, a collection of essays and reflections by M.A. Courturier, O.P. : “For Père Couturier, to be sure, straightforwardness, which begets clarity, was the simple and immediate principle of his personal…
The Humiliated Christ in Russia
Caryll Houselander was an interesting cat: quirky and Catholic, a bit of a mystic, a bit of a crazy cat lady without the cats. She was born in England in 1901 and died of breast cancer at the age of…
Who Wrote that Book?
Most of my life was largely guided by unquestioned assumptions: my parents loved me, school was a good thing, following the rules was a guarantee of success. I know that my parents loved me, but the other stuff? Well, let’s…
Settling In with the Quiet Sounds
Items continue to pile up on my desk and in my mind. I recently went to TJ Maxx to see if I could find a suitable inbox, but there was nothing that would hold my entire studio. Of course, the…
This Milky Way of Souls
I have been reading The Road to Vatican II by Maureen Sullivan, OP, in two ways these past few weeks. Sister Maureen was one of my professors in college, and I’m glad I went ahead and bought this book, as…
What Are You Saying?
This seems like a strange choice for a simile: “… as welcomed as child sacrifice.” I came across it in a book I’m reading, and it gets thoughts swimming in my head, thoughts like, Who thinks this way? You want to…
