Thinking about Love
If you do not know or understand someone, can you truly love them? The desire to love needs to include the desire to understand. To know, one must believe that knowing is possible. Communion, which encompasses authentic sharing, cannot be…
Where Meaning LIVES
We spend minutes, days, years,as if we are keeping score. Did you read the book,ace the test,.graduate? Who lives longest?Who keeps it together until...death do us part? How long until the nest is empty,the career is history,what you’ve sown is…
The Key Shouldn’t Cost More than the Treasure it Unlocks
For each of more than 400 days, I wrote and published at least 1,000 words on a site that no longer exists. I still have most of the posts stashed away and reread one every now again. The following was…
We Are All Afraid
We are all afraid. Despite that, and because of that, we tell our stories. We tell them to figure out who the hell we are, and when that fails, we read other people’s stories in the hopes that they can…
Continue the Conversation
Everything is interconnected, which is why I cannot try to isolate the books I read. I need to keep a dozen or so in process. I need to stop worrying about not finishing one or another: no more self-imposed rules,…
Of Men and Misunderstanding
To Share or Not to Share Two days ago, I began thinking in earnest about the balance between silence and expression. I am coming to understand how essential It is to express oneself and to be free to express oneself,…
Stop and Look Around
I have so many ways of collecting my thoughts—or more accurately, I guess, of prompting my thoughts in an attempt to write something coherent. It’s good to look around, and doing so today netted me the following in Evernote (ironically…
Something Stronger Within
How do we go about finding meaning in existence? Are we ever explicitly taught to do so? Where would one go for such teaching? Perhaps long ago, the answer would have been some form of institutional school, but that no…
Turn Around; It’s not All in Front of You
Andrew Forge’s essays on mostly 20th-century art has me thinking about paintings that tend to elicit the response “I could do that” and wondering why they are important. I think it comes down to a relatively simple distinction: perhaps we…
White, Grey, Black
“I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?” “No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly…
Peace on Earth
Has there ever been peace in the world, and if so, will there ever be again? I suppose it depends upon who you ask. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has an image of world peace that looks…
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…
