• Thoughts

    Words and Light

    Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be blind? If so, whatever you’ve imagined is probably wrong. According to Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight in an accident when he was eight years old, the world doesn’t…

  • Thoughts

    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…

  • Thoughts

    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…

  • Thoughts

    All We Need for the Journey

    For one reason or another, I saved a Magnificat meditation by Dorothy Day. Her words appear in purple. Today the atmosphere is very heavy. Rain threatens. So often one is overcome with a tragic sense of the meaninglessness of our…

  • Thoughts

    One Traveler

    Perhaps these words from Bishop Kenneth Untener (as shared by Maureen Sullivan, OP) in her book, The Road to Vatican II, are good openers for some thoughts. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise…

  • Thoughts

    Who Do You Trust?

    I think I had trust issues, but not necessarily with other people: with myself. What’s more, I have a feeling that my inability to trust myself enough, to let others consistently plant doubts in my mind, is the key to…

  • Thoughts

    It Can Get Hazy Among Humans

    Reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels set in Roman Britain is a bit of a paradox. As a lover of freedom, I should be rooting for the native tribes who have had their ways of life upset, curtailed, and sometimes ruined by…

  • Thoughts

    Big Pictures

    Through the details unique to each story, literature shows us the big pictures in life. When I take in the stacks and stacks of shirts in Jay Gatsby’s closets, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and the…

  • Thoughts

    The Old and the Novel

    The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well.…

  • Thoughts

    Please Don’t Get Comfortable

    The best part of reading more than one book at any period of time is finding the connections among them. It is a conversation, and like most conversations, paying attention is important, because if you do, you’ll likely find answers…

  • Thoughts

    Freedom of the Humble Soul

    I had every intention yesterday of writing about the interesting bits I found in The Gaze of Love by Sister Wendy Beckett, but I managed to get off on a political tangent. Can you imagine? Let’s see if I can…