A Discipline of Noticing
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I think of these words as a directive. They are my prayer for my vocation as a mother, that I would teach my sons to see the life at play in everything.
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Julian Of Norwich-A Revelation of Love
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There is a tenderness of language in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love. These sixteen mystical revelations manifested at what Julian had thought was her deathbed one night over several hours.
Read MoreMiddle School
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Middle school is an awkward time as it is, and now these young people have to deal with it during the disconnect of a global pandemic and wearing masks that hide our subtle facial expressions and stifle our mumbled words.
Read MoreWhat is my Identity?
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"My life story has been one of learning to be loved by God." My latest column for NorthWest Catholic What is my Identity? I wrote this as a love letter to the middle schools I see struggling to understand who they are.
Read MoreAnne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery
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“No commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.”
Read MoreA Gentle Saint: St. Peter Faber
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Inspired by Jon M Sweeney’s new book, Peter Faber: A Saint for Turbulent Times, my reflection on Peter Faber, a gentle saint for Loyola Press
Read MoreThe Boyfriend List: E Lockhart
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Have you ever wanted to get inside the mind of a teenage girl? Me either, but this is exactly where we live for 229 pages in E. Lockhart’s The Boyfriend List.
Read MoreFirst Art Love
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I don’t think any of us had grown up feeling like art was something we could approach. Graffiti, silkscreen and maybe Disney were for the likes of us. But the stuff in museums, that was for kids in John Hughes movies or people who lived in New York. Not us.
Read MoreBIG NEWS!
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I have signed a contract with Liturgical Press to write a biography on BRIAN DOYLE for their People of God Series.
Looking forward to getting to know Doyle even better as I contemplate his life and writing.
Read MoreWhat Does it Mean to Be Content?
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This year, I found out I can be a lot happier with a simpler life.
Read MoreThree Minute Ministry Mentor: The Many Gifts of Examen
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Honored to be included in this collection of Examen stories for Three Minute Ministry Mentor. If you have every wondered about praying this Examen, this is a great resource and inspiration.
Read MoreMolly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body
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Molly McCully Brown cannot forget she has a body. Many of us can. We float through life without recognizing the way we move from one place to another. Brown lives with severe cerebral palsy. She is “visibly disabled” so she must “talk about [her] body everywhere [she] goes.” In this captivating collection of essays Brown explores living with this body; hating it, learning to love it, what she says to her body, what it says to her, where she has taken her body and where she has pushed it to its limits.
Read MoreCannonball Moment: A Friend's Death
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Like St. Ignatius, we all have "Cannonball Moments", a moment where your story could have taken a darker path, but instead brought into God’s brilliant light. I wrote about one of mine for Ignatian Spirituality's #31DayswithIgnatius
Growing Stronger in Body, Mind and Spirit
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Learning to take a holistic approach to my health; my physical, mental and spiritual health are all intertwined.
Read MoreThe Year We All Became Bird Watchers: Writer Brian Doyle Finds God in the Birds
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This year, we all became bird-watchers from our windows, on those long walks we found ourselves on more frequently and when we learned we really didn't have anything better to do than to sit and stare at a body of water.
Katharine Smyth- All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
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“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” Katharine Smyth writes in her biblio-memoir All the Lives We Ever Lived. For Smyth, that book is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and it is the lens with which she views her father’s life and death.
Read MoreStrangers and the Funny Papers
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I think we want to see goodness in each other again. This past year we began to view each other as the enemy. But now, with our faces open, we see the Imago Dei, the image of God, shine out of our being.
Read MoreHow We Can Be a Blessing to Others
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Poet John O’Donohue said "It would be lovely if we could rediscover our power to bless one another." I've been trying to discover it for myself.
Read MoreGrace in Laughter
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I’m in my home office. I can hear my sons laughing in the room above me. My younger son, more in control of his emotions, delivers great one-liners with a straight face. My oldest absolutely delights in his brother and cackles like some sort of Amazonian bird. It’s a loud laugh — always louder than the joke calls for — brassy, joyful and free.
Read MoreRachel Cohen: Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels
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Jane Austen’s novels conjure up images of country ball rooms, empire waist dresses and teatime in the parlor---not grief. Yet Rachel Cohen’s biblio-memoir, Austen Years: A Memoir in 5 Novels, does just that. Cohen looks at the well-loved British novels through the lens of grief, mirroring Cohen’s own in her in the death of her father. Walking through Austen’s work with Cohen, one will wonder why they never looked at this literature in this way before.
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