Weekly Word

Prayer does not make us less aware of the circumstances of life. It makes us even more aware than we ever were before. Why? Because now we see the world as God sees the world.

A young woman, the newspaper tells us, who had been nothing but heartache and shame to her family all her life, walked away from an automobile crash that killed everybody else in the car.

“Moses was a reluctant prophet.

“I kept my sin secret and my
frame wasted away. Day and night
your hand was heavy upon me.”—Ps. 32

Commitment is that quality of life that depends more on the ability to wait for something to come to fulfillment—through good days and through bad—than it does on being able to sustain an emo

The feast of Saint Clare of Assisi is August 11.

Give us, O God,
leaders whose hearts are large enough 
to match the breadth of our own souls 
and give us souls strong enough
to follow leaders of vision and wisdom.

The feast of Mary Magdalene is July 22.

There were two old monks who lived together for many years and they had never quarreled.

Loving God, You who dwell in our hearts,
make for us a cave there
in which to hear your voice more distinctly,
feel your care more tenderly,
understand your will more clearly,

The first time I went to Rome, experienced the intrigues of the Curia, saw the politics of the system, watched the maneuverings of national clerical alliances, and realized how helpless women

To close ourselves off from the wisdom of the world around us in the name of God is a kind of spiritual arrogance exceeded by little else in the human lexicon of errors.

In most monasteries, as in most marriages, we celebrate our silver and golden anniversaries of final profession.

As a Sufi story teaches, "There are those in winter who, calling themselves religious, say, 'I shall not wear warm clothes.

Every afternoon, as I sit in my upstairs office, I hear the old monastery bells begin to ring in the once Benedictine church that then adjoined this inner-city monastery.