Living the Rule 
Stories and examples of how monastics and oblates live out the Rule in their daily lives.
Bright flame
Sometimes it can’t be helped, two world views collide, for many reasons, some too deep to understand. Yet we still try, rifts come into play, words spoken, emotions flare, and two people walk away from each other thinking the other wrong. Sometimes the divide is simply so wide that no bridge can be built, the… Read More ›
Beauty and beer: Monks’ outreach is part of new evangelization
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Even before retired Pope Benedict XVI set up a pontifical council for new evangelization and convoked a world Synod of Bishops on the theme, a new group of Benedictine monks was using Latin and liturgy to reach out to those whose faith was weak or nonexistent. Now they’ve added beer to… Read More ›
What Christ Jesus is calling us to
If you want something and it is good, you have to open up for it, reach out and move forward. Like in the spiritual life, to grasp God’s love and mercy, conscious acts of love and trust have to be made, often expressed against a current that wants to sweep you the other way. Death… Read More ›
The Near Death Experience
For the past 30 years the NDE (near-death-experience) has been of great interest to me. I think it is an important development in our culture due to our medical sophistication that allows many people to be brought back from the brink of death. Millions actually, in the United States alone 13 million according to P.M.H…. Read More ›
The difference (Loneliness and isolation)
Loneliness is an experience that the vast majority of people go through; perhaps all but there is no way of knowing that. There are people who experience aloneness all of their lives, but who are not necessarily isolated. Those who have faith, who seek to deepen their understanding of what their tradition tells them, have… Read More ›
Assumption
Often when I am saying the Glorious Mysteries’ of the Rosary, when I arrive at the “Assumption of Mary”, my mind often dwells on the mystery of the Holy Trinity dwelling in our souls. For the Christian, God is neither just transcendent nor immanent, but both. Some Christian writers will use the work “Panenthiesm” to… Read More ›
A wonder
How the mind works, it does what it wants, thoughts a jumble of absurdity, untamed, filled with flame and ice, earthquakes and tsunamis. Alive with impulses primal, primitive, hidden beneath our decadent cultural masks; sophistication a fraudulent aplomb, as the inner turmoil takes it toll. As if all is well in our hearts and minds,… Read More ›
Everyman (a book review of sorts)
Fiction is a very important genre of literature. People have told me in the past that they don’t read fiction, because it does not deal with life. When in fact the opposite is true, for to read fiction is to learn about life, to think deeply on many areas of existence, that may not be… Read More ›
Between here and there
Between here and there Trapped between here and there, in moments so swift as to be insubstantial; a wave of nothing that we ride all our days, in futures unknown and fate unsure. So swift who can contain it, our rapidity of flight through life, today becomes far… Read More ›
Those we meet on the way
the most important part of the NDE (Near Death Experience) It is often true that some of the favors or mercies, shown to us by others, those most remembered, are the small instances that may make the biggest impact. Perhaps this is so because it can be done in such a spontaneous manner, done freely… Read More ›