Mary’s Sheen of Authenticity
O Lover, In an earlier post I wrote that all prayer is somehow response to what I called Your “seizing.” Variously exemplified, this dynamic also occurs in liturgy. More than in timeless themes of...
Author: ambushee
What, Finally, Is Prayer?
O Lover, In a recent conversation a friend raised a question as old as faith: what is prayer? Although this is a query the answering of which finds a lifetime too brief a time,...
Music Yet Again
[Duruflé, Maurice (1902-86), Requiem (Op. 9, 1947); performance (with organ) by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Stephen Layton (cond.), Saint-Eustache, Paris.] O Lover, In the face of the darkness encroaching on Advent and...
The Unfolding of Advent
O Lover, Last week signaled the end of liturgical year #2023. We have now crossed into Advent (“coming” or “arrival”), a four-sunday season characterized by anticipation, waiting, silence, attentiveness, penitential preparation, and hope of...
The Risk of Fixation on Safety
O Lover, On the penultimate Sunday of this church year the gospel reading was the parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30). In contrast to a pair of servants who had doubled their five and...
A Lover-haunted Dream
O Lover, Last week, during my first night following a brief hospitalization, I had a dream. The experience was unique and arresting, both before and after waking. In the dream I was a participant...
Hope Revisited
[“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. . . .(It is) an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it...
Excarnation or Incarnation?
O Lover, Of the myriad of issues punctuating the faith journey of this trekker, one repeatedly presents itself as primary; the relationship of You, Source and Fount, with the cosmic effluence of which I...
Aging as Separation or Link?
[“The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction” (Meister Eckhart, OP (c.1260-1328]).] [“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing that...
Ave Maria
O Lover, Well You know that Marian issues have sometimes stuck in my craw. Entering the Catholic orb in mid-life, I came predisposed. As a child and youth I was taught that Catholics worshipped...