Yesterday on my birthday I attended a physics lecture with a friend who’s a creative writer (poetry, a novel in the works). The lecture was about this year’s Nobel Prize winners’ discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not decreasing.

It was satisfying to think for a ‘time’ of the immensity of the universe, about the invisible presence of dark matter and dark energy that may together account for about 96% of the universe. And even oddly satisfying — because true — to think of our planet’s destiny of extinction, when our sun grows old and expands, then contracts into a white dwarf.

Do you think it makes our lives seem to matter less, to set our lives in the context of the universe and its history? Continue Reading

“Praise God . . . small animals and flying birds, rulers of the earth, leaders of all nations, all the judges in the world. . . ” (Ps. 148:10b-11).

Small animals next to great rulers . . . I like this image. I suppose it could evoke the picture of a king with his own private menagerie of animals . . . but I prefer to think of it as an image of chipmunks and squirrels and other lively rodents going about their business beneath our feet. Continue Reading

Yesterday I half-noticed the ups and downs of my moods as I walked through a day of cooking and bill-paying and long distance phone calls and son on — a day that felt slow-moving because household things take so much time, especially when you cook from scratch. It was a day infected too with a tendency to fear about mild physical symptoms I’ve had a long while on and off and that have an as-yet unknown cause. And in this day, I noticed once more that a sense of well-being ebbed and flowed, as if the inner weather were fair but partly cloudy, or overcast with a few bright clearings. Continue Reading

Someone about whom I care deeply, is drawn to a deeper faith, but is repelled by the institutions of the faithful—the Church. How do I play a part in his struggle, especially when, in some measure, I share it?

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Our great friend, alumna and oblate Noreen McDermott Haiston died May 31, 2011. We all will miss her tremendously. Obituary

Read Advent reflections from the Benedictines!

I’ve been AWOL from this blog for the last few month. I have excuses, but everybody’s as busy as I am. Mostly, I just haven’t had anything much to say…or rather I’ve found myself unable to put into words the continuing, rich experience of  the life I live. Continue Reading

Reading an essay this morning by J. G. Janzen, I learned that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote the following Eucharistic blessing for a time “when he found himself in an Asian desert without bread and wine and had simply invoked all the parts and all the happenings of creation as that day’s Eucharistic elements”: Continue Reading