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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