Lent is a season, yes, a time. But it is also a place. Lent is Wilderness, a ruin, a wasteland. During these weeks, we learn of Jesus in the Wilderness. For 40 days, he’s stuck with himself and his thoughts and prayers amid the barren land and empty sky. When The Adversary arrives, at least Jesus has someone to talk to–even as he is tempted to eat, to commit suicide, to bow down and worship. It’s all very unsettling. Lent... Read more
1. Inside you there are two wolves. One wolf is Catholicism; the other wolf is dead. 2. You say that like it’s a bad thing. 3. The best thing about Catholicism is its people: Dorothy Day. Mother Theresa. 4. The worst thing about Catholicism is its people: Theodore McCarrick. Jean Vanier. 5. Poet Ross Gay (not a Catholic) suggests that sadness is a wilderness. 6. We are dead wolves in a wilderness of sadness.... Read more
St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, grandmother of Jesus, is the patroness of mothers. And junk collectors, according to a piece of street art I bought in the French Quarter years ago. The artist had painted her creepy greenish visage, which looks more like the ghost of Jacob Marley than the traditional saint of Catholic apocrypha and statuary, on a board salvaged from a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. That last part may or may not be true, which... Read more
By guest writer Milo Meldrum 1. Conquest I want to control everything: the way I am hurt and the way I am healed, to make a conquest of my own body by brute forcing nature with less grace than an animal. I am three years old, slipping in the bath and splitting my chin where the bone is closest to skin. The memory that sticks is having my chin sewn up, a doll who had misbehaved and split a... Read more
I remember a sunshiny morning in 1987. I remember sitting in Sunbeam on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, next to their enormous bookcase. Books by Edith Stein and Catherine of Sienna and Theresa of Avila were on my left. I had pulled out the small stack of children’s books from the bottom shelf. I was leafing through a picture book I had received for my first communion, and dismissed as “boring” because its pictures were mostly black and white. I have... Read more
(more…) Read more
In the town where I grew up, the first day of doe hunting season was a school holiday. My grandfather wasn’t a hunter, but sure enough, every winter as the deer were shot, slaughtered, and processed, packages of venison would arrive from friends with too much meat for their freezers. The first time I ate deer, I loved it without knowing what it was. Of course, I didn’t know the loveable creature that we left stale bread in the... Read more
Yesterday, as the Amazonian Synod in Rome comes to an end, it was reported that a statue that symbolized the Synod (Our Lady of the Amazon) was stolen and thrown into the Tiber River. Some celebrated (which was gross). Some were dismayed and cried “racism” and “iconoclasm” (which was correct). Henry Karlson had a particularly nice discussion of iconoclasm over at his blog this morning. The Amazonian Synod was controversial before it even began. It was known that the... Read more
Cool evening air whispered through the windows of my studio apartment where I lay one late Spring evening, hinting to me that life was still being lived outside. My arms and legs were cement. I hadn’t moved on the bed since beginning to play Sharon Van Etten’s album “Because I was in Love,” thirty minutes before. My phone buzzed beside me. My friend was calling to check in. “How’re ya doin’?” she said. “My body just feels... Read more
I began my summer. I started running in the mornings with a good friend. I sprinted out the pain. I tried out different meet-up groups, I needed new friends. I would not let the betrayal destroy me. Then one sunny day I went to a picnic on the lake near my apartment. Sitting in a group of people I’d never met before, I mentioned a city abroad where I had lived. The ears of a tall handsome man... Read more
Sick Pilgrim
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In