Sick Pilgrim Now Has Two Things in Common with the Pope

Last updated on: April 6, 2016 at 8:07 am By Jonathan Ryan

1. We’re Catholic. 2. We share a publisher. We’re writing a book for Loyola Press, the fine folks who brought you this and this and this. The book will draw on our most challenging personal experiences–grief, death, divorce, mental illness, natural disasters, infidelity, humiliation, addiction—while walking with you through the liturgical year, seeking God even in the darkest places. And when it’s released in Fall 2017, we’ll be doing a book tour, so let us know if you want the Sick Pilgrim... Read more

The Nasty Truth of a Mother’s Heart

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 6:45 am By Jessica Mesman Griffith

“They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world,” begins Colm Toibin’s novella, The Testament of Mary. “There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal that is being hunted can smell.” A friend gave me a copy of Toibin’s book a few years ago, and I read it through my... Read more

Is this Heaven? An Ode to the Sacramental Beauty of Baseball

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 6:14 am By Jonathan Ryan

Our regular Sick Pilgrims might be shocked to read a meditation on sports gracing the pixelated pages of our broken spirituality blog. Sometimes, I encounter a sniffy disdain among my artier friends when we talk about sports. Whenever I gush about my love for baseball, I get the usual lectures about how obsession with sports has ruined America and taken public dollars away from worthier community projects. I get it, especially when I look at the National Football League, the... Read more

The Dark Devotional: St. Thomas Didymus: A Heart Made Double by Breaking

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 10:46 am By Guest Contributor

Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and... Read more

Light One Candle

Last updated on: March 30, 2016 at 4:36 pm By Jessica Mesman Griffith

Every week after Mass I light a candle. I love the smell of hot wax and matches, the action of my own hand kindling one small flame that will burn for hours, a visible sign of my unseen petition flickering beside the anonymous hopes and burdens of others. I’ve always clung to this little ritual. In those moments of life when I’ve felt most powerless, when I’ve felt there’s no comfort at all for myself or a suffering friend beyond... Read more

A Mid-Life Report Card from St. Peter…..

Last updated on: March 28, 2016 at 11:42 pm By Jonathan Ryan

(We are taking a week off here at Sick Pilgrim. So, Jess and I will be posting some pieces we wrote for other forums. I wrote this piece for my now defunct blog, The Rogue. It didn’t really fit there, but it works here very well. I wrote it when I turned 40 and I think it still holds up. Enjoy) A few days ago, I turned forty. I felt pretty good about the first half of my life,... Read more

Dark Devotional: Holy Saturday: Sitting Outside of the Tomb

Last updated on: March 26, 2016 at 9:40 am By Tammy Perlmutter

And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave. (Matthew 27:59b-61) The two Marys, sitting opposite the grave. In some translations it says that this was a garden, so when I picture this, I imagine two women on... Read more

Good Friday Dark Devotional: The Day God Abandoned God

Last updated on: March 24, 2016 at 7:42 pm By Jonathan Ryan

Matthew 27: 45-46 From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”–which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” Growing up in Southern Indiana, I was a lonely kid. It’s not that my parents abandoned me. They were blue collar workers from a small Indiana town who married very young. Every second was spent on trying to survive... Read more

Dark Devotional: Holy Thursday: Thy Uncomfortable Will Be Done

Last updated on: March 24, 2016 at 8:54 am By Matt Lafleur

“The stage is set. The curtain rises. We are ready to begin.” Benedict Cumberbatch probably wasn’t thinking of Christianity when he recited those lines, yet his words are fitting on this first night of the Triduum. This was the night of the first Mass, the beautiful origin of washing your contemporaries’ feet, the great betrayal of Jesus by one of his own. Holy Thursday. The following days would bring the greatest hardships to both Jesus and his followers and would,... Read more

Losing It: Colleen Mitchell Reads Seth Haines

Last updated on: March 21, 2016 at 12:15 pm By Guest Contributor

I’ve been reading Seth Haines’s memoir Coming Clean, soaking up his call to make my way through pain to sobriety, toward God and away from the habits I use to numb the hard things. But the last couple of weeks have found me drunk on my own grief, fretful and anxious, trapped in a world that feels too noisy and skin that feels too thin. Haines and his wife stood next to their two year old’s hospital bed, planning funeral... Read more