The following article is the first in a series that will appear in the Catholic Herald to offer catechesis and formation concerning end of life decisions, dying, death, funerals, and burial of the dead from the Catholic perspective.
Tag: soul
We are called to build a monastery in our hearts
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The center point of my spiritual geography is New Melleray Trappist Abbey, just west of Dubuque, Iowa. I have returned there often for retreats ever since I first visited at the age of 19.
Founded in 1849 as a daughter house of Melleray Abbey in Ireland, this monastic community rises at 3:30 a.m. every morning for Vigils, the first liturgical hour of the day. The monks’ days are filled with prayer, meditation, work, and silence.
From the first time I entered their beautiful stone chapel, I have felt profoundly embraced by God at New Melleray; some of my deepest prayer experiences have occurred there. If I could have ever convinced God that the Trappist life was my vocation, I would be peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors there as I write now!
Mending the ‘holey socks’ of our souls
“M-o-o-o-m! There’s a hole in my sock!”
It was Sunday morning, 20 minutes before Mass, and our household was a-flutter with our four children scurrying about donning church clothes, brushing teeth, and fixing hair.
My eight-year-old son was in his room, half-dressed, with a sock on one foot and disdainfully holding up the matching holey one. “I can’t wear this holey sock to church!” he cried.
How marvelous is the miracle of life
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I experienced a miracle! A few days ago, I held in my arms my first grandbaby — newly born Faith Annmarie.
Thank God she’s healthy and perfectly formed. And as I was looking at her, I reflected how wonderfully she is made: arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet, toes, eyes, mouth, nose, ears, as well as what I couldn’t see but was just as real — hundreds of different tissues, dozens of organs including the remarkable brain, and trillions of cells.
And then I reflected on her divinely infused eternal soul.
Blasting holes through the buffered self
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Last week, during the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, I had the enormous privilege of sharing a breakfast with Fr. Robert Spitzer, the inter-galactically smart Jesuit, who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science.
I had just finished Spitzer’s latest book entitled The Soul’s Upward Yearning and delighted in discussing it in some detail with him.
The ‘buffered self’
This text is, in my judgment, the best challenge to what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self,” that is to say, a self isolated from any sense of the transcendent.
Why you need spiritual food
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Every third summer, the Catholic lectionary provides a series of readings for Sunday Mass from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the magnificently crafted chapter in which the evangelist’s Eucharistic theology is most fully presented.
It is a curiosity of John’s Gospel that the Last Supper scene includes no “institution narrative,” which is to say, the account of what Jesus did with the bread and cup the night before he died.
The priest: in persona Christi
I met a young priest in Fairfax, Va., last week. Of course “young” is a relative term. Everyone around me gets younger with each passing year.
Father Jaffe had been at the parish for less than a week and was the priest on call for the local hospital. It was 2 a.m. when his pager went off. A couple had lost their eight-year-old son hours before and the mother wouldn’t let go of his body.
All attempts of the staff and hospital chaplain to get her to release her son had failed. She sat rocking him, unresponsive to anyone. The woman wasn’t Catholic, but the staff knew from experience that it was time to call in a priest.
When the newly ordained 26-year-old arrived, he did the only thing that came to mind. He sat with the parents in silence for a moment and said, “It looks like you need some prayer.” He opened his rite book, The Pastoral Care of the Sick to the section with the prayers for the deceased and he began to pray aloud.
Reconciliation shows us God’s boundless mercy
A college student wrote in her college newspaper that sometimes she wished that she were a Catholic. Then, like her Catholic friends, she could confess her sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Through the absolution of the priest, she would be assured of God’s forgiveness.
God’s merciful forgiveness is expressed in the words of absolution: “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and the resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Life begins at conception
To the editor:
The period of time during the 40 Days for Life, September 22 through October 31, is an ideal time for all Catholics to be reminded that human life begins at the moment of conception.
At the moment of conception God infuses a newly created immortal soul into the cell union. At that moment there is a body and soul. At the moment there is a new person, a human being.