I sometimes wonder just what Mary was doing when the angel Gabriel appeared.  Was she out for a long walk in the hills?  Stopping to rest for a moment while hauling a heavy water jar from the village well?  Or was she in the kitchen?  Luke’s gospel tells us nothing.  Whatever she had planned for [...]

My first missal, its battered spine barely clinging to the title, still has a place of honor between the new Roman Missal and an assortment of prayer books.  I can remember tucking it under my arm as I walked to Mass at the church behind our house, happy to be able to follow along just [...]

What evidence could we show to others, and to God, that we are listening to God’s word, walking in His presence, sharing with our brothers and sisters and joining them in prayer?

“What else can’t you do that you would like to do?” asks my physical therapist at our first meeting, after cataloging a list of things I couldn’t do:  go down stairs, go up stairs, put in the clutch on my car so I can repossess it from my 16 year old. “I would like to [...]

The delightful Latin American tradition of Las Posadas begs a serious question at Christmas.

I have heat.  I have light.  I am connected to the interwebs. The refrigerator is astonishingly clean.  And for all these things I am grateful.  Last week we had no light, no heat, and the internet — far from being my window on the universe — had shrunk to a tiny shutter I occasionally peeped [...]

Covered in sweat and dust on a sultry afternoon in August, I was piling up 20 pound slabs of stone, while my husband of 20 years sat in a cool conference room at the college, sliding papers around a table. This do-it-yourself project did not look much like the anniversary gifts touted on TV. No pearls?

I was 7 and indignant, stomping up the street on my way to Sunday Mass, keeping a disdainful distance from my mother, and the queue of little ones she was shepherding up the hill, my straw Sunday hat dangling by its elastic from my fingers. It was that very elastic that had fueled the argument [...]