Catholic, Gay, and Feeling Fine, Thanks
I’m sitting in the parking lot of the shrink’s office. This is why I got a laptop: I am so often in transit that if I waited until I was settled at my desk, I’d never get any writing done. I think the woman two spaces away is in the same boat. She’s parked in…
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.1 When I was in college and going through the worst of it, I got tired of praying that the sadness would go away and that things would be easy. I got tired of it because…
A reader sent me part of this quotation from C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Since it’s better than anything I’m likely to come up with tonight, I’ll pass it along. It’s been too long since I’ve read that book. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you…
Lent really snuck up on me this year, the way Christmas never does. Of course there’s no real reason for the culture at large to get all geared up for Lent, since Lent usually means people buying less, not more. I doubt most people notice Lent at all, except for wondering about the black smudges….
Can you guess the reason that I’ve got a keyboard gathering dust in my parents’ attic, a drum set doing the same in their spare room, a fiddle languishing in my closet, and a duduk slowly drying in my dresser? I’ll give you a hint — it’s the same reason I can read the Cyrillic…
Is there anything more beautiful than the human face? Beautiful because it manifests the mystery of incarnation: meat made more than meat, flesh quickened by spirit, the breath of God made visible; the way the wind is made visible when it moves the trees. Faces show love, show what it looks like, a visible image…
Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke. My new Pandora station has been helping to keep me sane. I should be depending on the Lord for that, but I ask you: who else could have made Patsy Cline? Music always makes me think of colors, and Patsy is a deep, breathless blue, like a summer sky…
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”1 To be a Christian is to know that the phrase “too good to be true” is nonsense. A thing is true insofar as it is good, and good insofar as…
“Death is the mother of beauty.” Dear Wallace Stevens, you brilliant, urbane, doddering old insurance-salesman of a poet: no it isn’t. Yesterday being All Souls’ day, I spent some time thinking about death. I wasn’t depressed. I felt (and feel) great, actually. Thinking of death is what you’re supposed to do on that day and…
Some people think Christians are in love with suffering. Not true: it’s just that we don’t see it as something to be categorically avoided. My heart hurts right now. It just does, and none of your business why, dear readers, although you’d understand it well enough. I know myself well enough to know that it’ll…
