I am late getting this Jerusalem Diary up and running because like an absent minded old priest I left my laptop computer in Newark Airport. This has caused considerable stress and worry not only because I am lost without my keyboard, but also because nowadays personal information is on these gadgets and even with the best [...]
I realize I have been away from regular daily blogging for some time. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I had a stroke last January and my typing skills are still not up to speed. It is a nuisance as my mom taught me to touch type when I was in Junior high [...]
I first came across the Jesus Prayer when I was in college by reading J.D.Salinger's novella Franny and Zooey. Then I read The Way of the Pilgrim and began to practice the hesychasm as it is called in the Eastern church. This method of prayer is a technique to "pray without ceasing." (I Thessalonians. 5:17) The prayer [...]
Annunciation Here in a bright alchemy, history collides and combines with eternal things. The mundane is infused with mystery, and the dust and mud and blood have wings. Here every moment of time is pregnant with meaning, every tick of the clock fecund with potential, and every tock significant— eternity bulging in every second. [...]
I haven't been writing blog posts lately because I'm working to finish my next book and quite frankly, after almost twenty years of blogging I am finally just about blogged out. However, a conversation on Twitter has got me going and it seems like the topic is worth a blog post for clarification. The topic is [...]
Use this payment system. It is for your convenience, your safety and your security. To do so you need to have a username and password and security questions. You must also have your cell phone with you at all times because we will send you a security code to sign in. This is for your security [...]
Today's Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple brings me to ponder temples. The catastrophe that is modern church architecture reveals a basic ignorance of most architects about the history of church architecture. Unfortunately, it also reveals an appalling ignorance among our Catholic priests and a lamentable lack of foresight among those who plan [...]
What a beautiful soul St John Bosco was! It was while I was serving as a high school chaplain that I came across St John Bosco's philosophy of child discipline. He would advise his brothers that the boys in their orphanages should be treated with gentleness and kindness because, he observed, God had planted in the [...]
Did you know today is National Puzzle Day? During the Pandemic Lockdown we were all stuck at home and like many folks, we dug out the jigsaw puzzles and worked on them as a family. The rest of the population must have been doing likewise because, when I went online to order some more jigsaw puzzles [...]
In the wee hours when the mind is awake and pondering I kept thinking of all the artificiality, lying, deception, fakery and illusion in our world. The modern world seems increasingly to be a flimsy stage set, a simulacrum of reality, a plastic Disneyworld of fairy tale fakery and lies. We are alienated from reality not [...]