Living
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A Call to Honesty: Art and Architecture
“We’ve had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues – I see the world is rotten because of silence.” St. Catherine of Siena I should begin this post by saying I am no art expert. I am just a girl who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, subjected to the typically horrendous art, architecture and music that made its way into many Catholic Churches in those decades. Even as a small child, I had a strong visceral reaction to it. I sensed there was something off, something discordant about it. Then I went to Europe and was immersed in beautiful art and architecture — and…
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Taking the Time to Be Renewed
That time I hiked Croagh Patrick in Ireland, looked down upon all the beauty below and had a pretty good idea why St. Patrick decided to spend 40 days in prayer and fasting here. 😍 Don’t get me wrong. It is cold and windy and the conditions on top of this mountain were quite extreme — but Patrick knew the value of sacrifice, of mortification, of taking time away from the world around him so he could be with God — and God alone. Patrick loved the pagan world around him, and wanted to bring the Light of Christ to them — only he was well aware of all of…
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Rooting Bitterness Out of Our Lives
“The devil invites mankind to rebellion and disorder…he sows discord and incites us to pour out our hatred upon each other…” ~Cardinal Sarah~ I have had to work through some things this week. I have had to work through anger and sadness and repulsion at the meanness of men. But one thing I have learned in life is that I can not stay in that place of anger. I have learned that I must allow that anger to move me to the right and proper action and then I must let that anger go. Because if we don’t let that anger go, it will begin to fester like a thorn…
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The Early Days of the March for Life & Why We March Now
My mother is one of the founders of the March for Life. She was a “stay-at-home” mom, pregnant with her 4th child (me), when she traveled to DC to meet with 6 people to decide what to do about the one year anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Little did she, or anybody at that meeting, know that they would become the founding members of the largest human rights march in the history of the world. Let it be known that these people did not hate women. Hate was never the foundation of this movement. In fact, to this day, you would be hard-pressed to find a woman hater in the…
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Setting Goals for 2019
This is the time of year when everybody around me seems to be setting goals and filling in their day planners. Honestly, I am not one of those people who gets a thrill when they open their new day planner and begins to fill those blank pages with big plans for their upcoming year. I mean I have set goals in the past, and my husband and I are in a family business in which we have yearly planning meetings — but I tend to drive the poor guy crazy because I really don’t like to overplan things. My goals for our business are basically “make enough money to pay…
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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! I hope your celebrations have been beautiful! Even if it hasn’t been everything you hoped for, Christmas keeps going for 12 days, and then some — so there is plenty of time to experience all that this Season of Grace has to offer. I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to live these days in a celebratory manner — despite the challenges of being part of a family business and having to take care of many practical things at year end. Many years ago, a rousing game of “paper, scissors, rock” granted me the position of CFO for our family business. Clearly I lost. It’s almost a…
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Let’s Talk About Christmas Feasting and Why It Matters
Did you know that there was a heresy in the early centuries of the Church, known as gnosticism? The Gnostics thought the human spirit was naturally good, but it was imprisoned in the body, which was naturally evil or simply an illusion. Their goal was to free the spirit from its embodied prison. Why this matters is because many of us struggle with this same heresy today. We find ourselves seeing the body as bad or evil — and spiritual things as good and in conflict with the body. It’s understandable, considering the sex-saturated, botox injected world in which we live — but the proper response to all the craziness…
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Here’s to Hoping Advent Scares the Heck Out of You — At Least a Little Bit
Advent is soon upon us. Are you ready? I must say I had planned to write a nice post on ways to live out an intentional Advent, but then this tweet from Cardinal Dolan popped up in my feed and it got me thinking. It began “I’m sorry for the frightening readings at the end of the Church year, but they are meant to make us think about the end of time…” Let me say up front that I really like Cardinal Dolan, and I think his heart is in the right place, but I honestly feel that we shouldn’t apologize for the frightening readings this time of year. In…
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7 Things I Am Grateful For
Happy Thanksgiving! Hope your celebrating was beautiful and you have woken from your turkey coma and are full of gratitude for the time you had with family and friends yesterday. I hope you soaked up all the great conversations and food and wine that you could, because just around the corner is Advent, which is traditionally a time of fasting. Just remember, it’s the lukewarm ones that God spits out of His mouth — so if you have got the feasting thing down, the next season of Advent is a great time to get the fasting thing down, too. That being said, today is a day to reflect on all…
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Showing Our Kids The Place Their Story Began in Glendalough
“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Lock it up, safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~C. S. Lewis~ Some would say it is a stroke of sheer madness to settle down and marry just one person — just one — when there are so many people in this vast world of ours. I like to think that John and I are a little bit mad. We were crazy enough, 19 years…
