Praying
-
Holding on to Hope
Oh February! It has come close to getting the better of me on several occasions — bouts of sickness, exhaustion, little sunlight and motivation — but I am happy to say I think I’m going to make it through! How about you? If there is anything good to be said about February, it is that February is the month that I grow the most in the virtue of hope. Like any virtue, hope can only grow when it is tested. More specifically, it can only grow when we are tested, and so I guess I should be thanking February for always making me exercise the virtue of hope in new…
-
The Winter of Our Discontent…a.k.a How to Make Good Choices in Life
“Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by this sun of York;And all the clouds that lour’d upon our houseIn the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” William Shakespeare, Richard III Can somebody please make it stop snowing? Really! I’m absolutely done with all the cold and the slush and the ice? How about you? For those of us in the Midwest, summer is but a figment of our imagination — a promise of better days, soaked with sunshine and berries and every good thing. February, on the other hand, is the absolute worst of all the winter months — and so we buckle up and we grow…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Confessions of a Recovering Academic
Hello. My name is Moira, and I am a recovering academic. Likely, I’ll never fully recover — but that’s okay — the stumbles can help to keep a soul humble. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not study that is the problem: It’s what we do with all that knowledge we have gained. To those people with a natural inclination towards academics and learning, intellectual pride can be a major stumbling block to doing something beautiful with all that knowledge. It often leads to a total lack of gratitude to God for the intelligence that He gave you. It inevitably leads to thinking that you know better than everybody else —…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
That Time I Confessed My Sins in Knock, Ireland
Today, a young man from Ireland sent a kind little word about a post in my Instagram stories. It was a quote from John Paul II: Shout out, David, if you’re reading this! I have to tell you, this young man’s honest words about the struggles he has had with his faith, after all the scandals in Ireland is hard to bear. And yet, after our own “summer of scandal”, I feel like I understand a little bit about how he is feeling. So many people disillusioned with the Church — and who could blame them? We had an amazing experience in Ireland, but I’d be naive to think that…
-
An Awakening
There have been some bad moments in our Church lately — and we need to recognize that — but almost imperceptibly in the background, there also seems to be an awakening going on in the hearts of Catholics around the world. The truth is, there has been a weight that has been dragging us down, making us tired and lethargic — I know that I have felt it, and maybe you have, too. It was like we couldn’t quite name the darkness or our lethargy, but as members of the same Body, we were feeling the sickness that hadn’t yet been diagnosed. There was a rot that had set in,…
