Christ’s Story Is Our Story, Too

We often approach Lent as the opportunity for a fresh start, a time to make changes in our lives, to let go of bad habits, to grow spiritually. And we approach it sort of like a liturgical marathon, with the final push to Easter taking place during Holy Week. But Easter is more than a [...]

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Through the Cross to New Life

The next week marks the high point of our Church year. The French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus once wrote, “There is no sun without shadow. It is essential that we know the night.” Christians know that there can be no resurrection without the cross.
We hear two different versions of Jesus’ Passion this week. On Palm [...]

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The waiting is over!

Sometimes when we put everything we have into anticipating a great event—planning, preparing, hoping, dreaming—the event itself can sometimes seem almost anticlimactic, as though it couldn’t live up to the hype. Brides and grooms have said this of their wedding days, when after months and months of planning every perfect detail, they have little recollection [...]

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Tenebrae: ‘The light shines in the darkness’

I went to the Tenebrae service at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral last night. This has become my personal tradition for entering into the Triduum. I first experienced it back in the late 1980s at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, where it was sung after the Mass on the Lord’s Supper [...]

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“Life comes at you fast.”

Perhaps you’ve seen these Nationwide Insurance commercials: the partying college student is suddenly a balding man with a mortgage; the baby in a car seat is a teenager by the next intersection, the father pushing a toddler on a swing is suddenly knocked down by the swing now occupied by a hefty adolescent. Their slogan [...]

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