Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
Once again, I woke up well before my alarm, but this time at the far more reasonable time of 3:45. This is my final day at Our Lady of Clear Creek monastery. I got myself ready for the day, cleaned up my room, and finished packing up my belongings. I was finished with all of this by 4:30, so I […]
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Do you pray to your Guardian Angel? Do you ask them for advice or help? Why not? The Church teaches that we all receive a guardian angel at birth, an angel assigned to guide and protect us, to watch over us. As it says in scripture: There shall no evil come to thee: nor shall the scourge come near thy […]
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Whither is thy Beloved gone, O thou most beautiful among women? Whither is thy Beloved turned aside, and we will seek Him with thee? We begin with the first antiphon of Lauds for today’s feast of The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Monastic Diurnal. It has always affected me, but perhaps just now it’s affecting me […]
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Nine months after the solemnity of her Immaculate Conception, celebrated on 8 December, today we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a feast so ancient that it is celebrated on the same day in both East and West. Scripture tells us very little about the early life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Tradition tells us that she was […]
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Today is one of the more interesting feasts on the liturgical calendar, for today is the feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. OK, nowadays they’ve slightly sanitized the name; it’s now officially called the “Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist”, but for the sheer Catholic joy of calling a spade a spade, I’m sticking […]
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In this very volatile moment in our history, both of the United States and of the world, where things seem to be unravelling and so much anger rises to the surface so quickly, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the meaning of our times. This anger and factionalism and the accompanying doom-saying are hardly unique to our age. […]
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Today is the memorial of Saint Monica, beleaguered mother of Saint Augustine, whose feast is tomorrow. I’ve had many occasions to pray for her intercession, but right now, this day hits a little different for me. In the modern Roman calendar, her memorial is listed simply as that of “Saint Monica”, but before the calendar reform of the 1970s, she […]
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The Catholic Herald reports that for the first time in decades, the Catholic Church in America is growing. They go so far as to say, “If the projections for 2025 hold, this change could represent a significant turning point for American Catholicism.” I’m cautiously optimistic. The Church is a big ship, and she takes a good long while to turn […]
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My beautiful bride of 17 years was taken to the emergency room at midnight of Easter Sunday. She was physically weak and having trouble with her memory. At Tacoma General Hospital, they ran every test you could imagine. They even sent a sample of her spinal fluid to the Mayo Clinic. On May 5, we received the final diagnosis from […]
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Today, a week before Good Friday, the Church has traditionally remembered the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin. While the commemoration was removed from the calendar in 1970, it survives in the Extraordinary Form, as well as in many local calendars including that most Catholic country of Malta and many Hispanic countries. The commemoration is so widespread, in fact, that […]
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Twenty years ago today, on the night of the 26th of March 2005, I was baptized into the Church at the great Vigil of Easter. It’s odd to think that my baptism is now the midpoint of my spiritual journey thus far. Ten years ago, I shared some reflections of the tenth anniversary of my baptism. Last year, I shared […]
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The mercy of God is a scandal – Christ offers His infinite mercy to every worst kind of sinner, excluding no one. This eternal upwelling of mercy overflows, cascading upon the whole of the human race. It extends to murderers. It extends to rapists. It extends to thieves, and liars, and stalkers, and vandals. It extends to tax collectors and […]
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Today on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, we would do well to meditate on the life of the man who helped raise the Son of God. It can’t have been easy. Tradition holds that Joseph was already an old man and a widower when he married the Blessed Virgin, who was very young, perhaps 16 or so. He had several […]
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Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one. (J. Michael Straczynski, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars“) Today is the Feast of the Universal Doctor of the Church and one of my name Saints, Thomas Aquinas. When (certain) people, told of my conversion, said to me “oh, you’re […]
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I can’t speak for anybody else, but I need all the help I can get. As a writer, I often find that I love having written much more than actually writing. I distract myself easily. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I tend to write in bursts like I’m emptying my brain. Then I rather need to recharge the brain […]
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Today is the feast of the man many consider to be the founder of Christian monasticism, Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt, the “Father of Monks”. He was born in the middle of the third century in decidedly Pagan Middle Egypt to a well-to-do, comfortable family. He spent much of his life avoiding the sorts of comforts available to him […]
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Happy Epiphany, probably! In a sense, the Feast of the Epiphany is the culmination (if not quite the end) of the Christmas Season. It was once a much more celebrated feast than it is now. In fact, it once had its own Octave. Like many others, I’d love to see that restored. In the popular imagination, the Feast of the […]
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