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What Can We Learn from Puzzles about Our Life of Faith?
For the longest time, I thought that making jigsaw puzzles was simply a diversion, a way of relaxing, a pleasant hobby, especially during the cold winter months. At times puzzles almost became an addiction for me in my leisure hours. When shopping, I often found myself checking the toy departments for new puzzles, to see what creative new photos or paintings had been made into puzzles.
Recently, someone asked me why I enjoyed making jigsaw puzzles. My immediate response was that it was a means of relaxation for me, a healthy escape from everyday concerns and ministry. Later, however, I realized that my response had been incomplete. There was another reason that attracted me to puzzles. It was this – I think of making puzzles as a way of being in touch with a meaningful symbol of our life's journey, and the gift of spirituality. It is a process which can bring me into fullness, piece by piece, moment by moment, day by day.
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A Name from the Past, Vin Scully—The Velvet Voice of Baseball
He’s been dubbed: “The Poet-Philosopher of Baseball,” “A Voice for the Ages,” “The Velvet Voice.” He’s been compared to Walter Cronkite, Mark Twain, and Garrison Keilor.
In 1982, the Hollywood Walk of Fame honored him with a star among the Greats of stardom in the same year the National Baseball Hall of Fame enshrined his name among the Greats of baseball. Vin Scully may be the very model of sartorial perfection, but it’s not the wardrobe that has endeared him to baseball for sixty-seven years. It’s his deep baritone voice and the power of his words.
Read more A Name from the Past, Vin Scully—The Velvet Voice of Baseball
Another monumental Christ statue being built in Brazil
A small city in the south of Brazil plans to unveil one of the world’s biggest Christ statues, a 121-foot-tall giant of concrete placed on a 20-foot-high platform. It could be seen as an odd project in a country that recent surveys show now has a population that is less than 50 percent Catholic, but the fact that the sculptor comes from an Adventist family shows that the religious dynamics in Brazil cannot be easily deciphered.
Read more Another monumental Christ statue being built in Brazil
Brave ideas and blasphemy in ‘The New Pope’ from HBO
“The New Pope” is a television series on HBO written and directed by the Academy Award-winning Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino. It’s the sequel to his controversial HBO series “The Young Pope,” which came out in 2016.
Jude Law beginning the series as Pope Pius XIII
In that series, Sorrentino imagined what might happen if a youthful Gen-X cardinal (played by Jude Law) ascended to the papacy. “The Young Pope” (aka Pope Pius XIII, aka “Lenny”) uses his powerful new position to avenge, among other things, his abandonment to an orphanage by hippie parents.
Read more Brave ideas and blasphemy in ‘The New Pope’ from HBO
The Sacred Heart: A feast of friendship and an answer to loneliness
The night before he dies, Jesus calls his disciples “friends” (John 15:13–15). Jesus has already made himself known to his followers as teacher, healer, master, Savior. Isn’t that sufficient? Why now, in the fateful moment of the Last Supper, identify himself as a friend?
Because any god who fails to give himself to us as a friend can never be god enough. Friendship is what we crave as human beings. We need Jesus to say to us “I call you friends” because we are hard-wired for a God who loves us as his intimate companion, a God who wants to walk with us in the cool of the evening (Genesis 3:8).
Mosaic of Sacred Heart, Parroquia del Espíritu Santo, Anáhuac, San Nicolás de los Garza, N.L., MéxicoThe late renowned theologian, Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, used to say that if Christianity doesn’t connect profoundly with what we care about — addressing the deepest needs of the human heart — then “you can substitute the Great Lizard for Christ.” But I don’t know anyone who wants to worship the Great Lizard. And the reason is because Great Lizards don’t make great friends.
Friendship, wrote Servant of God Luigi Giussani, is every relationship in which the other’s need is shared in its ultimate meaning. If I don’t have a friend, then I’m alone in my need, and I don’t even adequately understand that need. My need can even begin to blackmail me.
To free us from this, Jesus promises: I am your friend; I share your need in its ultimate meaning; I know it, love it, get to the root of it, provide for it, cherish it, die for it.
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Come back to Mass!
The past fifteen months have been a time of crisis and deep challenge for our country, and they have been a particular trial for the Catholics. During this terrible COVID period, many of us have been compelled to fast from attendance at Mass and the reception of the Eucharist. To be sure, numerous Masses and Eucharistic para-liturgies have been made available online, and thank God for these. But Catholics know in their bones that such virtual presentations are absolutely no substitute for the real thing.
Becoming what we pray
The prayers that we say during Mass are a treasure of spirituality.
During this Easter season that we are now concluding, I was again struck by the force of these prayers — the Collect, the Prayer Over the Offerings, and the Prayer After Communion. These prayers express all the range of human emotions, desires, and hopes.
The troubled Catholicism of Ernest Hemingway
“I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example — and I have never set a good example.” — Ernest Hemingway to Father Vincent Donavan, in an unpublished letter dated December 1927.
Among the many surprises in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s six-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway are the accounts of Hemingway’s two adult conversions to Catholicism.
The code for his life – live by ethical principles
Most literary scholars do not take either of these conversions very seriously and see them as pressed upon Hemingway by family, friends, and circumstances. The conventional view is that Hemingway’s true “religion” — insofar as he can be said to have one at all — is his famous “Code”: the idea made explicit in his interviews that in order to give meaning to life, one had to live by some set of ethical principles.
Soon-to-be-saint Bl. Charles de Foucauld challenges our ideas of success
I was in the eighth grade (53 years ago) when I first read about Charles de Foucauld in Henri Daniel-Rops book, “The Heroes of God.” The book deals with ten men and one woman whom he calls “Adventurers of God,” who “lived … suffered … died to hasten the fulfillment — as much as it is possible for it to be fulfilled on earth — of the wish that every Christian addresses to the Father: “Thy Kingdom Come.”
Daniel-Rops had what they call in Spanish “buena puntería” (“good aim”). Three of the five non-saint heroes who were not canonized (nor beatified) at the time he wrote the book have since been raised to the altars: St. Junípero Serra, St. Damian of Molokai, and now, Blessed Charles de Foucauld, whose canonization date has yet to be announced.
Read more Soon-to-be-saint Bl. Charles de Foucauld challenges our ideas of success
If you’re a Western Christian, your spiritual ancestry is African
About video: Ancient Carthage, on the northern shore of Africa, was founded in the 9th century B.C. on the Gulf of Tunis and was home to a brilliant civilization. Carthage occupied territories belonging to Rome, which finally destroyed its rival. A second – Roman – Carthage was then established on the ruins of the first.
Western Christianity is fundamentally African, in the way that Eastern Christianity is fundamentally Greek.
Most Eastern churches — whether they worship in Romanian, Bulgarian, or Old Slavonic — recognize that their ritual and devotional forms largely come from fourth-century Constantinople, where the liturgy was rendered in Greek. Western churches will acknowledge that their own roots are Latin, but few of us in those Western congregations know that our Latin roots are African.
Who are “Roman” Catholics?
Read more If you’re a Western Christian, your spiritual ancestry is African