Category: Faith

spiritual garden

Tending Our Spiritual Garden

  “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” Garden Heritage I remember my grandmother reciting those words to me from the Mother Goose nursery rhymes book she favored. She was also quite the gardener, which probably explains her love of this particular nursery rhyme. She had two gardens in two counties and canned, froze, and preserved to her...

miracle

I Am Truly a Miracle
Are You a Miracle Too?

Like the lives of many who are reading this, my life is not picture perfect. The history I have lived is undoubtedly less rocky than the lives of scores of others. Being a survivor of an assault pregnancy at the tender age of fourteen does not make me a miracle, however. Although I was blessed to go on to finish...

winding path, narrow path

Following the Winding Path:
The Surrender Novena

  No, not the winding path! Instead give me the straight path. I want the simplicity of a quick and easy answer – and I want it now. Isn’t that what we want. Anything else seems just too difficult. Oh, how we humans cling to this in many aspects of our lives! We are comfortable in our own little niche...

Joyful mysteries

Living Through the Joyful Mysteries

We are now fully immersed in the season of Advent – a time of anticipation for the joy of our Savior’s birth. As we make ready and prepare for His coming, the Church reminds us to clean house – not our physical homes, but our souls. Every parish provides a penance service to encourage individual confession. The readings during Mass...

saint nicholas

The Counter-Cultural Message of Saint Nicholas

The feast of Saint Nicholas is upon us and affords us with a perfect time to consider how we celebrate the days leading up to Christmas. A previous post, Santa and the Elf on the Shelf – What are They Teaching Our Children?  conveyed a message of putting focus on the spiritual rather than on the imaginative secular. The point...

marriage, matrimony, grace

Marriage, A Matter of Grace
Reflections of a 17-Year-Old Bride

Spoiler alert: My husband and I are celebrating 45 years of marriage today (November 29, 2019). I write this perspective, then, from a position of decades of experience. As we are now both in our early 60’s, we have lived through several seasons of an ever-evolving society. Our childhood was a time of coming home when the porch light came...