“Hold on to your beat!” and, hopefully, others will join in.

The long-awaited Holy Leisure Trilogy is finished!!

Take a half hour each week for a quick retreat. These are 7 weeks that really will change your life!

Prodigality has two meanings:

to fritter away your riches and to give generously of them.

Isn’t mail a marvel? That someone is tasked with the solemn duty of conveying your thoughts to me! That for pennies my missive flies to you through an unseen network of hands, scales, sorting machines, rolling bins, airplanes and trucks! And against what odds!?!

In case you thought you’d be twiddling your thumbs for eternity, here are a few thoughts about how I plan to spend that time-out-of-time.

By the free and conscious act of courtesy, we may fill a simple human form with the glory of God and help to reweave the context of human being.

“Among sacramental, blessings (of persons, meals, objects and places) come first.” (CCC 1671) “Sacramentals…prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it. …There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be thus directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God.” (CCC 1670)

I’m beginning to think we need more conscious practice for being present to persons.

Though I know that you are a deep mystery and a unique, unrepeatable reality, you enter my space as an object in the environment and I often do not register your presence at all.

When a child asks “Where do babies come from?” he may just be wondering if the new one can be exchanged, or he may need a simple reassurance that he came ‘from Mommy’ and not from toxic slime as his older brother insists. Experienced parents know what he probably does not want is a long, technical explanation accompanied by slides and illustrations. Restraint is often the better part of apologetics as well.

Once upon a time, during what felt like a huge crisis, I received some great advice.

Since then, I’ve remembered it by way of the phrase, “Not a ‘crisis’, but a ‘life task’”.

“The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims.”

—A. G. Sertillanges

Live so completely immersed in the Faith that you must be in a life support suit to go out into the world. Live so deeply embedded in Catholic culture that you are a living artifact of that culture wherever you interact with others – your gestures, collar, habits of speech, prayer before meals reveal your home of origin. Live so fully in kairos that chronos does not limit the scope of your being.