Fr. Eugene F. Hemrick was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Joliet in 1963. He completed his seminary education with a B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in Theology from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein (IL) and after ordination earned a Master in Religious Education in 1968 from Loyola (Chicago, IL) and a Ph.D. in education from Notre Dame (South Bend, IN).

Fr. Hemrick served as Seminary Rector and Assistant Professor at Illinois Benedictine College from 1972 until 1976 and from 1976 until 1996 he served as Director of Research for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. While at the NCCB, Father Hemrick also served as Assistant Professor of Education at The Catholic University of America from 1984 until 1989, holding the Mother Seton Chair in 1984. He later moved to the University’s Development Office as Director of Diocesan Relations.

In 1999, he became Coordinator of Institutional Research for the Washington Theological Union and also the founding Director of the National Institute for the Renewal of the Priesthood (www.jknirp.com.)

Fr. Hemrick has a long association with the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. As a researcher, he has conducted more than 100 studies on various aspects of church ministry, the priesthood, seminaries, social justice, multiculturalism, immigration, and other topics for the United States Catholic Conference, and he has published about 75 articles in national magazines. He was also a weekly nationally syndicated columnist for Catholic News Service.

“How Did We Get to This State of Turmoil?”

November 7, 2024

Is respectful dialogue diminishing and if so, why? Four essential principles of dialogue listed by Saint Pope Paul VI help answer this. 

  1. Does dialogue contain clearness? Is care given to review every angle of language to guarantee that it is understandable, acceptable, and well chosen?

  2. Is it meek and peaceful avoiding violent methods, and is it especially generous?

  3. Is it trustworthy promoting confidence and friendship that binds hearts in mutual adherence?

  4. Does dialogue practice pedagogic prudence in which we put ourselves in the shoes of another to better reach him or her? Is there an effort to learn the sensitivities of one another to be on the same wave link? 

In public discourse, dialogue seems to be much more irreverent in tone. Derision is preferred to respectfulness. Forgotten is dialogue is based on speech a God-given gift and possesses the divine duty of possessing a moral compass to direct it.

We live in a post-postmodern age filled with enormous challenges needing the best of thoughtful dialogue. For example, unimagined scientific breakthroughs have elevated our knowledge level to new heights. William Shakespeare’s quote, “Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance,” reminds us of the complicated dimensions contained in its progress. Sophisticated knowledge can be employed to improve life or used to threaten and destroy it. Discovering the power of the atom can decrease energy needs or create Armageddon. Ernest dialogue can make the difference between capitalizing on newly amassed knowledge and avoiding its potential for destructiveness. The power of the media can be a blessing or problematic in deciding good from bad in it. The critical issues of our age are enormous, requiring a mammoth effort to respond to them prudently. “Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance" reminds us that much blood and sweat are crucial for ascertaining the knowledge and wisdom needed for a noble future. And only through sensible dialogue will this happen.

Presently, dialogue seems to be regressing more than progressing. Contentious interchanges and harmful divisions are one reason. The heart needed for warm dialogue seems to have become more hardened and callous. Heart-to-heart conversations are being replaced by heartless wrangling. Of great concern is irrational dialogue infecting all of society. 

Let us pray that post-postmodern dialogue is founded on the union of truth and charity, understanding and love, and respect and reverence. In unity, there is strength; divided, we fall.

“Fear of Dialogue’s Demise”

November 15, 2024

Why is a sizable percentage of society feeling our country’s principles and values are in turmoil? Is this uneasiness part of every new age? Will it eventually pass? Could it be a warning sign of an alarming malady needing immediate attention? Or could it be a blessing prompting us to examine turmoil’s roots in-depth? Let us examine this last option.

Study employs prudent questions which English philosopher Francis Bacon reminds us, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Today’s malaise poses two questions for a better understanding of present-day turmoil. Democracy in America by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville contains one reason. “In America,” he observes, “I have seen the freest and best educated in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet Americans seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures because they never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.”

Is materialism and the demise of gratitude at the roots of turmoil? Is profit-orientated commercialism that promotes the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence causing us to feel entitled to possess increasingly more? Is selfishness and forgetting our blessings inducing a sense of turmoil due to neglecting the values of order and peace created by benevolent unselfishness?

The manner in which freedom is envisioned is another question of importance. Freedom and the obligation to promote justice are at the heart of democracy. Often forgotten, they require responsibility and a sense of duty. Is misinterpreting freedom at the crux of America’s turmoil? Are there misinformed people who think they can do whatever pleases them when it pleases them? They don’t have to cater to anyone, creating an attitude of carefreeness that is contrary to the principles of democracy.

Duty implies obligations. Today, an often-missing obligation is having a conscience that knows right from wrong. Implied is possessing a moral compass and the order it creates. Another God-given responsibility is promoting another’s well-being. Justice, the heart of democracy, requires that being born into a community comes with the charge of supporting each other: one for all and all for one.

Fortunately, many unselfish citizens possess loving hearts that desire the common good over individual needs. These are values that create the order needed to fight disruptive turmoil.

“First Priorities of the Heart”

October 31, 2024

A priority is defined as something that is very important and must be dealt with before other things. Another way to understand its meaning is to point to our heart and ask what in it is considered most important and essential to me; what are its priorities?

In the encyclical Delexit Nos [translated God Loved Us], Pope Francis addresses the heart’s essence. “The heart appears as the locus of desire and the place where important decisions take shape. It is the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the “secrets” that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance nor illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely who we are.”

In contemporary society, there is concern that people are at risk of losing their center. As we become bombarded by violence, untruthfulness, divisions, unrest, and fears of natural disasters, no room for a loving, peaceful heart is left. How, then, do we maintain a strong, loving heart? It is by embracing metanoia aimed at a change of heart.

A change of heart is not a one-time happening but requires constant renewal and raising questions like what improvements are needed to maintain the heart’s authentic character and what needs to be avoided? What exactly in my heart is the most important concern needing immediate addressing?

A metanoia of the heart further raises questions that address the tenderness of the heart like when last have we felt intense joyful heartfulness?

Today it is getting more difficult to avoid losing a tender loving heart. The air is filled with brutality, revenge, retaliation and callousness. It is difficult to be warmhearted when innocent children are being killed before our very eyes, or a youth’s future is curtailed by overdosing. Kindness, understanding, and harmony, essentials to the heart’s tenderness, are dampened.

Recently I watched a little girl running on the U.S. Capitol’s lawn. As I looked more closely, I noticed her legs, feet, and arms were not coordinated, she was not whole. Yet she was so beautiful and so innocent. Why then did heartbrokenness suddenly hit me so hard? It was because I felt how blessed we are with a tugging heart that desires goodness and beauty for that child. That desire is the most important thing in life, the first priority of a heart-filled God.      

“A Postmodern Social Justice Movement Is Needed”

October 25, 2024

“Mucho trabajo?” “Si.” “Mucho dinero?” “No si!”

“Much work and long hours? Yes. Much money? No!”

Like these Hispanic laborers, as a laborer, I experienced long hours of demanding work, aching from heavy lifting, and collapsing at night only to repeat the same routine the next day.

In conversations with these laborers, I often wonder how much they experience as I did the same aching muscles after a hard day’s work. I wonder if they earn enough to feed themselves and their family, and I wonder about their chances for upward mobility, owning a home and enjoying the comforts of life?

In McMahon Hall at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, a statue of Pope Leo XIII graces its entrance. He too wondered about the plight of the lower working classes. These concerns resulted in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which translates as “New Things” that impact the rights of workers, fair wages, enjoying safe working conditions, being free to join trade unions, and the right to own property.

Rerum Novarum came at a time when the Industrial Revolution was in vogue, global immigration was at an all-time high, capitalism and making profit filled the day as did graft and corruption, often leaving the lower classes exploited and treated inhumanely.

Pope Leo created Catholic universities worldwide to increase the church’s ability to promote social justice and contend with the challenges of the new ages.

As a young priest, I experienced an age of social justice movements. In Chicago where I lived there was grave concern about the influx of African Americans moving into its southern side. Racism was predominant and its white neighborhoods experienced a mass exodus away from the Black people moving in. And too, there was skepticism about unions and concern about powerful companies trying to block them.

Despite the upheavals, a new consciousness of rights and respect for the little person heightened. Talk abounded about just wages, adequate rest for laborers, and ending child labor.

The Church has been blessed with leadership over the last centuries that has constantly championed the principles of Rerum Novarum and repeatedly has refined its principles to fit each new age. Today social justice challenges exist heretofore not imagined. Take for example, dock workers losing their jobs to robots and the need for retooling.

Rerum Novarum was an aggiornamento addressing “new things” in need of social justice upgrading. Upgrading is a never-ending process.” To add to this, Saint John Henry Newman would state, “To live is to change and to be perfect is to change often.”

“Psyched Out by Commercialism?”

October 17, 2024

The age of hyped commercialism has never been more robust than now. Oh yes: commercialism has been in existence for centuries but never has its scientifically developed means of persuasion existed as now. In the past, television and radio were nonexistent, and commercialism’s psychological impact did not come near to today’s standards. Those past days are gone. Astonishing is the way commercials can flash multiple mindboggling images per second that bombard our senses. And then there are the same repeated commercials that mimic brain washing.

Undoubtedly, commercials are titillating, alluring, and considered as part of our present times. For those who were brought up in the television/radio era its innovations seemed normal. So too, must today’s enhanced commercialism seem normal? But is it all that normal?

Commercialism is defined as an idea or attitude that focuses on making profits, supplying goods and services. The emphasis on profit has caused people to complain that at Christmas the religious meaning gets drowned out by the message to buy. In this case, it is viewed as materialism, greed, and avarice echoing the maxim the more we get the more we want, the sky has no limits, don’t deny yourself.

Controlling our appetites has always been challenging. On the positive side, having an appetite for excellence, wisdom, knowledge and making prudent judgments is admirable.

And too, the virtue of ascetism teaches us the more we effectively use our appetites the more they become a valuable means for practicing self-control, regulating our passions and being the person we are meant to be. Seen in a positive light our appetites challenge us to decide what is to be desired and to avoid what is undesirable. When correctly practiced they offer us an opportunity to order life based on the sound practice of spiritual detachment and to restrain rather than self-indulge.

A critical post-modern choice is ours to make. Either we sell out to commercialism and accept it as a normal part of life or we envision it as a challenge for employing wise means for controlling it, to psychologically allow it to influence us or seek wisdom to better regulate it.  

“Valued Companionship”

October 10, 2024

Life is about relationships and the more cherished the companions we enjoy, the more wholesome life is. As the song goes, “Love and Marriage go together like a horse and a carriage.” Companionship endows us with the pride of belonging to a team harmoniously pulling together as one.

The meaning of companion in Latin is “with bread.” Hence, the saying breaking bread together.

We have the saying in Italian, mangier bene: eat well. This saying can connote eating wonderful cuisine or being with delightful company that enhances a meal’s flavors. No doubt many an intimate candlelight evening with a companion has led to a marriage.

Unfortunately, as we age endearing companions thin out. Such a change in life helps us realize how precious they were and the emptiness this causes.

On companionship’s importance in a family, Indian actress Tejaswi Madivada wrote: “To me 'love' is not just marriage and kids. It is companionship.”

Amelia Earheart, like Madivada, addresses the importance of companionship in pointing out. “The more one sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine is one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.”

In coping with the loss of cherished companions, the well-known American writer and Unitarian minister Robert Fulghum recommends, “The solution to aloneness is not more solitude, but companionship and community.”

Willian Penn, founder of the province of Pennsylvania, teaches what to consider most when thinking about a companion we intend to marry: “In marriage be wise: prefer the person before money, virtue before beauty, the mind before the body; then you have a wife, a friend, a companion, a second self.”

Goodbye Daddy by Russian painter Valdimir Makovsky portrays a seated elderly father with his eyes set on his daughter standing in front of him wearing her wedding dress. In those eyes, you can detect a glimmer of sadness but also joy. He is about to lose his daughter's treasured companionship. On the other hand, she and her fiancé are about to enjoy a new and exciting companionship. Hence, the joy of shared companionship is passed on!

Stepping back from the lessons in this painting helps us to realize companions do not always last forever; to cherish companionship’s blessing we have experienced; to be a companion to others in need of companionship and to thank God for the times it touched our hearts with heavenly joy.

“Valuing Humor”

September 26, 2024

One of life's most valuable yet overlooked gifts is a good sense of humor. Not only because it lightens the day, but its wit can reduce the burden of overwhelming problems.

In his book on virtues Romano Guardini considers humor an essential part of kindness. “Kindness helps us to endure things more easily,” he writes. “Indeed, we could hardly get along without it. The person who sees someone only seriously, only morally or pedagogically, cannot endure him or her for any length of time, we must have an eye for the oddity of existence. Everything human has something comic about it. The more pompously a person acts, the greater is the comic element. A sense of humor means that we take a person seriously and strive to help him or her, but suddenly see how odd he or she is, and laugh, even though it be only inwardly. A friendly laugh at the oddity of all human affairs---that is humor. It helps us to be kind, for after a good laugh it is easier to be serious again.” Let us examine some quotations that spell out humor’s value.

Greek philosopher Epictetus states, “He who can laugh at himself will never be out of things to laugh at.” Good advice for beginning with self for expanding our sense of humor.

G.K. Chesterton writes, “When we get totally caught up in our own little world, we become like the moon, which is a circle without outlets. Once so inscribed, we are left only with ourselves, and too much of that turns us into lunatics. Good advice to see the possibility of using humor to free us from a self-centered repressive world.

Musician Louis Fromm advises, “Straighten your problems out before you go to bed. That way you will wake smiling.” Pope Saint John XXIII was called the jovial pope. One reason is the prayer he recited after a long day’s work, “Lord I have done my best, now it is time to rest and leave the rest in your hands.” Note the humorous outlook that lets go of worldly concerns and rests peacefully in God.

Today the gift of humor is needed more than ever. It is not an exaggeration to say our postmodern age is forever bombarding us with worrisome concerns depriving us of humor. Time to check our humor-gauge to see if it needs to reset to better compete against threats to humor’s life-strengthening powers.

“The Curse of Violence”

September 23, 2024

American writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov observes, “Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.”

Martin Luther King Jr further expounds on the insidiousness of violence: "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So, it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." Simply put, violence is a cancer that spreads and destroys our wellbeing.

In Latin violence contains the idea of strength and is defined in the dictionary as a behavior creating physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. Implied also is viciousness: doing brutal things on purpose, out of ill-will toward others.

In the first pages of the Bible God’s creation begins with the history of violence: Cain kills Abel. Its saga continues to this day as we experience its darkness on our T.V. screens, radio, and streets. It is perpetually ingrained in everyday life. How then can we deal with it wisely?

I once sat on a doctoral dissertation board that addressed the psychological effects on children who walked over dead bodies lying on the streets due to war in Ireland. In many cases they just accepted this as a common occurrence. They had become matter of fact, one reason being to protect themselves psychologically again the monstrosities they experienced.

No loving person likes violence. Being a loving person implies being well disposed toward life, country, society, and our neighbors. But possessing a good disposition comes with a cost. It means avoiding the temptation for revenge, allowing it to play on our curiosity or to become matter of fact about it. Kindness requires a charitable heart implying we become advocates for making a unified world.

St. Paul’s letters and our Christian wisdom contain a heartfelt desire to live a peaceful Christlike life devoid of strife. Therein lies the strength to counter violence’s use of strength.

“Encountering the Negative and Positive”

September 13, 2024

One of the meanings of encounter is being faced with something difficult or hostile. Without a doubt trying to maintain psychological balance is the number one hostility facing us today. Endangering our peace of mind are mind-blowing wars, senseless school shootings, divisiveness, racism, street crime, bizarre weather patterns, air pollution, and new dangerous viruses. Undesirable hostilities inundate our daily life. But there is no need to be pessimistic because we possess the means for countering these encounters.

Asceticism states to conquer hostility, we must first conquer ourselves. How does this translate? Having an encounter with another, an I-thou relationship with him or her is one answer. An I-thou relationship is camaraderie and at its deepest sense is a loving relationship. Creating an I-thou relationship empowers us by turning two persons into one. And how is this achieved?

It is through contemplation and divorcing ourselves from outside distractions, becoming silent, and developing a heartfelt relationship with another. Applied to spirituality it is prayer in which we humbly strive to encounter God, to experience God’s awesomeness, blessings, and loving care. This, however, is more difficult than it sounds.

One difficulty is contending with social media addiction that plays to our curiosity, is filled with disturbing news, and wastes substantial amounts of our precious time. Unless controlled, its negative impact can lead to depression and disillusionment, both of which are major psychological hostilities threatening us.

It is no exaggeration to say secularism is growing, often sidelining religion. “Science will solve our problems,” we tell ourselves. To a degree science has been successful in overcoming the undesirable hostilities bombarding our psychological balance. And yet science has found prayer is an enormously powerful means for overcoming these hostilities by putting us in contact with our soul, our inner center in helping us to be centered.

Furthermore, prayer is powerful because it unites us to our center, our soul and God. However, being able to subdue the distractions of the world, truly contemplate and to pray is difficult because of our new age of seductive Ersatz entertainment, and forces that militate cherishing sacred meditation and changing our ways for a better existence.

The choice is ours for employing time to craft a sacred encounter with God and our inner life or to succumb to business as usual and opt out a fortified existence for overcoming the hostilities threatening our psychological and spiritual health.

“Past, Present, and Future”

September 4, 2024

Throughout time the existence of three distinct mind sets has been common: those who long for the past, those who desire everything to remain the same and those who pine for future innovations and moving forward. As reasonable as are these mind sets, they can also be unreasonable.

Although the past is filled with cherished memories, time dictates memorable moments are not forever. Going back in time has its place but is out of place when it is over glamorized and unrealistic and clung to.

There are those who embrace, “Let sleeping dogs rest,” preferring the present and leaving the future to the next generation, forgetting parenting does not stop once a child matures; it never stops preparing a child for his or her future and the future of their offspring.

Desiring progressive innovations is natural but without oversight it can cause undesirable consequences. Discovering DNA is formidable as long as it is not used to create Frankenstein’s monster.

Mind sets are natural until they become unnatural and cause disorder and damage. Take for example hanging onto the past and preventing life-saving changes, remaining neutral when justice calls for social justice action, or unbridled progress ending in psychological and moral damage due to a lack of oversight.

In German, Gegensatz means opposites. It alerts us to the fact that within mindsets exist polarities causing tensions. For example, we are individuals but also a member of a family; individuality in tension with community. We consist of a head but also a heart, two opposite functions within one disposition, reasoning in contrast to feeling. And the past is the opposite of the present and the present is the opposite of the future.

Even though the past is filled with valuable principles and heart-felt memories, time’s requirements dictate we move on. Desiring to maintain equilibrium is vital for preserving order but time dictates inertia can be detrimental to growth. The desire to make future progress is very laudable but without guidelines it can be the cause undesirable consequences.

Today’s changing times are prompting us to realize life is filled with opposites and to understand how their inner play affects us. The choice is ours: to accept the reality of Gegenstaz, to accept opposites and work with them, or to ignore them and suffer the consequences of blinded one-sidedness.

“Cherishing Our Values”

August 2, 2024

With many of our valued ideals under attack, on what do we focus to deter it?

Ideals are standards of perfection, beauty, and excellence. Among those standards under attack are our democratic roots and religious values. The French sociologist and political philosopher Alexis Tocqueville and the Greeks point us a major philosophy calling for our focus.

Tocqueville argued that America’s physical circumstances helped us to succeed but more important, it was America’s values as habits of the heart, its notions, opinions, and the ideas shaping the sum of our moral and intellectual dispositions. He added that our values were seen not only as ideas and opinions but practices with respect to such things as religion, political participation, and economic life. Tocqueville saw the heart of American excellence as its moral and biblical values and the republic’s traditions. But how did all this happen? The Greeks give us the answer.

In Greek, paideia is the word for education. From early Greek times it followed the philosophy, “Every nation which has reached a certain stage of development has been found to instinctively practice education. Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character. It teaches us about our true self, the outside world, and the life we want for ourselves and the population - the polis.”

Lately educational progress has been hampered. The pandemic made ongoing education difficult. Students lost valuable learning time. In addition to this, education is facing challenges heretofore not experienced; schools need extensive funding to revamped facilities due to shootings; curricula are often criticized, and the poor are still behind in receiving a good education.

Educational systems have always had their woes but unlike today it is competing with our electronic age raising the question what it is doing to provide the understanding of democracy’s essence and the values it holds to be true? Where are the civic lessons? What is it doing to cope with rhetoric that is being publicly trashed? Why is it doing to teach truth in an atmosphere of dishonesty? Living in a country that championing prosperity over gratitude, is it addressing this imbalance?

Oh yes, we have some wonderful schools and schooling par excellence. But education is more than schooling, it is learning about ourselves, the world, and the significant role of true values. It is about addressing the whole person.

“Not the Time to Lose Our Heads”

July 29, 2024

In Italian we have the word ubriaco, in Spanish loco, and in German Verruckt. Idiomatically they translate the craziness we are hearing about today’s dysfunctionality. It is difficult to remain psychologically balanced when brutal violence is erupting in our backyard, when disunity outweighs the desire for unity, when dishonesty becomes taken for granted, when irrationality is replacing levelheadedness, when constructive protests are disrupted by destructive protests and when religion is misrepresented rather than reverenced?

How then can we live sanely in an ubriaco, loco, Verruckt atmosphere?

We are blessed with God-given intelligence and a magnificent mind for practicing it. We are also blessed with the gift of God-given strength for combating foes. These are not only gifts but responsibilities. Aidos in Greek means a sense of duty which the Greeks considered a supreme virtue. To avoid craziness, it implies fulfilling the duty of being a critical thinker.

Preventing social media from doing our thinking is one way to empower our intelligence. Some social media observers are conscientious while others debase the standards of thoughtfulness. A sense of duty means taking matters into our own hands by taking control over our thinking.

Equally imperative is contemplation and using its gazing powers to learn the essence of the truth. One way to avoid craziness is combating it with silent, in-depth thinking enlisting our minds to penetrate and get out into the open today’s madness, stupidity, and folly, to clear our mind from clutter in order to foster straight thinking.

Equally important is to take the temperature of negative influences besieging our emotions, feelings like revengefulness, disgust, despair, frustration, and the desire to retreat from the fray and bury our head in the sand.

Meditation is imperative for combating disorder, even though it can be difficult to practice because of living in a hyper stimulated environment that minimizes taking time out, to be on the go always. Meditation does not imply going to a monastery in which praying is done in silence throughout the day. It means carving out a quiet sacred space, be it in our homes, the restful outdoors or visiting a church to utilize stillness needed to clearly think.

A principle of asceticism states we must conquer ourselves first before conquering anything else. It is time to muster God’s gift of strength of conviction to make this happen. We have the tools to maintain sanity; we just need to use them.

“Finding a Quiet Peaceful Harbor”

July 23, 2024

The Grand Harbor of Valletta at the base of Malta’s capital is a picture of shimmering white stone walls embracing the royal blue the Mediterranean Sea.

Tranquility connotes a peaceful harbor like Valletta creating a sense of the psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd there is nothing I shall want. He makes me green pastures. He leads me beside peaceful waters. He renews my soul.”

In Mark 6:30-34 we read, “The apostles rejoined Jesus and told him all they had done and taught. Then Jesus said to them, you must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while; for there were so many coming and going that the apostles had no time to eat.”

Christ’s words contain wise lessons on leisure: even though the work of preaching and teaching is imperative, equally important is taking time for leisure and finding a tranquil harbor for reminiscing.

Renowned philosopher Josef Pieper states leisure is a “form of silence and that silence is a prerequisite for apprehending reality adding only the silent hear, and those who do not remain silent do not hear.” What is meant by apprehending reality?

It means being in touch with our inner self to ponder life’s purpose. In the case of the apostles, they have experienced an impressive experience. In the case of Christ, he removes them away from the crowds to reflect on the purpose of their new apostolic role.

Today we live in an age in which retreating to a quiet peaceful harbor is difficult, causing us to become clutter minded and catch up in hyperactivity. Phenomenologists fear we are losing our contemplative edge, we don’t know how to stop the music and get off the merry go round. What might be one way we might focus seeking tranquility regularly?

Spiritual writer Romano Guardini points to the reminder of church doors as that way:

“When you step through the doorway of a church you are leaving the outer world behind and entering an inner world. The outside world is a fair place abounding in life and activity, but also a place with a mingling of the base and ugly. It is a sort of marketplace, crossed and recrossed by all and sundry. …There is something profane about the world.

Behind the church doors is an inner place, separated from the marketplace, a silent, consecrated, and holy spot. It is very certain that the whole world is the work of God, that we may meet Him anywhere, that everything we receive is from God's hand, and, when received religiously, is holy. Nevertheless men have always felt that certain precincts were in a special manner set apart and dedicated to God.

Between the outer and inner world are the doors. They are the barriers between the marketplace and the sanctuary, between what belongs to the world at large and what has become consecrated to God.”

“Meekness for Judging our Times”

July 20, 2024

Looking for a means of lowering the acute anxiety caused by volatile times? Take to heart Christ’s desire to learn of him for he is meek and humble of heart.

Meekness is often misunderstood as being submissive, compliant and a weakness. On the contrary, it contains vital strength for assessing the tenor of the times. An examination of anonyms for meekness shows us why: emboldened, impertinent, unyielding, adamant, unbending, bold and immodest. The anonyms connote a dark spirit. Kindness which translates being well disposed toward life, our neighbors, God, nation, and church is missing, a charitable disposition evaporates.

The encyclical Ecclesiam Suam by Pope St. Paul VI points us to dialogue as the art of spiritual communication that fosters fuller sharing of sentiments, convictions, and a sense of conviviality. Dialogue contains potential for creating a sense of Benedictine hospitality that counsels, “Welcome a stranger as if he or she is Christ, make them feel at home.”

Meekness is a major principle of dialogue filled with the spirit of hospitality. An inspiring picture of it is painted by Pope Paul which states, “The dialogue is not proud. It is not bitter. It is not offensive. Its authority is intrinsic to the truth, to the charity it communicates to the example it purposes. It is not a command. It is not an imposition. It is peaceful. It avoids violent methods. It is patience. It is generous.”  And we can add it fosters camaraderie and a sense of welcome.

We must wonder what would happen if meekness were employed to measure soundness of one’s character and rhetoric. For example, does a person exhibit camaraderie or is his or her rhetoric bitter, offensive, and bellicose? Is there an effort to allow the authority of intrinsic truth to speak for itself or is its authority usurped?

Today’s unsettling challenges are calling for an aggiornamento, an updating in evaluating a person’s authenticity and character. A new measure of evaluation is needed that gets at the soul of a person. We have entered an age in which people are free to say whatever they want. Often, they leave us wanting to know what that wanting is about. Utilizing the principles of meekness is one way to find out.

We often hear that rhetoric should cool down, it is filled with bitterness, offensiveness, lacking charity, unhospitable and is often violent. The virtue of meekness not only tells us what needs cooling down but what should be given the space to exist.

“There Is No Respect Anymore!”

July 17, 2024

How do you feel about irreverent rhetoric, attacks on our justice systems, talk about our democracy crumbling, crimes against minorities, the emphasis on the power of money and the feeling that as much as our nation seems to be progressing, we are morally regressing? What is the missing cornerstone needed to hold us together?

It is reverence whose antonyms go to the heart of our troubles: dishonorable, disregarding, arrogant, discourteous, unmannered, impolite, uncivil, sacrilegious, and profane. Adding to this list is a growing tendency to invade people’s lives without regard for human feelings.

A scene from the play A Man for All Seasons digs deeper into a leading cause of irreverence. In it Richard Rich tries to convince Sir Thomas More of his love for the court. More sees Rich entrapped by the court’s trappings and tells him, “Why not be a teacher, you would make a good teacher.”

Rich replies, “If I were who would know it?”

Thomas replies “Your pupils, your friends, God, not a bad audience. Be a teacher, and oh a quiet life.”

Rich is reminded by More of his talent and to stop running after frivolous glories that are worthless.

One of the outstanding qualities of a statesperson is to focus on the common good and less on one’s own glory. When a person is entrapped in seeking glory, he or she will do anything to promote it even if it means trampling over others. The result? Avarice can lead to anarchy, despotism, dictators, tyrants, and autocrats.

The ruler of Athens, Sonon the great lawmaker, stated it is not outside wars that will bring down a nation, but avarice of leaders who hold on to power at any cost be it the downfall of their nation.

Reverence implies awe for another, God, and the truth and humbly standing aside out of respect.

As wonderful as is the adulation that comes from being a leader, like anything exalted there is always the fear of a downfall, of adulation going to one’s head and being addicted to it to the point of self-destruction.

Reverence comes from the Latin reverentia meaning respect. At the moment it would seem we are experiencing a diminish in respectfulness for God, our country, and especially the truth. The lack of reverential awe is being diminished leading to malaise bordering on depression and gloom.

Time to get back to basics and increase the blessed gift of reverence.

“Seeing Rejection from All Sides”

July 10, 2024

Did you know that the great impressionist Claude Monet’s early paintings were highly criticized, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was booed causing him depression? Have you ever counted the number rejections Christ endured? Take for example, his neighbors’ rejections, Judas betrayal, Peter’s denials, and he when he cried on the cross, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

As famous people and Christ were rejected, so too do we undergo it. Perhaps it was receiving back a paper from a teacher graded F, or being in a relationship in which a person we loved told us, “You are not the right person for me,” or it was receiving a pink slip and told to pack up.

The word reject in Latin is jocere, “to throw,” hence being rejected is being thrown out. Synonyms for rejection consist in repudiation, refused, spurned, declined, rebuffed, repulsed, discouraged. Note the pain they suggest. How then do we cope with rejection’s discomfort?

First, face how realistic we are. Do we feel rejection is solely happening to me and not to others? When rejected do we tend to take on a “poor me attitude” as if we alone are being punished? Do we face the fact rejection is an integral part of life that affects everyone?

There is the saying “Get off the dime,” meaning to get moving and stop sulking. But where do we move when rejection strikes?

To start, seek better understanding its causes. Why did it happen exactly? Is it deserved and justifiable? Am I making an all-out effort to get to the bottom? Do I enlist hindsight to review what followed it? Do I see it possibly containing a hidden blessing? For example, being let go of a job leading to a better job and tough teachers being the best for getting the best out of us.

They say after Monet’s rejection he worked even more diligently to be a magnificent impressionist. Rachmaninoff not only followed his first symphony with his famous second symphony but eventually his first symphony was lauded for its beauty.

There is an ironic side of rejection that Earnest Hemmingway captures, “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards some are strong at the broken places.”

There is also the saying, “God writes with crooked lines.” Rejection most often does not line up for us, but then that is what mysterious God-like lines are like.

“Navigating Tumultuous Times”

July 3, 2024

In 1889 Russian artist Ivan Aivazovski painted The Nineth Wave [a naval term indicating a gigantic wave] that has capsized a ship, leaving its sailors in the water holding on a wooden cross. When meditated it gives us a daunting feeling of how vicious a wave can become.

The word tumultuous comes from Latin tumere meaning swelling. When applied to the ocean, it reminds us of the ferocious heights to which waves can reach. When applied to today’s malaise, it is an apt word describing swells between rationality and irrationality, peacefulness, and chaos. On one side, we are experiencing senseless wars, unimaginable crimes, civil unrest, and concerning weather patterns. On the other side scientists, progressive thinkers and justice systems are creating wholesome order filled with hope for the present and future. For many caught in the middle of this malaise, keeping sanity has become an increasingly challenging task.

People I know have stopped watching the news to maintain calmness. Others are fighting desperately to avoid the darkness of depression and disillusionment. Still others worry about the effect this will have on their children’s future. All agree a healthy, upbeat disposition is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

Kindness is defined as having a good disposition toward life and everything in it. Sadly, when our disposition sours so too do our joy and happiness diminish. Melancholy replaces cheerfulness, and gloom and doom set in. How then can we cope?

When I would whine my mother would advise, “Gene, turn over the record, that is an old canzone.” She was forever promoting the joy of being cheerful and to move on. Where to we achieve this attitude? Saint Pope Paul VI’s treatise on joy gives us two ways to achieve this.

  1. After completing a task, take time to enjoy its results. Feel the joy of producing it and thank God for making it possible. Don’t move onto the next task but stop to digest the pleasure of an accomplishment.

  2. Make it a practice to help another in need regularly. Forget yourself and think of the good of another. Increase your goodness. One kind deed a day is a wonderful way to savor the joyful side of life.

Living in our turbulent times can darken life. No need for this if we practice sound principles for producing joy, sound ingredients for combating tumultuous dark waves threatening our daily happiness.

“Where Have All the Prophets Gone?”

June 28, 2024

Poets, preachers, patriots, statemen, social critics, moralists, enthusiasts, and martyrs epitomize the formidable roles prophets fulfilled.

As poets, they looked into the depths of life’s mysteries, seeking its wonders. Their preaching was perpetual. Love of country ran through their veins as they championed truth and justice and addressed the difference between good and evil. Enthusiasm translates engulfed with the Spirit of God which mirrors the prophets’ spirit.

Most important, they lived God’s pathos who cared deeply about the rupture between Israel and God’s desire for its righteousness, God who was not aloft like the pagan gods but a loving God in action among the Israelites.

Not long ago the spirit of prophecy filled the air. Much was written about its need to deal with society’s injustices. People risked their reputations by embracing it and endured persecution because of it.

Despite the hurdles, the prophetic spirit of the times led to social justice changes, inspiring literature and a number of movements aimed at living prophetic spirit in action. And too, people were reminded that when they were baptized, they received the spirit of prophecy.

Where has that prophetic spirit gone? What caused its demise?

One reason is prophetic spirit is driven by Divine Inspiration. In order for it to happen requires a community of believers deeply devoted to it. Implied is sound spirituality and the will to buck growing secular environment inimical to anything religious. Needed today is much-needed wisdom to confront economic exploitation, to oppose a don’t deny yourself society steeped in Ersatz entertainment, to look afar and not only dwell only on present needs. As the prophets saw through these abrasions, so too is needed today renewed prophetic spirit needed to see through life’s waywardness.

We also are experiencing pseudo-religious people who lack a statesman’s example of being dedicated to the common good and who portray selflessness and living the first principle of justice: God created us for the good of others and gave us a sacred responsibility to champion them.

Prophets of the Old Testament endured the dark side of life being brutally beaten, ostracized, and martyred for their efforts. The challenge of confronting a stiffed-neck nation was not for the lighthearted.

Our postmodern age is prompting the baptized in the prophetic spirit to reread the prophets of old and to rededicate themselves to their baptismal spirit. Although the prophets lived ages ago, present times need their spirit more than ever to cope with growing ruptures between God and today’s humanity.

“Ominous Cults and Wars”

June 20, 2024

Cults have existed before but never like the present, nor have they been so disturbing. One reason is the media’s universal power of attracting millions of restless people who image “Birds of a feather flocking together.”

Renowned psychotherapist Amy Morin’s research on present day cults reveals why they are worrisome.

  1. Absolute authoritarianism without accountability.

  2. Zero tolerance for criticism or questions.

  3. Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions.

  4. A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave.

  5. Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group.

  6. A belief that the leader is right at all times.

  7. A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation.

Throughout our times we have experienced the damage these cults have caused: suicides, needless deaths, the seduction of innocent youth, psychological damage, and radicalism.

Where do we start to cope with them?

A top diplomat was asked what is needed to stop the Israel-Hamas war. He replied, “Military force is not the answer. Unless you address the ideals prompting the war it will continue. Essential is knowledge of a country’s and its leadership’s beliefs.”

Saint John Henry Newman points us to one of the most overlooked essentials needed to achieve this knowledge. “There are men who embrace in their minds a vast multitude of ideas, but with little sensibility about the real relations towards each other.” In other words, missing is connecting the dots to comprehend the bigger picture, to expand our knowledge and make it more encompassing.

Newman would further imply we need to move beyond the moment and to envision long-range results. For example, to understand no one wins a war, and misdirected cults wilt under the blazing sun of truth.

As we move into a new age its challenges are urging us to put on our thinking caps with post-postmodern urgency, to see more than the senses convey, to seek the moving power behind ideas.

We have a choice to be matter of fact that cults and wars are part of life and to put them out of our mind as best as possible, or to embrace knowledge that is described as an illumination and to embrace its powers to guide us to a brighter reasonable future.

“Bashing Truth”

June 12, 2024

To experience the truth these days is becoming a mammoth task. The smallest things tend to hide it and idiotic people are forever exploiting it. We have entered an age in which it is difficult to know what or who is truthful. When truthfulness goes by the wayside so does veracity, sincerity, authenticity, credibility, trustworthiness, reality, and frankness. It is a fact that the best way to destroy a nation is not by weapons of war but to spread distrustfulness among its citizens.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points us to one way to counter this malaise. “The simple step of the courageous individual is to not take part in the lie.” Here Solzhenitsyn reminds us truthfulness begins at home with our wives, husbands, children, neighbors, and fellow workers, to shut the door on untruthfulness in those environments.

Examples of dishonesty and outright lying are now flooding our media and news outlets conditioning us to get used to it. Why this onslaught on truth? How has it come to be?

Plato gives us one answer in stating, “The true lover of knowledge strives for truth, and he is not content with common opinion, but sores with undiminished, and unwearied, passion, till he grasps the essential nature of things.” He points us to the essential foundations of truth, one being a lover.

St. Thomas Aquinas helps us better understand what being a lover entails. It is desiring to bring about peace, joy, benevolence, and mercy, it is selflessness for the good of the common good. Being a peacemaker implies a desire to create order, unity, and the joy it creates. Mercy, misericordia contains the Latin word cor meaning heart; to possess a compassionate heart toward another and benevolence is the practice of generosity.

Truthfulness is a precious ideal and like so many beautiful ideals require an unwearied, undiminished passion and love for getting at the essence of what is the truth. It demands labor, reverence, and respect. It is unfortunate in our times to experience truth callously kicked around, twisted, and ignored. Equally unfortunate are misled people devoid of the moral compass needed to embrace honesty.

William Shakespeare once observed “Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance.” We can add, “Truth teaches reality and requires integrity. Sadly, some would rather put their heads in the sand and deprive themselves of the soothing waves of the sea majestically crashing against the shore.”

“The Demise of Noble Rhetoric”

June 4, 2024

“We are experiencing an increase in brutal rhetoric emanating from those in leadership positions.

Their way of beating an opponent is viciously beating him or her over the head.”

The observation by a media analyst is very alarming because brutal rhetoric is becoming an accepted weapon of destruction. Synonyms for brutal expose the reason for concern: inhuman, cruel, savage, bloodthirsty, and vicious.

Brutal rhetoric is often a sign of weakness. Word artist Henry Rollins tells us, “Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.”

History repeatedly teaches that brutality is also caused by lust for power. German revolutionary Rudolf Rocker states why: “Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.”

American historian George Bancroft further adds, “The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.”

Needless to say, brutal rhetoric is a reminder that we are in a war of mindlessness against mindfulness.

How then do we ensure brutality is not normalized in today’s rhetoric?

Sigmund Freud answers, “Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.

G.K. Chesterton speaks of the heart’s role in combating brutality, “Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

Hence, courage implies taking heart and standing strong against the ignoble, which in our case is heartless rhetoric.

Undoubtedly, our media fills us with valuable knowledge. Unfortunately, it also promotes brutal violence to entice its audiences. And unfortunately, we promote it by letting ourselves become conditioned by it wherein we forfeit the responsibility of utilizing the power of the community to counter it.

We have a choice: to permit brutal rhetoric to continue, or to see it as a call to be a revolutionary, to say “unacceptable, no more en masse!”

“Catching Your Breath”

May 24, 2024

Thanks to bicycling across the country in my youth I learned sound breathing habits necessary for accomplishing this. Routine physical exercises were an absolute necessity but most important was developing the skill of proper breathing.

During a lecture on how to prepare for cycling long distances a woman biologist attending it asked, “Can I demonstrate what will help you best to conquer those mountains?”

She then asked me to put my hands around her lower rib cage, called floating ribs. “Now I am going to take a deep breath.” As she did, she told me to note the expansion of the floating ribs and amount of air she inhaled. “Next, she said, “Watch what happens as I hum while inhaling.” The difference was extraordinary. Humming expanded the floating ribs significantly and the air intake doubled in capacity.

Her lesson to us? “Most of us do not breathe properly.” Adding, “That is why opera singers are forever improving their breathing techniques as are athletes. This is from where their power and endurance come.”

Good breathing technics also have a medical side: reducing pain and anxiety. When experiencing a painful side stitch, I learned how true this is. As I slowly inhaled more fully it disappeared. And then we have the saying when anxious, “Take a depth breath.”

Often, we do not note our breathing. When responding to a person experiencing a heart attack or stroke the first thing done is giving them oxygen. This not only keeps them alive but especially their brain.

The awesomeness of breathing begins with creation. God forms man and then breathes life into him making breath a sacred gift.

Thanks to postmodern progress and Clear Air policies there is a heightened awareness of respecting the vital role air plays in our life.

The word reverence in German is Ehrfurcht. It contains two meanings: to be in awe and to keep a respectful distance, to handle with care.

As progressive as is our postmodern age it is also becoming increasingly secular and more concerned with worldly things, disregarding whatever is religious, spiritual, and sacred.

As healthy air depends on healthy ecology so does it depend on responsible industry and governments. If it is to be a healthy source of life it must enlist religion to maintain its sacredness. The choice is ours to place God first or to be godless left to our own selfish demise.

“Mastering Self”

May 16, 2024

Do you feel the media is causing you anxiety?

Hopefully, the following exercise will help understand its influence on our psyche.

  1. Count the number of commercials you experience within one of your favorite programs.

  2. Count how many of them are repeatedly shown within that program.

  3. Count how many of them refer to medical problems.

  4. Count medical problems you never heard of before.

  5. Rank how valuable you found the program you watched: Very valuable, somewhat valuable, of little value, worthless.

  6. Evaluate the psychological effect the program had on you: Very heartening, somewhat heartening, somewhat disheartening, very disheartening.

  7. Evaluate how attached you are to the program: No attachment, some attachment, overly attached, totally attached.

Hopefully, these questions will inspire you to design your own questions that lead to a deeper understanding of the range of influence the media possesses.

The Greek word for ascetism is askesis, meaning to properly direct our life. Contrary to picturing it negatively depriving us of freedom, ascetism aims to create a life that betters us through self-mastery.

There is the saying: “Self-mastery must come first before we master anything else.” To succeed in life self-mastery is imperative. How often have we heard of a renowned golfer spending countless hours mastering a golf swing? And when mastered it flows freed from flaws. The same is said of famous musicians who sometime spend years mastering the spirit in a musical masterpiece.

As wonderful an educational tool as is the media some of its manipulative tools include repetitious commercials, flitting enticing images, increased volume for advertisements, and playing on the need to get-it-now-don’t- deny-ourselves. And then there are nonsense programs playing to our lowest level of intelligence.

The questions above are designed to address anxiety-makers in the media that epitomize the essence of foolishness.

Foolishness is the opposite of wisdom depicting a dazed clouded mind. On the contrary, wisdom prompts us to be clear minded to seek the ultimate cause behind an issue and employ wise means for living a noble life.

The above questions are not meant to be disturbing but rather to seek the principal causes creating media anxiety and to encourage us to wise up.

“Pain’s Bright Side”

May 14, 2024

“When the going gets tough the tough get going.”

“No pain, no gain.”

During graduate studies, my classmate who was a physical fitness enthusiast would recite these sayings as we exercised.

As I experience the aches and pain of aging, what exactly [if any] is the value of pain? Strengthening our character is one of its hidden values. Greek philosopher Heraclitus tells us, “Good character is not formed in a week or month. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.” To maintain excellence, character requires constant updating. Our mental strength, psychological resilience, and resoluteness define our character. As unwelcomed as is pain, it has a bright side by challenging us to be gallant.

My father was an engineer for the Chicago Fire Department. During the riots he worked shifts as long as forty-eight hours straight. As a result, he contracted sciatica due to constantly shifting the gears on his fire engine. For weeks he endured paralyzing pain without complaint. He was an inspiring example of fortitude never losing heart.

As I reflected on his example it caused me to think of those who hang-in-there despite the pain. They may have a family to support, elderly people to care for, or neighbors in need. Whatever the cause may be, if needed they are willing to put themselves out to help another illustrating the valiant side of a fighting spirit.

Pain takes many forms. It can be excruciating physical pain or mental worrying. Watching destructive violence or children traumatized by war on television can be heart wrenching as is feeling hurt for lack of recognition. No matter the type of pain, it hurts.

Today we live in a society enjoying unimaginable amenities. We have much for which to be thankful. Unfortunately, gratitude to God and for our wounded warriors is sometimes overlooked. Perhaps this is a way of ignoring the existence of pain. As much as we do not want to be reminded of it, it possesses a valuable lesson. Without pain we would not have had Christ enduring it for our sake, those in military service risking their lives for us and those in dangerous roles protecting the safety of our society. Nor should we ever forget our parents who labored night and day for us to enjoy a healthy upstanding life. In dealing with painful times, no doubt there are tempting moments to forget the effort of enduring them. Without them, however, redemption, freedom,  stable family life and civil protection would not exist.

Not all pain is unreasonable. It has its good motives.

“Dealing Positively with Mourning”

May 9, 2024

The renown philosopher and poet Sir John Ruskin exclaimed that Edwin Landseer’s painting The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner is “One of the most poetic poems which modern times have seen.”

It portrays the shepherd’s coffin. Draped over it is his faithfuldog. Resting nearby by are the shepherd’s hat, staff, and a bible.The painting captures grief’s unending pain most of us have experienced.

The Swiss American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in studying bereavement learned of its five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Millions have taken heart in her findings and better coped with the causes of mourning.

What might be ways to manage mourning?

In Italian we have the saying “Uh fa” meaning let it go, life is too short to be bogged down with prolonged darkness. As we read in the bible wine cheers the heart, my Italian grandfather would pour a glass of wine when we were mourning and sing out, “Let life begin anew.” inviting us to move on.

Another Italian proverb of his was “La Providenza non manca mai,” “God’s providence never lets us down.” It prompts us to look beyond our mundane life and enter into God’s world reminding us we don’t control life but are under God’s providential care who knows what is best for us. 

It echoes the fact we are on a journey in this world that ends with a journey back to our Maker. Life on earth is not foreverand does not end with death but reminds us of hope.

Grief’s bright side teaches us to appreciate the value of happiness. When we mourn a beloved, a part of us dies. Mourning teaches us there are two sides to life, loss of a beloved, but gaining a deeper appreciation of happiness when they were to us. Truly, we are meant to shed tears when losing a beloved because of the joy they were to us. But joy is not lost atdeath it is meant to pass on its indomitable spirit.

When we suffer mourning, the choice is ours either to cherish the blessed joy we experienced from a beloved and to pass it on to others or to moan “poor me” and live an empty life devoid of life.

“Meaningful Friendship”

May 6, 2024

As progressive as is the nuclear age without reverencing the essential role friendship fulfills it faces regression. A sage lesson on friendship is contained in Aesop’s fable of the lion and mouse helping us to understand the essence of friendship.

A quiet mouse accidentally goes up the back of a sleeping lion. The lion wakes and vows to kill it, but the mouse pleads for mercy. The lion relents and wanders into the wilderness where he is trapped in a hunter’s net. The mouse sees the lion in trouble, frees him and a beautiful friendship blossom. The lesson? The smallest friends matter in our lives.

In today’s growing secularism what essential powers of friendship are needed to counter its worldly tendencies?

The 11th century spiritual writer Aelred of Rievaulx answers, “A friend is called a guardian of love. . . Love consists in rejoicing with a friend in his joys, weeping with him in his sorrows and feeling as his own all that his friend experiences.” He goes on to say, “He that is a friend loves at all times . . .friendship is eternal.”

Among its virtues friendship includes charity and benevolence. Charity is an affection of the heart, we are touched by a person’s goodness, desirability, and beauty and heart-to-heart feelings surface.

Benevolence converts charitable feelings of mutual goodness into actions needed to nourish a friendship.

Even though Aelred lived in the eleventh century, his observation on the difference between true friendship and false friendship is ever so apropos for our material times.

Aelred states friendship can be carnal, worldly or it can be spiritual. “Carnal friendship seeks nothing but pleasure; it is guided not by reason, but by passion and lust. Such friendships focus on likes and dislikes that incite mutual pleasure and easily comes and goes. Worldly friendship seeks nothing but temporal advantage. It focuses only on a person’s usefulness.”

Here we have wisdom that teaches carnal friendships grow old quickly. How frequently have we experienced divorces when a carnal friendship dissipates leaving the marriage empty?

“Spiritual friendship,” Aelred observes, “seeks not earthly pleasure or worldly gain, but its own dignity and perfection. It is directed by prudence, ruled by justice, guarded by fortitude, and moderated by temperance, spiritual friends resemble each other in the way they live, in the values they hold and the goals they pursue.”

Experiencing couples who work to maintain dignity and perfection as one is without a doubt divine inspiration par excellence.

Today’s friendships have two options; they can be based on integrity or ersatz empty values.

“To Be or Not to Be”

May 1, 2024

A sigh of relief is ever so comforting whenever news of two opposing parties coming together in unity is experienced. In our divided age governments, churches, and society in general seem to have become matter of fact about the vital role of working for unity. Efforts to revere its importance have waned raising concern over the truth of the proverb “In unity we stand, divided we fall,” to be or not to be.

What makes unity so vital?

In Gensis God starts with chaos and then converts it into cosmos. Order replaces disorder and when there is order peace of mind and accord follows and happiness begets unison. When missing cacophony follows depriving us of harmony and its music. Plato states that “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Plato’s wisdom leaves us to wonder if hardhearted reckless divisions are infecting the soul of society causing restlessness, depression, and hopelessness. There is no music in the air. As we need certain vitamins for health, is our health being deprived of the healing powers of music?

In lauding wisdom German-Swiss poet Herman Hesse points us to the role unity must fulfill in life, “Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing of unity at every moment.” Hesse’s observation makes us wonder are we losing the desire needed to improve unity’s wellbeing endlessly?

When created by God we were blessed with the spirit of unity. We were meant to be social human beings caring for each other and being united with one another. Unity is implanted in our very being.

Equally important to unity’s importance is its role in having a successful marriage and family life. As one spiritual writer sees it, “When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you are not sacrificing to each other, but to unity in a relationship.”

When we sigh joyfully over successful unity, ultimately it is the happiness of experiencing humanity at its best. Unlike animals we have the gift of wisdom that prompts us to think, feel and breath unity at every moment, to embrace its beauty and power for creating a heavenly atmosphere.

“The Voyage of Life”

April 18, 2024

As a child I remember my grandfather escorting me down the aisle to view Uncle George who had died.

“Gini Uncle George came from Italy as a youth, worked hard and now has completed his journey and is returning to God. As Uncle George was on a journey so am I and Gini so will you.”

No tears, just wisdom. In that moment I received the best religious lesson one can experience: “O death where is your sting?” signifying death is not the end but the beginning to Eternity.

In the Museum of National Art is Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life depicting our life’s journey in four paintings: Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Aging. It is an allegory of religious faith in which an archetypal hero floats along the River of Life.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842

Near a verdant riverbank against soaring, hazy cliffs, a nude, chubby baby sits in a golden boat on a bed of pink and white flowers in this horizontal painting. A winged angel wearing a white robe with a glowing starburst hovering overhead stands behind the child with one hand resting on the tiller of the boat. The angel and child both have pale skin and blond hair. The baby holds up handfuls of flowers and looks forward. The bow of the boat is angled to our right as it glides along the glassy surface of the river. The boat seems to be made of or carved to look like a mass of gold, winged angels clustered to make the vessel. They reach toward a single angel thrust forward from the bow, like a masthead, who holds up an hourglass. The boat has just emerged from a dark cave at the base of rocky, rose-pink cliffs that reach off the top left edge of the canvas. The jagged peaks become pale pink as they march into the distance. A spit of the lush riverbank fills the lower left corner of the composition; it and the far bank are dotted with white waterlilies and a profusion of yellow, blue, pink, purple, and red flowers. Celery and moss-green growth carpets the boulders on either side the cave mouth and the ground stretching beyond the riverbank. The growth becomes mauve-purple as it recedes to the horizon, which comes a third of the way up the composition and is lit by a golden glow. Petal-pink and gray clouds float among the cliff-tops against an otherwise pale blue sky. The artist dated and signed the lower left, “1842 T. Cole Rome.”

In Cole’s picture of childhood, a golden boat emerges from a darken cave --- a mysterious earthly source --- the womb from which a joyous child reaches to the world with wonder and naivete light bathes the scene of fertile beauty as an angelic figure guides the boat forward.

Addressing childhood the renowned psychologist Carl Jung states, “in our early years, we explore the world with curiosity, innocence. It is a time of discovery, where we form the building blocks of our personalities, learning from our experiences and relationships with parents and caregivers.”

Poet Kaillash Satyarthi states, “Childhood means simplicity. To look at the world with a child’s eye --- it is very beautiful.”

Tom Stoppard would add, “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become old.”

When I studied human behavior for my dissertation, I remembered Fr. Romano Guardini saying that liturgy should be play. This caused me to study children at play and their behavior. Ah, yes how carefree they are and yes so should we be never growing old by being overly concerned with life’s concerns.

The Greek Heraclitus lauds childhood as a precious gift of life: “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of child at play.”

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842

A young man sets out in a golden boat on a river that winds from the bottom right corner of this horizontal painting across a lush landscape and into the distance before disappearing beyond two rocky outcroppings far off to our right. Hazy in the distance, the jagged peaks of a barren red mountain rise into an almost cloudless blue sky. To our left, a semi-transparent, white palace looms above and beyond the mountain, filling most of the upper left quadrant of the composition. Hills and valleys leading from the mountain and palace are dotted with trees and carpeted with grass. A winged and haloed angel wearing a white robe stands on the bank of the river under a towering palm tree in the foreground, in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The angel has pale skin and long golden hair. One hand is lifted toward the palace or a young man in a boat in the river nearby. The small boat is angled away from the riverbank to our left and toward the palace. The boat is ornately decorated and at its bow, a winged, golden figure holds an hourglass aloft above her head. The young man has pale skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and he wears a red and gold tunic. A profusion of flowers and trees line the riverbank.

Moving to Cole’s youth portrait we see the voyager confidently assume control of his boat. Oblivious of the increasing turbulence and unexpected twists in the river, he boldly strives to reach an ariel castle, emblematic of adolescence’s ambition for fame and glory.

Jung tells us, “Youth is marked by seeking our identity and pursuing our dreams. We immerse ourselves in life and career choices. It's a period of self- discovery and self-expression.”

Aristotle points out, “Good habits in youth make all the difference. It is a time of development of character and learning what we are supposed to be.”

In Italian we have the proverb, “Chi dorme con cani si che svelgia con pulsi,” “He who sleeps with dogs wakes with fleas.” It is a wise proverb I learned when going through my youth. Those proverbs were a time of developing sound ideals, one being picking good friends and avoiding bad ones.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1842

A man looks up as he kneels with his hands clasped in prayer in a small golden boat on a river that rushes toward craggy rocks in this horizontal landscape painting. The man has pale skin, dark brown hair and beard, and he wears a crimson-red tunic. A winged figurehead at the front of the gold boat holds up an hourglass. The boat sails to our right, away from calm waters to the left toward whitewater rapids along the right edge of the composition. A ridge of tall, jagged, moss-covered rock lines the water’s edge to our left and another channels the water on the opposite side of the river. Closest to us, a barren, blasted tree twists up from the lower right corner. The river passes off the right edge of the canvas, and calm waters beyond extend into the distance. The horizon line comes just under halfway up the composition. Bands of golden yellow break through the deep mauve-pink sky near the horizon line to our right. Diagonal plum-purple streaks suggest falling rain in the distance. A white glow in the upper left corner emanates around a person with long, reddish-blond hair and pale skin, who looks down at the man in the boat. That person wears a white garment and a golden star shines at the forehead. Smudges of fog blue in the sky above the man first read as clouds but upon closer inspection, the cloud-like forms contain the faces of three bearded men.

Nature’s fury, evil demons, and self-doubt threatened the Voyager in the next painting of manhood. It shows the helm of the boat is gone and the Voyager has lost control of his life. The Angel looks down from the clouds as he whirls toward violent rapids and bear fractured rocks. Only divine intervention, Cole suggests, can save the Voyager from a tragic fate.

In evaluating middle-aged Jung describes it as the “pivotal phrase of reevaluating one’s life. Many individuals encounter feelings of restlessness, questioning their achievements, relationships, and their true purpose. This stage often leads to a period of self -reflection and self- exploration.”

Jung believes that midlife isn't a negative experience; it is an opportunity for growth and transformation. It's a time when we take stock of our lives, confront our mortality, and make important decisions about the future. For some, it is a turning point that leads to personal development and an authentic pursuit of happiness. As he writes, “Midlife is the time to let go of our over dominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence. We are reminded that entering midlife often triggers a search for a deeper meaning in life.”

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1842

A balding, older man sits in a golden boat guided by a winged angel away from craggy rocks to calm waters, toward a shaft of light piercing a billowing bank of clouds in this horizontal landscape painting. The man and angel both have light skin. The man wears a crimson-red tunic and has a fringe of white curls and a long, white beard. He holds his hands up, palms facing out, as he looks toward the light in the upper left corner of the canvas. His golden boat is made up of wings and human bodies facing inward, the rudder and figurehead at the bow broken off. The man glides from low, jagged rocks in the lower right corner onto placid waters. Floating above the man and slightly to our left, the angel has long golden hair, a flowing white tunic, lilac-purple wings, and a bright starburst at the forehead. The angel gestures up to the shaft of light, where another angel has swept down into the cloud bank. Dozens of touches of white paint farther up in the clouds, closer to the light in the top left, suggest more angels descending toward the scene below. Concentric rings of clouds darken from butter yellow in the upper left to pale mauve and muted plum purple across the landscape. The artist signed the painting as if he had inscribed his name and date on a rock near the lower left, “T. Cole 1842.” A second inscription, to the right of center along the lower edge on another rock, reads “Rome.”

In the last painting of old age, the stream of life has reached the ocean of eternity where the Voyager floats abroad his broken weathered vessel. All signs of nature and corporal existence are cast aside by the guarding Angel, whom he sees for the first time, directing his gaze towards a beckoning soft light emerging from the parting clouds revealing the vision of eternal life.

Jung states, “Old age is a time of reflection on wisdom and is potentially a spiritual awakening. We accumulate a lifetime of experiences and knowledge. Jung saw this stage as a time for integration, where we embrace all aspects of our personalities, including its shadow side. We begin to understand the interconnectedness of life and face the reality of mortality with grace and acceptance.”

Jung concludes the four stages can help us navigate life's journey more consciously. It can be life changing, an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, reconnect with our authentic selves, and embark on a path that aligns more closely with our values and aspirations. It is a time of transformation and personal growth.

Heraclius would remind us, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” Ah yes, to remain young at heart.

Cole would remind us in his allegory of faith that in old age it is not time to let our eyes cast downward but to see an angel’s light in the heavens and look upward to the new life of eternity.

Romano Guardini, addressing old age, tells us, “Wisdom is insight into things as they are, and is acquired only when one is near the end. It cannot be taught; each must learn it for himself or herself through their own folly and out of the bitterness of their own end. It is the understanding of the relationship of the particular to the whole, and this understanding is achieved only when the whole comes into view -- that is to say, at the end. It is the sense of what is important and unimportant, of proportion, of what is ultimately rewarding, and it is to be gained only when it is too late to change anything, but when there is still time for forgiveness, for contrition and for leaving everything in God's hands. Of this nature is the true faith of old people. Their attitude grows very simple, one might almost say childlike. Childishness is the form of something which can be very beautiful. Childness, like first childhood, feels that all is one, that everything is under protection, that all will be well. Such faith is broad, understanding, tolerant. It is the old age of experience to the fullest -- when it has humor in it. It is a wonderful thing, the humor of a religious person who carries everything into the boundless love of God, including the inadequate, the strange, the queer, who hopes for a solution when reason and effort can do no more, and who discerns a purpose where earnestness and zeal have long since given up hope of finding one.”

“Trust Under Fire”

April 12, 2024

In life what is especially essential for creating unity, enduring love, and maintaining self-confidence? The virtue of trust is the answer. When it thrives so does all human activity.

Wall Street’s bestselling author Stephen Covey goes to the heart of trust’s role in our life observing, “It is the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships together.”

It has been said that if you want to destroy a nation, plant distrust among its citizens. Nothing divides them more than skepticism and not knowing what or who to trust. Twisting the truth and using it to split a person’s allegiances is a deadly poison capable of causing massive devastation. On the contrary trust contains commitment, faithfulness, and loyalty, the human glue that preserves humanity par excellence.

Anton Chekhov further addresses the scourge of distrust in saying, “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.” How true, life can become meaningless when people no longer have a sense of camaraderie due to disbelief and mistrust.

George MacDonald observes how trust and love complement each other, “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

How often has love been lauded as the most valued virtue of virtues? Often overlooked, love needs trust to maintain its effectiveness. True love is founded on an I-thou relationship creating mutuality. For an endearing affinity to remain strong requires commitment and total trust in another. Relationships by their nature require endless maintenance of trust and never be taken for granted.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe points to self-trust as the best means for living life as it should be lived in telling us, “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

Today, preserving democracy has become the center of our attention. In Greek “demo” means people and “cracy” means strength, thus the strength of the people is the core of democracy. It must be added that mutual trust is the heart and soul of that strength. In unity we stand and in distrust we fall. Most important: “In God We Trust.”

“Wisdom Defending Democracy”

April 8, 2024

Frustrated over today’s politics? An antidote for this is studying wise principles statesmen, philosophers, and Christ conceived for maintaining a wholesome civilization. Take for example Pericles, who developed Athenian democracy making Athens the political and cultural focus of Greece. Interestingly, the Greek meaning for democracy is demo meaning people and cracy meaning strength.

Another great statesman is Solon known for responding to the Athenian conflict between the landed aristocracy and peasantry. His economic reforms, known as the “shaking off of burdens,” dealt with one of the immediate causes of a horrific crisis: debt. All debts were cancelled, enslaved debtors freed, and borrowing on the security of the person forbidden. Solon is credited with empowering the poor through equal rights.

Solon was a poet whose fragments of his poetry contain insight into his thinking.

“Often the wicked prosper, while the righteous starve.

Yet I would never exchange my state for theirs,

My virtue for their gold. For mine endures,

While riches change their owner every day.

(Fragment 15)

Justice, though slow, is sure.

(Fragment 13)

In great affairs you cannot please all parties.

(Fragment 7)

To the mass of people, I gave the power they needed.

Neither degrading them, nor giving them too much rein:

For those who already possessed great power and wealth

I saw to it that their interests were not harmed.

I stood guard with a broad shield before both parties.”

These are soul searching examples of treating all levels of society equally and justly. Add to this the wisdom of philosophers championing the common good and Christ who died for it and we possess the time-proven principles of successful democracy.

Another example of this wisdom is from Seneca who counters avarice, which he considers the scourge of government, with the virtue of contentment. “A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”

Socrates counters self-conceded politicians by reminding them, “To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of knowledge.”

And Christ’s law of love is the epitome of excellent governing, “Treat others as you would have them treat you.”

Studying the wise mores of the centuries is one way to counter our frustration over dysfunctional government. It is the light beyond the tunnel filled with wisdom, hopefulness, and morality.

It is easy to view politics as an evil lacking a moral conscience and to fret. Or we can study and apply time-proven wisdom needed to remedy it. We can shake our head in frustration or employ our thinking powers for rectifying postmodern disorder.

“Defusing the Weaponization of Religion”

March 22, 2024

It protects us from vice and promotes goodness. Martyrs have given their blood defending it, believers have left homes to spread it, and wise minds have studied its mysteries throughout the centuries.

Enough words cannot be found to describe the beauty of religion in moving us from our mundane world into a spiritual wonderworld.

Religion means to pull together, to be intertwined with God. Like anything divinely precious it is forever fighting for its existence which raises the question, “What might be most detrimental to its existence today?

The stoic Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca gives us one answer. “Religion is regarded by the common people as a true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

It is no exaggeration to say that religion is being tainted by a lust for political gain by those who claim to be allies of God doing God’s will. They boast being God’s battle weapon again a country gone wrong. How do we decipher this claim?

The Dalai Lama gives us one way in stating, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”

As simple as this sounds it goes to the heart of authenticity. Authenticity is acting in accordance with one’s true self, behaving in sync with one’s values, beliefs, motives, and personality dispositions. How, then, does kindness apply to those claiming to be defenders of religion?

The word kindness implies disposition: to be well disposed to God, to others, the world and towards self. Ill disposition on the other hand can lead to war, corruption, violence, untruthfulness, and employing inuendo warfare. Worse, it can cause hardheartedness that contends I and only I am right.

One of God’s most precious gifts is conscience, empowering our center that prompts us to choose good over evil. It causes us to check how true we are to ourselves and others urging us to examine the heart’s disposition and ask, “Is it filled with egotism, hardheartedness, and one-sidedness? Or is it, as kindness suggests, being well-disposed to others and seeking the wisest means for dialoguing and promoting unity? Is it to be employed as weapons of war or for being a peacemaker?”

Christianity is based on Christ who died for love for us and the desire to create peaceful loving communities. Fighting for this principle is right, but most important for fighting for the right reasons.

“Don’t Forget to Say Thank You”

March 20, 2024

“Gratitude is one of the strongest and most transformative states of being. It shifts your perspective from lack of abundance to allow you to focus on the good in your life which in turn puts more goodness into your reality.”

“Gratitude is not only the greatest virtue but the parent of all others.”

These salient quotes of Jan Sincero and Cicero alert us to a virtue needed for our prosperous-centered times. For example, Sincero implores us to be thankful for blessed abundance and goodness and equally important how to go through a truly satisfying life. Heartfelt giving generates heartfelt joy.

Some time ago I ran into a homeless person in critical condition at Washington, DC’s mall that exemplifies goodness we repeatedly experience. Detecting she needed immediate help, I called 911. Within minutes, DC paramedics from the fire department arrived and checked her vital signs. They decided to call a hospital ambulance to have her examined further. Both medical responders were housed blocks away and yet within minutes they were on the scene. Both were examples of caring par excellence.

One of the blessings we enjoy is the wealth of care institutes that are at our service. When we shop among shelves stacked with varieties of food, survey thriving farms, enjoy homes with running water, heat and air conditioning, and recount comforts we enjoy, the numbers are overwhelming.

No doubt there are those who barely survive. But even here we can find a myriad of charitable institutions serving them. Not a year passes in which new helping institutions are created for the needy.

There is an old saying, “The more you get, the more you want.”  It is easy to overlook our blessings, to increase our personal needs and forget to say, “Enough for now, thank you.” 

Eckhard Tolle adds, “It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.” Tolle reminds us to transcend our mundane world and to enter into God’s caring world, to leave our narrow secular world and to move our hearts upward and experience God’s life on earth.

We have the choice of embracing the materialism of the marketplace and commercial world of goods urging us to get it now do not deny yourself or we can contemplate the abundance we enjoy, thank God and share our blessings with the less fortunate.

“A Right and Wrong Disposition”

March 14, 2024

Slandering, backbiting, unbecoming language, vicious infighting, belittling, falsifying, and opinions without evidence are on the rise. Not a day passes in which atrocious rhetoric, contentiousness, and irrationality course through the media. There is the saying, “Unity without verity is no better than conspiracy,” and “In unity we stand, in division we fall.” What is behind our ominous times?

One answer is to get behind erratic behavior and examine its causes. What exactly is prompting it?

A number of those responsible for causing it are usually in positions of power and are utilizing the influence of the media to expand power. Presently the media enjoys wide ranging freedom and thrives on titillating stories, especially those of powerful people. This can be to our advantage but also can be to our disadvantage depending on how it is used.

Another reason people hold on to power is the support of admirers. Some great has-been athletes continue to play despite the pain because of the roar of the crowd. And too, it is difficult to take a back seat when having sat in the front row. This being true, what should be the ultimate driving moral force for dealing with power?

Foremost is our conscience that dictates good and avoiding evil, the desirable and undesirable.

Often overlooked is the disposition of the heart and to ask, “How often is the true purpose of power and its God-given moral responsibilities contemplated? Is the question ever raised, “Is this really life’s ultimate and most important thing in it?”

I live in Washington D.C. and have experienced powerful people in exalted positions filling the pages of our newspapers and television daily. Most are gone now, and many have been forgotten. Life is fickle, it tends to jump to the latest and quickly passes over the past. It doesn’t stand still for long in lauding those who were.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the wisdom to seek the true realities of life. These realities consist in contributing to the common good and serving others rather than oneself, being a gentleman and gentlewoman rather than a rude person, and a person of noble character concerned for the proper and avoiding the improper.

Everyone eventually passes on no matter what their role in this life. But what does not pass on and lives forever is the memory of the values they left us.

“Maintaining Optimism”

March 7, 2024

“The more troubled the world becomes, the more important it becomes to be optimistic. And the more deeply we need to root our optimism. When we cannot reasonably base it on the w things are going, we know we have to base it in the ultimate reality of God. We know it has to be radical.”

The advice on optimism is from Beatrice Bruneau’s book Radial Optimism.

What is optimism and how can we best generate it?

Optimism is a spirit, the faith that leads to achievement generated by hope and confidence. It is a heart stimulant that is energizing and containing the conviction all will turn out well.

William James points to the antithesis of optimism in stating, “Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

Colum McCann would add, “I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’” How true, a fighting spirit is required for maintaining optimism.

As courageous as the spirit behind optimism may be, it can be much weaker than we suppose. How often have we experienced a formidable team filled with optimism wither, or witness it revert to cynicism. How then keep it strong?

Enter Beatrice Bruteau again who points us to basing our optimism on the reality of God. And how might this be spelled out?

St. Augustine states that the spirit’s health depends on its relation to truth, to the good and the holy. If this is destroyed it is sickened.

The antithesis of truth is falsehood and deception that deflate the spirit of goodness and darken it. They also go against the Ten Commands and the commandment of love. In Italian, the proverb La Providdenza di Dio non manca mai translates as “God’s providence never fails us.” It reminds us to look at the bigger picture of life and to turn to God to see it. Equally important, it reminds us we are not alone in our struggle to maintain optimism, we have a divine partner.

An inspiring definition of patience is “Do not allow anything break your spirit.” No doubt today’s news is often bleak. We have the option of letting it overcome our joyfulness or to fight a hard-fought battle needed to keep alive and well.

“A Blessed Blackout”

March 5, 2024

“Beautiful mass this evening. I felt as if we were transported to another time. Thank you.”

The beauty alluded to was a total blackout during mass, no lights, no music, and dead mikes.

One way to envision liturgy is a time to be transported from the world’s phenomena into divine time. Church doors symbolize leaving the busy world outside and entering a sacred temple. This is difficult for many people because they are continuously employing  activity to avoid loneliness or stillness. Craving Ersatz entertainment often rules their lives. A good example of this craving became apparent when the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. was constructed.

When first proposed, the Vietnam Committee was outraged because it did not reflect America’s suffering. Its designer Maya Lin defended it, maintaining the monument was not envisioned as a political statement on war but as a sanctuary for people who lost someone in the war. Her design consisted of a V-shaped wall gradually descending below the earth to free people and to be alone with their loved ones. The memorial was to be a quiet temple, not a thunderous glorification of war.

When visitors visit the memorial, they quietly and reverently process down into walls of plaques filled with names of fallen soldiers often hesitating to offer a silent prayer.

The word monastery means alone, to be drawn away from the world for religious purposes, to be “all there” with God.

I remember the story of a person who visited Sicily’s Cathedral during mass. He was astonished at the attention of those attending who just gazed toward the altar, no movement, just quiet tranquility.

On Amtrak trains there is a car strictly for silence. It is a joy to experience because it allows a person to gaze out the window with no distractions and to drink in the lovely scenery.

The people I spoke with after the blackout seemed so delighted and joyful. Why? Because there was a moment to black out all commotion and enter into another time, a heavenly time.

Molto adagio in music connotes very slow and expressive. This allows its listeners to become absorbed in leisurely soothing melodies. So is the purpose of liturgy meant to engross our soul. We must wonder if the beautiful experience of the backout echoed a longing to be quietly engrossed with God, to go down into the earth to be with a divine beloved.

“Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Has Arrived”

February 29, 2024

Confused by postmodern phenomena? Take, for example, the biological advance in the discovery of the structure of DNA. We can now take an early-stage embryo and edit a child’s traits. Want a child with altered DNA that will protect against horrific Huntington’s disease or sickle cell anemia and what was impossible before is now possible.

These breakthroughs are the tip of an iceberg filled with unimaginable possibilities. But as we know an iceberg sunk the so-called unsinkable Titanic. How then do we avoid possible disasters?

To begin, we must start with ourselves and our center the conscience that is responsible for decision making. As free beings we have the liberty of choosing to go one way or the other. Choices also create a crisis mode. When we hear the word crisis it often is negatively seen. Actually, it connotes the positive meaning of a crossroads offering us options.

Today we live in an age of unimagined crossroads creating the option of accepting scientific breakthroughs as progress or taking the road of questioning what is true progress.

In 1979, the National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America, and the U.S. Catholic Conference wrote President Jimmy Carter about a lack of ethical concerns over DNA. Will engineering DNA be usurped by industry and used for monetary purposes or will the primary concern be serving those in need? Will it generate inequity between the wealthy who can afford its use or the poor? And too, are we entering into a Frankenstein age?

These concerns call for the principle of thoughtful long-range planning. In the gospels Christ commends the military commander for taking note of the enemy army. If it is overwhelming, he will negotiate rather than do battle: an example of prudently looking afar.

Whenever there are exciting breakthroughs and the possibility of economic gain there is the temptation of developing greedy markets. Sometimes overlooks the impact on the future.

Yet another critical crossroad in scientific progress is moral ethics. God blessed us with freedom that comes with the responsibility of employing God’s wisdom. Moral ethics contain spirituality that is imperative for guiding critical decision making. By its nature it transcends worldly thinking and creates Godly discernment.

When faced with postmodern challenges, we can throw up our hands and opt out of confronting them, or we can roll up our sleeves and seek modern-day wisdom to cope with them. The song “We have only begun” reminds us here we have entered the new age of the unthinkable.

“Life’s Journey”

February 26, 2024

Want a good meditation on our journey through life? Voyage of Life by American artist Robert Coles is where to begin. His picturesque paintings of Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age depict a voyager traveling in boat on a river through the mid-19th-century American wilderness. In each painting a guardian angel accompanies the voyager. As a child and youth, the boy sails smoothly through an idyllic forest and bright sky toward the dream world of a shining castle. In adulthood the voyager prays for safety through rough waters. Finally, as an old man the guardian angel guides him across dark waters to eternity.

The four paintings portray our life journey. In a youthful dream world there are few worries, everything is new and exciting. Then comes adulthood with the price of struggling through turbulent difficulties, and in old age we face the reality of life’s journey ending.

Facing the reality of aging can be difficult. How we pine for our zestful youth. In adulthood we work with the sweat of our brow to achieve and prosper. And when faced with the end of our journey how we hang on for dear life. But then there is the realization we can’t stop the clock and wisdom sets in prompting to ask, “What should constitute a meaningful journey?”

Former President Jimmy Carter gives us an excellent reflection to ponder. He tells us, “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

I think we can concur whatever our purpose in life, our age or its rough journey, its goal is to improve our life and the life of those around us, to be an example of making a meaningful difference for the common good.

Interestingly Coles includes an accompanying guarding angel in his paintings prompting us to think of a spiritual voyage.

In Jesus Cristus author Fr. Romano Guardini defines the purpose of Christ’s journey. He starts with the question, “Well who exactly was Christ?” He answers “Perhaps, we may express it with the words He passed by. The form and shape of Jesus’ Being is a passage.” He has come from the Father and now he returns to the Father.”

So too is our life, a passage that does not stop with time but leads to the Father and eternal joy.

“Right and Wrong Rhetoric”

February 22, 2024

The Greek meaning for rhetoric is the art of oratory and speaking in public eloquently and effectively.

As art, it is a human creative skill that fills our imagination.

Humanly speaking, rhetoric is the art of speech and a power of sound. In this context it is envisioned as a beautiful instrument able to bring music to our ears.

Spiritually speaking, rhetoric is a gift of God that comes with a moral sense of duty. In ancient Greek civilization performing a duty for the common good was cherished as a prized virtue.

Plato saw rhetoric as the art of ruling the mind. In this definition we denote a possible misuse of rhetoric, the possession of power over another’s mind. Today this possible abuse is increasingly evident in ways the media’s power is employed to psychologically manipulate us and too it is often based on greed and power seeking.

On the Supreme Court a frieze lauds the esteemed law maker Solon who wisely governed Athens. He especially championed equality and urged citizens to work together to make it a thriving civilization. He was also incredibly wise in understanding what could destroy it. He writes “Our City will not perish by the degree of Zeus and the counsel of the gods immoral. . .. But its citizens themselves in their folly to ruin it by avarice.”

Avarice not only denotes greed but amassing power at any cost. Stories of corruptive power abound in the history of people selling their soul for a moment in the sun. Worse are those who sold out their countries and those dependent on upright leadership.

Rhetoric, like anything precious, is a power requiring responsibility. When it is guided by a moral compass its powers are miraculous. When, however, it is manipulated for selfish reasons it spells disaster.

Solon’s wisdom and the Scriptures are filled with warnings against avarice repeatedly. This leaves us to ask, “How might we counter this best?” In Scripture Christ promises, “He who loses his life for me, will find it.” In the Psalms God desires a humble heart not sacrifices of animals - not what I can get but what I can give.

Today we have the choice of being matter of fact about the daily bombardment of Ersatz rhetoric or to treat it as harmful to our psychological well-being and morality, to overlook its damaging influence or to ban it.

“Hope Abounds”

February 19, 2024

When we review synonyms for despair, they fit a disposition many of us experience: gloom, depression, and hopelessness.

Atrocious wars, innocent people killed, especially children, increased violence in our streets, religious and political dividedness, corruption, and hardness of heart are bringers of gloom. These culprits create undesirable disorder and without order peace of mind is impossible.

Hope comes from the Latin Spes meaning to be forward looking. Despair contains the word Spes but when prefaced with de, it translates nothing to look forward to.

Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and natural philosopher reminds us throughout time we were meant to be forward looking. “Hope,” he points out is “the pilar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a walking man.” Pliny envisions hope as a pilar supporting joyfulness. Take for example two people falling in love and dreaming of a cheerful home life. Optimism is the spirit driving their dreams.

I ministered to many parents who have had a wayward child. As difficult as he or she was they never gave up hope or quit trying. Often, they were rewarded with a peaceful outcome.

Most importantly hope is the basis for desiring eternal happiness. Aristotle calls hope a walking dream and we can add the dream of eternity.

When we look at scientific breakthroughs are they not the result of scientists who labored under the dream of creating a more hopeful life? Are not all impressive achievements founded on hope for the better?

Fyodor Dostoevsky reminds us, “To live without Hope is to cease to live.” When we cannot see light beyond the tunnel there is darkness and without light life ceases to exist.

Albert Eistein speaks of how to maintain a hopeful spirit. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

The sociologist Francis Bacon would follow this by telling us “A prudent question is one half wisdom,” and we can add wisdom is our best means for conquering hopelessness by getting to its bottom.

How do we see hope ultimately? Do we ever envision it as a God given spirit aimed at achieving future goodness? Is this not the virtue God bestowed on us to keep us forward looking and to continuously desire a more perfect life?

Hope leaves us with two options: to opt for optimism or to let ourselves be sunken into hopelessness; to succumb to it or to embrace ascetism that inspires us to work at continuously striving for a more proper life.

“Obsession with Aging”

February 14, 2024

It is a fact that billions of dollars are spent annually to stay youthful looking. Is this expensive craze realistic? Is it folly that clouds the hard truth? How wise is it to be in a frenzy over aging? On the other hand, how can it be seen as an asset rather than a deficiency?

When my grandparents and parents aged, they exuded elderly wisdom. For them, their life was not an aging journey, but a journey filled with priceless lessons they prized.

My grandfather was a sewer contractor and, in his day, dug trenches and laid clay tiles for carrying water. His hands were like concrete, and his face was ruddy from working outdoors. At eighty he and my grandmother were examples of inspirational character. Never did they speak of age or did they allow me to speak of it. As my grandfather left home with his mattock, spade and pick he was like a soldier off to battle.

My dad was a Chicago fireman who often would fight fires throughout the night and then he went to another job the next morning. He went gray, but it did not bother him or my mother because both had work to do, an example of duty over comfort.

When we look deeply into the lives of today’s elderly men and woman of character, they symbolize dedicated sacrifice and are models of realism. Gray hair and slowing down were less concerning to them than self-concerns.

An emphasis on youthfulness, hiding wrinkles, tightening waste lines, and dyeing hair have been part of life forever. It is about feeling good about ourselves. As true as this is it is also true that time never stops.

Many people age beautifully because they are free from the obsession of setting the clock back --- they know their present place in life and have accepted it. They have stopped looking at themselves in the mirror and now look deeper into what life’s realistic expectations are.

Peggy Lee would often sing about life’s journey and repeat the refrain, “Is this all there is to life,” a song of uncertainties about life’s purpose.

It is easy to age and say, “Is this all there is about life,” to look askance at it and focus on its regrets or on the other hand to envision it as a blessed gift of God. The choice is ours: to dwell on life’s disappointments or to be thankful for it, to be obsessed over aging or to be freed of it.

“Man’s Best Friend”

February 12, 2024

His trademark was a joyful bounce whenever we met. As he aged, he never lost his bounce.

Although we knew my sister’s dog Magee was old and declining, his recent passing hurt, a comforting soulmate was no longer around to greet us.

Josh Billings once said, “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.” 

Kinky Friedman would add, “Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.

How true is the observation of Robert Wagner, “A dog will teach you unconditional love. If you can have that in your life, things won't be too bad.”

Why is love so beautifully attributed to dogs?

St. Francis would say that God’s animals are a blessing of God’s love. In the Canticle of Daniel we pray, the Lord bless all God’s works: “You dolphins and water creatures, you birds, all you beasts, wild and tame. The Canticle is a profound reflection God’s reverence of nature.

Dogs, like all God’s animals are sacred because of God’s love in creating them.

Billy Graham felt “God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.”

President Harry S. Truman who knew well unfriendly politics of Washington, D.C. said, “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”

When we add to Truman’s advice politics in general spawns extreme judgementalism Eckhart Tolle would remind us of a unique canine virtue, “When a dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are.”

Some time back, the Women’s Museum in Washington, D.C. hosted an exhibition on the Virgin Mary. In it was a portrait of St. Luke who was close to Mary. He is working at his desk surrounded by medical books. Below him sits a dog symbolizing Mary’s exceptional gift of faith. No matter the sword that had pierced her heart and difficult times, she never lost faith in Christ and his mission.

We must wonder if God blessing us with animals is a divine message teaching us to reverence all God’s creatures, both human beings, and those of another species. Is this prompting us to see the whole picture of the universe?

Thank you Macgee for the beautiful memories of being a loving, faithful dog, and your gift to us.

“Revenge is Mine Says the Lord.”

February 8, 2024

As I watched jets retaliate for the deaths of three American soldiers while also retaliating against Houthis, and then viewed Israel’s attack against Hamas I thought, “We are in an age of revenge like never before.” Never before have we been able to view brutal daily revenge in the media. Never before have we experienced images of violence, devastating destruction and experience men, women, and children who were brutalized.

Salient quotes on revenge remind us of its psychological, physical, and spiritual damage.

Douglas Horton warns, “While seeking revenge, dig two graves --- one for yourself.”

Jeremy Taylor points out, “Revenge . . . is like a rolling stone, which, when a man has forced uphill will return upon him with a greater violence and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.”

Coretta Scott King cries, “Revenge and retaliation always perpetuate the cycle of anger, fear and violence.”

Francis Bacon warns, “A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green.”

On the other hand, Josh Billings says, “There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.”

Marcus Aurelius concurs, “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”?

How do we control revenge from destroying us humanly and spiritually?

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches fraternal correction is an essential part of love. In retaliation loving fraternity must not fall by the wayside. Even though we may wish to crucify a contemptible person, he or she is our sibling. The first rule of justice is we are created by God to be responsible beings for each other. God meant us to be social beings, not recluses. As Christ died for us, we are created to practice the principle of living for the human and spiritual good of another. Difficult? Most certainly and St. Paul tells why.

To be “redeemed,” and to adhere to Christ, means that within the “old” man in us there is also the beginning of a “new” man. But the old man remains with his urges and inclinations, good and bad. Two centers are now active, two men are contending with each other. Often the good man is overcome by the old. In the psalms the psalmist tells us that psalms addressing revenge are reminders that revenge is imbedded within humankind, the old man --- original sin and Cain’s revenge lies dormant within all of us.

It is easy to say, “Retaliation is the only way to stop the enemy and teach it a lesson. When retaliation turns to savage brutality it is never justifiable and often comes back to haunt us.

History teaches better ways to avoid revenge exist that create the true person in us for which God created us. Time-proven examples of reconciliation exist leaving us the choice to embrace the old man or new man in us.

“Befriending Loneliness”

February 1, 2024

Though our need to connect is innate, many of us frequently feel alone. Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection and actual experiences of it. Even some people who are surrounded by others throughout the day—or are in a long-lasting marriage— still experience a deep and pervasive loneliness.

Loneliness is a sure sign of age causing emotional suffering. One of the most difficult things to experience is it hitting us suddenly and feeling a lack of companionship, being left out, and empty. This is especially true as our growing number of significant others dwindles. My two best friends are dead, as are most of my classmates. How I miss our conversations and picking up the phone and talking with them.

Loneliness can set in also when problems mount and we feel we have no one to turn to.

As my mother was losing old friends, she would say, “Gene this goes with the territory of aging.” As much as she was realistic, we need not succumb to that territory. Other territories await exploration. Loneliness is an opportunity to update and discard undesirable routines. It is especially a time to think of others fighting the same old battle of loneliness.

An essential element in dialogue is pedagogic prudence, meaning to put ourselves in the shoes of others, and practice fraternal camaraderie. Lonely people in search of support are around us perpetually. One support Pope Francis would encourage us to employ is touching them with our human touch. To accomplish this is to reach out --- get out of our self --- and to exude a warm understanding smile that says, “I feel what you are enduring.” No giving advice, just touching another lonely soul with understanding kindness.

Christ was forever healing the lonely who were cast aside by society. He not only touched them physically but with a caring heart especially and suddenly a healing bright world opened up to them. In doing so Christ gave us a model to imitate --- using Christ like human touch that transports a person into an elevated sphere deplete of loneliness.

Life offers us a choice when dealing with loneliness. We can bemoan it and feel sorry for ourselves or see it as an opportunity to create a new province for ourselves and especially others. All it takes is embracing an “outreach mode,” and reaching out with a warm caring smile to another in need of consolation that says, “I am one with you. Let us walk together” --- a proven way to combat our own loneliness while enabling another to do the same.

“A Call for Postmodern Courage”

January 29, 2024

“Last but by no means least, courage --- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the old-age struggle --- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.”

These sage words of General Douglas MacArthur apply to our age in need of postmodern courage leading us to ask, what is the essence of courage?

The renowned philosopher Josef Pieper states, “Courage is a strong activity of the soul, i.e., it is a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good. It is only from this stoutheartedness that we get the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death. Courage is something we can and must work at and the work begins with defining and redefining the good that is and around us.”

The essence of courage is the good, a first principle of life. Plato tells us, “Good is a perfect, eternal, and changeless Form, existing outside of space and time.” It is a God-given sense, a desire for the best possible in life.

Note how MacArthur focuses on the voice of conscience, a voice desiring the good creating the a Divine First Principle.

As Pieper directs us to courage being a strong activity of the soul, so too, does MacArthur sagely remark that our soul faces an age-old struggle in doing what is right. What are some of these struggles?

Emile Durkheim, a pioneer in the field of sociology, points out there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior a community can afford to recognize. As behavior worsens, the community adjusts to its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so. Expectations are lowered to the point that behavior once considered abnormal is now seen as normal, hence the struggle to maintain high standards.

St. Thomas Aquinas adds another foe of courage is pusillanimity, “the falling short of that which we can do because we refuse to tend to that which empowers us to do it.” Hence, the struggle to maintain willpower.

The historian Arnold Toynbee sounds an alarm for our times. “A young nation is confronted with a challenge for which it finds a successful response. And if it continues to make the same once successful response to the new challenge, it will inevitably suffer a decline and eventful failure. As we begin the last decades of our century, the United States faces such a challenge.” Hence the challenge to our God-given gift of entrepreneurism and creativity the antithesis of true progress.

Today we have a choice, to champion the good no matter the cost or to refuse to tend to that which empowers us to produce it.

“Looking Aging in the Eye”

January 22, 2024

“Like a great Bordeaux, you just keep getting better with age!!”

“You don’t look a day over 60.”

“You will outlive us all.”

Every time I have a birthday friends see me having stopped the clock when it comes to aging.

I believe most of us desire to give a blind eye to growing old and we still like to relive the day when we were in our prime. This is natural but does not face the reality that life goes through stages, and no one is exempt from aging. More importantly, aging is no time to close our eyes to it, but to marvel at life’s valuable and blessed lessons and to be truly realistic about life.

Most of life is lived under pressure and hustle bustle daily chores. But as in autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees, our aging view expands, and we become conscious of wider space, it allows us to realize how life is more profound than imagined. As we look deeper into the benefits of aging, we learn the urgency and tensions of daily life tend to slacken as we tell ourselves “Been there and done it before, don’t get excited.”  And too, aging spawns a sense of detachment, reducing the urge to amass goods. As my mother would say, “It is time to give things away, not hold onto to them.” It is an opportunity to release our hold on “stuff” and what is no longer meaningful as it was and to enjoy the freedom it creates.

A danger in aging is capitulating to its transitoriness and having no more future to look forward to. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to cast aside the dreamy aloofness of childhood and renounce the endless demands of youth, to be an exemplary adult, ensuring a healthy future for others. It can also be a moment of humor seeing through life’s nonsensical and transcendent side and how generations come and go.

Wisdom is a precious gift of aging prompting us to say, “I have seen it all and now have an expanded understanding of life’s limitations and possibilities, to know others will experience the same challenges we experienced because that is life.

Aging gives us time for forgiveness, for contrition and leaving everything in God’s hands. It enables us to think about eternity, to dream of being with our Creator God.

Undoubtably, aging comes with health problems, and loneliness. If we reflect on its possibilities of deeper wisdom and understanding, an opportunity to put our life in better order, and deeper faith in God our Creator, its light filled merits far outweigh its dark side.

As long as we have our senses, we have the choice to age gracefully or gracelessly.

“Asceticism for Our Times”

January 16, 2024

As I watched disturbing news reports, I wondered how anyone can psychologically get out from under this ominous experience.

Modern age ideology gives us a good place to answer this. It is an age that sees ascetism as out of date and an intrusion to freedom we treasure. The slogan “Give me freedom or death” captures our love affair with it.

Sociologists find we are a freedom-centered country but once we obtain it, we don’t know what to do with it nor comprehend its responsibilities.

Even though we don’t hear much about ascetism, it contains an amazing spirit needed to cope with disturbing news. Why emphasize this? It is because ascetism contains the principle that only one who masters himself or herself can master the disturbing challenges confronting us. It prompts us to get ourselves in order first before combating external problems: to become disciplined, to censure out, if necessary, to control undesirable urges and to reassess values.

The Greek word asceticism is asekesis meaning to properly direct our life.

When we study why unwelcome news is disturbing our peace, we learn it is because something is out of order. Peace denotes order that in turn connotes harmony and tranquility. It is a gift a loving caring God bestows on to live joyfully. As harmony in music lifts the soul and generates an elevating spirit so does asceticism produce this spirit. “Life is now in better order, this is the way it I should, if only I had done this earlier,” we tell ourselves. Thomas Merton would further add, “Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

Human nature is often fraught with addictions, ingrained unhealthy habits, prejudices, selfish egotism, and fears of dying to self. We admit these undesirable faults, but when it comes to changing them, we learn quickly how change is difficult and how strong is the desire to cling to life the way it is. Like riding a wild horse, we are often thrown to the ground when attempting to tame ourselves.

Ascetism is a blessed virtue that offers us a choice between conquering self, or allowing our self to be conquered.

“Treasuring Silence”

January 11, 2024

“There was a wise old owl that sat in a tree,

The more he heard the less he spoke,

The less he spoke the more he heard,

Why can’t we be like that wise old owl.”

Our wise old owl raises a fundamental question, “What makes silence so significant?”

The Latin word for silence is silens, meaning to be still, quiet or at rest. Stillness is the tranquility of inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden streams. It is a collected, total presence and being ‘all there,’ receptive alert, ready. It is when the soul abandoned the restlessness of purposeful activity.

In German Wahrnehmen means the reception of truth. Through silence we are enabled to behold the truth, consume it, and make it one within us.

Kahlil Gibran description of silence captures its overwhelming pleasure: “But now I have learned to listen to silence, to hear its choirs singing the song of ages, chanting the hymns of space and disclosing the secrets of eternity.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks of a postmodern malaise that is forever threatening silence’s beauty: “We seem so frightened of being alone that we never let it happen . . .We choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill space. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place.”

In Power and Responsibility author Romano Guardini concurs with Lindbergh and suggests what is needed to safeguard silence: “First, we must try to rediscover something of what is called the contemplative attitude, actually experience it ourselves, not just talk about it interestingly. All around us we see activity, organization, operations of every possible type, but what directs them? An innerness no longer really at home within itself, which thinks, judges, acts from the surface, guided by mere intellect, utility, and the impulses of power, property, and pleasure. An ‘interiority’ too superficial to contact the truth lying at life’s center, which no longer reaches the essential and everlasting, but remains somewhere just under the skin-level of the provisional and the fortuitous. . .Before all else, then, man’s depth must be reawakened. His life must again include times, his day moments of stillness in which he collects himself, spreads out before his heart the problems which have stirred him during the day. In a word, man must learn again to meditate and to pray. He must become all there opening his mind and heart wide to some word of piety or wisdom, of ethical honor, whether he takes it from Scripture or Plato, from Goethe or Jeremias Gotthelf.”

Losing our contemplative edge suggests a critical question, “Is there an alarming correlation between a growing number of disturbed people and their inability to cultivate silence? Is our age’s emphasis on perpetual motion and commotion eroding our quality of life? Is today’s existence losing its lifegiving depth?”

Want to read more of Fr. Hemrick’s observations on Catholicism in our time?

You can find Fr. Hemrick’s reflections from 2023 by clicking here and from 2022 by clicking here.