Category Archives: ordinariness
“He lived in God’s favorite place.”
That title caught my eye as I was leafing through the November 2011 edition of Restoration (published by Madonna House). The article is a homily given by one priest at Madonna House at the funeral of another priest. He speaks of the deceased as often being in “the right place for the wrong reason.” A …
“Love your helplessness”
This is why I love Thérèse . . . when I come across these kinds of things she said: “Agree to stumble at every step, even fall, to carry your crosses weakly; love your helplessness, your soul will benefit more from it than if sustained by grace you accomplished with enthusiasm heroic actions which would …
Dull weather
Is it “one of those days”? Here is a little encouragement from Amy Carmichael: Ps. 76.4 LXX Thou dost wonderfully shine forth from the everlasting mountains. Sometimes it is dull weather in our soul. Here is a word for such days. Often when it is misty on the plains it is bright on the mountains. …
Extraordinary ordinariness
If you have a spare 18 minutes and you didn’t get to hear Fr. Dennis Brown’s homily on “the still small voice” Sunday at Christ the King, you can find it here. Well worth listening to . . .
Great victories won by ordinary people
A word of encouragement from Philip Yancey for those of you who wonder what difference your everyday life is making for the Kingdom of God: I once watched a public television series based on interviews with survivors from World War II. The soldiers recalled how they spent a particular day. One sat in a foxhole …
One of those days
I’m continuing to read and be inspired by the lives of protestant missionaries. My current favorite is a book by Isobel Kuhn, a missionary to the Lisu people in China in the 1940′s. The book is entitled In the Arena and basically recounts the challenges she faced in her daily life as a married woman …
A walk along the river
Yesterday I was talking a walk around Gallup Park along the Huron River. When I turned one corner, I was struck by the brightness of the sun being reflected off a portion of the river. I started thinking about how that brightness was the result of the sun being reflected of many individual drops of …
The context of our lives
I just finished re-reading The Context of Holiness, Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Marc Foley, OCD. His main point is that God works within the context of each our lives, within the physical, psychological, social and emotional dimensions of our lives. Here is an excerpt from the …
“Those Endless Dishes”
As we move back into Ordinary Time, I thought you might be inspired by this article by Catherine Doherty about doing the mundane things of life: THOSE ENDLESS DISHES by Catherine Doherty Recently my prayer has been spearheaded by a remark of one of our members who said that she wished that she had something …
Praying for our government
I’ve been waiting for an article I read last month in the print version of Restoration to go online. (Restoration is a Madonna House publication.) It’s entitled “Praying for the American Government” and was written by Cynthia Donnelly, a Madonna House staffer, who lives in a house in Washington, D.C.. The house was set up by …
