Spiritual Experience & Disciplines

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” These words from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” were first published one hundred years ago, in a time not wholly dissimilar to ours. The 1918-1919 flu epidemic had ravaged much of Europe, tearing through communities and

Throughout the month of November, the Church ponders the last things, and on All Souls’ Day, the Church not only prays for the faithful departed but focuses on the reality of death as a part of everyone’s life. Dying is our last moral action. Whether

We must have experienced it before in prayer – the silence of God and feeling distant from Him. We pour out prayers to Him, begging Him for things that we believe are in accord with His will for us and yet we feel abandoned and

“Awesome. Awesome.” That’s how Anna Sudomerski, the communications coordinator at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, describes the parish’s Eucharistic adoration program. St. Peter’s is among the parishes in the United States that are hosting perpetual Eucharistic adoration with the Blessed Sacrament exposed

It might sound odd for me to claim that Confession is one of my favorite sacraments, but how could it not be when I have found such tremendous mercy and redemption in it? If I am merciful to others in my ministry and teaching settings,

I went for confession some weeks ago when I was feeling burdened and interiorly restless. After I had confessed my sins, the priest said to me, “My brother priest, no matter what you are going through in life, never forget who you are in Christ

I had a conversation recently with a couple who told me that they were thinking about giving up their prayers because of all the lingering problems that they were having among their children and grandchildren. There were experiencing divisions, sibling rivalry, alcoholism, abandonment of the

One of the best analogies given in years past describing the Presence, Power and Perfection of the Holy Spirit is a sailboat. This was before electricity, motor-driven vehicles, or the electronic world. The sailboat is an analogy used in the Middle Ages or earlier. Imagine