Prayer is never easy. Sitting alone for an extended period of time, whether on an open hillside, by the shore of the ocean, or in a church or at a shrine, is not easy.
Archive for category Devotions and Sacramentals
Beads of Prayer
Nov 6
Becoming present to God in the liturgical action, participating fully and willingly in God’s trinitarian act of salvation for us, is the ideal of liturgy. This willing participation, though, is a skill as well as a choice. Coping with distraction is one of the components of this skill.
How American Catholics Pray
Jul 23
This is a review of James P. McCartin’s book Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (Harvard University Press, 2010).
May we “taste and see!”
Jul 8
This photo of a homeless man with “invisiblemanitus” cleverly expresses the primary disease from which not the homeless, but the rest of us, suffer: defect of sight.
Total Bull
Jun 16
In the ring, bulls are regularly sacrificed “in honour of the Virgin Mary, as part of the celebration of a religious festival.”
We tend to have a standing assumption that a symbol is a symbol precisely because it doesn’t serve any real purpose — a bell is a bell because it performs a function by making a sound, but a bell on a Christmas tree, without a clapper, is merely a symbol. See how quickly that “merely” slipped in there? Already, symbolism becomes minimal when one takes this route!
Yesterday, May 15th, the Oberammergau Passion Play opened its 2010 season.
“I am … asking that those few parish churches and chapels where the tabernacle is not in the direct center at the back of the sanctuary, that these spaces be redesigned in such a way that the Reserved Sacrament would be placed at the center.”