Category: Daily Post
-
I don’t remember much about my father’s voice from when I was small, but I remember his arms. They weren’t especially gentle. They were strong, a little rough, and they picked me up anyway whenever I needed picking up. I came across a line this week from St. Josemaria Escriva, who spent his whole life…
-
I’ve been sitting with something John writes, almost in passing. See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are. Not employees. Not apprentices working toward a title. Children, already, right now, before I’ve proven anything. I spent years assuming I had to…
-
I grew up calling God things like Lord, and God, and Almighty. True words, good words. But somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that getting closer to him meant speaking more formally, not less, the way you’d address someone too important to call by anything but their full title. Then I kept…
-
There’s a detail in the story of the prodigal son I didn’t notice for years. The father doesn’t wait at the door with his arms crossed, ready to hear an explanation first. He’s watching the road before his son is even close enough to recognize. The text says he saw him while he was still…
-
I started reading Pope Francis’s letter on St. Joseph this week, the one called Patris Corde, “With a Father’s Heart.” I picked it up because this month I’ve been sitting with the idea that fatherhood is supposed to be modeled on God’s own, and I wanted to see what that actually looks like in a…
-
For a long time I assumed I already knew what God the Father was like, because I thought I’d start from what I already knew about fatherhood and work from there. If my own father was patient, I figured God must be patient. If he was distant on a given day, some part of me…
-
I’ve been sitting with something small this week, and it won’t let me go. Everything I think I know about being a father, I didn’t invent. I’m borrowing it. Saint John Paul II wrote that every act of fatherhood on earth finds its model in the fatherhood of God, that his is the original and…
-
Four weeks ago I started writing about building a foundation, Scripture, the sacraments, prayer, the saints, like it was something I could finish by the end of a month. It isn’t. Hebrews says we’re surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and then it says the thing I keep needing to hear: we run the…
-
I keep coming back to John Henry Newman today. Today is actually his feast day, the anniversary of the day he was received into the Catholic Church back in 1845. It only became a feast for the whole Church this year, though the Oratory and a few dioceses had already kept it for a while.…
-
For a long time I thought asking a saint to pray for me was basically going around God. Like I didn’t fully trust that Jesus actually heard me, so I found a workaround through someone who maybe did a better job of it. Nobody ever told me that outright. It’s just what settled in, somewhere…
