Once on a retreat I was finding prayer difficult. I felt dull, held back, resistant. I was praying with a passage from the Gospel of Mark, one of those simple passages about Jesus teaching and healing the crowds.As I was meditating on the Gospel passage, I imagined myself in the crowd. Suddenly Jesus approached me and took me by the hand. He started to walk with me so fast down the road that I could barely keep up. Just the two of us were on this lightning journey. I realized I couldn’t ke...

Sometimes it’s difficult for us to read scripture and superimpose a map over it—so much has changed since biblical times, the Middle East reconfiguring itself several times over—so not everybody knows that Jesus was in Lebanon when he visited Tyre and Sidon. In fact, Lebanon is mentioned in the Bible over 70 times, so it is surely holy ground.And the home of a saint.Youssef Antoun Makhlouf was born in 1828, in Bekaa Kafra (North Lebanon). He had a  passion for prayer, whic...

Oddly enough, it was long after I had a devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel that it even occurred to me to question where this “Mount Carmel” might be, and why it has such a special place in our lives. As we celebrate the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel this year, let’s take a moment to go back in time—and far away—to discover the origins of this special devotion.Some places are holy. Speaking from the burning bush, God told Moses the ground he stoo...

When Gabrielle Bossis was 62 years old, aboard a ship midway between Europe and Canada, she began to hear the voice of God. From that moment until her death in 1950, she kept a near-daily record of what she heard, transcribing her conversations with him word-for-word. She eventually shared these intimate moments of prayer in a book entitled He and I which quickly became a classic of spirituality. A successful playwright and extensive traveler, Bossis was an unconventional mystic, ...

“I need a Heart...who will be my support forever” (Saint Thérèse).The Salve Regina is right when it calls this world a “vale of tears.” From Mary Magdalene to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the saints have sought in the Sacred Heart of Jesus their solace along this painful path we call life. If you are looking for a friend who will be refuge and strength in your every need, these two great saints point you to the most Sacred Heart of the Master...

Welcome to the second week of our summer retreat on the Holy Spirit! Today we’re looking at the gift of counsel and the fruit of goodness—and, honestly, one could spend a summer meditating on them alone!I know a number of people who are “sober”—people who used to abuse alcohol or drugs and have managed to abstain from them for weeks, months, years, and even decades. In many cases, they decided on their own that they needed help. In a few situations, people close to ...

I must have been about eight years old when I first started creating comics. I remember drawing the adventures of a group of superheroes who would fight giant monsters and evil robots. I understand now why I was attracted to comics at such a young age. It’s the same reason that people of all ages and across many different cultures are drawn to comics—drawing, the heart of comic-making, is a universal language. Before humans could read or write, they were drawing on cave walls.My appr...

This Sunday we celebrate a special feast day—a solemnity, actually, which ranks above the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time that would normally fall on this Sunday. It’s the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, also known as Corpus Christi.Not many people know that this feast is due to the initiative of a woman in the 13th century, St. Juliana of Cornillon. Or, rather, it’s due to the initiative of God, who inspired Juliana, who then acted on this inspir...

On June 13th, we celebrate the feast of one of the most beloved of Franciscan saints, St. Anthony of Padua. You probably know him as the saint to turn to when you’ve misplaced your keys or your wallet, and you may even have recognized that there are other things worth finding, too—lost friendships, lost faith, lost people.But how did Anthony become the guide to that which has been lost?The story has changed slightly over time with the retelling, but its essence is that a novice monk ...

I love you. You know that. I’m sorry. You know you’re my dearest daughter. The words were soothing, forgiving, as I rested a moment in my father’s hug. It had been a long week and a lot of work as we prepared their house to go on the market and my parents to move.I love you. You know that.All my failures rushed over me. I hadn’t been able that week to plaster over my own broken humanness with a schedule of prayer and community and work. Instead I saw myself. In the raw. T...