Getting married in a Catholic Church involves more than just choosing a picturesque setting for the reception and colors for the bridesmaids to wear. It’s a significant decision, and a significant commitment, and one for which you need to prepare thoughtfully and prayerfully.Most of all, there are things that you need to know—and do!—well ahead of time.The first thing you need to do is contact the parish where you want to be married and let the priest there know of your intenti...

My friend Julie acts as my conscience in one particular way. When I feel like I’m dragging a little, not completely good in my skin, she’s quick to make a diagnosis: “You need to come to the gym with me!”I have to tell you: those aren’t words I particularly like to hear! I’d much rather sit home like a sloth and read a book. But the truth is that after I go to the gym, I do feel better. Sometimes a lot better. Julie is right: I need regular exercise if I want ...

It’s sometimes easy to believe that we’re not measuring up to what God wants of us. Oh, we try to live good lives, but we often fall short of even our own expectations. We snap at our children. We forget a commitment we made. We have unpleasant thoughts about our next-door neighbor.When that happens, a lot of us feel that we’re the only people who have ever fallen short of doing what we should. We think that people in the early Church somehow lived better lives, purer lives, ho...

I have a stack of them. People whose lives I’ve admired. People whose words have inspired me. People whose memory makes me want to be a better person, a holier person. Most of these heroes are people I’ve chosen through my encounters with them in various ways, through my readings, through my prayer, through observing their lives and accomplishments. The list is disparate: Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Lillian Hellman, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Jimmy Carter, Pope Francis&he...

I wrote a prayer when I was eight or nine. I remember that I was in my bedroom and very worried. A very big question—for a very small person—was haunting me: What if I died and discovered that I had lost everything, that I had put all my good deeds into a bag with a hole in it? What if everything I believed about heaven wasn’t true?The shadows of that possibility have darkened the threshold of too many days of my life. The celebration of Good Friday and Easter, and the Feast of...

One of the secrets of the spirit is to recognize the bond of love that exists because God has reached out to us, has loved us so much that he asked his Son to die for us. Once we have a sense of how inexhaustible, how great, how limitless that love is, then we can open ourselves up, then we can truly invite the Holy Spirit into our lives.

The final week in the "Pray to Your Father in Secret" Lenten Book Club.

How can God die?I once asked a theologian friend to explain to me how it is possible that God, the Creator of the Universe, could die and still keep the world in existence. My friend told me it was possible because Jesus, a divine Person, is true God and true man. The Son of God died a human death, but the divinity itself did not die. Of course that is true, and I felt satisfied for a time. But this paradoxical moment of the God-man dying on the cross—so pregnant with meaning and mystery&m...

The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.The concept is tricky: our God is three, but is also one. I remember as a child when my mother explained the classic water-ice-steam analogy to me, describing something with essentially the same properties but that takes different forms. It didn’t exactly clarify things for me; I was left vaguely wondering if God manifested himself differently at different temperatures—in the desert, say, or in Antarctica.B...

Darkness begins to fall upon the earth as Mary Magdalene looks up into the face of Jesus hanging from the cross…struggling for breath…shuddering under the pain of the nails in hand and feet.This Jesus who had freed her, saved her, shown her mercy…She could no longer wash his feet with her tears or anoint his head with oil…She was about to lose the Light that had taken away her darkness. She watched his eyes, hoping for one last sign that he knew she was there…f...