Spirituality

“Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. I never imagined I would lose my son, Kieran, at thirty-two. I thought he would marry, have his own children, that I would be a grandmother one day.“

Introduction by David A. Sylvester,
Editor, Labyrinth Times

Ever since its creation 250 years ago,  the American soul has torn by two opposing traditions, one justifying expansion, colonialism and imperialism and the other protesting against the dangers and evils of empire. This struggle of conscience vs. conquest was demonstrated in the brutalities of the wars against native tribes and the protest of Helen Jackson in her landmark “A Century of Dishonor.”

It surfaced in the claims of “Manifest Destiny” to justify the Mexican-American War to capture half a million acres of Mexican territory that became seven new states in the American West vs. Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay a tax for the war and his subsequent publication “On Civil Disobedience” that influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

And it surfaced in the contest between the abolitionist movement against slavery, the Underground Railroad, vs. the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” The traditional history of the “American Experiment” has justly recognized the importance of the creation of the world’s first constitutional democracy in the United States, but it has also ignored the horrors of the tens to hundreds of millions of victims. 

Simply put, the traditional history of the U.S. is no longer believable. We need a full accounting of the good and the evil through a Truth & Reconciliation process similar to the one in South Africa under Archbishop Desmond Tutu and in other countries like El Salvador. For all the difficulties and imperfections of this process, it is an alternative to the horrors of civil war and offers the possibility of reconciling the best with the worst of the American past can we  heal the American present and find a path to a more just and honest future. It’s time the U.S. confronts its full history and return to its life-giving roots and strip away its the imperialistic lust for world domination.

Pope Leo XIV’s critique of the Iran war exposes its moral bankruptcy, the risks to our alliances and the hollow core of the new right’s Christian nationalism.

On Ash Wednesday, it’s standing room only at our church – with IU students! The St. Paul Catholic Center offered five – yes, five – Masses with Ash Wednesday services, all jam-packed!  And lines three deep against the back wall! Something’s going on.

Fifth Sunday of Advent (Novus Ordo)
Master, the one you love is ill… This illness is not to end in death…
Passion Sunday (Tridentine Latin Mass)
Do me justice, O God, and fight my fight against a faithless people…

On the Danger to which Tepidity Exposes the Soul  “But Jesus hid himself.” John, 8:59.   He enlightens all; but he cannot enlighten those who voluntarily shut their eyes to the light; from them the Saviour hides himself…

In the strongest, most impassioned terms, Scott Ritter denounces the catastrophic bombing of two girls’ schools by the U.S. in Iran. It reminds him of his own horrifying mistake 25 years ago in Iraq…

In 1998, I traveled to Iraq delivering badly needed medicines… and I saw a destroyed society, heard the children wailing in hospitals… Iraq: once prosperous, now impoverished. Where was the victory?

First Sunday of Lent, (Novus Ordo, Year A)
The LORD God formed man .. so man became a living being…
I Sunday of Lent,  (Tridentine Latin Mass)
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will deliver him and glorify him; with length of days I will gratify him.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the spiritual combat of Lent. Dom Prosper Guéranger notes we face two enemies, internal passions and external devils, both from our pride and refusal to obey God. God forgave him his sin, but He punished him.

Ash Wedneday (Novus Ordo, Year A)  …Rend your hearts, not your garments… return to the LORD, your God

Ash Wednesday (Tridentine Latin Mass) … thou hast mercy upon all… and overlookest the sins of men for the sake of repentance.

No sports season has been more thrilling than Indiana University football’s 16-0 record last season…  until one brutal hit left its star quarterback lying in the grass… and all the euphoria popped…  revealing the ugly truth of tackle football we choose to ignore…

He was a very old man … in his late 70s… absorbed in one of the simplest tasks on earth …but his movement had a dignity that I do not remember seeing in the city with its more important tasks.

Below us was a crowd, men in business suits pressed together… the desire in those eyes and hands, each one searching for the feel, the touch, the connection with the force we call truth, as if through the shake of a hand, that which Sam Ervin had done could run into their bodies and erase their sins…

On the General Judgment  “And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of Heaven with much power and majesty.” Matt. xxiv. 30.

In today’s reading, the uncaring rich man was cast into hell, the impoverished Lazarus was “carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.” Which of one these are we, the U.S. Catholics at Mass?

“What is left to say about the endless cycle of bloodshed in the Arab community? How can you cry so loud that it’s heard everywhere?”

Two conservative law professors say the original meaning of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from the presidency for fomenting the January 6 insurrection.

Dan Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023 after a life of courage and conscience. He exposed the lies of U.S. military leaders behind the Vietnam War.

In downtown Oakland, at 4 o’clock in the morning, I go out for an early coffee. No one is around… yet, there’s the skunk, the sickening burning smell coming from … a security guard doing his rounds… lights illuminating ghost-like clouds trailing behind wherever he goes…

Holy Trinity Church was a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, PA, outside Pittsburgh, where my cousins grew up in the 1960s. Then the steel mill closed, and the town and church collapsed.

Turkish novelist Ahmet Altan was imprisoned on false charges in Turkey.  In prison, he wrote “I’m watching the Coronavirus virus unfold from a Turkish prison. This is why I’m hopeful.” – From the Washington Post, May 24,2020.

After hundreds of airplane flights, I still feel a thrill when I’m stepping into the airplane and look down into that space below my legs, between stairway and fuselage, earth and sky… a space that becomes 35,000 feet deep in the air. 

It’s early morning in Oakland’s Skid Row, and Steve F. is coming at us… bouncing from leg to leg…  grinning his manic drug grin.. Artie G. and I dread his approach… until he says something I’ll never forget… 

A political crisis poisons a nation’s spiritual life. In 2018, the Honduran dictator Juan Orlando Hernandez used fear, despair for repression. Freedom came by acting on faith and hope.

The underlying religious crisis is plain for all to see. In the Middle East conflict in 2014, only four powers are secular, and the other six claim to base their identities on their religions: Judaism, Islam, and behind the scenes, Christian Zionism.

In 2005, after years of reading about the U.S. military’s bombing  campaigns and torture around the world, I could take it no longer. El Salvador. Guatemala. Then Iraq. So I quit my job at the San Jose Mercury News and made one tiny effort to reclaim a shred of integrity as a U.S. citizen. This is my story.

Today, Palm Sunday, we must pray for the United States which has trained  foreign soldiers at the School of Americas to torture and repress political opponents and innocent civilians in Central and Latin America.

Two local parishioners – one seeking to “live in the truth” and another citing the example of Father Bill O’Donnell – have been sentenced to three months in federal prison for trespassing at the former School of the Americas in Georgia last fall.

The question I ask myself is not about why I went to Georgia but why it took me so long. Once there, I prayed and prayed for God’s guidance and in the end, was holding Domingo’s cross and the poster of the Jesuits when I crawled underneath the fence of the fort.

Two Bay Area Catholics were among 40 protesters arrested Nov. 20 during a prayer vigil and demonstration at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia.

We confuse not having peace with not being aware of the peace we possess. When… storm-tossed, we only perceive the storm… we have not lost our peace of soul, but only our awareness of it…