Not long ago I spoke with a transformed man. Yes, you’re right. I’m overstating the case. Let me back off and rephrase the proposition less extravagantly and more accurately. Not long ago I met a man, newly baptized and chrismated, in the process of transformation. This revised statement, while less flamboyant, points to a state […]
What do you do with obnoxious people? You know who I mean—difficult people, insolent people, nasty, mean, irritating, drive you out of your mind and push your crazy buttons people. Maybe we’re talking about friends, acquaintances, or total strangers. Then again, maybe we’re talking about family members. For us monastics, we might be talking about […]
Discussions about the relationship between parish life and monastic life often get way off track. It becomes all too easy to go off on a tangent with abstractions, quotations from this Holy Father and that, accounts of various monasteries in other countries and other centuries, and spiritual-sounding concepts that have little to do with real-life […]
The Storms of Life with Fr. Stephen This past year has seen its share of really bad storms hitting various areas of our country. Some of these storms brought horrible devastation to so many, many people. Such storms often bring to mind a story I had heard many years ago that may be of some […]