A young woman told me how she almost took her own life at 21. Not because she had no friends or family (she knew she did) but because she felt alone in her pain, isolated in the anguish she had carried so long, and convinced nobody could hear.

“From bitter experience she knew that pictures thrown on the screen of her imagination could seem much more unnerving and terrible than the actual facts.”

On a visit with my mother, who is bedridden now, diminished in sight and hearing as well as mental and physical mobility, we were not getting through to each other.  She couldn’t understand me, and I couldn’t understand her.  Each of us wanted to break through into the other’s world, but were prevented by intractable walls we couldn’t see, like glass, hard and smooth. She cried aloud to God for help.

Amusingly, and confusingly, two signs were posted, one above the other, on the charming wrought-iron gate leading to a country estate: “Welcome” and “No trespassing.” The place seemed to say simultaneously, “Come in, we want you,” and “Stay away, we’re afraid of you.”

How do we become fertile earth?

Showing a young French couple our summer youth camp, we chatted about our part of the world and theirs. André, an intense observer of human nature, lamented the lost connection with nature he sees everywhere. His greatest sorrow was not that people are distant from nature, but that they are not sad about it.

Religion, an essay in a major news service declaimed recently, is a sociological phenomenon that exists as a psychological need-fulfillment. It is a never-ending series of (similar) movements that are born and die when their usefulness to social groups has passed. 

Sitting on a patio having coffee, Fr. George was watching people rush along in the shadow of the big bank towers. He was silent, contemplating them. 

Is it getting harder for us to listen?

How do we not become violent in an age of violence? How can we find another way when in our world, and even in our Church, violence seems to have made such terrible inroads?