We don’t know how to celebrate things as they’re meant to be celebrated.

OTTAWA – After a 15-year hiatus, an evangelization conference organized by Canada’s bishops will return in April and is already sold out.

A number of years ago I attended a funeral. The man to whom we were saying goodbye had enjoyed a full and rich life.

I don’t always find it easy to pray. Often I’m over-tired, distracted, caught-up in tasks, pressured by work, short on time, lacking the appetite for prayer or more strongly drawn to do something else.

Several years ago Hollywood made a movie, City of Angels , about an angel named Seth whose job it was to accompany the spirits of the recently deceased to the afterlife.

Our society tends to divide us into winners and losers. Sadly, we don’t often reflect on how this affects our relationships with each other, nor on what it means for us as Christians.

TORONTO – Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s next book will be about death. 

Five years ago the popular newspaper columnist, book author, theologian and university administrator was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was caught early. A six-month round of chemotherapy seemed to knock it out. But two years ago it came back. Now there are chemo pills every day and check-ups every six months.

A colleague of mine shares this story: Recently, after presiding at Eucharist, a woman from the congregation came up to him with this comment: “What a horrible Scripture reading today! If that’s the kind of God we’re worshipping, then I don’t want to go to Heaven!”

What is the real root of human loneliness? A flaw within our make-up? Inadequacy and sin? Or does Augustine’s famous line, “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” say it all?

They say that the book you most need to read finds you when you most need to read it. I’ve had that experience many times, most recently with Heather King’s book Shirt of Flame, A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux.

No generation in history, I suspect, has ever experienced as much change as we have experienced in the past 60 years. That change is not just in the areas of science, technology, medicine, travel and communications, it is especially in the area of our social infrastructure, of our communal ethos. And perhaps nowhere is this change more radical than in how we understand sex. In the past 70 years we have witnessed three major, tectonic shifts in how we understand the place of sex in our lives.

Belgian spiritual writer Bieke Vandekerckhove comes by her wisdom honestly. She didn’t learn what she shares from a book or even primarily from the good example of others. She learned what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being hit at the tender age of 19 with a terminal disease that promised not just an early death but also a complete breakdown and humiliation of her body enroute to that death.

When I first began teaching theology, I fantasized about writing a book about the hiddenness of God. Why does God remain hidden and invisible? Why doesn’t God just show Himself plainly in a way that nobody can dispute?

In one of his books on contemplative prayer, Thomas Keating shares with us a line that he occasionally uses in spiritual direction. People come to him, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re left struggling with belief and struggling to pray as they used to. They feel a deep sense of loss and invariably this is their question: “What’s wrong with me?” Keating’s answer: “God is wrong with you!”

The world takes our breath away as we honour its author, the Lord

“Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of Heaven and a son of Earth.”